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Probably not. Celebrating when bad things happen to someone is evil, plain and simple. I'm not going to claim I've never done that (I have, I'm not a perfect person), but I regard those occasions as personal failings which I tried very hard to rectify. I would like to think in the future I would be more successful in avoiding it.
But he wasn't struck by lightning. He was murdered. And that makes all the difference here. You're constructing this argument that we should have more sympathy for those who feel happy that someone they hate got killed by a freak accident, but the simple fact of the matter is that even if they perceive it as that, their perception is false, and they are in fact celebrating a murder.
Yeaaah.
The subtext of all the celebrations is they want it to happen again. And again. And again.
If it were a lighting strike, well, they have no way to influence that. Its wishful thinking at worst. Though still repugnant.
When its a targeted murder, then yeah, condoning, celebrating, and encouraging it IS influencing it to happen again. Its inviting another of their number to step up and do it for glory, for the cause, for their tribe.
Whatever you want to call it, it is the opposite of telling people to stand down.
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I absolutely agree! But even if it's wrong, I think the internal experience of this kind of Schadenfreude makes it clear that it's not at all the same subjective experience as supporting vigilante murder at the political level. One is much more common, much more human, than the other, even if it isn't good. And I don't think it's fair to accuse people who are only guilty of that lesser sin of secretly harboring the explicit pro-assassination view. When I say that we should "have more sympathy" for them I don't mean infinite amounts of indulgence, I just mean affording them the intellectual charity of not treating them as covert assassination-supporters. That's not where they're at. Where they're at isn't good, but it's not that.
Sure, I can agree with that. If one is to engage with people who are cheering upon the news of this murder, it is more accurate (and more productive!) to respond along the lines of "hey, it's not really ok to be happy someone got killed" than "hey, it's not ok to support assassination".
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