No - nor are they inherently conjoined.
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I split off this topic because people requested it; i wasnât planning to participate in it.
But the argument, as I understand it, is this: Hachette has the right to decide who they do business with, according to whatever ethical principles they hold. Because many of their employees objected to the release of Allenâs book, the company elected to cease publication of the memoir.
I donât feel Iâm informed enough on this to say more at this point.
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Heh. I agree that he should put it out on amazon self-published.
Iâm sure that the reviews would be worth it.
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Much of what Farrowâs publisher required of Ronan Farrow-- in terms of fact checking had very little to do with ethics, and a lot more with being a great defense strategy against potential libel. Does Farrow think that Allenâs book is libelous?
The one ethical bound that might be breached is that Farrowâs book and Allenâs book potentially contradict each other. And if Farrow is prevented by corporate from speaking against Woody Allen, as he is wont to do, that could be a conflict of interest. (An artifact of consolidation and oligopoly in the book industry.)
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Worked for The Martian.
Doesnât seem to be working for the Milo.
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But thatâs not an ethical argument against Allenâs book.
Itâs an argument of a hypothetical conflict of interest should some hypothetical action occur that canât occur as theyâre not publishing Allenâs book.
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And thank you for that.
The Misogyny thread is important and doesnât need to be muddied up with the usual logical fallacies, unhelpful interjections by false allies, and the intentionally tone deaf commentary of folks that would rather talk about anything and everything BUT the actual problems at hand.
On this actual topic:
Woody Allen is still an old rich White dude with power who will be just fucking fine and dandy, even if his ego-stroking book never gets published⌠but we all know it will be, eventually.
And while heâs an author whose work I like, Stephen King is also an âold rich White dude with powerâ who needs to take a good hard look at his own privilege.
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Ethics is all about contemplating hypotheticals beforehand in order to resist the temptation of doing harm, even in the face of lucrative rewards.
âWe do not publish the unsavouryâ has never been a guiding principal of the book industry. But âRejected manuscripts are returned to the author, and not shared with any other potentially competing authorsâ generally is.
So, when Farrow claims that Hachette is violating some ethical norm, he should either put up, or shut up. The role of ethics is to make things clearer, not to insinuate.
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Ah - Farrow - that would be a third thread then.
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It really would, as the actual topic of this thread is âKing, Allen and White Male Privilege.â
âRonan Farrow shouldnât talk shit if he canât back it up!â is not.
*sighs
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And the publisher didnât cite Farrow over declining to publish.
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Companies are allowed to choose the parties with whom they do business; and this one time, the company in question actually listened to the complaints and concerns of itsâ employees regarding a poor choice.
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And really- at 72 and 84 respectively for King and Allen - theyâre not worried about running out of cash and having to rely on their social insecurity.
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The employees of Hachette did.
Yes, they did.
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His technique is more or less like writing by genetic algorithm.
- Write a lot, like a drunken monkey flinging poop and seeing what sticks.
- Take the best of what sticks and discard the rest.
- Mate parts of the best together in weird ways, producing more fucktons of output.
- Repeat steps 2 and 3 until convergence is achieved.
This is a technique only the most prolific of authors can attempt, and only then if they have an audience. But itâs also bound to result in some pretty weird mutations. It also does not converge to formula as much as it converges to a collection of tropes. This is preferable, because when you read formula, youâre like âholy shit this guy only has one storyâ and you never read him again. With frameworks of tropes, you can tell how the story will feel, but the plot and characters will be different enough where you wonât feel like youâve read the exact same thing before.
Not that thereâs anything wrong with that.
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Quite true. What I meant was to say that âcancel cultureâ is not something that affects these men, and if such a thing exists, itâs online backbiting aimed at people who mostly havenât done anything bad.
I agree that thereâs definitely an intentional movement trying to silence the voices of the disenfranchised and histrionically persecuted, (âchilling effect,â anyone?) but the term âcancel cultureâ got co-opted by the aforementioned rich white dudes with power and their ardent defenders, rendering it basically meaningless.
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If I were to take a zero tolerance stance on cancel culture, Iâd still say âcancel cultureâ isnât really about canceling anything. Nobody is really saying that Louis CK, for example, should go away for good and never come back, full stop, end of story, for any reason. Weâre just saying that he should atone for his past behavior and earn our forgiveness before things can be âback to normalâ, whatever normal is. He clearly has not only not earned our forgiveness, but hasnât even tried. His past behavior has also corrupted my view of his earlier work. I no longer think his earlier work is exaggerated for comic effect, but instead I think âeww, heâs seriousâ and canât watch any further. If I canât watch his stuff because it feels gross now, and donât want him back because I feel like he hasnât earned it, thatâs not cancel culture. Itâs not vindictive. I donât want to see him out on the street or see his family suffering or anything like that. Itâs more like i canât stomach this weirdo anymore and donât think he is entitled to a platform.
But people would give him a platform anyway. Not the case for other performers and writers, who are basically viewed as outside the mainstream because of their gender, sexuality, ethnicity etc alone.* They arenât given a fair share at all, and have to debase themselves to get ahead. Iâm not even using âdebaseâ lightly, because thatâs exactly what theyâre doing. Nobody is giving them a platform, and if anything, they are taking away a platform that is rightfully theirs. The Louis CKs of the world will always have a platform, whether we want them to or not.
*yes, I know Louis CK is Latino, technically, but he looks white, minimizes his Latino background, and is waaaaay more of a generic (white) comedian than a âLatinoâ comedian.
Why is it that certain people always believe the alleged perpetrator out of hand, but demand the alleged victim âback it upâ?
Iâm not saying we should blindly believe every accusation, but it shouldnât always fall on the victim every damn time. Especially when weâve been hearing about this exact same shit with the exact same people for 25 years and it would require suspension of disbelief for me to believe Woody Allen is innocent. Even if he somehow didnât commit any crimes, it would take flat out lying to myself to believe Allen isnât a massive scumbag.
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