alt Hacker News> he pointed out that by insisting on maintaining ignorance, I could be funding a very bad person.
I don't consider that to be something worth worrying about. On the contrary, I find the obsession that some have with moral purity and not ever supporting the wrong type of person to be a serious mark of immaturity. Every person, without exception, is a collection of both good and bad traits. I believe that the adult thing to do is to encourage and reward the good, while discouraging and punishing the bad. When I support an artist's work, I do not thereby endorse everything that person does. I think that the desire to reduce everyone to "good guy" or "bad guy" (and acting towards them accordingly) is literally the sort of thing one would expect from a child, not an adult who has learned to have some nuance in thinking.
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I think the desire to not have to be accountable for ones choices and their effect on the world is also childlike, personally.
One of the powers we have in this capitalist world is to decide where our money goes. If there's a decent chance it'll end up perpetuating something I find massively objectionable, it's my choice not to fund that.
Beyond that it's not just about reducing everything to good or bad, it's also about understanding the context of the works you're consuming. Sometimes the author's life, prejudices and mores seep into the work, and put a new spin on the characters and scenarios.
Someone pointed it out to me that, if a person does something bad and faces the consequences by law, then that should be the end of it. Applying a personal punishment individually like avoiding anything they have involved in, is pointless or even unfair.
It can’t apply to all scenarios. But that struck me as an important thing to consider. Sometimes people get out of the consequences by using the riches they accumulated by being bad.