Dr. Medulla wrote: ↑03 Apr 2024, 8:46pm
I frustrate students because I never allow that answer (or "it's both") during discussion. Pick a side, bub! But, yes, in the real world, the answer is grey, not black or white
Yeah, it's obviously not really a position you want when you're debating in a class or writing a paper or something, but I think it depends/its both/sometimes is underrated in regular life. I've really gotten on this with "ethical consumption" and whatnot (including from discussions here), I think we're always being pushed to make totalizing, black and white decisions - especially when it comes to ethics. But, like, doing incremental amounts of less damage or abstaining from supporting bad people or whatever seems like an obviously better result than just saying "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, so fuck, who cares what I do." I'd way rather have someone who decides not to buy a record from Dicky Barrett for being an anti-vaxxer (to use one example dear to my heart) even if they still can't help themselves from buying Morrissey records rather than just decide it's all pointless if you can't or won't be 100% consistent.
Ooof, I wasn't aware of his "idiosyncrasies" regarding genocide. He was never a massive influence in my formative years—I was solidly in the world of the past rather than contemporary critique—but that's still rough. In a way, and bouncing off your last sentence above, I think of one of the arguments about limiting copyright. Yes, the Beatles produced inspiring music, but it took audiences, generations of audiences, to make them influential. Accordingly, those songs deserve to be in the public domain, reflecting the importance of the public's role as a creator after the fact. So, whatever the alarming qualities about Chomsky as a thinker in some areas, many ideas have germinated because of what others have done with them. If he's a candidate for "cancelling," take care to not make it retroactive in a way that nullifies everything. But even writing that, I can see that that's not how this shit works. Social media doesn't traffic in nuance.
I actually tend to think these things win out over time. Social media is a weird beast, but it's also extremely short in attention span by design. If Chomsky is unfashionable (perhaps for very valid reasons!) for a moment, I tend to think the stuff of his that's worthwhile would resurface and endure far past the social media blip that comes with "cancelling." Also, notably, Chomsky is an example of someone I'm thinking about personally, afaik there's no backlash to him at all, for the past writings or the epstein stuff.
Oh lord. Like, what on earth would he have in common with Epstein to place him there? What kind of benign explanation is there?
Maybe he got confused and stumbled onto the wrong plane. (More seriously, I'm hesitant to say more just because I remember his name popping up when those flight log names were released but I haven't double checked or sought out more info at all, and I don't plan to because I'm trying to not get sucked into Discourse as much these days, so I don't want to get out over my skis even tho, as you say, what other explanation there could be escapes me at the moment.)
I'm less invested in this because I don't see many media figures as much more than people who read off teleprompters. Or at least the network people. More independent journalists, yeah, if your stock in trade is incorruptible and speaker against power and all that, so much of what you say depends on people giving you the benefit of the doubt, a person who doesn't lie. And yet, if we find out that, say, Seymour Hersh, has been a serial rapist, does that negate his work? Like, a monster can still tell the truth, they can reveal the horrible truths of others. Does this mean we go brutally relativist? Are those our choices: absolutist in condemnation or putting assets and debits side by side and doing the calculations? Neither one of those options seem to speak well for us as a jury.
Here's a talking head example I found insane. My wife still likes (or liked, we haven't watched it in a bit) The Today Show and I caught a segment on the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial (you wanna talk about a guy getting... whatever the opposite of cancellation is and the female accuser actually functionally being blackballed instead) and post trial-verdict (which was in favor of Depp, if you don't recall) they ran this incredibly pro-Depp piece, speaking to Depp's attorneys, portraying him as a huge victim, the whole works and as the segment ended and they were about to cut to commercial savannah guthrie quickly says "full disclosure: my husband works on the Depp legal team but wasn't one of the trial lawyers". now, this is not a news story I care about except insofar as it all seemed insanely misogynistic in how it was dealt with but that seemed INSANE to me. I guess the disclosure was something, but I think knowing that about her should have rendered the entire segment complete worthless and untrustworthy for any viewer. You know, the ones that I'm sure were hanging riveted to the TV during the time the hosts usually just say "back after these messages."
But yeah, mostly I'm thinking of independent journalists and, like, opinion writers and analysts like Chomsky, Greenwald, Taibbi, etc. I think it's fair, maybe even necessary, to consider their biographies in assessing THEIR takes.
The Hersh example is actually maybe useful. If he was outed as a serial rapist, assuming that his behavior wasn't, like, with people he had been investigating and whatnot then, no, I don't think it would invalidate his other work. I think it'd be fair to suggest that he stopped being booked on speaking tours or to get new publishing deals, tho.
I'm a bit uncomfortable with the idea that pleasure determines it even if I know that it plays a big role. It makes it sound like our decision to invoke morality isn't rooted in principle so much as convenience. We can condemn X and gain morality points while looking the other way on Y because our pleasure matters more than the morality points. That throws the whole morality thing in the can … maybe. I don't know.
I have a childhood friend who's pretty libertarian and he always used to annoy me by saying that all forms of altruism are really just about seeking our own pleasure because it ultimately is just about making us feel good. Real annoying guy when he got in that mode.
And yeah, I meant to say more that just wanting to learn more about artists that make stuff we like is part of the pleasure of the art for most people (whether that be a visceral pleasure or something more abstract), so I think learning the "bad" stuff about them is just an inescapable part of that pleasure seeking. What we do with that knowledge may be about pleasure, or about moral action, or consumption, or something else.
I'm less sure about that, but I suspect my casual fandom (even that word is too strong) with Bowie means I'm not invested in him. Did he ever do a mea culpa? I'm rather Catholic in these matters where I expect a confession first before I'm willing to consider whether I need to re-evaluate.
I'd be interested in someone like Jon's take. I'm a big Bowie fan, but I feel like I'm still a neophyte compared to Really Big Bowie fans. I don't know if he had a mea culpa moment but I've read a bunch of his late era interviews (conveniently, I was gifted a collection of interviews he'd done towards the end of his life) and he seemed... you know, mature, introspective, good head on this shoulders. The kind of person you hope to grow into being. I dunno, I think if I read a bunch of stories about him being a womanizer and guy who had really dodgy taste in companions up through the end of his days I'd be more skeeved out and less willing to overlook his history.
I'm thinking of an example, here, that of Dan Harmon, who was accused by a writer on Community who said that he was abusive and demeaning, with sexual undertones to ut all. Harmon replied with a rather thoughtful admission of his culpability, of a selfishness that he rationalized into something acceptable. And the writer accepted his apology as sincere, that there was no deflection or weasel words, but a full acknowledgement that her understanding of what happened was legitimate, that its effects on her were undeniable and wholly on him. That confession and the acceptance from his accuser/victim has meant that he's not fair game for others.
Yeah, he's a great example. Also, an indication that a lot of this shit would not be a big deal if those being accused of bad behavior, you know, learned and made amends. It's such a low fucking bar and we have like
one example of a dude clearing it.
Maybe it's the bullshit of social media where a few loud voices get confused for a real movement. An extension of the bullshit where "people are saying on Twitter" becomes a justification to claim that it's news. Some rando declaring a person cancelled with 2000 likes—does that mean anything? Fuck, to the real movers and shakers, I'd be snorting at being "cancelled." Who fucking cares? If you're not going to prison, the judgement of the excitable, short-attention-span masses means fuck all.
This DEFINITELY is true. I truly think the "cancelling" thing is like 2% stuff that actually happened and 98% hysteria and backlash because news and magazine writers all post all the fucking time on twitter and that's all they see and think about anymore. So there's this huge churn about a non-existent "problem" of people being cancelled just for, you know, being horrible. Drives me nuts. And it's also part of the anti-cancel culture/anti-woke backlash. I heard on the radio that something like 75% of DEMOCRATIC identifying men think "woke culture" and "cancellations" have gone too far. People absolutely get brainwashed about these cultural panics. Cancel Culture is more like the 80s/90s satanic panic than anything else, imho.