It seems more and more sites are starting to go video. Noooo!

Maybe they based their stance on having only seen the biased documentary of the case. Maybe they haven’t ever read the court testimony. I still can’t believe they think the girl somehow deserved to be raped, that Polanski deserved the right to rape her, or that a fugitive from justice gets to outrun the law if he’s a Hollywood name.

Or maybe all these signatories really are “moral illiterates.”

No statement from these fearless artists–no more admiration (or dollars) from me and others who share my outrage.

OK. Thanks.

Forget Polanski being Jewish. If the Daily Telegraph is to be believed so is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past

I thought all that ‘self-hating Jew’ stuff was exaggerated. I may have to rethink that.

BTW, to commenter #6, I saw the video on YouTube where the comments are already filled with anti-Semitic attacks against Polanski, Weinstein, etc.
So maybe Simon’s original post wasn’t so “curious.” I thought it was obvious, if anything.

Also, your dichotomy between moral relativists and moral absolutists misses something yet more obvious – the rule of law. That is what this is all about to me.

For a moral absolutist, it is always wrong to rape a 13 year old. It is also always wrong to flee the country after you’ve pleaded guilty. There are no excuses. There are no exculpating circumstances. There are no mitigating factors. It was wrong, is wrong and always will be wrong no matter the circumstances, culture or society.

For a moral relativist, everything gets considered. It is relevant that Polanski is an artist who has made some movies. It is relevant that he lived for 32 years without pressures and then gets arrested in Switzerland (and that would be an issue if he had not already pleaded guilty). It is relevant that the victim objects to be putting back into a media induced circus.
(But, while she was the victim, the crime was also committed against the people of the state of California – it was a crime against a civilized society or, if you will, a crime against humanity.)

I do not see Hollywood that’s defending Polanski as a bunch of privileged elitists who feel celebrity status trumps morality. They have no moral absolutes to trump. Every case is a case of first impression and all factors are relevant. And if a relativist does not like the result, it is obvious that other considerations are not being given the appropriate weight. Is that not how you end up with the “it wasn’t rape-rape” defense? Isn’t that how you generate sympathy for a convicted murderer who wrote a children book?

The most curious comment posted was Roger’s original post saying that this would not be good for Jews. To a moral absolutist, the sentiment is nonsense. Polanski being a Jew or Holocaust survivor is absolutely irrelevant. However, to a moral relativist, yes, it could be a factor, one way or the other. Being a moral absolutist, I don’t see it one way or the other, but it could.

Does this also shed some light on what is coming out of Hollywood as product or art? A moral relativist can rationalize anything, even the drek that finds its way to screens. It’s particularly easy, one would think, when you’re surrounded by other moral relativists.

“Who would have thought in 1978 when Polanski jumped bail, left America, and fled from the charge of having seduced a fourteen-year-old girl, that the subsequent exile would become his way of life?”

Innocent errors or spin?