There’s a faith vs works thing going on here that I’m having trouble fully articulating, where the way some people are processing this would make hypocrisy and compartmentalization not possible. But we *know* people are hypocrites and compartmentalize.
It is not usually as stark as this, but it happens to everyone, ourselves included, that we act in ways that are counter to our stated politics, sometimes habitually so. I don’t think that means, like you say, that we don’t *really* have those politics.
Insofar as a person like him believes in anything he believed in at least some of his states politics, because he spent a lot of time on charity work. It's weird!
People are complex and contain contradictions. It would be weird really if someone didn't. Few people are just criming monsters 24/7. Jimmy Saville did raise a lot of money for charity, but the other stuff, imo, pretty much cancels that out of were weighting the heart like ma'at.
"A person like him believes in anything"
Meaning what, exactly? The bitter, bitter pill is that abusers are people too. This isn't a "We should feel bad for the guy" thing, just suggesting that it's a flattening narrative to say someone who's abusive must be a hollow-eyed humanoid shark.
I fully believe that he believes in everything about hope and love and compassion and being kind he talked about and lived his public life exhibiting and also has some little twisted justification for his abhorrent personal behavior. Or maybe he doesn't and he just rightly hates himself for it.
This is just as common among abusers as the type who are some kind of Cruelty Robot. I won't say *more* common. But evil is a broad road that helps everyone down it.
What do you want from me? I never loved him. I cried when Terry Pratchett died and I didn't even love *him*. I respected Gaiman as an author and extended the same benefit of the doubt regarding accusations that I would to anybody. This full report is damning.
I don't. I very genuinely don't, just from what I've seen in my own life. Evils more profound than even what he did by miles sleeps inside each and every one of us.
I kind of think we do. You're suggesting that there is, essentially, a neuroatypicality that makes you evil, or cruel, or abusive, or however you want to put it. If that's not what you mean, that's how it's coming off to me.
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Meaning what, exactly? The bitter, bitter pill is that abusers are people too. This isn't a "We should feel bad for the guy" thing, just suggesting that it's a flattening narrative to say someone who's abusive must be a hollow-eyed humanoid shark.
And yeah, I like a lot of his work. I also love the Belgariad, and the works of Lovecraft, and Michael Jackson.
Loving his work isn't what created the permission structure for his abuse. It was loving him.