I'm upset that people thought it was more important to make sure the focus was on Kobe being a rapist in the fresh hours of victims being confirmed rather than mourning the innocents lost especially when children are involved and an entire family basically perished in that crash.
I saw multiple people only writing about him being a rapist and not giving any attention to the innocents in the crash. The gleeful shit being the worst because people were using this situation to celebrate as though innocents perishing is totes okay because they a rapist is dead!
Sure. That's not what posters were doing. They were specifically focusing on the rape case without any mention of the innocents that died. Same with many others on twitter. If you think that's more important than showing support for the innocents than that is disgusting.
While I'm not here to defend every particularly morbid post, I think it would be disingenuous to say this discussion is solely about people who said "glad he's dead and fuck them kids too". A lot of people's issue come from the fact that people brought up at all.
The problem is that you can't paint yourself as a progressive person and forum and have your first response to a tragic accident in which innocent kids smashed in to the side of a mountain be ''yeah but he's a rapist''. Like these are sensitive subjects, Kobe has left behind a victim who other than financial gain has had no justice in her favour but on the other hand multiple families have been devastated by a tragic accident.
The response to anybody trying to brush the rape under the carpet should absolutely be to remind them of it because it's part of his legacy. On the other hand eight other people died in that accident yesterday. This is why for me you aren't as progressive as you may think if you operate and two different ends of an extreme scale. We can show empathy for the woman Kobe raped but we can also show empathy for his family, the other families and the people he inspired.
We have the emotional capacity to do both and subjects like these and especially on this forum should be discussed maturely. Jumping in with ''He's a rapist'' and also responding to people with ''fuck off'' is neither.
People can change, they can be rehabilitated, they can improve their lives and the lives of others. They can be looked up to, placed on a pedestal and do right in their community but they can also commit terrible acts with little to no justice. These things absolutely go together but emotions are raw and complicated.
I don't particularly care for this line of rhetoric because it projects a label onto people to create a strawman.
The crux of topic in general IMO is not a rejection of purported binary thinking. It's about who's feelings matters and when. For one, feelings about sexual assault don't come out of no where, and I find it troubling that people are sort of adopting this counter-internet culture thinking by dunking on people they've identified as "progressive".
I don't know what it says about us when we presume that people have strong feelings about rape because we think they are trying to virtue signal that they are the most "progressive" of them all. I think a lot of people have strong feelings about rape because either they themselves have been victims of the act, or know somebody who has. To me that is the good faith approach when responding to people who are effectively saying "fuck kobe". Presuming them to be disingenuous internet strangers trying to get upvotes and internet clout for having a visceral reaction to people who commit sexual assault...I just can't get down with that.
I think we should have visceral reactions to sexual assault. What's troubling here is that we are downplaying the feelings of those who do in the name of "nuance".