How the Internet Mourns: "But What About the Kurds?"

A million years ago these friends told me about a saying they'd taken on, that came from a heated dinner party conversation. They were having an argument about Armenia or Iraq or something, or Palestine, who knows, and it was getting unreasonably heated due to the way these kinds of conversations go, and finally at one point a woman banged on the table and screamed, in an accent that I always do as "really fake French": BUT WHAT ABOUT ZE KURDS??? This is an argument stopper akin to invoking Hitler. What about the Kurds? Let us not discuss provisional governments or the rights of women or whatever, when don't you understand the Kurds are suffering?

And that is basically what happened on the entire Internet this weekend, after Amy Winehouse died, and because it was boiling hot in 85% of North America, everyone was glued to their computers and their Twitters and had to really let it fly. Some people made jokes! Some people were offended by the jokes! Some people were sad! Some people were upset that people would pay attention to Winehouse's death when a really, really, unbelievably horrible thing had just happened in Norway. Some people were upset that other people were being self-righteous! And really, no one had any skin in the game. Everyone just got up in each others' business. Basically, no tweet went uncriticized!

To put it another way, here are the Seven Stages of Internet Grieving, which starts with something like "Unvarnished Personal Expression," pauses at "Ill-Conceived and/or Ill-Timed Joke" and ends with "Flipping Out on Everyone Because Everyone Else is Doing It Wrong." What an exhausting weekend!