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?
Imagine someone telling you “you have to separate the product from the corporation. Yes, they lobby to permit slave labour and are directly funding the genocide in Palestine, but they make one fine chicken sandwich - and if you don’t put down your silly objections to focus on that, you have failed as a human being”.
Fuck that, fuck everything about that.
Art is political. Fiction doubly so. You cannot and should not try to rip art free from its cultural context, because that context is the perspective that gives it meaning in the first place.
And extra-splintery fuck the idea that the onus is on the audience to sweep everything under the carpet for horrible people.
We’re in no danger of running out of art. We have an unlimited supply of artists just waiting for a break in the canopy to sprout up and grow into something new and exciting. If a handful of toxic assholes get canceled despite being popular, then so much the better.
Every work has the author’s stank all over it, it can’t not. It’s seen through their eyes and spoken through their lips (or fingers I guess).
Once you know what it is, it will - and should - colour your perception. If it turns out to be something toxic, then you’re allowed to be viscerally repelled by it. It’s okay. It’s not intellectual dishonesty to have an emotional-based opinion on art ffs.
Now if you let your opinions on engineering get affected by emotion, that’d be another matter. When deciding whether a bridge is safe to carry traffic, you absolutely should not let your personal feelings about the architect factor into the decision.
But this is art we’re talking about. Entertainment. Works designed specifically for emotional impact, with no value outside of that. How you feel about them is the only valid criterion.
If a work squicks you out because the author is a piece of shit, that’s a genuine, valid and authentic opinion - it’s pretending otherwise that would be dishonest.
And in my experience, the ones shouting the loudest about the intellectual integrity angle tend to be fanbois with a huge emotional attachment to the work from their adolescence. Buncha simps, in other words.
Which fine, feelings are valid - but they should damn well own it. If nostalgia > victims, then have the balls to just say it, don’t try to well-ackchewally it into some lofty principle, because it isn’t.
First up, fandom is free advertising; fuck them I’m not promoting their product for them, even if I don’t buy it.
But more than that, it’s sending a message that the behaviour is something we’re willing to condone, that we stand with the abuser rather than their victims.
Imagine telling a sexual assault survivor to just lie back and enjoy the masterful comic stylings of Bill Cosby, or at least to shut up and let you enjoy it, because they’re ruining the funny.
Would that person have reason to consider you a friend or ally after that?
The Harry Potter IP, for instance, is just a giant anti-trans flag now, and the people who wave it around are picking a side. They can’t pretend they’re not; pinning the logo to their chest is explicitly endorsing the author’s views, and spitting in the face of every trans person in their life.
As a Christian most of the circles I’m around are pretty chill…no stone-cold fundamentalists. But I have been around people (and even had family members) who are 100% convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home....
My grandfather (born round the start of the first world war) was hideously racist, not overtly religious, but neither of those seemed to figure into his horrified disgust and moral panic at “rock and roll”. Seriously, he’d be less shocked at someone wiping their ass with a slice of bread and eating it, than he would be at them playing rock music in the house. If it featured on a TV ad, or came in the window from someone driving past, it was like he was under siege.
Part of it was the sex-and-drugs angle, I’m sure, but I think even that was a small part of the whole.
I think the biggest part was that it was a symbol of counterculture, of men growing their hair long and rejecting the order and authority of the world he was born into. He experienced a fuckton of social change in his lifetime, he couldn’t navigate the culture any more, and this left him lost, angry and afraid. There were these people pissing on all the symbols he understood, and waving around a bunch he didn’t, while rejecting all the values he’d been taught - and dancing about it, like (from his perspective) a horde of crackheads ransacking a library and smearing shit on everything for lulz.
I mean, I wince and block channels with any kind of ‘reaction videos’, and I’m only genX. I get it, to a degree - though I’m trying at least to ensure that when I get irretrievably stuck in the past, it’s at least from this century. But the change I’ve been through only stretches from Kojak to Skibidi Toilet whatever the fuck that is. His stretched from before cars or refrigeration to the internet itself. I don’t think I’ll see as big a transformation as he did in his time; I hope I cope a shitload better than he did with what I do see, but who knows?
Pretty much the title. I’ve been watching more realistic super hero shows like The Boys and Invincible. The reoccurring themes is that with great power comes great immorality....
You get that power, you use it on people who are making the world a shittier place first.
Now, that’s not precisely moral, but let’s be honest, beyond a bit of minor larceny there’s not a whole lot of personal gain you can realistically achieve.
Steal a truckload of cash? Sure, but then you’ve got to launder the heck out of it, and I’ve seen Ozark, that’s more drama than I want in my life even if I had the skills, which I don’t. And nobody pays cash even for groceries any more, have to wait for one of the non-card registers to open up and it’s a pain in the ass. Maybe you could rig a horse race or something, but the people involved in serious gambling are very good at spotting anomalous wins, and your life wouldn’t be worth dick the second time you tried it.
That pretty much leaves pranks and murder, and you’re a damn fool if you bring that within a dozen miles of any kind of personal connection.
Which pretty much only leaves assassination of high-level assholes as something that would a:) make a noticeable difference, b:) keep you under the radar and c:) be immensely satisfying.
Snipers are a thing. And at best, who wants to spend their life on the lam? I want to play video games and eat toast, it’s hard to do that if you can’t spend an entire day in any given location.
If I could think of a way to become comfortably well-off without eitehr getting in trouble or living in crippling anxiety that I was going to get in trouble, that might be another story.
It’s just that getting away with shit is for rich people with powerful connections, and bootstrapping into that state without passing through an uninsulated trouble phase is pretty damn nontrivial. They don’t let just anyone into the club, and they stomp anyone who dares to try.
I don’t actually know about the international-super-assassin club, but I’m willing to bet it’s either a fair bit more porous, or a lot more discreet, to the point that you never have reason to suspect they’re onto you.
You ever see a dog that’s got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it’s never going to make the connection....
If you’ve got just one app you use, and the admins go all Elon on the place, you either put up with it or you’re out in the cold.
If you have a hundred different apps - you don’t have that problem, but it’s a fragmented mess you can’t possibly keep track of.
But the fediverse gives you the best of both worlds. It’s hundreds of apps, but they each pull in the feed of all the others - and if the admins of any one app turn out to be evil clowns, the other apps can quietly snip them out of the feed, just like making a new groupchat with everyone but Karen in it.
It’s slowly coalescing into a handful of major cliques defined by the kinds of people they don’t want to talk to.
Ask Lemmy is a place to ask thought provoking questions. The mods have been lenient with some of the recent posts on the basis that they must provoke thought for some people, but after seeing two posts essentially saying “what do you think of my stick?”, I believe we can raise the bar a bit on what kind of thoughts we want...
You could turn invisibility on and off as you like and there would be no time limit. Your clothes would turn invisible too, and you could decide whether the items you are holding would be visible or not....
Hey, so I believe in a higher power but I’m not on board with any particular religion. Anyone else think it’s cool to just fly solo as a good human, no religion attached?
I personally am in a phenomenally stable polyamorous relationship. I’ve been married to my wife for 12 years, and she has had the same boyfriend for about half of that time. It’s a really fulfilling arrangement for all of us in various ways. We’re all genuinely happy and satisfied. I’m kind of casually looking for a...
I don’t care for later composers; I love the elegant-yet-complex structure of early/ier music and I have yet to find anyone who can explain to me precisely what I mean by that.
I have a huge mental blind spot when it comes to music theory; I don’t understand a damn thing about it and likely never will, so I can’t put this in actual smart-people words.
But Bach (along with a number of earlier composers) sounds immensely fucking clever, like he’s carrying on a conversation on three different levels at once, and somehow doing counterpoint down the timeline instead of across it, even with an unaccompanied cello.
Whereas your beethovens and mozarts of the world seem to use ten times as much sound and fury, or ten times as many twiddly bits… to say very little at all. If you boiled out all the redundancy, all the structures would collapse and you’d have nothing left over.
If anyone knows what the fuck I’m talking about and is able to translate, I’ll be eternally grateful.
It’s all over twitter lately, people getting recorded ripping down posters with a graphic about the missing Israeli children and then their real names are found and are quickly fired from their jobs.
It seems society always goes down the shitter over and over following the same path. People rise to wealth and power extracted on the repression of the masses, massive disparity, ignorance exemplified, xenophobia and blaming minorities for any possible issue, laws signed with golden pens but becoming more meaningless when...
Yes, it’s a drunkard’s walk. All systems constantly and inevitably evolve towards concentration of resources.
People talk about entropy being the big-bad, but selection is entropy’s personal wetwork consultant, and she is a cold heartless bitch.
It’s like a rainforest: you start off with a bunch of tree species that all grow at the same rate. Then some chance mutation makes one tree grow just a little bit faster, and hey look not only does it get the sunlight the others trees don’t, it shades them out so they can’t compete. That’s some hellacious selection pressure right there, and so the arms race is on.
You can’t stop that from happening, it’s baked into the very fabric that all the systems are built on.
Some deer decides that big antlers are hot, and a million years later all the males are stuck walking round with a fucking tree growing out of their head. Fuck the individual, keep them teetering on the edge of starvation or violent death at all times, extract maximum efficacy at all costs.
Everything from biology to economics and fucking video games. Oh no, you don’t get to play a fun creative entertaining build, you slavishly follow the meta or you’re out of the running. It’s the same in business, it’s the same everywhere you fucking look.
Every slightly sub-optimal build of [organism | business model | social organisation | I dunno, school of fucking architecture ] since the beginning of forever has been outcompeted by something slightly more effective, and has been abandoned, throat slit and dumped on the roadside like an underperforming child prostitute.
And enshittification is just one aspect of this. Anything that exists can be out-competed by something else a little more ruthless, a little more exploitative or unscrupulous, a little more expensive, a little more shitty. And at any step, someone can not take that step, in which case things stay as they are… or they can take it, in which case it gets worse. And once they have taken the step, there’s no going back. One little step at a time, salami-slicing us all to hell.
You can never fix it from inside the system, because the system is always rigged to protect itself - you don’t get there in the first place unless you’ve already subverted the things that could stop you. All you can ever hope to do is burn it all down and start again.
I was wondering who is going to pay for the reconstruction of all the razed apartment buildings, schools and hospitals in Gaza? Are the US and Europe going to do that, or is Israel going to do at least this?...
Court documents naming Epstein associates are to be made public this week? Who do you think will come out the worst?
We already know that Prince Andrew was heavily involved but who else do you think will be named?
What's the consensus on swearing here
Noticed not many people use curse words....
Is there an artist so horrible that no matter how hard you try that you cannot separate their art from them?
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?
Does "Rock music is evil / of the devil" have racist roots?
As a Christian most of the circles I’m around are pretty chill…no stone-cold fundamentalists. But I have been around people (and even had family members) who are 100% convinced that rock music is evil and will lead people to engage in witchcraft and draw pentagrams all over their home....
Be honest: if you had the power to stop time, your morals would go out the window. (lemmy.zip)
Pretty much the title. I’ve been watching more realistic super hero shows like The Boys and Invincible. The reoccurring themes is that with great power comes great immorality....
What's the simplest thing humans are too dumb to grasp?
You ever see a dog that’s got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it’s never going to make the connection....
What is the most terryifying siren noise?
There’s an emergency at the Facility down the road, and everyone in a six-mile radius is very likely fucked....
How would you explain Lemmy/Kbin to a Reddit person or to a social media person?
Trying to "recruit" more folks in Kbin but I think I lack enough information to describe Kbin effectively....
Low effort posts
Ask Lemmy is a place to ask thought provoking questions. The mods have been lenient with some of the recent posts on the basis that they must provoke thought for some people, but after seeing two posts essentially saying “what do you think of my stick?”, I believe we can raise the bar a bit on what kind of thoughts we want...
Scrabble’s New Official Word List Contains Dozens of Stunning Additions. Elite Players Are Mortified. (slate.com)
Would you choose invisibility or teleportation?
You could turn invisibility on and off as you like and there would be no time limit. Your clothes would turn invisible too, and you could decide whether the items you are holding would be visible or not....
What are your thoughts on the concept of having faith in a Higher Power but choosing to distance oneself from established religious doctrines?
Hey, so I believe in a higher power but I’m not on board with any particular religion. Anyone else think it’s cool to just fly solo as a good human, no religion attached?
What are your experiences with polyamory, first or second hand?
I personally am in a phenomenally stable polyamorous relationship. I’ve been married to my wife for 12 years, and she has had the same boyfriend for about half of that time. It’s a really fulfilling arrangement for all of us in various ways. We’re all genuinely happy and satisfied. I’m kind of casually looking for a...
deleted_by_author
What are your thoughts on people being doxxed for ripping down missing israeli posters?
It’s all over twitter lately, people getting recorded ripping down posters with a graphic about the missing Israeli children and then their real names are found and are quickly fired from their jobs.
What's the significance of calling it "Israel-Hamas War" vs "Israel-Gaza War"?
I’m in the US....
Will human societies always enshittify themselves?
It seems society always goes down the shitter over and over following the same path. People rise to wealth and power extracted on the repression of the masses, massive disparity, ignorance exemplified, xenophobia and blaming minorities for any possible issue, laws signed with golden pens but becoming more meaningless when...
Who's going to pay for the reconstruction of Gaza
I was wondering who is going to pay for the reconstruction of all the razed apartment buildings, schools and hospitals in Gaza? Are the US and Europe going to do that, or is Israel going to do at least this?...
certain phrases preventing posting?
ETA for fuck’s sake, even this post had to be censored down to go through. It took about 15 attempts....
This banana was perfectly straight! (lemmy.world)