Jann Wenner Removed from Rock & Roll HOF Board After Remarks on Black, Female Artists
mo_ztt ✅ @ mo_ztt @lemmy.world Posts 40Comments 673Joined 2 yr. ago
mo_ztt ✅ @ mo_ztt @lemmy.world
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You do know that's the "bad guy" speaking at that point in The Wall, right? It's pretty complex and this is only my take on it, but I interpret the whole album as basically a titanic struggle between authoritarianism and humanity in a bunch of different contexts and in that section the antagonist (authoritarianism) is the one speaking.
Do you have some kind of citation on him being racist? I read this just now but I'm not convinced. "The Wall" is among other things a pretty strong statement in opposition to fascism and the holocaust (which is not an especially bold stance to take), but it sounds like he's also against Israel's modern-day version of apartheid, which is a little more bold stance and one I definitely agree with. That doesn't mean he's anti-Semitic.
Why he likes Putin and Russia I have no idea. He had pretty complex feelings about WW2 because the Nazis were very clearly the "bad guys," but also his dad got killed in the war when he was just a little kid, so he also just hates war in general. If I wanted to be charitable I could say he's applying that logic to Ukraine (maybe there's some kind of justice to this war, but also war is so horrible that we should just make peace with Putin and end it at whatever cost, even if Russia "wins," so no one else has to lose their dad.) That's not to say I justify his view -- it's just me trying to make some kind of sense of it.
Ah, makes sense, no worries.
In some contexts yes... honestly for me I have a problem with two people getting frisky to that level in a packed theater while a play is going on that people came there to see. I don't think they should go to jail or anything but I would definitely want them kicked out, and, it seems like they'd be happier in a hotel or something anyway, so win-win.
I didn't say unowned, I said unincorporated. You can purchase land outside the jurisdiction of anything below the county level and there will be effectively no police presence for you to worry about.
And yes, I'm aware of the hilarious New Hampshire libertarian experiment. I'm comparing the person I was speaking with to the libertarians. They said police are the enemy, and I was trying to imply that grouping together a bunch of like-minded people together and living in a place with none of those "enemies" would expose the underlying flaws in the idea of how police are just a bad thing in the US from start to finish. I'm obviously being facetious when I say they should do that. If it actually was an accurate summary of what the police do to a community, then what I'm saying would be a sensible idea.
There are actually good examples of takeovers of a place by like-minded individuals to make the government there better. A big part of the reason Vermont is a pleasant place to live even up to the present day is that 50 years ago a whole bunch of liberal-minded people moved there, some of them with the specific goal of concentrating their political power in a single place so they could make it more progressive in its government. So that "takeover" worked, because the people moving up there actually had good, productive ideas for how they wanted their community to be, and Vermont is still a very nice place overall.
In this case though, I'm suggesting that "police are the enemy" is just as childish an idea as "government regulation on my trash disposal is the enemy," and trying to put that attitude into practice would fail just as badly as that libertarian project. But, who knows, y'all can always make it happen and prove me wrong.
Yah, I agree with that. I think the penalty for, e.g., the police attacking someone illegally, should be a lot greater than the penalty for some random person attacking someone illegally. Like I say, I actually do think the cops in this particular case should face some kind of penalty for overstepping their bounds.
I'm just trying to say that, these two statements are both true for more or less the exact same reason:
- The police really should be more aware of the psychology of how their behavior will be perceived and take on a common-sense responsibility to not just come in and say "Stop walking, come over here right now, give me your ID." They should be aware that being a dick in their demeanor will impact the effect of that technically-legal statement and how people react.
- This dude should really be more aware of the psychology of how his behavior will be perceived and he has a common-sense responsibility to not just come into the encounter saying "Go fuck yourself, you don't need my ID." He should be aware that being a dick in his demeanor will impact the effect of his technically-legal statement and how people react.
I don't think either one is contingent on the other. Common sense dictates that for any person walking around, it's in that person's own best interest to be aware of how others are going to react to them and interact in a way that is productive.
Bro that wasn't at all what I was saying. I was talking about criminal penalties. I get it and it's a fucking tragedy everything Brailsford did and the system's response from top to bottom. But:
The problem is that people can be violent with no repercussions, and we need a system that enforces actual justice, because the system doesn't do justice. 100% that's an urgent problem, I agree 100%. Now we're gonna fix the problem by adding more violence and less system.
Oh no now there's more violence and less justice! And the system that enforces justice is even weaker.
How could this have happened
Jann Wenner has ALWAYS been a gargantuan prick. This was pretty well known all along, but people kept it shushed up because from its inception through at least the early 90s, getting a nod from the Rolling Stone was a career maker (or breaker). Hell there’s even a cheesy old Dr. Hook song about it.
That's sad to me. Oh well, these things happen. If people are finding it out and publicizing it and punishing him for it (now that he's no longer in a position to damage their careers 😐), then better late than never, I guess.
Eric Clapton, Ted Nugent, and Roger Waters
Fuck me, what did Roger Waters do? I know he supports Russia in Ukraine for some godawful reason but I thought that was some recent early-onset dementia or something. I like Roger Waters, does he have some kind of awfulness I wasn't aware of?
Judging by the yt comments, you’re subscribed to a channel that caters heavily to racists, so I don’t have high hopes here.
Right, it's clearly a channel that looks purely from the police's POV. I watch other stuff from all kinds of different viewpoints. Audit the Audit is probably the most evenhanded one in terms of breaking down when the police did wrong, or when the citizen involved did something wrong, or both.
I definitely try not to come just from a purely "pro police" standpoint; to me what's important is coming up with a system that works. I would be fully in support of:
- More police accountability when they do something illegal
- Better training, something like Verbal Judo and elements of psychology -- i.e. help the cops not to antagonize people when they walk up to them, like this particular cop did in this particular interaction, and got the guy all amped up and then punished him for being amped up.
So with that all being said, I don't feel like coming at things from a purely "anti-police" standpoint makes sense either. Maybe this dude has a warrant for some violent crime. He honestly gets pretty much no sympathy from me based on his behavior, because I suspect that he interacts with people this way in his personal life, too. He parks in the handicap space using someone else's placard, he shouts over the cop and insists things that are clearly not accurate ("I'm not under arrest!") and tries to bully his way to the cop accepting them. To be honest, for as much as I agree he was reacting out of fear, this whole interaction makes him seem like a POS that likes to throw his weight around and starts shouting if things aren't exactly how he likes them. If I saw someone walk up to a cop and say something, and the cop reacted that way -- which, yes, some cops do in some situations -- I would make pretty much the exact same POS judgement about that cop based on what I observed. Just the fact that ultimately he got bullied, instead of being able to be the bully like he was trying to do, doesn't change my assessment of how he acted at the outset.
Antagonism level of the suspect: 12/10,
Literally walked away to avoid conflict.
I get that both the cop and the big dude are basically just scared and reacting poorly out of fear.
Only one of them is armed with a lethal weapon and regularly assaults people. The cop is actively pursuing conflict, whereas the victim is avoiding it.
But that's not the whole context! If I came up to your table in a restaurant, took your wallet, and then walked away and tried to leave, and screamed at you if you tried to follow me, I don't get to blame you for "actively pursuing conflict." There's unresolved business we need to talk about, same as in this video.
Actual reasonable approach: follow the man in. Don’t keep making demands of him to stop, etc. Just keep up and explain to him that you’re going to ticket him for a broken break light, and if he accepts that you’ll be on your way. If he refuses, instruct him to get it fixed asap and take down his number plate so you can send the ticket in the mail. Cars usually have several brake lights. One of them being broken really isn’t a big deal.
If you want to change the system so the police can't stop you for a brake light out, we can do that. There have already been some reforms after BLM, and some areas (e.g. cash bail) that clearly still need reform. But it needs to be, okay what's a good whole system and how do we change things? Not just that we change them on the side of the road because someone's shouting and if we counter-escalate in accordance with written law, that'll wind up in a situation that's bad for the shouting person.
Would you be in favor of changing the system so that what you're describing is the prescribed behavior for cops in this situation? I.e. written law that if someone leaves a traffic stop for a minor infraction just shouts in your face for you to get the fuck outta here and leaves, you take down their plate number and deal with it via the mail?
Edit: And, just to throw my own answer in - how I think the cop should have reacted in this particular moment was somewhat similar to what you said, just without letting the guy bully his way out of the citation. I've actually seen a cop deescalate in a similar situation by using this general approach: Hey man, all I really need to you do is X, Y, Z. If you can do that, I'll be out of your way and you can go about your night. If you don't want to do that, then you are going to go to jail. But that's not what I want to do. I want for you to do X, Y, Z so we can resolve our business and everything can be good. But I will take you to jail if you don't do those things. Here's what's up, here's the reason, and what I want to do is talk to you a little and then we can go on our way.
In the case I observed, it took a while (I think around 10 minutes) for the other person to calm down, and a whole lot of it has to do with the tone and body language involved. It is hard to do that, remain calm and steady and patient while someone bigger than you is screaming in your face. I actually can get why the cop here was rattled and reacted badly. But, that being said, him being calm and more understanding and less just repeating "Do X, Y, Z. Do X, Y, Z. Do X, Y, Z," like he's the boss and everyone's supposed to obey, would have gone a long way on the cop's side to making this have a better outcome.
Yooooooo 🤣🤣🤣🤣
But that's what I'm saying: Back in his day, it was all white men. He was a little outside the mold that he even would put a black person on the cover or work with women as human beings with abilities (Annie Leibovitz) instead of as machines for coffee/filing/sex. In his mind I think that's still super progressive. But, all the people who really run shit are white men; it's not at all weird that all the "masters" in his book are white men, any more than it's weird that all his employees are humans. What sense would it make if they weren't? That would be just putting someone who isn't a master into the list for some weird other reason, not because they had important things to say.
I really have no idea about the guy, I'm just sort of guessing here. But it seems pretty plausible just based on that interview.
I think he genuinely just doesn't see anything odd with any of his answers. Think about how different a world he comes from. I have a vaguely positive impression of Jann Wenner because of his association with the golden age Hunter-Thompson era of Rolling Stone and the genuinely good journalism that it still does today. But at the same time, the landscape of what's permissible behavior from a big white guy in charge has changed so much that we can lose track of how much of an asshole it used to be okay to be.
My sister's worked in a male-dominated industry for basically her whole life, and now that I'm thinking about it the stories she tells have gradually been transitioning from stuff that's genuinely horrifying to now being simply upsetting and wrong. I think people who lived during that era are just starting to sound like everyone's segregation-era grandparents did back in the 90s. I mean, for a lot of his adult life, women basically did live under a segregation system. In one way it's a good sign for how much progress has been made. Not to excuse him for being an asshole - I'm just saying that it kind of makes sense that the system didn't filter him out back then, in the way that it would today if he didn't learn to keep quiet about what he thought about these things.
I've seen a massive black man in a lovely dress and heels pick up a bachelorette, position her so she's straddling him while he's still standing, and vigorously dry-hump her in time with the music while continuing to sing the song at the top of his lungs, while her friends all cheered. I found that far less off-putting than this titty fondle.
Look at the people sitting right next to them watching the show. This is legitimately one of the most uncouth things I've ever seen.
HOLY CRAP you're not kidding (vaguely NSFW)
The Q: "There are seven subjects in the new book; seven white guys. In the introduction, you acknowledge that performers of color and women performers are just not in your zeitgeist. Which to my mind is not plausible for Jann Wenner. Janis Joplin,
Janis Joplin was literally the exact counterexample that first jumped into my mind when I read the headline.
Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Wonder, the list keeps going ... What do you think is the deeper explanation for why you interviewed the subjects you interviewed and not other subjects?
Wenner's answer is telling. He says, "When I was referring to the zeitgeist, I was referring to Black performers, not to the female performers, OK? Just to get that accurate."
Oh wow. Did he get screwed through no fault of his own? That's a very straight answer, and I'm not at all a fan of this new thing where you can get your career fucked if you say "black" in any sentence and don't immediately follow it with "empowerment" or "voices."
The selection was not a deliberate selection. It was kind of intuitive over the years; it just fell together that way. The people had to meet a couple criteria, but it was just kind of my personal interest and love of them."
Yeah, that seems 100% reasonable to me.
"Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level."
...
Jann you fucked yourself.
I take it all back. You're a creep for thinking this and a moron for saying it out loud to a reporter.
The reporter pushes back, incredulously asking if he really doesn't think Joni Mitchell was articulate enough to talk music on an intellectual level.
Wenner responded, "It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses. It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest.
STOP IT, STOP IT, THERE ARE PEOPLE THAT CARE ABOUT YOU, YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO THIS
Don't sell yourself short, queen. I think you nailed your values spot on.
I'm still just sort of blown away by the unanimously at-face-value reception. Like, I definitely didn't fully understand what was going on right off the bat, but it doesn't take a PhD in comparative political analysis to see that there's something hinky about it. And there are only like 2 other pages you can click on to get to the bottom of the mystery. For as firmly as the Lemmy userbase seems to believe themselves the final source of truth and wisdom, you'd think a few of them would've been able to overcome the puzzle.
Well that was a confusing couple of minutes. 😃 I thought it was a fairly unfunny satire, I definitely didn't take it at face value because something is clearly weird with it, then I read this and went back and reread it and the second time through it was fucking hilarious.
Here’s a question. Do you think the rest that showed up on Jan 6th were just taken in by mob mentality, or?
I think people had all kinds of individual intentions and mentalities, but the bulk of the crowd was convinced that American democracy was being overthrown in broad daylight in front of their eyes. They thought that because they'd been systematically lied to in very crafted and calculated ways and weren't equipped with, or didn't want to use, the tools that would have let them figure out the truth. That's what makes the whole thing so incredibly dangerous -- it's actually pretty reasonable to go to literal war if you think American democracy is ending. The problem is that there's a huge chunk of the country that thinks that, when it's not true (or... well... not in the way that they think 🥲). And so, lo and behold, they're steadily becoming more and more willing to go to war.
(And this also gets back to the tactical aspect that I keep coming back to -- How Democracies Die has a great breakdown of how to behave in a collapsing democracy, and one of the things that they found through their research is that "cheating" to fight back against the emergent fascist movement that is cheating to steal their power often makes things worse. It accelerates that abandonment of democratic norms and hastens the collapse. In that case, there are a lot of situations where the best thing is to fight back within the system, even when your opponents are going outside the system so you have to fight an uphill battle, to maintain the democracy in the long run.)
If what you’re saying is true, civil rights movements across the world have been little more than people who felt that they were justified to commit acts of violence because that’s the only way to change a behaviour they felt was detrimentally affecting them. And what you’re saying is that’s wrong.
So, I don't actually think violence is never justified. In some other comment in this thread, I broke down some different scenarios from history where a body of people resorted to different types of resolutions when their rights were being "legally" trampled and what I thought of each one (just from my personal POV). I talked about the labor movement having violent confrontations with police and private security when their economic freedoms were being denied (more accurately, they fought back when attacked with violence). To me I think that was 100% fine.
So one other example that comes to mind is that early night of the BLM protests, when they took over the 3rd precinct and burned it down. This might sound surprising since I have a mostly "pro police" viewpoint, but I actually think that was pretty justified. There's a severe injustice (you're killing us in the streets without consequences), it's been known for a while, we tried nonviolent means of addressing it (peaceful protest, going through the courts), it cannot just remain unaddressed, and it seems like we're out of options. Okay, fuck it man, if that's what's up, then let's go.
So here's the distinction: I definitely think there are individual departments that commit genuine atrocities and get away with it. I strongly disagree with the the "that's every US cop" narrative, but it does happen. And so the distinction is that this was a genuine war crime, and that's the precinct that did it. It's hard for me to say people in that precinct should hold a rally within their designated area to chant about how it's wrong and then go home and hope it doesn't happen again. I can guarantee that that event changed the calculus of a lot of police and police leadership nationwide in a way that peaceful protest will not.
(Edit: Side note, burning down the precinct was also clearly a crime, and I think they wound up sending someone to prison for 4 years for it. That side of it to me is justified also. If it's so big an emergency that you claim the right to upend other people's lives to make things change, it needs to be so big an emergency that it's okay to upend your own life as a result of making things change. Trying to apply it in one direction but not the other -- as a lot of the January 6th people did -- is pure, selfish, deluded, dangerous bullshit.)
And keep in mind that while this particular example of capitalist greed and overreach does not affect rights and freedoms, it is part of a systemic problem that on the whole is detrimentally effecting rights and freedoms as well as people’s ability to live. Because capitalism is all about keeping a class of poor people poor to exploit profits.
Yeah, I agree with all that. That's why I'm being a little careful not to say that this is all just a silly overreaction to a software company's pricing. But at the same time... I think people should think about what they genuinely want and how to get there. Sending death threats to the Unity offices is, I think, going to:
- Maybe scare some individual people that work at Unity
- Maybe change the pricing, although I think the fundamental idiocy of the pricing change is more likely to do that honestly
- Maybe get you arrested for a felony
- Do jack shit to address the underlying economic factors
... and, crucially, it's going to add one little iota in favor of the idea that if something's happening that you don't like, you need to make threats of serious violence unconstrained by a justice framework or a long-term plan. That's a pretty popular idea right now, mostly from the conservative side, and I don't think it needs more people to sign onto it.
So, I'm really not trying to be combative with you about this. I actually did exactly this already to find the Guardian link I sent. I've now read the second link, the CNN article, which says basically more of the same -- that he's potentially in trouble for playing that satirical character in "The Wall" because of Germany's strict regulations against Nazi iconography. Also he doesn't like Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Nothing about racism that seems at all convincing to me. There are some people who call him anti-Semitic because he disagrees with Israel's government, but long story short those are two very different statements to me. You're free to have a different opinion, but I read the two articles and I'm not convinced.
IDK man. It sounds to me like you're falling back on "It's all there, do your own research, it's all there" and sort of talking down to me because of my viewpoint, but I feel like that's not a fair thing to ask -- if this stuff is easy to find, you're welcome to find some and send it to me and I really will take a look. I'm genuinely open to someone showing me why I need to change my view if you're into the idea of investing the time to do that, but I don't feel like I should have to indefinitely search for new sources when I've already invested a certain amount of open-minded time into trying to research the question.
Like I say, I have actually read a few articles trying to look for the information. I see that there are certain people who think he's a racist. I read their reasons and in my opinion they're wrong. But you're free to see it differently.
Cheers mate