Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

Underlying all of the points in this article is the idea that people are somehow entitled to success. Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby are famous, dammit — how dare people not promote their work or give them money!

Meanwhile, zero sympathy for the people who experienced professional repercussions after being harassed or assaulted. Before you're successful, people can harm your career or discriminate against you all they want. It's okay!

Would we have a problem with replacing an unknown actor if it were discovered that they were a serial sexual assaulter of minors and minor-adjacents? No? Then why do we care when it happens to Kevin Spacey?

View on HN

> Underlying all of the points in this article is the idea that people are somehow entitled to success.

No, underlying all of the points in this article is that works are separate from the person who produced them, and it does us no good to erase all reference to their works for actions that are sometimes no more criminal than a stupid tweet. It turns out that, when you suppress a work that many people have collaborated on because of something one member did, a lot of innocent people lose out.

> Meanwhile, zero sympathy for the people who experienced professional repercussions after being harassed or assaulted. Before you're successful, people can harm your career or discriminate against you all they want. It's okay!

Please Google "straw man argument". You have no idea what amount of sympathy the author has for the victims; it simply isn't the focus of her article. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

No, that's not the point. This is not about any famous person being entitled to anything. Her point is that "the arts consumer" is entitled to make their own decision about what to read and watch and think. We are hampered in this by posturing platforms and by the mob's simplistic "by association" mental model of evil.

I can hold entertainers to any standard I like, or none at all. I can judge them for the subset of crimes that are topical to judge them for, or some other arbitrary subset of my choosing. Or, I can take the words "gratia artis" literally.

I understand her point, it's just not consistent. Where is my option to support people who would have had a career had it not been killed by some powerful abuser?

The choice isn't "art or no art". That choice is made for us when someone decides to wield their power over someone else. Our only choice is which art we ignore: that of famous abusers or that of their victims. The "arts consumer" loses out either way.

> Where is my option...?

There is an established path for group action here:

1. Vote

2. Pass a law that says powerful abusers are bad

3. When someone's convicted of wielding power in a mean way, the justice system will punish them by due process

4. People learn what will get punished

5. The artists you wish you could see will be less scared away

6. You get the art you want!

Notice how throughout this entire process, you don't get to tell me, of the art that exists today, what I'm allowed to read or watch or listen to.

On the other hand, cheating that hangman and bullying the platforms feels a little bit like, how to say, wielding your power over someone else.

This would be a much more convincing argument if 3-6 weren't extremely rare despite 1 and 2 already existing.

It's not really "cheating the hangman". He's not doing his job, so we have to deal with it on our own.

Which sucks, because I agree: your proposal is way better.

> He's not doing his job, so we have to deal with it on our own.

Ah yes, this is how everyone starts to think after a long glut of too many superhero movies.

Criminal law has/will come down hard upon Cosby and Weinstein and such. Other alleged offenders will settle claims and lose out on future employment. Step 5 is looking way brighter in this generation than in the last. But step 3, not vigilantism, is really the best system we have for deciding between innocence and guilt.

Because Kevin Spacey has proven himself in his craft. If Michelangelo's works were destroyed this week because it was discovered he'd assaulted his daughter, would you mourn the loss? I would. I'd be furious at an incredibly stupid people!

Yeah but how much of that is because of the place in history his works hold. We're also not actually memory holing these people, their work still exists it's still part of the canon of culture. By and large they're still fantastically wealthy and likely will continue to be.

Ultimately what's happening is just a decision that the good parts of a persons outputs don't outweigh the bad parts any more. That the acceptance of shitty behavior and the damage it does to both the people it directly affected and the damage the culture that excuses that behavior does to unrelated people isn't worth it.

It's easy to see one side of the scale, everything a Spacey or Cosby has added to culture, but it's impossible to see the other side of the scale, the things we haven't gotten because of people driven away.

(And on a simpler level fame doesn't excuse crimes no matter how much we raise people up because of it.)

You absolutely are memory holing them. If you decide I'm not not allowed to see older Cosby episodes on your platform, new people can't watch it and it's little by little erased from cultural memory.

> We're also not actually memory holing these people, their work still exists it's still part of the canon of culture

So Kevin Spacey's performance in All the Money in the World is still part of the canon eh? And Louis's voice acting in Gravity Falls? No, because those performances were literally given the ol' Jones/Aaronson/Rutherford, at considerable expense.

> Ultimately what's happening is just a decision that...

I love the passiveness of this sentence. A decision is happening. Who decides? Do our gatekeepers decide for us? Or does each of us have a brain?

> ...the good parts of a persons outputs don't outweigh the bad parts any more.

Outweighing is irrelevant to the question of whether to enjoy the good. Cake doesn't outweigh death. But if you offer me cake, and we're both crystal clear on the fact that death sucks, I'll eat the cake.

> Outweighing is irrelevant to the question of whether to enjoy the good. Cake doesn't outweigh death. But if you offer me cake, and we're both crystal clear on the fact that death sucks, I'll eat the cake.

The problem with that is that by continuing to cast these actors companies are inherently saying the value of their performances is greater than the cost of the bad behavior.

The whole current problem with the culture of assault and covering it up in Hollywood is because for decades it was brushed aside and the perpetrators protected. It's many decades of chickens coming home to roost.

> I love the passiveness of this sentence. A decision is happening. Who decides? Do our gatekeepers decide for us? Or does each of us have a brain?

As for this? It's a collective thing. If there's enough consumer pressure to bring Cosby or anyone else back you know someone will (hint you can still totally stream it off Amazon Prime). Vote with your money and the companies will follow, we know from their long history companies barely have morals when there's a pile of cash involved) there's no committee of people deciding who's in or who's out outside of these companies on each production.

Not even close to what was written. The article couldn't have been more clear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com