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People aren’t just one thing. They can be right about one thing and wrong about other things.
by 2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
People aren’t just one thing. They can be right about one thing and wrong about other things.
- MegaDeKay 1y agoIt was an awfully big thing. I had a number of his books along with a little Dilbert doll sitting on top of my desktop PC, and threw it all away for the same reason as the parent poster when I learned of the awful things he'd said.
- southernplaces7 1y agoTruly hard to understand the pigeonhole mentality of people who discard all the creations, that they obviously took pleasure from, of someone because they later don't like that person's opinions of something unrelated.
- thephyber 1y agoWe already know that. The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible? I first saw people wrestle with this idea for Michael Jackson and recently it has been a big issue related to Kanye West.
- quantified 1y agoThe art was good. I remember Cat Stevens disappearing from the airwaves when Yusuf Islam emerged. You might feel differently about the art based on how it connects to the post-revelation artist. Michael Jackson was close to a genius. Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
- ch4s3 1y agoIt doesn’t help that Yusuf Islam called for the murder of Salman Rushdie live on TV, which connects his odiousness to his work in a way the other artists transgressions often aren’t.
- defrost 1y ago"His odiousness" was less a personal jihad to see Rushdie killed and more the end result of ill considered comments about what different systems of law state after being drawn in and questioned on the contentious issue live. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Stevens%27_comments_about_Salman_Rushdie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Stevens%27_comments_about_...
- WarOnPrivacy 1y agoI have no feelings about him either way. I've read thru Islam's statements and gotten the best context I can. The adjective I would apply to all of it is hapless. More than anything, Islam seems ill equipped to handle these matters. And to be fair, he indicated he is not the guy to come to for this topic. I would bolster that to say that if someone truly wanted a substantive, educated opinion about fatwa, they would have gone to someone capable of giving them that.
- defrost 1y agoThe context for one of the two(?) TV statements on air was Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals. Great TV factual, devilish, host led open panel discussion about hair trigger dilemmas of real life and law staged by an international QC (now KC) and human rights lawyer. It was literally about exploring the gap between written law, law as practicied, morals and ethics, and circumstances that would test anyone. Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam was a typical guest .. an everyman of no particular deep study into such things, just one of many on the Clapham omnibus. Taking anything said by anyone on that particular show, sans context, as a literal statement of their core personal belief is tenuous at best. Good show concept though, pity it's not around anymore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Robertson#Media_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Robertson#Media_caree...
- ch4s3 1y agoNonsense. Yusuf Islam is a Sunni Muslim and the fatwa wass issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, a Shia cleric. So there was no reason for him to recognize the fatwa as legitimate, and he literally said "He must be killed. The Qur'an makes it clear – if someone defames the prophet, then he must die." There is no ambiguity here, Yusuf Islam called for Salman Rushdie's killing over a book that a Shia cleric claimed insulted the prophet. A book I might add that neither of them ever read. Later that year he again said Rushdie should be killed in a different context.
- armadsen 1y agoPicasso absolutely was called that and worse. His treatment of women in his life and some of his children was far from decent.
- jonstewart 1y agoVery nice Repo Man reference. Well done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI-gt7GrNAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI-gt7GrNAA
- defrost 1y agoCould've been an OG Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers reference . . . lot of Road Runner and Wheels on the Bus fans out there still.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- userbinator 1y agoThe answer is: nothing. It doesn't matter.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 2muchcoffeeman 1y agoArt is relatively low stakes. We can always create more art. You should increase the stakes as a thought experiment. The person who solved global warming/cancer/whatever turns out to be a terrible person? Should we throw away their work, and come to a different answer? Or wait a few generations so people forget and come to the same answer again but the people involved are “pure”?
- only-one1701 1y agoThere is some art that, to some people, is as important as anything else in their lives. For some, the stakes are that the artist who made the art that made them want to keep living after, say, being sexually assaulted, was himself credibly accused of serial sexual assault. I’m not advocating a decision here, but I wouldn’t call that low stakes.
- MPSimmons 1y agoFritz Haber has entered the chat. His first paragraph sounds pretty solid: >Fritz Jakob Haber (German: [ˈfʁɪt͡s ˈhaːbɐ] ⓘ; 9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives.[4] It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this food supports nearly half the world's population.[5][6] For this work, Haber has been called one of the most important scientists and industrial chemists in human history.[7][8][9] Haber also, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid. The second paragraph gives the context: >Haber, a known German nationalist, is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. He first proposed the use of the heavier-than-air chlorine gas as a weapon to break the trench deadlock during the Second Battle of Ypres. His work was later used, without his direct involvement,[10] to develop the Zyklon B pesticide used for the killing of more than 1 million Jews in gas chambers in the greater context of the Holocaust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
- 1y ago
- mx7zysuj4xew 1y agoYou seperate the work from the author.
- losvedir 1y agoGrowing up as a devout religious kid in the 80s, it was always understood in my household that rock stars were lascivious, immoral sex crazies and that Hollywood was a den of heathen propaganda. Nevertheless, we still listened to (some) music and watched (some) movies. I'm mostly out of that environment now, but occasionally put myself in those shoes again and think how odd it would seem to me that people look up to and expect moral righteousness from these people.
- wredcoll 1y agoI think most people recognize more states that 'moral righteousness' and 'immoral heathen'. I don't expect, e.g. christian bale to spend his life volunteering in a food pantry and washing prisoner's feet. I do expect him not to rape, murder, commit fraud, and so on. One of the things I occasionally notice about conversations in this area is that some people care more about actions that hurt people than property. If our hyopthetical rockstar trashes a hotel room, wrecks his car and then has a heart attack from cocaine, that might be judged differently than one that joins the local nazi party and attempts to murder someone.
- jollofricepeas 1y agoHowever if a rockstar were to protest peacefully and shout “Black Lives Matters” then throw a rock through a police car window.. …I’d assume that would be judged differently than an attempted murder and trashing a hotel room. The question is what would be the judgement for all three?
- wredcoll 1y agoI'm genuinely confused what the question is. Shouting "black lives matter" at a protest is a fairly minor virtuous action. Throwing a rock at a police car is a pretty minor sin. Attempted murder is generally a pretty major sin, modulo quibbles about legal vs moral definitions of murder.
- verisimi 1y ago[flagged]
- Nursie 1y ago> The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible? It's an interesting conundrum isn't it? H.P. Lovecraft is a case in point - Lovecraftian horror is a special sort of literary genius, in my opinion, and massively influential on other writers to this day (I'm a big fan of The Laundry Files, for instance, which draw on it). But it's clear that he was massively racist, and significantly more so than just "well those were the times". Some people (some people here in this thread) say that we should "separate the art from the artist", but there's quite a bit of veiled and not-so-veiled racism in the art as well. Not to forget the misogyny. So we decide to disavow him? No Cthulu for anyone! Well, that doesn't seem like a good option either. There's no easy, feel-good answer here other than to understand that flawed people sometimes create great art, to understand we don't have to (probably shouldn't) make idols of artists, and to be nuanced in our appreciation of their output. In this vein I did enjoy reading "Lovecraft Country" a while ago, which both explored the horror of racism and embraced mythos-style themes. Scott Adams gave us Dilbert. In the 90s I found it amazing. By the 00s I'd stopped paying attention, and then he started saying some somewhat less wonderful things which, if you squint, you could see foreshadowed in how uncharitable he was to people in his earlier writings. Another imperfect human, who gave us some good fun and insight, and in the end didn't live up to everyone's expectations. We shouldn't gloss over it, but perhaps we shouldn't pile those expectations on them anyway. I had a decent lunch at Stacy's that time though...
- mrtksn 1y agoUnderstand and it and celebrate the art when acknowledge the shortcomings of it creator. A lot of great creations, inventions and discoveries are made by otherwise insufferable assholes. Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR is known to be a prime one. You can’t stop using PCR in biology just because the character of the person who discovered it. Many painters, singers, composers and CEO’s are known to be horrible people. Unless they are actively harming humanity with the power they acquired, this is nothing more than a curiosity that is only relevant for people around him.
- throwawaygmbno 1y agoIt's more interesting to not separate them while they are living even if you still enjoy the art. You know exactly where the money is going if you continue to pay I don't really have an opinion on Wagner's music because he is dead. Michael Jackson similarly feels fine. But it feels more and more terrible to stream Kanye, a contender for one of the best in producing and rapping, every time he opens his mouth because you know you're helping support his life style. But if you ripped his albums you can still enjoy the previous art. But it's nice to know more about the riches finances and we should demand more. Papa John's fired their CEO for being racist, but he still holds significant stock, so I continue to avoid their pizza. Tesla could do the same and hopefully it still shouldn't matter without a complete sell off.
- hyperhello 1y agoWhat do we do with the honey of the bees that sting us?
- HideousKojima 1y agoWe certainly don't hide it away from the public ever being able to (legally) see it again. That's what the Simpson's rightsholders did when they removed the episode Jackson guest starred in from streaming services. People also like to be selective about which artists they try to memoryhole. John Lennon was a wife beater, an adulterer, and a deadbeat dad but people still love his music (though I personally think his solo career was worse than Paul's).
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoDo we know for a fact that Michael Jackson did anything wrong? On Wikipedia you can read that the original accuser suspect his son was being molested, and asked for money or he would go to the police. Doesn't this undermine the credibility of the accuser? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Michael_Jackson_sexual_abuse_allegations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Michael_Jackson_sexual_... > Chandler demanded money from Jackson, threatening to go to a criminal court, but no agreement was reached. After Jordan told a psychiatrist that Jackson had molested him, the Los Angeles Police Department began a criminal investigation. The investigation found no physical evidence against Jackson. Update, I just read that entire page and it seems obvious the whole thing was a set up.
- throw292737 1y agoIt basically says more about us than it does about the other person we "admire." Basically, what do you value more and what can you excuse?
- WarOnPrivacy 1y agoEnjoyment is a different thing than admiration. Folks who initially enjoyed Adams' work, later found they couldn't. His work had become associated with his opinions and folks were unhappy with having his remarks return to their mind again and again. Losing his books stopped that cycle. I've gotten rid of stuff that had negative associations for me. It was good for me.