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I have to admit that the debate on this topic confuses me.
People who are merely talking negatively about the legacy of a public figure are fine in my book, but isn't actual celebration of murder something that would usually get one shunned?
I'm not being sarcastic: Is there a norm of it not being a fireable offence to openly celebrate murder? There may be a point that actively calling an employer to get someone fired is not healthy behaviour, and also that a witch-hunt atmosphere may or will also drag in innocent people, but should I be worked up over the firing itself, if the facts of the case are correct?
I suppose there's a nuance of whether people are celebrating his mere passing, or the actual fact that he was murdered.
If he was assassinated, and people are celebrating it, I don't see why not...? He isn't an enemy soldier of a country I'm at war with. Personally I've enjoyed watching videos of him speak before, whatever I think he's responsible for.
I think one core idea here is that it used to be the case that a company could get reputational damage. But nowadays it seems like these cases are less and less “organic”. (Dovetails a bit with less organic virality in general). Like maybe in the past someone who got spontaneously famous would need to be cut loose. But when groups dedicate time to hunting down each and every offender? That’s just morality police, empowered with governmental-adjacent power, but without governmental guardrails. A bad state of affairs.
There’s also some conflation of what makes you a good human (don’t celebrate murder) vs what is human but shows a lack of tact (expressing true feelings of ambivalence about a murder) vs what is human but normally acceptable (half-private venting on supposed friend networks) vs what is possibly not even a genuine value statement at all (people feel “out of control” of the political trajectory and sometimes cope poorly with that feeling, saying things they may not truly mean in the heat of the moment).
And celebrities are already subject to a degree of dehumanization: Taylor Swift, Korean idols, etc all have people way up in their personal lives and even normal fans can display at times sociopathic tendencies and expressions. If you have Kirk in the mental bucket of “celebrity” and not “father to two young children” of course your conduct will be different! Frankly no one got fired if they celebrate Michael Jackson dying, whether they thought he was a creep and a predator, or a misunderstood star with a broken childhood. Yet politics, we are told, is different. That’s a little true (threatening democratic processes is more long term destabilizing to future democratic processes), but it’s not completely true!
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Yes, there is. In most of Europe firing someone for anything outside work is explicitly illegal.
In most of Europe, celebrating terrorism is also explicitly illegal.
Citation needed.
There is certainly no such clause in Finnish law. Even supporting (ie. material / financial / other direct aid) terrorism is illegal only if the support is for an actual terrorism act or a designated terrorist group.
Don’t assume UK and Germany == most of Europe.
The criminal code chapter 34a paragraph 5e criminalizes encouraging or enticing to join a terrorist organization or to commit a terrorist crime, if it is done in a manner that is likely to cause someone to do so. The law does not explicitly mention celebrating, but I suspect that for example celebrating a terrorist act on television could be interpreted to be enticing, although I don't know if any judgement based on this law has ever been decided in a court of law.
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Most major European nations have laws on the books for this, and there are two EU directives and frameworks expressly referencing "glorification" in a "public provocation to commit a terrorist offense" that may be banned within that framework.
It's a norm that has a long past in Europe (since you know, we've not exactly been a peaceful continent), and though there are exceptions and enforcement varies, free speech that includes support for terrorism has essentially never been the norm in Europe.
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It doesn't mean the police can't arrest you for activities outside of work. It means corporations can't terminate you from your job for your out-of-work activities.
Yes they can. There are just valid and non valid causes for firing. Going to jail for glorifying terrorism is one such valid reason.
If that were the case I know more than a couple of people who should’ve been imprisoned a long time ago.
Plenty people are and its trivially easy find information about this online.
For instance, in 2016 there were 306 persons in France alone that were convicted of apologia for terrorism and 232 of those were sentenced to jail.
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I legitimately don't know how european employment law works- the closest analogue in the US that I can think of is union contracts which generally are not going to be used to defend celebrating terrorism even if they might slow down the termination process- does it require a hate speech conviction to fire an employee who says these kinds of things?
It's all complicated and specific to whatever country but in most cases you can fire someone for criminal behavior insofar as you can legitimately argue that it is either related to the business or tarnished the reputation of the business.
In this case, advocacy of terrorism is a very easy crime to argue tarnishes reputation.
So in practice you'll likely be fired soon after being arrested unless your employer is sympathetic.
In theory you are innocent until proven guilty so that should only happen after conviction, but in practice mere criminal proceedings are enough to argue reputational damage. And at best you're signing up to more lawsuits. As I said, details vary a lot.
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Yeah, you wouldn't get fired. You'd get arrested.
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When you actually dig into what people are being fired for, a lot of it isn't actually celebrating murder. Most people are imagining something like what this lady posted, which yeah, is totally celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk. But then you log onto Twitter and see doctors getting fired for for reposting content drawing a comparison between the brutal violence in Gaza which Charlie Kirk implicitly supported and the brutal violence which ended his own life. This, while stupid, is still valid political commentary.
Maybe I'm being gung-ho about this, but that second link looks like it boils down to "he got what he deserved," which sounds like a celebration of murder to me.
I'll say that there's room for doubt, and also that there's probably a way of wording that sentiment so that it doesn't make me think that it's a celebration of murder. I suppose I should add that there's no reason why my feelings should be the judge of this.
Still, if this is the main problem, the debate should be about whether someone is celebrating murder or not. Instead, I've seen (or, more accurately, I feel as if I have seen) a lot of discussion about whether celebrating murder should be a firable offence.
I actually don't know what the norms or precedents on this question are. If you asked me before this killing, I would have assumed it wasn't that controversial. Maybe I'm wrong.
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Doctors also have really, really strict standards of non-anonymous social media behavior.
We also had that case in NJ where a nurse was suspended for calling out a doctor for celebrating.
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Nope.
EDIT: I absolutely expect to see overextension, here -- 'database of 40k+ incidents' and 'reasonable filtering and accuracy' are less venn diagrams and more completely separate circles -- but it's not very persuasive when the central examples inevitably look like this, instead of this.
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The doctor in question isn't just drawing a comparison to it, though. She's saying, 'Charlie Kirk knew there was genocide happening in Gaza and he loved it and he wanted more of it. Now he's dead and it serves him right.' In her own (quoted) words: "The chickens have come home to roost". That seems pretty close to celebrating his murder. At the very least it seems to be saying, 'Charlie Kirk deserved to die this way'.
You could read it like that. You could also read it as a general leftist criticism of the pro-Israeli position, in which violence over there against those people is seen as categorically different than violence over here against our people.
Hmm. She says she's specifically quoting from Malcolm X, and that was celebrating:
The speech in general is pretty icky:
https://www.nytimes.com/1963/12/02/archives/malcolm-x-scores-us-and-kennedy-likens-slaying-to-chickens-coming.html
Wait, Malcolm X had a bone to pick with the end of the south Vietnamese theocracy? Like sympathy with North Vietnam is at some level expected for leftists of the era but supporting the Ngo family against the military is not what I would have expected.
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