Episode of "The Simpsons" featuring Michael Jackson pulled from circulation

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Like what they did to Moses in the movie The Ten Commandments? Or in the book 1984 where disgraced people were “unpersons” and had to be removed from the archives of newspapers?

I get the feeling that we are applying the “unperson” idea even to the living these days. Rugby league was considering banning a player who was accused (not convicted) of domestic violence from playing. Rugby union then said “if the league doesn’t want this player, we won’t take them either”. Not because the union had a preexisting policy against players accused of domestic violence. Just because they were getting on the bandwagon of erasing this particular player from existence
 
Flopfoot said:
Yeah when I heard about the latest backlash against MJ it made me wonder what is the point of the “punishments from the court of public opinion” ?

If it is to punish the celebrity, or deter other celebrities from doing the same thing, then why would we be trying to punish a dead man?

Is it so that we avoid co-operating in the celebrity’s “crimes”? The secular world needs a lesson in the Catholic ideas about “remote material co-operation with evil”

Or is it an emotional reaction? We find anything to do with the celebrity to be “icky” and just want to save ourselves from being reminded of them?
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If you watch the documentary and listen to what the director and two subjects of it have said, the point is to explain how pedophiles groom and seduce their victims. Neither of these victims thought of themselves as victims because they’d been groomed not to. Frankly, this is an aspect of the sexual abuse of children that hasn’t been highlighted nearly enough.
 
But what does that have to do with his music being pulled off the air after he is dead?
 
Thom18 said:
I watched part of the documentary before realizing how “big” it was supposed to be. From what I saw, it didn’t introduce much (if anything) that we didn’t already know, so I don’t understand this mad rush to distance from Michael Jackson. If people weren’t doing it before, what changed?
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Before this documentary, the public wasn’t hearing direct and explicit testimony from alleged victims.
 
Flopfoot said:
But what does that have to do with his music being pulled off the air after he is dead?
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How about this? If the man was a serial pedophile who abused untold scores of children, why should his estate benefit from continuing sales of his music? For that reason alone, perhaps it’s prudent to pull an episode of “The Simpsons” that portrays him positively and draws further attention to him positively.
 
Because his estate didn’t do anything wrong, he did

And because his music has nothing to do with his crimes
 
MJ’s music is not going to vanish off the face of the earth because a negative documentary came out. Having a Simpsons episode pulled is not wholesale censorship of his art. I would add that the particular Simpsons episode “Stark Raving Dad” had a whole lot of stuff in it that was, by today’s standards, insulting to the mentally ill also (it was a parody of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) which may have been another nail in its temporary coffin.

Give it a few years and people will be back to listening to MJ and writing books about him and the whole 9 yards .

Also, there are likely to be a whole lot more celebs who, after they die, are going to have unsavory things come out that they or their lawyers or their managers managed to keep hidden during their lives. It’s been happening for centuries and it will continue to happen. Most intelligent thinking people can separate the art from the person.
 
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Flopfoot said:
Because his estate didn’t do anything wrong, he did
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Were he alive, he might well be prosecuted again by others. Since he’s not, his estate must field these claims and respond to them accordingly. Do you imagine that he was able to abuse children without any other adults in his circle being aware of this?

Wade Robson, one of the documentary’s subjects, has explained that he brought forth a suit against the estate because it was the only way to force the estate to actually listen to what took place. Only in a court of law would its representatives be required to hear what allegedly took place.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
MJ’s music is not going to vanish off the face of the earth because a negative documentary came out.

Give it a few years and people will be back to listening to MJ and writing books about him and the whole 9 yards .

Also, there are likely to be a whole lot more celebs who, after they die, are going to have unsavory things come out that they or their lawyers or their managers managed to keep hidden during their lives. It’s been happening for centuries and it will continue to happen. Most intelligent thinking people can separate the art from the person.
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Perhaps intelligent thinking people don’t want to support his estate through increased sales of his music.
 
No one’s twisting people’s arms to buy anything he, or rather his estate, puts out.

Some will refuse to buy.

Other people won’t care.
 
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Clearly.

The point is that “intelligent thinking people” might legitimately view this issue differently. Those who choose not to line the coffers of men and women who enabled a pedophile aren’t simply dumb.
 
No one is saying they are. I think the issue concerning some people on this thread is that if art is suppressed due to the alleged personal life of a dead artist (it’s still “alleged” because he was not convicted and because some witnesses who were personally involved are disputing the allegations), then we first of all lose art, second of all we lose art in a context where the artist isn’t around to defend himself, and third of all people are not getting the right to choose whether to consume.

I’m not concerned about any of this because in our digital internet-connected world, and given that the medium is music and video rather than one unique painting, sculpture etc, we’re not going to have a bookburning situation here.
 
Sure. In the bigger context of censorship, I can agree. Having seen the documentary? There’s no chance in hades that I believe he’s innocent. And I find it difficult to believe that anyone who’s seen it and wasn’t predisposed to be a hardcore fan and defender wouldn’t think the same.
 
He may well be guilty. On the other hand, most recent documentaries I have watched on any sort of crime, other than the basic “police procedural” type, are extremely biased and designed to trigger an emotional response in the viewer. For that reason, I don’t bother to watch them. It didn’t used to be that way back in the Bill Kurtis “American Justice” era.
 
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I find that it’s incredibly important to listen to witnesses and survivors. Perhaps that’s the training I’ve had when working with Holocaust survivors. Perhaps it’s the work I’ve done with survivors of sexual assault.
 
Yes to that. It was all pioneered by Stalin, I believe.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
MJ’s music is not going to vanish off the face of the earth because a negative documentary came out. Having a Simpsons episode pulled is not wholesale censorship of his art. I would add that the particular Simpsons episode “Stark Raving Dad” had a whole lot of stuff in it that was, by today’s standards, insulting to the mentally ill also (it was a parody of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) which may have been another nail in its temporary coffin.
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www.thewrap.com

'The Simpsons' Boss Al Jean Believes Michael Jackson Used Cameo 'to Groom Boys'

"It wasn't just a comedy to him, it was something that was used as a tool," showrunner tells The Daily Beast
www.thewrap.com www.thewrap.com
 
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