Obligatory Kanye West Post

I didn't post on this because I had nothing much to say about it, except one thing.

But that's dumb -- commenters provide a lot of the content here. Maybe you guys have something interesting to say.

I'll link this Jim Treacher piece because it digests the Twitter Frenzy, and because of its title: Kanye West Doesn't Care About Cuck People.

The only thing I can add is a very minor word to describe the left's tactics in cases like this.

This Sexton piece notes the left's (and the Democracy Dies in Darkness Washington Post's) attempts to brand everyone on the right who found this pleasing as "alt-right" -- we're all alt-right now, are we? -- and to say that Kanye West is crazy, a lost soul looking for meaning in... the racist misogynist homophobic president.

First Sexton quotes the Democracy Dies in Darkness piece of shit:

It's easy to cast West as just another lost man seduced by the far right’s promise to provide a sense of purpose. All that pseudo-philosophy does suggest a preoccupation with the sort of existential problems figures such as psychologist Jordan Peterson, who has become a surprise lifestyle guru, claim they can solve. It's also possible to connect West’s eccentric behavior on Twitter -- this isn’t the first time his forays into politics have discomfited some fans -- to the mental-health struggles that led to his 2017 hospitalization.

Or it could just be that West is cloistered in a world of wealth, away from the realities of racism that motivated incidents like his declaration on live television after Hurricane Katrina that "George Bush doesn't care about black people." He may be too preoccupied with his image of himself as a truth-teller to recognize that the unconventional communication style he finds so attractive in Trump is just a way to cover up lies.

Sexton comments:

So the options for explaining Kanye’s kind words for people on the right include the following:

* He's a clueless dupe.

* He's desperate for purpose.

* He's preoccupied with the big picture and a dupe.

* He has mental health problems

* He's so rich he’s out of touch with reality.

The word I offer to describe this tactic is "pathologization" -- any Wrongthoughts you have will be instantly pathologized, redefined as a pathology, by the left as some kind of mental disease.

This is, of course, quite literally what the Soviets did to dissidents it didn't have the balls to kill. It would brand them insane and pack them off to the asylum for re-education.

The left keeps wondering why the nation's civility is breaking down.

Could it perhaps have something to do with the fact that the left constantly pathologizes mere political and philosophical disagreement, hunts people down in an effort to get them fired and made penniless, etc.?

The left isn't doing politics. It's not doing social change. What it's doing is social war, and then they have the audacity to whine that people aren't giving them the amount of respect and deference they think their status in the Privileged Caste entitles them to.

posted by Ace of Spades at 05:30 PM

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