{"id":82,"date":"2002-04-23T13:14:29","date_gmt":"2002-04-23T17:14:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/not_schadenfreude"},"modified":"2002-04-23T13:14:29","modified_gmt":"2002-04-23T17:14:29","slug":"not_schadenfreude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2002\/04\/not_schadenfreude.html","title":{"rendered":"Not Schadenfreude"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to the dictionary, “schadenfreude” means “pleasure in the misfortune of
\nothers”. White-collar Enron employees complaining about the vagaries of
\nhyper-capitalism? Schadenfreude. Alan Sokal’s
\ncosmic joke on
\nthe editors of Social Text<\/cite><\/a>? Schadenfreude.
\nMicrosoft getting burned by
\nits own bought-and-paid-for witness<\/a>, Jerry Sanders of AMD? Achtung baby, it’s
\nschadenfreude.<\/p>\n

But when M’ris announced that she is having DSL problems<\/a>
\n(again), it was obviously inappropriate to feel schadenfreude. First, one can’t
\nfeel schadenfreude at the misfortunes of one’s friends. It simply isn’t done. I can
\ncertainly feel that way towards Pac Bell — for example, when they
\nare
\ninvestigated for fraud for “slamming” their customers<\/a> (including me, for six
\nlong months). But poor M’ris is an innocent bystander. I suppose that if I had warned
\nMark and M’ris properly about DSL, I could feel “cassandritis”, or “smug satisfaction that your
\nprophecy of doom has come true.” But that would be wrong also. I didn’t rant and rave
\nat them. I didn’t warn them that not only is Pac Bell’s service generally lousy,
\nbut because Pac Bell controls all the phone line central offices, they can (and do) screw
\nwith the reliability of their DSL competitors (so no matter what you do in DSL-land,
\nyou’re at their mercy.) <\/p>\n

In other words<\/em>, this is all really partly my fault. I didn’t
\nsteer Mark and M’ris away from the foul clutches of Pac Bell. I failed in my
\nmission to do what is right and good and true. <\/p>\n

Sorry, guys. My bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I failed in my mission to do what is right and good and true. Sorry, guys. My bad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}