The portion of his fanbase that posts on Kanye-related subreddits is very displeased with this latest bout of iconoclasm. [Edit: Actually /r/westsubever seems pretty adamant about sticking with the music.] However, I'm curious about the non-Reddit-posting demographic of Kanye fans. I'm not sure whether they're tuned into this issue nor whether they're bothered. I guess I'm basically echoing you: "It's a shame we don't have a way to see what the median person thinks about this."
Perhaps a decent proxy — some comments from theshaderoom's latest Kanye post (celebrity gossip Insta focused on black culture, predominantly black commentariat):
Y’all are not understanding that this guy is trying to build his own empire,but he can’t if he is still in contracts with all them labels and companies! This is all planed
131 likes ^
He’s getting out of his contracts and y’all don’t see the genius in this lmao.
1,707 likes ^
They ain’t move like this when he said slavery was a choice but I guess
1,160 likes ^
Nobody lifted a finger when he was talking about black people though
1,871 likes ^
I think he ending his relationships with the companies but y’all gon spin shit how y’all wanna 🥴🤷
138 likes ^
He used the system to make his money. Now using the platform they gave him to speak uncomfortable truths. The man is a genius. He is already a billionaire he’ll be fine.
57 likes ^
it’s funny when he was saying all this shit against black people (“slavery was a choice”) ain’t nobody end they relationship with him but the moment he speak Jews in the industry and they wrong doings, they ready to clean house with him. It just shows how much they don’t gaf about anybody but them.
3,990 likes ^
sonya
1yr ago
I believe that my trans friends should be able to browse the internet without seeing content they deem hateful/disturbing (like harry potter content).
To me this seems like the error. Rather, it is your friends' responsibility to avoid content they find offensive, and when they do encounter it, control themselves like adults and promptly move on to look at stuff they do like without losing their shit. This is the strategy I employ.
sonya
1yr ago
Exit rights to life are intrinsic, you just have to actually commit suicide. Granted, it's not easy, but it's not impossible either.
I tend to agree with OP that this slope has proven alarmingly slippery.
sonya
1yr ago
Mental health as typically conceived hinges on whether your mindset impairs your day-to-day functioning. So by that metric, the answer to this is resoundingly yes:
can someone who is convinced that a man 2000 years was literally god incarnate and rose from the dead really be called mentally healthy?
sonya
1yr ago
Mentally ill people rummaging through garbage early in the morning or other problems occur even in expensive areas.
Not in the suburbs! I know OP was focused on city living, but still, I want to put a good word in for my preferred environment. Source: I live in a suburb, not even a particularly expensive one (by Bay Area standards anyway), and it's blissfully isolated from all manner of city problems, including a wide swathe of undesirables undertaking undesirable behavior. One perk of the car-centric setup is that you need to minimally have your shit together to own a car, and it wouldn't be practical to live here without one. (For whatever reason the hooligans who steal vehicles don't penetrate here often — perhaps it's not a particularly lucrative environment for thievery?)
sonya
1yr ago
I worked in privacy tech for a couple years, and the other two examples du jour are abuse victims and LGBTQ+
sonya
1yr ago
Would the transgender tendency to document absolutely everything online
It may be a legitimate demographic tendency, idk, but this is like drawing the conclusion that all plastic surgery is botched because the plastic surgery one notices is botched. Sampling bias. The people who document and publish their lives online the most are the most visible.
sonya
1yr ago
You've read this, right? https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
sonya
1yr ago
sonya
1yr ago
I get that you're nodding to general perceptions regarding who "counts" as Christian but the caveats bug me.
She's shown to have pre-marital sex and considers posing nude at one point so she is admittedly a bit of a stretch.
You don't have to be personally / socially conservative to be Christian! If we use the Nicene Creed as an orthodox litmus test, being a Christian is defined by what you believe, not how you conduct yourself. (This is not to say that I don't personally think Christians, including myself, should strive to meet certain behavioral standards. But there is a lot of disagreement about what those standards should be precisely. And pretty widespread acknowledgement that most of us aren't going to live up to the ideal all or even most of the time.)
implied he found religion after a life of dirty deeds, so your mileage may vary here.
So did St. Paul!
sonya
1yr ago
I comment very sporadically for this reason — effortposting takes too much time and, well, effort! Even when I do comment, it's usually just a brief thought. The Motte is an entertainment + procrastination venue for me, and my substantive effort is reserved for things like my actual job or personal creative projects. I do try to contribute by promoting the community elsewhere on occasion.
Is it just a matter of exercising my writers-muscles?
In general yes, the way to get better at anything is to practice. I work as a writer and I've gotten a lot faster over the years (though I'm still not particularly fast, nor prolific, in the overall distribution of writers).
Is it my method of commenting, is there some more efficient way to comment? Do other people put hours into posts with any amount of substance? [...] Is most everything on here peoples' first edit?
It varies. Some people are indeed investing hours into their posts and going through multiple rounds of edits. Others have the enviable combination of logorrhea and natural eloquence.
sonya
1yr ago
These lines of argumentation kinda strike me as arguing that monogamy doesn't real because people cheat. Like, sure, the map is not the territory, but that's not a good reason to throw out the map.
My other thought is that race is a "thick" concept that bundles various things together — phenotype, ethnicity, culture (sometimes including nationality), and the emergent socioeconomic connotations of combinations thereof.
sonya
1yr ago
Yes, I'm sure you'd be exactly this sanguine if your employee fucked your wife. C'mon.
sonya
1yr ago
Based God (rapper Lil B) (who also has a KnowYourMeme page lol) is an example that predates the wider popularization of "based" and was definitely a reference to freebasing. I think this origin was quickly obscured as the term began to spread though.
sonya
1yr ago
If they can just coerce me to only do what they will allow, then owning property becomes completely useless.
But like, they can. Nonetheless, people choose to own property, because it still affords greater freedom to do [whatever] than renting. The set of things you're allowed to do when you're renting is smaller than the set of things you're allowed to do as a landowner / homeowner. This remains true even though the latter set does not contain "literally anything conceivable."
sonya
1yr ago
Estrogen has pretty profound cognitive effects (though of course hormones aren't literally everything). For example, transitioning MTFs often describe feeling way more emotional, crying more often, etc., while transitioning FTMs describe the same thing in reverse.
Anecdotally, from the perspective of a cis woman who doesn't have a problem with trans women*, the ones I'm familiar with read to me as nerdy girls in terms of affect and personality.
*my own problems with transness / gender ideology / whatever are all about <18yo children transitioning — the adult trans people I know don't bother me (regardless of when they themselves began transition, which I rarely even know)
sonya
1yr ago
I vastly prefer this interface to Reddit, and the CW threads have not had as much "here's my dumbass manifesto" lately, so I'm happy overall.
sonya
1yr ago
I have no idea how to hire an escort.
I mean, if you were so inclined, it wouldn't be hard to find out. You can literally Google it
Just empirically, people are not allowed to use their land however they like. There are innumerable restrictions, which is basically what this whole fight is about — which possible set of restrictions is optimal. The answer to that varies based on one's vantage point. "Do whatever you want" is not on the table because we live in a society, etc. It would be cool if Ancapistan existed but it doesn't because it's game-theoretically untenable.
Why do we have to be so soft on homeowners?
Because there are a lot of them and they vote in their own interests, and otherwise advocate for themselves, to a greater extent than opposing demographics. Insofar as this changes, preferential treatment of homeowners will also change.
I assume you already know this so possibly I'm being obtuse about what you were actually asking, or it was a rhetorical question?
We don't extend this level of hand-holding and thought about compensating business owners or owners of large amounts of stocks. Those things can rapidly lose their value as well and consist of a large part of individuals assets.
This isn't strictly true, for example there are assets you can't buy unless you're an accredited investor.
sonya
1yr ago
The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch — it's a little too comprehensive for my taste, and thus a bit of a slog, but interesting enough that I'm going to finish it. Broad theme: Once the universal hold of European Catholicism is broken, various polities discover through successive rounds of bloodshed that it's no longer practical to have One True State Religion.
sonya
1yr ago
although, ironically, this is the case
Wait, are you saying Leopold's subjects did maim themselves? Link / source?
I bet you've heard the phrase "living well is the best revenge." I think it's also the best argument. There are so many ideas, or larger schemas, that are alluring in abstract. See: every teenager's politics. But far fewer paradigms are actually effective in practice. (Granted, which ones work does vary somewhat based on the local circumstances / environment.)
Living out one's ideals is a costly signal of sincerity, and achieving success and happiness by doing so is the least refutable argument. This is a big reason why religion is so persistent despite sounding batshit crazy from the outside — and I say this as a religious person. The philosophy makes sense once you fit yourself inside of it, but the incentive to attempt that in the first place, despite the context of a secular overculture, is that religious people are more likely to thrive.
Anyway, my question is, why don't more culture warriors pursue this path, of exemplifying why their chosen philosophy is good? Am I wrong that it's the most convincing way to advocate for one's ideals? Or maybe everyone is indeed trying to do this, and most just don't seem very effective from my particular vantage point / vis-a-vis my conception of the good life? Perhaps it's a selection effect where people who deeply care about what everyone else is doing are less likely to be happy, point blank, so anyone discernible as a culture warrior is already precluded from "living well is the best argument" unless they learn to give less of a shit in general.
Edit: Apologies for not responding individually, this ended up getting more responses than I expected. But I appreciate you all and am pondering your points!
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