At one point the devs of Spec Ops: The Line said something that has stuck with me: “putting the game down and walking away is a valid form of engagement”.
I accept that for media, and that’s actually a solid stance from the developers. I’m just struggling with the ubiquity of it all. The island of what I haven’t put down is getting too small to walk away on.
I think it’s possible to enjoy the art of a problematic artist on its own merits. What I don’t particularly like is the hero worship that permeates society and gives problematic artists platforms for their shittiness. The Ed Sheeran thing comes to mind. Dude is known for playing mediocre guitar and singing songs I don’t listen to. I don’t expect deep geopolitical insights from guitar man. I understand people that would take offense at his stance, which to me came across as someone who hasn’t spent much time thinking about it at all and ignored the pleas of his PR team telling him to keep his mouth shut.
The Epstein thing is obviously worse, but we also don’t know the details of that either. Epstein wasn’t an idiot, he schmoozed with everybody, not just the people that paid him to procure children. Did King participate in the pedophilia, or did he just go on vacation to a private island? One of those things is a problem that should be pursued to the fullest extent of the law, and the other is very suspect in retrospect. There was a dude I went to school with who I was friends with for a bit who, about a year after I last talked to him, beat someone half to death and stole their car. Went to jail for it. Does that make me a shitty person? Probably not? Maybe not a great judge of character, but I wasn’t there for the beating nor the theft.
Also, people can change and grow with time. Again, that’s not an excuse to not prosecute King if he was involved in pedophilia, but if he was just hanging out with the wrong crowd, it’s much harder to declare him a lifelong Bad Dude ™. Maybe he had Epstein read a manuscript and Epstein was like “nah man, that’s not what a 12 year old girl peeing sounds like”.
Edit: I was rewatching firefly the other day, and a line from the jaynestown episode comes to mind: “My estimation is that…every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another.”
At one point the devs of Spec Ops: The Line said something that has stuck with me: “putting the game down and walking away is a valid form of engagement”.
I accept that for media, and that’s actually a solid stance from the developers. I’m just struggling with the ubiquity of it all. The island of what I haven’t put down is getting too small to walk away on.
Been unsure how to phrase this, so.
I think it’s possible to enjoy the art of a problematic artist on its own merits. What I don’t particularly like is the hero worship that permeates society and gives problematic artists platforms for their shittiness. The Ed Sheeran thing comes to mind. Dude is known for playing mediocre guitar and singing songs I don’t listen to. I don’t expect deep geopolitical insights from guitar man. I understand people that would take offense at his stance, which to me came across as someone who hasn’t spent much time thinking about it at all and ignored the pleas of his PR team telling him to keep his mouth shut.
The Epstein thing is obviously worse, but we also don’t know the details of that either. Epstein wasn’t an idiot, he schmoozed with everybody, not just the people that paid him to procure children. Did King participate in the pedophilia, or did he just go on vacation to a private island? One of those things is a problem that should be pursued to the fullest extent of the law, and the other is very suspect in retrospect. There was a dude I went to school with who I was friends with for a bit who, about a year after I last talked to him, beat someone half to death and stole their car. Went to jail for it. Does that make me a shitty person? Probably not? Maybe not a great judge of character, but I wasn’t there for the beating nor the theft.
Also, people can change and grow with time. Again, that’s not an excuse to not prosecute King if he was involved in pedophilia, but if he was just hanging out with the wrong crowd, it’s much harder to declare him a lifelong Bad Dude ™. Maybe he had Epstein read a manuscript and Epstein was like “nah man, that’s not what a 12 year old girl peeing sounds like”.
Edit: I was rewatching firefly the other day, and a line from the jaynestown episode comes to mind: “My estimation is that…every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another.”