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.
Basically, what do you value more and what can you excuse?
That's how we have the life we have today. People now seem to be taking it to the extreme, ignoring the rest, even when there is no hint of any good.
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”?
After reading his other work, I can’t really enjoy his comics anymore (and I’m a die hard HP Lovecraft fan, FFS).
Anyway, I recommend not looking his other stuff up.
I’m not advocating a decision here, but I wouldn’t call that low stakes.
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.
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.
Just in semi-recent history we had mccarthy 'cancelling' people for purportedly being linked to communism, and that was a whole lot more serious than some modern publisher refusing to buy your book or twitter banning you.
A few decades before that, it wasn't real uncommon that if your neighbors objected to who you were or what you said, for them to hang you by your neck from a convenient tree until you were quite dead.
Humans have always suffered penalties for being on the wrong side of their neighbor's majority opinions. These days the penalties are frankly pretty minor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Stevens%27_comments_about_...
lot of Road Runner and Wheels on the Bus fans out there still.
…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?
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...
>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.
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.
For your thought experiment, I don't think we as a whole threw away the scientific work of the nazis. We have a concrete answer to that
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.
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.
It seems so strange to me what this politicized bubble has become. So far it's an (attempt at) collaborative "vote with your wallet" [0] and one political party is loudly saying "not like that". But the political party most complaining about "cancel culture" is also the party most actually trying to ban things, yet that's not "cancel culture" it is "think of the children" (and it's not "vote with your wallet", it is town hall grandstanding and letter writing campaigns and lobbyists).
It is such a fascinating example of hypocrisy in our society right now. To entirely strawman it: "You can't tell me what to do [with my cash], but I can tell the libraries what you shouldn't be allowed to read. You are the real monster telling me what to do with my cash. Censorship of libraries is in the best interests of the children! Think of the children! They could be reading filth, oh no! Freedom of speech doesn't apply to children, just to me!"
I know in many cases not everyone that hates "cancel culture" also wants to ban library books, but the intersection seems large enough that it is concerning.
[0] Which carries its own terrible baggage. "Vote with your wallet" just means that the rich "deserve" more votes. That's not Democracy. Which isn't to say that boycotts and general strikes don't work or don't have some power in our economy, but that it isn't always the power you think it is, and to wield that power correctly takes collective effort (large enough boycotts and general strikes to hit a bottom line figure), not individualism.
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.
Yeah. Hanoi Jane and Beatles Burnings quickly come to mind.
"I would never judge a book by it's cover."
> because I didn't want anyone to see it on my bookshelf
"Yet I am worried that someone else might."
The extremists on both sides are what you hear the most of, but the rest of the population is far more moderate.
Encouraging other people to not buy something is ALSO not censorship. It is the exact opposite of censorship: it is making a case that people are free to listen to (or not).
If I say the comment I'm replying to is stupid, have I just cancelled someone?
Also I agree 100% with you that "one side" trying to pass laws to control access to books in libraries is exactly the same as the "other side" going around telling people not to buy tesla cars. Definitely not something to worry about.
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).
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.
Most of the things that alt right people talk about as though they're some amazing truth bombs, are - in fact - the basic realisations of adulthood. There's a reason there's such an overrepresentation of teens and young adults in that loud but tiny political segment.
Whether you take the hard facts of life and build an identity around lifting other people up - or whether you use those same facts to build an identity around cutting them down - is a reflection on you and you alone.
(The way of overstock returns I was most fascinated by as the type of kid who loved deep dives into weirder parts of the libraries is that some libraries have an "illegal" section of books that they literally dumpster dive local bookstores for. These books had their original covers removed, which is the simple, minimal way how the bookstore "marks" them as unsold/unsellable/"destroyed" before tossing them in a dumpster, because by that point even the publisher doesn't want the overstock physically back collecting dust in a warehouse, but also still needs a good relationship with bookstores. Many publishers still to this day have some form of wording in print books like "if this copy was found without its original cover it is to be destroyed and is illegal to be resold". The bookstore would get some form of partial refund on all the "destroyed" overstock.)
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_caree...
The sitcom Rosanne was removed from my Apple library purchases after the actress went on a racist tirade. Was it banned by the government? No, but my access to the material was taken away. I think that there is censorship beyond government censorship, especially when competition is limited, as it typically is with art under copyright (as well as payment processors, etc).
Sure, some people take art seriously. But throwing it away is super easy. You don’t alter your quality of life much if you burn all your Harry Potter books even if that was a defining part of your childhood. Removing technology from your life on the other hand is hard. Doing something that has little consequence to your life is kinda meaningless in the scheme of things.
No, you would just be lying.
If you lost previous purchases, that sounds like an account question between you and Apple. Other than your anecdote here I don't see complaints come up in web searches that they removed it from people's libraries.
The problem with unethical behavior in sciences is that you have to check - which you should be doing anyway, but once someone has been exposed as a fraud the community as a whole needs to go back and clean out all the fraud by checking all their work. Unethical behavior in someone's personal life doesn't necessarily invalidate that.
Although I don't see many people talking about ReiserFS these days.
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.
Air Shaffer does a stand-up bit where he says that society gives a pass to extreme artists because we value their art and we don’t really care about (or we downplay) the other aspects of their life.
Any notion why you have such a PoV?
In the TV context it was clearly a rhetorical / hypothetical statement .. one of the two utterances was literally on a show titled "Hypotheticals" .. which I guess you watched along with reading the Qur'an, numerous commentaries, reading Rushdie's book, etc.
In a statement in the FAQ section of one of his websites, Islam asserted
that while he regretted the comments, he was joking and that the show was
improperly edited.[94]
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-2750537/Video-1...
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/sep/27/yusuf-c...
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.
The video you linked has been edited twice .. once from raw live footage in order to create the TV panel show that went to air, and again a second time to extract and join short specific sections from the TV show to create the segment you linked .. with additional voice over added.
The original TV footage appears to have been sourced from Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals.
The very name "Hypotheticals" might indicate to you how you the second round of editing has led you astray.
The segment you linked has removed all context .. there is nothing of Geoffrey Robertson setting up a situation and instructing panel members "to imagine they are ...".
All you have there is a tight segment lacking the larger context with an added voice over claiming that this is Islam speaking from his heart as himself, nothing about being asked to play himself as a more fundemental true believer.
See my peer reply.
another edit, steve martin's "king tut", now thats cosplay. Maybe whatever his name was trying to be serious as hypothetically speaking while simultaneously joking about terminating somebody's metabolism in a non consensual manner.
last edit:
I checked on whether cosplay is haram, it is not according to "gemini", can any humans verify this? I'd hate to get killed because I listened exclusively to "gemini" because these AI's are "hallucinators" or whatever tech bro's call it nowadays haha so indeed he could cosplay, be actual Muslim, be joking and hypothetical all at the same time so maybe you're right.
The transcripts of the TV show? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3616539-geoffrey-roberts...
That seems dry, but okay.
> Is he saying God is merely a "Hypothetical"?
Which "he"? Islam|Stevens or Robertson .. in either case, no, God being Hypothetical was not a central thesis of the show although it's likely something that was bantered about somewhere in the course of at least one of those scenarios.
Maybe look through the transcripts for some mention of any God(s).
> hehe I liked steve martins take on that egyptian thing
I confess I'm unsure as to how Steve Martin (Banjo playing comedian slash actor Martin?) ties into this .. but yes, Hypothetical is a partially scripted staged drama that explored tricky situations, Trolley Problems, and difficult judgements that creep up on people at the edges of law and morality.
The host literally assigned real people "personas" that matched some aspects of that persons real life experience and then asked them to react as their persona through a series of increasingly conflicting and escalating events of the sort that often end up in court.
What ever Cat Stevens is doing there in the show he is absolutely not independantly taking the stage on his own to declare a Fatwa on Rushdie and to call on all Muslims to hunt him down and punish him .. which was the original up thread claim about his behaviour.
Honestly, I doubt either of us will have our minds changed but I do like the guys own explanation
"In response, Yusuf Islam said that some of his comments were "stupid and offensive jokes" made in "bad taste," while others were merely giving his interpretation of Islamic law but not advocating any action."
the steve martin bit is how to do a proper cosplay. nobody is taking steve martin out of context lol
These shows by Robertson had no single scenario, each started with (say) news that people in a cafe had been taken hostage by a unknown assailant .. and built from there. First one guest representing law and order might be asked what their response would be, then they are informed that demands have been made to release convicted terrorists (say). This might build and involve a diplomat, a former singer in the public eye pressed for comment, etc.
I haven't said as I literally last watched the one in question some forty years ago.
Perhaps you can fill us all in given, as you said above, you've read the transcripts and hopefully still have a copy you can look up.
> the steve martin bit is how to do a proper cosplay
Riiigght. Okay. Sure. Bit random. Personally I largely preferred Damian Cowell over Cat Stevens and|or Steve Martin on a banjo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLAFy7o7Zvo
I don't really have a copy, I just link to the source material, which is the wikipedia page. Still, I can quote it to fill folks in:
"He must be killed. The Qur'an makes it clear – if someone defames the prophet, then he must die."
>Bit random.
I thought Steve Martin would be a nice break from all the religious fundamentalism terrorism talk.