Y’all have only seen a small part of the loot I’ve collected recently on the Apartheid Princeling’s latest shenanigans, so for those of you who are not twitter-readers, take my word: It’s a WHOLE BUNCH of… stuff. A journey, of sorts:
So richly deserved: Now that Musk suspended Ye for sharing a swastika, Musk is getting slaughtered by his fans, who are finally realizing his "free speech absolutism" was always the scam we told you it would be: pic.twitter.com/aN4P3DaObX
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) December 2, 2022
Here is a fairly comprehensive narrative, if you want one:
Kanye ‘Ye’ West wasn’t happy with just one controversy in 24 hours.https://t.co/cBDUo5hOZy
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 2, 2022
Below is a photo of Ye during his Infowars appearance. As many people have said, when Alex Jones looks like the reasonable half of the interview…
The House Judiciary GOP Twitter account deleted a now infamous tweet that touted Kanye West, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump on Thursday afternoon after the rapper praised Adolf Hitler on "InfoWars." https://t.co/Jtv5plravS
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 1, 2022
There’s a running debate as to whether the former Kanye West, given that he has been open about his bipolar diagnosis, can be held personally responsible for his reprehensible statements. Even if you (not me!) accept that as a get-out-of-jail-free card, there is no such excuse for those — from the wingnut wurlitzer to the Republican Party — who are exploiting him for their own benefit.
the usuals are having a real tough time finding out their fascist fantasyland is only 95% of what they dreamed it could be https://t.co/8Rhc7awVFS
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) December 2, 2022
Personally I think a better rule is "don't post swastikas on Twitter" but that would be too simple
— nilay patel (@reckless) December 2, 2022
Elon: Maybe grant the fanbois an avowed Nazi who isn’t as well known to the Major Lamestream Media?…
Twitter has reinstated the account of Andrew Anglin, editor of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer. His account was suspended nearly a decade ago. pic.twitter.com/jd8fdCgPeV
— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) December 2, 2022
TIME FOR SOME SERIOUS DISTRACTION THEORY!
Earlier today, Matt Taibbi (now downgraded to appearing exclusively on SubStack, where he can make a very nice living telling The Real Truth Unfiltered By Mainstream Bias, just like so many other top-ranked formerly-mainstream journamalists) tweeted out that he would be breaking his ‘exclusivity’ to share a paradigm-breaking story from The Emperor of Twitter Himself, after which nothing would ever be the same: HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP, SUPPRESSED!!!!
Apparently Taibbi had a little trouble figuring out the twitter interface — also his narrative was delayed ‘for an hour or so’ while, Musk tweeted, some last-minute fact-checking took place — but the Big Reveal seems to have been something of a wet shart.
Okay then. That’s the big story.
Taibbi says, seemingly with access to all internal docs, the earlier big claim that the government had directly intervened (“stepping in”) to suppress a story before the election has no evidence.
Also seems some nonconsensual nudity was removed. pic.twitter.com/2N5b6fBdiA
— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) December 3, 2022
So far, the big scoop from Matt Taibbi and Elon Musk's Hunter Biden Files collaboration is that the Biden campaign asked the Twitter moderation team to remove some posts and accounts that featured Hunter Biden dick pics, which is basically a form of revenge pornography.
— steven ''italian elon musk'' monacelli (@stevanzetti) December 3, 2022
Like a lot of people, I was a Taibbi reader during his golden period, after he left Moscow and before he became… infatuated with a certain Independent Senator. It was clear, even then, that Taibbi’s emulation of Hunter S. Thompson was going to end badly. I rank HST among my top twenty favorite writers, but even *he* couldn’t avoid a predictably tragic ending…
Thing is… Matt Taibbi didn’t have even a fraction of $44 billion worth of credibility to lose:
What Elon Musk’s Twitter files have revealed so far is that content moderation at Twitter WAS being decided by a team of people with differing viewpoints.
Now it’s being decided by the richest man on Earth with an axe to grind against one political party — a true scandal.
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) December 3, 2022
(Putin’s) MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Because it doesn’t matter. You insist it’s a shocking bombshell exposé and the intended audience will dutifully act as though that’s what it is. https://t.co/IqrW8fNtF0
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) December 3, 2022
Ten Bears
Kayne “Ye” West, Billboard magazine’s Top Christian Artist Of 2022
Major Major Major Major
There was SO MUCH TWITTER this week. lol. I miss the days when twitter wasn’t all about twitter.
David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch
3..2..1.. to Floriduh Man saying “I don’t know Kanye, never met him, I wouldn’t know him if he was standing next me because I don’t see color.”
Martin
The only way screaming about the Jews into the darkness is going to restore white christian nationalists to the cultural majority is if a civil war breaks out.
Either they get deplatformed or they get the violence they seek. There’s really no point trying to occupy the liminal space between the two for the sake of free speech. Eventually you are forced to pick.
Ken
@Major Major Major Major: I’ve seen a fair number of complaints from twitter users, who miss the days when their “timeline” wasn’t 80% spam ads from robots.
Origuy
The Kanye story keeps getting weirder. The swastika in a star is the symbol of the Raelian Movement, a UFO cult.
Martin
What’s notable about the Hunter Biden Twitter bullshit is that even at that late date Twitter didn’t seem to have an instinct about protecting themselves from being party to a foreign influence campaign.
We really need to have the social media equivalent to the ‘know your customer’ rules that banks operate under.
Chetan Murthy
@Origuy: I read most of the Wikipedia article on these Raelians. All I can say is: if this is the best you can do, really, I got nuthin’ for yez. The swastika is off-limits, dumbfucks, and if your alien overlords don’t know this, then can come down and have it out with us. Otherwise, find another symbol, dickweeds.
Alison Rose
I don’t give a fuck what diagnosis Kanye has, there is no entry in the DSM-5 where one of the symptoms is “Starts loving Hitler out loud”. He might have a (or many) medical condition of some sort, and alongside that, he is also a bigoted, hateful moron who is pathetically desperate for relevancy and attention that he will do literally anything to get and keep it, and is also so monumentally stupid that he has no filter whatsoever in his minuscule brain telling him “hey maybe don’t say the Nazi stuff where people can hear you”.
I do not give a shit what might be wrong in his brain. He’s human trash and he gets zero sympathy from me.
Poe Larity
I know Ye can’t buy Auschwitz, but wondering if Kehlsteinhaus is available.
Chetan Murthy
@Alison Rose: Well, if he were a poor person, you might understand: people have all sorts of delusions, and a poor person cannot get medical treatmetn. But this is a gazillionaire, and they can get the best medical treatment money can buy. If THE FUCKNUGGET CANNOT STAY ON HIS FUCKING MEDS, HE’S GUILTY OF ALL ACTIONS WHILE OFF THEM.
Sorry, yeah: what you said. He’s fucking rich. He has *minders*. His minders need to do their fucking job. Or get him fucking committed.
Alison Rose
@Chetan Murthy: But even then–he’s not claiming that Hitler showed up in his house and made waffles for him or something. He’s not exhibiting delusions, he’s spewing bigotry. Those are two very different things
Also too, I concur with the many people wondering why Britney was put under a conservatorship for a million years and this fuckstick is waltzing around a free man. Pretty clearly a situation in which male privilege is winning over white privilege.
Major Major Major Major
@Ken:
I haven’t noticed an increase in the amount of spam or ads myself, but the ads are definitely lower-grade.
Chetan Murthy
@Alison Rose: I’m even going as far as assuming that his spewing bigotry is a manifestation of his illness. So: assuming that, either he’s literally *always* that way, and there is no treatment, in which case he needs to be confined to a mental hospital, or there *is* a treatment — in which case, if he goes off that treatment, he’s liable for his actions.
I mean, yes, I personally believe that this sort of bigotry is a moral, not chemical failing. But I’m saying that EVEN IF we assume that this is some chemical failing, THE BASTARD CAN GET TREATMENT. And if he can’t stay on it, he can be confined to a facility.
Fucking rich people, they get away with everything.
West of the Rockies
So tired of both these moon-faced loons (Musk & West).
NotMax
Who the frack greenlighted If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Wannsee?
Worst. Remake pitch. Ever. //
NotMax
@West of the Rockies
Cue Ambassador Molari?
:)
scav
RIP. The GOP’s mascot is no longer an elephant — it’s manifestly an overweight loon.
Poe Larity
The one thing I’ve learned about trainwrecks is that they never seem to run out of rail.
Alison Rose
@Poe Larity: rotating tag
Calouste
@Major Major Major Major: That’s what happens when the major advertisers no longer advertise. The ad space get sold to lower paying, lower quality advertisers. Note the “lower paying”.
Btw, running Twitter “according to the First Amendment” runs into the issue that 90% or so of the user base lives in jurisdictions not covered by the First Amendment, but by different laws. As the EU has already made clear to Elmo recently.
NotMax
Poe Larity
Mixologists might have a different outlook.
;)
SpaceUnit
Imagine having so much money and still end up being Putin’s desperate little bitch. It’s like there’s some sort of pattern here.
Mike E
Honestly, this whole business is just the last season of The Walking Dead which I never watched since I cannot get into disaster porn. Sorry, Twitter!
Major Major Major Major
@Calouste: Yeah, he’s speed-running an education about content moderation, it’s fun to watch tbh
CaseyL
Musk is trying to save Twitter by making it the most OTT comically chaotic show in town.
There will be RW/QAnon/GOP foamers, ads, and bots actually using the site for nefarious purposes; everyone else will drop in once in a while to point and laugh at the latest dumpster fire.
LeftCoastYankee
I can’t figure out who is more overrated, Kanye or Apartheid Clyde.
Apparently, self-promotion on the back of other people’s talent and work seems to impress the hell out of the rubes/marks.
Major Major Major Major
So my latest dumb hobby is making up band and album names (with the assistance of a generator)… and then having the A.I. generate classic album covers for them… They’re turning out pretty well!
Steeplejack
@Chetan Murthy:
Maybe Ye could get one of those brain implants that Musk has been testing. 🤔
Ken
@Steeplejack: Are we sure that hasn’t already happened? Ye might be one of the lucky (?) 2% of the test subjects who didn’t die horribly when the implants poached their brain proteins.
Steeplejack
@Major Major Major Major:
Cool. Looks like it could be an album by, say, It’s a Beautiful Day or Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Steeplejack
@Ken:
Touché.
Chetan Murthy
@Ken: @Steeplejack: But seriously, these richies, they have people to make sure they don’t irreparably harm themselves, not other people. Sigh.
Kay
The angry, middle aged celebrity Men of the Right obsession with Hunter Biden feels natural, like Hunter was a good fit for their club but veered off on a different, but equally damaging, direction.
Major Major Major Major
@Steeplejack: This one feels the ‘realest’ to me
Kay
You feel like all this stuff was lined up and ready for A Red Wave and when the Red Wave didn’t materialize they all decided to just pretend there had been a Red Wave, that “wokeism” was denounced by voters and there’s huge public interest in Hunter Biden.
It all just operates independent of actual elections and politics, because there’s a 6 month lead time for these coordinated attacks and often their predictions about winning are wrong. and they lose.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@scav: Which one? They’re all fat loons
Major Major Major Major
@Kay: Great point.
It doesn’t help that they’ve been trying to make Hunter Biden happen since, what, 2019?
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@Major Major Major Major: Thats pretty. It looks like the classic Pan Am Clipper posters for Pacific destinations
piratedan
@Kay: It do seem a mite coordinated, right?
all this bullshit, all of these goddamn narratives, it’s like it’s a series that the chairman of the network favors and goddamn if they aren’t going to make us all “fans” no matter how unattractive the hero character is or what shitty ethos they live by ; they just repackage it by slapping a new and improved sticker on this shit sandwich and demand that we smile as they encourage us to eat it.
I do wonder who is attempting to manage the marionette show.
Gvg
@Chetan Murthy: He seems to be short on relatives. I don’t hear of anyone who actually can get him committed. Brittany had a controlling father and I think he started when she was sort of young. The law actually wants a family connection. People without relatives have problems sometimes.
a lot of relatives are also hesitant about forcing anything unless they really know for sure it would be best for a relative they know well. A distant relative, they will hesitate and not act.
scav
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: Exactly. Party mascot!
Eolirin
@Chetan Murthy: Oh my God.
That is not an okay position to take ever for anyone.
Do you even know what the inside of a mental hospital looks like? Cause I do. You don’t put people there just for spouting racist bullshit; there’d be more people in hospitals than prisons.
You don’t put people there just for having symptoms either. People are pretty much only hospitalized nowadays if they’re at risk of violent psychotic behavior or suicide.
They’re not places of effective treatment. They’re places you go to get your meds stabilized or to get over a moment of crisis and get out of asap. They’re more restrictive than a lot of prisons and they’re not places you want to be. And I say that with my experiences being relatively beneficial and in the voluntary rather than involuntary wards; the difference between the two is significant.
Being hospitalized for long periods of time destroys your ability to function outside of a hospital. There are whole programs that exist to ease people back into living outside of them, and there are very few facilities that will do long term care for a reason.
It’s a fucking serious intervention with serious consequences and it’s only something that should happen in extreme circumstances and ideally for very short periods of time. It is not something to make cavalier jokes about or to suggest as a solution to someone being an erratic asshole but who’s doing nothing more serious than making bad life decisions and saying stupid shit.
It’s a desperate act of last resort, always.
And don’t get me started on what psych meds can do to people when they have no control over their treatment.
I know you’re not meaning to be, I’m painfully aware of the significant educational gaps in our society on these topics, but the way mental health keeps getting talked about here is frequently exclusionary and demeaning and bigoted to hell. You don’t know what you’re talking about even a little, because way you’re talking about treatment isn’t how treatment works and it isn’t how our conditions work. And this is life for a lot of us.
Look, I’m not in a great place right now and my frustration about this is at more than just you, cause you’re hardly the only person here to talk about mental health issues like this and even in the recent conversations on allyship I’m feeling a tremendous amount of exclusion and general invisibility around this and disability concerns in general, which isn’t entirely fair to you. Hell, it’s taken me so long to compose this that you may not even see it now.
So I’m addressing this to everyone.
People with disability and people with mental health issues are frequently made invisible and the concerns of our communities are often everyone’s lowest priorities. But we are a community. We’ve been fighting for equal rights and recognition just as much as every other minority group. We have a history of exactly the same kinds of advocacy as every other group. You can say things that are just as bigoted toward us as you can for any other minority group and you need to be aware of it just as much. We have our horror stories and a long history of abuse and being treated as less than human.
But we’re also not like sick people who can go in for a course of treatment, get better, and come out the other side and be like everyone else. Treatment approaches that expect that tend to be extremely counter productive.
We have challenges that typically functioning people will never have to deal with and for most of us they will never go away, at least not completely, we just develop ways to cope with them. And that doesn’t mean we can’t function, but we function differently.
We aren’t, broadly, dangerous, any more than immigrants are dangerous. Spree shooters aren’t usually mentally ill; being angry, lacking the tools to deal with that, and being radicalized toward violence with easy means to carry it out isn’t a mental health problem, it’s a social one.
Being mentally ill isn’t grounds to take extra or more extreme measures to restrict our freedom; people without mental health issues do crazy stupid shit all the time and most of the criming and we don’t preemptively or indefinitely lock them up for it. Keeping people in psych wards forever because of a history of violence is a more extreme position than we take with incarceration of violent criminals, and it isn’t warranted.
We are still people. We still have all the same needs for self determination and choice and freedom. Most of our issues stem from inadequate accommodations and frictions between how we function and how society expects, or demands, or is set up for, people to function.
Meds may or may not be helpful. Meds can be extremely harmful. Not being able to be involved in deciding what meds we’re on or at what dosages frequently ends with broken people.
I need y’all to listen at least a little. Educate yourselves. Be better. Please.
MomSense
Sorry, but there was no golden period for Taibbi.
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: Just gonna say that RATMs Maggies Farm is a top 10 song cover.
MomSense
@Eolirin:
That was very well said. Thank you.
Major Major Major Major
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: and with that classic rock cannabis leaf shape.
Manyakitty
@MomSense: i liked him for a while, but he went way over the edge years ago and never came back.
Martin
@Kay: The right are seriously losing their shit. It is an article of faith that America, by design, is a culturally white christian nation, and try as they might they can’t get any measure to show that it is. They can’t win elections. They can’t get advertisers to care about them. I mean, they’ve been abandoned by capitalism. Reality just won’t fucking reflect what they know in their heart is right, and the only thing they can think to do is yell it louder.
sab
@Eolirin: Thank you for that.
Eolirin
Oh, also, since we’re talking about Hitler via Ye anyway; don’t forget that those with mental health conditions and physical disabilities were where the Nazis started with their mass executions.
Eolirin
@sab:
@MomSense:
You’re both very welcome. And I appreciate the solidarity, so thank you both as well.
dm
@Kay: The Hunter Biden stuff is just Rovian inoculation (attack your opponent first for your own vulnerabilities) for stories about Jared’s billion-dollar “investments” from the Saudis.
dm
@Eolirin: wow. Thanks. I needed to hear that.
JWR
@MomSense:
I largely agree, and I’m sure I’m misremembering this, but in one of his Rolling Stone articles, Taibbi, in response to some bru-ha-ha about “all these crazy leftists”, (I think it was during the Iraq War or some other big protest), he wrote something like, “Sure, there’s lots of Leftists in America. They’re the one’s standing in the alleyways handing out copies of the World Socialist Web Site newsletter to protesters”.
Whatever it was, it gave me a brief Lol, but he went over to the dark side shortly thereafter. But if he ever did have a golden age, I think it was during GWB’s Iraq fiasco, so a very long time ago.
JWR
NBC has a story up about Twitter, Musk, Taibbi and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Not much “there” there, far as I can tell.
gwangung
@JWR: From what I hear, the “pressure” that was put on Twitter was to take down and suppress tweets containing nude shots of Hunter Biden.
I think that’s something Twitter would do even if you’re a low level fry cook at Burger King….
Ruckus
Don’t know how many of you have had experience with someone who is Bipolar. I have. A relative is bipolar and I have been attacked with absolute drivel on more than one occasion. I’d say it’s like 2 personalities except that my experience as a mental health counselor showed me the difference. Bipolar will be the same person talking, just they will be talking nonsense, most likely one side will be fine, normal, cognisant. The other will sound the same but be completely unfathomable, non sensical. A dual personality will likely use a different voice, personality, possibly different form of speaking. It likely won’t sound like the same person. Possibly this may be my experience with the different affects but this is what I’ve been told as well – it was decades ago.
Nelle
@Eolirin: Thank you for writing this. For giving us the time, effort, and eloquence. It’s 4:40 am where I am, but I don’t want this lost in the early morning darkness. If you are willing, I’d like to nominate this for a prominent position in daylight hours.
As a 12 year old relative said about his older sister, who was struggling with mental health issues, “It’s not fair that her brain works that way,” leaving unsaid that he was sailing through situations in which she was floundering. Such awareness and empathy among us all would help us all.
JWR
@gwangung: I haven’t read anything about any d*ck pics, but yeah, pictures of HB were one reason. From the NBC story:
But there’s also this, seemingly showing that Twitter’s actions at the time were legitimate:
Ruckus
@Eolirin:
Very well stated.
I worked as a counselor a very long time ago and I’m not sure if it’s better or worse today than decades ago, but it wasn’t all that good then. It’s a process, not a list of stuff, because while mental health has diseases/issues, they aren’t like a lot of biological diseases, there are a lot of issues with finding out what is going on, what is the best course for any person and what works for one person might now do anything for someone else. And a shot or a pill or operation can often fix a physical issue, mental issues take time effort, sometimes meds and work. Not all of those things are always available in the way and context needed and sometimes don’t work without a tremendous amount of work of both the patient and the helpers.
skerry
@Eolirin: hear hear!
PBK
@Nelle: Yes to all of this.
@Eolirin: Thank you.
Circular reasoning
@Ruckus:
@eolirin
I actually supervise the team that responds to mental health emergencies and evaluates for hospitalization. I can tell you that entire system is profoundly broken. Eolirin’s comments are accurate. Inpatient is good for applying meds and preventing immediate physical harm to self or others. Very little “treatment” happens in the best facilities. The real work is in building community supports, breaking down stigma, and increasing overall education for everyone.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@MomSense: Given his long time defense of Putin, it was less of a golden period and more of a golden shower.
Betty
@Eolirin: Thank you for sharing this. As you rightly said, this country really does not know how to deal with mental illness and doesn’t seem to want to learn. Wishing you the best.
Josie
@Eolirin:
Thanks for saying this. I would like to see your comments front paged, maybe along with some information on how to educate ourselves on this topic. I am definitely open to learning more.
Kay
I’d be really nervous if I had a Twitter account and Elon Musk was in charge of protecting any information I had on Twitter. If it becomes politically useful to him, he’s releasing it to one of his fans on the Right.
kalakal
@Eolirin: Late I know but I’d like to add my respect for what you said. Many years ago I worked in a old fashioned ‘bin’. This was for people with severe learning difficulties in the terminology of the day but most of the patients also had/ developed chronic mental health issues. It wasn’t malice on the part of the staff but it was not a good environment. Institutionalization is an awful thing and it’s not for nothing that Chlorpromazine is called ‘a chemical sledgehammer’. Chronically underfunded and staffed such places often functioned as a place to hold stigmatized people that society didn’t want. If you were admitted you were mostly there for life despite having (in nearly all cases) committed no crime. Most people I encountered were no danger to others, in fact the reverse, they were very vulnerable, very unhappy, and in far too many cases having their problems exacerbated by the environment
Mental hospitals aren’t therapeutic environments*, often quite the reverse.
* except, in the UK at least, ironically the maximum security ones. Having been to places like HMP Rampton I can say that there at least the function does include more than containment. They’re also very scary.
WaterGirl
@Calouste: Before we get too judge-y about the lower quality advertisers, we should remember that when we rolled out the site rebuild and wanted to go with new advertising, “they” wouldn’t have us because we say fuck.
And Balloon Juice is most certainly not the cesspool that twitter is!
Gvg
@Eolirin: my comments were aimed at the unfavorable comparisons to the way Brittany lost control of her fortune compared to Kanye retaining control. It may be that women in general get less favorable treatment under the laws, but it also could be just the luck of relatives. Brittany had some. Kanye seems to be out of them. His mother died and his ex wife tried but eventually gave up. Brittany’s father also seemed to have really liked running her money and not cared all that much about how she felt and she wasn’t acting like this.
The kind of guardianship she had probably wouldn’t even help Kanye although it might protect his money if he had a good trustee. He needs good counseling and has to want it. I don’t see either. We won’t be locking him up unless he seems suicidal (temporary) or actually does something. People may stop paying attention. Advertisers are dropping him. Our society does not lock up all the creeps or lunatics.
Bex
@Ken: Chips in your brain are a good idea? Where are all the vaxxwhacks who lost their shit over having “chips” shot into their arms? Wait, this is ELON. You can trust him to put chips in your head, right?
trucmat
@Eolirin
Thank you. America doesn’t need another prominent voice of insanity at the current moment for sure but Kanye/Ye can only be deplatformed not silenced.
What I hear is a man who is not sane. He’s not trash and he’s not evil … he’s ill. He’s not in control of himself which left him open to be taken control of by evil others. But as he is not sane he has little chance of steadily steering around such people by himself. He seems to have none of the allies he’d need. He’s been captured.
Kanye/Ye has my sympathy even as I hope he disappears from the public eye.
different-church-lady
I first became aware of Taibbi during that same time, when he was punching up at capitalist vampires, and my reaction was “I’m enjoying this, but I sure as hell don’t trust it.”
I think I even responded to a Taibbi post on DKos with, “He’s a stunt writer. You shouldn’t trust stunt writers.”
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: I HAVE THAT ALBUM!!
Madeleine
@Eolirin: Thank you.
Your comment about hospitalization comes as NYC’s mayor proposes relaxing criteria for hospitalizing people against their will who may be mentally ill.
Your comment makes it clear that hospitalization would be incarceration with drugs.
Edited for missing word.
different-church-lady
@Kay: It really does seem programatic. Same with the flying immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard: they didn’t get the reaction they wanted, so they just went ahead with pretending they did.
different-church-lady
Y’all keep talkin about Ye like he’s crazy, when instead he’s just being a rebellious teenager who has too much fame and too much money.
karen marie
@different-church-lady: At that time, Taibbi had space for a brief bio in the sidebar next to his stories in Rolling Stone. He used the space for a paragraph-long rape story – to show his cutting-edge sense of humor, I guess. I emailed him and the editor to complain but was told “it’s a joke.” The rape story stayed, I never read Taibbi or Rolling Stone again.
Chetan Murthy
@Eolirin:
Since you’re claiming him, I’ll say “one of yours”. When one of yours becomes a literal danger to the Republic, when one of yours engages in Holocaust denial, then something needs to be done about it. Saying “oh, but he’s got a brain chemical problem” doesn’t solve the problem. So sure, I’m happy to throw him in to Federal prison, though I have this small suspicion that he’d do worse in gen-pop than in the sort of cushy hospital that his money could have constructed for him.
Look: I do get that he’s sick. That doesn’t give him the right to help destroy our society. He’s perfectly free to be sick in his palaces — just stay off the airwaves and internets, and we’d all be good.
RepubAnon
@Eolirin: I understand. Unfortunately, there aren’t many good solutions to this problem.
A friend of mine has been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia for many years. He had it in and out of control over the years – and had one good period where he had a nice place in a group community (sort of a small apartment house type situation.). He even had job and was doing well.
Unfortunately, his medications caused considerable weight gain as a side effect. He didn’t like that, so he stopped taking his medications. He then lost his place in the group home, and then got kicked out of several other group living situations. (Blaming one’s fellow residents for summoning demons and complaining about spiders that only he could see did this.). He ended decided that he’d rather live rough on the streets.
Eventually, he committed a serious enough crime that he was arrested – and is currently in jail. The court is holding mental competency hearings.
We really need a solution that’s better than either the old, underfunded mental hospitals, letting them live unhoused with no access to bathrooms, or waiting until they do something that puts them into the criminal justice system.
Eolirin
@Gvg: Yeah you were fine, just to be clear.
Eolirin
@Chetan Murthy: He’s not a fucking danger to the republic and people engage in Holocaust denial all the god damn time and we don’t put them in prison. They have a constitutional right to do so in this country even; you’re suggesting we effectively incarcerate and forceably drug him for protected speech just because he’s mentally ill. I don’t see you calling for Elon Musk to be put in jail.
Note: I’m not defending Ye’s behavior at all, I think the dude needs to shut the fuck up. What I am saying is you’re acting like a bigot and saying outright hurtful things in the way you’re discussing mental health itself.
Step back. Think about what you’re saying. Seriously be fucking better.
MomSense
West is a bigot. Whatever else may be going on with him does not cause him to deny the Holocaust and like Hitler. Let’s stop conflating mental illness with whatever horrible things people say and do.
Calouste
@WaterGirl: I wasn’t judgmental, just pointing out that what we perceive as lower quality ads bring in less money. That’s the price we would pay on balloon-juice for being able to say fuck, if we still had ads. And that’s the price Musk pays at Twitter, where he’s managed to turn ad space worth $5 billion/year into ad space worth $1-2 billion/year.
Quiltingfool
@Eolirin: Very late to this thread. You are absolutely right re mental hospitals. My mother had to go to a mental hospital many times, and it was to get her meds for bipolar adjusted. They weren’t horrible places, for short term, but long term? Nope.
To go to a mental hospital is because you are in dire straits and need close supervision, until the crisis has passed and you can manage your illness without that kind of supervision.
Through my mother’s experiences, I know that there is so much stigma about mental health. Bipolar is hard to treat, and it can be managed, but not cured. Oh, and folks thinking you can “snap yourself out of depression?” Get the fuck out, no you can’t.
Take care of yourself, my friend, and know that lots of people here on this site are in your corner.
Ruckus
@Circular reasoning:
As we were not docs we did no meds. We did do suicide calls and one of my most important and the toughest call I ever had was a discussion with a smart middle aged woman that lasted 45 minutes and I have no idea if I helped or not. There was just 2 of us in the building that day, my 25ish yr old self and a woman in her 40s who was another counselor. The woman on the phone was smart, well spoken, thanked me for talking, said goodbye and hung up. I was devastated, sure I had failed horribly and the other counselor said, “You gave her 45 minutes.” It wasn’t even close to enough. I never found out what happened to her, if she followed through or not. Back then it took a court order and about an hour or more to trace a call so we rarely ever even attempted.
The system, what little existed then was also broken. There are many reasons, not the least of which is that we are supposed to be smart, driven, complete human beings but most of us are not, we have foibles, minor and complex, we have upbringings all over the place, we have expectations that often are ridiculous, we are human, with all the faults and expectations that make us strong, weak, broken and rarely complete. The best of us seem complete but aren’t, but at least understand the incompletion, the worst think they are finished, complete, perfect and don’t even come close. I’m not sure if it’s humanity or hubris – or all of the above but a problem is that we often can’t admit that we are anything but perfect. And we are anything but.
Dan B
@Eolirin: What boggles my mind is that Kanye would have been among the first people the Nazi’s would have executed.
Eolirin
@Dan B: Yeah, but well, people are bad at self awareness and thinking things through, even the “normally” functioning ones. Takes work to be good at it. Ye is super insulated from consequences and has absolutely no reason to engage in it even before the bipolar comes into play. He’s straight up doomed when it comes to being sensible.
Eolirin
@Quiltingfool: Thank you, appreciated. I hope your mom managed to find some peace with her condition.
Dan B
@Eolirin: And the story about the holocaust that is most common is it was just Jews. They’ve been the loudest and most relentless. The many other groups who were slaughtered first were smaller and the mentally disabled and homosexuals were fearful of stigmatization. If you spoke up you could lose your job and your home.
Steeplejack
@Major Major Major Major:
That’s a good one too.
Tehanu
@Alison Rose:
Since we don’t have “Like” buttons, just letting you know I agree with every word you wrote.
Tehanu
@Eolirin: This ought to be front-paged. Thanks for writing it.
Trine
@Eolirin: Thank you. That was one of the best ablism rants I’ve read in a while, and I wholly agree with you. Hugs, friend.