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Finally we're seeing the extent of the damage of the Kanye controversy
In the span of a month, Kanye West has destroyed his empire
yup..YeezyGap.com redirects to gap.com
What I don't understand is, how is his wealth being calculated here? Wouldn't Kanye's wealth be a roughly monotonically increasing function , that being his income from his endorsement deals? Losing said deals would not mean he has to forfeit accumulated wealth, just that he stops making any new wealth? So either he was never worth $2 billion or this decline is somehow based on some extrapolation?
From the Forbes link, it looks like an extrapolation : https://www.forbes.com/profile/kanye-west/?sh=515edd0c56f1
That seems misleading to say someone is worth something but it's not actually realized
To add, it shows how the mere accusation of racism or antisemitism is the left's superpower. It forces the accused to go on the defense and presumes some guilt. Any nuance or misunderstanding on the accused goes out the window. You can destroy someone's reputation this way even if it was a mistake. As popular as anti-woke sentiment is on twitter ,like Rogan and Musk, it does not matter if the people who hold the levers of power are still, by in large, woke , and and you have to literally be a self-made millionaire to survive said accusations without being completely destroyed career-wise or reputationally. Someone can argue "what Kanye said was really egregious" but people have been cancelled, banned for less and it does not change the automatic presumption of guilt.
I don’t think of a superpower as requiring the target to hang himself.
Kanye made himself pretty clear in a public forum. Where’s the nuance and misunderstanding?
What is considered racist is always changing. Something as innocuous as making an ok-sign hand gesture has now been deemed racist. https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/okay-hand-gesture. Also, just being accused of racism can be as bad as being racist.
Yes, your thesis is clear. How does Kanye back it up?
He didn’t get tripped up on the euphemism treadmill. There was no ok-sign invoked. Getting on the “cancellation is soooo arbitrary” soapbox seems like a stretch.
David Shor was fired for merely tweeting a study that went against the narrative of BLM . How are you supposed to anticipate something like that.
I'm going to echo @netstack and say that again, this doesn't really address the point. I certainly agree with you that things like David Shor's firing, or the "OK" gesture being labeled white supremacist, are insane overreaches and well worthy of criticism. They are horrible, and the people advancing those ideas should be laughed out of the marketplace of ideas.
However, like @netstack I don't think that they are particularly relevant to the object-level point about Kanye. For his entire life (he was born in 1977), it would have been considered bad to go on a rant about the Jews. This is not some new and capricious facet of cancel culture, this is the crossing of a very well established boundary in polite discourse, one which Kanye should have known full well about.
You are certainly welcome to disagree with that, but in that case an argument of "these other outrageous things happened too" is not going to be persuasive as it isn't really relevant. A more relevant (and thus persuasive) argument would be something like "here is a public figure who recently angrily ranted about Jews and got away without consequences". Better still would be multiple such examples, because they would show more clearly that the examples were due to different norms and not because a single person somehow flew under the radar. But bringing up cancel culture overreaches that are completely unrelated to anti-Semitism isn't going to really cut it, at least not for me personally.
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I think Kanye thought he was saying what everyone is thinking and so he might lose a little money, but he would start a conversation we need to have and so would eventually be forgiven.
Because to be clear, he is saying what a lot of people - especially poor black people (and absolutely not just NOI or Farrakhan followers, that is just an excuse to pretend there's nothing to see here) - think. And we absolutely do need to have a conversation about it if we ever want to get out of the snare of racial politics, the situation is fucked.
Nobody wants to be tarred as a nazi so everyone is vociferous in their support for Jewish people in public, but so many people are seething with mistrust towards them in private, and not being able to say anything just increases their resentment!
Why wouldn't you think they control society when you can talk shit about anyone you like - even the president - but must never badmouth the Jews? Or at least never imply they hold more positions of power than seems natural given their numbers even though they indisputably do?
It shouldn't be necessary to say this, but I know it is - this does not mean I think they should be discriminated against. But I think after 75 years it's time to retire the holocaust card. It is the only thing that really separates them from the Irish, or Italians, or Armenians, or any other "white" ethnicity. They should not be treated as minorities in need of protection any longer. I don't actually think that would change their prospects much, but it would ease a lot of resentment.
Irish & Armenians I'll give you -- like the Jews, the Irish and the Armenians were victims of genocidal policies; it's at least a topic for debate what should happen with the surviving remnant of an incomplete atrocity.
But is there some genocide of Italians which I've forgotten? In particular, Rome conquered Israel, Ireland and Armenia in ancient times; it's an odd hodge-podge to stick them up as a neutral example of overcoming bias alongside the other two!
I don't quite understand what (other than the passage of time?) invalidates a "holocaust card", but I believe that the targeted mass murder of ancestors for shared attributes is relevant to discussions about identity and minority status, even in countries which didn't engage in that murder, and that 75 years isn't necessarily enough time to declare the topic closed. Certainly I believe 2000 years is; maybe 300 years is, maybe 300 years isn't; no opinion.
I think you're saying that in a perfectly egalitarian world, being Jewish would be no more relevant to politics than being seventh generation Italian-American. Often that's actually true today, so take heart!
Maybe you see the holocaust brought up in arguments where it feels out of context? I personally hear it come up when discussing "bright" ideas such as counting jews (, gentiles, asians, blacks, ...) in jobs or other positions of power, such as accusing groups of malice based on their immutable characteristics, such as other political experiments that point at the gulag.
I think that there is no Holocaust card; there are only political debates which reward demonstrations of trauma, and conversations which somehow keep making the trauma relevant (these are often but not necessarily the same thing).
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Oh yeah I definitely agree. Kanye is clearly not well mentally, and I don't think it's right to castigate him in light of that. As you indicated, one can show compassion for a sick man while also not pretending what he did was ok.
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Agree...I think he knew. Maybe Kanye thought he would be able to get away with it owing to his fame and popularity, or be able to explain that he meant Jews in an abstract sense , but evidently not .
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