de mortuis

Some very right wing American political thinker died recently; frankly I hadn't heard of him until his death, but he sounds like he was an absolute piece of work. Of course, this has reignited the usual debate about whether it's acceptable to say that someone who recently died was a disgusting racist. I started a comment to that Making Light thread, but in the end decided that it was too long and rambly and not really on topic (given that I barely know who Buckley was anyway), so it is better as a separate post than a comment on someone else's blog.

( speaking ill of the dead )

Pain is bad. Mortality is bad. The fact that sometimes they affect despicable people doesn't really improve things very much, in my opinion. And part of the definition of not being evil is that you don't take pleasure in someone else's misery; using the excuse of their past bad behaviour to indulge in fantasizing about such things is morally dangerous.