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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   42660 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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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.

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.

drawing a comparison between the brutal violence in Gaza which Charlie Kirk implicitly supported and the brutal violence which ended his own life.

"the chickens have come home to roost".

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.

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:

Accusing Mr. Kennedy of "twiddling his thumbs" at the killing of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngô Dinh Nhu, Malcolm X told a Black Muslim rally at the Manhattan Center that he "never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon." He added: "Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad.”

The speech in general is pretty icky:

Malcolm X told the crowd, estimated at about 700, that immediately after Mr. Kennedy's assassination the Black Muslim leadership had been asked for comments by the newspapers. He charged this was an attempt to trap the organization into a "fanatic, inflexibly dogmatic" statement. He said the press was looking for such a remark as: "Hooray, hooray! I'm glad he got it!" With this exclamation, there was more laughter and applause.

Throughout his address, which lasted an hour, Malcolm X repeated a previous contention that the Black Muslim movement is based on monotheistic love and tolerance of all men, including white men. However, he said that while his followers were nonviolent, they were encouraged for purposes of self-defense to study judo and karate and "everything else you should learn that will show you how to break a white man's neck." Again there was applause and laughter.

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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