I thought the first Saw film was awesome. It was a cool gory story about making the most of life. It's fiction, so nobody actually got hurt and there is no secondary consideration of awesomeness there.

Some people think that the prospect of making disabled kids commit suicide is awesome; fewer people think that actually doing so is awesome. I don't think that people who actually do so are awesome.

I think that's a relatively standard use of "awesome".

Much for the same reasons that people can be mistaken about their own desires, people can be mistaken about what they would actually consider awesome if they were to engage in an accurate modeling of all the facts. E.g. People who post flashing images to epileptic boards or suicide pictures to battered parents are either 1) failing to truly envision the potential results of their actions and consequently overvaluing the immediate minor awesomeness of the irony of the post or whatever vs. the distant, unseen, major anti-awesomeness of seizures/suicides, or 2) they’re actually socio- or psychopaths. Given the infrequency of real sociopathy, it’s safe to assume a lot of the former happens, especially over the impersonal, empathy-sapping environment of the Internet.

At least, at the levels most people operate at. Things tend to get better from the top down; for the bottom-dwellers, things are still pretty desperate and terrifying.

This doesn't seem to be true over the long haul-- somehow, the average behavior of the big boys has become less cruel.

Bur there is no evidence that there real world works on he Awesomeness theory.