[untamedmedley]

I'm sorry but this idea that you get a pass for drug dealing and misogynistic lyrics because you are black and from a poor background needs to just die.

There are options that don't involve poisoning the very community you claim to care about through drugs and promoting a lifestyle/"profession" that can get someone killed or sent to jail.

[GHFigs]

What I meant and what you appear to be ascribing to me are separated by such a wide gulf that I must have communicated very poorly, indeed.

I am not saying anybody gets a pass for anything.

I am saying that the comment above has simply substituted a set of new rules for when someone can be praised (e.g. "you can't have ever been a drug dealer") in place of the old ones (e.g. "you can't be black") with the same puritanical intent of undermining anything the target of the criticism might have actually accomplished.

It's tempting to think that this acts as a filter, keeping the riff-raff out of the pantheon of saints, but in practice it only rewards large-scale ignorance, subterfuge, and mythologizing.

[makeramen]

like what options?

Jay-Z promotes ambition, through whatever means necessary.

Lots of things get people killed and/or sent to jail.

Zuckerberg profits off the millions of college students "dumb enough" to waste their precious time "socializing" instead of studying like our society says they should. And don't forget the videos of myspace obsessed children and the like, I'm sure there are people out there who have died of social media related things, it's just not as easily attributed as a cause of death.

Similarly Jay-Z just happened to profit from people "dumb enough" to buy the drugs he sold. It was an opportunity, and he capitalized on it.

You have to work with what you got. It's just the way the world works. I'm pretty sure if you put Zuckerberg in the hood, he'd turn out to be a dealer and give Jay-Z computers in his childhood and he'd probably be a hacker. It's a combination of the ambitious troublemaker personality with the environment that makes what these people have become.

In a sense, you could say Jay hacked the coke game, and was smart(lucky?) enough to get out before he got into too much trouble.

[untamedmedley]

Jay-Z promotes ambition, through whatever means necessary.

Exactly. ::sigh::

[catshirt]

If I can correct that sentiment: The reason Jay-Z is inspirational is because he promotes ambition regardless of your situation.

[ori_b]

I agree, we shouldn't look up to Zuckerberg either. Both are doing rather slimy and morally questionable things, and I would argue that we should find both of them distasteful.