I don’t know man. My dad, my teacher and the fireman have no public presence so they won’t be the face of any media workers’ strike. And at least one of the above is also an anti-vaxx and/or an asshole. This lady is just doing her role and I don’t think it makes much sense to undermine her work on this subject because her poor takes on others.
But isn’t that what our society does these days? Or at least certain segments of it.
They take someone who is X and then elevate them to some unreasonably high status that no one person should attain, and then that same society drops them like they’re a hot potato when they find out that the person isn’t perfect.
To be clear, I don’t disagree with your take. We shouldn’t be undermining someone’s work because of some stupid opinion on this or dumb decision to do that.
But think about what’s become a rather popular event over the last couple of years. Some actor gets shunned for saying some stupid shit about vaccines. There has been a whole rash of events where statues of people long dead have been taken down. Buildings dedicated to certain people were renamed. Columbus - the poor guy’s legacy has been dragged through the mud because of people who can’t separate the fact that he was a great explorer but he was also a bit of a douchebag.
We need to stop elevating these people to the level of a deity, and then we won’t be shocked to find out the person was just human and a bit of a womanizer or a prick about money or he didn’t like certain groups all that much. Praise them for their singing or acting or the new world they explored.
You say on one hand we should stop putting people on pedestals, but then in the same thought you go on to say that Columbus’ “legacy” was ruined just because he was a bit of a douchebag.
Like how logically inconsistent are your own thoughts? Columbus was a piece of shit who genocided multiple ethnic groups. He never should have had statues in the first place. He didn’t even find what he was looking for. He was an arrogant fuck who got lucky, and the world probably would have been better off if he drowned at sea.
And nobody “dragged him through the mud”, they just took a realistic look at who and what he actually is, which is supposedly what you’re proposing.
What is so difficult to understand? The person - all people in general - are multi-faceted and as humans we are all flawed. Someone can be a murder but also be brilliant on the football field, like OJ. Stop putting these people up on a pedestal. But at the same time, are we supposed to simply ERASE his accomplishments on the football field? Everything is so obnoxiously polarized.
That’s what people these days want to do. On the one hand they elevate every stupid celebrity they can think of and then everything comes crashing down when they say an off-color joke. If someone is a great singer… great, listen to their music, but stop fawning over what they wear and what they drive. Stop listening to every stupid comment they tweet. They are a singer, chances are they aren’t a scientist which probably doesn’t make them an expert on climate change or vaccines or whatever other topic. One day people are paying double for some celebrity endorsed sneaker and then the next they are burning those very same sneakers in a pit because he said something about endangered trees.
Was he really a great explorer though? The guy dramatically underestimated the size of the earth and he and his crew probably would’ve died from thirst or starvation or whatever if they hadn’t run smack into the new world halfway to India.
By that logic then, the majority of world famous chemists and other scientists out there shouldn’t be heralded as great minds because they only accidentally discovered a certain medicine that cured a disease or a new element or some other new compound that eventually was put to great use.
