(MM, I know this is an extremely touchy subject. If you'd rather not have it here, I understand.)

I know people have lamented his "sad downfall" and the state of his mental health,but,fuck it. The man has crossed over into dangerous territory. I use to regard him as another clown, but you seriously can't anymore.

What's going to happen when some lunatic commits a horrible act on a synagogue and says "I did it for Kanye!"?. He has to be held accountable in other ways besides losing his fortune.

This is the freedom of speech issue that we are discussing (now without IChris, hilariously). KW can say pretty much anything right up until it breaks the rules of whichever platform he is using. Even Phoney Stark realises hate-speech might not be a good look, even if the money is the same.

There will always be those that 'inspire' others to atrocities but you have to put the blame on those folks who pulled the trigger as much as the instigator. Problem is while a nice idea, it's legally it's very hard to hold people accountable that didn't actually do any act.

This is why Trump was careful to not say anything to directly inspire 6th Jan, but his supporters "knew what he meant". Supporters = arrested, Trump = "I didn't tell them to do it soooooooo....".

When it comes to Kanye, he is just the latest in a long list of people that are allowing the public to blame mental illness on their shit behavior. Does Kanye have some kind of mental illness, I think it is possible. But I am sick of people blaming mental illness on what is happening with him and others. I have many friends with mental illness and not a single one of them turned into an anti-Semite. Not a single one of those friends has shot up a school, mosque, night club, etc. We need to stop talking about these people with excuses. End of the day Kanye is a piece of shit. He always has been a piece of shit. We need to stop acting like they are just a little troubled. While I did not see the video, I have heard that Alex Jones thought Kanye was too much. When Alex fucking Jones is the voice of reason in a room we are in trouble. Are we seeing who Kanye really is? We need to stop giving him attention and let him go back to obscurity where he belongs.

Well, he got banned from Twitter. And deplatforming in general seems like a good idea. But I'm not real sure what else we could do. If someone in his life sees him making more concrete plans or more specific threats, they could involuntarily commit him to a mental health hospital, but that's not something that random people online can do. I'm open to suggestions, though.


As usual, I'm not real impressed with Freddie's opinion here.


Uh, which is why Kanye, a Black man with a mental illness, is now a "permanently discarded oppressor"? That makes no sense. The fact that we're willing to hold Kanye accountable proves that we *aren't* judging him according to predefined, simplified, binaristic categories. Freddie is badly straw-manning the social justice perspective here, as he usually does, and his ludicrous straw-man is causing him to contradict himself.


These are just generalities and platitudes. Like, what does this even mean? piecub, can you tell me? Because Freddie never actually takes the risk of saying what we should, specifically, do. It makes me very, very skeptical when some would-be moral expert shows up and scolds everyone for doing (or even just saying) one thing while hiding their own preferences behind vagaries and innuendo.


Yeah, okay, and you can also hear the n-word at a Trump rally and meet men who've beaten their wives at a cop convention. "Brokenness" is not the exclusive property of people who have diagnosable mental illnesses, and bigotry is not somehow a mask that always hides the true face of mental illness. Also, just to throw this out there, the people in psychiatric facilities are *in psychiatric facilities.* They aren't allowed to just roam around in public promoting racist, antisemitic material.

And, like, I get his point - we have to be willing to help people who are mentally ill even if they're pieces of shit - but, again, what does that actually *mean* in this case? What form of social "help" does he think is appropriate for a billionaire celebrity rapper? Because any form of "help" that I can think of looks an awful lot like punishment. Like, again, if we put him in a mental hospital against his will, technically that's help but it's gonna feel and look an awful lot like punishment. If we take away his social media accounts (say, by putting him under some kind of conservatorship), that's technically help but it's gonna feel and look an awful lot like punishment. So, again, I'd really like for Freddie to stop doing this little tapdance routine and say something real.

Finally, just as a background note, I think it's worth remembering that Freddie himself is a criminal who blames his own criminality on mental illness. In 2017, in his own words, he "made totally baseless accusations of sexual misconduct against the writer Malcolm Harris on social media [and] was threatened with arrest regarding an unrelated matter." Now, whether or not he's right to say that all of this was caused by *his* mental illness, it sure does feel as though he's projecting all of the problems in *his* life onto this Kanye situation. In other words, when he says, "We would not be able to sit back in perfect judgment of West," I suggest that what he's really saying is, "We would not be able to sit back in perfect judgment of me, Freddie deBoer." Which, besides being very sad, is a dangerously self-obsessed bias for Freddie to bring to this conversation.

The term "anti-semitism" gets thrown at any criticism of Israelis. My experience of the people of Israel is that they are a fun loving and considerate people. However you don't have to hate Israelis to hate some of the things they do. For example with their land grabbing to build their 'settlements', it is no wonder that the Palestinians lob bombs into their areas.

Israel showed restraint when Sadam started firing missles into their land during the Gulf Wars, by not retaliating. With having friends in both Gaza and Isael, I just wish the one would not keep trying to exterminate the other.

Kanye or "Ye" as he wants to be known is just a mentally ill man with power, position and too much free time. Sadly the current state of the US, the US post Trump or just the US ingeneral allows him to be as hateful as he wants with no major ramifactions.

Yeah he is losing money hand over fist but he is still Kanye West. or attatched to said name.

This is an outsiders perspective. Outside of Kanye's circle but most importantly outside of the US.

The US is like a fruitcake it's either too nutty or not nuttier enough.

He is in no way, shape or form better than Vanilla Ice!