One of the things that upset some people about Mr. Easterbrook’s rant against violent movies is that it made value judgements. The fact that Mr. Easterbrook feels that there are higher values than the profit motive has some, like libertarian Virginia Postrel, claiming that he’s anti-capitalist which is downright nutty. If somebody says there are things you shouldn’t do to make a buck, most people would agree. There would be some disagreement about exactly what those things are that you shouldn’t do, and I realize that doctrinaire libertarians have a somewhat smaller list than most people, but having such a list doesn’t make you anti-capitalist. My rule of thumb is that people are perfectly happy making judgements based on their own value system, but bristle when other people mention their own value judgements if they don’t share the same value system.
Another problem for Mr. Easterbrook is that Jewishness is both an ethnicity and a religion, unlike for instance Christianity. Thus while he was comparing the behavior of certain individuals to the values of their religion (Judeism), others heard it as a slam on Jews the ethnic group. He could have, and I expect would have, made an appeal to Christian values if it had been different movie moguls – just as he did with Mel Gibson in an prior post.
Lastly, he got in trouble because you could lift out a single sentance out of his post: “Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence?” and fool people into thinking he was claiming that Jews in general worship money above all else. The trouble with words is that they can be taken out of context while they are always given in context – always. The context of that sentance makes it clear that he was talking about two particular Jewish executives. That gives me another rule of thumb, namely don’t get outraged until you’ve seen the full statement, not just the excerpts.
