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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.
On the margins. Kanye West's behavior would have drawn censure 20-30 years ago (though it would have been harder to expose himself in such a way without modern social media), so it's not like he's the victim of semantic creep here. Nor are we talking about a careless choice of words in an isolated incident. Even in time when anti-semitism itself was more tolerated, you were generally expected to be somewhat genteel about it. Going on an unhinged rant in public about the Jews would've gotten many of your fellow anti-semites edging away from you awkwardly for fear of association.
I'm not entirely sure what this is supposed to mean, but I think what you're saying is that the social consequences of having people falsely believe that you are racist can be as bad as the social consequences of having people correctly believe that you are racist. Which seems trivially true, and applies to any accusation of some negative trait (e.g. being believed to be a liar). The real question is how likely is a spurious accusation to be taken seriously, and my comment there is: even in communities that think racism is a serious issue, "that's racist" is mostly a punchline. People of relatively ordinary means who live in communities that are hypersensitive to racism do sometimes get in a lot of trouble for innocuous statements, but that doesn't lead us to the conclusion that accusing someone of racism is a superweapon unless we're willing to accept an incredibly high miss rate on our superlaser.
Why is The Motte here and not on reddit? Accusations of racism or other forms of badthink carry a lot of weight even if unfounded. All it takes is a handful of people. For someone like Dave Chappelle, who has made controversial remarks , it's understood he has some artistic freedom and is a major draw, thus he has more leeway. But it costs Facebook or Reddit $0 to delete/suspend an account accused of being racist. It's not like Netflix can find another Chappelle or Spotify can find another Rogan as easily as Facebook or Reddit can sign up another annon user.
The thread above this one has multiple explicit white nationalists arguing about the exact borders of their ideology. If the Motte was accused of harboring racists, that's because it was - it has made a deliberate policy of tolerating positions and beliefs that Reddit doesn't want to play host to or are otherwise outside the Overton Window. You can quibble over what exactly qualifies as 'racist' (or transphobic/homophobic/otherwise bigoted) but the content that was getting the Motte unwanted scrutiny from the admins was a) generally not marginal b) generally not imaginary.
I want to be clear: I am not claiming that nobody has ever been subject to bullshit accusations. But people like West and places like the Motte make a really bad case for such accusations being rhetorical superweapons.
You certainly can get in trouble over imagined transgressions, but it's extremely unlikely that any given accusation of racism is going to manifest into actual consequences, especially if there's nothing actually there (for that matter, even if there is). Conservatives get accused of being racist constantly for their views on basically everything (criminal justice, voting rights, immigration, welfare, education, housing policy, transit policy...) and so far it doesn't seem to be making much of a dent.
Losing access to private services can still make your life miserable. I like having a reddit account. i like having access to Gmail. Losing my contacts would be a major inconvenience.
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