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shadowkatWell, I now finally know why everyone on Face Book wants me to boycott Hobby Lobby. Thank you ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shipperx who posted a lengthy recital of the Supreme Court ruling and Ruth Bader Ginesberg's dissent. Also, how great is Ruth? Best Supreme Court Justice on that panel.
Never heard of Hobby Lobby. So it's not all that hard to boycott. Love being told to boycott companies that I did not know existed. Now I can go on ignoring their existence.
Just wish I could boycott the five male justices on the Supreme Court. Who are once again giving Catholicism and religious rights a bad rap. As if it needed any help in that department. We really need to stop taking away or infringing on other rights in the name of religious rights. Last time I checked, someone's right to their religious beliefs did not take precedence over everything or give you the right to hurt people.
Gun ownership and manufacture and the right to own and fire guns at other living things is against my religious beliefs. Can we do away with guns please?
I loved the Daily Kos, which said...
Oh sorry, but paying for war violates my spiritual beliefs...you know, Thou Shall Not Kill" - so send me back $3 trillion.
Nailed it.
On the boycotting bit? I'm not sure it always works. It might. I don't believe in boycotting writers. Movie studios, yes. Publishing Companies? Depends. Corporations? Definitely but again, depends. They employ a lot of innocent people who are struggling to make ends meet. How would you feel if someone boycotted your company and you ended up getting laid-off as a result? It could happen.
But writers, artists, entertainers - smacks of censorship somehow and that makes me uneasy. Should we silence them because we don't like or despise something they did ages ago or recently, which we heard about through the media? To what degree do we even know it is true? Having done the criminal law bit - I can tell you that indictments and criminal convictions and confessions don't necessarily make it true. Lot's of gray area that very few people know about. You sort of have to have done criminal law to know whereof I speak.
Also art isn't always a reflection of the person's bad deeds. People are more than their actions, after all. We aren't defined solely by one or several deeds. Isolated or otherwise. A lot of people don't appear to understand this? Or so I've found? I guess I do because I worked in the Kansas Defender Project for a bit, and had to defend people who had robbed and murdered others. One guy that we were defending was this amazing artist, he was also a psychopath and in solitary confinement, think Hannibal Lector. We were defending his right to humane treatment, because everyone deserves to be treated humanely regardless of their crimes - anything else falls under vengeance. These people were complicated. One guy, the armed bank robber, was actually rather kind and had found ways to help others - including writing a pamphlet for drug abuse, and forming a drug rehabilitation support group while in prison. (Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary is a lot like the Prison in Orange is the New Black.)
And there are writers, philosophers, etc who historically did bad things, yet still added a great deal to our culture:
Socrates hated women and was a misogynist. Yet at the same time a brilliant philosopher.
Plato believed women had no souls.
Ghod only knows what Sophocles did.
TS Eliot was a sexist jerk (horrible to his wife) and anti-semitic. But an amazing poet.
Alfred Hitchcock...well, he was sexist and not nice to women, yet had a loving relationship with his wife and a brilliant director.
Flannery O'Connor - racist, but a great story teller
I admittedly haven't really read anything by Orson Scott Card, Walter Breen, Marion Zimmer Bradley (Sharra's Exile was about it, and I can't seem to make it through Mists of Avalon) or Anne Perry (not a fan of her writing - did try, after I saw Heavenly Creatures, partly out of curiousity. You can't tell it's the same woman.) But what they've done has little affect on my desire to read them. Actually, I've made a concerted effort to ignore these reports. I can't do anything about them. How does knowing this information help me or the world in any way? Does it stop others from doing this? Does it heal those who were hurt? Does it change how I view their novels? No, not really. Too late in the game to have much effect, I suspect. Also, being human, it's possible their books are helpful in other ways. I hear Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is an anti-war book? And you really can't tell he's a homophobic bigot when reading it? Same deal with Mists of Avalon. Should a writer's actions done outside their writing life affect how we view their work and to what degree? How much do we need to know about the artist? How much should we? And do we really need to know anything at all?
Corporations - I get boycotting. That makes sense. Although not sure how useful it is. Artists and Writers not so much.
shipperx who posted a lengthy recital of the Supreme Court ruling and Ruth Bader Ginesberg's dissent. Also, how great is Ruth? Best Supreme Court Justice on that panel. Never heard of Hobby Lobby. So it's not all that hard to boycott. Love being told to boycott companies that I did not know existed. Now I can go on ignoring their existence.
Just wish I could boycott the five male justices on the Supreme Court. Who are once again giving Catholicism and religious rights a bad rap. As if it needed any help in that department. We really need to stop taking away or infringing on other rights in the name of religious rights. Last time I checked, someone's right to their religious beliefs did not take precedence over everything or give you the right to hurt people.
Gun ownership and manufacture and the right to own and fire guns at other living things is against my religious beliefs. Can we do away with guns please?
I loved the Daily Kos, which said...
Oh sorry, but paying for war violates my spiritual beliefs...you know, Thou Shall Not Kill" - so send me back $3 trillion.
Nailed it.
On the boycotting bit? I'm not sure it always works. It might. I don't believe in boycotting writers. Movie studios, yes. Publishing Companies? Depends. Corporations? Definitely but again, depends. They employ a lot of innocent people who are struggling to make ends meet. How would you feel if someone boycotted your company and you ended up getting laid-off as a result? It could happen.
But writers, artists, entertainers - smacks of censorship somehow and that makes me uneasy. Should we silence them because we don't like or despise something they did ages ago or recently, which we heard about through the media? To what degree do we even know it is true? Having done the criminal law bit - I can tell you that indictments and criminal convictions and confessions don't necessarily make it true. Lot's of gray area that very few people know about. You sort of have to have done criminal law to know whereof I speak.
Also art isn't always a reflection of the person's bad deeds. People are more than their actions, after all. We aren't defined solely by one or several deeds. Isolated or otherwise. A lot of people don't appear to understand this? Or so I've found? I guess I do because I worked in the Kansas Defender Project for a bit, and had to defend people who had robbed and murdered others. One guy that we were defending was this amazing artist, he was also a psychopath and in solitary confinement, think Hannibal Lector. We were defending his right to humane treatment, because everyone deserves to be treated humanely regardless of their crimes - anything else falls under vengeance. These people were complicated. One guy, the armed bank robber, was actually rather kind and had found ways to help others - including writing a pamphlet for drug abuse, and forming a drug rehabilitation support group while in prison. (Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary is a lot like the Prison in Orange is the New Black.)
And there are writers, philosophers, etc who historically did bad things, yet still added a great deal to our culture:
Socrates hated women and was a misogynist. Yet at the same time a brilliant philosopher.
Plato believed women had no souls.
Ghod only knows what Sophocles did.
TS Eliot was a sexist jerk (horrible to his wife) and anti-semitic. But an amazing poet.
Alfred Hitchcock...well, he was sexist and not nice to women, yet had a loving relationship with his wife and a brilliant director.
Flannery O'Connor - racist, but a great story teller
I admittedly haven't really read anything by Orson Scott Card, Walter Breen, Marion Zimmer Bradley (Sharra's Exile was about it, and I can't seem to make it through Mists of Avalon) or Anne Perry (not a fan of her writing - did try, after I saw Heavenly Creatures, partly out of curiousity. You can't tell it's the same woman.) But what they've done has little affect on my desire to read them. Actually, I've made a concerted effort to ignore these reports. I can't do anything about them. How does knowing this information help me or the world in any way? Does it stop others from doing this? Does it heal those who were hurt? Does it change how I view their novels? No, not really. Too late in the game to have much effect, I suspect. Also, being human, it's possible their books are helpful in other ways. I hear Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is an anti-war book? And you really can't tell he's a homophobic bigot when reading it? Same deal with Mists of Avalon. Should a writer's actions done outside their writing life affect how we view their work and to what degree? How much do we need to know about the artist? How much should we? And do we really need to know anything at all?
Corporations - I get boycotting. That makes sense. Although not sure how useful it is. Artists and Writers not so much.
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Date: 2014-07-02 03:32 pm (UTC)MZB...well as I stated to Flake in my own post, the sexual nature of her work combined with the sexual nature of her crimes is what makes it a visceral ick. I don't want to read the sexual fantasies of a predator.
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Date: 2014-07-02 11:51 pm (UTC)Picked it up discounted.
And well, regarding MZB? I read one of her books in high school - there was almost no sex in that book. She doesn't write romance novels or erotica. She wrote sci-fi fantasy adventures. Sharra's Exile - barely had any sex in it.
And Mists of Avalon...well, I couldn't make it past the first 50 pages, because it was dry and preachy sort of like Roger Zelzany. I'm told there's sex later and often between younger women and older men, but that was true in the Arthurian Legend. It's not like you are reading a philosopher or Mein Kamp. Not that I'm telling you to read her, or anything. I'm still on the fence as to whether I want to attempt to read Mists of Avalon for a third time. MZB was never a favorite.
Heck, Edgar Rice Burroughs was racist beyond measure. Those Tarzan books, ouch. Can't say I wanted to read him - mainly because didn't like the writing style.
However, I did read Yellow Raft on Blue Water by Michale Dorris, the husband of Louise Erdritch. Found out today that he was an alleged pedophile who eventually committed suicide. (http://www.salon.com/1997/04/21/dorris/) But since he died prior to the case being tried, it was never proven, and just alleged - similar to Lewis Carroll. And Erdritch may have known about it. Read both writers - they are amazing writers. There's no sexual fantasies in these novels. And you can't tell. (See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dorris for more on Dorris.)
There's also, Lewis Carroll, and the alleged abuse of Alice Liddell - whom the stories were told to and written for. Did he write them to seduce her?
Does knowing it change how you view Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass? It does and it doesn't for me. I have to admit after I found out about the allegations - I saw the sexual subtext in the stories that I was oblivious to before - which makes me wonder if it's better not to know this stuff? How much do we really need to know about a writer? How Doylist do we need to be - as opposed to Watsonian?
I don't know...I read today an article in Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2014/06/27/re-reading-feminist-author-marion-zimmer-bradley-in-the-wake-of-sexual-assault-allegations/) about re-reading Mists of Avalon after the information regarding Bradley was reported...and the writer makes a good point:
How, then, to reckon with the masterful public work and the allegedly monstrous private life? Zimmer Bradley’s contradictions raise an unnerving but important proposition. Survivors can offer tremendous insight into pain and transcendence. But so can the people who committed or facilitated depredations against them.
And while I can't say I'm a fan of Bradley's work nor would I call it masterful, I didn't see it as erotica, pedophila, or the perverted sexual fantasies either. There really isn't that much sex in it at all. I'm not defending MZB's actions nor necessarily her work, just questioning avoiding her work because of her alleged actions.