[bborud]

So the people we love get away with an implied critique (nudge nudge wink wink), but we hurl stones at anyone famous?

Changing makes us better. Virtue signaling does not. Assuming we're monotonously moving towards tolerance and treating people better is also extremely arrogant. The comments to this post demonstrates that with great clarity. Sean Connery isn't even cold and already people line up to piss on his grave.

Next time someone in your family dies, are you going to list their moral shortcomings? The "but" right after listing their accomplishments and good sides? "BUT...he didn't like Asian people, spoke ill of jews and objectified women and stared at Mrs Jenkins daughers tits whenever he could. He ate red meat and belonged to a religion that terrorized much of the world for a thousand years".

Of course not.

But then again, Sean Connery isn't a person to any of us. He is just a symbol of something it is okay to hate. So pissing on his grave is somehow permissible.

What annoys me isn't that people get upset about his views. What upsets me is that people have the absolutely disgusting idea that pissing on his grave makes them better. It doesn't. It just means they are a different kind of asshole.

[tartoran]

They climb and they fall, that’s how it’s always been and probably won’t change anytime soon. The Overton window is sliding a bit faster and characters who did questionable things get in the spotlight in their lifetime not a few centuries later. That is okay as long as it doesn’t degenerate into violence, but that is easier said than done

[mlthoughts2018]

Regular people tacitly endorsing misogyny is awful and should be confronted, not sugarcoated.

But that is in no way remotely comparable to a huge worldwide movie star openly endorsing spousal abuse on a major television news program and never retracting it or apologizing.

Obviously we should criticize that extreme of an act far far more than tacit sexism passively accepted by eg an out of touch grandparent or something. You are trying to equate the two but they are not similar at all.

There’s no logical requirement for people to apply this criticism uniformly eg to every racist extended family member in order to be unhypocritical when leveling the criticism against a big media figure.