Similar to the recent question about artists where you can successfully separate them from their art. Are there any artists who did something so horrible, so despicable, that it has instantly invalidated all art that they have had any part in?

  • TheBananaKing@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    A good moral principle is ‘don’t do things that needlessly harm people’, but unintended consequences are everywhere. By delaying a passerby two seconds while you give a homeless guy $5, you might end up causing them to get hit by a garbage truck that would otherwise have missed them.

    You can’t enforce the principle consistently, but that doesn’t make it worthless; you give it a good-faith, best-effort go, and that’s all you can do. If your best efforts turn out to be disastrous, that’s shitty, but life’s unfair like that.

    Also, whatever else was going on with the person 800 years ago, JK is right now causing ongoing harm in her relentless campaign of hatred for trans people. Waving her IP around is promoting her cause, and so harming more people, right now.

    If nobody knows whether the 800-years-ago guy was a piece of shit or not, then promoting their work isn’t supporting some piece-of-shit cause and harming people.

    As for chicken sandwiches - without explaining why you think my analogy was inapt, calling it bullshit is no more of a slam-dunk rebuttal than if I called you a poopoohead.

    Entity X makes product Y and does shitty horrible thing Z. By being a product-Y fanboi and promoting Y all over the internet, you’re expressing approval for X and condoning Z (at least enough to cut them slack for it).

    What difference does it make whether Y is a media IP or a food product?

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Fine your analogy is in apt because you can get a fried chicken sandwich anywhere. It isnt exactly intellectual property.

      Also you are muddling the difference between not being all knowing with not being consistent. Not the same thing at all.

      • TheBananaKing@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Don’t muddy the water: you were talking specifically about chick-fil-A, even though I was using it as a generic example of a product people might get attached to. The ‘separate the art from the artist’ crowd would have you ignore any unpleasantness on the part of the producer, so long as the product is enjoyable in isolation - and hold it a moral failing not to do so.

        And your entire point was that you couldn’t be consistent because you werne’t all-knowing; not knowing the character of your 800-year-old artist is no different in this instance from not knowing the future: to perfectly apply the principle would require full knowledge of every situation where it could possibly apply (which is of course impossible). This does not, I contend, render the principle, or attempts to apply it as consistently as your knowledge allows, worthless.

        Do better, and try again.