I barely remember them, because barely anything happened to them. Some people got criticized on twitter or whatever. Big fucking deal.
And in the meantime, hundreds of millions of women and girls have been and/or are being abused, with no justice or consequences for their abusers.
Bad luck (or bad motives) for that guy. Unfortunately, there are some “stumbles” that are likely to have some pretty significant consequences. Media figures in America should be careful with their words, and if they’re not, there may be consequences.
And in the meantime, hundreds of millions of women and girls have been and/or are being abused, with no justice or consequences for their abusers.
Misunderstandings happen, unfortunately. And this one was unjust. Bad things sometimes happen to good people. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do about it, though. Hopefully media companies are smarter going forward.
And in the meantime, hundreds of millions of women and girls have been and/or are being abused, with no justice or consequences for their abusers.
What a joke this example was. Some random internet dude makes a list and a bunch of people click “cancel” next to names… and this is notable, why? Internet people like to click “cancel” or whatever? I don’t get at all why this is significant. A million silly internet things happen every day and have zero effect on the real world. Why is this one special? Did anyone suffer consequences because of this?
And in the meantime, hundreds of millions of women and girls have been and/or are being abused, with no justice or consequences for their abusers.
If this is all you’re saying – that there are assholes in every group, then fine. But I don’t know what this has to do with Woody Allen. Or #MeToo, except that it’s a group of humans and thus might have some assholes in it. But why is this important or notable? I don’t want innocent people harmed. Nothing I’ve done has lead to any innocent people being harmed. I haven’t advocated for any innocent people being harmed.
And in the meantime, hundreds of millions of women and girls have been and/or are being abused, with no justice or consequences for their abusers.
A lot of verbiage from Andy without any words addressing my more on-topic post about the Yale investigation or Moses Farrow’s post corroborating the idea that Mia Farrow was the real abuser here.
The facts of particular incident may be unknowable by those who weren’t directly involved. But there are multiple publicly known events regarding Allen that aren’t in doubt, which plenty of people have a problem with.
Do you think that’s the only reason a publisher rejects manuscripts? You’re wrong. There’s also “We don’t want to be associated with this author” or this kind of work or this kind of business or this is just not our thing or an important person in our company has a problem with you. Woody Allen is not the first person to lose a deal because people stopped liking em. Remember O.J. Simpson’s “If I Did It” or whatever it was called?
This has always been the case. Publishing is not a common carrier like the public telephone network.
A free speech right is not a right to have any particular entity publish your book. Losing a publishing deal isn’t censorship. Period. So long as Woody Allen has the option to stand outside and hand out copies of his book, he hasn’t been censored.
I know this is nitpicking for some of you, but for me it’s an important part of understanding what people are talking about in their posts. When SlackerInc talks about Andy in post #104, I was confused about what he meant. I knew that there was no poster named Andy in this thread. It was only by searching through the thread that I realized that he mean iiandyiiii. I haven’t thought about that board name as being related to the name Andy. I guess I thought of it as “something . . . and . . . something”, where I couldn’t figure out what ii and yiii had to do with anything. There is at least one other regular poster who I do think of as Andy, so I assumed SlackerInc meant that that poster was in the thread, which he isn’t. So I’m just asking you all to not come up with a nickname for a poster in the middle of a thread, because it’s confusing.
Ha! My first name is Andy, by the way. There’s a very boring story behind my username that I’ve posted a few times. I’d do it again but it’s really, really boring.
Do you not see the difference between not getting a job or a contract, because of a bad fit or whatever based on the opinion of the job-giver; versus having that job lined up and then pulled away because some random Yahoos on the internet or company minions whip themselves into a frenzy and make a lot of noise?
Would you take this same approach if it was YOU who had the job/contract and then it was pulled because other folks you don’t even know decided they didn’t like you? Maybe you would; I don’t know. But I think that would make you the exception, being all fine with others affecting your life that way.
I don’t want to nitpick on this excessively as it’s not even directly on topic, but at no point did I intentionally misrepresent anything you said. And I acknowledge that you did say, later on when directly confronted with it, that you don’t know what the Ghomeshi verdict should have been. But initially you had also said (emphasis mine):
Perhaps I misread your meaning, but if you think there is “plenty of reason to criticize … the findings of [the] judge”, then I took this to mean that you disagreed with his finding of “not guilty”.
And then there was this:
Not to belabor the point, but I gave you a link to the full text of the judgment, in which it was clear that all three complainants were engaged in systematic lying and withholding critically important evidence that seriously undermined their case, until, under cross-examination, they were confronted with irrefutable physical evidence. And even then you tried to excuse it by saying that it “easily could have been accidental omissions”, or that somehow it was society’s fault for “gaslighting” them and muddling up their thinking. No, what you talk about in pre-trial testimony and preliminary hearings and on the witness stand is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I reject any notion that this is complicated, and I would consider it insulting to women to suggest that they were unable to fully comprehend the concept. It was soon obvious that critical information was deliberately withheld, and continued to be withheld, until their deceptions were exposed. And that was only part of their lack of credibility.
I don’t want to argue about it any more, certainly not in this thread, but I did want to strongly make the point that I was not intentionally misrepresenting you or being dishonest, though I may somehow have misunderstood your meaning.
FWIW, I think Ghomeshi was guilty as sin, but there was no way under the rule of law, based on the evidence presented, that he could reasonably have been convicted in this trial.
Allen is not a perfect human being and many people don’t like him for a variety of reasons, one being the rather unusual circumstances of the marriage with Soon-Yi, although obviously they’ve had a long and happy relationship, so good for them. Other than the Dylan situation, I’m not aware of other allegations against Allen, although I must admit I follow his art much more than his personal life.
With regard to Dylan, I think the quote from Moses Farrow in post #95 is worth a read, whether you choose to fully believe it or not. This is a familial dispute in which very few people have access to all the truthful details, and fewer still to the actual truth of what really happened.
That no evidence was found to substantiate Dylan’s claims doesn’t mean that Dylan isn’t telling the truth. I have no idea what the truth is, but I do object to those who think they do. I don’t care if Allen is worth $80 million or just $1; “equal justice for all” has long been a fundamental American ideal (though far from true in reality) yet many of us are willing to cast Allen into the outer darkness like a suspected witch in 17th century Salem. To me that maxim implies social justice as well as legal justice; no one is obliged to watch his movies or read his books, but don’t gather in mobs to stand in the way of those who do.
The publisher didn’t “reject” his manuscript. They had every right to, but they did not. They enthusiastically accepted it. It was cancelled after an impromptu revolt and a walkout by rank-and-file employees. Stephen King was right. This is censorship. Hachette took on the book because they believed it would be very popular. If their judgment turned out to be wrong, they would have lost a ton of money. That’s the way things are supposed to work in the land of free speech and capitalism.
As for OJ, I have no hesitation in saying that OJ was a murderer who was acquitted through a combination of having at least seven (don’t remember the exact number) of literally the absolutely top criminal lawyers in the country and an ignorant jury that was more impressed by Johnny Cochrane’s rhyming couplets than by any actual evidence. These morons took something like fifteen minutes to reach the wrong verdict on a major case that had massive amounts of evidence and huge numbers of factors to consider. There is no comparison with anything we’re talking about here. It was a major failure of the US justice system, so major that President Clinton himself felt obliged to tell a very disturbed American public essentially that what’s done is done, now let’s move on. OJ did eventually prove himself a criminal, aside from losing the civil case over the murder, and was sentenced to 33 years for armed robbery, of which he served 9 before being paroled.
I already regret wading back into this interminable argument as I type this, but you do realize this is just more he said/she said, yes? Because on one side you have Moses Farrow and Soon-Yi Previn. On the other you have Matthew Previn, Sascha Previn, Fletcher Previn, Daisy Previn, Ronan Farrow, Isaiah Farrow, and Quincy Farrow saying they’re wrong.
I wouldn’t rest my hat on what 2 out of 9 kids are arguing. Which is not the same as saying Moses Farrow is wrong. Maybe Mia was in fact abusive to Moses and Soon-Yi specifically and that understandably colors their view. Or maybe their siblings are making excuses or allowances for her general behavior that they shouldn’t be. The point is that we just can’t know, so bringing up Moses’ claim as a gotcha just doesn’t work.
No one is “gathering in mobs” here. People are speaking out with their opinions. There’s no reason to believe Allen is in any danger beyond losing some fans. All that’s going on here is that lots of people are saying they don’t want to work with Allen or give him money, and that kind of thing has consequences that free market entities like publishers take into account for their decisions. And it may go well beyond that single incident – it may be about the publicly known incidents from earlier in Allen’s career (just from memory, like the time he tried to convince a teenage actress to accompany him on a trip to Europe, making it clear they would be sharing rooms along the way).
I totally agree with you that we just can’t know. I don’t think that Moses Farrow’s essay was supposed to be a “gotcha”, but just another data point. I happen to think that Woody Allen should not be made a pariah and social outcast because of something that may or may not have happened a very long time ago, while having led a relatively blameless if imperfect life ever since.
I also have to say that Dylan’s apparently recent introduction of the electric train going round and round while this was going on was something I found really fascinating, because it’s strangely reminiscent of the “lost in the mall technique” in which certain triggers or psychotherapy techniques can be used – especially some forms of psychotherapy, but also other random triggers – to elicit so-called repressed memories in adults about childhood experiences that are in fact completely false. Yet they often feature remarkable detailed descriptions, despite the fact that they never happened. It remains a controversial area but the general consensus seems to be that the later recall of such repressed memories is more often false than true. There’s been a lot of controversy about it but one of the original principal researchers has offered a spirited defense of it.
Again, I have no idea what really happened and have no interest in defending Woody Allen aside from appreciating many of his works. But Moses’ claim that there never was – and could never have been – an electric train in the attic, and Dylan’s apparently recent recall of the train going round and round – seems to fit precisely into the false memory syndrome being described here.
Which is not an exoneration of Allen or proof that he never abused Dylan, but just another data point to illustrate how complex the situation is and why jumping to conclusions – the lifeblood of social media and zealous activists – is not always good policy.
LOL at the idea that I “made up a nickname” for Andy (uh, iiandyiii) in the middle of the thread! That was random. (But okay, when I squint I can see how it might have been interpreted as sounding something like “ee and yee”. That’s funny.)
And I don’t believe for a second that Woody Allen would be anywhere near as toxic as he is right now if everyone knew about the stuff I posted.
Odd, how you don’t put the thorough contemporaneous investigation by the Yale experts on “one side”. Why are they so conveniently erased from your narrative?
Allen’s last two films (“A Rainy Day in New York” and “Rifkin’s Festival”) were both completed, produced by Amazon under the deal they reneged on for no valid reason (there being no information that has come out publicly since they inked the deal). I would like to see both of them, just as I have seen virtually all his other films. As far as I can tell, there is no legal way for me to do so (I don’t torrent anything, ever). Am I mistaken about that? If so, please let me know how I can see them. If I’m not mistaken, how is this not de facto censorship?
It doesn’t bother me at all. I expect posters call me Andy (and I do recall others doing so, including at least one mod) because it’s a bit of a pain to type out all the i’s.
Who exactly is jumping to conclusions? People have had several decades to consider his actions with respect to Soon-Yi, to consider the statements of his various children, to consider the allegations made by Mia Farrow, to consider the justice system’s conclusions, to consider what his own works suggest about his character, and to consider the statements of other people who have interacted with him (such as Mariel Hemingway), and after all these several decades they’ve held all this up in the light of a movement that is seeking to stop powerful people from feeling free to abuse the people around them and some of them have decided that they don’t want to do business with him, which is a completely appropriate and reasonable conclusion to come to.
If he releases more movies, I might or might not see them because I have liked much of his past work, but I am glad that some people are willing to stand up to a powerful man like him and say “no,” your character matters, your reputation matters, how you treat the people around you matters, and I hope that these very minor losses to him serve as a lesson to him and others to police their own behavior in the future.
And I am also glad to see that employees speaking up can change the business decisions of their employers so that the company has to care about at least one more thing other than a pure consideration of potential profit.
SlackerInc, it’s a good idea to not assume that other SDMB posters have read dozens of your posts in previous threads. I’ve been on the SDMB a long time and tend not to participate in the threads you post to. I guess I haven’t participated in many of those that iiandyiii posts to either. Both your names are familiar to me but not any abbreviations of those names. My only point is that I think threads on the SDMB should sound like carefully thought out arguments for any intelligent reader rather than discussions among people who’ve known each other for a long time and who don’t expect anyone new to listen and respond to them.
You continue to make light of the situation. This is not about something that may or may not have happened. This is about child molestation, based on the testimony of the victim and those around them. We also have direct evidence that he has no problem violating the social taboo and being romantic with one of his other step daughters. By far, the vast majority who cared enough to look into all of the evidence have concluded he actually did abuse his step daughter.
You also make the actual situation with Allen far bigger than it actually is. One publisher pulled his book, because people didn’t want it to be available, and they’d lose money if they made it. He is still rich, and can still publish. Even if no publisher will take it, he can self publish. There is no great harm in him not being able to get a deal.
And there is no moral issue with a company choosing not to publish a book. People have the right to come to conclusions based on the evidence, and are not required to adhere to the courts or pretend something is 50/50 if they don’t know 100% for sure. They can 65% sure, and that can be enough. People have the right to lobby publishers and tell them not to publish things. Publishers have the right to choose what they publish. Everything involved here is just freedom of speech.
You say that you don’t really want to argue that Allen isn’t guilty, but that’s exactly what you’ve done in this thread, using the same tactics of those who minimize rape and sexual assault. You’re literally making the argument that was used to try and shut down #MeToo, to stop women from coming forth. If everyone will just treat all situations like 50/50 and care more about the smaller harms that occur to the accused, then there is no reason to come out in the first place.
I mean, you’re trying the conflation argument. It is extremely rare for stories of child abuse to conflated, as has been shown in the literature since at least 2003 when I was writing a paper on child abuse. Traumatic memories are harder to change, and are almost never created out of the whole cloth. It’s the less important details that may be conflated. As such, the fact that she may have remembered one detail wrong is only NORMAL, and not remotely evidence against her.
But these are the tactics that are used to defend alleged rapists. You say you aren’t trying to defend them, but you sure pull out all of the arguments used by those people who do this. You can’t just add a disclaimer and it all goes away.
As is, if you want to convince me that this isn’t just a casual attitude towards alleged rape, or an attempt to defend an author you like, you’d have to stop doing these things. But it seems your entire argument depends on them, so I doubt you will.