"The British government has blocked Ye from entry on the grounds that his presence would not be conducive to the public good...."

"Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it 'deeply concerning' that Ye was scheduled to perform 'despite his previous antisemitic remarks and celebration of Nazism.' 'Antisemitism in any form is abhorrent and must be confronted clearly and firmly wherever it appears... Everyone has a responsibility to ensure Britain is a place where Jewish people feel safe and secure.'"

I'm reading "London music festival canceled after Britain bans headliner Kanye West/The move comes after days of mounting controversy over past antisemitic statements made by the rapper, now known as Ye" (WaPo).

West has apologized and stated "I love Jewish people," but he did sell swastika T-shirts and release a song called "Heil Hitler." 

"To Those I've Hurt/By Ye Formerly known as Kanye West."

"Twenty-five years ago, I was in a car accident that broke my jaw and caused injury to the frontal lobe of my brain. At the time, the focus was on the visible damage - the fracture, the swelling, and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed...."

Writes Kanye West, in what is a paid advertisement in The Wall Street Journal.

It wasn't properly diagnosed until 2023. That medical oversight caused serious damage to my mental health and led to my bipolar type-1 diagnosis. Bipolar disorder comes with its own defense system. Denial. When you're manic, you don't think you're sick. You think everyone else is overreacting. You feel like you're seeing the world more clearly than ever, when in reality you're losing your grip entirely.

Nakedness presented as fashion is an old idea: "Robert Altman put an all-nude runway show at the end of 'Pret a Porter' in 1994."

"Anthony Haden-Guest wrote that Grace Jones showed up fully nude at Studio 54 so much that it became a bore. In 2003, Pam Grier said this about her work with the filmmaker Jack Hill in an interview with the AV Club: 'You’re not thinking about some sort of Victorian handicap called, "Don’t show your breasts, it’s considered indecent.'"' Nudity is still a taboo, but people have been challenging that taboo for a long time.... I mean, it looked like a Los Angeles old man/trophy wife couple that had been generated by slightly malfunctioning AI. If she had been wearing underwear, it wouldn’t have even registered as a stunt. It’s not blowing my mind, but it is interesting, if just from a dorm-room stoner 'what even are clothes, man?' point of view."

Said WaPo style reporter Shane O’Neill, in "The controversy over Bianca Censori’s naked Grammys outfit with Kanye West/Unpacking 'naked dressing,' power dynamics and what that red carpet stunt really meant."

I've been avoiding this topic because I like to withhold attention from people who are trying to get attention, but I liked Shane O’Neill's way of addressing the story, which I'm sure you've noticed.

The one thing I'd like to add is that I assume Censori is in on the performance and just as dedicated to it as Yoko Ono was part of "Two Virgins" — way back in 1968:

"There’d be a cell-like capsule to provide for some basic human needs, from which one could emerge into a big, semipublic space that was open to the sky."

"This was a vision less of a home than of a refuge within a striking concrete art work.... Ye sent... various drawings showing an arrangement of amenities within a small space. One image contained spherical and ovoid objects—'cooker,' 'pump,' 'fridge'—but no mattress. Another included three crates, a 'flat pack shower,' and a 'robot platform.'... There were... desultory exchanges about recycling rainwater and cutting a hole in the floor to make a toilet. Ye remained adamant about disconnecting the house from the grid; he also opposed installing solar panels...."

Writes Ian Parker, in "Kanye West Bought an Architectural Treasure—Then Gave It a Violent Remix/How the hip-hop star’s beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy turned a beach house in Malibu, designed by the Japanese master Tadao Ando, into a ruin" (The New Yorker).

"[Kanye] West, who was with her, donned his favorite all-black getup featuring a loosely fitted unhemmed T-shirt, slouchy pants, a cloth covering his head and face, and socks — with no shoes."

I'm reading "Bianca Censori keeps breasts covered with pillow as she steps out in another sheer outfit" (NY Post)(Kanye West’s 'wife' Bianca Censori stepped out in yet another sheer outfit — this one, accessorized with a couch cushion").

I'm blogging this to help you keep up with the latest news in fashion and humiliation.

"It seems Ice Cube has become quite the conservative media darling lately, sitting down with not just Carlson, but Joe Rogan and Piers Morgan as well."

"He’s joining a long list of rappers – Kanye West, Da Baby, Kodak Black, Lil Pump – who have all put themselves in dangerous proximity to conservative politicians even as rightwing populism threatens to destroy their communities.... So what do these rappers have in common with rightwingers who wouldn’t otherwise touch them with a 10ft pole? Shared values. In discussions about money, gender identity, public health and a variety of social issues, rappers and rightwingers have a lot more in common than you’d immediately think. Many people from both groups share hypermasculinity, conservative Christian values, and a distrust of social institutions (justified or not); and on this common ground sits a messy and dangerous alliance full of people who ordinarily would hate each other, but have come together to make vulnerable people their enemy...."

Writes Tayo Bero in "Why are Black rappers aligning themselves with the right? Ice Cube has joined a long list of rappers who have cuddled up with conservative pundits and politicians" (The Guardian).

"[T]he school had no janitorial or medical staff and a bizarre list of rules. For example, students were served only sushi for lunch..."

"... which reportedly cost Ye $10,000 (£7,800) a week. The kids weren’t allowed to use forks and had to sit on the floor to eat because Ye 'banished chairs in place of foam floor cushions.' Another alleged no-no at Donda Academy was stairs: there weren’t any classes on the second floor, because Ye is 'afraid of stairs.' Colours were also prohibited: students had to wear all black; cups and bowls had to be grey. Windows were empty because the musician 'doesn’t like glass.' Perhaps most disturbingly, the school doors were locked from the outside during the school day...."

From "'No chairs, no stairs, no glass in the windows': what did Kanye West’s schoolkids get for $15,000 a year? The rapper denies his private Christian academy was a ‘dystopian institution’. But the bizarre allegations keep coming" (The Guardian).

I'd love to watch this as a documentary, but right now, it's just 2 lawsuits.

I laughed out loud at "Windows were empty because the musician 'doesn’t like glass.'" How does that happen? Not liking glass. I could only think of Mary Sweeny, The Window Smasher.

"Yes, the French are... lazy. It’s just not in the way we lazily think."

I'm reading "Are French People Just Lazy?" by the historian Robert Zaretsky (NYT).

"Late in Anna Karenina, in a period of self-imposed social exile in Italy, Anna and her lover, Vronsky, are treated to a tirade on..."

"... the destructive superficiality of the 'free-thinking' young men—proto-disrupters, if you will—who populate the era and have been steeped in 'ideas of negation.' 'In former days the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought,' Vronsky’s friend Golenishchev observes. 'But now there has sprung up a new type of born free-thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities.' The problem then, as Tolstoy presents it, was that such an ambitious young man would try, 'as he’s no fool, to educate himself,' and so would turn to 'the magazines' instead of 'to the classics and theologians and tragedians and historians and philosophers, and, you know, all the intellectual work that came in his way.'"

Writes Thomas Chatterton Williams, in "The People Who Don’t Read Books/Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character" (The Atlantic). Williams is aggrieved that Kanye West called himself "a proud non-reader of books."

Children's books made with Midjourney/Dall-E 2/ChatGPT suffer from a "Whimsy Gap" — they are "moralistic, but not transporting."

The "images... are sometimes cute, even beautiful, but somehow off, with distorted proportions or elements of an idea mashed up to discordant effect."

Writes Alyssa Rosenberg in "Why AI will never beat Maurice Sendak" (WaPo). She tested the tools, trying to make children's books.

So far, these tools are limited to the data sets their creators have used to teach them about language and images. If AI is moralistic, limited in imagination or — as in the case of a powerful new avatar generator — inclined toward porn, that’s on the humans.

Oh? I don't know how she's so sure of that, but it sheds some light on an article I saw the other day that said AI wrote better and more "moral" opinions than the Supreme Court.

I can't find this right now. Did the lawprofs who wrote it withdraw it — perhaps because someone pointed out the flaw in their reasoning? The more "moral" opinions were, as you might imagine, more in line with the political left, and the machine may have been fed that point of view.

But I did find this:

"There are many ways for a person to be questionable... and men found every single one this year. There were the men with an unbearable lack of self-awareness, screaming..."

"... 'cancel culture' to an audience of millions. There were the men whose long history of abuse allegations did nothing to dissuade people from coming to their defense or giving them MTV VMA cameos. Did you know Louis C.K. won a Grammy this year?... It was a particularly embarrassing year for men with too much money. Over the summer, Jeff Bezos reportedly wanted to pay to disassemble and reassemble a bridge in the Netherlands so his big stupid boat could pass through.... [F]or reasons unbeknownst to humankind, Musk tweeted a picture of his bedside table.... ... Drake decided his collaborative album with 21 Savage was a good time to claim that Megan Thee Stallion lied about being shot by Tory Lanez....  [There] were the cringey men — men who embodied 'the ick.'... There was the Try Guy cheating scandal that validated our cultural suspicion of Wife Guys.... [There were] Whiny Little Baby-Men. These are the men who had to overcome such adversity as omelets and pens.... [T]here are men who are still making hypermasculinity their whole thing. These range from supplement-scamming Liver Kings to men who proudly embrace the title 'King of Toxic Masculinity.'... Then there are the truly sinister men.... They have either been a guest on Alex Jones’s podcast or are Alex Jones himself..... [There are] Ricky Gervais, Matt Gaetz, Brad Pitt, Tom Brady...."

Writes Mia Mercado in "The Year Men Flopped" (The Cut).

I love the way she got through all that without naming Trump. We really have moved on! And now, 2022 is about to expire, and we can move on from all the scoundrels she did name. Let's move on once again, to the — hopefully — much better masculinity of 2023.

"A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution."

Wrote Donald Trump, at Truth Social, quoted in "White House rebukes Trump’s suggestion to suspend Constitution over 2020 election" (WaPo).

The post came a day after Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, claimed he would expose how Twitter engaged in “free speech suppression” in the run-up to the 2020 election. But his “Twitter Files” did not show that the tech giant bent to the will of Democrats. 

Trump's "truth" is so hyperbolic and disrespectful of the rule of law that it's idiotic clickbait, only worthy of attention because the man is running for President, and apparently, as polls go, the leading candidate. Sorry, I'm not going to spend every day agonizing over that. We will move on... I hope... I trust... He's so over-criticized that I don't see the point of jumping on him one more time. That doesn't work, and it drives some dedicated believers more deeply into his sphere.

I want to move on to the link in the indented quote — on "did not show" — which goes to "Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ ignite divisions, but haven’t changed minds/The company’s new chief executive detailed Twitter’s decision-making around a controversial story" (WaPo). 

Yesterday morning, I was critical of The Washington Post for not having an article on the "Twitter files," but by the end of the day, they had that. Let's read:

"The naive view is that the refusal to defend West marks a sea shift in black attitudes toward Jews..."

"... transcending the impulse to defend the indefensible just because it was done by a fellow African American. The cynical view is that if West hadn’t first angered black people with his comment that slavery was 'a choice,' and betrayed black leaders with his decision to put on the MAGA cap, the reaction would have been entirely different. West’s accusations... [suggest that] Kanye West has lost his mind. But that doesn’t explain enough. If West had blamed the Iroquois for his woes, that would be unhinged. But he didn’t. He blamed the Jews, and that’s no accident of mental illness. West found a powerful political explanation for his experience, one that already has a pedigree in the black community—anti-Semitism. Look at his accusations again: Reference to Jewish exploitation is de rigueur in writings about blacks and Jews...."

Writes Elliot Kaufman, in "O Ye of Little Faith: The Anti-Semitism of Kanye West The billionaire star is not just crazy. His Jew-hating politics have a history—and a radical potential" (Commentary). Much more detail at the link. But just a bit more, from the conclusion:

"I tried my best. Despite that, he again violated our rule against incitement to violence. Account will be suspended."

Tweeted Elon Musk, quoted in "Kanye West suspended from Twitter after posting swastika inside Star of David/Elon Musk intervenes after rapper posted image hours after airing antisemitic views in Alex Jones interview" (The Guardian).

In case you thought Elon Musk was a free-speech absolutist.

Notice that it's not a matter of rules, but how the rules are applied. Old Twitter kicked out Trump because he violated the rule against incitement to violence, but how close was Trump to inciting violence?

Now, how close was Ye?

Kanye West didn't want to deny that he's a Nazi.

well shit... https://t.co/0RnHcw5Bv4

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) December 1, 2022

More here: "Ye praises Hitler during interview with Alex Jones/The hours-long interview on a conspiracy theory website gave Ye a platform to make antisemitic statements with little challenge from the host" (NBC News).

"It makes no sense. Somebody who’s such an extraordinary friend of Israel, whose daughter is an Orthodox Jew, whose grandchildren are Orthodox Jews—I cannot explain..."

"... why he would want to have dinner with an overt anti-Semite and dinner with a white-supremacist Jew-hater, an ugly, ugly scum like Nick Fuentes. And Trump says, 'I didn’t know who it was.' Even if I take him at his word, that he didn’t know who Fuentes was, fine, now he knows. Why doesn’t he say, 'Fuentes is a despicable scum whose beliefs have no place in the United States of America'?"

Said the head of the Zionist Organization of America, Morton Klein, quoted in "A Right-Wing Zionist Digests Trump’s Anti-Semite Dinner Party/Can the former President be the 'best friend Israel ever had in the White House' while also legitimatizing 'Jew-haters'?" (The New Yorker). The Z.O.A. recently gave Trump an award designating him the "best friend Israel ever had in the White House." 

Does this help make sense of what happened: "Milo Yiannopoulos claims he set up Fuentes dinner ‘to make Trump’s life miserable’/Rightwing provocateur says he helped arrange for white supremacist to attend dinner with Trump and Kanye West" (The Guardian).

"[Kanye] West said that following his 'Death Con' comment, Alex Jones’ producer introduced him to [Milo] Yiannopoulos, who in turn suggested West 'bring in' Fuentes."

"The artist said he was 'impressed by Nick' and asked him to join the dinner, stating that 'Trump had no idea who Nick Fuentes was.'"

From "Kanye and His Antisemitic Friends Storm Off Live Right-Wing Podcast After Pushback on Offensive Views/West, Nick Fuentes, and Milo Yiannopoulos abruptly walked off the Timcast IRL podcast after pushback to antisemitic claims" (Rolling Stone).

Here's the show, with Ye and friends exiting after 20 minutes or so: 

 

I listened to the show for about the first half hour. I don't think I'd ever noticed Pool before, but I think I understood him to say that the show has a format — discussing the news — and West knew that but West just went ahead and took over and seemed to feel entitled to rant from subject to subject however he wanted. Pool seems to have been more deferential than usual but had to break in, not merely to preserve his own concept of the show, but because West was indulging in general statements that Pool knew would be characterized as anti-semitism. Pool wanted West to name particular individuals, not speak of the group in general.

West had one good point: Why are people allowed to speak of "the black vote"? Why is it okay to speak about black people that way?

"Kanye West very much wanted to visit Mar-a-Lago. Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about."

Said Donald Trump, quoted in an update to a Breitbart article that is now titled "Trump Dined at Mar-a-Lago with White Nationalist, Holocaust Denier Nick Fuentes Alongside Kanye West; UPDATE – Trump Responds, ‘Had Never Met and Knew Nothing About’ Fuentes."

I can't believe Trump doesn't control who has access to him! Either he's lying or he's reckless.  

I guess Ye sets his own terms and Trump makes a calculated decision to accept (and maybe he doesn't mind signaling that he's doesn't categorically reject white nationalists). Here's how Ye presents it:

#YE24 pic.twitter.com/DyIhMU5By6

— ye (@kanyewest) November 25, 2022

"Some left-leaning Jews shy guiltily away from centering any persecuted status, on the logic that other questions (anti-Black racism, issues around Zionism) are more weighty."

"Some right-leaning Jews don’t want to cut into an allyship with the Christian Right and its support for Israel (even if it contains characters like, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who once claimed that wildfires in California may have been started by a space laser connected to the Rothschilds).... For younger Jews especially, calling out antisemitism has felt like an outdated habit.... It has been easy to self-soothe by telling ourselves we live in a golden age of ease, because compared to so many other ages, filled as they are with pogroms and expulsions and mass murder, we do.... But this year... the hatred is hitting them where they live — on cultural feeds, playlists, favorite brands, phones.... Now, seeing uncoded antisemitism emerge in usually anodyne pop-culture settings — places like basketball news conferences and Hollywood interviews — another deep cut emerges. We once had a media ecosystem in which obvious antisemitism could end a career.... But today it can be the beginning of a new phase of exposure, the start of a conversation that will contain both denunciation and approval... the dissolving line between a world in which it is not permissible to say hateful things... and one in which people just go ahead and say it.... Finding the humor in the hate isn’t, in the end, so much help at all."

Writes Mireille Silcoff, in "Laughing at Kanye Doesn’t Help/My people have always turned our haters into humor. It still breaks my heart when antisemitism starts trending" (NYT).

"In the twenty-tens, when I reported on the online subcultures that were then known as the alt-right, I met dozens of atomized young men..."

"... who had stumbled onto the trail that led from libertarian anarcho-capitalism to just-asking-questions hypernationalism to full-blown white separatism, male supremacy, and anti-Semitism; they didn’t all travel the whole distance, but the path in front of them was clear and well worn. A few years ago, whatever else could be said about Kanye West’s search history, at least it was idiosyncratic. These days, his serial fixations might as well be scripted by a mediocre satirist or an unsophisticated A.I. A decade or two ago, an ascendant Kanye West would have been too proud, too self-conscious, to be caught wearing a mid-tier outfit or using a played-out sample. The newly stagnant West, both as an artist and as a propagandist, keeps reaching for clichés."

From "Kanye West’s Parler Games/A stream of offensive statements from Ye and the announcement that he will buy a fringe social network have reignited debates about free speech. But maybe that’s not the best place to start" by Andrew Marantz (The New Yorker).