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89 points Michelangelo11 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.216s | source
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alwa ◴[] No.44522167[source]
Bizarre that this category of touring show continues after all these years. It seems like such self-consciously guilty behavior on the part of the organizers: you don’t accidentally end up with human corpses (that you’re selling as entertainment on the basis of being human corpses!).

They came by them somehow. If the nature of someplace’s justice system is that a death sentence comes with a “turned-to-plastic-and-paraded-around-for-selfies” enhancement, so as to trouble the offender’s eternal soul as well as their life, then just.. say that. “They’re ’bad guys’ and we as a company believe that’s what bad guys deserve.” Or even, “we weren’t involved in the circumstances of their death, but we figure if we’d had a chance to ask them they probably would be fine with it.”

As morally repugnant as I find the entire endeavor, I bet it wouldn’t even hurt ticket sales: people in the West have, in the not-so-distant past, treated hangings and beheadings as social occasions.

But like, there’s a right way to do informed consent—why not just do it and say “yeah we did it the obvious way”? Come to think of it… the ambiguity sure is a reliable path to free attention. It wouldn’t be the first marketing strategy to rely on provocation…

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yodsanklai ◴[] No.44522554[source]
> people in the West have, in the not-so-distant past, treated hangings and beheadings as social occasions

Is that unique to the West?

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1. alwa ◴[] No.44523387[source]
I don’t think so at all—for that matter the Americans still execute prisoners, and still send news crews to attend the executions (though not to show the dying person directly). I was more thinking about TFA as specifically a British objection, and the other examples involving a press release from the New York Attorney General.

I don’t know how the exhibition is received in other territories, but I feel like it’s Americans, Brits, and Europeans who I hear raise this specific set of concerns that plastinated Bodies exhibitions display executed prisoners. Often mixed in with some degree of insinuation about Chinese justice systems and political practices.

Whereas it seems to me that dark delight in bodily violence is a much more essential aspect of the human condition—Rene Girard’s notion of a scapegoat mechanism comes to mind—and that for all the pearl-clutching, the event promoter probably would still sell tickets if they catered to it upfront.