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Macklemore x Ed Sheeran concert: politics cannot be ignored
Ed Sheeran (everyone's favorite dreamy male singer) is holding a big tour across North and South America. Macklemore (everyone's favorite white rapper) got kicked out after (in an earlier concert) saying "Free Palestine", playing a song with pro-Palestine lyrics, and this:
Ed Sheeran has defended himself, saying it was not his decision - indeed, one Robert Kraft graciously confirmed he coordinated venues to boycott Macklemore - though Sheeran also remarked he tries to avoid politics in general:
So far, four other performers have dropped in solidarity with Macklemore.
Interestingly, Gillette stadium which banned Macklemore is hosting Kanye West, yes, the guy who was praising Hitler a year ago (albeit later admitting mental illness).
What do you think?
First, let me address the elephant in the room: the music industry is a corrupt dumpsterfire, basically a cartel. This is what cartels do. Besides dropping his pro-Palestine friend, Sheeran must also accept Ticketmaster price-gouging attendees, limited tour dates (I overheard somewhere there used to be far more concerts), and other nonsense. He probably could just find more accomodating venues if every one wasn't owned by Live Nation.
Lots of people are discussing how politics can't be avoided, and they're right. This is an excellent case study of how the endgame of "politics" convolutes everything and makes everyone miserable. Everyone loses here: Macklemore for taking a mild pro-Palestine stance gets kicked out of venues and attacked by Palestine opposers, Sheeran for taking a pro-peace neutral stance gets his tour lineup wrecked and attacked by Palestine supporters. There is nothing these performers can do, even be completely silent, that won't get them attacked by some group.
But the other side of "every side gets you attacked" is that no side is truly best. With no obvious winning strategy, you can be truer to yourself. And as Macklemore says:
Less tyrannical cartels, more people able to say what they want and go home to their families (with careers, money, opportunity, safety, and audiences)...I can defend these by linking them to other axioms, but ultimately they just seem right to me. I think celebrities should express their politics (including neutrality), for authenticity, and moreso because they can: it widens the Overton Window as they avoid life-ruining consequences. Even Kanye and his edgy schizo-manifestations, which I (unsuprisingly) strongly disagree with, but don't hate and even sort of appreciate for some odd reason. Yes my thinking is flawed, but look, his "cancellation" gave him the Streisand effect and today he performs where even Macklemore cannot, so what is flawless?
(Also, holy shit, can news sites link to their actual sources instead of writing articles whose sole content is paraphrasing them? Credit to variety.com of all outlets, the one article I found that did, albeit in the middle.)
Seems to me to be an understatement. And one that the whole thesis of the post relies on. He's an extremist, even if not so on the modern online left.
Lets just posit a world where people are informed and on truth serum. We pose the question, as something like, "What percentage of Israeli strikes in Gaza actually targeted a combatant, terrorist, weapons cache, military supply depot, intelligence operation, or related facility?" Basically everyone would answer 99%-100%.
But then there is the more consequential question. "What if Israel just fired missiles indiscriminately into Gaza at random targets, what is the chance they would hit a combatant, terrorist, weapons cache, military supply depot, intelligence operation, or related facility?" The informed, truthful, people, would say something like 80-99%.
If you want to side with the weaker side in a military conflict because that is your philosophy, then just say that. But it is, to me, disgusting and evil when people reward the use of human shields and false flags and piracy and the like with sympathy. The crybully tactics of modern Islam need to be punished like they would have been by the Brits and French of the 19th century. And, quite frankly, given the current set of belligerents, the Brits and French should have been mounting up to do it themselves years ago under a sane system.
But Israel/Palestine is mostly just a proxy for
which is what modern feminists do, so you can generalize your statement to
and we'll note that it's not the 19th century any more. In fact, it's been over 100 years since it was the 19th century.
This is a problem with women, and women will have to hand over the wheel back to men on this one.
You, as a man, cannot force this to happen; you have no more military or organizational power in this matter than modern Britain or France do under US hegemony.
Dude, this is one of the most unhinged things I’ve seen you say. I’m not even sure I parsed it correctly.
The Clancy case isn’t an ideological touchstone, and it’s certainly not analogous to urban warfare. I have no idea how or why women “handing back the wheel” would fix the Middle East, if that’s even what you have in mind.
Women need to co-operate with men for this one to actually fix the problem about which they complain. Right now they're just bitching to bitch.
Women would like peace in Palestine because they value peace over war. And fine. Peace is good. But women don't make war[1], so how much are they willing to pay for it?
Normally, women will give up some of what they want- a society that honors exclusively them and not men, and imposes their fundamental desires of safety, equality, and consent- so that men will go and accomplish some of their other goals. Men will risk their lives if it comes with some benefit beyond that which women currently permit them in society, like "allowed to own a house" [and/or a bunch of ludicrously expensive things most people spend their lives working for and never get, which attract women by proxy], "free pass to the upper-middle class" (would need some updating, college degrees are dime-a-dozen these days), "lots of sex and being considered a hero forever [re: 'I love a man in uniform' and 'thank you for your service']", etc.
But right now they are not willing to pay what it costs for men to go to war to enforce that goal (and make token efforts instead; like "impose sanctions", "excommunicate Israeli politicians and prosecute them in religious court[2]", "Queers for Palestine" [which is the same thing- an instinctual attempt to provide social cachet to the men who want Israel checked by conflating Palestinians with themselves -> implying those who defend them will be rewarded in the above ways, and if they actually had bodies that were more attractive than the average PornHub woman they might have a point], etc.).
If they actually wanted to pay this cost, much as Britain and France once did (to spread their cultural values throughout the world), they'd arm an expeditionary force and send them in (much like Ukrainian ethnic groups currently do for their allies) with those rewards bestowed upon return.
But they don't want that. They want to crybully (which does give them some control to the extent powerful men are willing to listen to it) and otherwise run the "poor me" routine typical of little girls. They no longer want a set of men who are attractive to them because they met the goals women/the culture set. And young women could spend their current power to incentivize the creation of men attractive to them, but they do not.
The Clancy case is the exact same on a much smaller scale- society's civil war against one woman. If young women wanted justice (in a way that's fair to men, meaning "women [who kill their children] are punished for that evil action" [this harms mostly men, as the authority to produce children is something men inherently lack]), they'd start calling for her head and eventually they'd get it.
They're willing to throw loads of money around to get this done, as the GoFundMe pages prove; a man who did this would result in a million dollars paid to his family at the cost of rolling the dice with his life in front of a jury.
But they don't, and they won't do this themselves (again, because of [1]), so the evil persists.
[1] Outside of very specific circumstances where losing means inescapable genocide; WW2 Russia, Israel (all the time), Palestine (also all the time, but abstract as their military and soldiers are all irregular).
[2] The ICC is basically just the Inquisition, meant to legitimize how righteous Europeans are in killing the losers of wars Europe has some stake in. (Which is the purpose for which it was created in '45, to legitimize killing rival elites from the defeated German state.)
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