I’m not really worried about subverting my own beliefs, I compromise myself daily. I just don’t want to support these folks, and money is the most direct means of support I can imagine. Particularly in Carrey’s case, since he’s off the radar right now and this might give him a broader pulpit to spread his harm. I also haven’t paid for anything by Cruise or Travolta in over a decade.
I’m not even sure what he’s done. Besides, it’s probably minor in comparison to some fine, fine historical examples, like Ezra Pound (poets are usually the worst at this sort of thing, but even by their standards he was bad: he went to Italy and made pro-Mussolini broadcasts even after the US entered the war). In comparison, Orson who? (There’s an unwritten law that only one person named Orson can become famous, and the spot is filled.)
Yes. well, if only ignorance was somehow universal, you would have a point. As it is, you’re wandering into a discussion and mumbling “Huh?” while picking your nose, i.e. Not Helping Nor Contributing.
The only controversy I could find about Carrey is his “Cold, Dead Hands” video and that’s no big deal, to me anyway. It’s more that I never really liked him as an actor and rarely bothered with his films. However, if what I mentioned is all that you can hold up against him, the problem is that outrage isn’t universal.
By the way, that’s “if ignorance were universal”. Thank you.
Carrey doesn’t like vaccinations for kids. It’s on his Wikipedia page.
This is an interesting thread. I’ve been boycotting Cruise, Travolta, Gibson, Card, and others for more than a decade now because I loathe the notion of giving money to their causes, which buying their works accomplishes. In some cases, this is annoying. For example, I enjoy Braveheart and would like to own it on Blu-ray, but I’ll never buy it now that Gibson’s insane racism is a matter of public record. On the other hand, an artist’s views have to be pretty extreme for me to take this step. Run of the mill “support a different presidential candidate” stuff flies completely below my radar. They have to be massively intolerant bigots (Card, Gibson) or prominent cult members (Travolta, Cruise) for me to care enough.
If I liked Carrey at all, his anti-vaccine stance would probably result in a boycott, but I don’t, so it’s irrelevant.
For me it’s kind of a weird thing. If I know of someone’s views before I encounter their art, I’ll never be able to be impartial.
But why would having views that disagree with your own make it such that you cannot possibly appreciate something as separate as their art?
That implies that you are drawing some kind of ultimate judgement about them, based on their views, to the extent that you essentially deafen yourself to all further input from them.
Don’t you have friends who have views that are different from your own? Don’t you listen to their positions when you discuss things upon which your views differ?
If you judge someone so permanently that you couldn’t even appreciate their art, because their views are different than your own, that seems to imply that you have fixed your beliefs into absolute permanence, and don’t even consider that you could possibly be mistaken in them.
First off, I’m talking about what I’d consider serious transgressions. This is not the same as having friends with differing views, since I’m not friends with anyone who I know has done something over the line to that level. As for the artists, it affects the way I see their art. If I know a director is a rapist for example, I won’t watch his movie. It’s not that I judge his movie less worthy, less artistic, it’s that I won’t experience it at all. It could be the greatest thing since sliced bread but I won’t know since I won’t see it.
If, on the other hand, I saw the movie first then I would recognize the artistic achievement. No matter what happens after that, no matter what that director does or did, I’ll never deny that the movie was a work of art. I’ll never be able to unenjoy it.
That’s why I’ll always enjoy watching The Road Warrior but I’m not going to be seeing any more Mel Gibson movies. To me that’s not a contradiction or difficult to understand. I saw Road Warrior with an open mind, anything he does now I’m already biased against.
Oddly enough I’m the opposite. I can watch a Mel Gibson movie because he’s an actor. He’s playing a role with, due to his fame, a lot of creative control but he’s still not the ultimate sole creator of the work. On the other hand a writer is the sole creator; there is no one else so I find myself with a running commentary on the thoughts and ideas of the book seen through my feeling about the author. I can’t read OSC anymore as a fiction author although I found that as a non-fiction writer I can appreciate his writing ability. Same views (still not my views) but it feels honest in non-fiction.
I cannot enjoy anything to do with card carrying vocal scientologists. Its a brain-washing, money laundering super cult and disgusts me to no end. So sadly Tom Cruises’s movies are mostly ruined for me, that 70s show lost its charm since 2 of its cats members are very active cultists, and Marge from the Simpsons, and Leah Remini’s role has been ruined for me in King of Queens. If they weren’t so active in scamming pele into becoming new and members bleeding away all their money I wouldn’t mind so much.
No matter what the reason or cause, I cant set aside moral issues from the person in any form of art.
They scammed Pele? Those bastards!
Intolerant author pleads for tolerance about his work so he can make more money.
Well, he is an idiot and an ass, so his failure to fully understand the term “tolerance” doesn’t shock me. He wrote a heck of a book, but so can one of those infinite monkeys I’ve got sitting at my infinite typewriters, and at least they fling crap at everyone and not just gays.
There’s a discussion about Card’s recent statement in the Ender’s Game film thread, too. My love for the book predates my hatred for Card. I won’t see the film and I won’t buy any of his other works, but Ender’s Game is still one of my favorites.
Beck is a Scientologist. You still like Beck. Everybody loves Beck.
The reason that you miss out on so much entertainment because you don’t like Scientology is twofold; first, there was a pattern of recruiting famous people to raise the opinion of the religion in the eyes of the people, second, auditing is extremely effective for acting and screenwriting.
Here’s the deal with Scientologists; they’re actually nice people. First, they’re people. Second, they’re nice. You might not like the fact that the branches have target numbers for recruiting, but you might like the fact that tax dodging can get you excommunicated from the Church of Scientology. It does. Scientologists are prohibited by their religion from utilizing tax minimization strategies.
You might not like that they criticize Psychiatrists both openly and through the Citizen’s Comission on Human Rights. You probably will like the fact that they are some of the only ones working to stop pharmaceutical companies from getting psychiatrists to put children on dangerous antipsychotics. When a psychiatrist diagnoses a three year old as having bipolar disorder, do you know who can and will and does help to stop that? The Church of Scientology. You’ve probably seen the criticisms of the DSM-V, which attempts to make being sad that your dad died last week a condition that warrants psychoactive drugs being prescribed. Did you write to a congressman about that? Did you do anything about that? They did. Did you check the numbers coming out of Walter Reed to see that many of our veterans who kills themselves and others were prescribed similar drugs and given little or no followup care? Because the crazy haired guy from That 70’s Show and his friends did.
You probably don’t like Tom Cruise because during a KSW speech, he said that a Scientologist knows he has to help the victim of a car accident if he or she sees one, because they are the only ones who will, because most people are kind of shitty when it comes to helping other people. You probably do like Jesus, and you probably liked when he said the exact same thing during his parable of the good Samaritan, or maybe modern statisticians when they called it, “The Collective Action Problem.” The truth is, their religion requires that they help you if you are in a car accident and they see it.
You probably don’t like that Scientologists have to tell another Scientologist every bad thing they ever did if they hope to get past it and move on with their lives. You probably don’t mind it, though, when the Catholic Church asks its members to do the same thing but says they have to go to a lake of fire and get raped by a fifty foot insect with teeth on his dick if they don’t.
I’m not going to challenge anything you have heard about the religion, but I do want to ask you this; “Are there or are there not billions of dollars to be made in the selling of mental health pills?” We live in a world where the Koch Brothers buy articles and ads laying into Unions and Solar Power. Do you think that drug companies do not?
The number of victims of what is universally recognized as malpracticed psychiatry is in the tens of thousands, and I am only counting the graves. The number of victims of Scientology, according even to its greatest detractors, is…
five.
Scientology is not an apocalyptic cult, it is a specifically anti-apocalyptic religion. Where most faiths welcome the end of times in a planet consumed by fire, Scientology sees mass death and global extinction as a bad thing. Yes, it involves aliens, Lizard King and I discussed how that is or is not objectively more humorous than faiths with idiosyncracies ingrained for thousands of years into our cultural fabric, but at least it views humanity favorably enough to spare us the threats of eternal torment.
Shit… Flowers is a Scientologist…
My ex-wife was an ex-Scientologist, as was her entire family. Yes, they were people, and they were nice. That doesn’t mean the Church of Scientology was nice, or that it wasn’t toxic. Boy, did I get an earful from people who knew firsthand how predatory the church was, how focused it was on sucking the maximum amount of money out of its followers, and how if you left the church you were treated like pariahs.
Yes, most religions suck money out of their followers, but usually they have the good sense to just shear the sheep, rather than slaughter them. The chuch does its best to take everything the rank and file have. Not the highly visible celebrities like Cruise, but if you’re middle class, they’d kind of like you to give it all. Not to mention how much they love sue people.
Do I hold merely being a scientologist against someone? No, not particularly. It’s just a label, it’s not sufficient information in itself. I don’t hold being Christian against someone either, since that doesn’t mean much either. But I do hold what people say against them. I don’t like Orson Scott Card for things he’s said, not for his label. I think Cruise is loony for saying loony things.
Not going to touch the crap about psychiatry being evil after all.
Yeah, that’s too bad. I reread it hoping there was some layer of irony that I missed, but … no.
I represent individuals subject to involuntary civil commitments. They are alleged to be mentally ill and a danger to themselves and forced to take medication. The system in my state resembles a rubber stamp. The psychiatrists always say the same things, even when they haven’t seen the patient in five years, ten years, or ever. The psychologists always agree with the psychiatrists. People are subject to the commitments for years, sometimes decades after they stopped being appropriate. I have seen children as young as three diagnosed with bipolar disoder and forcibly medicated with antipsychotics. I have seen children prescribed psychotropic medications which are not approved for use in children. I have had psychiatrists complain to the Office of Lawyer Regulation about me because I fought hard to get children off dangerous medications where the negative side effects were manifest and readily apparent.
Psychiatry has its good points, but there are a lot of abuses and they are typically against the most vulnerable members of our society, children and the mentally ill. In Milwaukee, the mental health system is an utter failure. I cannot be specific about the results of the failures from the Milwaukee County mental health system I have witnessed personally in my professional capacity, but they involve murder.
Let me ask you guys, with the revelation that all our recent mass shooters were treated in our mental health system, and the fact that so many soldiers are left with a bottle of pills and nothing more, and children are forced to take Ritalin just for being too energetic, are you happy with the state of modern psychiatry?
I don’t think you are, and I don’t think you should act like you are just because the only people complaining about it are connected to L. Ron Hubbard. You’re accusing him of brainwashing people. I hope you realize first, that brainwashing isn’t real, and second, at the time those accusations were first made, the 50s and 60s, psychiatry was performing lobotomies on undesirable elements of society.
The moral rectitude ain’t all on one fuckin’ side in this dispute.