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Yassmin Abdel-Magied's avatar

@helen - excited to see this book from you! Looking forward to it.

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_A Clockwork Orange_ poses this question vividly. Alex and the Droogs' acts of "the old ultra-violence" obviously pose a problem for the society they live in (and are probably the result of a deep and pervasive sickness in that society), but high-tech behaviorist techniques that extirpate those tendencies seem also to eliminate creativity and the ability to experience beauty. This leads the authorities to forbid using those techniques to fix people like Alex.

The incorporation of the other Droogs into the Metropolitan Police seems not to raise the same principled objections.

The alternative of keeping Alex imprisoned and therefore unable to inflict harm on the public doesn't seem to have been considered, or maybe I overlooked it.

There is a difference between criminalizing actions that harm other people, and criminalizing thoughts that exist in a person's subjective interior. Of course the two are not unrelated, but the distinction has to be made.

Weinstein seems to have been a complete bastard, I wouldn't want him for a neighbor, and I'm glad that apparently there are several degrees of separation between us. I don't know that it makes sense to refuse to watch any of the movies he profited from though.

Cosby's acts were quite despicable and creepy, but I think the harm was not as extensive, in the same way that second-degree murder still involves a wrongful death but is not considered as serious as first-degree. I wouldn't want him for a neighbor either, and, in case I was unclear, I don't think his actions were excusable, or just boys being boys.

As for his creative artifacts, I never cared much one way or another about his TV shows, and was never tempted to eat Jello pudding. But the standup was really very funny, and I think it still is, even though it's hard to watch it without thinking of what the man did when he was able to get away with it.

Norm Macdonald was a big Cosby fan, and admired him both as a performer and as a man, he said. When the truth about Cosby came out, Norm of course changed his perspective. The post-Cosby comment of his that I remember is, "People say, 'You know, the worst thing about Cosby is that he's a hypocrite,' and I don't agree with that. " Pause for a beat. "I think the worst thing was the raping."

Many people have a shadow side that nobody sees. These two had huge, malignant shadows. How many "normal" people that we see every day are criminally-minded under the surface? In _Chinatown_, John Huston's character Noah Cross comments, "You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of ANYTHING."

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