Yay for Ye!

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I’m glad Kanye is speaking his “beautiful mind”

I\'m not committed to the idea that he actually has a beautiful mind I just use that expression, in quotes you\'ll notice, because he referred to his own mind as beautiful in an interview with Piers Morgan which I suppose speaks for itself insofar as his personality and character or hubris or whatever, but the point is that I\'m glad he is speaking.

Typically one would have to begin such a point of view by walking a wide berth around the toxic opinions expressed and perhaps show one\'s bonafides about not agreeing and so forth and so on but I\'m not going to do that because that isn\'t the point and frankly I\'m offended not at the notion that I would agree or disagree with any one particular statement, but at the entire notion of everyone having to walk a wide berth. So I\'m not going to participate in that, which, of course will be taken as...etc so forth, and so on.

So finally to my point: I love it when someone speaks without a lot of care and concern about political correctness and so forth. Perhaps I would have a different one at a different time than this, in a different era. But in this period, if nothing else it functions as a badly needed corrective ; he reminds me of the 80s when people simply spoke and maybe you meant something maybe you didn\'t maybe it was a joke maybe it was just a witty phrase maybe you were saying it for the purpose of popping somebody else because it was so outlandish maybe it was the opening to another conversation whatever but things that you said, in the process of thinking something through  that might lead to a temporary dead end in an emotional cul-de-sac, weren\'t carefully transcribed and then gone over with a fine tooth comb like happens now.

Even prior to the advent of this technology that we have, there was already a movement to so called consequence speech, which is just bullshit and cheap and far more dangerous in my opinion than anything that could be said when speaking freely.

I was reminded of late nights in a wood paneled basement on a furry rug with friends saying anything at all that came to mind when he spoke laughingly about Jews working only for Christians and that he would hire one only if he could go through their phone and put cameras in their living rooms. It was hilarious, and it seemed as if he walked himself into a logical corner, and then simply continued his point rather than see it as evidence of him being wrong because the speech was casual. Now I understand the casual speech is being made on a public platform that would normally would happen in your basement in a rec room on a weekend night with your friends, and wouldn\'t be broadcast of the entire public. However, now that we are in this particular place in the world where everything is overanalyzed, I am in favor of speech that is so cavalier and casual and frankly sloppy that perhaps it will knock out some of the walls needed for more careful speech going forward.

And by careful I don\'t mean careful to avoid offense. I mean, careful as in more critically thought through, but of course, critically thinking something through often begins with having to start with broader, even wild thinking, metaphors outside the box and so forth before it narrows down, sort of like starting with metaphor and ending with science and so I think overall yes as a particular individual he can be crazy, annoying, obnoxious, whatever a jackass as Obama famously said, but wouldn\'t say on the record (which makes my point) but nonetheless he\'s serving a wonderful function and I\'m grateful for him, so three cheers for Ye!

P.S. As to the complaint about platforming toxic speech by allowing it to be said at all did everybody forget that that\'s how the careers of everyone Oprah, Jerry Springer, Rivera literally everyone that had a talk show started out? That was the entire point! They literally had Klansmen on there as well as black supremacists arguing and nobody thought my goodness let\'s not have that out there because the thoughts will become contagious and everybody else will believe them! Yes , shock television for ratings but once it was out there many used it to watch the arguments made and talked through and that was useful and beneficial exposure.

The more sophisticated opinion now to have is that they were always there but that they\'ve been given permission to be bolder which just assumes that there\'s a block of people that are stasis: thousands of years old rather than the reality of a churning public that is constantly living and dying and re-populating itself and therefore needs constant flexible speech ongoing for each generation not an attempt to squelch and funnel only \"appropriate\" types of speech into the public sphere. 

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