Yeah, I know that vultures are really cute, but they're still really not very welcome at meals. Not even on the Upper West Side of a certain howling wilderness of barbarism, or private parties (exclusive, invitation-only-and-if-you're-not-invited-you're-nobody) on the Left Bank.
- Too often, the legal profession forgets that it harbors — that, as a profession, it must harbor — advocates for dissent, and even actual dissenters. It doesn't matter which specific legal system is at issue; it's really easy to snicker at Hong Kong (and the whispers of "agency capture" in the background are almost deafening), but the pretense that law can be kept separate from power and politics has just as much validity as saying that the military can.
The appropriate limitation is mostly on means used to advance a client's interests, not on the client's views or — putting it as neutrally as possible — social disloyalty, repulsiveness, in the worst instances treason (or at least advocacy of violent overthrow of the government). Even Drumpf's inability to accept that he lost an election deserves advocacy, because stolen elections do happen, even (at least historically) in the US. It requires a foundation in fact first, of course. And the right to advocacy doesn't excuse licensed professionals forgetting the special duties of professionals in the law any more than it does on the battlefield in the pursuit of a particular objective (what? you don't think "military officer" is a licensed professional? cops?) — especially when that objective is itself dubious.
The most controllable element of the problem is not limited to any particular nation, let alone common-law nations. Neither is it limited to attacking the powerless (although that's much more common than not). All these failures require is diving into the murky swamp between "privacy" and "reputation" in search of an illusory line between them — and that the swamp is an estuary between freshwater competition of ideas and saltier considerations of personal interests just makes it that much more fun… and about individual judgment. In which, worldwide, the legal system does its very best not to educate its members.
- And advocates of the so-called "blockchain method" are no more connected to reality. If nothing else, consider the negative externalities of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies — the environmental cost, not to mention the cost-shifting of energy usage that is not even being discussed. "Democratic promise" my ass: This is merely a shift in which subset with a privileged initial position can continue to exert that privileged position, from behind a rather less neutral veil of ignorance than Rawls ever contemplated.
- As ridiculous as the preceding sausages are, they pale in comparison to the goofiness of "authenticity" disputes in the arts. Even this doesn't go far enough, considering differing opinions on what it takes to be Jewish that inelegantly echo the "Are Mormons really Christians?" debates among the entrenched and real 'murikans common in the 1970s (and, no doubt, continuing today — just in forums to which I have no exposure, dank sei Gott — and entirely begging the followup question, "does it really matter?"). I ask you: Can you name a military officer who has played military officers since Col James B. Stewart? <SARCASM> Is it just barely possible that this particular experience deficit impacts the believability of the ever-popular use of military officers in film — beyond a certain former President's closest exposure being that he learned how to salute, in a way that serving officers never actually do except (perhaps, rarely) on ceremonial occasions? </SARCASM>
Perhaps there are some dimensions on which an underlying characteristic matters to depicting a character or another element in the arts. In extreme instances, it might even matter to the propriety of creation… although I think that much less common a real issue than improper failure to do research — and learn — by creators, critics/reviewers, activists, or all of the above.
- All of which is less ridiculous than the estates of band members suing the estates of other band members over the scraps left by the perfidy of the recording industry.
- That, though, just demonstrates that there really is a difference between creativity and The Arts: The money. Even when it's only arts-adjacent, for an extremely flexible and broad definition of "adjacent." Look, there's a good reason that I've never sold a painting in my lifetime… and it's not because I work in clay and stone (authorized audio, and you should seriously ponder the meaning of "authorized" here) but because my visual-arts output is both negligible and — to be honest — bad. (It's better than R___ P___'s, though, at least ethically — I at minimum acknowledge any "reappropriation" source works.)