Background Check
For all entertainment and cultural consumption:
I hate to break it to you, but everyone is “problematic.” Human beings are flawed. If they weren’t, literature and art would not exist. You’ve been duped by an ideology that will happily rob you of all joy and complexity in life and art. https://t.co/kLY3CGmnMo
— Joseph Massey (@jmasseypoet) May 3, 2026
Imagine the hours of fun. All that tutting and disapproval.
Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
It would “happily” rob us all.
Well, the urge to achieve purity in such things is, I think, a little odd. I look at my own bookshelves and I’ve long since become accustomed to reading things by authors whose political opinions, insofar as they’re known to me, and insofar as I’d care to find out, may not be entirely congenial. Given the leftist dominance of cultural production, that’s kind of difficult to avoid.
Ditto TV and cinema.
Someone just discovered “never meet your heroes“, after all these years.
Given the liberal bubble most artists live in, I take it as a given that I’d never agree with any of them politically. That’s fine, I’m paying them to give me music/art/entertainment, I’m not going to give them a purity test and refuse to listen to them because they voted differently than I do.
Of course, that excludes the ones who are obnoxious about it (as many are), and who feel compelled to use their fame to lecture people who disagree with them.
And then there are the ones who are egregiously immoral that I want nothing to do with them. I’m not concerned with political disagreements, but wife beaters, child abusers and the like aren’t people I’m interested in giving money to.
But somehow I doubt that’s what the original poster was referring to.
Would a Socratic dialogue lead the complainer to an admission that she, too, is “problematic”?
But scrolling down through her feed suggests that seemingly everything upsets her. Oh–and she hates Israel and “Zionism”…of course. An Arabic version of a teenage basket case.