I wonder if anyone has written in English about the counter-backlash to the bullying scandal. Basically the 2006 blog post you link to was misconstruing the tone of the interview. Cornelius started out as a genuine friend of the developmentally disabled victim, but after the bullying started, Cornelius became cowardly and found himself "going along with" the torture, becoming a silent witness to the degradation of his former friend. The purpose of the interview was to reflect on the collective mob mentality that creates bullying, but the blog post trimmed this down into Cornelius being a bully himself, and because of the horrific incidents described the psychologically complex point of the discussion was erased. He did indeed have agency and deserves blame, but contrary to the 2006 blog post and the thousands who retweeted it, he was neither bragging nor laughing about the victim, but rather about the pathos of his own mentality.
Anyway, this is all to say that Cornelius was probably correct to resign from the Olympics, but in retrospect I wish I had not deleted his music from my library and I would feel no guilt in listening to this new album.
Respectfully, I'm curious if this is something you know based on having read the article yourself or someone else's more sympathetic framing of it. Because I think if you had read it, you would've seen that he laughed through the whole thing, that he revealed humiliating details about the victims (there were two, not one) that should've remained private, and continued to make jokes at the expense of people with developmental disabilities in general (p. 65, "people with Down syndrome all look the same," laughs about how he and his friends used to make a game out of trying to tell the boys apart from the girls at the special needs school next door to theirs). That's my perspective as someone who read every word of the original interview in Japanese.
I agree that many reports sensationalized the extent of his involvement, but he was still involved, and he recounted abuse as shock value comedy to bolster his own profile. Keep in mind, the Quick Japan interview (which, yes, was nominally meant to be a reflection on bullying from the bully's perspective) was only commissioned in the first place because he had already bragged about it unprompted in an earlier interview for a different magazine. So why was he so eager to show himself off as a bully for clout if he was really a genuine friend to this person? Why were the events he described still funny to him if he was truly sorry?
"Can we still listen to Cornelius" debates are not that interesting to me — obviously, I think people should listen to whatever they want — and I feel like the accountability he did face at the time was satisfactory enough for him to go on and have whatever redemption arc he's going to have now, but it does make me uncomfortable to see how easily people have been able to twist the narrative in service of cleaning up his image, taking advantage of the language barrier and slipshod reporting from when the story originally broke.
No worries, thank you for your kind response! I hope I didn't come off too strong. (Comment deleted and reposted for an error I couldn't seem to edit, sorry about that.)
I wonder if anyone has written in English about the counter-backlash to the bullying scandal. Basically the 2006 blog post you link to was misconstruing the tone of the interview. Cornelius started out as a genuine friend of the developmentally disabled victim, but after the bullying started, Cornelius became cowardly and found himself "going along with" the torture, becoming a silent witness to the degradation of his former friend. The purpose of the interview was to reflect on the collective mob mentality that creates bullying, but the blog post trimmed this down into Cornelius being a bully himself, and because of the horrific incidents described the psychologically complex point of the discussion was erased. He did indeed have agency and deserves blame, but contrary to the 2006 blog post and the thousands who retweeted it, he was neither bragging nor laughing about the victim, but rather about the pathos of his own mentality.
Anyway, this is all to say that Cornelius was probably correct to resign from the Olympics, but in retrospect I wish I had not deleted his music from my library and I would feel no guilt in listening to this new album.
Respectfully, I'm curious if this is something you know based on having read the article yourself or someone else's more sympathetic framing of it. Because I think if you had read it, you would've seen that he laughed through the whole thing, that he revealed humiliating details about the victims (there were two, not one) that should've remained private, and continued to make jokes at the expense of people with developmental disabilities in general (p. 65, "people with Down syndrome all look the same," laughs about how he and his friends used to make a game out of trying to tell the boys apart from the girls at the special needs school next door to theirs). That's my perspective as someone who read every word of the original interview in Japanese.
I agree that many reports sensationalized the extent of his involvement, but he was still involved, and he recounted abuse as shock value comedy to bolster his own profile. Keep in mind, the Quick Japan interview (which, yes, was nominally meant to be a reflection on bullying from the bully's perspective) was only commissioned in the first place because he had already bragged about it unprompted in an earlier interview for a different magazine. So why was he so eager to show himself off as a bully for clout if he was really a genuine friend to this person? Why were the events he described still funny to him if he was truly sorry?
"Can we still listen to Cornelius" debates are not that interesting to me — obviously, I think people should listen to whatever they want — and I feel like the accountability he did face at the time was satisfactory enough for him to go on and have whatever redemption arc he's going to have now, but it does make me uncomfortable to see how easily people have been able to twist the narrative in service of cleaning up his image, taking advantage of the language barrier and slipshod reporting from when the story originally broke.
Thank you for the reply -- I was following the Japanese debates but apparently not as closely as I should have. I'm glad to be informed.
No worries, thank you for your kind response! I hope I didn't come off too strong. (Comment deleted and reposted for an error I couldn't seem to edit, sorry about that.)
This sounds so good, gotta hear the whole album!