I’m not going to get back into the whole “Mel’s Profits” thing. However since I had to read so many emails making similar arguments, let me respond to one point en masse.
To summarize: People say my “comparisons” of Gibson to Michael Moore or Oliver Stone are inappropriate because Gibson’s a good guy — for want of a better term — while the other two are crapweasels.
Well, first of all, I didn’t really compare Moore and Stone to Gibson so much as use their examples to illustrate my point. Nevertheless these readers illustrate it just as well when they say Gibson’s a good guy (which I still think is probably true).
If you think Gibson’s a good guy you’re “judging” him just as much as you would be if you thought he’s a bad guy. If Gibson had announced he was going to give all of his profits to orphanages, how many of the readers pounding their keyboards about how I have “no right to judge Gibson or what he does with his money” would have still complained if I said the guy was a hero? In other words, it seems like most of the readers who say I have no right to judge Gibson have judged him too. They just think he shouldn’t be judged poorly.
If we have no right to judge people, then it must be absolute. Otherwise, we live in the sort of cultural sewer which says we can celebrate everything but condemn nothing.