What amazes me about modern life and modern media isn't just that nuance and shades of gray are sucked out of the discourse by the nature of modern media, but that so very many people seem to be trying to remove nuance and shades of gray on purpose! A child could understand that Hitler could be 95% dripping malevolent evil, and still be nice to his cat, and like pretty art. Apparently that is beyond most internet commentators now. Every person and every opinion must be made entirely good or entirely bad. It sucks, and is 100% bad!

Teh interwebs has given a platform for every stupid fool on two feet to bullhorn poop from their mouths to the annoying masses. This is example 999999999999999999999999999999999 of that truism. When someone is this nakedly dumb it is hard to be outraged at them.

The evil people themselves would want everyone to believe that they have good in them even when there are psychopaths who love their abusive bosses. But then there are those other people who just want to get away as fast as they can. Telling people there is good in everybody is OK, but if you actually want to be around people like Hitler, there is something seriously wrong with you.

She proved to be full of shit when she claimed not knowing what antisemitism was.

Katie - not sure how a Stranger writer has become a voice of reason online. But kudos to you and your editors for hiring you. The Stranger has for decades fueled the groupthink on the left, the pile ons, even working with labor front groups to attack everyone who doesn't agree 100% about every subtlety in every policy. So, thank you. And hopefully none of your co-workers need to write a counterpoint calling you an asshole. Again.

Badu is a heroine for me.

I've been saying something like this about Hitler for years.

He wasn't born that way. He was terribly abused by his family and by the education system of Germany. And then his entire country was punished for WWI (a mistake that wasn't repeated after WWII.)

Hitler and his minions did horrible things. But if we call him evil, like he is somehow different from the rest of us?

Then we are in danger of repeating his pathology.

I am most heartened when I hear about neo-Nazis and white supremacists who leave their beliefs behind when they are met with reason and calmness.

My favorite story is the skinhead who was imprisoned for crimes against a Jewish man. The Jewish man went to visit him for months, as a human being meeting another human being. It took a long time, but the skinhead left his hatred behind.

He wasn't written off as evil. And he had the time to heal.

It is unfortunate that the most broken among us are genius as fanning the brokenness in others.

Badu has always been a bit of a moonbat. Don't look to her for insight. Look to her for I-wish-it-was-just-a-little-better spacey weed-infused R&B.

Why do we have to pretend this is some ground-breaking or even a controversial statement?

We all know that Hitler was born to a human woman and grew up to be a human man. He was not a demon birthed from the fires of hell.

To a thinking person, this is what is the true horror. Convincing yourself that he was some kind of primal evil force with no humanity is hiding from reality like a child would.

Fascism seeks to remove all nuance. This is in no way a call to let those wish to wreak terror on a class, sex, race religion, or any other categorical group some sort of fair hearing at all. But I just read an article about that Doc in the Michigan State molestations. Obviously horrible occurance that damaged people severally. BUt it was just dripping with vile metaphor and lauding for some grandstanding judge turning her courtroom into a theatrical piece.

I understand the urge to go to town on people but control yourselves and stop acting like a pack of howler monkeys. I get nervous about this stuff because I know the irrational tone that starts whipping up pogroms can tip towards my categories which I identify as very, very easily. So easy, it does, often.

Tell that to the ten million people that cannot speak. Hitler is responsible. No there is not good in everyone. Somebody is smoking.

Is it not possible that seasonal hormone variations in the mother's body and the corresponding impacts on fetal brain development do impact the child's personality and this can generally be correlated to birth month within a given climate zone? What I want to know is if she is a northern hemisphere, southern hemisphere, or tropics pisces?

Sounds like she's taking that sort of Jesus, Christian position on morality. Always problematic.

Why is anyone still interviewing her in the first place? Has she had any hits since Bag Lady?

Am I the only person that thinks this is funny?

In an attempt to defend Louis Farrakhan, Erykah Badu compared Farrakhan to Hitler.

Let's just look at that again.

To defend Farrakhan, she compared him to Hitler.

I think she missed her calling.
She should have been a lawyer.

Christ on a crutch Katie, are you trying to be obtuse?

Agree with the sentiment to read the words and not just join in the judging. But those words should be condemned. He's a good painter and was a child leaves aside a horrible atrocity that killed 6 million. Would she agree that plantations were efficient at raising?

cotton

That was a moving story, @7.

When we refuse to recognize, or forget, that all humans have the capacity to change for the better, even if not all will, we lose something of our own humanity.
When should never lose faith in the capacity of people, as individuals, to change for the better.
Even though the society as a whole is on a one way trip straight to hell.

Plus, Hitler wasn't a very good painter.

"We" should never lose faith.....

You people are ridiculous. Of course people are products of their environments. And yet ten of millions people grew just like Hitler and didn't turn out evil. He made his choices in a context where tens of millions chose better. That makes him a contemptible monster, kind to dogs or otherwise.

But what if we have absolutely no free will, and his path was inevitably preset? The leap from this to no one should be condemned as culpable for anything is a pathetically facile virtue signalling cop out. Shame, rejection, and exile are incredibly powerful social controls. As such the most good Hitler ever did or can do is to be held up as an icon of evil and disgust to be reviled. So get straight with your own epistemology by calling out evil as evil, and calling out the dingbats who profess otherwise as assholes. Fuck Hitler, he was an abominable piece of fucking worthless human garbage who ripped kindergartners away from their mothers and threw them in ovens. Find good in his paintings? You are a repugnant narcissist.

We've all had bar conversations that go something like this then we have to reel our friend back in. The interviewer's point about turning empathy into an empty abstraction is a good one.

Nicely written -- very funny ending.

Anyway, this reminds me of Kyrie Irving. Mr. Irving is one the best basketball players in the world. But he also doesn't believe the earth is round. Seriously.

Like Ms. Badu, you could give him the benefit of the doubt. You could make a philosophical case, and assume that Kyrie isn't sure if there are any absolute truths (other than the fact that he exists). Or, you could just assume he is as dumb as rocks.

Same with Erykah. In both cases though, i wonder why I should care. They are artists, and as long as their art is fine, and they aren't doing anything evil (like so many artists have been found doing lately) I don't give a shit.

As far as the interview goes, what a bizarre pivot. It wasn't like the interviewer was pressing her on the point, and used Hitler as an extreme example. She decided to bring up Hitler, as a way of saying "not everyone is all bad". OK, fair enough. Charles Manson, the man who raped your kid, the head of the KKK and the head of ISIS aren't all bad. That is an opinion shared by many clergy.

But so fucking what? That wasn't the question. She wasn't being asked about whether someone who is evil is responsible for their own evilness, or whether someone who is evil might have some actual good in them. She was being asked about Farrakhan, and pivoted from a perfectly reasonable position (I like a lot of what he has to say, but didn't realize he took the anti-Semitic and offensive positions that he did) to crazy ass, even-Hitler-had-his-good-points bullshit.

She makes Kyrie Irving sound downright sensible, which isn't easy to do.

"I guess it’s just the Pisces in me." This is another idiot who believes in horoscopes. Why do we care what she thinks??

I think its important to separate "this person has some good in them, we should be empathetic" from "this person does some good things, we should follow them for the sake of the good they do". I can recognize Farrakhan's humanity while still understanding that he's a pretty awful specimen of humanity who preaches hate in general and thinks my people in particular are evil subhumans.

@15: Do you believe that no expelled indigenous peoples should have the right to return to their ancestral homelands? Or do you just think the Jews specifically should be a stateless people?

This article is an example of faux outrage-outrage that I see a lot lately. "it's worth looking at what Badu actually said before we order her vocal cords cut." Why don't we also look at what the ADL spokesperson actually said. He understands her argument (" I also like to think that there is good in all people") and he didn't call for her vocal chords to be cut. His statement seems pretty reasonable and his offense seems genuine, not outrage for the sake of outrage. This article says, "lets take a nuanced look at Badu's statement" and also says, "The entire Internet's criticism of Badu is misguided, performative outrage." You are creating a straw man target for your outrage about outrage. Just give your opinion and let people opine on what you say. Some people's critiques will be dumb. This is nothing new.

"People are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity."
--Margaret Atwood

The belief that people are either all-the-way-good or all-the-way-bad, and that empathy for anybody in the all-the-way-bad category is dangerous, is a belief that everybody in your all-the-way-bad category also held. The worst monsters see themselves as heroes, possessed of a sense of perfect moral clarity.

Performative displays of moral certainty read as charisma to people who find uncertainty troubling. None of history's villains would've been in a position to commit their crimes if mobs of ordinary people hadn't been drawn to their confident exhortations to all-or-nothing, us-vs-them morality.