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In the days following Charlie Kirk's murder, has seen a wave of employers being contacted regarding off-color remarks made by employees on social media about his passing. The debate is, does this constitute cancel culture, but by the right instead of the typical left? Some have argued that it is not the same thing, due to the disparaging comments being immediate, vs old comments dredged up in an attempt to cancel someone. There is a big difference between someone desecrating Charlie Kirk in an overt manner right after his passing, compared to a social media post made 10+ years ago against living targets that could be deemed as racist only under the most uncharitable light.
My take is, contacting an employer with the intent of getting someone fired for something not work-related or fired in the public interest as a 'concerned citizen', by definition, is cancel culture. Sure, one can argue that this is a different degree of cancelation, but it's the same principle. Someone posting a vile comment on his social media celebrating someone's death doesn’t necessarily affect his ability to do his job, like making sandwiches or whatever. Sure, if said individual confessed on social media to spitting in customers' sandwiches or making disparaging remarks about customers, go ahead and get his ass fired to protect the customers if no one else. But this is not like that. Consumers and other employees are not negatively affected by an employee holding a grudge against a dead podcaster.
To turn the tables, imagine if George Soros died and many of those same people wrote "good riddance" on their social media accounts, should this be grounds for cancelation? By the above logic, yes if you want to be morally consistent.
relevant tweet https://x.com/politicalmath/status/1967066826590028174
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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