My Uncle Wayne just dug up this old picture of my dad and his sister, and obviously we must all now ooooooh at the cuteness together.
Jamelle Bouie on How Trump Happened (yeah, it’s racism):
For millions of white Americans who weren’t attuned to growing diversity and cosmopolitanism, however, Obama was a shock, a figure who appeared out of nowhere to dominate the country’s political life. And with talk of an “emerging Democratic majority,” he presaged a time when their votes—which had elected George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan—would no longer matter. More than simply “change,” Obama’s election felt like an inversion. When coupled with the broad decline in incomes and living standards caused by the Great Recession, it seemed to signal the end of a hierarchy that had always placed white Americans at the top, delivering status even when it couldn’t give material benefits.
In a 2011 paper, Robin DiAngelo—a professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University—described a phenomenon she called “white fragility.” “White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves,” she writes. “These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.”
The trailer for the second season of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is here, and I’m sure it’s gonna fix everything that bothered us about the first season while keeping all the good parts.
A show I like more than Kimmy that ALSO has some big issues is Silicon Valley, and they know it, but:
The crew went to TechCrunch Disrupt, a startup competition also featured in the show, to film footage of the crowd, Berg explained.
During the review process once the footage was woven in, another editor criticized the crowd shots for not featuring any women and blamed Berg for the oversight.
“She said those crowd shots were absurd,” Berg told the crowd at SXSW. “Those were real shots of the real place, and we didn’t frame women out. The world we’re depicting is f—ed up.”
Even trips to visit tech companies, like Google, didn’t help. “That’s where we realized it really is 87% dudes,” executive producer Mike Judge said. It was the same when they visited the bars in Palo Alto, Judge added.
“Palo Alto is the ‘no sense of humor’ capital of the world,” Judge declared.
MAROONED AMONG THE POLAR BEARS for title of the year:
Sergey Ananov is trapped on a slab of ice in the Arctic Circle. He has no locator beacon, no phone, and barely any water. The fog will hide him from any rescuers. Night will come. Hypothermia will come. And whatever large, powerful creatures that scratch out their existence in this primordial world—maybe they will come too.
His eyes wander past the ice and over the roiling open waters of Davis Strait. He is alone, and with each minute that passes he will drift farther from the spot where the helicopter went down, lessening the chance he will ever be found.
You had me at “I found a horrible blog about a co-worker”:
There’s a certain head of a department who I have to work with occasionally who is rude, dismissive, and just does not seem competent enough to do her job. I’ve spoken with other coworkers and they think the same of her. And she writes her emails in Comic Sans, so clearly not a person worthy of respect (I kid! Sort of…)
I googled said coworker after a very frustrating day trying to work with her (she totally screwed my team over for an international trip that she was told was high priority weeks ago) . I found a blog written about her. She’s a recruiter, and it sounds like it’s written by a candidate she worked with.
The complaints about her on the blog are similar to my complaints with her, only the blog is more scathing. I would be beyond mortified if someone wrote about me on the internet like that. In my opinion, it looks terrible for a company to have someone who’s the head of a department have this nasty blog show up as the second link when you Google her name + company (and she’s somebody who would get searched for, given her role).
The blog has been up for several months, so I’m assuming other people in the organization have seen it, even possibly her managers, and may have already dealt with it, but I’m wondering if the blog and complaints from coworkers might spur change? I don’t want to put my neck out there either though, so can I send an anonymous complaint? Casually let higher-ups know what I’ve seen? This isn’t a me or her situation or anything like that, but I’d still like to know this was addressed with her and she knows she needs to make changes to be productive within our company. So – what, if anything, can I possibly do here?
A few days after dropping a medium-size spoiler about the upcoming season of Game of Thrones, Ian McShane could not be filled with less regret. “You say the slightest thing and the internet goes ape,” the actors tells The Telegraph, accurately. “I was accused of giving the plot away, but I just think get a f—ing life. It’s only tits and dragons.” So, why did he take the gig? “They asked me if I wanted to do Game of Thrones and I said, ‘Sure, I’ll be able to see my old pals Charlie Dance and Stephen Dillane,’ and they said, ‘No, we’ve killed them off.’” (Coincidentally, “No, we’ve killed them off” is Thrones‘ tagline for season six.) McShane says he wasn’t sure if he wanted to commit to taking on another TV role, but was swayed when producers revealed he’d only be in one episode. “I said, ‘So that means I must die at the end of it. Great, I’m in.’” Now, technically, that’s not a spoiler per se, just speculation, but we have a feeling Ian McShane doesn’t care either way.
I really loved Laura’s piece about Pat Conroy, ICYMI:
Conroy grew up Catholic in the South, an anomaly that made him feel like a perennial outsider. His father was a Marine Corps fighter pilot and his mother was a housewife and a fierce personality. There were seven Conroy children, and every day when Dad got home from work one of them would yell, “Godzilla’s home!” and the children would scatter to their respective corners of the house in whatever state they happened to be living in at the time. Don Conroy was a physically abusive man, a trait his son did not shy away from depicting in his many novels and, eventually, his memoirs. Southern men and women of Conroy’s generation did not grow up in a world that offered counseling or treated abuse as something to be discussed; it was a world that had a great deal invested in a certain kind of stoic masculinity. Pat Conroy wrote openly about his childhood abuse; he spilled pages and pages of ink talking about what it was like to be hit and threatened and caught in between his mother and father when he was sure one of them would die. There is a scene in Prince of Tides in which the Pat Conroy character gets hit and knocked down by his father at home, and runs into his mother’s arms. His father looks at him, at his child, and laughs. “I would run from that mocking, cheapening laughter for the rest of my life,” Conroy writes, “always away from him, always toward the soft, embracing places.”
I had a lot of feelings yesterday, if you would like to know about them, they start here:
This time around, there won’t be any suggestiveness about Xena’s (Lucy Lawless) relationship with her sheroic partner Gabrielle (Renee O’Connor). Xena will for sure be openly gay in the series, according to executive producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach.
“There is no reason to bring back Xena if it is not there for the purpose of fully exploring a relationship that could only be shown subtextually [sic] in first-run syndication in the 1990s,” Javier Grillo-Marxuach wrote in a Tumblr response. “It will also express my view of the world—which is only further informed by what is happening right now—and is not too difficult to know what that is if you do some digging.”
My conversion podcast-y thing! This was really hard! The sweet Toasties who run this podcast were very welcoming, I just find these things so intimate and squicky to discuss. But it was good to do. I’m glad I did it. If you find the whole idea laughable or ridiculous, that is SO FAIR, but I am not having the greatest week emotionally, so I would so appreciate it if you had that convo over email with friends. I did this off-site for a reason, so that only people who wanted to take part would. Thanks, teammates.
Wait, did we have any problems at all with Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt season 1?
Assorted general racism and, especially egregiously, a white woman playing a Native character whose heritage was used for a bunch of lazy punchlines.
Eh. In a world where Trump is inciting racial violence I don’t have the energy to be upset about a joke where Jane Krakowski is playing an Indian in white face.
Eh, we’re capable of opposing more than one shade of racism at a time. White supremacy is a spectrum and all of it sucks.
That’s great for you, but plenty of other POC (I’m not sure if you’re a POC?) find the time to be upset both about Trump inciting racial violence *and* white people playing POC in yelow/black/brown/etc. face.
So.. congratulations?
I remember the show using Indians as a framework to make fun of teenage angst in general (inverting the trope of the caucasian teenager misappropriating African American/Indian/Rastafarian/etc. culture) and the shallowness of Krakowski’s character specifically. But I don’t recall the actress ever appearing in red face or any Indian stereotypes being referenced as part of the joke.
Not worthy of a Humanitas Prize to be sure (and not funny, either) but it didn’t strike me as harmful.
Okay, but many people did find that character hurtful, and have said so. You don’t have to share those feelings, but trying to argue someone out of them is not great.
Yeah it’s perfectly fine to enjoy a TV show without worrying about the commentary that surrounds it, or to understand others’ criticism and still enjoy the show, or to have entirely your own opinion on it, nobody is saying that you Aren’t Allowed.
And you’re right that “there was a storyline on a niche TV show that may have been in bad taste” isn’t really at the top of the list of world issues, but it’s okay to let other people discuss and critique, because some of us do find it interesting/meaningful/necessary. Again, feel free to just watch TV and enjoy your own experience if that isn’t your thing.
What many of us are trying to say is this: even though you, as one person (of whatever personal ID), may not think it’s harmful, it’s not for you to decide if other people feel it’s harmful, especially if you don’t belong to the group in question.
You might consider re-watching those episodes with these criticisms in mind and see if you see what we’re talking about.
Well, you’re definitely not going to win any humanitarian prizes either, so perhaps you should call it a day here.
Dude, people are answering your original question. Stop rejecting their answers.
That’s like how white people want to think they’re not racist cause they’re not in the KKK. It’s an absurd standard to only criticize problems when they’re as obvious as Trump.
ETA: I really wish English didn’t have its/it’s and their/they’re/there. I shouldn’t mess those up still.
Nope. Definitely pretty upset about both.
I’m only one Native and don’t speak for others, but I thought that storyline was hilarious and actually skewered assumptions about modern Native living.
I liked the line when Jacqueline’s father mentions the “iron eagle,” then says, “Just kidding. I know what a plane is. I was in the Air Force.” I like how it winked at the stereotypes. But then, I’m not Native, so I’m not the arbiter of whether this was offensive.
I started warily disliking it and ended up hating it. I’m sorry because I wanted to like it and I liked the concept and the acting was good given what it had to work with, but ugh.
I don’t think it’s ever possible to say that “we” had problems with something like that, it’s not as if everyone held a big conference afterward where we took a vote and you were the only one that didn’t get invited.
SO MANY PROBLEMS.
In addition to the Native problems already outlined I could not stand the contempt for teachers. Dammit Tiny Fey, punch up for ONCE, urban public school teachers deal with enough.
TINY FEY
Typo or not, I love it
I mean that is true, but as someone who has dealt with (almost exclusively white) teachers all my life “I’m going to mispronounce your name, just deal with it” teaching classrooms of non white kids. There are (at least in my experience of 13 continuous years of public, semi-funded schools there are teachers who don’t try and don’t know their subject and there are teachers who see themselves as white saviors. I think there is room for humor in it? Not necessarily a fan of it from Fey, who I’m 90% certain sends her kids to ues schools, but I don’t know.
I was going to post a link to that Tumblr post about Daisy Ridley deadlifting my body weight and then baking a cake because a play made her sad, but
GAY
XENA
WARRIOR
PRINCESS
Is the only goddamb thing I want to talk about today.
A little queer 90s prayer:
Lord please let me let grow up to be Zena Warrior Princess also my little brother stole my favorite Lisa Frank eraser if you could send a pillar of fire that would be great. amen.
How about Daisy Ridley with a regular guest gig on the new Xena? All of your favorite things together. (Throw in Gwendoline Christie once in a while and it’s all of my favorite things.)
I genuinely gasped out loud at this comment. Yes. Yes please.
I never watched Xena but I have been starting to wonder if I should… now I am glad I never did because out gay Xena will be the only true Xena.
You’ll miss some great ridiculous episodes though. There’s some super high quality ridiculousness.
Karl Urban as cupid. It’s not even the best of the wonderful ridiculousness, it is only a representative sample thereof.
For real I named my new puppy Cupid as a teen after watching Xena. Or possibly Hercules. But one of them.
Karl Urban playing different roles in back to back episodes.
And Aphrodite.
New Zealand is truly a magical place.
BUT will they cast people we will want to kiss as much as the originals? This is the real question we should be asking.
I’m really worried about this! I love the idea of more Xena, but the knowledge that it won’t be Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor makes me heartsick. (I mean, like, mildly heartsick, but still.)
who needs an actual link when that description conjures so perfectly the delight that is Daisy Ridley??
Threadgill’s restaurant in Austin had a full-size cardboard stand-up thingy of Gabrielle in the lobby back in the 90s, because Renee O’Connor was the owner’s stepdaughter (or niece, or something?). My daughter (like, 2-3 at the time) would want to go play near her when she finished her food. It prevented so many meltdowns.
Thanks, Gabrielle!
…am I the only one who thought it WAS official in in the original series that Xena and Gabrielle were lovers? I’m serious, I was surprised to learn it wasn’t.
It was one of those things where it was fairly obvious, but they couldn’t really make it explicit. So, like, if they kissed on the lips, it’d have to be because they were doing CPR, or one of them wasn’t in her right mind, or one of them was currently inhabiting Autolycus’s body, or… SOMETHING. They could say they loved each other, but not that they were IN love with each other. There’d always have to be some kind of deniability in there, though how plausible it actually was tended to very.
ETA: Oh, and also, the whole thing where it was frequently obvious that a man and a woman were about to have sex (or had just gotten done), but (IIRC) f/f sex was only ever in the form of allusion or innuendo.
It was very clear, but technically deniable. They were expressly completely devoted to each other, but didn’t make out on screen or say “I love you, in like a sex way.”
They also would each occasionally hook up or have complicated emotional things with dudes, which rarely threatened their intention to spend their lives together (with a couple early exceptions). I’d like to think that in the remake they could be openly queer and still retain the healthy committed poly relationship part, but that might be too much to ask for.
HAMILTON AT THE WHITE HOUSE
Lin Manuel rapping with Obama in the Rose Garden
#BamforHam
And it turns out there are 2 goddamn things I want to talk about today.
Also:
“Alexander Hamilton”
“My Shot”
Obama is SO EXCITED to introduce this performance. LOVE IT.
Obama, Lin-Manuel, and Hamilton coming full circle seven years later? Yeah, I’d be excited too.
I’m screaming.
I have so much work to do but I’m watching these videos wheeeeeee.
motherFUCKER not available in my country, how dare you, YouTube 🙁
this is a clear failure of american foreign policy.
I’m in Canada. Does America not love us anymore? We have a nice prime minister and everything.
Hmm, now that i think about it, this may be a direct response to your overly-handsome-and-charismatic and-tolerant-prime-minister situation.
…Fair.
ME TOO!!! Why do you so despise us, video uploader???
Everything about their trip made me so happy.
(But Lin. What were you wearing. Can Leslie take you shopping next time?)
that man. can wear. a suit.
Seriously.
I nominate Leslie to be in charge of dressing the rest of the men henceforth.
It was Not Good.
I KNOW. Lin, I don’t care if it’s not your first time at the White House, WEAR SOMETHING NICER THAN JEANS.
I was so not pleased with him. You don’t wear jeans to perform at the White House! Look at all your male colleagues and how nicely pulled together they looked!
And seriously, Lin performed there in 2009. And he wore a suit then. HE SHOULD KNOW BETTER.
I can’t, I can’t, this whole thing was so dang overwhelming and exciting. I searched the #bam4ham Twitter tag for an hour last night.
SCREAMING and emailing to the relevant coworkers thank you
I was so emotional yesterday. There are so many great photos online, and I got to see My Shot. We didn’t even get to see this but I got teary-eyed just reading about it.
Ok, I’m having trouble embedding the image (how does this work again?). Here are the links:
https://twitter.com/Lin_Manuel/status/70952874452… https://twitter.com/Lin_Manuel/status/70952897487… https://twitter.com/Lin_Manuel/status/70952950597…
Anyway, yeah, just imagining “One Last Time” messed me up! And I’m fantasizing about creating a time loop where we leave behind all the bad and the Obamas are in the White House forever and the OBC of Hamilton is performing forever and everything is good and nothing hurts. Sigh.
SO happy that it will be included in the documentary coming out this fall (as per LMM’s twitter). Also so happy it will be on PBS so I can weep in the privacy of my own home.
I want to vote in “last two years Obama” for everything, ever. He’s reached supreme DGAF and it’s FANTASTIC.
Obama’s speech before the performance. I’m so proud he’s our President.
Heh, I’ve been going on about Hamilton to my Dad (who is currently finishing up working on an Obama documentary) and that I was going to give the ticket lottery a shot when we are in NY for my cousin’s wedding in June. He said he wouldn’t mind giving it a go with me and I was appreciative but also like… you understand that I won’t just be going once right? Like I’ll show up to the actual wedding party but otherwise there will be a LOT of queuing.
what, how am I one of the first commenters on LR today?
thoughts in the form of a list!
1. I loved that Pat Conroy tribute, too – I read and re-read him in my early college years; there was something in that bruised, lush prose that resonated so deeply.
2. really looking forward to listening to your interview today, Nicole. I think it would be unbelievably hard to have that conversation in so public a way, so bravo for bravery.
3. uhh sooo mr inkwashed and I watched Black Mass last night and whoooaaa as someone who didn’t grow up in/near Boston and really only heard of Whitey Bulger when it was all over NPR that he’d been arrested back in 2011ish god damn what a situation. It’s like: you can’t make this shit up! holy smokes.
4. has anyone else read the dancing goddesses by E.W.Barber? I’ve been so fascinated and would love to get nerdy with others about it.
If you liked Black Mass you should absolutely dive into the many, many books, documentaries, etc. about Whitey Bulger. It all stays crazy the more you learn.
I took a class in Boston taught by the retired head of special investigations (organized crime) for the city, and he told us (in exactly as great an accent as you’d expect) about a time he was sitting in a bar in Southie and Whitey Bulger comes up and wraps his arm around his neck. Of course his heart stops, but apparently a second later Bulger steps back and starts laughing, just intending to mess with a kid from the neighborhood and having no idea that this guy is a cop.
whatttttt. that reminds me of the scene in the film at our man in the FBI’s dinner table – the “family secret” recipe for marinade. the quietly spreading panic is just tangible.
as a bostonian, did you find benedict cumberbabaloobach’s accent to be odd?
His accent was odd but actually a fairly accurate representation of how Billy B actually talks- he purposefully tried to affect the old school/ “Kennedy” accent, which often ends up sounding like a cross between the working class Boston accent you see in movies and an English accent. So it seemed like Cumberdoodle was slipping into his real accent at points but I think it was on purpose!
oh, fascinating. I definitely want to read more about the entire saga – thanks so much for the WBUR coverage link!
Yeah, I’m with you on that, although I tend to cut English actors a little more slack than I cut Americans doing bad Boston accents. Full disclaimer, though, I’m not a Boston native, so I’m probably not the best judge (ask me about the accent work in Drop Dead Gorgeous and I can give you some detailed opinions).
I loved the movie, but the various attempts at Boston accents in Spotlight were just awful. They probably should have followed the lead of John Slattery, actual Boston native, and gone subtle, instead of… whatever it was that Mark Ruffalo was goiing for.
Just don’t do the accent! It’s fine!
Haha as a very part-time Minnesotan, yes! (It’s been so long though I can’t remember if Allison Janney did one or listened to some of her co-stars and was like “. . .No.”)
She did do one! As someone who is not remotely Minnesotan, I cannot judge its quality, though.
After seeing “Black Mass”, I went on a serious Whitey Bulger jag. The book “Black Mass” by Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill (which the movie is based on) is a fascinating read. In retrospect, the movie barely touched on just how deep the corruption and shit went.
oh my god I can see myself in equal parts going on a serious binger while simultaneously terrifying myself beyond belief!
hi I’m replying to myself but, oh, ye gods, that hazlitt piece just ripped me open.
ME TOO. Dang. And they live in a place with public health care! Gaaaah.
I grew up in Boston & my family = Irish immigrants who were living on Winter Hill (Whitey’s stomping grounds before he moved his business operations to Southie) in the 60s-70s and I find this stuff endlessly fascinating. Lehr and O’Neill’s work on it is great — they were the Globe reporters who broke the story that Whitey was an informant in the 90s (I remember my suburban prep school teachers talking about how unbelievable it was, is what a huge figure he was in MA).
If you’re interested in learning more about Bulger I thought WBUR’s coverage from the time of the trial was some of the most comprehensive and readable- http://bulger.wbur.org/story/1977/?location=14098
The section about each individual victim is heartbreaking (of course) especially when you consider that there might still be more we don’t know about.
Dancing Goddesses–I love Barber, especially all her stuff on Tarim Basin mummy textiles. But have you seen the catalog from her museum exhibition that was kind of adjacent to Goddesses, Resplendent Dress from Southeastern Europe? (http://www.amazon.com/Resplendent-Dress-Southeastern-Europe-History/dp/0984755039/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1458064381&sr=8-5&keywords=elizabeth+wayland+barber) It is just luscious.
OH YES the mummies! every time I am talking about that book (which, tbh, is more often than is perhaps really reasonable) someone asks me whyyyy I have so many weird textile history books and I just mumble and blame grad school when the reality is that it’s so fascinating. I have 100% bought and given away at least 4 copies of women’s work.
I haven’t seen this catalog, but I have heard mention of it casually in other writings of hers so I should try and check it out.
It’s bracket season! I’m mehh on basketball, but I’ll vote in Internet polls all damn day. Anyone found any good ones?
I had high hopes when I saw there was a Star Wars dark side-light side bracket, but the matchups seem uneven enough that I can guess pretty confidently how things will go (http://www.starwars.com/this-is-madness).
Do you follow Go Fug Yourself’s Fug Madness? They have brackets for celebrities in horrible, wacky, eccentric “fashion” all year round and have match-ups until they hit the Elite Eight, Final Four, etc. and crown a Fug Madness winner! One of my faves!
Fug Madness is the best! GFY and The Toast have the most wonderful commenters. I’m also a sucker for Deadspin’s Name Of The Year playoff, starting in a couple of days. They’ve posted the bracket already.
Fug Madness isn’t up yet, but I’m already ready (http://www.gofugyourself.com/fugmadnessfaq)
When does it start (usually)?
The Fug Girls just posted the bracket: http://www.gofugyourself.com/fug-madness-2016-sta…
My very favorite bracket event is the annual Suvudu Cage Match, which pits fantasy characters against each other. Popular vote decides the victors, but various authors write mini-fics of how the fight will go, and the authors of the characters in the fight often write their own version of the fight. This year’s theme is “Dynamic Duos,” so each slot in the bracket is two characters (Legolas and Gimli, Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, etc.) http://suvudu.com/2016/02/cage-match-2016-bracket…
I like the smart bitches trashy books dabwaha: http://www.mysideline.com/u/18566/custom/default….
They do brackets for romance novels in a bunch of different categories, and usually I find a few new reads out of it- plus if I’m going to pick winners by name/ mascot anyhow, romance titles are more fun than basketball teams.
The Current – a Minnesota Public Radio indie rock station – is doing their March Music madness http://www.thecurrent.org/feature/2016/03/09/marc…
The Current – a Minnesota Public Radio indie rock station – is doing their March Music madness
http://www.thecurrent.org/feature/2016/03/09/marc…
Your dad looks a lot like Bobby Draper to me.
which one??
The final Bobby Draper. He is, after all, the one true Bobby since he was able to slay all the others. I mean, we all know Highlander was an allegory for Hollywood casting, right?
I don’t know what I expected to see as a response to my question, but that is the best possible answer I never imagined. I salute you.
which one though
AHHHHHH MAROONED ON AN ICE FLOE WITH POLAR BEARS. I read that this morning and it was HORRIFYING. I mean, I personally would never fly a tiny helicopter in the Arctic to begin with so I would never be faced with that situation but AAAAHHHHH
I’m halfway through it and I feel like this story was written for me personally. HOW MANY POLAR BEARS CAN YOU MEET IN LIKE A DAY?
If you read/listen/watch CBC North on the regular, you get the local stories…some ending tragically, others illustrating how badass people can be. This is my current favourite: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/sanikiluaq-hu… The combination of bravery and craftiness is breaktaking…
Whoa.
THAT WAS SO INTENSE.
It was really intense!
Also, I thought the writer did a really good job of building up suspense while keeping the story moving briskly.
Am currently Marooned On Comfy Couch With Housecats, so I feel his pain.
That AAM letter reminds me of this really obnoxious lady at my last job who had a personal blog that my coworker and I would occasionally hate read (the first entry we saw was about how feminism is stupid and how she gets along better with guys anyway). One day we came to work to find an email had been sent to the whole office saying this woman had been fired, and it was followed up shortly after with an email about our social media policy. It turned out that she had written a blog entry about how much she hates making small talk with coworkers (for example, when one of us trolls compliments her designer boots she then feels obligated to compliment our ugly outfits) and then went on to describe specific individuals in such vivid detail that nobody who worked there could miss who she was talking about. And it was reallyyyyyyyy mean. And then she tweeted a link to it from an account in her real name, and since she worked in a very social mediay/media-facing department people from the company saw it immediately and she was dunzo.
The moral of the story I guess is that stupidity is sometimes a fireable offense.
yessssssss
stories like yours give me hope that there are workplaces where management really does care about the culture and take care to protect it.
Although I should be fair and say that my company fired someone a while back for several reasons, one of them being that he apparently/allegedly brought prostitutes (or at least… scantily clad, ill-behaved women that were not his wife) to our office late one night. It’s only a rumor – management didn’t address it to the whole firm directly – but a couple senior people have made references to it. Which is decent enough proof for me.
I’m in tech– thank god, though, not a startup and not in Silicon Valley– and the comments from the showrunners about industry makeup are unfortunately correct. I’m the only woman in the room at 80% of my meetings, sometimes the only woman on the entire conference call. It does kind of feel like a joke.
I wonder, though, does the show ever make the “satire” they claim explicit? I would not argue that having an all white male cast is unrealistic, but just because it’s a real problem doesn’t mean you’ve satirized it just by mirroring. (I can think of a few ideas if they don’t have any!)
Yeah, it’s been a while since I watched Silicon Valley, but I don’t remember much explicit dialogue (if any) about the lack of women in tech. It’d be such a simple way to actually satirize the problem, instead of going welp, that’s just how it is, nothing to work with here!
They comment on the lack of women pretty frequently, but the jokes often fall back on “hur dur geeky guys are bad with chicks, amirite.” There were some good moments last season when they added a female coder to the team and she was able to give some commentary, but in general the show is focused more on skewering the absurdities of tech culture than the incredibly disappointing lack of diversity in the industry.
I still find the show really funny and in general the satire is spot-on (having gone to a high school filled with these exact people) but it could definitely stand to address these issues more pointedly.
That’s what I was worried about– having tech guys make jokes about women is not the same as satirizing women in tech. And “tech culture in general” is immensely influenced and defined by a lack of diversity– not commenting on it is like remaking The Sopranos, but removing all references to their Italian heritage.
True points. Also the show has not done a good job of handling the presence of the Asian community in tech. Almost everyone on the show is white and the single Chinese character is a heavily-accented poorly constructed racist caricature.
Kumail Nanjiani’s character?
I was referencing Jian Yang, who comes off as a tired stereotype pulled from a very different, less self-aware show.
Kumail Nanjiani’s character is hilarious, well-drawn, and very relatable. However, one well-constructed minority character does not representation make.
Yeah, in some ways it makes the character of Jian Yang worse — they know how to write characters for non-white actors, they just don’t in his case.
does it make you feel any better that 50% of the writing staff is women?
they could certainly do more to lampoon the # of women in tech, but it appeases me a bit to know that behind the scenes they’re working to have a diverse crew.
They do make comments on it and make the point that the geeky guys are terrible around women because they are never around women.
And there’s a few supporting women characters who do point out the lack of women.
Personally I think its a funny show that’s reflecting a ridiculous world where there aren’t a lot of women; and the women they have added have felt real and natural, rather than shoe-horning women in to please critics. It comes back to the fact that not ever show, or every woman character, has to be everything to everyone; in this case the lack of women is justified (unfortunately) and the showrunners are aware and are trying to address it while still being true to the subject matter
That’s really… unfortunate. Because honestly, the whole “geeky guys are terrible around women” just really isn’t true. I spend all day in a tech office and let me tell you, the guys here really aren’t substantially different from guys elsewhere. Some of them are really bad at women. Some of them have mostly women friends. It’s a copout to addressing the toxic attitudes of masculinity to pretend that the people in the tech sector are somehow worse than the rest.
Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like enough men in tech and engineering ARE awkward around woman that I don’t feel like the is reaching with its comedy. I mean, I am an engineer, and I feel like the show exactly jokes about men in engineering/tech in the same manner that my engineering female friends and I do. So I think that makes me love the show. I am also dating an engineer (electrical), and we always joke about how one semester in grad school he went the whole semester without even speaking to a woman because of the lack of them! (And subsequently, how awkward that made him for a while!)
I think the show does a worlds better job of satirizing geeks and nerd culture than a similar show that is much more popular *cough* *cough* *Big Bang Theory*.
I am also in tech, also not in silicon valley. I did not get the satire of this show and do not think it is funny :-/ It seemed to me very shallow, like “oh we’re being self-deprecating about tech culture while still reinforcing all of the ideas that can make that culture so toxic!”
This quote pretty much explains how I feel about the show: Though Silicon Valley lampoons the sexism of the tech world with fictional apps like Nippler, which tracks “the location of a woman with erect nipples,” Judge seems to sympathize with the privileged men who star in the show. It mocks them, for being “pathetic, emasculated dudes,” Breger wrote, but not “the troubling system they’re a part of,” and the viewer is on their side as they try to deal with their new-found success and attractiveness to women. from this article – Does satire always need to be progressive?
But I’ll admit, I only watched like 3 or 4 episodes before I became exasperated and gave up on it, so maybe it gets better.
Speaking as someone at a big tech company (that is in Silicon Valley, although I work in a satellite office.) It just sounds awful. Yes, my company is about 18% women, just like the rest of the tech industry. But it’s not like we aren’t there. And I just don’t want to watch a show about an industry that I am both a part of and frequently feel ambivalent toward that doesn’t have a place for me, when I sometimes wonder if the industry has a place for me.
Yeah, I can understand that sentiment – it is real. But I mentioned above, I think I like the show because the way they satirize the male characters in the show is exactly how my female engineering friends and I joke about the men in our engineering graduate programs. I think at my current moment I do not feel ostracized by my gender as a female engineer; however, I think that feeling of being ostracized comes and goes and I could see how I might not like the show as much if I was having similar feelings as you are.
I dunno, I think you’re definitely supposed to be laughing at the main cast’s attitude toward women, not with them. And there’s a lot of fairly pointed stuff about, say, cultural appropriation, with Gavin Belson’s tell-him-what-he-wants-to-hear guru. For me, it seems pretty self-aware. I really want to see more of Monica this season, though. I feel like they could do a lot more with her.
Satirizing the tech industry is sorta like satirizing the Republican party, at a certain point you just pretend to be one on TV and waggle your eyebrows suggestively
I actually bark-laughed at this image. Thank you.
I think the satire is very explicit. Also, imo, the women in the show are very well-written, though they are few in number (second season is better than the first on this, for sure). Many of the male engineers are not so good with women, but there is also heterogeneity there (heyyy Martin Starr).
Though I definitely agree with the statement in the article Nicole posted – ‘Berg argues that a show made for entertainment not meant to be a “social-action wing” or be a force of change — the show is just satirizing the reality that the tech industry itself needs to take care of.’
I’ve only watched Silicon Valley sporadically, but I just want to say that I think people should ask that question about satirizing versus mirroring a LOT more often.
We watched both seasons of Silicon Valley, and I really thought that it started slowly and then got funnier and funnier as it went on. The last episode where the guys literally get distracted by the math of whether they could jerk off all 800 people in the Tech Crunch room is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. I thought the 2nd season was better about adding more women, but I found the whole show pretty enjoyable, and I’m a middle-aged white feminist, with 2 daughters and 2 stepdaughters who are constantly advising me about racisim and sexism and diversity etc. So I feel like I am aware of the issues, and conscious of the problems. But I still really, really enjoyed that show. We still re-watch that last episode occasionally.
Your dad as a kid was surely one of those Serious Intense Gazers. I wouldn’t dare have a staring contest with him.
Also I’m so glad you decided to share the experience of your conversion with us
Toast! Today is my 2nd day in my new amazing job and I have an office now w a window– WHAT! Currently there is a construction crew working on a building and watching the cranes deliver heavy things and them bring out all these crazy tools for concrete is an awesome soothing / fascinating morning routine. Anyone else find watching major construction pretty mesmerizing?
I do! I live in NYC and whenever I drive upstate there is the glorious new Tappan Zee bridge going up, which is huge and amazing.
” I have an office now w a window– WHAT!”
Ugh, I’m going to need some toast for all this jelly.
You better have lots of nice plants to make up for the fact that I can’t keep any alive in my basement broom closet/office 😉
You’ve come to the right place.
(For toast. Because this is the-toast.)
I’m making a plant run this wkd! I’m thinking lavender and lots of mint (although my herbs always die…)
Rosemary is hard to kill! (I have to suggest it, it’s my name 😛 )
I’m watching an apartment being built across the parking lot. There’s about ten workers at any one time, but if you just watch ONE of them going about their work — you see him walking back and forth, maybe leaning down — but you never actually see him DO anything. And yet the walls are going up, the windows being installed and it’s all very mysterious. There’s some major carpenter-stealth-witch-magic going on here. And the cranes!! I was getting upset because the carpenters stood UNDER the loads and I thought, what if the loads fall! You’d be dead. So I was yelling out my window like a this-is-your-mother-asking-you-to-be-more-careful-crazy person and luckily no one seemed to hear me and take note. Anyway, it’s a great break from writing, watching the workers.
I love that kind of stuff! There’s constant construction in my area (lol, DC) and I’m that person that stops to look through the gaps in the fence like “whoa, that’s a big hole. Oh shit, is that guy welding? Awesome.”
There is so much construction in SF these days that I am not only doing that but taking pictures of the whole process in some cases – so you can see how that hole in the ground and bunch of concrete rebar and wood becomes the next overpriced condo. The transformation from grunge to sleek is mystifying.
Same, but with Portland.
I’m not mesmerized by construction itself, but I do find scaffolding oddly comforting. Something about the sidewalk feeling like it has a roof is very pleasing to my nervous system.
I work in a Manhattan skyscraper, and watching the window washers come down is pretty amazing. I get vertigo just looking at it.
I walked into my office today, and there was a wall missing (not a load-bearing one, it’s cool), and they’d torn up part of the patio outside to expand it and build a new walkway. Magic!
When we were last on holiday, my boyfriend and I stopped halfway up a flight of stairs in a museum to spend ages looking out of the window and gawking at a building being demolished. (The machine being used was very inefficient – it kept grabbing clawfuls of the building and pulling, frequently accomplishing very little.) It was a highlight of the whole trip.
That Hazlitt article was terrifying. I think more and more of us are discovering the limits to the knowledge of the medical world/scientific community, while simultaneously discovering that if you acknowledge that limit, you’re treated like a nutcase.
In other news, it was 89 degrees in the Dallas/Fort Worth area yesterday. TOO SOON.
God, after going through something similar with a toddler who just refused to eat, it was all too real. Especially this: Journalists who read widely and deeply are specialists; parents who read widely and deeply are nutcases who spend too much time on the internet.
Yes! I get that I’m not a doctor, but I *can* read, and actual doctors wrote this article, so why are you blowing this off like a conspiracy theory?
I’m just WTF about the pediatrician not taking a throat swab when the author brought it up. It’s a throat swab! It’s cheap, easy, nearly zero risk (afaik, not a medical professional), and it gives a pretty definite answer.
Also, as a US American, I feel like our national honor (NO U) was insulted by the Canadian medical establishment completely disregarding NIMH’s research. (I’m three-quarters joking.)
I agree with 100% of this comment.
Yeah, I’m going through something similar myself and it’s tough. Been having trouble breathing after a pretty tough bronchitis episode and I’ve been to lots of doctors. The pulmonologist that I was finally able to see (after weeks of seeing other doctors) pretty much told me that it’s either a) panic attacks or b) hypochondria (definitely not asthma).
Pretty demoralizing, I must say! But he did prescribe a CT scan of my chest, which is what I wanted anyway, so I go tomorrow. He also did suggest some cognitive behavioral therapy techniques for calming myself. It was overall an *extremely* weird appointment. Helpful, but emotionally hurtful. A complete wash.
I’ve also dealt with a child having long-term weakness, fatigue and low-grade fevers (for a year or so). We considered Lyme’s, rheumatic fever (she’d had scarlet fever a year before) and Crohn’s. Ultimately, it was completely crappy tonsils and we got those suckers out. Prior to that, though, my pediatrician told me I had to force her to go to school. Had to. What the writer went through was so much worse, but I can imagine her pain so vividly, because I experienced a fraction of it. So very tough.
Sorry for blathering, just thought I’d chime in that this whole “you’re a nutcase” thing is so very very common. I have more stories, but don’t want to go on!
DO GO ON. I had something similar–trouble breathing, blown off as anxiety. I do have asthma, but it didn’t seem to be an asthma flair. One thing I’ve learned is that if it isn’t a heart attack or blood clot or asthma, doctors will say it’s anxiety. To them, there is no other option, apparently. I wasn’t going to rule out anxiety because a quick internet search revealed a LOT of people who had refused to accept anxiety as a diagnosis, and I figured they can’t all be right. Surely at least some of them really do have anxiety. So that made me think that it’s possible for me to have anxiety and not realize it. But the fact that doctors wouldn’t even consider the possibility it could be something else, when Dr. Google gave me a whole list of not-rare issues that could cause my symptoms . . . it does not inspire confidence.
Good luck!!!!
Difficulty inhaling is a hard one for them, apparently? I’ve gleaned that both from doctors and from web md. I filled in symptom finder for difficulty inhaling and they said “You’re having an anaphylactic episode. Go to the hospital.” To which I was all, “Jeesh, who’s the drama queen here now?”
They haven’t focussed on cardiovascular, I’m guessing because my heart sounded okay and my blood pressure is low. But overall, this CT scan will help me feel better, to eliminate that nothing is seriously wrong with me. Hopefully!
Right now (btw, you said GO ON!), I’m accepting the anxiety thing, even though my life is pretty great right now, because I’m thinking it’s like the ghost-limb phenomenon with amputees. Here me out! My brain thinks I can’t breathe, even though my pulse ox levels are fine. I feel like I’m drowning! But that’s just my dumb brain, just like pain sensations from nonexistent limbs exist for amputees, because the brain is dumb there. So I bought a pulse ox monitor and sit there and watch it and tell my brain to calm the eff down. It’s helping. And it makes me feel like I’m not at fault here, I’m not a hypochondriac, or trying to have panic attacks or freaking out my family. Anyway. We’ll see what the CT scan says later.
Thanks for your support, too. Anxiety is serious and legitimate and makes you feel out of control. Also makes you doubt yourself. Having doctors be dismissive doesn’t help. But you know what helps? The hyphen Toast dot net. So, thanks.
I’m glad it’s helping! You are not a hypochondriac!
I bought one of those things too because I’m terrible at monitoring myself and knowing when to use my inhaler. But then I read that if your oxygen is at 99 you could still be having an asthma attack because that could be a sign of hyperventilation. So . . . mostly it’s calming for me while possibly hiding the fact that I should use my inhaler.
I have had too many CT scans because that it the go-to for my doctors (“Hey, what if I have silent reflux?” “Let’s do a CT scan instead”), but that’s how I found out I have a totally benign cyst on the lining of my heart. That’s fun to throw out at parties.
Please feel free to vent to me whenever. I am hear for all your stories about scary medical issues and about doctors not listening.
Thanks!
Anxiety can, and often does, manifest in physical symptoms, even if you aren’t aware of the anxiety. Unfortunately doctors dismiss this by saying its ‘just’ anxiety or ‘its all in your head’.
No. Its a real symptom that happens to be caused by a mental condition, your symptoms are real and you’re not crazy.
Anxiety also floods your body with adrenaline and all sorts of other hormones, its a physical disease as well as a mental one. (I went through all of this when I had a heart condition and weird blood pressure, but as soon as I mentioned that I was super stressed at the time and had anxiety, they just brushed it off instead of acknowledging that I was having very real heart problems that happened to be caused by stress hormones.)
I worry about that! I mean, I was a little annoyed that they assumed it was anxiety for reasons I won’t get into here, and then refused to consider whether it could be anything else (between heart attack and anxiety, there are many, many possible causes of shortness of breath, some of them quite common*). BUT, now I just have to hope that I don’t ever have any heart issues because, having decided that my issue was anxiety, that’s all they’ll ever think it is.
*I have too many instances within my family of doctors misdiagnosing health issues that I am distrustful of a diagnosis if it seems like the diagnosis is less from my symptoms and more because the doctor just doesn’t want to spend any more time on it.
Doctors can be really tiring after awhile. I’ve gotten to the point at times where I thought I was having a heart attack, but didn’t bother going to ER because I didn’t want to wait around for hours to be told its nothing just go home.
And now I worry that because I tend to ignore all the weird shit that goes on in my body and not go to the doctor, because I’ve has such bad experiences, I’ll end up having serious cancer or something that will be untreatable by the time it’s found because I didn’t go to the doctor until it felt like something ‘real’.
I hope you find a decent doctor and get some solutions (if you’re up for it, try a Chinese medicine doctor or acupuncturist, it sounds hokey but they will take you seriously and at least attempt treatment and it’s what got me better in the end)
No, I’ve been thinking about trying TCM or acupuncture. I figure, even if it’s just a placebo effect that I get from them, I’m cool with that. Whatever works! And I am 100% with you on ignoring stuff, for the exact same reasons.
Anxiety is so weird! I started an anti-anxiety med for insomnia a while back. I had never felt particularly anxious, but I felt so much better with the meds. Turns out for me a lot of anxiety manifests as ALL CONSUMING RAGE, so it’s pretty cool to not be angry all the time.
Good luck with your breathing–I can’t breathe and run at the same time. Not asthma, thousands of dollars of tests, no diagnosis. Doctor advises “don’t run.” Um, thanks?
I had this recently as well – feeling short of breath, went to the GP about it, but various tests (peak flow readings, etc.) suggested my oxygen levels were completely fine and nothing was physically wrong (I was relieved it wasn’t a blood clot). All they could suggest was anxiety.
I have multiple friends with varying levels of disability whose doctors are also mystified by their illnesses. It’s bad enough when its 1. physical (though their doctors have certainly all suggested it’s psychosomatic) and 2. yourself, but when it’s psychiatric and your CHILD, gah, the horror. I can only imagine how awful that would feel.
Right? I think that level of helplessness would be terrifying for a parent.
One of the things that has been so frustrating to me over the past 15 (gah) years is having doctors insist that my symptoms cannot exist/cannot exist at the same time. My hand pain cannot possibly be worst in my index and middle fingers. I cannot have headaches that “fit” over different parts of my head at different times. I shouldn’t need anything stronger than Tylenol just to go to class. You’re on the pill so you can’t be having your period every three weeks/eight weeks and counting (and not on purpose!) It’s like, well, either you’re call me a liar (which 2 dudes did, memorably?) or you’re literally ignoring data I’m giving you because it doesn’t make a unified theory.
Even this week, I can’t have strep because I’m coughing so much! Although luckily, at least the doctor I saw took the attitude that he might as well do a swab since I was there and voila!
I am just an internet commenter and I don’t know you or your medical history, but anecdotally: I had excruciating pain in two of my fingers for years, plus chronic migraine that moves around constantly in my head. My neurologist has worked with me for years trying different therapies and never brushed me off. He didn’t suggest it, but when I stopped eating wheat (trying the Whole30) and my headaches and hand pain went away nearly completely, he said it’s fairly well-known that gluten can cause migraines and other neurological problems. Anyway, you may have tried it already, you may think it’s bunk, etc., but if my dumb anecdata helps one person it’s worth it. I wish you luck!
Yes! I have had this exact problem! They think I’m lying or they ignore it. Sometimes they make assumptions without asking. I had my (former) GI doctor say to me, when I thought I might have X, “Well, it can’t be X, because if you had that, you’d be having symptom Y.” And I had to tell him, “Yeah, I have that. That’s why I thought it might by X.” Like, he just assumed I didn’t have that symptom, without me saying that and without him asking. He had already made up his mind, and that was that.
I am loving the weather in the mornings in Austin, but the afternoons are making me dread the coming heat of summer. I wish we could just skip it.
I’m surprised by how many people in this thread actually actively get off their asses to go to the doctor to try to figure things out. I find the healthcare system so frustrating that I tend to just deal and hope it passes. Which is why you know it’s bad that I sucked it up and set up an appt with an allergist this month to figure out whatever the fuck is causing this fatigue I feel so much of the time. Your comments are not making me hopeful, but at least there’s a test to help pinpoint things vs relying on one person’s opinion.
Someone tell me they’ve found a solution to (possibly allergy related) fatigue? Please?
If you find one, please let me know. Because I have allergies and also fatigue.
Also, I am also dreading the summer. It. will. be. awful.
I got basic allergy testing last yr ar after a horrendous summer. Apparently intense grass allergy can crossreference to a wheat allergy which causes fatigue. So that might help…? Of course, sneezing and sinus infections are pretty fatiguing too, so there is that.
Belle Starr Update: she slept through the night! At ten weeks old, which is way earlier than my human children did.
Yes, but does she have raccoon hands?
Puppies don’t have hands, silly; they have wolf teeth and brave wolf hearts.
I so enjoyed listening to your interview, Nicole, so thanks for being brave and doing that! It was really interesting and edifying.
I am listening to it right now, and it’s really very beautiful. I know Nicole feels somewhat uncomfortable talking about her faith here, for perfectly understandable reasons, but what little I’ve seen of her journey has been both fascinating and enlightening as I’ve been on my weird and confusing journey towards a faith of my own.
I just finished listening to it, too, and something that was an unexpected takeaway for me was her moment of knowing – as someone who was raised in the church, struggled with faith for yearrssss, and who ultimately left, I have never had that moment of knowing, and somehow hearing her talk about it gave me the sense that yes, this is a true and real and valid thing for her (and so many others, of course) and that the absence of faith in this sense is real and true and valid for me. This may be an obvious statement, but it was somehow affirming in a really positive way.
How Trump Happened: I also think there’s a component of Ironic Complacency? Like, everyone spent a lot of time laughing and saying, “YES! Let’s watch this campaign combust and consume!” and “There’s no way this is going to work!”
And then, of course, it did combust and consume but did not die out and it isn’t failing and we keep making jokes (John Oliver’s #MakeDrumpfGreatAgain actually reified Trump’s base) and we’re locked into a “this can’t happen here” but then also there are all these Open Letters to Trump — like those do anything but they don’t, they just induce ::more:: complacency because the reader thinks, “Yep! This’ll do it. There’s no way Trump is coming back from the scathing critique of that guy who publishes photos of eccentrically-dressed New Yorkers!”
I guess why Trump is succeeding is a lot of things, and absolutely racism, of course, but also I think it’s that we didn’t take him seriously enough when we should have and now here we are.
I guess my question then is: if criticizing Trump and pointing out all the ways he’s awful doesn’t work and actually makes his voter base more energized, then what the fuck should we do? Because just saying nothing and silently going to the voting booth doesn’t seem like a good/effective strategy either.
Ye…ah — I’m in your boat, too, with that question.
What might have helped, early on, is to have constantly re-focused any interview with Trump back to issues. It would also require, especially television journalists, empowerment to say, “Okay. Since you’re not going to answer these questions we’re done here.” And the ability to say, “But that’s not the question.” And all of this is, of course, easy for me to say from the well-appointed teachers’ lounge at the Mike Bevel School of Isn’t This Easy?
I read this book on crowds, the psychology of crowds, and it’s terrifying, so I don’t know that I’m recommending it, because it kept me up at night and we’ve only maybe just met (it’s called Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti), but one of the points he makes is how necessary attacks/threats are to crowd cohesion. And Trump supporters are absolutely a kind of crowd, and attacks just galvanize rather than make any effective difference.
So — we’re back to “I don’t know” on what we should do next. But I’m hopeful that someone else might.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay (1841) should be required reading (I read it as a supplement in college). I think back to it all the time.
Passages on Witch Mania–blaming your problems on a a magical Other–seem especially relevant to Trump.
Mmmmhm, I’ve had the “okay, what do we do?” question in my head for months, with no good answers. Like you, I can think of plenty of things that, say, the media should do (Should HAVE DONE, at this point), and other candidates should do, but what have most of us got besides showing up at a protest (if we can) and raging or mocking on the internet? Mocking feels good, if nothing else.
I think that an emotional appeal to his supporters might work, instead of an attack or a rational rebuttal or a cold shoulder (all of which make them feel aggrieved). I am not the one to be able to formulate said emotional appeal, but it might work to appeal to other values that they hold which are contra Trump — religious values maybe? patriotism in what America is actually supposed to be?
Yeah, actually – that’s why I thought this campaign ad from LBJ’s election that’s been going around is pretty effective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiG0AE8zdTU
Honestly I wish the whole world could just adopt a policy of giving Trump the cold shoulder – no media coverage, no jokey late-night bits, no validation of his policies as legitimate. Because for him, any attention is good attention, and any criticism just fuels more bombastic hateful comments that inflame his supporters. When people laugh at him it doesn’t affect him. He punches back and he does so without the constraints of common decency or humanity. And his supporters just get madder
I don’t agree that a complete cold shoulder would work – certainly don’t validate his policies as legitimate (because they aren’t and that would simply be bad journalism), but just ignoring him seems just as dangerous because then there would be no mechanism in place to point out that oh wow his policies are wrong and bad.
mass media did mostly ignore him for the first half of the primary; for months he was treated as Carson sans the fun theories about pyramids; he didn’t have policies to discuss and accordingly nobody did. Wishing upon an all-powerful conspiracy of media elites to suppress his campaign by replicating that breakout success now that he’s picking the official appointees’ ribcages out of his teeth seems like several layers of goofy
I think it’s pretty clear I wasn’t being 100% serious in the above statement? I mean, it would be lovely if everyone stopped talking about Trump and he just disappeared from the public discourse and went back to yelling at people on reality TV, but that’s obviously not going to happen.
I am legitimately distressed by the way that the media has been covering him, but like most of the world I don’t have an easy solution for it. Trump’s name dominates every news article and all the pieces about how the GOP is scrambling to stop him just seem to reinforce the idea that his nomination is inevitable. I wish that more prominent conservatives would condemn him publicly or that someone with some real intelligence and charisma could get up on a debate stage and eviscerate him, but at this point I really don’t know what could work to stop him.
the issue is the the prominent, charismatic conservatives rallying against him all blatantly think like this, which sort of renders their political savvy and high-flown rhetoric irrelevant. We’ll be seeing the same thing going into the campaign if Clinton wins – this isn’t a debate between people who all fundamentally want the same thing and disagree about how to get it, this is discrete subsets of the American electorate voting in their self-interest and fuck the other guy.
Holy shit. He literally said poor people deserve to die. And in that many words. Hooooly shit.
Also as far as the early months of the primaries go, that’s when everyone on the Internet was just laughing at Trump saying ‘ha, he’ll never win, what a goof’ which was clearly a really stupid, dangerous, thing to do. I wish journalists would now refuse to cover Trump based on the fact that he is totally unqualified to hold public office and that his hateful and violent rhetoric has no place in our political discourse/should not be broadcast to an international audience. But again, obviously that ain’t gonna happen.
I spent the first few months of his current campaign pretending he wasn’t happening, and trying to will the rest of the world into doing the same. But then the media was all “everybody’s talking about Donald Trump! What makes this man so irresistible to the American people?” “Well, you keep fucking talking about him, for one.”
idg how it’s so utterly mysterious to people that the guy who goes to shitty rustbelt towns and promises to drive out all the immigrants and force the corporations to bring semiskilled labor back gets a following, or the guy who follows up a decade and a half of everyone on TV telling people that the crusade against a few thousand jihadists in pickup trucks on the far side of the world justifies totally upending American society with a ‘well, let’s get rid of all the muslims!’ gets serious credence from people whose knowledge of the world comes from the newspaper and Fox, or they’ll get out the vote for the guy who makes replacing all the legs that got left behind in Iraq a pillar of his primary.
grouchy working-class factory guys didn’t just stop existing sometime in the eighties, they’ve always been an extremely high-turnout bloc of voters who likes to spite-vote against ivory tower types who call them stupid and backwards; the Democrats dropped them and labor decades ago, they’ve spent the last few elections growing increasingly disenchanted with the neocons running the Republican party who’ve fucked everything up, and lo and behold suddenly a new con comes in and steals their hearts with insult-comedy nativist trustbusting
yeah, exactly, I live in the most educated-liberal bubble and I know these people. and people who think politics is a big shitshow and as long as voting changes nothing why not vote for the entertainingly awful guy? I’m a little surprised that Trump, the joke candidate because he was just a silly celebrity personality at that point, also turned out to be the racial resentment lightning rod candidate, but the surprise from people who follow politics professionally is like…dang, you MUST know these people too, right?
(ETA: which is why Bouie’s writing is so excellent & insightful on this stuff; he is never surprised. Dude pays attention.)
yeah if I had to name someone in touch with the motivations of working-class Republicans six months ago Trump would not ever have been a name to come up
This has been a problem for democrats for decades– you have two guys on stage, and one of them is saying “hrm, if we raise the social security payroll threshhold above $118K then the fund will be solvent for a projected 75 additional years…” and then you have the other guy going “HEY, DOES ANYONE IN HERE LIKE SHOOTING GUNS?” and lo and behold, people pick the second guy. And instead of trying to be less boring, we dig in our heels thinking that if only we could better explain how the new tax bracket is going to work, people will finally understand. And if they still don’t understand, it’s probably because they’re dumb, because they surely read all the same papers and have all the same conversations that we do, and that’s how we came to understand?
Thiiiiiiiiiiis. I notice this tendency in myself too, to be honest, but it’s frustrating as hell. Liberals need to get it into their heads that a) sometimes you can explain something in detail and people will get what you’re saying and they’ll STILL disagree with you, and b) detailed and well-thought-out policy is…not what people vote on. (Not even liberals! You cannot tell me that the Bernie vs. Hillary thing is based on policy.)
So true that a large deal of Americans vote based on their emotions, especially which candidate is “selling hope”, or which candidate they’d “like to have a beer with”, and that is certainly present on both sides of the aisle! Anti-intellectualism is rampant in the States.
Though, I must say, as a woman voting for Bernie due to my leftist beliefs, I am frustrated by people pinning the Bernie support *only* (or even *mostly*) on sexism or something to do with their personality. Clinton is quite a moderate Democratic, and Sanders is an extremely progressive Independent (I still consider him an Independent, as the switchover to the Dems was purely for the feasibility of his campaign). The difference between their stances IS large enough to account for quite a few people who are voting based on policy.
Oh, there are definitely people who make decisions based on policy, and I don’t mean to imply that Bernie and Hillary are the same, policy-wise. But that is not entirely what the fight is about. And once you get into Republicans vs. Democrats, policy is not even *most* of what the fight is about.
True true!
I don’t think it’s so much that people vote only on emotion as that the average person is really bad at guessing how policies are going to impact their own lives or weighing short term vs. long-term priorities? I mean I spend a lot of time reading about current events and politics, but I’m in the small minority. Even with big policies like the ACA– you get a ton of people who are like “I’m not on Obamacare, what I have is a state program that didn’t start until a few years after that!” And you want to shake them by the shoulders because it’s the same damn thing. And most policy isn’t even that clear cut, it’s more like you’re living your daily life maybe switching on the news from time to time and one day you look up and your kid is coming home from school with a 20-year-old textbook or you fuck up your car on a pothole and you go “how did this happen?” Oh, were you too busy to find out what was on page 247 of the budget? Actually yeah, probably. It’s way easier to be like “hmm, fewer taxes and more guns today, or a complicated series of regulations that might clean up the financial sector by 2030? Easy choice.”
Not only that, but I’m not sure how possible it is to weigh alternatives. I mean, take the choice presented to us as liberals in the 2016 primaries (I’m assuming here, but I feel like it’s a pretty safe assumption). Do you prefer a white woman with a lot of policy experience and what frankly qualify as center-right policies in the rest of the world who strikes fear into the hearts of Republicans just by existing? Or do you prefer a white guy running as an actual honest-to-god socialist but who doesn’t quite seem to get race and gender issues? If Bernie is elected, how many of his policies will ever see reality? If Hillary is elected, how likely is it that we’ll end up in another war? How much will having a woman as President matter, as a symbol? How much will having a socialist as President matter, as a symbol? How will either of them handle whatever potential curveballs get thrown at them (hopefully nothing like 9/11, but you never know)? And how the hell can you weigh all those options when you’ve got a life to live? And that’s only one race – what about all the downticket races?
Everyone votes on a simplified set of issues, because it’s the only way to avoid being paralyzed by the possibilities, and not all of those issues (or even most of them, I think, for most people, conscious or not) are purely policy issues. But Dems tend to act as if the policy is the only thing that should matter, so they lose by not even getting into the game on things like emotional appeal and the power of symbolism. If people are hurting, they want to know how you are going to make it stop. Save the details for people who have time for them.
“But Dems tend to act as if the policy is the only thing that should matter, so they lose by not even getting into the game on things like emotional appeal and the power of symbolism.”
Well put, that’s exactly it.
Great points! I completely agree with that, although I feel like the nitty gritty, complex nature of legislature is part of why I do see people voting based on likeability/relatability. It’s easier than actually doing the hard work of diving into the policy. Then again, unfortunately I think I know a lot of people who are complacent about their own political ignorance, and openly admit to voting based on who they like. 🙁
Toasties, you might like the “Countable” app for smart phones! I’m not much of an app person, but it’s been really useful to me – you can track your representatives’ votes, read summaries or the full text of upcoming bills, and learn what bills are passing/not passing in the legislative branch!
“they’ve always been an extremely high-turnout bloc of voters who likes to spite-vote against ivory tower types who call them stupid and backwards”
I have a lot of extended family that falls into the big umbrella of semi-skilled labor from economically not-so-great towns. I really am not sure liberals are aware how much they’re shooting themselves in the foot for being shitty about that?
I have heard some really out there nonsense from enlightened liberal types about, for example, how things like environmental disasters in West Virginia aren’t really a big deal, because anybody smart would have gotten out years ago, and only the inbred hicks are left, and who cares about them~. I guess it’s not really surprising to me that people would respond really poorly to that, you know?
Oof yeah I remember hearing that stuff too– I don’t even have any ties to WV and it’s still sort of stuck in my craw. Because if you’re near the top of the pile in an economy that extracts resources from poor communities, ships the profits elsewhere, and leaves the people whose labor makes it all possible with little except poisoned drinking water– maybe don’t turn around and tell those people to go fuck themselves? That sounds like step one or maybe even step zero in the instructions for “being even a little bit progressive.” Like, not that I ever want to understand even part of the reason why somebody would vote for Trump, but if your day-to-day life is hard and both parties are basically suggesting that you deserve it, maybe, just maybe, we could anticipate that you will use your vote to say “no, fuck YOU.”
I think there is an element of all the ‘liberal’ jokes and mocking of Trump just galvanising his supporters and making them more devoted and willfully ignorant because they feel like their being attacked
I don’t think that’s really anything unique to Trump, though. Everybody tends to dig in their heels a bit when someone makes fun of something they admire or value. The real problem is that the GOP is basically just a massive conspiracy theory and persecution complex masquerading as a political party at this point. Just like you can’t convince a moon landing conspiracy theorist that they’re wrong, you can’t convince Trump’s supporters that they’re backing a racist, bigoted showman (and actually, a good chunk of his support seems to be because of those qualities). Regardless of how rational your arguments against him are, the simple fact that you don’t agree means you’re part of the very system he’s promised to go up against.
After 50+ years of racial politics, denigrating the government they work in, and denying the very concept of a shared understanding of reality, Republicans have finally caught the tiger by the tail. Their party looks to be on the verge of being consumed by the fear, hate, and willful ignorance they’ve spent so many years stoking to a rolling boil. Even if Trump doesn’t get the nomination, the next most likely candidate is Ted Cruz, who isn’t so much “better” as he is “the same thing, but wrapped in a weaselier, less personally likable yet slightly more politically palatable package”.
It’s unique in that Trump has built his base on a focused appeal to the leftover people the existing party establishments have rejected – attacks on him from those fronts (or anyone who’s interpreted as coming from there) are much more directly interpreted as attacks on them than simple jabs at some celebrity they admire, especially when they’re mostly couched in the same language people have used for decades to dismiss white trash from rotten industrial towns out of hand.
The Trumpists are the children of the same people who fled the Democrats over civil rights and the abandonment of labor, now fleeing the Republicans over offshoring and crippling their sons and husbands in wars over private grudges. Nobody wants ’em, but Trump does, and if he’s the only one then what’s it matter that he models himself on Mussolini.
I keep comparing him to the thing that happened my senior year of high school in which we all (or, at least a simple majority of us) voted to have Party Like It’s 1999 for our class song, but when it actually won there was all sorts of outcry that it was only a joke and that was definitely not what we wanted for our class song and could we please have a do-over (spoiler alert: our class song ended up being Another Brick In The Wall Part II), except that we don’t get takesy-backsies in the Presidential election.
I’ve been trying to articulate this, but in addition to the ironic complacency, I feel like there’s an element of this tendency to separate political rhetoric (or other types of rhetoric) from people’s character, like there’s this Platonic version of people that exists as good or bad separate from how people speak and act. At least from celebrities, there’s been some “Well, when you know him he’s really a great guy,” (and even some of his supporters interviewed on Samantha Bee last night had a touch of that defense). It’s this twisted form of civil discourse where it’s like you aren’t allowed to say that actually someone who says the things Trump says is not in an overlapping Venn diagram with “great guy,” “nice person” or “cerebral thinker.” I don’t know if this is from overvaluation of performative punditry, or because the definition of satire has gotten so watered down that Daniel Tosh telling an audience member it would be funny if she were raped is, like, totally satirical, dude. (I mean, I also feel this a little bit when people speak with huge amounts of horror at possibly judging your friends/refusing to be friends with someone based on their political views, but it seems so obvious to me that most political views are also questions of moral/ethics/principle.)
Sorry, this feels very rambly! But I do think there’s way too much tendency to insist that on some level, the performative choices you make are not demonstrations of values.
Yes! Thank you! It’s so bizarre to me when people act like it’s shallow and bigoted to not be friends with people who have certain political views. It’s not like you ship Harry/Hermione and they ship Ron/Hermione, or they root for the Giants and you root for the Dodgers. It’s like, they think 13-year-olds should be forced to bear their rapists’ offspring, and you think not.
“There’s been debate about whether “Silicon Valley” the show should have more diversity than Silicon Valley the place, but Berg argues that a show made for entertainment not meant to be a “social-action wing” or be a force of change — the show is just satirizing the reality that the tech industry itself needs to take care of.”
This is such a cop-out, to me. You have a platform with this well-funded popular TV show on a big network, and if you choose not to improve representation then you are perpetuating the problem.
THANK YOU. You’re not a documentary, guys. You can have dramatically increased representation on your show and still satirize the problems in the industry. “Welp, that’s actually Silicon Valley’s problem, though, nothing we can do about it over here in TV land” is a spectacularly lame, ill-conceived, and insulting response to the issue.
Wouldn’t it be cool for once to have a show that gets remarked upon for having MORE female and minority representation than the industry/world/city it depicts?
This reminds me of that RBG quote that goes something like, “The right number of women justices would be 9. There have been 9 men for centuries.”
YESSS. “People ask me sometimes, ‘When do you think it will be enough? When will there be enough women on the court?’ And my answer is when there are nine.”
(I’m a lawyer, and I’m planning to frame an illustration of her with this quote over it to have on my desk in perpetuity.)
I don’t want to hear a white guy make jokes about how all he sees are white guys – that’s not satire, that’s hanging a lantern on the problem and feinting towards insightful commentary. Give me a character that’s literally any other combination of demographics to make jokes about how all they see are white guys AND speak to their experience as an “other” – hit from both sides.
Someone tell this guy that entertainment doesn’t exist in a vacuum! REPRESENTATION MATTERS.
“In America, racism is a default setting. To do nothing, to go along with the market, to claim innocence or neutrality, is to inevitably be a cog in the machine of racist hierarchy.”
From Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article on Nina Simone’s face. This.
That STRANDED WITH POLAR BEARS story is one wild ride, holy crap.
the kind of writing you’d usually see across from an illustration of some guy shooting Nazis on a yacht
Is that Leonardo DiCaprio?
My irony sensor has failed. Is this a real thing? If it is, can we have more?
Oldschool men’s magazines are the highest artform and beyond irony
look at that. They probably hadn’t even invented sarcasm yet when that got published
Hahahahahahahahaha…what even is the dude in the background doing? Like, your bro is over there getting murdered by rabid turtles, and you can’t even keep your balance? Get it together, Plaid Dad.
Turtle attacks was a whole baffling genre unto itself, apparently
And when you get tired of the same-ol same-ol and wanna mix things up a little:
Reaction to the first image: “Dude. Don’t bring a knife to a turtle-fight.” #n0ob
Reaction to the second image: “Jesus man, pull the trigger before that creature rips your shirt into even more unmanly tatters!”
… are those pangolins?
They are…must have run out of more legitimately dangerous critters. Weird they didn’t focus more on the sticky tongue aspect…I mean…this is pulp, right?
These things are… not unconnected.
They’re super disconnected. The Trump people being shouty and punchy at Hispanics and Muslims and African-Americans are not, I feel confident in baselessly asserting, watching Tiny Fey’s direct to Netflix sitcom starring a female protagonist recovering from abuse inflicted by a white psuedo-christian demagogue.
I don’t think Emma meant that Trump fans have absorbed their values from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, just that all racism is connected because it’s a systemic problem.
Why should the existence of more extreme racism discount critiques of racial caricature on television? No one is saying ‘well obviously Tina Fey and Trump pose an equal threat to society’ just because they aren’t keen on a whitewashed indigenous character.
No, but lite racism in popular comedy definitely helps normalize racism on a wider scale. The Native American storyline in Kimmy almost exclusively invoked cultural stereotypes and was trivializing of Native identity. If a predominantly white TV show did that with my ethnicity I’d be pretty offended.
I feel confident in asserting that you are willfully misunderstanding the point.
Yeah, except that casual racism in the media is completely connected to serious and violent racism in the culture at large. We marginalize people of color, we minimize the slights against them, we don’t see them represented in the media we consume, and so it becomes easier and easier to dehumanize them, to see them as “other” and to then, if not commit violence against them personally, to be silent and complicit as violence is committed against them by private individuals and by the state.
I KNEW IT. As soon as I read her little girl had a red face, and what seemed to be an ear infection, I was like, I bet she’s got some weird form of strep. I KNEW WATCHING MEDICAL MYSTERIES WOULD PAY OFF SOMEDAY.
I am continually astounded at the way in which so many whites, white men, and working class white men don’t seem to understand that respect is a two way street. They assume others will automatically respect them because ‘white’ and ‘man’, and feel entitled to said respect, but don’t seem to understand that they might need to return that respect on a deeper level than merely appearing to be tolerant. The woman cited in Bouie’s article echoes the sentiments I hear from a lot of working class whites in upstate NY: empathy is replaced by fear and assumption of ill intent. They can’t even take the time to talk to or meet the people they’re afraid of.
And it is this that keeps so many white people absolutely beholden to the Republican party, which wrings their votes with promises of restoration of some pristine myth of the past, while gutting the infrastructure that would provide them a better life. They’ve been conned by their own prejudices, and Trump is the latest con artist.
Ugh, this sounds so much like my future stepfather in law. He is ACA-enrolled, pro-choice, and nonreligious, but as far as I can tell votes Republican because… black people? It’s beyond my understanding.
Yep. And so much of the handwringing and flailing about how America has allegedly gone to hell and a hand basket is actually about the chipping away of the unearned privilege that white men have benefited from for so long. (Obviously they still have unearned privilege. Just slightly less than a few decades ago). But heaven forbid anyone enact policies that actually would make your life better.
Always my favourite quote about respect: http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/115247…
Oh man I was just thinking about this sort of thing yesterday, because I heard someone pull out that “respect is something you have to earn etc. etc.” line and I was like wait, we are using those words in totally different ways, what you call respect is what I would call trust or admiration. This puts it way more succinctly than I was able to.
Those kind of people also often expect you to respect them without them trying (because they’re used to being respected just for being a white man usually), but you have to earn their respect because you are somehow underneath them, often because of your age, gender or race.
And what they mean is ‘the group you belong to doesn’t get my intrinsic respect, so you as an individual have to defy my expectations of your group in order for me to respect you as a person’
Yeah, to me respect is more like being conscientious of other people, not being loud and obnoxious in public places, offering to lend a hand if someone looks like they need it. And those are things that you automatically do for everyone. You definitely do NOT need to prove anything before I’m going to be courteous and compassionate towards you, and in my mind if you’re withholding that behavior, you’re just being rude.
And of course there are levels of trust that people need to earn; I’m not going to jump in a car with anybody off the street, or let any random one of my coworkers reorganize my desk. But you can’t get that just by being in a certain demographic or projecting an air of authority, either?
This is how I make the distinction: I respect Donald Trump’s basic human worth. As a human being, he has the right to food, shelter, education, healthcare, and equal treatment under the law, same as anybody else. I do not respect Donald Trump as an individual, because everything he chooses to do is vile.
I was just thinking of that too!
YUP this is the first thing I thought of too
That quote puts it well. On exactly the same line, philosophers* have distinguished between recognition respect (which you do not have to earn and cannot forfeit) and appraisal respect (which reflects your actions and achievements and which you can lose), exactly to protect folks from this kind of shifting between standards when it suits them.
It’s been one of the more powerful distinctions I’ve learned in philosophy grad school so far.
[*Specifically, Stephen Darwall introduced this particular way of naming the distinction. I’m never sure how much detail non-professional philosophers want in these things, but I figure I should give credit where it’s due.]
Saw this video this morning (posted along side this very Trump article). Addresses the very issue about what’s the matter with white people: https://www.facebook.com/reggiehoodofficial/video…
whites, white men, and working class white men
You know, I suspect the reason you’ve specified working-class white men here is because middle-class white men still do get that automatic respect. I certainly don’t think they are better than working-class white men at understanding that they don’t automatically deserve it.
Holy shit is this true.
What bugs me the most about Silicon Valley isn’t even the gender stuff so much as the bizarre 1950s-era stereotype character that is Jian Yang. Like, holy crap, I kept expecting that to turn into some kind of Lee in East of Eden situation, but nope, just a racist caricature!
Yeah, I posted defending the show above, but I do not understand what they are trying to do with Jian Yang at all.
Yeah, Jian Yang is… tough. I really want them to be doing some kind of long game with him, in which he will become a more developed character, but it hasn’t happened yet. I love the scenes with him and TJ Miller. I keep hoping there’s more there… and yet…
Bless Javi- he is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met and I felt so awful that THAT episode of The 100 was his first and he had to deal with death threats for it. He’s a fantastic choice to run the Xena reboot and also he posts lots of pictures of his new baby on Facebook and she’s sooooooo cute.
ART CRAWL!
Middleman FOR LIFE.
YES. It was soooo good!!!
I feel I must defend Silicon Valley.
1) They do comment on the lack of women. The first season they had a bit about how parties have to hire women to be there (again, this is satire sooooooo). This past season had a subplot about hiring a female engineer: 1) she was super hilarious and played a great prank on the rest of the guys, 2) there was a really funny plotline where everyone thought she’d be friends with the other woman, because of course, which she ripped them a new asshole for, 3) she had a great line about “I’m not a “female engineer,” I’m an engineer.” I know it was a subplot, but they’re lampooning the very real ridiculousness that is SV.
2) 50% of the writing staff are women. I know, I know, it should be higher but at least they’re at 50% and I think that should be celebrated just a little.
I am a woman in engineering and am super sensitive to gender issues in engineering and tech… and I just absolutely LOVE Silicon Valley. I agree with you whole heartedly. Also, the Laurie Bream character is so perfect – exactly like so many of the woman I interact with daily.
And I loved the joke in the second season when the ONE female on the Pied Piper team was also the SCRUM-master and Zach Woods character tried hitting on her by telling her she looked “SCRUM-ptious” – I died!
I do think the criticism about the Asian character is on-point.
omg Laurie Bream’s character is great. I work in the non-profit sector and run into weirdo development people like her a lot and it is PAINFUL.
Zach Woods’ character in general is amazing. On par with Jonah from Veep for me. Also I totally want to sleep with them?
The criticism of the Asian character is 100% correct. I…don’t know how or why that got past the writers room.
Agreed. I feel a little bad jumping on every thread to proselytize this show, but HAVE YOU HEARD THE GOOD WORD OF OUR LORDS AND SAVIORS THOMAS MIDDLEDITCH/ZACH WOODS/ TJ MILLER/ KUMAIL NANJIANI/ MARTIN STARR?
Also ok I’m confused about something from the polar bear piece– I’m not questioning the dude’s survival skills and know-how, this might just be a reporting thing– but I don’t get why he immediately crashed the blades into the water? It sounded like he was making a smooth landing on water but then was like, “blades can chop of my head” and so tilted the thing to stall the engine, but couldn’t he have… landed, gathered his survival stuff, and waited for the fuel to run out? Or landed, gathered his survival stuff, and then tip the plane?
Again, not that I’m questioning his gumption, there was probably a good reason that just wasn’t communicated here.
I assumed that the helicopter wasn’t equipped for a water landing, so while the landing was smooth, it was going down either way. I think the choice was between scrambling out of the sinking craft with the blades spinning or the engine stalled.
But also the piece made it sound like stalling the engine made it sink faster, so idk?
Basically, flying a helicopter is like flying a deli-slicer set on one end. If he’d come down on land, what you’re describing would have worked, but coming down on water, the cockpit’s gonna sink, and then you’ve got the deli-slicer on all sides as you try to exit. Also, because they’re really long, the blades of a helicopter start to angle down as they slow down, while still spinning fast enough to decapitate you. So you get more trapped the longer you wait.
Autorotation, which he did when the engine failed, is literally falling with style. You can fall without style — lose control of the angle at which the air passes through the blades, potentially flip over and land deli-slicers-first — or you can fall WITH style. You’re gonna fall either way. Autorotation allows you to make sure you fall in the direction you intend, toward that bigger iceberg, and in the orientation you intend. It’s possible you may fall a little faster, I’m not sure, but not falling head-first into deli-slicers seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.
Ah, the angling-downward of the blades is what I was missing. That makes sense. Thanks for the info!
Oh god, why do we even have helicopters?
I know very little about helicopters, but I don’t know that they float on water, and he couldn’t find a good ice floe to land on. The helicopter was going to sink anyway, and maybe getting out while it was upright would have been too dangerous. That’s sort of how I interpreted it, but you’re right, it’s not totally clear.
I don’t watch Silicon Valley so maybe I am missing something but since it is, as I understand, fictional TV and not a documentary, I don’t quite see why they are obliged to put in real life footage. I know they want to “satirize” which means they just don’t want to bring up the other issues, but take responsibility for the choices you make in the fictional worlds you are writing.
They’re not obliged, but the scenes from Disrupt did somewhat depend on having a large crowd… maybe renting a giant hall and filling it with extras wasn’t on the table?
I’m guessing it was just a lot cheaper to send out a day crew to an existing event than to actually stage one. A big part of the explosion of reality tv was that it is cheap as f*ck to make.
TechCrunch Disrupt is quite possibly the most obnoxiously startup named name that has ever happened.
it’s so obnoxious i didn’t even realise it was real thing until
today
Me too! I thought it was made up for the show like Hooli.
TechCrunch in general is…pretty obnoxious.
I’d eat it as a sugary breakfast cereal, though.
Only if it could be absolutely guaranteed to be free of jagged metal o’s and flesh eating bacteria.
I’m SO bad at listening to podcasts because of my attention span (I feel like I should be reading something so I’ll start to read something while listening and find myself tuning out what I’m listening to :X) BUT oh my goodness, Nicole, thank you for the podcast! I’ve been keeping an eye out for your conversion story and it was so worth the wait and better to hear you talk about it than read it, I think. Spirituality is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I’m usually pretty atheist but lately I’ve been feeling drawn to things of faith as maybe a way to find myself out of the terrible depression I’ve been in lately. Which is a mixed feeling for me because I don’t want to feel like I’m trying to use it for something other than it is, but also it has to be meaningful that I keep getting drawn to it? I don’t know, it’s a weird thing that I haven’t talked about with anyone so it’s still just a jumble of ideas in my head.
Oh my God you guys. I just spent two hours at two different registrar’s offices to finally get my actual literal diploma – and then we couldn’t find one of my grades. Or rather, there was a grade and a date, but there was also a question mark and I couldn’t for the life of me remember what course this would have been. I knew I hadn’t received a grade in this subject from the two professors available at my faculty and I almost started crying because I thought I might need to take another course and therefore couldn’t graduate.
AND THEN we remembered that it was a course taught by a professor who is not a regular at my faculty. So I’ll receive my diploma in a few days!!
Looking at my undergraduate transcript many years after graduation was really kind of a revelation for me, in part because I got credit for things that I did outside of class, and later couldn’t remember exactly what those things were, and in part because my grades just seemed sort of random in terms of what I got, As and Bs and the occasional C. (I got one D, an algebra course which was taught by an instructor who did an absolutely shitty job of explaining the syllabus and grading system and took no responsibility for the same; I retook the course over the summer with a much-more-plugged-in instructor, and got an A without much difficulty.) I’m sure that at least some of it had to do with my relative interest in the course subjects, but probably much of it had to do with my tumultuous emotional state over those four years; getting through them and getting my degree at the same time was like some madcap, get-me-to-the-church-on-time chase scene that ends with the car screeching over the finish line with one or more wheels missing.
1) Charles Dance goes by Charlie?! I am flummoxed, outraged, and amused all at once. Imagine a graduate of the Assassin’s Guild using that nickname.
2) I am so over these mfers at my husband’s company. When they offered him the job in CT, they said we could live anywhere in CT we wanted. He’s working from home, visiting customers, and his territory is the whole state. So why come now that I have an offer on the table from an org in NYC are they backtracking andn insisting we live in Hartford? TF, y’all? It’s not as though I didn’t apply for jobs in a lower cost of living area. But guess what? The offer I actually have isn’t there! If you aren’t going to raise his party so I can be a spouse of leisure, then we need a second income. So deal with it.
(The actor-who-sometimes-fills-in-so-Vetinari-can-go-on-vacation’s name is Charlie, so I actually find this really pleasing.)
Nicole, I’m so sorry you’re having a hard week, and even sorrier that it has to do with your kid’s health. I can’t imagine anything scarier or more frustrating.
I listened to the podcast last night on my way home and it was [100 emoji].
Talking about your faith, especially when you don’t come from a tradition where that is A Thing, and especially especially when you expect people to doubt or mock you for it, is so hard and brave and vulnerable. The whole episode was really great and thought-provoking; thanks for sharing it with us.
Also, can I say here how much I love that whenever I read/listen to an interview with Mallory or Nicole, there is p much always something about how much the one speaking loves and respects the other one? Listening to Nicole talk about Mallory and Nikki with such affection and admiration was so great, and I think that attitude among our fearless leaders is a key factor in the wonderful commenting environment we have here.
All I could think of while reading the Marooned Among the Polar Bears article was Troubling a Star and Vicky Austin being stuck on an iceberg (obviously that was fictional and at the South Pole and polar bears weren’t a threat but STILL).
Yes! Semi-related: Vicky Austin’s story started so idyllic and pastoral and then really went off the rails with all the talking to dolphins and getting caught up in international intrigue. Also semi-related: I haven’t read the Vicky Austin books since I was a teen and I’m afraid to re-read them because I was MAJORLY Team Zach and I have a feeling I would be retroactively ashamed of myself if I read them now.
I still love A Ring of Endless Light with my whole heart and soul, but yeah, Zachary is not great; to be fair though, all of Vicky’s love interests in RoEL are flawed (though I am very firmly Team Adam). I also only read the first few books of the Austin series years after reading RoEL and TaS, so the adventures of RoEL and TaS seemed totally reasonable to me (especially compared to the Time Quintet).
I feel like so much of my Adam and Zach feels are colored by The Arm of the Starfish and A House Like a Lotus (which I really loved, but have a feeling at least some of the handling of lesbian + restorative sex with adult man would be pretty hard to handle.) Starfish making me much more sympathetic to Adam and Lotus making me that much less patient with Zach.
But as I got older, I found several of L’Engle’s “good” men to be kind of self-righteous and sanctimonious. Even Calvin 🙁
I apparently have L’Engle THOUGHTS! I needed to say.
I actually never read A House Like a Lotus and all I really remember from Arm of the Starfish is there was some kind of hot babe causing trouble and there was a plane crash at one point? I looooooved A Ring of Endless Light (and will never stop being outraged at the TV adaptation starring Mischa Barton and Dean from Gilmore Girls) and also the one before that where they travel the country in an RV or whatever, and Zach was the troubled bad boy of my dreams in both of those.
I read Ring of Endless Light a couple times a year. It’s my go-to when battling major depression. I still love it fiercely, and love Adam. I was never Team Zach, so I can’t speak to that. I find him infuriating and juvenile and selfish. I read Troubling a Star (but literally skipped most of the non-Adam parts).
YES! Both for the association and someone else who has read that one. Prince Otto and Esteban and ADAM (and okay, I love Vicky, but at some point the “I’m so awkward and uncool” shtick whilst constantly being competed over by guys has to be let go, yes?)
But her 12 year old sister is the sexy one, remember.
I never understood why Vicky, who could kythe with dolphins, didn’t spend more time calling to the nearby marine mammals asking for help returning to her people or sending them a message. Someone on a boat will notice if a pod of marine mammals approaches and acts differently than usual.
Nicole, thanks for talking about your conversion. I’ve been thinking lately about reconnecting with religion in some form, and it’s really nice to hear an honest conversation about it — even if Christianity isn’t what I’m drawn to, I think the underlying discussion is really important and it’s honestly too bad that you have to worry about people criticizing you over it.
YAY Kimmy Schmidt! BOO racism in Kimmy Schmidt.
Also, I was looking through my childhood report cards this morning and because I was home schooled my mom wrote most of them from 6th-11th grades. According to her, I was lazy.
Thanks ma.
Hot Wheels new releases include cars for Black Widow, Maz (Star Wars), and an absolutely EPIC Wonder Woman car.
welp, guess I’ve got birthday presents for the dudes sorted.
OMG yes, yes you do.
That wonder woman is gorgeous.
I’m serial posting because this PS Mag piece on the horror that is school BMI checks seems up Toastie’s alleys. (Some references to eating disorders, so proceed with caution if that’s an issue for you.)
After reading this, I discovered that my state doesn’t mandate BMI report cards, but my district does measure & track BMI, though they have the good sense to do it privately. I’m still not happy about it and will def be opting my kids out of that bullshit. Particularly since I just learned that my kids’ future elementary school gives them all of 10 minutes to eat lunch, so this seems like a nice CYA way to say, “oh, we care about health!” while everything they do undermines, you know, actual healthy habits like eating at a normal human pace.
Oh my god, I remember those damn caliper tests. We all had to line up in gym class and the gym teacher would do them in front of all the other kids and then pull out certain kids and talk to them about how their BMI was too high. I was one of those kids and all it had me doing was pinching at myself critically for DECADES.
This was back in elementary school and it makes me sad and furious that this is something we’re still putting kids through.
I remember those too! And once, my gym teacher pulled me aside and said “150 pounds looks good on you now, but it won’t in a few years.”
WHAT THE HELL.
Oh god, horrible. My schools didn’t do this, but I remember with perfect clarity the first time a kid in 5th grade starting comparing kids’ weight on the school bus. (“You’re average, I’m average, but REDACTED is fat.”) These pronouncements take on a huge weight to impressionable kids and I just can’t get over adults thinking this is a good idea.
I only had one gym teacher who pulled that shit. I was a super-skinny kid and I was STILL appalled.
Whoa. This was definitely not a thing at my elementary schools (and I didn’t know it was a thing now, but I don’t have kids or hang out with kids, so I’m not particularly informed). We just had scoliosis tests. I do remember being a senior in high school AP Biology and having to partner up to measure each other’s BMI as part of a lab, which was awkward enough – I can’t imagine having to deal with that earlier in school!
I hated caliper day SO MUCH MORE than stupid dodgeball day and I SUPER hated dodgeball day.
Seriously, how did the bullies manage to find the balls that were even a teensy bit more deflated than the others so it would hurt more when they pegged you with them while the teacher wasn’t looking. Also I don’t know if they practiced but their aim and throwing speed were v. good.
My elementary school gym class was some sort of Lord of the Flies horrorshow pretty much.
What was best was the combination of being fat-shamed, and then having gym time full of crap like dodgeball where you got shamed for being tagged out early and then just sat there the rest of the time. Way to make the concept of “exercise” seem like nothing but boredom, pain and humiliation.
(And climbing the rope. The motherfucking rope. I think it was actually the worst when the teacher made the others “encourage” me. Not because they were sarcastic; because they weren’t.)
I still have a lot of feels. 🙁
We did the BMI test all through high school (4 years of PE required), but at least after freshman year you could pick units and do something less horrible than dodgeball. Although the teacher I had for step/kickboxing “self-defense”/yoga was a pretty horrible person.
I can’t even imagine! I had 1 required year of HS gym and, as it was, my schedule was so crammed with requirements that I ended up having to take the required health class in summer school.
The rope was also terrible. I was lucky with that because if you couldn’t do it our ES gym teacher was like, “okay, why don’t some kids skin the cat [author’s note: WTF] with their time on the rope.”
That part of the President’s Physical Fitness Challenge where you had to do a pull up? I swear I had nightmares for a while about just hanging there struggling to move AT ALL while people were waiting for my time to run out so they could take their turns.
As it turns out, women have better lower body strength vs. men’s upper body strength so it’s a rigged game anyhow.
Oh God yes. I feel sick just thinking about it.
Ten minutes??!!
I KNOW. And this is one of the better elementary schools in our district.
I think in high school we got 25 minutes, but there were so many of us the first lunch period started at 10:35 and the last one at 1:35.
Also, the “healthy” line with salad and sandwich making stuff always took about 15 minutes to get through, as opposed to the multiple other lines (where at least once they served scalloped potatoes as an entry with mashed potatoes the side dish.)
a large longitudinal study of adolescents, Neumark-Sztainer and colleagues found that parents who knew their kids were overweight did not start serving more fresh produce, nor did they encourage more exercise (both of which have been linked to healthy weight in teenagers). In fact, these parents were significantly more likely to put their children on diets that focused myopically on restricting calories—which, as Neumark-Sztainer’s work shows, leads to higher levels of weight gain in young adulthood.
Good lord, this is making me so mad. The schools are shaming kids, and then not educating anyone about how to actually be healthy!
GAAAH this is why I wish we could all just de-emphasize weight as a health thing in general. Encourage people to eat more vegetables and get some exercise, talk about food deserts and poverty, but stop lecturing people about their weight! Especially KIDS.
Yeah, I still remember that all the gym teacher said was that I was basically the same size as [OTHER GIRL] but her muscle to fat percentage was much better so she didn’t have a BMI problem. And that was it. It was so so upsetting to be singled out and taken into the hallway like I’d done something WRONG (I was a really self-conscious, goody two shoes kid who’d never been in trouble a day in her life) and that was the extent of the “advice.”
Made me feel like hell the rest of the day. And the thing was, at home, we’d already switched from 2% to skim and taken red meat out of our diet, as was the style in the late 80s/early 90s. My mom is a great cook and we had lots of veggies and salads and stir fries and other homemade stuff.
It may have been the first time I became fully aware of my body as an object open for critique, requiring the visual approval of others and 8 or 9 years old is way too early for that crap.
Good call. Not only is that just full of NOPE, but the BMI is a bullshit indicator of health anyway.
The only time my BMI has ever been in the “suitable” range for my height (at the top end of that range, but still in that range) was several months into my year of unemployment. At one point, I was allotting $50/month for food (which is easier to do when you have the leisure time to cook large pots of lentil soup and make everything from scratch). I was usually listless, depressed, and cold, and I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without having to stop halfway for a break. But hey, at least the BMI said I was at a healthy weight!
KILL THE BMI WITH FIRE.
That is horrifying, and I’m so sorry you had to go through that, and fuck the unrealistic BMI.
Silver lining: I’m incredibly good at figuring out how to CLEAN ALL THE THINGS with items that can be purchased with food stamps.
I was also fortunate in that I had the unwavering emotional and financial support of my parents, as well as an upbringing that taught me how to make food from scratch, stretch and modify recipes, etc.
I have not read other people’s replies yet so someone else has probably already said this, but ten minutes!?!? That’s a recipe for short-circuiting the feedback loop between your brain and your stomach so you never actually know how to tell if you’ve had enough food, which is in turn a recipe for a bunch of little kids with disordered eating habits before they’re even teenagers. What the actual fuck.
Also, kids need breaks. Lunch is a wonderful time for one of those breaks. Give them some time to socialize and have fun and cut their salisbury steak into weird shapes!
And not just breaks for socializing, but breaks with time for unstructured play and for fucking going outside and running around and falling down and scraping their knees and working off all that energy. Kids are not made to sit still for 6 or 7 or 8 hours every day, FFS.
Ian McShane is a goddamn national treasure. The “tits and dragons” show is the perfect description for that show. And I am so excited for him as Wednesday in American Gods that I can’t handle it. I may have to reread the book.
Every time I see him I’m like “God bless Ian McShane.”
His casting in AG is the first time I’ve gotten even a little excited about the project (I didn’t care for the book). I mean… it’s perfect. Just perfect.
Right? I was excited because it’s Bryan Fuller and I’m always 100% in for anything he does, but he is absolutely brilliant casting.
WAIT! SO HE IS OFFICIALLY WEDNESDAY!?!!?
Holy shit, y’all! HE IS PERFECT!
(My love of Ian McShane is a little extreme, but HOLY SHIT IF HE IS WEDNESDAY I’LL SUBSCRIBE TO CABLE JUST TO SEE HIM.)
He is the best part of the Nick Frost dance movie, Cuban Fury (which I enjoyed because I love dance movies, but it’s a ymmv film).
Yep! He’s Wednesday (PERFECT casting), the guy from The 100 is Shadow (also excellent). It will be wonderful.
I’m just going to call it Tits and Dragons from now on, that seems pretty accurate. I kind of gave up on it after I heard about Sansa last season, but I’ll go back because I always do.
Same. I only watched about half of last season, and other than the episode with the battle at The Wall, it was dreadful. And yet I’ll keep watching. Ugh. At least McShane is worth watching for.
I don’t believe in Ian McShane. I truly believe he is actually Lovejoy and every acting job he has had since then is an elaborate scam that got slightly out of his control, but from which he will eventually emerge victorious.
(I particularly loved it when he disguised himself as a Russian ambassador, probably in order to get hold of particularly valuable antique kept in the White House.)
I was really hoping, when I heard he dismissed spoilers, that there was going to be a “cocksucker” thrown into his statement for good measure, but this is just as good.
“It’s only Tits and Dragons” is now a t-shirt!
“along comes a slick-haired sage”
I must have that!!!!!
I’m not sure whether everyone else has already seen this, but if you need a pick-me-up go watch the music video for Miike Snow’s song Genghis Khan.
Oh my goodness, that was delightful.
I happened across that music video a week or two ago and I think we’ve probably watched it close to a dozen times in my apartment since then–whenever we need like five minutes of positivity. (My fiancé has called it “the best music video in the world.”)
Yes! And, if fanfic is something you do, there’s a great one based on the video.
(I’m replying via email, and I’m hoping the link html doesn’t get messed up! If it does, it’s “Pas de Deux” by Icarus_chained on AO3.)
I would definitely read that.
Oh my god, it got messed up so much. Imma try again.
Thank you! I… I loved that!! That’s exactly what I needed this morning.
I knew it had to end the way it ended but I was worried it wouldn’t. And apparently they like to do music video sequels!
I have already seen that music video five times, but I do need a pick-me-up, so I will be watching it again.
I just listened to your conversion podcast and I loved it and then at the end there was even a shout-out to New Brunswick from one of the hosts so basically my life is complete now.
Also, thank you for introducing me to that podcast, in particular. Adding to my list.
I am sorry you’re having a difficult week, Nicole; much love. I hope Sansa is giving you lots of restorative snuggles.
It always disappoints me when people say “gay” when they really mean “bi”. Xena and Gabrielle, in addition to their obvious love for each other, had tons of romances with guys during the show. They’re my peeps. *waves bi pride flag*
THANK YOU. I’m bi too, and I’m actually terrified that they don’t mean bi at all — that they will just make Xena a straight-up lesbian. Which, I mean, okay, is also great and cool and I feel really mean for not being 100% stoked, but bi erasure is real and shitty?! I’m surprised at how painful it actually feels to have that identity glossed over in all this coverage — that show just meant so much to me as a kid, considering it was one of the only mainstream media products with a glimpse of bisexuality that I could latch on to. Ugh, but then I feel like such a killjoy.
I *totally* get this. Right here with ya. <3
The use of “gay”/”lesbian” to mean “same-sex” drives me mad, although I can understand why it’s used. Yes, it’s a convenient shorthand to say “lesbian parents” or “gay marriage” or whatever, but people can be in a relationship with someone of the same gender and not be gay/lesbian! Ditto “heterosexual relationships” – I am a cis woman in a relationship with a cis man, but I am not heterosexual and therefore neither is our relationship. But I am aware that making the distinction between the relationship and the people in it is tricky and can lead to clunky phrasing. Still, argh.
“Mixed orientation” may be a helpful descriptor for relationship stuff? And should be more of a thing anyway, IMO.
And not only do labeling relationships and marriages as gay/lesbian/straight erase bi and ace spectrum identities, it also assumes both/all people involved identify with a binary gender.
On a related note, I hate those same descriptors (gay/lesbian/hetero) when talking about sex. Again, it erases other orientations, and assumes both/all people adhere to the gender binary, AND is implicitly cisnormative.
Mixed-gender relationships is pretty good, that’s the one I use to describe my relationship with my boyfriends. I’m nb and they’re both bi men, it’s impossible for us to have a “straight” relationship but none of us are gay
Mixed-gender or mixed-sex is what I normally go with (I try to avoid “opposite-sex”, due to the binary reinforcement). It just feels much clunkier than “same-sex”.
Okay, on the Trump piece? I’m kind of bothered that they chose to feature photos from Oklahoma and Oklahoma only. Check your Super Tuesday results, article. We picked Bernie and Cruz.
Like, Oklahoma does not need your help to look bad, article. Also, Oklahoma is not all dead trees and rusted-out buses. We have cities! Nice cities!
That said, it was a really good article.
They’re really good pictures! but yeah
NICOLE. You saying “there is nothing more biblical than getting into fights with God about shit” is really powerful for me. I’m going to sit with it for a while. Probably a long while.
Also the discussion of creeds/professions of faith being more about saying “these are the things you’re going to tussle with, as opposed to the things you’re going to say with 100% conviction”.
NICOOOOOOOOLE. Speaking directly to my soul right now.
YES THAT WAS GOOD.
You guys, I have some not good news for you regarding Kimmy Schmidt throwing out the bad parts…
Fey loves nothing more than digging in her heels when criticized, even when that criticism is well-reasoned and legitimate.
So do her fans, apparently.
Ugh yes, I saw some interview where she was talking about not wanting to be part of the “apologizing culture.” WTF TINA. So much grossness.
I’m kind of tearing up at my desk listening to the podcast talking about Nouwen, because I had a great privilege of working with his estate as an editor. And a lot of really difficult things happened around those books publishing-wise at the exact same time Nicole was reading them the first time. And those institutional changes shifted my entire world, upended it, and I had to rebuild in a totally new direction. And here we are on the other side. There’s something about Nicole reading Nouwen when there was so much torment behind the scenes…it fills me with a really deep sense that even though all the worldly stuff was ugly, that Nouwen’s words–and god–can transcend any of it. So thank you thank you thank you for making this podcast.
Your dad looks like a classic Daddy’s Boy.
WHITE-KNUCKLING IT THROUGH ANOTHER PRIMARY TUESDAY
I keep hoping that Trump won’t win any more states. Like, surely voters have wised up by now, right? Surely they’ve realized this is not an America we want to live in. Surely this is not the America I live in, with so many of them still voting for this man.
But even I can’t kid myself that Rubio or Kasich have a chance, and that leaves…Ted Cruz, who is NOT BETTER, and yet he’s able now to say things like “I don’t want anyone to punch you in the face” to protesters and thus sound like the VOICE OF REASON AND SANITY.
I guess I just thought I’d have a cooler style aesthetic when living in a dystopia. That’s all.
Right there with you.
And the Dem races worry me. I don’t want the eventual winner, whomever that may be, to come out damaged by the primary campaign.
Honestly, I’m not too concerned about that. Trump’s racist shadow is so huge and outrageous that, by the time the general campaign season starts, I don’t think anyone’s going to remember a single thing that happened during the Democrat primary. And I hope the choice will be really, really obvious to the American electorate.
I really, really hope you’re right.
This is one of the scariest things: Trump allowing Ted Cruz to recast himself as the Reasonable Choice. To be honest, he is far more frightening than Trump. We’ve just forgotten that. For now.
I KNOW. I don’t really believe Trump is secretly working with the RNC for this goal (if for no other reason than NO ONE IN THE ESTABLISHMENT LIKES CRUZ), but I totally get how some people might think that a plausible theory now. EVERYTHING IS BANANAS.
(Also, hello Houston friend! I’ve been watching the storms in the South, hope things are drier in the Heights.)
Both Trump and Cruz, in their own ways, remind me of that guy from The Dead Zone.
My almost-plausible-I-think-maybe Conspiracy Theory of the Hour is that at some point, somebody’s going to try to assassinate Donald Trump, and the RNC will let them. The fact that Ted Cruz would then almost certainly become the nominee throws a wrench into this theory, but w/e.
I just don’t want a Secret Service agent to die for this asshole.
That’s true. Poor Secret Service agents, having to protect Trump.
Echoing comments above, I’m really sorry if Nicole has to deal with people shitting on her innermost thoughts in supposedly safe spaces. Awkward metaphysical fence-sitters unite.
Oh, no one here has ever, in my mind, crossed the line about my faith. I’ve definitely seen one or two moments where I felt that other people talking about their faith here were spoken to disrespectfully, or in a manner I think of as Un-Toastlike, but we’ve always been able to sort it out and move on. But just in CASE, I wanted to stave off the possibility!
Also, big hugs to you, Nicole!
I’ve said this before, but I’m still amazed at how unfamiliar I am with stories of adult converting to Christianity when they weren’t already at rock-bottom. I grew up hardcore evangelical Baptist with conversion stories everywhere, yet I’ve never heard this type. The literal “come to Jesus” moment was always…way more dramatic, like God had to literally seize you by the neck to “get your attention” and ugh, there’s so much wrong with that mentality.
Anyway! I’m really glad your story isn’t like that, and it’s fascinating to hear something so unfamiliar to me, and so positive! I’m glad you found a safe forum to talk about it.
Did anyone else read this New Yorker article (tw: child sex abuse, suicide, violence) and want to discuss it?
My comments in a reply so that it collapses for anyone who doesn’t want to see this.
I’m feeling really conflicted about it. Like, on the one hand, Romeo and Juliet laws certainly cause problems. And certainly, the way the system handles child offenders is very flawed.
But on the other–like, the first girl they talk about in the story who was “play-acting sex” with her siblings–I have difficulty seeing that as anything but abuse. I used to be acquainted with someone who’d done that to his siblings and they were certainly hurt by his actions. (I also find it suspect that the NY got quotes from the “victims” in the Romeo and Juliet cases, but framed the story about Leah entirely through her words. She used the kind of minimizing language that multiple sexual predators I’ve known tried to downplay their actions with.)
The whole article just left me feeling really weird. Like, I’m not comfortable centering the conversation on the feelings of the perpetrators (because at least some of those cases I would genuinely call abuse, even though the kids almost certainly didn’t understand what they were doing), but I can’t deny that we need to change how the law treats them.
It’s so difficult, and it raises so many questions of agency and culpability. Because I think both these statements are true: 1) a 10-year-old playacting sex is abuse; 2) that 10-year-old does not understand what she’s doing in the way an adult would. And yes, there’s a lot of questions that ought to be raised about where she might have learned to do that.
I’m glad you brought up that article, because I had lots of conflicting feelings about it too. It seemed like there were two different things going on: 1) sometimes teenagers have basically appropriate relationships and their lives are ruined by these laws, and 2) sometimes children abuse other children and their lives are ruined by these laws.
I think both are bad applications of the law! But they’re very different, and the way the article is written conflates them. I think the case of children abusing other children deserves a better article, because it is a complicated situation where you can’t write a child off as an unredeemable sex offender at 10, especially since it’s often an expression of having been abused. But if they did commit sex crimes, then those can’t be minimized, and I agree that the first girl seemed like she was doing that.
Thank you for articulating what was wrong with the article! I was having trouble fumbling towards the right words for it but it is precisely the way the writer treats these two different types of case as the same that I found upsetting.
But the Silicon Valley article is right, Palo Alto is the wooooorst, why would you go to eat and drink there? You could at least go to Mountain View which is overpriced but usually serves delicious.
Delicious what? DELICIOUS WHAT?!
Ramen! My favorite ramen place is downtown.
Gelato
Gyros
Bubble Tea
There used to be a pretty good tapas place?
Burritos
ZOMG yes on Castro! That great little ramen place with the fantastic kimchi across the street from such good gelato.
That was my thought. Who actually goes to bars in Palo Alto, especially 20-something tech dudes? Pretty much everyone I know in the Bay is gonna go into the city if they’re hitting up bars.
cosign
Ohioan here. I am vehemently anti-Bernie bro, I wanted SOOOO badly to vote for Hillary. But I took a deep breath and grabbed the republican ballot this morning (I don’t know how it is anywhere else, but we are a straigtht party ticket state, so if you really can’t stand the opposition you switch sides and vote against the front runner in the primary). Ugh. I felt like a traitor, esp. since I then had to vote for all those other small-office republicans. Although really my dem vote is pretty worthless in my county, so there’s that. Anyway. Tell me it’s ok I didn’t vote for Hillary because I had to do my part to stop Trump. I hate this.
YOU DID A GREAT THING. Thank you for voting today. Wash and feel clean and vote Dem in November.
YOU ARE DOING THE POLITICAL-EQUIVALENT-OF-THE-LORD’s WORK IN OHIO. I am in Illinois and voted in my Democratic primary. I personally could not have stomached selecting anyone on the R-side, but Kasich has a real chance to win your state and Trump is still not inevitable.
SO excellent job, I’m with redheadedwolf and I hope you can wash that ick right off with full knowledge of your sacrifice.
OMG, so this happened:
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/crossove…
(record Dems voted Republican)
That was super brave. I hope it pays off in a Kasich victory. I don’t think I would have been able to do it because I’m too worried for Hillary, but my state is a super late primary that doesn’t matter, so it’s just an intellectual exercise for me. I’m impressed with what you did!
I struggled with this! Honestly. I voted for Hillary, but I seriously considered doing exactly what you did. After Bernie won Michigan, I just had to go with the Democratic primary. So conflicted.
You are doing the best possible thing in a completely shitty election season. Either Dem candidate in the general would be far, far better than anything the Republicans are offering, and Trump is absolutely the worst.
Also, someone asked her about my berniebro comment? Just to answer (also politely), in a room full of Bernie voters, women and POC who are voting for Bernie Sanders are the reasonable people in the room and the BernieBros are outshouting you and jumping up and down. Sorry.
I’m sorry you’re having a hard week, Nicole, and I LOVED the podcast. I was moving and interesting and indeed very intimate.
Hope things get better as this week moves along, Nicole. I’m not good at the podcasts, but I will try to listen tonight because God and I have issues and it helps to hear how others navigate that dance.
The Hazlitt piece if giving me a huge malware warning at the moment. 🙁
Remember last week, Gary, the deleted commenter, re: Magic Mike XXL? Well, thank you Gary. I never would have watched this movie, and I did last night. Now I just wanna weep tears of joy. My hope in huMANity has been partially restored. But wait…did women write this movie? How did this movie even get made? I was grinning the entire time. I kept waiting for something disgusting to happen…attitudes toward women, boobs flying, but no…it was AWESOME. I even had a dream about the reiki dude who I am utterly in love with. The reiki dude…the artisanal froyo…gahd!
It’s amazing! What that and the Battlestar Galactica reboot, which I also adore, have in common is that they manage to be feminist not by explicitly fighting misogynist tropes but merely (“merely”) by depicting a beautiful, utopian parallel universe where misogyny doesn’t exist. It’s like living your whole life with a car alarm going off right behind you and then suddenly, for 2 hours… blessed, blessed silence.
I have lent it to my sister because she is sceptical that it’s a feminist masterpiece and I am waiting for her to watch it and repent!
I hope your sister enjoys it!
I’m late to the table here, but did anyone read this amazing story about a group of Japanese moms who got together and started their own laboratory testing the levels of radiation in all sorts of things from around Fukushima? None of them were scientists when they began. It all started with one woman who’d been a part-time yoga teacher before she realized she had a calling to help her community and her kids, and it is so, so impressive.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35784923
“They named the laboratory Tarachine, after a strong female character in Japanese theatre who speaks the language of Samurai warriors. ‘We felt as though we were on the front line of a battlefield,’ says Suzuki. ‘When you’re at war you do what you have to do, and measuring was the thing we felt we had to do.'” <3 <3
that’s incredible!
Given that the new runner for Xena wrote the most recent lesbian death episode on television, the way he’s handled the fallout (as opposed to the show-runner for The 100) has been fascinating. It really shows what a threshold television is at these days, with people on one side and on the other – there’s a lot of classic queerbaiting in the way that The 100 and The CW have been dealing with the fallout, but the guy who’s going on to Xena has gone in a completely different direction with it.
I have to admit, though, I’m a little suspicious about his authenticity. Variety wrote a great article about it: http://variety.com/2016/tv/opinion/the-100-lexa-j…
Anxiety is so weird! I started an anti-anxiety med for insomnia a while back. I had never felt particularly anxious, but I felt so much better with the meds. Turns out for me a lot of anxiety manifests as ALL CONSUMING RAGE, so it's pretty cool to not be angry all the time.
Good luck with your breathing–I can't breathe and run at the same time. Not asthma, thousands of dollars of tests, no diagnosis. Doctor advises "don't run." Um, thanks?
Yes, I was in the states recently and when I described myself as a communist it was like I'd confessed to eating puppies! Turns out they like the word "left libertarian" more, even though it means literally the same thing. Mind blowing
Thanks for the post. The “tits and dragons” show is the perfect description for that show. And I am so excited for him as Wednesday in American Gods that I can’t handle it