The kind of professor Iโm trying to be at university:
EDIT: just to clarify, this is a screenshot found offline, not from one of my student. Iโm more direct as I tell my students that "piracy is sharing knowledge and sharing knowledge is ethical and what Iโm paid to do so please use libgen.rs and sci-hub"
Given academia's emphasis on respect for intellectual property, I'm not sure directing students to a repository of stolen material sends quite the right message. Yes, textbooks are a grift. That's why I never use them. All materials needed for my courses are online for free, legal access by anyone, or else I write them myself.
A little tour of the Greystones coastline from my OneWheel. (Decided to treat myself to a crepe and make the most of the dregs of the good weather from this week.) :)
I think we do it by emphasizing the roll of the editor instead of the publisher. Same reason I still pay for science fiction when so much of it is available on line for free: I don't have time to find the good stuff on my own. So, I am willing to pay to have someone I trust make my editorial choices for me.
Also, we do it by admitting that people should get paid for doing something useful, much as we hate that idea.
Agreed that being a hypocrite doesn't invalidate one's argument. But my observation wasn't about the argument. Part of Banksy's appeal is their counterculturalism (or so I'm told; I find Banksy boring). Yet here's Banksy, building the brand by making a counterculturalist argument that is utterly self-referential.
It's the same "I'm on your side" trick Trump uses to win undeserved support. That was my point.
The police took virtually no action against a massive white-supremacist "demonstration" several years ago in Charlottesville, VA. One of the participants deliberately rammed his car into some observers, one of whom was a woman named Heather Heyer, who died as a result.
If the police had acted to break up the event as readily as they are responding to these campus protests, Ms. Heyer would still be alive.