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Notes -
Kanye is also somehow impossible to look away from. I don't know what it is. Some innate sense of comedic timing and pitch-perfect camp I guess. It doesn't seem like he intends it, it just seems to be part of who he is.
This is one of the funniest videos I've seen recently and he isn't even trying to be funny, I don't think.
His, erhm, "personal trainer" was the one who originally made the phone call to have him committed. If you read this recent exchange that Jewish "personal trainer" had with Kanye I think it's hard to not understand Kanye's perspective:
This isn't a doctor telling Kanye to take his meds. This is somebody threatening him and his children, threatening to medicate him to send him to "Zombieland forever" for criticizing Jewish people.
On one hand, Kanye is pretty unhinged, or at least that's how it looks, and I can believe your interpretation; a personal trainer, Jewish or otherwise, absolutely could send that message in good faith and without malice (though without «love» either). Antipsychiatric narratives are popular with exactly the kind of people who would benefit from some treatment – many among them Black adherents of insane doctrines.
On the other hand: «meds, schizo» is something I'd be receiving here for every second post of mine, but for the standards of local moderation; and indeed that's what I often get on platforms with lower (they'd argue higher, naturally) standards. This has nothing to do with the quality of the argument and everything with the fact that certain topics are coded as psychotic. The ability to define psychiatric norm, and therefore the bounds of permitted (or rather, conceivable in a polite society) discourse is a political superpower precisely because it lies nominally outside politics (cue Foucault), and punitive psychiatry is a well-known practice. The peace activist (and notable Philosemite) Andrei Sakharov was probably crazier when he proposed the tsunami-causing nuclear weapon than when he got forcefully medicated in 1984 for a hunger strike in the name of his wife Yelena Bonner, but the system, that is, the set of bureaucrats and careerists running the place, approved of the former way more, so that's how it went down. And if Black celebs were as policed by their Jewish agents and doctors for their takes on systemic white power... yawn. Well, you get it.
– A Dissident’s Guide to Psychiatry, Vladimir Bukovsky and Semyon Gluzman, ~1973
The interesting thing is that schizos act against their interests and can't keep their mouths shut, unlike normies who learn from example; so if you institutionalize people for X, eventually only schizos will keep bringing X up, which will tie X to schizophrenia in the public mind and retroactively justify your stigmatization of X back when you were institutionalizing dissenting normies. This is another good case for always doubling down, a la Greenblatt, I wonder how far down that path we are with regards to this topic.
Gluzman is an interesting character. Bukovsky is fairly well-known.
Do people really call your writing schizophrenic? Is that like...a default slur?
I could buy “manic” or maybe “autistic,” if I were desperate to label your style with a condition, but schizophrenic seems odd.
Thanks for high praise, hah.
Well, they do. In lesser venues, writing a lot (writing little is beneath me), and on unconventional topics too, is enough to get the diagnosis (unless it's rdrama and they call you a cute twink instead?)
By the way, there are estimates that SZ is overdiagnosed by 500% in Russia, so I could have received the same diagnosis from a shrink. In my real interactions with them this never happened; but then, I never tried motteposting at shrinks.
And hey, manifestoposting (which long posts can pattern-match to) is robustly associated with schizo and paranoid traits.
What's your account there?
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