| I want to respond to you here because I think you've captured my point quite well in two ways, though maybe unintentionally. I really hope this gives you some personal insight somehow. (Part I) > I understood (and still believe) what I did was legal. As you mentioned before, this work produced anger and fear, but you believe it was legal. I take that to mean that people in general understand what you did was wrong (morally) but the snapshot of the legal code at the time hadn't caught up with this intuition yet (as far as you know). From a practical standpoint, I get why this is important to you. I don't have much to add on the legal side because I'm not a lawyer and I think it's focusing on a detail that glosses over the big picture of your actions. I feel like you're fixating on it for that exact purpose, though. "I thought of violating rights in a way legislators hadn't even dreamed up yet! Violated tons of people's rights along the way, but the important thing is that I found a spot where those legislators forgot to dot the i's and cross the t's. That's what we should focus on". I wholeheartedly disagree. I think the focus is, and should remain, the people involved. Whether you found a loophole or not is, in my mind, such a distant inconsequential second to the primary focus of your actions and their effects. You doing them in a possibly legally creative way is focusing on the wrong thing. (Part II)
> It is also undeniably art. I assume this is based on me using "art" in quotes in another response, and you misunderstanding why I used the quotes. So, imagine someone was punching people and the reason they gave was "boredom". I would use quotes there too, not because I doubt whether or not they were experiencing boredom, but because the word is being used as though it were a sufficient explanation of their actions. While it might be part of the explanation, it glosses over the most salient part of their action: the punching people bit. They also had a desire to punch people, and that desire is not encapsulated in the standard definition of "boredom", but they're using it as though it were in a way to gloss over it, even though it's the most important part of the whole thing. I think it's a sneaky trick to deny personal culpability so I'm putting the word in quotes. Similarly, your use of "art" feels the same. Whether the end result had any artistic merit is beyond the scope of my comments. I'm saying that "art" as a motivation glosses over the most salient part of your actions: your desire to take something private irrespective of others desires to give that. The standard definition of 'art' doesn't adequately encapsulate that desire: I wouldn't say the most salient aspect of artists is that they behave in this manner. I think it's similarly a sneaky way to try and deny personal culpability by masking the most salient feature behind a more accepted term. But, to be crystal clear, what you did was take moments of people's lives they might not have wanted you to have and turned it into a spectacle for yourself... whether this resulted in art or salad is such a wildly distant second consideration it's practically immaterial (as far as me and others with similar reactions are concerned), let alone whether or not the resulting art or salad is legitimate... it's why your words echo the character in the movie saying "I was gentle". For what it's worth though, I think it's nice to see you do sort of care on some level how your actions impact others, gives me a little bit of hope. |