@lindsayellis I think what really gets me is that this is just such a low level, minimal to zero effort thing. All you have to do is not spend money on it, out of your pocket. And if you can't do that, just shut up and do it quietly.

The part where it becomes depressing is that if you can't be counted on in such a low stakes manner, how about when it actually has real costs? Perhaps people will realize 'It's serious' at that point and step up, but...it's difficult to trust.

@lindsayellis
I never really thought before about this idea that even by pirating an artist's work and consuming it, you were still increasing that work's cultural footprint (you called that "cultural capital", but that means something very different to me as a Bourdieu fan). Undeniably, by becoming familiar with a given work you are arithmetically increasing its cultural footprint, but I don't think it can be said that by increasing it's cultural footprint you are also arithmetically increasing that work's influence within culture.
You can read a book and be critical of it’s ideas. You can even thoroughly enjoy a book and be very critical of it’s ideas. Infamy is a type of fame. That's why think it's different from a car's emissions, where every meter releases greenhouse gazes, and every greenhouse gas particle released into the atmosphere brings the world closer to a global cataclysm.

Another point:
I have never seen a Chapelle show and I have never read a H.P. book, but it is my understanding that in a D.C. show transphobia is in the text, while in the H.P. franchise it is only in those book’s context. I think the distinction is important because IMO you can easily put yourself in the position of the naïve spectator of a text even when you are aware of a context that is abhorrent to you. Meanwhile, I think it is impossible to genuinely enjoy a text when you have to read around revolting ideas to find that enjoyment.

Once again L.F. Céline is a perfect case study for this. I always come back to him because I am quite obsessed with his work and I have studied it quite intensely. He is by far my favourite author, and yet he was a man I would never in a million years have accepted to talk to or shake hands with.
His trilogy and "Travel to the end of the night" are books that changed my life and I believe universal literature is richer from these works and anyone who reads them is richer too. But I have also read his anti-Semitic pamphlets and I can't express enough how much those are books that will make you violently physically sick if you read them. Unless you are yourself a monster it should be physically impossible to find a single ounce of pleasure in reading those. And one of those books I won’t name is actually really brilliant and funny, and that makes it 100 times more sickening.
I don’t believe his anti-Semitic pamphlets should ever be edited along with his other books. They should only ever be edited in their own distinct collection, accompanied by an extensive, solid critical work by specialists and historians. Actually, If I could have my way they would never be sold to the public and would only ever be distributed to public libraries to be consulted on site.
Obviously I first got into his writing by reading his novels as a teenager, but even then I already knew about those book’s context – that they were written by a monster – ,and yet I fell in love with those novels all the same, and I genuinely don’t believe loving those texts and knowing about their context made me more complacent or indifferent to anti-Semitism in my life growing up.

P.D. English is not my first language so I most likely wrote a number of things in a weird manner. Sorry about that.

@lindsayellis

My thoughts exactly. The amount of mental gymnastics progressive people are doing to *checks notes*.... play 1 video game, is quite absurd.

@lindsayellis I think dunkey is trying to say the same …

https://youtu.be/3OV4VaNW4FU