When a giant comet or Megatron or giraffe flu finally arrives to claim major portions of humanity, there are people it should really focus on. Case in point just about everyone involved in this Gizmodo post and accompanying comments.

How exactly did we reach the point where a 17 year old girl's death is fodder for internet comedy, not on SA or /b/ or Digg, but on what's supposed to be a mainstream site catering to people who are not socially retarded freaks who wear V for Vendetta masks and quote Ayn Rand to prove their superiority to everyone else?

Seriously, I'd like to know. Sure Gizmodo is part of Gawker Media, and Gawker Media is shorthand for the hip trendy version of /b/ without the ability to laugh at themselves, but there's something seriously sick and twisted here when a post on a gadget site does nothing but mock a 17 year old girl's death, because she made a stupid mistake and got electrocuted.

If you think I'm exagerating,


Good, welcome to natural selection dumbass.



Do I never need to point out that this is being said by a guy who no natural process of selection would actually select?

2009 Darwin award nominee.

I salute her for removing her inferior genes from the world 'pool'.



Funny how the people going on about inferior genes and darwinism in the 20th century and the 21st, are people who look like a smurf's uncle. At least back in the 20th they tried to cover that up with spiffy mustaches.

If you think this is as bad as it gets....


I laughed so hard when I read this article... thank you gizmodo for making me laugh at the expense of some stupid girl who didn't deserve to live.


Now Gizmodo would crack down on comments that were genuinely out of line. These don't qualify, and why should they. The comments aren't random, they flow directly from the post by Adrian Covert.

"The Austrian times says that Maria Barbu was, in fact, in the tub while using Twitter when she likely reached to plug in her charger with a wet hand, electrocuting herself in the process. You smell that? Yeah, that's a Darwin Award in the making."


Do you know what Darwin didn't have in mind? He didn't have in mind that idiots would mock other people's misfortunes and mistakes by misusing his ideas. The ugliest part of the Darwin's Award talk is that it lets people whose own contribution to the world is right about the level of a bacteria pretend to be superior to a dead 17 year old girl, because hey, they never actually electrocuted themselves to death.

That kind of arrogance reminds me of one of Niven and Pournelle's more overtly nastier books, Oath of Fealty, now translated into an internet culture with a hundred thousand little niches with their own little identities and the entitlement to treat everyone on the wrong side of that identity as inferior.

In this case the 17 year old girl's death was mockworthy because she was supposedly using Twitter. And in an internet culture in which people can't separate the things they make fun of, from the people, and can't separate disliking Twitter, from treating a human tragedy as contemptible, the Gizmodo post and its comments are what comes next.

The funny thing is, that if a Gizmodo commenter died in an accent, there would be plenty of people who would be as happy to roll out a Darwin Award for him or her, as for a Twitterer. Because it's not as if there's any shortage of Granfaloons on the internet, and to someone out there, someone else is always expandable because they're associated with a tech trend we don't like.