Thread by @startupdaemon

ATTENTION: This is brutal. Striking story from @chuckpalahniuk :

Often people aren't censoring it because it offends them, they're censoring it because they're afraid it will offend someone they know.

They are white-knighting on behalf of someone else.

1. David Sedaris told me this about telling a joke about a girl in a wheelchair. He looked at the audience and no-one was laughing. They were all looking at a girl in a wheelchair. And the moment she started to laugh, the entire audience started to laugh.

2. Sedaris was in a forensic lab as an autopsy was taking place. And this autopsy table was adjacent to a huge indoor window that separated the autopsy suite from this lunch room. And in the lunch room were the rest of the forensic staff and they were eating their lunches.

The technicians watch as the pathologist incises around the top of a perfect 12yo kid's face. This boy was alive, riding his bike, just two hours prior.

And he peels the entire face off of the skull of this little boy. And leaves the face around the neck, like a rubber mask.

And this exposes this liver-colored, dark red musculature of the child's underlying face. And this one guy watching it with a mouthful of tuna sandwich points this out and he says:

"See that? That there. That's the color of red that I want to paint our rec room."

When Sedaris told that story, it was dead silent and people were weeping and crying and hating him for having told it. And so I had to laugh, and I laughed like a donkey, and the hatred in that auditorium swung from David to me. That story never went in any book. ~ Palahniuk

Feelings are what we're made of. Indulging them indiscriminately is lazy ignorant lo-awarenes bullshit.

One of the most underrated books of our time. GIFT it after your read it.

amazon.com/Against-Empath…