Steven BeschlossPlenty of people have mental disorders and don’t praise Hitler or spread hate.
Oregon Animal Lover@StevenBeschloss My feeling about this Kanye situation is that the only appropriate response to his comments is that of concern that he get the therapy/treatment he needs. I feel the same about the garbage spewing from the mouths of other magas.
sal@dswidow @StevenBeschloss therapy doesn't make people into anarchists devoted to collective liberation, in fact therapists have all sorts of pathologizing labels for people like us
@sal @StevenBeschloss Yeah, I have a strong distrust of much psychotherapy, not that I'm any expert. I just meant that Kanye appears to have a condition that could be treatable. His embrace of Nazism seems to come from a place of illness rather than analytical thought. I get a similar impression from many magas.
@dswidow @StevenBeschloss Well, your "impression of many magas" is mistaken, the point of this entire thread was that psych disabilities don't cause naziism and saying they do harms other people with psych labels, and white supremacy is not an illness. [There's a good article by that name already written.] I don't think there's anything else for me to say. At a certain point people either get that or they don't.
@sal @StevenBeschloss I guess I shouldn't have commented in the first place. I have no expertise in these things. Didn't mean to disparage mentally ill people. I consider murderers and rapists to be mentally ill. To me, Trump is mentally ill. Fascism seems insane to me. Though a mentally ill person may be the most compasionate, etc. of us all. Ted Bundy was mentally ill, but that doesn't mean other mentally ill people are murderers.
@dswidow @StevenBeschloss I am not trying to insult anyone I just get tired of the scapegoating. I guess really this becomes a question of what it even means to call a state-of-mind an illness. It doesn't mean "brain disease" (that's neurology's wheelhouse, not psychiatry) so is it being used as a metaphor for distress? For believing anything false or unscientific? For dissent? For being the person in a conflict with the least power to define the terms? At some point it becomes an umbrella term that obscures more than it reveals.
@sal @StevenBeschloss Yes, well said. You obviously know/have thought about this stuff a lot. I haven't. But I do believe (on faith, I guess) that we have a basic sanity at our core, and most of socialization, propaganda, religion, etc. f*ks with that sanity. It's simplistic, I know, but works for me. Advocating for hate, in my world, is a loss of sanity. I agree that what I said initially was kind of dumb.
@dswidow @StevenBeschloss I think a lot of us are probably more on-edge right now bc of the awful news out of both NYC and California about more sweeps to pick up and detain people without charge or trial based on psych status (as judged by one person w no oversight) and new kangaroo court to bypass due process and expand longer-term confinement. I get what you're saying, I dig Erich Fromm and stuff.
@sal @StevenBeschloss I couldn't believe it when I heard about that in NY. Didn't know CA was doing the same. These people should be helped, but not in that way, for sure.