[tomohelix]

Maybe I am a callous person, but I have never agreed to this "don't speak ill of the dead" thing.

People live and die. It is inevitable. To the grieving family, I can understand why refraining from insulting the dearly departed is necessary. They are grieving and can be irrational. No need to make things worse for them.

But between unrelated people? Why can't I discuss the legacy of the dead? We are defined by our deeds in life. It is only natural that in death, people will talk and opine about what we have done. Nothing wrong with it.

[cowsup]

I feel like there's an unwritten "recently" in there. If you were to speak ill of Colonel Sanders, nobody would berate you for speaking ill of the dead. But when a CEO like Wojcicki, who made changes that were unpopular to the end-users (but helped turn YouTube into an actual profitable company) dies, it's considered very impolite to use that opportunity to bad-mouth decisions she made. When her son died earlier this year, that would've been a bad time to speak ill of her, as well, even though she herself was still alive.

A better phrase may be "Don't say things that will hurt the feelings of those who are grieving," but that doesn't roll off the tongue so easily.

[zarzavat]

She was a public figure. If millions of people around the world know your name then when you die, people will have things to say. Some will be good, some will be bad.

The custom about “not speaking ill of the dead” makes sense in a small IRL community, not for internationally famous people.

[meiraleal]

> "Don't say things that will hurt the feelings of those who are grieving"

I for one would prefer "don't get attached to evil people"

[nozzlegear]

Few people are comically evil enough that you can look at them and say "Ah, yes. You are evil. I will not get attached."

[HaZeust]

You haven't talked to enough people. I probably have that inner-thought at least once a month.

[meiraleal]

Yep. Feathers of the same birds flock together so one is just a little bit worse than the other and nobody feels ashamed.

[DannyBee]

"We are defined by our deeds in life"

We are but most folks here basically know nothing of her deeds, or really anything about her. They see one piece of a thing she was a face of for some time period, and that they also knew mostly nothing about, but appear to love to have strong opinions on!

If you want to speak of her deeds then go and learn about them. Otherwise, people aren't speaking of anything other than some small myopic view of a human being they knew nothing about. Folks don't get to say that she is defined by the small piece of stuff they saw, just because they want to have an opinion on it.

Besides being disrespectful, it's not even interesting, and it says more about the people doing it than the person they are talking about.

It's like saying you are defined by the small and short interactions you had with grocery store cashiers who happen to like to post about their experiences with you on the internet and nothing else.

[sigmar]

>But between unrelated people? Why can't I discuss the legacy of the dead? We are defined by our deeds in life. It is only natural that in death, people will talk and opine about what we have done. Nothing wrong with it.

unless you have a magical way to make your comment here invisible to her family and friends, posting it to the internet is not keeping the comment exclusively "between unrelated people." Many of those replies to Pichai are vile.

[dotnet00]

There's an implied "reasonable chance" in there.

[dotnet00]

Agreed, I don't get it either. I also wonder how many people saying this sort of thing expressed the same sentiment when someone they had a strong dislike of passed or had a close brush with death.

We've had many such incidents over the recent years and at least in my anecdotal observations, people do not consistently apply this.

[somenameforme]

Socrates never wrote a single thing down and was, somewhat ironically, opposed to writing. The reason is that he felt that words cannot defend themselves. They can be twisted, taken out of context, and misrepresented, with none there to defend them, provide that missing context, or what not. Fortunately his student Plato disagreed so here we can discuss him 2400 years after his death.

With a dead person, I think this logic holds to an even higher degree. Personally I'm not really sure whether I agree or disagree with it, but it seems pretty reasonable, especially if we don't hyperbolically immediately leap to absurdly extreme examples like Hitler or whatever.

[matrix87]

> Maybe I am a callous person, but I have never agreed to this "don't speak ill of the dead" thing.

If they're rich and powerful who cares... here's John Oliver's reaction to Kissinger dying [0]... tl;dr "not soon enough"

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HmrJmq7d1c