First of all -

- this is not about fanvids.

And second of all ... I do not think "Angel/Spike" means what you think it means.

I'm almost done posting about this, I swear (probably).

I just happened to love this quote:

If Roman Polanski had made a fictional film about drugging and raping a 13-year-old, and had been prosecuted for it, I would probably be in his corner as far as having the freedom to do so goes, as brutal as the portrayal might have been. I am not, you know, annoyed with Nabokov for writing Lolita, which is a brilliant novel (in no small part because it's so damn creepy). Where Polanski went wrong was in actually drugging and raping a 13-year-old. This is one of the reasons I'm irked, by the way with a lot of the Polanski apologetics; the concept of artistic freedom applies to the freedom to create art. It's not a license to shoplift, embezzle, or rape. Or murder, Raskolnikov.

Also, this:

I can only hope that most of the signatories to this kind of thing [nb: the petition] aren't actually familiar with the facts of the case. Of course that sort of selective blindness is a huge problem of its own.

This. Exactly this. It's like a Somebody Else's Problem field - people literally cannot see the facts that would make it clear that this was not consensual, not a technicality, not merely an accusation (rather than a conviction), etc, etc. More than one columnist has described the case in those terms, and it's a completely predictable pattern.

Okay, yeah.

I, umm, actually don't want Roman Polanski to get raped in prison. Or, beaten. At all.

Just throwing that out there.

Also, I know very little about prison psychology but I actually strongly suspect that child rapists aren't targeted by other prisoners because of those prisoners' well-honed sense of moral boundaries, but because they can be targeted, because they're a defined group that everyone agrees can be a target.