Respect for the dead?

[Tammy the Lich]

But... Tammy already got the balloons from Party Warehouse.

[Squeakmaan]

I suppose this is always a fine, and wavy, line to walk. To not seem crass, but not let their death allow their viewpoint to be the only one told. When the deceased makes it their life's work to harm other people, I'm not going to tell the people harmed how to respond to that person's death. I simply lack the perspective to understand.

[I'm Hiding In Your Closet]

Sissyl wrote:

Oh, and the Havamal quote is harsher than written in the other thread: "Folk dör, fä dör, själv dör du. Men ett vet jag som aldrig dör: dom över död man.", roughly translated to "People die, cattle die, you die yourself. But one thing I know which never dies: judgement of a dead man."

This. I've seen several variations on this line, and I won't claim to know which, if any, is officially correct - but it does get to the point of why it's stupid to alter one's view of another simply because they're dead. Judgment is really a job for everybody, not just 9 people.

Is this the kind of agonizing we see when famous criminals die? No, never. Their deaths we can, and do, celebrate...and yet evil and stupid legal policy deals vastly more harm than law-breakers ever could. If they're viewed as part of lawful society, we must be content to "strongly disagree."

Unless it's a leader/operative of some other society we're not supposed to like *blahblahblahetceteraetceteradowntherabbitholewego....*

The more one thinks about this, the more arbitrary and illogical it all seems.

[Irontruth]

I could be mistaken, but I don't believe anyone has suggested you are required to change your viewpoint on the person.

[I'm Hiding In Your Closet]

As far as I'm concerned, if it's not okay to say it, it's not really okay to think it. I mean this not merely as some stodgy axiom, but as a conclusion I've arrived regarding how the insidious primrose-path of real-life mind control can gradually talk people out of their own sense of right and wrong.

But here. Here's Hunter S. Thompson giving Richard Nixon a eulogy for the ages in less intimidated times. I will let it serve as my final word on this matter.

[TriOmegaZero]

Damn.

[Krensky]

And he never once gloated or celebrated in it.

[I'm Hiding In Your Closet]

Perhaps if he'd been willing/able to find more cause for personal joy in the frequently-awful things he covered, he wouldn't have wound up killing himself.

[Krensky]

Or maybe that's not how depression works.

[The Raven Black]

Celebrating someone's death tells much more about the one doing the celebration than it does about the one who died

[Sissyl]

Well, it could be worse. He could have done drugs. That significantly increases the risk of suicide. Luckily Hunter S. Thompson wasn't into drugs.