[bakuninsbart]

Some of the best fiction was written by people with absolutely despicable opinions like Francois Céline or Knut Hamsun. You can see it in their art, but their art isn't limited to it, and still holds a lot of value. Friedrich Nietzsche's opinions on women and politics are plain dumb, yet his other thought can be extremely compelling, and he is rightfully one of the most influential thinkers of modern times.

Going back further in time will only make you miserable if you hold the work closely accountable to the person. Terrible people can still say really good things, and I don't believe it is different with games or modern entertainment in general. Old Blizzard games are still good, and old Louis CK sets are still funny.

[aftergibson]

Celine and Hamsun aren’t getting engagement activity from their in-app analytics. They also can’t respond to all of the legitimate criticisms against them. Activision can and they’ve decided to bring in the Pinkertons.

At the end of the day, another player booting up an Activision game is another (tiny) data point that says whatever activity Activision/Blizzard is engaging in is a-ok with that player. It’s not revenue driving right now, but in 6-12 months, this has blown over and enough of the tiny subset of temporarily outraged players will eventually start to generate revenue. That’s what they’re banking on.

Decide what you care about or don’t, but at least accept/own the impact of your decisions and don’t conflate the situation with century old authors.

[dylan604]

>whatever activity Activision/Blizzard is engaging in is a-ok with that player

This is definitely how Activision/Blizzard will interpret it. However, not every single gamer is tuned into these kinds of stories about the game makers. Some will be totally unawares of any of the shenanigans that occur behind the game. Not everybody has the time and/or interest for that. Just like people do/don't care about Amazon, Walmart, Nike, etc. Someone that does care will bring to light something that may garner media attention. Some people will see that, and get worked up about it. However, the majority of people will be just as happy to put their head back in the sand and continue on with their day-to-day.

I also came here to see if anyone else was calling that Activision/Blizzard's next move were to call in the Pinkertons.

[aftergibson]

I completely agree that you can’t act on what you don’t know. It’s almost impossible to act as an entirely ethical consumer today, who could know if a suppliers, suppliers supplier is doing something dodgy?

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water here. This case however is a pretty simple B2C relationship and if a consumer is aware of what Activision is up to and continues to support through revenue or engagement, simply accept that you don’t care about these issues enough to change your behaviour, we all make compromises in life.

What I’d like to avoid is consumers deluding themselves into thinking that playing Starcraft is fine because it’s the same as people buying the books of dead racists.

[falcolas]

One small difference between those specific artists and Activison-Blizzard - they're dead. But more importantly, their beliefs are also a product of their times.

ACTI doesn't have that excuse. They're all with us now, and their actions don't have the shield of being reasonable in the society they exist in.

[temp_account001]

Why should we value greatness more than morality? Should the magnitude of someone's impact overshadow the morality of their impact?

Opinions of celebrities don't exist in some sort of extra-dimensional cloistered thought bubble; they influence other minds and affect society in very real and measurable ways. Amplifying the celebrity status of these individuals by cherry-picking their acceptable works will in turn, unavoidably, also amplify their less-acceptable opinions -- though probably not by the same magnitude. But in general the masses are terrible at sorting out "oh, this is a righteous opinion that I should listen to" vs "this is a despicable one by the same person, but I have the intellectual & emotional maturity to be able to compartmentalize it". We're too tribal a species, on the average, for that. Our brains, societies, and cultures have not evolved to effectively handle multiculturalism well, ivory-tower internet freethinkers notwithstanding.

The flipside of cancel culture is moral nihilism, in which speech has no consequence and exists purely as a form of harmless intellectual exercise. But that's just not how it works in the real world. Speech has consequence, and for those wishing to prevent those consequences, sometimes ignoring the speaker and refusing to amplify their voice is the only realistic option they have, if they have no power to censor them outright or sufficiently amplify contrary opinions of their own. A canceled author isn't really very different from a boycotted company; it's a moral vote by a like-minded mass of humans who together value their version of morality more than that author's impacts. It's really not that difficult to not be an outspoken asshole.

Saying "I don't want to read this book" or "I don't want to play this game" because you don't like the author's values is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It's very different from, say, government ban lists. So what if someone doesn't want to read Harry Potter or watch Weinstein movies anymore?

Back to the first question: why ought greatness be the measure of a person, instead of righteousness? Our species is largely full of mediocre apes with mediocre thoughts who nonetheless manage to coexist and thrive to some degree, yet are all too often led astray and into peril and evil by the "great" Machiavellian few among them. How does that help anything at all?

[mnowicki]

What we're Nietzsche's opinions on politics/women? I'm not surprised based on the bit of his work that I read that he has some unappealing thoughts on women, but am surprised to here his politics may be problematic as well(aside from the whole nazi affiliation thing - which as I understand is a misrepresentation of his work by his sister and her Nazi husband).

[boomboomsubban]

Nietzsche was ultimately pro authoritarianism and anti liberalism. His view on women is fairly standard nineteenth century misogyny, like how he "compliments" them by saying they are more clever and wicked than men.

[acituan]

You missed Heidegger being an outright Nazi, and not even a rank-and-file one.

Not being able to relate to an other if they are not pure is a failure in having strong enough ego boundaries. High functioning requires complexification of our boundaries; a confidence in deciding what goes in and what doesn't on the fly without requiring rigid codification of rules, which ultimately requires a confidence in ourselves; what we are and what we are not.

All-or-nothing purity is a way of keeping things simple and reducing the complex calculus the reality demands. Not saying this in a demeaning manner, because we all do this in varying degrees. But if one can't tell if they are being a "bad" person or not for making use of a "bad" person's valid idea/product, that could as well be a shortcoming of their own self-conceptualization than the "badness" of the other.

[user-the-name]

Terrible people can say good things, but there are a million good people out there saying good things that you could listen to instead.

Why spend the limited time you have in this world on consuming the works of terrible people? There is more out there than you could possibly experience in a lifetime. Why not dedicate that time to people who are not awful?

[harpersealtako]

There are a million authors worth reading if your standards are low enough, but there's only one Friedrich Nietzsche.

[user-the-name]

There are plenty, plenty of people who are as good or better to read.

There is only one of any given person, that is not an argument to read them either.

[yowlingcat]

A problem with privileging "good" is that it is socially constructed, and social constructions of good can sometimes reveal themselves rather painfully to be fads of the time which ironically are anything but good, such as Lysenkoism [1].

On the contrary, real insights tend to stand the test of time, which is why Nietzsche continues to remain relevant and timeless. Lysenkoism, not so much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

[user-the-name]

You are somehow turning a remote possibility into a near-certainty in this argument.

[nate_meurer]

There's more than a remote possibility that anyone you think is worth learning from has done or said things that other people consider awful.

Your logic is exactly the reason many people tell us we shouldn't bother learning too much about, say, the founders of American democracy.

[manofmanysmiles]

Learning from an “awful” person helps you grow as a person.

Also understanding the enemy.

Also not all “consuming” of work is for “entertainment”.

[user-the-name]

Does it, though? Does it do that in a way that's better than just paying attention to people who aren't awful? I'm really not convinced here.

[akudha]

I guess different people draw lines at different levels. And it is a personal decision. One extreme would be to just care about the art and not the artist at all (especially if the artist is long dead and lived in a completely different era) and the other extreme would be to only support artists who we think are nice people. I suppose most people would fall somewhere in between.

We still celebrate conquerers like Genghis Khan after hundreds of years, even though they brought a ton of misery (especially Genghis, who was known for his cruelty) to the people they conquered and often to their own people. The pyramids, great wall of China etc were all built on the death of tens of thousands of workers.

Sometimes the more we learn, the more depressing it gets (Ignorance is bliss? lol)