Get ready to bear witness to Milo Yiannopoulos’s return to the world of internet drama, alongside internet “journalists” Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog. Today, we delve into the shadowy and malicious role Yiannopoulos allegedly played in the legendary dinner between former president Trump, the rapper formerly known as Kanye, and the white nationalist zoomer influencer currently known as Nick Fuentes.
Also discussed: the online outcry over a Balenciaga photoshoot that spilled over into the mainstream media, spurred on by YouTuber-cum-Twitter-influencer Shoe0nHead (June Lapine) and the bipartisan outcry that ensued… and why it’s all quite silly.
Et tu, Milo?
Links:
Errata
UPDATE: Balenciaga has since dropped the suit
George Takei’s Mastodon
https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei
The BalenCIAga Conspiracy
The document in question: Scalia’s opinion from United States vs. Williams
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/553/285/#tab-opinion-1962658
Note the dates on the chart and teddy bear (bottom-left)
Note the Borremans book on the desk
The closest I can get you to Borremans’ Fire From the Sun without hotlinking an image (obviously NSFW)
https://www.google.com/search?q=fire+from+the+sun+michael
This diploma either reads “John Phillip Fischer” or “L is real 2401”
Fischer’s sex crime conviction
Oli London’s tweet, accusing Balenciaga’s owner of profiting from CPThe sculpture in question, controversially being auctioned by the company that is owned by the company that also owns Balenciaga (NSFW)
https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5335329
Fox’s indictment of Balenciaga
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6316362543112
Slate: “Oh, Dear: Fox News Kind of Has a Point About Those Balenciaga Ads”
https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/11/balenciaga-scandal-child-teddy-bears-fox-news.html
NBC: “TikTok users protest Balenciaga's holiday campaign by destroying bags and shoes”
The Calvin Klein ad from the 90’s
Allegedly, it angered even President Clinton!
https://www.vogue.com/article/calvin-klein-jeans-90s-ads-kate-moss-mark-wahlberg-controversy
I Miss The Old Kanye
Recap: Kanye goes “Death Con 3” on the Jews
The ADL on Fuentes
https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/nicholas-j-fuentes-five-things-know
Axios: “Trump talks with white nationalist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago dinner”
https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/nicholas-j-fuentes-five-things-know
WATCH: GOP leaders condemn Trump-Fuentes dinner
He said, Ye said: Ben Shapiro, Kanye West clash over Trump dinner with Holocaust denier
Fuentes announces he’s taking a break from his stream to join Ye’s campaign
https://cozy.tv/nick/replays/2022-11-26
The Guardian: “Milo Yiannopoulos claims he set up Fuentes dinner ‘to make Trump’s life miserable’”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/30/milo-yiannopoulos-nick-fuentes-donald-trump-dinner
TheWrap: “Milo Yiannopoulos’ Rise and Fall, From GamerGate to Pedophilia Comments”
https://www.thewrap.com/milo-yiannopoulos-timeline-rise-fall-gamergate-pedophilia-breitbart/
Milo once owned Dangerous.com!
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/milo-yiannopoulos-sold-website-dangerous/
Jesse in NY Mag: “How Breitbart Is Milking the Milo Yiannopoulos Campus-Outrage Outrage Cycle”
Jesse on his newsletter: “No-Platforming Didn’t Wreck Milo — *Milo* Wrecked Milo”
Milo, rocking the most heterosexual haircut I’ve ever seen
Kanye storms out of TimCast interview
Rolling Stone’s coverage of the event
Politico: “Virulently antisemitic comments by Kanye West spark new GOP criticism”
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/01/ye-antisemitism-republicans-hitler-00071695
The mental health argument
UnHerd: “Don’t Punish Kanye West”
https://unherd.com/2022/10/dont-punish-kanye-west/
RAËLISM
https://jalopnik.com/kanye-banned-twitter-symbol-ufo-sex-cult-racing-driver-1849847363
Kanye got substantially more votes per dollar than even Biden!
https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/kanye-west-presidential-run-analysis-9477968/
Misc.
BAP is not happy with any of the figures involved (WARNING: Slurs. A lot of them)
https://t.me/BronzeAgePalaestra/685
All involved with the dinner say Trump was impressed with Fuentes
https://www.axios.com/2022/11/25/trump-nick-fuentes-ye-kanye
Contrariwise, none were with Trump’s 2024 announcement speech
https://web.archive.org/web/20221125044521/
A heavily detailed TimCast piece on the whole affair
The Guardian: “Donald Trump ‘shied away from criticising Nick Fuentes’”
Guess who got that article corrected?
Patriots.win describes Fuentes as “a short hispanic homunculi that consorts with homosexuals”
https://patriots.win/p/16ZWybOvmZ/i-for-one-want-to-welcome-nick-f/c/
The alt-right describes Milo as a “paid Zionist operative”
I’m going to try to say this as respectfully as possible, but in reference to why some people would be really bothered by the Balenciaga ads (or some of the other things people are disturbed by): many of the people who are bothered by this are parents. Katie and Jesse are not parents. Neither of them have been in a parenting situation where they realized their child was genuinely at risk and felt the horror and fear of “what if,” or, even worse, had to deal with what did happen. No, most of us bothered by the ad campaign don’t think it’s going to directly inspire a person to commit a crime or that it’s a sign of a secret Hollywood p-phile cabal. We’re bothered because it reminds us that there are people in the world who do see our children this way, who don’t mind sexualizing or exploiting them, and who don’t mind playing around with themes blending p-rn and children to make money for someone. I wish Jesse and Katie would see the gray areas between the two extremes of “I don’t see why people should be this upset” and “stupid people having a moral panic destroying their Balenciaga gear on TikTok” and recognize there’s a whole range of reactions in between those two responses that can be calm, rational, and less extreme even if they still don’t agree with them.
Even without worrying about pedos, there are plenty of reasons to be critical about the sexualization of childhood, which is ubiquitous. Consider:
- Sexualized slogans on clothing for toddlers and babies - "lil pimp" for the boys and "I'm sexy and I know it" on a onesie (the latter can be seen here: https://www.spreadshirt.com/shop/babies/clothing/sexy/)
- Beauty pageants for girls as young as toddlers - who among us can forget the image of a tarted-up JonBenet Ramsey?
- Bratz dolls
- Dress codes that shame prepubescent girls for wearing tank tops and later tell girls that they're a distraction to adult male teachers
- Clothing cuts for girls from size 2T onward that are so form-fitting, they're likely to violate the dress code (and almost no alternatives unless you go to the boys' section)
- Halloween costumes for young girls that are cut like those for adult women https://www.today.com/parents/halloween-survey-shows-parents-are-sick-sexy-kid-costumes-t139998
- The "barely legal" porn category
- Cat-calling of girls as young as 10 and 11 (this is ubiquitous in my college town, where the middle school is located in the midst of student housing)
- Porn in the pocket of many kids this same age
All of this takes a toll on girls' sense of self-esteem. Some research indicates that when prepubescent girls are immersed in a culture that values them for their hotness, they're at greater risk for anxiety and depression in adolescence.
To be concerned with this is not a "moral panic." I'm frustrated with this reductive framing.
Completely agree. It is well established in child development and child psychology literature that we should not be sexualizing, adultifying, and parentifying children. Calling it a moral panic or overreaction to have concerns about things like this shows a lack of knowledge about child development and a lack of journalistic curiosity to ask the average person why they don’t like this and I mean asking a variety of people from the left, right, and center, not just nut picking from the most extreme TikTok videos.
One of the great advances of the past 150 years was the separation of childhood from adulthood, the recognition that all children (not just those of privileged classes) are vulnerable to exploitation by adults, and that allowing that to happen would stunt their prospects to wide detriment.
I will say I’m not sure things are, overall, getting worse, with the exception of the availability of porn. But I think it’s a line worth holding.
Goodness, yes, the dress codes you mention are in place at my kids' public elementary school. They infuriate me.
Jesse and Katie often lack nuance when they discuss parenting, particularly around safeguarding.
Thinking that children should not be posed with a child's toy in bondage wear is not a moral panic or evidence of a belief in a global paedophile conspiracy. And "well, no one actually abused anyone because of these images" is a nonsense argument. Parents do not like sexualised images of children. This is not unreasonable.
I think the "it's art!" defence is a little thin. It's commerce, if it's anything, and Balenciaga is a multi-billion dollar company that depends on walking the line between "being provocative" and being acceptable by mainstream consumers. They failed at it, in this case.
Even if you accept it as art, then it's one of the most hackneyed images anyone can make in fashion. Children - mostly girls - are constantly being portrayed in overtly sexual ways by the fashion industry. See Brooke Sheield's modelling career in the 1970s or Carine Roitfeld's controversial 2011 editorial in Paris Vogue with 10 year olds girls styled to look like much older, sexy women. Roitfeld left Vogue not long after and it no longer publishes images like these. https://www.businessinsider.com/french-model-thylane-loubry-blondeau-2011-8
See. I find the vogue spread highly inappropriate.
I don’t see it the bancialago pics (at least the ones in the bar pod post).
The bears look punk rock to me.
Yes! It’s the same thing with teaching gender ideology in K-5. I am so relieved that my children graduated before it was considered “normal” to introduce sexual topics to young children in progressive areas.
I love the work J and K do, but they have blind spots in this area.
I don't mind my kids learning about biology in K-5. . . pretty sure they'd figured out the whole penises and vagina thing well before K. So teaching them the correct biology seems natural to me if age appropriate.
Doesn't seem necessary to go into detail on specific sex acts for the purpose of explaining procreation and risk behaviors till post pubertal.
I fail to see the utility of teaching very young kids (or really anyone not in college gender studies) about all the different genders either. It's not like they're grounded an any sort of science or consistent theory. It's just a laundry list of stereotypes that get dreamed up on the internet and changed to suit whatever's popular at the time.
I see gender the same as Goth, Emo, Punk, etc. Let them do it if they want, but it's not like we need a class or curriculum to "understand" them. Obsessing over why someone decides they're "Goth" or a "Jock" or the intersectional implications of Goth Jocks just seems like the Glass Bead Game of navel gazing.
Teach them about males and females and the biological groundings.
“Age appropriate” is the key phrase here and while your child may have figured out the “penis and vagina thing” before kindergarten, mine did not and I’m no prude.
I agree that the current trans craze resembles old-school goths or punks in the way it is socially contagious, but no teacher is pushing children to learn about the goth spectrum and as far as I know they are not paying for Goth Story hour in public schools.
I must express disbelief.
It's highly unlikely to be the case that your kids still thought people were like ken and barbie dolls when they went to kindergarten.
The developmentally appropriate milestone to "discover" genitalia is around 18 months.
If they didn't know they had a penis or a vagina by kindergarten it's not because they didn't know they had one but that no one taught them the name.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but it'd be really developmentally concerning.
I mention this because age appropriateness tracks with these developmentally appropriate understandings. While on a range, it's an objective, empirical measure and you can choose topics for which 99% of the population would be "at the right spot" in their development.
Knowing about your own genitalia and having teachers talk about them before grade 5 (when I remember the awkward sex ed section of health class) are two different things.
Are they? I don’t think so. Once a kid is aware and capable of asking questions we, as adults (and especially teachers), should be capable of answering them at their level of understanding without it getting weird.
We’re talking about basic anatomy at that age.
By 1st grade, rumors were spreading at our school that the way girls get pregnant is by by boys peeing in their vaginas.
And that’s what happens when adults aren’t willing to have frank, clear, and biologically correct discussions.
I used to think a vagina was called a fur china (because it had hair in it) and thought babies came out of women’s butts. And that was okay because I wasn’t going to impregnate someone in grade school. It’s okay not to know some stuff at certain ages.
Fur China, stealing that. New band name? MAYbe, maybe NOT.
I also thought it was related to Mongolia somehow because they had furry hats in a movie I saw and I knew Mongolia was close to China but I could never quite figure it out.
Yeah, I think fur china has to go into the lexicon now.
Aaaaack
And especially teachers? More so than parents?
I agree teachers should be able to answer these questions, even from kindergarteners. I disagree that teachers should initiate these discussions. Further, there are many ways to tell the truth:
Teacher, what is a penis?
a) It is an organ on boys. They urinate through it. Also, it is involved in reproduction, or making babies. It is the passageway through which sperms travels from the boy to the girl. Now let's go back to addition and subtraction.
b) It is an organ that exists on the bodies of approximately 50% of the human race. It has nothing to do with whether someone is a boy or a girl--both boys and girls can have penises. If you think you might be a boy today, but think later that you might be a girl, that's awesome, and we can find a doctor to remove that penis from you, if you want. If you change your mind later, you can still go back to being a boy, because simply having your penis lopped off does not mean you cannot be a boy, because they don't have anything to do with that. Also, you might decide you are not a boy OR a girl, in which case you can basically do whatever you want with that penis. Does that make sense? Good, now let's go back to learning addition and subtraction.
"Disbelief"? Are you accusing @Adrienne Scott of lying? It's entirely possible for a kid to have no idea that the opposite sex has different genitalia. I didn't know penises existed until I noticed one on a classical statue when I was 8 (maybe 9) and asked about it. It was another year or two before I learned they were for anything other than peeing. Do you disbelieve my anecdote as well? Or do you find it "developmentally concerning"?
Lying might be a harsh. Disbelief means I'd assume this is extremely rare. 8 or 9 and not knowing that boys are different than girls and had different genitalia? Super odd.
Maybe true, but it's definitely getting close to the "no-weird shit rule" territory for parenting. (https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/03/parenting-doesnt-matter-that-muchas-long-as-you-dont-do-anything-super-weird.html)
Sorry, but that's the truth. I mean, you never saw a dog and was like "what's that between his legs?". Seems it would take significant effort on the part of parents to pass off these questions. Also hard core watching to make sure none of the boys mentioned they have a penis (something most of them realize pretty damned early). More "nevers" are never seeing a male baby, adults that never answer questions honestly or a kid that never asks questions about boy/girl differences. Absolutely zero peers that know or talk about it.
Like I said, within the first couple of weeks on the bus with older kids my 1st grader was being told babies happen when the boy takes his penis and pees inside a girl's vagina.
So it wouldn't just be you and your parents, but everyone's kids and all the parents around you. A concerted community effort to hide anatomy and dodge questions.
Possible? Sure. But way, way into the weird zone. Like puritanical christian weird.
So when I say disbelief to what you're saying, it's in the same why I'd respond to someone that claimed they were raised in a cult and grew up thinking boys and girls looked like ken dolls and that menstruous is the mark of the beast and you only had your period if you were evil....
My jaw would drop and I'd say...."No fucking way??"
It was called Elvira, and it's partly the reason I'm gay now.
(Shhh… don’t tell them about Elvira being our groomer!)
I mentioned something similar to this on the Club Q episode. That said, if anyone would like to hire me, I’ll gladly come read your kids some Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (or Stella Luna, for the younger kids).
Agreed. I came here to make the same point, that parents are seeing this very differently.
I agree 100%. "Blind spot" is the exact term I was going to use.
Often when talking about these issues and the impact (or potential impact) on kids or parents, both Katie and Jesse are a little bit casual when it comes to kids. I remember before I had children other people, who had children, telling me that I can't really understand until I have them myself. I was dismissive, but once I had kids, I understood. When you are completely responsible for the well-being of another person, most of us take that very seriously.
It's not enough to say the ads probably did not cause a kid to be molested. Fair enough. But why does a sexually themed ad campaign have to involve KIDS?
It's similar to their aversion to the word "groomer." Are all of these teachers on Tik Tok really "grooming" kids? Probably not. But why do these conversations about YOUR adult sexuality have to involve MY kids? If I am a parent of young children (I'm not--mine are grown), I think I have the right to decide what I want them to be exposed to in a public school, and to make my opinions known.
On the other hand, an episode like this is a good one from the standpoint that it demonstrates that Katie and Jesse can really raise tough issues, make us think, and allow us all to interact in a pretty civil way.
Thank you! I was very frustrated with the amount of grace they gave them. Imagine if these were the equivalent racist dog whistles. No one would hem and haw.
Let's just enjoy a bipartisan don't be gross moment
Yeah and I think the argument that no one is concretely harmed just misses the point. This is gross shit. Let’s not glamorize gross shit.
There's also no acknowledgment by Katie and Jesse of the expressions on the faces of the children or the overall staging, This really is supposed to evoke child sex abuse images - I agree that there is probably no great pedo-conspiracy behind it, but it's distasteful and ad campaigns aren't art. Balenciaga (or whoever is responsible for the campaign) wanted to be an edgelord (I have no idea if I'm using this word right - I'm a middle-aged non-native speaker woman in the UK). Many people from both sides (haha) saw what was going on.
Anyway, as many of you have said already, this is a real blind spot for K and J and I wish they'd get someone on the pod who has a different view. I'm very concerned about safeguarding. In the UK, we have a service called CEOP to help combat child sexual exploitation and online grooming. The service is completely overwhelmed. I know personally the husband of an acquaintance who didn't get any kind of prison time and retained access to his own children, despite having 20,000 images (some in the highest category) on his computer, because essentially if everyone who had these images was locked up, we'd have to build many more prisons. This is not a moral panic, but I suspect there are many people (mostly men) who perhaps in the days before the internet would have had a fleeting thought about certain sex acts, would feel shame and that would be that. Now they can look things up and just like anyone else in almost any other sphere of online life, can get sucked into things. I'm absolutely not excusing their behaviour, they are adults and it's their choice, but it's a choice the same person wouldn't have had 40 years ago.
K and J seem to think that pedophiles are one thing (i.e. a sort of sexuality comparable to being straight or being gay). I suspect this may be true for some people (though again, they deserve treatment but essentially cannot ever act on their desires), but I also think it's simply a kink for the vast majority of men who download these images and films and are capable of forgetting what is happening to real children in front of the camera.
As someone who has personal experience of this area as CSA victim, I also find it quite sad that Katie keeps using terms like kiddy p*rn. I'm not one to monitor language and I certainly wouldn't unsubscribe or anything like that, but I think it's important to name things as they are - child sexual abuse. It would also make the discussion on the Balenciaga story more coherent, because the chidfren in the campaign are NOT CSA victims, though their pictures may be used by people for whatever purposes. This is sadly true of any pictures of children, of course.
I agree. I sensed in this episode that Jesse wanted to push back on Katie's assessment of the situation but he was too tired/ hadn't done the homework/ doesn't want to talk about child sexual abuse. It was a very poor segment which just allowed Katie to demonstrate how much cooler she is than all the idiot normies who don't get art and care about children. I love Katie but she is oddly shallow and defensive about this issue maybe just because it's horrific and most people will try and avoid talking about it. But she's a journalist so I would hope she might #dobetter.
I'm reminded here of Louise Perry's comment that child sexual abuse concerns are "low status" and I think that is true. I'm also horrified at the links between the normalisation of the consummation of pornography and child sex abuse. I'd love to hear a conversation between Katie and Louise on this topic. Also being a parent changes everything in regard to this.
Yes, I agree. The kiddy porn jokes did not land well with me either. I’m not offended, I just think it was a fairly shallow take compared to some of their other work.
YES. All this. We know there's more anal sex and choking in young people's sexual repertoire nowadays because of porn. Do we really think normalizing the packaging of child sexual abuse as art and fashion has no effect on the world?
I’ve read that “child sexual abuse materials” is a more accurate term than “kiddie porn” (not re: the Balenciaga ad which is staged but actual video/photos).
Jim Clemente (former FBI expert on child sexual abuse, victimization, abduction and homicide) has said "images of sexual abuse of children" (for the actual video/photos). He hates the term "kiddie porn." I like this because it centers the victims. Even calling it "materials" put the emphasis on what it's used for, rather than the fact that this is a visual record of a horrible crime.
They also haven’t shopped for a pre-pubescent female child and found child-sizes versions of the latest teen fashions. This area is really outside of their skill set
Right. But they seem really confident dismissing us.
Nothing like parenthood (and perhaps especially, motherhood) for getting an inside view of this toxic bullshit.
They do seem callously dismissive ... I’d love to find out what Katie’s parents and Jesse’s dad think
I'd call it clueless, not callous. We often don't know what we don't know.
I want Hal Herzog to come on the show sometime! Maybe next time there's a dog theme. He studies animal-human relations.
I remember the first time I was shopping for maternity clothes back in 2003. I was wandering the maternity section wondering what looked the least like a muumuu, I turned around and saw a rounder of girls underwear on the edge of the girls section. They were shiny/sparkly and had string sides. Some of them had words on the butts like “Hottie”. I walked over and saw that they were sized for toddlers. It was a total WTF moment.
Okay I’m a parent too, and I agree in general that they lack a parental perspective (in particular Jesse has this very asymmetric perspective where he freaks out about red state laws that might separate kids from parents but seems totally unconcerned about equivalent blue state laws). HOWEVER I would argue that these kinds of overblown freak outs do not actually benefit kids. What we got out of the satanic panic is that kids don’t get to run around outside any more. Now we’re seeing with the pedophile freak out that red states are adopting horrible blue state norms about arresting moms for letting kids walk to school. Children benefit most from an environment where they can express their independence, and these panics act as a ratchet to steadily reduce their freedom. I try to be measured about the threats to my kids, and “Balenciaga executive” is pretty far down the list compared to “cars” and “accidental drownings”.
YES. Here we are restating our case because Katie, in particular, is entirely dismissive of anything relating to child safeguarding, or in this case, something that could be seen as normalizing child sexual abuse.
My reaction is “that’s weird and gross”, but I’m aware there’s nothing meaningful I can do about it, and that it poses no threat to my children. Generally I wouldn’t spend much attention on it, but if we’re talking about it, then yeah, I have an opinion.
And I could say the same about any number of issues very unlikely to affect me or my family that are nonetheless of obvious public interest or concern.
I have far less concern about the CK ad and others that depict post-pubertal teenagers, not zero, but teenagers are fashion consumers and aware of their own sexual interest in one another. The prurient interest of adults makes it a little unsavory, but it’s a world away from a toddler who has no idea what is going on.
When I see those kids it triggers distress, because little kids are so vulnerable and because it is obvious that none of the adults in their lives or working on this shoot have given a moment of thought to what is in the child’s interest. They are, literally, a prop, and much like a video that freeze-frames at the moment a tiny puppy is released into an frenzied mosh pit, the fact that no harm is depicted doesn’t help: it’s what the image conjures up that hurts, the reminder that the world contains such cruelty and indifference.
And I think it is a “parent thing” - or some parents - because before I had kids I was far less sensitive to any of this. But once you do, you are constantly reminded of just how, well, dumb and trusting little kids are. My 13 year old has some chance of recognizing a sketchy situation. His sister a few years younger, much less so. At 3 or 4, they have no idea what’s going on.
[I wrote half of this comment earlier and then lost track of it, so if I already posted another version, chalk it up to my advancing years.]
“Generally I wouldn’t spend much attention on it, but if we’re talking about it, then yeah, I have an opinion.”
Same. I noticed it on Twitter & thought “that’s kind of f-ed up.” I’ve only written about it here in response to the episode, which I wouldn’t have written about on my own in the open thread. I’m guessing many of us wouldn’t have, either, but if we say “that’s messed up” bc it’s a featured topic, then we’re said to be in a moral panic.... which makes me wonder whether they did the episode as clickbait, because like you said, as a parent it just makes you appreciate how vulnerable children are.
I remember when my kids were born there was a brief moment of panic at the thought of anything hurting them. It’s primal. Someone once told me having children is like having pieces of your heart walking around outside your body, & I still think about it that way.
Haven't they noticed that there's some sort of brain chemistry change that occurs in parents as a result of having children? It's possible you really *can't* understand if your brain hasn't been warped in that way...
Reminds me of Haidt'e weird scenarios where people can't point out the harm in fucking a chicken and then eating it but people knowing it's somehow "wrong" and finding a post hoc justification for it.
Hey shameless plug but I've been writing about some of that Haidt morality stuff over on my substack!
Here to speak for the child-free adults who ALSO find this shit disgusting. You don't have to be a parent to be angry. You just have to remember that you, yourself were once a child (this is why we all try to protect and support kids, right? Because someday they're going to grow up and move about the world with us, and as a society we want them to be healthy and well-adjusted?)... and imagine how confusing/scary it would be to learn about these topics too young and from people you don't trust and who don't have your well-being in mind. I agree, Katie & Jesse really missed the mark here. I would like someone to ask these photo designers what's the point? What are you trying to say? That there are TOO MANY laws protecting kids from being exploited? WTF. If it's just to push the envelope, there are other taboo roads to go down. Animal torture, cannibalism, genocide, those tiktok videos where people cook disgusting food for likes and clicks, etc. I can't blame the "conspiracy theorists" on this one because there does seem to be a real fixation on sexualizing kids in a lot of fashion/art and it's just gross. Doing this campaign to "Troll" them is not an excuse, sorry.
“Here to speak for the child-free adults who ALSO find this shit disgusting. You don't have to be a parent to be angry.”
I always try to include people without kids, too, as among those able to see why sexualizing kids is wrong. Just as I know that many men are in support of women’s need for single-sex spaces. Because I’ve met many gay men, dads, & others who appreciate safeguarding. If I made it seem otherwise, it was unintentional (I can only speak for myself, but I’d guess that other parents here would agree).
I think it’s from listening to BARPOD for a while now that I, and others, know that safeguarding is a blind spot for J & K.
Oh absolutely. I just don't want their blind spot to color how a majority of us who don't have kids feel. Sometimes I think they try to be Mary, Mary Quite Contrarians about stuff like this to take the other side in some internet arguments when the reality is if these things were just posed to a random assortment of shoppers at a grocery store literally ANYWHERE in America 99.9999% of people would say WTF. TLDR; Twitter rots brains.
I think of child sexualization as an issue pf the camel’s nose--there are people who really want to normalize child sexual abuse and then there are those that like to be edgy, and the more the edgy get push back the less the really dangerous people can progress.
When you don’t, you get government programs to put foster children with pedophiles as an experiment: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-experiment-that-placed-foster-children-with-pedophiles
Holy f***. I wish I hadn't read that
I saw the title and went.....
Nope.
Looked like some of the teddybear attire is inappropriate. I don't get the vibe the kids are being sexualized though. . . . which makes the choice so weird as the kids are entirely properly dressed like, well, kids.
Not sure what they're going for, but it didn't make me immediately think "wtf is this?" like, say, the CK ads or beauty pageants.
An ad campaign that coyly hinted at eating dogs would probably get wider disapproval.
Imagine sad dogs and cages, people enjoying cuts of meat, some small but plausibly ambiguous hints that the setting is a place where eating dog is acceptable.
I’d wager that this hypothetical ad would be looked at differently by Katie, too.
To be honest, I was kind of dreading this episode because I know it's right in their blindspot. I'm not a parent either but I am in the more safeguarding needed camp. I'm not clutching pearls on the ad in particular (though no question it was a big mistake) but it points to a bigger conversation where someone saw this as being OK to do. How did we get here; what is feeding into this etc... There is nuance needed in the discussion; however, what is the solution for BARpod?
This is a podcast that rarely does guests, and we see the downside of this depending on your own experience/expertise as their understanding of any issue has limits as all of ours does, whether journalist or not. Some subjects have a harder time riding in on the snark they are known for which might serve other subjects better. What would have been a better way to handle it is as you can't un-Katie Katie and un-Jesse Jesse?
I get this podcast is about internet nonsense and on some level this Balenciaga stuff is very much internet nonsense. The fact that people looked at the dates, diplomas, etc. is the level of internet sleuthing that quickly leads you down crazy rabbit holes. It seems to fit the BARpod format well-enough.
While the making links to Salma Hayek's husband and some edgy artists sold at Christie's is wall-with-red-strings stuff, there were also many, many people who objected for different reasons. Lumping everyone in together with the conspiracy theorists and not acknowledging that people raised concerns for very different reasons is not good journalism and something Katie and Jesse would be critical of if someone else did it.
Some very of-the-moment language here, but it does sum up a lot of what I see as the problem: https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2022/11/25/balenciagas-teddy-bear-ad-is-a-warning-against-pushing-luxury-too-far/
The kids are being used as a prop in advertising that targets adults. Why? Which adults might find these ads appealing?
I was hoping that article was going to be about something like fall-of-Rome level decadence.
I'm a parent. Doesn't bother me.
Sadly, many of parents whose children were featured in the campaign said the same thing. The fact that many don’t see this as problematic is proof that we have been totally desensitized to the sexualization of children.
Even if a child looking half-drugged on a couch with empty wine glasses, bondage paraphernalia & pedophilia references littering the room doesn’t bother you as a parent, at least have some level of concern about the fact that they are obviously pushing boundaries and gaging our tolerance level for this kind of thing.
What, exactly, is sexualized about the Balenciaga ads? The court case thing is weird. But not offensive on the surface since it's totally not obvious.
Beauty pageants bother me. Some of the older CK style ads with tweens and 13 year olds are very distasteful.
This one? Doesn't bother me. Unless you can point to something that looks significantly different than my own kid's bedroom (hoodies and sweat pants and dolls with horrid makeup on them).
*edit*
Like what's being proposed here? That some barely visible piece of paper on a desk with fuzzy print I can barely read when I zoom in whose content is excessively dry legalese in a pornography case (that was a pro child protection finding) is going to subliminally influence me to find kiddie porn more acceptable?
*edit 2*
Went back and looked. The wine flutes are barely visible in the picture, didn't even notice the first time....and they're full of water. Big whoop.
If you can’t see why the ad is concerning, and you’re desensitized to what others see that’s off... no one is going to be able to convince you.
But many people do see a problem.
This is a sort of no-true-Scotsman circularity: Any non-desensitized person can see why the ad is concerning; if you can't see why the ad is concerning, you must be desensitized. Therefore, there's no further burden to persuade you otherwise.
To your point about these ads not looking far off from your own kids’ rooms, this ad campaign got me thinking about similarities to other dolls and toys popular on the market. For example, Monster High and Shadow High dolls have some similar motifs, they are styled with punk and goth looks. I’d argue they’re a step up from previous dolls, their bodies aren’t too thin and their clothes are more stylish than sexy. While the purple Balenciaga bear is a bit more BDSM, I really don’t see the white one as too problematic— I could see it sold alongside these aforementioned dolls, and (had it not been for this debacle) not cause any controversy.
Haha, guess you’ve never dabbled in bondage or BDSM 😆😆
I just saw one of the "purple bear" images. Now that's definitely a BDSM harness.
Pretty weird choice and I'd say that's inappropriate. Not sure it crosses into the "save our children!" zone for me. Or implies some sneaky conspiracy to sexualize children and normalize pedophilia.
Agreed and also a parent. Now I think they are in bad taste (like the fashion itself) but I fail to see this as world ending. But is also amuses me how conservative the crowd is here.
Won't somebody think of the children?!?!?!
Rational? What is the legal standard that these pictures crossed? Opening with an emotional appeal to your personal experience as a parent isn't a good way to start a reasonable debate about an issue that, if your, and many others, claims are true, is a crime. It's best to always start with the legal standard, and never make it personal. Hence why it's a panic. It has no standards, and is based on only an emotional response from parents that doesn't meet a legal standard, otherwise someone would have taken action. Worse yet is the near complete rejection of anyone who isn't a parent questioning calling this "sexual exploitation". "You just wouldn't understand because you're not "X"" is not a legal standard that courts accept, because it's not reasonable.
I'm all for going after people who cross that line, and with a vengeance. However, if we're going to move it back much further to encompass this particular example, then the legal definition will cover almost all pictures of children depending on the circumstances of the legislation. Be it exploitation, or sexual appeal.
I never said they crossed a legal line. Legal standards are not the only standards in the world or the only standards that matter. I’m also not arguing that the company should be punished, charged, or even boycotted. I - and I would propose many others commenting here - are not losing sleep or sinking into puts of despair or anxiety over this ad campaign. I was only making the point that parents often see things from a different perspective and that some people (and that includes people who aren’t parents) and that there are reasons a person may not like these ads that are not about a moral panic and are also not extreme or hysterical in their response. They’re just statements of “I don’t like this and this is why.” And I’m also trying to make the point that Katie and Jesse are either not acknowledging or not recognizing that there are many people who fall into this category (ie, acknowledging the nuance in a debate that they always wish people would acknowledge) and that it’s possible the reason why is because they are not parents themselves.
And just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. There are many things not prohibited by law that people would rightly think, “Eh, think we’d be better off not doing that.”
No they aren't the only standards, but when you're making claims about things that are laws, then you don't get to set the standards at your whims. This isn't sexualization of minors, a crime, nor is it exploitation, also a crime. But you use those terms to describe this thing that makes you so uncomfortable. And then when asked to back it up you run away to places where you don't have to meet any standard at all. We just have to accept that you feel this way. And I'm fine with that. I can accept that this makes you uncomfortable. But I don't understand why we you can't use language that actually reflects that you do not think that this rises to a crime.
Ok. Read the psychological literature on sexualizing, adultifying, and parentifying children. It is well established that treating children as small adults and exposing children to adult themes and concepts they are not reading to handle is not good for children. And please read carefully what I’m saying and what I’m not saying: I am not saying the children in this ad campaign were harmed by the props in the photo shoot. I am not saying there’s a conspiracy or a cabal of pedophiles behind this. I am not saying I should feel comfortable at all times or that wet is not allowed to push boundaries. I am not saying the company did anything illegal or should be boycotted or cancelled. I am saying that people, especially parents, can feel uncomfortable with these themes because we are very aware of and sensitive to what we know about adultifying and sexualizing children and that does not make us hysterically running around in a moral panic. There are other reasons - grounded in the science of child development- that a person may say “I don’t like this,” and there are many people who have those opinions who are not burning their stuff on TikTok or seeing secret messages in the dates on the wall. We are just expressing an opinion and explaining why because this is usually a space where nuance can be recognized, and, to quote Jesse, we can say about an issue, “It’s complicated.”
I haven't seen a single comment here claiming that these pictures are criminal or cross a legal line.
Sexualizing children, and exploiting them are crimes. There aren't really lesser versions of them that don't rise to being crimes, just differing opinions on what is, and isn't either of these things. If you want to assert your opinion that this ad campaign is exploiting children's sexuality, then we already have an agreed upon standard, and this example doesn't cross those lines.
Not sure why we're debating that children are being sexually exploited, and yet, somehow, you're all not suggesting to get the law involved... do you see the trouble with not using the legal standard now? We're not talking about breaking contracts, or failing to pay your bills/taxes here. In what possible situation do you really believe that you would call a child sexually exploited, and not think to get the law involved?
I think we seem to be reading different comments. Sexualising children is not a crime, though it is morally wrong. Sexualising means to make something sexual. I could dress my child in highly suggestive clothing or get them to hold a bondage bear or even a dildo and no crime would have been committed. It would however be a deeply funked up thing to do. And people would be allowed to have opinions about it.
If there's a different definition of sexualising children I'm not aware of, please let me know.
I'm also not sure exploiting children is illegal. Seems far too loose a term. I'm pretty sure my teen thinks I'm exploiting him by getting him to do the dishes. I'm not a legal expert nor a US citizen, so I'm very happy to be corrected if my definitions are not accurate..
So the explicit definition of exploitation is "the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work." That's not the legal definition, which is where you'll find the details outlining what is, and isn't considered unfair. There you will find that yes, the law does distinguish at which point you're exploiting your teen when you make them do the dishes. A line, a standard upon which, once you cross it, you're "exploiting" your teen. Because your teen doesn't get to set the standard at their whim.
It's a really odd example of dressing up your child. Yes in my country that would get you investigated, and likely convicted for sexual child abuse. It's hard to say what prosecutor will bring what charges, and which juries will convict, but dressing up your kid to be sexy is really suspicious, and if your kid is put on the stand, they'll be used against you no matter their claims. However if you recreated this ad campaign, you probably wouldn't even get to trial. Because this ad campaign doesn't cross any of the lines you mention... except for maybe the bear. And he doesn't qualify because he lacks a number of qualifiers to be considered a "bondage" bear. Bondage gear is straps that BIND, and whips. Not just studded leather straps which are established fashion statements that don't necessarily have sexual connotations to them. Seriously, just google search "punk bear" and you'll find a lot of examples that look a lot like maybe they're bondage bears. But in reality they just have a lot of studded leather straps.
I feel we are talking in circles here. I have read only comments that have used the verb exploit to mean what you state, which is not a legal definition.
I have not seen any information about how sexualising anyone can be a criminal offence. I find it incredible to hear that anyone would get arrested for putting their child in provocative clothing and giving them inappropriate props - surely this would make pageants illegal?
The ad was about props and staging, rather than clothing - I just used clothing as an example of why I understand the sexualisation of children (or anyone) not to be illegal, because it really can't be illegal unless we live in a totalitarian regime where it's mandated what people are allowed to wear or how they are allowed to pose.
There is a clear (and legal) difference between the sexualisation of children and child abuse. Pretty much all commenters here seem to understand this. The ones having an issue with the ad in question are saying that this is feeding into the sexualisation of children, which, while NOT illegal, is problematic for many reasons. I reserve the right to find things problematic which are not illegal. I also don't think everything needs to be regulated by law. Some things are just social norms and that's fine.
As a listener, I had an issue with how in the segment Katie suggested that anyone who objected to the ad was a nutjob. I think there are many legitimate concerns that one can have with regards to this ad without wanting to lock up everyone at Balenciaga and without thinking there is a pedophile ring at work.
There is no clear difference between child abuse, and sexualization of children, though I wonder if you could articulate that one here better then the imaginary line that this ad campaign crossed. There is a difference, but no court system maintains the same one, and these trials tend to be controversial in the extreme. You seem to think that some of it is okay, while the rest is not, and that someone, somewhere, has this all straightened out. That you can feel your way through all this without any negative consequences for anyone if you're wrong. Which is clearly not true, as my nation, which is one of the only ones with free speech enshrined in it's constitution, has laws against defamation. And I've no doubt that so does yours. Luckily for this conversation it doesn't meet those standards. At least I hope so in your case.
Exploitation is an unfairness, and in my country, at least, we're promised fairness as a matter of law. It's in our founding documents, all of which are legal ones, even the declaration of independence. And fairness is very much one of the virtues that are framed in it. Thus real exploitation, not the one your kid feels when you make them do chores, is, technically, illegal in my country, you just need to meet the standard. Claims of it without proof can net you a defamation lawsuit. It's really weird to me that you know of established unfairness taking place in your country and no one cares to do anything about it.
Pageants don't put dildos and bondage props in them, and they're also hardly sexualized. You proposed taking a sexualized picture, as in the kid would hold a sexual pose, in a lewd outfit, holding an explicitly sexual prop. None of these standards have been met by this ad campaign. Even the prop isn't explicit, as it can be demonstrated to be something besides a "bondage" bear and most of the evidence of that can be collected by simply searching the internet. Such a picture as the one you proposed can bring a lot of trouble down on you in my country. An organization called CPS (Child Protective Services) can be very zealous in applying the law. They've slapped people with child abuse charges for making their kid walk home a half mile in a safe neighborhood. And sexually explicit images of children can net you up to 20 years behind bars. I don't know what backwoods country you live in that doesn't protect children from being sexually exploited... but I'm pretty sure you're just ignorant of your own laws on this matter.
Eh, I think Jesse and Katie were a little harsh on people who believe this, but I don't think they were wrong, especially after this conversation. Still no clearly defined line, either legally, or socially, about what this campaign did to meet these words that have standards. We're just supposed to trust you. Which is the basis of every nutjobs claims that I've ever met. Also, when I don't believe them, I'm deficient somehow.
I've tried to engage in this conversation in good faith. I've tried to establish that we are using the same words in the same way. I don't appreciate personal insults and be told I'm from a 'backwoods' country and to receive a patronising lecture on how much better your country is. This is going nowhere.
You have? At some point you compared this photo shoot to having given a kid a dildo. That's not at all good faith. And your ignorance of your own laws are on you, not your country. I'm not the one who called it a backwater (that was just my shorthand), it was you who implied that your nation protects some kids from some exploitation, and not others. That's probably not true unless you live in an unstable nation. What is true is that you don't think your nation protects all the kids you think are being sexually exploited. And I wanted to know what about the pictures is sexually exploitive of these children, so I could more easily address the concerns about the photos. Turns out it's a bunch of nothing but the uncomfortable feelings of some people. Whose only real argument, turns out, is a patronizing one about how they have a deficiency due to a lack of offspring.
Yeah, you guys really started out trying to have a good faith discussion about if this campaign sexually exploited these children. Besides the fact that you presumed that there is something so wrong here that only the superpowers of being a parent can even see it. Like it's magic or something. Besides the fact that you're arguing it from a position of presumed guilt. Besides all the rules you're not following, and are insisting that you don't need to follow, you really tried hard to have a good faith discussion.
It's fetish wear which isn't really the same thing... You can go clubbing in an outfit like that.
I mean I don't have kids but I have to echo what all the parents are saying here. I was a prematurely sexualized young girl once and that shit is gross and scary and holds girls back.
I'm unqualified to diagnose Kanye West or anybody else (not a mental-health professional). That said, Kanye's recent behavior and remarks are very, very similar to the behavior of a relative of mine with Bipolar I. My relative, when manic, goes into grandiose conspiracy theorizing about how some entity (in his case, the CIA) is out to get him. Frankly, he doesn't sound that different from Kanye talking about the Jews.
I don't want to excuse Kanye's antisemitism. But it seems ludicrous to me that actual journalists like Josh Marshall feel qualified to say that bigoted conspiracy theorizing is NOT a hallmark of mental illness. Losing touch with reality to varying degrees is a classic symptom of multiple mental disorders, including the one that Kanye has apparently been diagnosed with! Who is served by our pretending that people in the throes of mania don't say terrible things and still require professional help? Certainly not the many less wealthy, less famous people who are similarly afflicted.
After nearly two decades of going on and off his meds, my relative finally committed to staying on his meds for the sake of his family, and he's been doing well ever since. I wish the same happy trajectory for Kanye.
Kudos to Jesse and Katie for not letting the ugliness of Kanye's remarks cloud their view of his sad condition.
Thank you for pointing this out. (I also know someone with bipolar 1) Psychosis is disabling because people do start believing all sorts of bizarre things that they would not believe if they were not psychotic. It's very difficult for people who have never been around someone who is sometimes psychotic or who who has actually experienced psychosis to understand. Many people who recover from psychosis are mortified by the things they believed and did when they were psychotic.
I hate to say this but I think some of this inability to understand psychosis has to do with the mental health awareness movement. It's focused on more common and less severe mental health conditions and ignored the more severe, less relatable ones. The whole "I'm bipolar and I don't become an antisemite" is also a really bad take. Most people with a bipolar disorder diagnosis don't have bipolar I and bipolar I is a very different disease than the other bipolar disorders. People who have never experienced bona fide full-fledged mania really aren't suffering from the same condition and their experience really isn't relevant.
End of rant.
Yes. Have you read Freddie DeBoer on the gentrification of disability? I ask only because it's been at least a week or two since I cited him on a Barpod thread. :-) He's very much with you on this stuff.
Yes! It's both depressing and refreshing to read his writing on this stuff.
The “gentrification of disability” has been such a helpful way to frame this, DeBoer is a great mind (even if that mind has caused him some very serious pain).
I was just about to mention him, too.
Even amongst those with BP I, it presents in wildly different ways.
One person might think their family members are trying to murder them. Another might think there's an evil jewish cabal that changed history and hitler was really Jesus.
It's just the height of ignorance for someone to say "my disease is the only legitimate presentation. my actions are due to the disease, but yours represent core personalty traits."
I just wanted to say that all of your comments on this episode have been very thoughtful and measured.
Yes! Right now, many of the loudest voices in online mental health activism are not only distracting attention and resources from more severe mental illnesses but are frequently spreading misinformation and bad takes about both severe and less severe conditions. And anyone who is making calls on someone’s “real intentions” and “real beliefs” while in a state of psychos s being shamefully ignorant and exploitive of a very serious mental health condition. FFS, the very definition of being in a state of psychosis is experiencing and believing things that aren’t real or true and unlike what a person behaves outside the psychotic state.
Top rant. I enjoyed it. And I agree with you.
I think the press should just ignore Kanye. As Katie said, we all know that Hitler was a very bad man. There's no need to state it lest anyone think you don't agree with that statement.
Eh. But the vast majority of people with bipolar I disorder do not go into anti semitic rants. They do get super paranoid when they are manic. But the anti semitism is a result of pre existing beliefs and maybe the culture in which he grew up. I bet if he were in treatment he would not do this
> But the anti semitism is a result of pre existing beliefs
This is just. not. true.
It _may_ be true, but it could be 100% a symptom of his mania.
Look, when Deboer thought his family was poisoning him...is this due to a preexisting belief that his family are murderers? No. It's delusional paranoia.
He literally could have been in a mania fit, stumbled on some Jewish Cabal conspiracy YouTube video, jumped to "hey, my agent is a Jew" and BAM! off to the races with a simple google search and a a few clicks to add piles of fuel to the delusional fire.
I've literally seen people go down these rabbit holes in real time due to mental illness or hallucinogens.
Right, but mania differs by person. Some people become convinced that space aliens are invading. It's unlikely that most of them believed in alien invasions prior to the onset of mania. And like you mentioned those who did believe in alien invasions were probably not going to discuss those beliefs in public when they were not manic.
It certainly is possible that he had some vaguely anti-semitic feelings (or even long-standing anti-semitic beliefs) and his mental health problems caused him to really focus on anti-semitic conspiracies and go on anti-semitic rants, but it's possible that these beliefs were not pre-existing. There's plenty of anti-semitism floating around in society and his manic brain may have picked up on that particular conspiracy theory.
I am not a mental health professional but I have six years of experience living with someone who seems to have paranoid delusional disorder. (Believing that millions of strangers are part of a worldwide conspiracy against her; messages designed for her are being sent through the TV, radio, and the internet.)
Anyhow, I can attest that this adult-onset disorder has exacerbated and amplified some pre-existing prejudices and animosities against certain races/nationalities. So there may be something to this analysis of Kanye.
Josh Marshall has clearly spent no time working on a psych ward. Latching on to bigoted conspiracy theories is as common as the smoking used to be on those units.
I am a doctor and Josh Marshall saying he's "familiar with the DSM" is laughable, not least because the DSM runs around 1000 pages. It's like me saying I'm "familiar with War & Peace" (although I've never read it) because I have it on my shelf and have heard people talk about it before.
Delusional paranoia is a hallmark of psychosis and it's absolutely absurd to think that someone in the grips of psychotic paranoia wouldn't be prey to one of the oldest conspiracy theories there is (anti-semitism). I wonder if Josh and other "iT's NoT mEnTaL iLlNeSs" progressives would prefer to go on record attributing Kanye's rants to the anti-semitism that's pervasive among African-Americans.
As others have said in these comments, the so-called "mental illness" the progressive armchair psychiatrists are familiar with is simply not the same thing as what Kanye is going through. Kanye is not like a quirky ADHD girl on tiktok. He's closer to the untreated schizophrenic living on the street, it's just that he started out with a lot more resources than most of those people did. He should be hospitalized for treatment but the tragedy is that a prominent person like him is surrounded by too many yes-men and hangers-on like Fuentes and Yiannopoulos who are using him for their meal tickets, so they'll never help him get the care he needs. They'll just abandon him when he no longer serves their purposes.
“I wonder if Josh and other "iT's NoT mEnTaL iLlNeSs" progressives would prefer to go on record attributing Kanye's rants to the anti-semitism that's pervasive among African-Americans.”
Right? No one seems to be wanting to acknowledge this history and ongoing reality. I went to high school in a black neighborhood in the 1990s. It was many of the black kids who spouted anti-semitic and homophobic stuff *on the regular*. Not all of the black kids but if those ideas were being openly expressed, it was black students expressing them, not white kids. Once a white girl was beaten up walking to school and the group of black girls who jumped her used anti-semitic slurs. I recall being at a political forum with a black state legislator in that neighborhood and all of the sudden while answering a question about redevelopment, she started railing against “the Jews” and mentioned that her opponent was Jewish. Many of the black people in the room started clapping and cheering.
Yep: even James Baldwin wrote about black antisemitism in Notes of a Native Son.
The last serious black presidential contender (Jesse Jackson) before Obama was derailed because of anti-semitic rhetoric inspired by Nation of Islam teachings. It's out there for sure
Ok. I'll do it for you:
I excuse Kanye's anti-semitism if (and it sure looks like it) he's in the middle of a Bipolar I manic episode. As I would anyone's behavior in the same state.....excuse, not justify.
Now....if he's on meds and not in a manic swing...same behavior, inexcusable.
I dunno, I have enough personal experience with people who are insufficiently medicated--not taking their meds, or not on the right things at the right dosages--that I'm inclined to be a pervert for nuance here. :-)
I just think there's a lot we can't know as news readers. Freddie deBoer is good on the balance of accepting personal responsibility for one's actions while acknowledging the complications that mental illness adds, IMHO.
Yep. I also personally excuse it because who is he really? A career egotist with a "Fair to Good" level of pop performance talent. Why is it any kind of news or scandal that he might also be a narcissistic mentally ill jerk? We all know at least one person like this. If we're upset about collectively making him a millionaire that possibly over-procreated and over-wasted owing to our sheeple largesse, that's one thing. But it would be ludicrous to be disappointed or confused that this person lacks coherence or tact.
An academic friend of mine who specializes in contemporary music rates Kanye's first 4-5 albums highly. My friend points out that Kanye, as someone who started out as a producer making beats, is really gifted at that work and has also collaborated with other artists on albums that became some of their best work. (I am citing my friend's opinion because I have a pop-cultural knowledge deficit and don't understand contemporary music at all.)
So I guess I wonder whether we may think of him as another troubled artist whose work is in a category largely apart from his personal life and comments (except to the extent that the latter affect his lyrics). If--just speculating here--he's an artist whose work benefits from the energy he may get during hypomanic periods, he may even feel that treatment hinders his work. That would be sad and difficult for anyone treating him but not at all uncommon for someone with bipolar disorder.
I agree! It’s easy to chuckle at him making his Adidas comments, only to cut to him being dropped days later. And it’s even easier to be enraged by his brazen platforming of dangerous antisemitic rhetoric. What is very obvious, even to us armchair psychologists, is this is going to end with him back on meds, hurting others (his kids, if we want to talk about kids who could truly be in danger), or hurting himself.
Similarly, I don’t know what to make of Milo. Is he truly just a vile opportunist who will jump on whatever provocateur act gets him the most notoriety and cash? Or does he have some pretty serious Cluster B issues that are really messing with his sense of self and driving him to do what he does? Is he really just so fucked up and self loathing? I was losing it over that Church Militant sales show, but then just felt icky and sad.
But why is Ye's antisemitism a symptom of mental illness while his white buddies are just flat-out evil white dudes? To me this seems like a double standard designed to let him off the hook. Both things can be true: Ye is mentally ill, and Ye is an antisemite.
The devil is in the details!
Ye is known to have mental illness, and it has affected his relationships before. He is saying all kinds of crazy shit we haven't heard from him before. He is torching his business empire, acting erratically. He is behaving manically. How is he being let off the hook? He lost billions from his Adidas partnership being ended. Of course he could be antisemetic! But going by the fact that he is clearly manic and hasn't said this shit when he's doing well, it seems pretty obvious to me.
What "evil white buddies" are you talking about?? Are they people who are known to have mental illness and are destroying their businesses? Or are they opportunists who find ways to make money off their terrible opinions?
By his "buddies" I just meant the white guys involved in this episode, Yiannopoulos and Fuentes. I was just wondering why their bigotry is presumed to come from a place of stability while his is presumed to come from a place of illness. I don't doubt that he is unhealthy, but as I said, he can be both mentally ill and, independently, a hater of Jews. It's entirely possible that during healthier times he had enough inhibition to keep his views to himself, as many of us often do with unpopular opinions.
Sure- and none of us have any way of knowing.
That last point (the both/and one) I agree with. I personally don't label people "evil white dudes."
As someone said either in a earlier open thread here or somewhere on Freddie DeBoer's Sutbstack, it's disingenuous to say that a guy latching onto possibly the most prominent conspiracy theory for the past thousand years ("the Jews did it!") can't come from a place of mental illness.
What strikes me is Kanye has gotten this far without anyone in his family or personal network trying to get him committed. Britney shaved her head and her family took over her life for years. He's also a parent, and seems just as out of control, or more, and has so much to lose.
The relatives of mine who have developed forms of dementia both became uncharacteristically interested in various crackpot and conspiratorial theories in the early-mid stages of their deterioration. It was heartbreaking to see. One was being preyed upon by scam artists who used this to their advantage. (We were able to protect this person, but boy howdy, it was not easy. Keep your durable powers of attorney & health care proxies up to date, friends.)
"The relatives of mine who have developed forms of dementia both became uncharacteristically interested in various crackpot and conspiratorial theories in the early-mid stages of their deterioration." I bet some of my relatives believe this is exactly what's happening to me, now that I've become a late-life crusader against gender nonsense.
Kanye was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital in Nov 2016 for one week. I think he refused meds once he was discharged.
Exactly...the only ones that know are the ones that are close to him. Kim would know, for example.
Because they've seen him in all states. They'd be able to tell you unambiguously if these are magnified reflections of personal beliefs or pure delusion. Not that I blame them from staying way the hell out of this one.
I think part of the problem is that whereas your average psychosis sufferer burdens their limited personal milieu (if lucky to have one), KW can put out tp and get widespread attention and support from millions of people. (I mean, until he can't, which may be soon.) I always considered him a sort of pop culture troll who wasn't appealing enough to me to actually appreciate on that level, but it does seem like this guy's going through "some shit" right now. A 1% drop in attention to him should go a long way to solving the problem.
During the height of Trump hysteria, I pissed off my brother (who I considered a really close friend) by saying "I don't like Kanye's music, but then I don't listen to a lot of hip-hop so I know that's not a weighty opinion." I was called racist and given a lecture about the black experience (neither of us are black) and rap culture before he stormed out of my house.
I've been laughing about that to myself for the past week or so.
Ah. Disliking rap is so racist. Disliking klezmer is anti semitic, too, I suppose. I hope things have improved in with your brother
I had a very stereotypical SJW friend who insisted not liking country music was classist.
I like country music. It’s all i listen to. There is zero chance your Sjw friend doesn’t judge people who like country music. Nearly everyone who discovers my taste in music is shocked, and I know enough not to share that part of myself freely. I’m an Ivy League educated liberal :). Maybe they just find it incongruous, but there’s almost always an undertone of judgement.
Lol. Can’t win. It’s also not that I hate rap or country or anything, they just wouldn’t be on heavy rotation for me.
I'm half asian/half white and I don't really like country or asian music (whatever that is?) so maybe I just really hate myself? He also alluded that a metal show I went to was some white supremacist event (It was Mastodon and Gojira, really mainstream stuff 🙄). At some point I resolved not to talk to him about politics, but since everything seems to be political these days, we don't talk all that much.
That really sucks.
Yes. Yes it does.
I’ve not been able to take him seriously, however good his music may or may not be, since in the very distant past, I heard the lyric “it’s Kanye, but most of my plastic still say Kane.”
I think my criticism at the time was that he rhymes the same word with itself more than I’d expect from a genius voice of a generation.
I like his music. But totally fair comparison.
He's also rhymed "Klondike" with "blonde dyke" in at least two songs, and possibly three.
The veil was pierced for me by his feature on "That Part" with School Boy Q.
Katie, Jesse, and Trace: you are in *the right timeline*, it's like J. Michael Straczynski is the showrunner of the internet all of a sudden, and you are the only people ready and able to shape it into something not-just-brain-melting. (Though also: brain-melting.)
Katie's point about how a lot of gay men used to effectively get initiated/groomed by older men when we were a less permissive society: I once had a fascinating conversation with a cab driver from the Middle East who genuinely believed you became gay *because* you had an experience as a young man with an older homosexual. (Also, it must be said: I'm gay, my 'dar is pretty good, and this cab driver...well let's just say, if I had to place a bet, I'd say he was speaking from experience.) Anyway, he was telling me how certain countries had better underground gay scenes than others. (Totally something a straight man would talk about out of nowhere, amirite?) And apropos of nothing, I want to share my favorite quote of his from our *totally unprovoked* mid-cabride "best underground gay scenes in the Middle East" conversation: "In Kuwait they are gay like they are buying a bagel!"
Milo's return to the simulation is...fascinating. What a desperate creature, and boy, has his fall from grace made it painfully apparent what a *huge* waste of time and energy it was for anyone to get so upset about him. The thing that sucks is, I have a weird soft spot for the plight of (wait for it) ex-gays. Specifically: adults who decide to take that path over time. I think it's because I was raised Catholic, and can see somebody making that choice, either because they found the gayscape nihilistic (it so can be) or because they have a real focus on by-the-letter Christianity--which I don't personally? But like, I know a gay guy who became a monk, for instance, and I don't look at ex-gays as being very different from that. (Frankly, being a monk is much more difficult! At least you get to have kids if you're an ex-gay.)
Anyway, Milo's being an ex-gay makes me angry not because he's an ex-gay but because he's ruining being an ex-gay now LOL. I'm like, "Leave the ex-gays alone! They're dealing with enough! Why don't you just become a BTS stan, FFS?!"
And finally (way too much content in this comment) this Balenciaga thing! So creepy! I obviously don't think there's a pedo conspiracy here, so much as there's a wave of pushback to a provocative advertisement. But oh man, do I get why that ad set people off, and winning a debate on the "pro Bondage Bear" side, for whatever reason you engage in it, is pretty much a loss for you.
Did anyone see that amazing movie "The Square," about the disastrous marketing campaign for an art museum? It's incredible, you should see it right now. Katie, Jesse, Trace: see it! You'll love it. It's terrifying. A cringe comedy rollercoaster.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy of like, actual practicing pedophiles; but I do think that the desire to transgress for its own sake can lead people to very, very dark places.
There is often a very fine line between a provocative ad campaign that gets you talked about, and one that destroys your brand. I think this one has danced merrilly across the line and off into the sunset.
They’d probably have gotten away with it in any year that wasn’t dominated by groomer hysteria.
"way too much content in this comment"
There's no such thing.
I agree with Katie (or was it Jesse or both) that this supposedly ultimately damning comment of Milo's was the least of the problems with him. I was the Gen X equivalent of today's SJW and grew up in the NYC metropolitan area and I know PLENTY of people who were young gay guys that hooked up with older men and viewed it positively. I do get that people may have been waiting for something objectively condemnable to bring Milo down with.
I grew up in NYC and one of my friends - he was 14 or 15 and dating a married man with kids. His parents knew.
I think Katie mossef something else - with apps teen boys can meet other boys their age. Or older men. And teenage blys, however disturbing this is, do not seem to suffer the same psychological damage tren girls have from these relationships. Not that theu are ok, but they often are not damaging. And plenty of teen girls date adult men and OT does not lead to damage as well. Even if it is the last thing anyone would want fpr their kids
It's definitely not easy to have a soft spot for ex-gays. I think the pursuit/identification understandably raises people's hackles either because they themselves similarly tried, and now find the notion ridiculous, and/or it feels threatening, adding stones to the "enemey's" slings.
As someone who voluntarily went through conversion therapy all throughout high school for reasons of faith (blessedly, it was wildly unsuccessful, still gay as hell), I nonetheless resonate with your soft spot. I remember going to an ex-gay retreat when I was 17 and meeting all these men who were trying to deal with feelings which they, for various reasons, found unacceptable. For some, it was definitely from fear and what we would call internalized homophobia, but for many it was precisely because of their faith, or because they were married to women and had kids and felt morally they needed to make it work. I put those latter guys in a different category than someone driven by hatred/self-hatred. They were earnestly trying to make sense of their lives, and their choice doesn't take away from my choice to embrace bein a big ole homo.
However, I think we have ample reason to doubt Milo's qualifications as one of those latter, earnest seekers.
I don't think Milo is really ex-gay. Do you? I think this reversal, like 99% of everything else he does, is an act to get attention. And I also think if any of the people he's chumming around with these days found out they would probably either shrug it off or he could appeal to them as being 'a flawed human' and probably get away with it... because a lot of their aversion to homosexuality is also an act/something they do to fit with their tribe(s).
I'm sure you're right. His path will necessarily snake toward any attention he's capable of getting, this is more than likely a cynical turn. Fun fact: one of his avowed enemies, Ross Mathews, is on TV all the time now--and what's more, "still" gay!
It's performance art. His caricature of how a straight man dresses is quite something.
I think the ""I'm gay only because I was groomed/molested" mindset still has some currency in fundamentalist Christian circles. It was in part the impetus for that pray away the gay conversion therapy. I suppose these folks deem homosexuality to be a form of PTSD that can be addressed by prayer and counselinng
Suddenly those vampire movies don't seem like such a hot metaphor! (Though don't get me wrong, they're still hot.)
Hear, hear!
We watched The Square about 3 weeks ago. Highly recommend - it will stick with you!
Look I hate BTS fans as much as any moderately-normal Twitter user, but even they don't deserve to have Milo wished on them.
I find this whole century so far very confusing.
It just keeps getting weirder.
When I came home with a tattoo, my dad just looked at me and said "one day. one day kids are going to start doing things that you just can't bring yourself to understand. You'll never see it coming. You won't understand it in the least. When I was growing up, only sailors and circus people got tattoos. . . . I wonder what your moment will be."
Well. Now I know.
If you said "There'll be a new fad/clique like Goth or Punk Rock except to be part of the clique you have to chop off your penis or your breasts. It'll be super popular. If kids in 2nd grade want to one day be part of the clique, doctors will give them hormones so they don't go through puberty until they're old enough to get castrated or mastectomies. Something like 20% of kids will want to join the group in some way."
I'd have been like GTFO of here! That's some crazy dystopian sci-fi shit.....and not even good sci-fi.
These are all the kinds of things I think of as well. But sort of tangentially, I justified tattoo-getting based on my experience volunteering at a hospital when I was a kid, and seeing the tattoos of older people who weren't otherwise able to tell you about themselves, whether because they were sedated or asleep or had dementia. I liked seeing the signs of of somebody's earlier life.
My grandfather, who was a foreman at Union Carbide factory in W Va.(asbestos) had the names of all of his female family members (wife, daughter, granddaughters) in beautiful "ribbon" font on his muscled arms. I loved seeing my name on his arm.
That’s a really lovely perspective.
that's really lovely. The only person in my family with a tattoo is a grandmother, interestingly. I've been thinking I'd like to get some with my kids names but such tattoos are very much considered tacky in my world. but your comment has me rethinking!
Get it where no one can see it if you're wearing normal clothes.
Jackson, what year did this tattoo conversation take place? Interesting story, thanks for sharing.
ohhh, must have been around 1995.
I'm only 30 and I'm having the same thoughts. Times sure do change quickly...
Yay, another person on the internet that's been alive this whole century!
and then some!
Haha!
I sent my friend the Church Militant Milo sales clip and all I could muster for the caption was, “Let these be the last days.”
This was honestly a great use of the BARPod format where one host is learning about the story for the first time, because we got to hear Katie's framing of the Balanciaga story repeatedly crash and burn against Jesse's reactions.
Katie: Tell me what you see.
Jesse: A toddler standing in front of a bunch of empty alcohol glasses holding a bondage bear.
Katie: No! You didn't see a bondage bear. It's obviously a goth/punk bear in a leather harness.
Jesse: (Proceeds to call it a bondage bear for the rest of the episode, calling Katie to also call it a bondage bear until she remembers and corrects herself to say punk bear)
Katie: Then they shot an office ad that included pages of a Supreme court decision that said that virtual child porn was legal, but EKTUALLY that decision was good because it said that porn with actual kids was illegal.
Jesse: That's really wierd and creepy. Why would they do that?
Katie: ...
(Me: Also, duh - I'm pretty sure toddler porn was illegal before that decision.)
Katie: Here's an ad with an unreadable diploma that weirdos think says "John Phillip Fisher," but it's unreadable.
Jesse: It looks like it says John Phillip Fisher to me.
(Me: Given that ad, I'm less inclined to believe Katie's argument that the dates in the other ad were just coincidentally associated with child porn. Also, it totally and obviously says John Phillip Fisher.)
Jesse: Are these guys deliberately trolling people concerned about child porn?
Katie: No! It's just a weird series of coincidences! Or maybe it's on purpose, but then it's just an ad campaign playing around with toddler sexuality for clicks! And there's no reason to be offended by that! Or maybe there is, but it doesn't mean there's a worldwide pedophile conspiracy!
The empty wine glasses ought to be a red flag on their own! FFS! Plying children with alcohol is literally a thing a groomer would do, and including that in a photoshoot heavily implies that the kid in the photo has been/is being groomed within the world of the photo.
Maybe the photoshoot itself is not grooming, but why the fuck would anyone think it is a good idea to create/depict? Edgelord/lady is a stupid-ass fucking non-excuse.
"We don't have a single actual victim here"
The children in the ads, Kaybee. Reduced to props to fulfill somebody's idea of a "wEiRd" and "EdGY" fashion shoot, apparently.
There is a long history of exploitation of children in the modelling and entertainment industries and this illustrates that not enough has changed.
"What people are mad about are hypothetical children that, what, may get molested someday because some child abuser sees these images as like, 'cool! It's normalized now"'
Kaybee, Jaybee, I say this with love: Could you please get an actual exert on child safeguarding on to speak about this before the next time you do an episode about child abuse or "grooming"?
Yes, please! I think K and J really don't know very much about safeguarding. That's fine - many people don't. They also don't have kids so it's a step removed further and by their discussions I guess that they thankfully seem to not have experienced sexual exploitation or grooming as kids themselves (obviously speculating here, very much hoping I'm right).
Please, please speak to someone who knows what they are talking about. This is not a moral panic. Yes, the right is quick to jump onto anything and call it grooming and sure, people went a bit nuts looking up dates and court case papers, etc. over this, but what happened in the ad and in general in our society with regards to kids is often really, really damaging.
Children are not small adults.
Apart from using baby names, i totally agree that the child models are harmed in this.
They may not have known in the moment what that bondage stuff was that they posed with, but they probably do now, and even if they don’t, they will as soon as they can use the internet and they will realize that no matter if the intent was to shock and get publicity or bc the designer felt inspired to have them model with those items, they were sexualized for profit, their parents put them in the situation to participate in the campaign and be effected by the public reaction. And they will know that most people stood up for them and said, “this isn’t ok to do with a child” and that some people didn’t. There is no way that a child could consent to participating in this ad.
One technique for grooming IS desensitizing people to inappropriate sexualized images. This was not meant to be published in children’s media, but I don’t want the greater public to be desensitized to such images.
You sound like a Karen.
Ok, Mr. Grumpypants.
Y’all, those are not “punk” bears. Come on. You can say people overanalyzed/freaked out over the ad if that’s how you feel but denying what is very clearly bondage gear is stupid.
The purple bear is pretty obviously in bondage wear, but I think the white bear is arguably just an edgy bear.
I think sometimes the people who create this stuff to be ‘edgy’ don’t actually know enough about the subculture to understand what they are referencing, and how others will read the message they are putting out.
Some of the stuff in those campaigns is almost certainly innocent coincidence, and some of it is deliberate provocation (you don’t accidentally come across that Supreme Court case, you have to know how to find it). It’s possible that someone somewhere was deliberately dropping these weird little nuggets in but it’s more likely a series of people with a brief to be ‘edgy’ who didn’t realise quite what it would look like when all taken together.
This is the logical endgame of a society where transgression has become the cultural norm. There are so few boundaries left to push that the people who typically engage in boundary pushing end up doing legitimately crazy shit. Fashion houses and artists start dabbling in one of the few remaining taboos that's taboo for a very good reason (child porn) and kids start gender transitioning because it's the only thing left that can shock their liberal parents. We need to bring back some kind of norms and institutions to rebel against before things go even further off the rails!
I'm surprised you guys didn't include Balenciaga's "official" response to the paperwork that was included:
"All the items included in this shooting were provided by third parties that confirmed in writing that these props were fake office documents. They turned out to be real legal papers most likely coming from the filming of a television drama." (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnn.com/style/amp/balenciaga-lawsuit-controversial-campaign/index.html)
To me, this is pretty believable. For sure they should have had someone at least skim it, but I can totally see this just being negligence.
I sort of disagree with you guys on the bears. On the one hand, I think they could have just been trying to be edgy. But I think saying the shoot was "in poor taste" is an understatement. Honestly, the photos reminded me a lot of the Alok Vaid-Menon quote "I believe in the radical notion that little girls are complicated people. There are no fairy tales and no princesses here. Little girls are trans, queer, kinky, devious, kind, mean, beautiful, ugly, tremendous and peculiar."
The practice of adults ascribing adult-like sexuality to children is both incorrect and extremely troubling to me. I do think that some child molesters use logic like this to justify their behavior. And although the photos are obviously open to interpretation, that's how I read them.
That Alok Vaid-Menon quote will never not be creepy AF.
Listening to the new episode, and wanting a thing I heard that a fan of the Advisory Opinions podcast made for that pod to become a thing for this pod: a bingo game to complete while listening to the episode https://aobingo.com
And just like that, I lost a good third of the audience who might now be googling "what is bingo?"
It looks like it's built on a WP plugin, which in my younger years I'd happily waste time putting together but I'm baking bread right now so carbs come first. https://github.com/brichards/wpbingo
Ideas for squares:
☐ Katie & Jesse go back and forth on how to pronounce a word
☐ Jesse talks about food
☐ Katie dismisses concerns about the sexualization of children as a moral panic
(Okay, not the last one... yet.)
More on topic, isn't it Bah-len-ciaga, not Bah-lawn-ciaga?
Katie says being nonbinary is fake, and Jesse hems and haws so as not to have to agree out loud.
It's complicated is the free space
The only time I’ve heard Balenciaga pronounced out loud before this kerfluffle was in American Horror Stiry: Coven, so not only do I read it as Bah-len-ciaga, I ‘hear’ it dramatically pronounced in Frances Convoy’s voice
I liked Katie's pronunciation of "automaton". "Balenciaga" not so much.
Yet another current day controversy which has some links back to gamergate.
When are we getting the 12-part GG special?
Endorse. C’mon Jesse, can it really be much more work than Keffels?
I want that so badly. Krffals felt like...why?
My current theory is that Jesse and Katie have a tegridy gene where they don’t want to feel bought, even by us, so in this case they have to be super edge Lordy about the Balenciaga stuff.
I don’t know if a pedophile is orchestrating all that stuff but ask yourself the following question: would you have been onto Epstein or Saville before those allegations became undeniable?
People who want to fuck kids do weird shit.
Yeah. I am a little wary of this stuff too now. I remember laughing at the "moral panics" and "conspiracy theories" around the time that the paedophile episode of Brass Eye aired. Then it transpired that there actually were paedophile rings operating at high levels of various British institutions.
I think we all want to believe no one could do that shit brazenly but I think being brazen about it is an evolved mechanism to go undetected because everyone thinks “surely if that’s was what it looked like, people would shut it down.” Then if you ever do realize you can’t forgive yourself for not having done something right away when it was obvious so you don’t say anything out of shame and guilt.
I feel like you need a normie middle-age lady to help you with some of your cultural references. If you need me for any kind of things that you haven’t heard of, a drop me a line.
Don't try to steal my job!
I am always face palming ( middle aged enough reference for you?) at the cultural ignorance those two have. I yell like they can hear me.
I listen with earbuds (the ones on cords, not like those newfangled magic ones I’d lose.. I actually paid Apple for the adapter bc I was so mad they did away with the regular headphone jack in my new iPhone)... so I have to stifle my reactions somewhat to avoid scaring the family.
I feel like I've found my tribe.
I’m still clinging to my fossilized iPhone 6s.
Guess why? :)
I’m still on my iPhone 6. No S!
Wow! I bow to your superior resistance to change and or frugality madam. Well played!
Lol, you are kind to praise a couple of my least-admirable qualities.
I’m with you. It pains me
I did that too during this one.
“WHAT???” followed by face palm. My husband was confused and possibly frightened ;)
Katie, just stop a the goddamned red light. And I think in most jurisdictions the vehicle owner is responsible no matter who is driving.
The best way to get out of traffic tickets is to obey traffic laws. Jesus christ why are people like this.
But if you really want to break them it makes way more sense to cover up the license plate so you won't get the ticket. the idea you'd be like "it wasn't me see that person is wearing a mask!" and they'd be like "okay then you win" is pure internet fantasy
Katie's take about traffic cameras was so idiotic I'm kind of speechless. Try arguing with a government bureaucrat it wasn't you and see how that goes? Trying to imagine her arguing it wasn't her in traffic court. Was she kidding?
Also just obey traffic laws and then you won't get a ticket.
I am truly fascinated by the hate that traffic cameras get. They can get drivers to obey the traffic laws and unlike human police, you don't really have to worry about bias. If bias creeps in, its because of which intersections you install them at. Yes, you can reasonably see them as part of the surveillance state, but that's not usually the argument against them.
Yeah US drivers have a very weird entitled attitude. It's really difficult for me to understand
Not to defend the US, but that weird entitled attitude towards traffic cameras is all over Italy too.
The problem in California at least was that red light cameras were being installed and then the orange timer was set unreasonably short for the traffic speed, so people were unable to avoid running the red. Same as speed traps where the limit drops from 55 to 25 without enough time to brake and the cops just pull out-of-towners over all day to ticket them. Easy revenue but it does nothing for traffic safety, in fact probably the reverse by having people stamp on the brakes when they’re expecting to make the orange.
See eg the results here where adding 0.3-0.5 sec to the orange timer reduced red light running by 80-95%, implying that the cameras were ticketing people who were not intentionally running the red:
https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/safety-programs/documents/ctcdc/f0017772-item-18-08-report-on-minimum-yellow-light-change-interval-timing-for-intersections-a11y.pdf
I was one of the CA drivers who suffered this fate. I was making a left turn on a yellow - COMPLETELY legal. Got a ticket in the mail (and the photo of me was extremely unflattering). By the time I went to fight it they were like "yeah those have already been forgiven, you're good".
They get hate *because* they can get drivers to obey the traffic laws, and drivers don’t want to. 😅
I wish I could come to a different conclusion I've found the podcast so entertaining and cathartic over the years. But yeah it's kind of hard to argue
On the contrary, I think she is very principled and empathetic. She just likes making outrageous jokes, and some people fall for them, I guess. Which I find so weird.
lol "principled"
I don't know, I tend to see most of those comments as self aware jokes. I may be wrong, though. Regarding the non binary and asexual people, I don't think she mocks them as much as she mocks the weirdest, less coherent parts of the main discourse, as she does with, well, everything.
I lived in NJ the first 36 years of my life. If a driver couldn't make a left turn on red with impunity the entire state economy would collapse.
That wasn't a joke? Yeah it was really weird. So if they get you, but you're wearing a gimp mask, you just say your car was stolen? And then you're at the police dept so they ask you why didn't you report your car stolen? Where does this story end? Very odd understanding of how these cameras/tickets work.
It reminded me of things people say when they just have no life experience at all. Like something a hick relative would say. Very odd
Of course she was kidding.
She was definitely not kidding
Heh. My dad tried to argue his way out of a parking ticket. It...did not go well
Y’all, those are not “punk” bears. Come on. You can say people overanalyzed/freaked out over the ad if that’s how you feel but denying what is very clearly bondage gear isn’t cool.
I know. Where were the piercings? Has goth evolved to pseudo bondage?
Also, as Eli Lake points out, the 1970s punks, if transported to 2022, would be wearing Maga hats bc that really freaks ppl out
Now I’m imagining a photo shoot with trump teddy bears. Gotta admit I’d get out the popcorn and watch the freak out
Goth, punk, metal and all other sibling subcultures have always borrowed from the BDSM/gay leather community. When these scenes were in their infancy in the 70s, aesthetic influence was coming from Rob Halford of Judas Priest (who was closeted, but performed in leather daddy attire), Vivienne Westwood and Malcom McLaren (founder of Sex Pistols) and their fetish inspired proto punk rock clothing shop straight up called SEX (stylized all caps), and underground fetish and drag culture in London. The bondage pinup looks (a la Bettie Page) have also influenced these subcultural aesthetics. In the 90s and 00s, you could walk into any suburban mall and find bondage pants and o-ring collars at Hot Topic— along with fishnet tops, nothing too different than that white bear.
I think someone said it somewhere else in this comment section, but I could see the white bear being a punk bear. Or like a punky/goth raver bear. That purple one is definitely bondage, though.
Yeah a punk teddy ought to have a cig sticking out of his mouth like in that Jerry Jones photo
I have already commented a lot on this episode but I had to add: the people who are out there *defending* Kanye, not from the "he's mentally ill" side of things but from the "hey maybe he has a point" side of things...I'm like, wow. I can't tell if it's their anti-Semitism coming out, or their ill-advised "anything your team does not like, my team will support, because fuck your team" approach to political discourse, or BOTH! But I've definitely lost a lot of respect for several conservative talking heads this week.
Who? I haven’t seen any of that (on purpose).
Well "respect" with regard to the *people* may be pushing it, but after his victory over Carlos Maza, for instance, I always respected Steven Crowder's hustle...and now I don't.
Jonah Goldberg had a good piece on the phenomenon:
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/gfile/get-with-the-pogrom/
Thank you, Jonah is always good on this sort of thing.
I’ve never been a Crowder fan, something about him always bugged.
I probably have an indefensible "enemy of my enemy" thing with him because Carlos Maza (who tried and failed to cancel him) is someone I view as a blight on my people--specifically, the Alphabet ones. I honestly prefer worthy adversaries to incapable allies. But now, I guess I've seen behind the curtain on both of them, and I'm all out of fucks to give.
Speaking of fucks being given, yes, I also think I had a crush on Crowder because he's a douchey blowhard and I have a thing for those. I don't have a crush on cancer cells, though, so we're THROUGH, Crowder! Do you hear me? THROUGH!
Haha! I get it, sometimes there’s no explanation- you like who you like. The blowhard thing is not in my wheelhouse, bet that puts a pin in what I didn’t like. Oh well, he never deserved you anyway and you’re better off without him! JERK!
It's alright, Jonah Goldberg is honestly more my type LOL! (When I look for the conservative perspective, I tend to seek out public figures I am superficially attracted to, so that I can get the "listening to the other side like a grown-up" thing and the "he's so damn cute" thing at once. Sometimes multitasking DOES work!)
Very smart time management ;)
I think Jesse and Katie are effectively supporting the woke religiousy thing by denying or willfully discounting how ideological conditioning works. There is an ongoing effort to dissolve boundaries and definitions around childhood, sexuality, health, human development and biology/nature. Jesse and Katie will go from, “this is no big deal” to “this is all good and true”- successor ideology.
Do you really think it’s a deliberate conspiracy toward those ends specifically or do you think those ends are incidental to this “progressive” way of activist thinking - as in no reform or change is ever “done” and every issue must continue to “progress” and so ends up in some dangerous or just dumb places way past what your average person is on board with.
I think it is both. I haven't been on BLM's website in literally years but back in 2915, what turned me off to them was the way they talked about families.
So I think it is both - for some there is the deliberate queering of children, either because they have nefarious goals or more likely, they think it is good for kids. For others, it is a byproduct of prpgresive actvisism.
I think you’re probably right. It’s just such a foreign impulse to me. I can’t imagine trying to get involved with other people’s children and mess around with their value systems and familial relationships. It seems like such a violation.
They were free to make that clarification, instead they scrubbed the text from their website.
I’m confident that they find traditional families where two parents enforce rules on their children to be an oppressive power structure that needs to be dismantled. For them it’s just more hierarchy, and hierarchy is bad.
But also, ok, I checked their website in 2015 or 2014 and then a few years later and I haven't looked since 2020. They were explicit about destroying the nuclear family - if they meant that they wanted larger kin-like families, it was never clarified when I looked. Which means that either that wasn't what they meant at all, or they assumed everyone would understand what they meant
My assumption, based on what BLM leaders have said, is they think nuclear family is bad, and anything else is preferable.
Why is it 'objectively' not better for kids? I see this line in its various forms put out by a range of folks, especially John McWhorter. But I'm not sure I've seen what makes it 'objectively' a bad thing.
Possibly I've been influenced by Albert Murray's Omni-Americans, which goes on a tear about the vilification of single-mother families as broken.
I think some may be advocating for that. I think some of it is making sure single moms are not stigmatized. And based on everything I have heard, it is more about the single moms than large extended families.
The problem is stigma hurts kids AND children in single parent homes do not do well.
I also think that BLM specifically is about queering families, not just normalizing extended families. They were VERY. specific about the dangers of heteronormativity. Which, fair enough if you are assumed to be straight, this is not fair. At the same time, the vast majority of us are straight and again, kids do better with married parents, regardless of sexual orientation.
I hope you are right that their point was about larger families, but it didnt seem that way at all. Not basec on other things the leadership said. ,
Ah! Not to nitpick, but as a widow I did a little research on this after my husband died, and there's no difference in outcome for kids if the parent is single because one of a parent's death. Strange, right? But death is more (though not perfectly) evenly distributed in society than divorce or getting knocked up by random dudes. So it's likely it's something about the people who tend to get divorced or knocked up randomly that makes kids do less well, not the fact of singleness.... btw, the stimga is real, though, even if you're a single parent cause your spouse died of cancer. And it sucks.
I think how upset you get about Balenciaga depends on whether you think we will see a serious push to normalize pedophilia within the next 10-30 years. I think we probably will; if you don’t, obviously you’d be less upset.
There seems to be a real push around ages of consent. I've seen people on Twitter legitimately argue that 12 year olds should be able to consent to a tattoo.
Once you believe a 14 year old can consent to having her breasts removed, then consenting to sex with an adult feels much less 'damaging'. There is a shift taking place in terms of how mature we think teenagers are and what behaviour is being allowed.
I hate to sound like a prudish old woman but, you can see it in popular culture - teen TV shows these days revolve around sex, drugs and crime storylines, you rarely see the parents of characters who are supposed to be 15/16 years old, and nobody ever seems to do any schoolwork! (The one exception to this is Derry Girls - as someone who was the same age as the girls at the time it's set, it perfectly captures what life was like as a teenage girl in the mid-90s. And they're not all shagging and taking drugs!)
Are you sure the tweets about 12yo getting tattoos weren’t from a scorned adolescent who wanted one? The body modification industry is one I am intimately familiar with, and there are no serious pushes to get kids tattooed. Most piercers I know won’t even pierce noses under 15 or 16– even with parental consent. While I agree teens are absolutely not old enough to consent to top surgery and the impending lawsuits will be staggering, there’s no reason to believe this will spill over into the body art industry.
I’d also be eager to know if any states have reduced their age of consent in recent years. I doubt it.
Television shows have portrayed all of the above for decades, from 90210 to The OC to Skins. I’d actually argue the 00s, and its pushing the limits of a then still new reality show format, was the raunchiest time in television. Everything feels pretty tame compared to Bad Girls Club and Rock of Love. **Edit: While reality shows like these didn’t center around teens, teens were very much part of the intended audience.
I don't think the person who said a 12 year old should be able to consent had any links to the body mod industry. It's interesting that tattooers and piercers are acting more responsibly when it comes to minors than educators and medics.
In the UK we have a concept called Gillick competency - a very Christian woman called Victoria Gillick in the 80s tried to ban the supply of contraceptives to minors without parental consent. It backfired on her, because Gillick competency is now a measure of if a teenager is mature enough to understand the consequences of their medical treatment and if a child is deemed Gillick compentent then they can consent to treatment. It was used by the likes of online GPs to provide hormones to teenagers, until the Kiera Bell court case which ruled that children could never be Gillick competent when it came to puberty blockers. Gillick competency is going to be a major battle ground over the next few years and will probably come up a lot in detransitioner court cases.
Re: TV shows, it used to be that a drugs or crime storyline would centre on one character who was going off the rails or that it would show negative consequences for those acts. Now, it feels like the adults who write and star in teen TV shows want to make it appear that kids are living these hedonistic lifestyles - when the actual research suggests that today's teens are actually the most straight-laced ever, the vast majority are not drinking, smoking, taking drugs or having sex and the numbers that are keep falling. It's very strange.
I think about films like Pretty Baby and American Beauty, and then think about how those would never fly now. Or how normalized teen groupies were during the eras of Elvis through Motley Crue, and how outraged people are at a 31 year old Jesse Rutherford dating Billie Eilish. Just a couple examples, but I see a lot of progress made in the attitudes around child exploitation. What is your hypothesis is based on?
The 1970s had a lot of terrible moral innovation. Veneration of criminals, cults, normalization of children as sex objects.
Jesse has said he’s a fan of Martyr Mare’s New Jerusalem series. I wonder if he’s given the Jonestown series a listen. There’s a lot of history repeating itself right now, history that’s noted in that podcast series.
Or the Children of God / The Family International. They were at it well into the 80s, and they had a lot of members.
I was more confident that a repeat would be resisted before the trans thing completely went off the rails with kids. I would never have believed 10 years ago that just questioning the evidence base for double mastectomies on 12 year olds would be forbidden in progressive circles. It makes me think those norms are more malleable than i had hoped. Similarly with groups like Prostasia operating openly.
That’s really scary. What are you basing this on?
About a decade ago, my husband got pulled over for speeding and learned that he had an outstanding red light ticket from a few years back that he had failed to deal with.. except he hadn’t even been living in the state at the time, and the car it ticketed was no longer his - it belonged to his ex, although apparently it had been in both of their names for a few years after they broke up. Anyway, long story short, he even showed the red light photo to the judge to prove it wasn’t him driving, but the only way to make the ticket go away without a huge hassle was to pay it. So, sorry Katie, your body sock scheme probably won’t work.
Yes as I wrote elsewhere in the thread: I've seen this play out many times. It's a pure internet fantasy that you are going to make any kind of argument to a government bureaucrat about a traffic ticket and win. It's even more fantastical you would make such an argument *in a case where you were actually the one driving* and win. The judge is just going to look at the picture of the mask and be like "it was you wasn't it?" and katie will say yes. End of argument.
Kind of like arguing with the IRS when they say you owe $.
Seems reasonable to dislike pictures of children stylized to evoke and glamorize sexual abuse of children (bondage, alcohol, etc). Even if you want to say it’s “just art” it’s reasonable for people to say they don’t like a specific example of art, especially if it seems to *needlessly* evoke twisted stuff for purely prurient or vapid reasons. Even if you want to say it’s “just edgy,” it’s reasonable for people to say it’s fucked up and in poor taste.
If it’s just edgy art, what exactly is the provoked discomfort with this instance of “art” supposed to make the audience question? Seems like it’s just supposed to make us question why we’re alarmed by the sexualization of children, which is precisely why people think it’s shit: It’s not subverting a norm that ought to be subverted. It’s not even making the (very gross) argument that children can *consent* to sex; if we’re to pretend it has a Serious Art Message that isn’t simply “abusing children gets me hard”, then it’s suggesting children be given alcohol and introduced to bondage restraints in a way that makes them seem like fun toys. When society was asked what they thought of that concept, society said, “ew, fuck no, what the fuck is wrong with you?” which is fine.
What’s weird to me is if there was an ad campaign glamorizing, say, sex trafficking of adult women with bondage gear and crime scene tape and wine glasses and court cases related to rape or sex trafficking laws, I’m not sure Katie would call disgusted reactions a moral panic? Maybe she would. Okay, so if Balenciaga had instead glamorized and sexualized the Holocaust, would they not deserve to take their massive L? Clearly people are not wrong to have lines they do not enjoy seeing crossed, and it’s so weird to paint grooming and raping children as a silly line. What level of glamorizing sexual abuse are people expected to be desensitized to, or permissive of, before they’re no longer, I dunno, cool? Is there something about the sexual abuse of children that makes it less conceptually real?
This is really one of those areas where public criticism, boycotts, etc are appropriate. If a product’s ad campaign evokes widespread disgust and people do not want to buy the product, then it failed as art and as marketing. Why contort oneself to defend it? I worry that projects like this podcast warp their creators over time; people naturally get habituated to picking up their culture war lens for everything and always need to fashion some take, forgetting that there are still things that transcend petty culture wars stuff and not every reaction people have is informed by what the content creator is obsessed with. I feel like it’s worse for society when stuff like this gets shoehorned into a culture wars framework -- like if you think it’s fucked up to glamorize the rape of children you’re suddenly conservative and anti-free speech and pro-censorship and sex negative and a conspiracy theorist and a bunch of other dumb labels; you have to pick some side. Most of us don’t want the sexualization of children to be a partisan issue.
Journalists play a role in pushing this katamari ball of doom to vacuum up absolutely every facet of life because their livelihoods literally depend on it. It genuinely reminds me of how stupid liberal arts academia got once more and more people had to justify their graduate degrees; conceptual frameworks become balloon animals, blown up and twisted and contorted to make one more useless thing. Maybe we never needed a balloon representation of every animal. Maybe the thing itself is simple enough and doesn’t need translation into a new form. Maybe sexualizing children just sucks and people don’t need academics or journalists condescending to them about that.
I’ve quit listening to the podcast as much lately because it pains me how it’s fallen prey to the very sort of stuff it criticizes. It’s just true that if you have a podcast about culture wars, everything becomes some front in a culture war. It can’t just be that there is a natural and warranted distaste to seeing the sexual abuse of children glamorized for profit. Really looking forward to finding out whether expressing pain when I stub my toe makes me a right- or left-wing extremist in 2025.
I mean, for God’s sake if we’re going to defend it as merely edgy art, then let it stand or fall on its own merits. If someone makes art so subversive it asks the audience to consider how they feel about children being raped, then they should have some pretty thick skin about the risk they’re taking! The audience owes art nothing but their sincere reaction. Seems dumb to call the reaction a moral panic.
I get disliking QAnon-adjacent takes, but it’s not actually crazy for someone to think the person who designed the shoot and perhaps some of the people who signed off on it are permissive of sexually abusing children and would like to spread the idea it’s no big deal. There are huge sex trafficking scandals, including of minors, in the modeling and fashion world. Do people genuinely imagine the sexualization of minors in ad campaigns is unrelated? Lots of pedophiles do, in fact, make a point of trying to chip away at norms around pedophilia: NAMBLA and at least some portion of the MAPs movement are the obvious public examples, the people behind that weird “eunuch identity” thing with WPATH, etc. I get not wanting to stigmatize people who don’t act on their urges, or being tired of the term “grooming” being driven into the ground, but good lord, grooming is actually a REAL tactic and it’s not limited to targetting individuals. There are people in creative fields who consciously, in collaboration with likeminded people, work to desensitize the public. To think otherwise is to imagine all pedophiles are either stupid or ashamed, which is absurd and infantilizing. Katie especially is so painfully naive about this.
Standing ovation from me too.
If I could give a comment a standing ovation it would be this one. (Completely sincere!)
“I worry that projects like this podcast warp their creators over time; people naturally get habituated to picking up their culture war lens for everything and always need to fashion some take, forgetting that there are still things that transcend petty culture wars stuff and not every reaction people have is informed by what the content creator is obsessed with.”
Yes. This. They’ve gone on before about not wanting to be changed because of audience capture, but the point you make about how the subject of the show itself might warp how they see issues is one I hadn’t considered. Because like you said -- some shit is disliked because it’s genuinely deserving of societal scorn (e.g. the sexualization of children).
“Journalists play a role in pushing this katamari ball of doom to vacuum up absolutely every facet of life because their livelihoods literally depend on it. It genuinely reminds me of how stupid liberal arts academia got once more and more people had to justify their graduate degrees; conceptual frameworks become balloon animals, blown up and twisted and contorted to make one more useless thing. Maybe we never needed a balloon representation of every animal. Maybe the thing itself is simple enough and doesn’t need translation into a new form. Maybe sexualizing children just sucks and people don’t need academics or journalists condescending to them about that.”
I love that paragraph. For all the talk about “moral panic” we hear from people within the media scene, many of the media ppl themselves are only there because they took on culture war stuff as a brand.
I have found myself questioning why I stay here recently. I can enjoy the free episodes without paying. I’ve often felt like the free ones are the better ones anyways because they’re trying to reach s bigger audience with those. If I bail I will likely move to Bari’s Substack and/or The Fifth Column (not leaving just yet though).
No part of me is upset that Balenciaga got slapped down for that ad campaign. 🤷🏻♀️
I was confused by Katie's comment that Nick Fuentes is Hispanic in the same way that Ted Cruz is Hispanic. After googling, I'm still not sure what she meant, but as far as I can tell:
- Ted Cruz's father is Cuban and his mother is apparently white. His paternal grandfather is Spanish and his paternal grandmother is Cuban, so depending on whether you consider Spaniards to be Hispanic, Cruz's heritage is either 25% or 50% Hispanic. His father fled Cuba under Batista using a student visa, fleeing the country with $100. Cruz is a Republican, but I think there are a fair number of Hispanic Republicans, particularly Cuban-Americans.
- Nick Fuentes says he is Mexican on his father's side, but I haven't seen confirmation.
I read it as meaning “Hispanic when convenient”.
I hope you are right. I think it meant "white." Which.. Plenty are. Plenty are also Asian. And plenty are also descendents of African and European and indigenous people
Spaniards ARE Hispanic. Kinda where the definition comes from. Cruz is 50% Hispanic and 25% Latino
Yeah I wondered about Katie’s remark too. Decided it was a brain fart
Seems kinda similar to dismissing Hispanics /Latinos etc as "white-adjacent" (i.e., a political categorization, due to dislike of their/Cruz's politics).
Anyone read Pamela Paul's piece on Free to Be ... You and Me in the NYT today? She has a bit that's openly critical of gender ideology. Could have been written by Lisa Selin Davis.
Another sign that the Times, at least, is backing off from wokeness? Perhaps?
I had to scroll back to the top to check that it wasn’t LSD. I thought it was great.
Balenciaga already dropped their lawsuit. I have to assume that's because the whole thing was their idea and they had no case.
I can’t believe every last prop of a shoot like that wouldn’t be controlled.
I think Katie's take on this Balanciaga situation was so abhorrent. Adults can add shock value to whatever they want but children do not need to be involved in any of it, and adding humor to it makes it worse. I feel like Katie was biased with her own feelings about the groomers' situation on Twitter, and also with her experiences of young boys dating older men, which I'm assuming was meant to soften us to this situation and make us presume it's all normal..and maybe it is in Katies world but I'm now super disappointed in this podcast. Some of us are not in the porn world so can't tell the difference between bdsm and "punk". I became a premium subscriber a couple of months ago so i know your response will be laughing at a comment like this to your readers. I used to laugh along but with something like this? It's so obvious what balenciaga were doing and it's incredible you'd try to defend them
I actually saw Yiannapolis with Julie bindel on a college campus back in the day before he seemed to lose it. So it's interesting where both of them ended up (on barpod)
I want to push back a bit. If he's genuinely become a trad Cath, selling statues of the Virgin Mary is very normal. (I doubt his sincerity because being a racist is a pretty big sin) I would also point out that the Church Militant is a common term for practicing Christians defending the faith in addition to some specific groups. Just some perspective from your friendly neighborhood (not quite Trad) Cath
As a 40-blabla Catholic-raised and -educated person with a soft spot for psychodynamics and mythology, I'm ashamed to say that it wasn't until Katie compared the Virgin Mary statue to a dildo that I realized it might be one of the more complete fertility symbols the world has ever seen (i.e. vaginal, clitoral(!) and phallic).
Historically doesn’t the Church Militant just mean the Church alive at present/before the Second Coming, as opposed to the Church Triumphant, which is the Church already in Heaven/after the end of time?
Yes, absolutely. (Bonus points to you because most people just hear the word "militant" and freak out.)
It's also, less historically but more specifically, this organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Militant_(website)
As a Catholic I admit I (a) wanted to see the stature and (b) had to remind myself that K&J would make fun of any religious object, not just the Theotokos
I first saw him in a video with Christina Hoff Sommers (who tried her best to moderate him). I found him a bit annoying but also entertaining.
I really wonder how much of his behaviour is due to attention whoring and grifting and how much is really due to his (very fucked up) beliefs.
I f like Christina Hoff Summers. And my sense from her is that Milo really likes attention and does npt care where he gets it. Due to that, it os hard to know what his actual beliefs arr. In terms of working with Nazis and stuff, I am betting he just did not gove a shit
The Church Militant org is definitely rad trad/hyper conservative Catholic organization. Taylor Marshall, Michael Voris. Tim Gordon used to be on with Taylor Marshall until they had some sort of drama and Tom Gordon is the sort to argue Catholic wives *need permission from their husbands to leave the house at all*. Unlike Milo and Ann Coulter types, who quite often say such things just to be provocative/get people riled up, Tim Gordon and Taylor Marshall actually believe the crap they spew. I’m an actively practicing Catholic and I don’t have a high regard for the Church Militant. It’s an extreme take and they just love to claim to be more Catholic than the Pope.
Wow, this sounds absolutely insane. Are these people sure they live in the US rather than Saudi Arabia? Would love to see K&J see a deep-dive on them.
I don’t think that Jesse and Katie know enough about Catholicism to take a particularly useful deep dive on the Church Militant.
They seemed to think it was a generic Christian fundie pray away the gay nonsense thing but let me tell you right now. NO Protestant fundies are going to be selling statues of the Blessed Mother. That wouldn’t happen. If someone is selling Mary stuff, then they are some flavor of Catholic or Orthodox.
Source: being one of the only BarPod listeners who has such statues (yes, plural especially during Advent) in her home. That said, I didn’t buy them from The Church Militant. 🤣
Me too! I occasionally listen to Taylor Marshall because he's good on some of the interesting historical stuff (why is Easter different for Orthodox, original lentan rules) but he's very arrogant for someone supposedly pious.
The Church Militant that Milo is shilling for, is a news outlet slightly to the right of LifeSite News. Michael Voris, an ex-gay, is the founder, and I must admit he’s fun to troll, although I haven’t done that in several years.
Correcting Katie's pronunciation Barpod is the best Barpod.
If we're going to play this game, then as someone who academically specializes in the period that invented the word "miscellany," I will note that it's usually pronounced "miss-SELL-uh-nee."
I never actually correct people's pronunciation IRL, as I view mispronunciation as a sign of having learned things through reading. Which, as an English teacher and passionate autodidact, I applaud.
Carry on with the mangled pronunciations, everybody!
Heh, the internet says my pronunciation is British, so maybe I'm just doxxing myself as someone who specializes in non-American English. ;-)
Al-oo-min-ee-um!
I was going to say! I have never, ever heard it pronounced any way other than "MIS-sell-ay-nee", and my dictionaries confirm that's the accepted pronunciation, but one also says "chiefly British: mis-SELL-uh-nee" :)
We Americans have an accent. The English have a language.
On the contrary!
We have a really cool language with super interesting regional dialects. Language is always evolving.
Love American accents, especially the weird middle ones
I’d have said Miss Ellany, but that sounds like a dominatrix.
May I suggest a “Pervert for Nuance” stuffed Bear for the merch store? Or at least a baby sized shirt for my pre existing bear? I can’t imagine this would cause any headaches for you two.
I guess what I don't understand is why anyone pays attention to or takes seriously anything Kanye West says. He is a few air bubbles off the beam, if I am allowed to use that phrase, and the amount of outrage and ink/characters his recent hijinks have generated is perplexing to me. As far as I can tell as a person who intentionally stays 90% out of the loop, he is trolling the media, and they (and we) are letting him because they and we are giving him what he wants most: attention. The comment about Hitler was a dead giveaway. "Hmmm, what's the most outrageous thing I can possibly say to get more attention? Ah, I know, I can say that I like Hitler. That should really get people going."
Someone please explain to me why this an important issue to spend time on. I just don't get it. I was watching live in 2005 when he said that George Bush didn't care about Black people while Mike Myers stood there like a deer in headlights, and I knew he was a few fries short of a happy meal right then. If we keep giving these people air time, they will keep trolling us. I am open to explanations for why I should take this seriously.
Poor Mike Myers! I still remember that look on his face. I wonder if he’s ever done a live event since.
It’s because Kanye is a Trump supporter. The end.
And now this morning folks like Yashar Ali are posting links to videos like this:
https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1599443350675128321
Aren’t these just Black Israelites on their portable PA systems saying the same stuff they have been for decades, and now thanks to virality, a new generation is going to attribute this to Kanye’s recent antics?
I have walked by these guys outside Barclays for many years. My gf used to live near there and there's a target nearby I would frequent. These same guys have been outside that entrance with the same signs for at least a decade. I literally recognize them. I have no doubt Kanye emboldened some of them but it's pure ignorance to act like this is new.
Good show K, J, and T!
Katie, now I know who's been running red lights in Olympia. Why'd you "out" yourself, girl?
Jeez I’m surprised you guys haven’t gotten into the Church Militant before. A couple things:
1: Although CM is founded by ex-gay reporter Michael Voris, it’s not an explicit gay conversion organization, it’s a radical traditional (RadTrad) Catholic organization.
2. CM believes that all of the church’s issues with the pedo stuff is due to the Vatican II conference
3. They think a lot of it has to do with Freemasons
4. They have beef with other RadTrad orgs like SSPX since they try and somewhat work within the church to change it instead of just constantly yelling about a “Homo mafia”
Source: my dad watches this shit every night
Congratulations on the Guardian article correction Tracing! Getting any outlet to correct anything these days is quite an accomplishment.
Correction for Katie! The FIT student was from China and didn’t understand the significance of the monkey ears/mouth. He wasn’t being edgy, he was unaware of the offense https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/23/nyregion/fit-racist-fashion-show.html
“‘I have only lived in the United States briefly,’ [Junkai Huang] said. ‘My understanding of American cultural references is still developing. In the future, I’ll be more aware about political correctness, cultural differences and history.’”
Katie, Balenciaga does indeed make cargo shorts because Balenciaga makes hideous clothing.
https://www.farfetch.com/shopping/men/balenciaga/cargo-shorts-2/items.aspx
Sometimes I feel like their designers are trolls.
Wait, Milo is British? How am I just learning this? How is it we threw tea in the ocean and not him?
This is a violence.
I always forget that he’s British, too.
I don’t have children but yeah: Encouraging the sexualization of kids is obviously bad and scary. The fringe left keeps trying to push the Overton Window to absurd places. Like these so-called MAPS (Minor-Attracted Persons). For every crazy thing Conservatives do, the fringe left sees them and raises them two. How far do we let these nutbags go? There was a time when overt racism was considered normal. Ditto antisemitism. Do we really want to push open the door to child sexual exploitation?
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
My wife pointed out to me that Kim Kardashian wore the same hood to the Met Gala. https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/09/kim-kardashian-met-gala-2021-balenciaga-hood-full-face-makeup-underneath
She also mentioned that Kanye is just the latest example of successful men who the women of that family have broken….
I think the Balenciaga "controversy" is as legitimate as the whole "Tinky Winky Teletubby is gay" fury from the early 2000s.
Last I checked they weren’t dressed up in gimp suits, but maybe I missed that episode.
I mean, he was gay, wasn't he? https://slate.com/technology/2017/12/jerry-falwell-and-tinky-winky-the-gay-teletubby.html
Falwell's gaydar shouldn't be underestimated.
I’d forgotten about that, but an ostensibly male character in children’s TV carrying a handbag would undoubtedly set off all sorts of tripwires these days.
Were the teletubbies male?
I see that Balenciaga has dropped their suit against the stylist. I don't believe they didn't know what they were doing, or what was being done in their name. They got a huge boost in publicity, they made all the appropriate gestures of contrition.
To expand a bit about mastodon, forking, and federation - mastodon is an open source software project, and those sites are using the code to build their site (with some modifications - hence the forking).
Saying they share an ecosystem is analogous to saying you share an ecosystem with stormfront because you both run phpbb forum software.
Federation does indeed mean they would be networked together, creating a ecosystem larger than just a single install of the software.
Anyways! Love the pod - but little things like this are one of the reasons media and tech have such bad blood right now, so thought I’d chime in.
Shoe has far more than 225k on YouTube, she’s approaching 2 million I believe. And she also started out a little farther to the right when she first took off because she was in a relationship with a now washed out right wing YouTuber called Armored Skeptic.
Seeing Shoe0nHead's name pop up here is wild.
She (and ChrisRayGun and SomeBlackGuy) were the first non-woke lefties I started following, which years later led me to BARPOD.
Very sad to learn that her hot ex-boyfriend has lost it.
That's... certainly a way to describe being one of the most bloodthirsty Gamergate shot-callers out there and directly putting more people than I can count in mortal danger, sure.
I’m really not too familiar with armored skeptic so forgive me if I didn’t go out of my way to condemn him, he just seemed to cringey to be taken seriously.
I was referring to Shoe and exaggerating for comedic effect.
Haha lol gotcha
I hope the same people who are complaining about these bears are as fanatical about closing down all the religious organizations were their children have an actual chance of getting molested.
Oh, another lazy dig at churches. *yawn*
Do 👏 Better 👏
Yes; I'm no friend of "religion", and certainly the RCC and SBC have their ongoing issues, but so does the BSA, and probably US public schools.
I bet any large bureaucratic organization which involves children has significant amounts of hidden abuse. The solution is to figure out policies to prevent that, not preempt the existence of all such organizations in the first place.
I said 'religious organizations'....the fact that you jumped straight to churches says a lot.
They’re the most common type of religious organizations. Was I supposed to retype what you wrote? When further down in the comments similar statements were made?
With respect I think some of the people who are fanatical about child protection are like this because of the past influence of such organisations.
It bugs me that the media feels compelled to link Kanye's antisemitism to mental illness as if but for mental illness, Kanye would never hold such beliefs. I get the impression that the media desperately wants to provide the seed for a Kanye redemption story so they don't have to permanently cancel him. (Look! He's on his meds now and has stopped saying he likes Hitler! All is forgiven and we can listen to Kanye's music and wear his sneakers openly again!) Good riddance to Kanye.
You did ZERO research on who Shoe is yet feel qualified to dismiss her claims as “false” without evidence. Honestly the way you both, Katie especially, dismiss claims of pedophilia is starting to get concerning.
This is the first time ever that I have been thoroughly dismayed by a segment. Did either of you reach out to Shoe? What am I saying, of course you didn’t.
Does Shoe have a bunch of evidence of some kind of wrongdoing that she hasn't made public?
Keep going, I only need “should have their hard drives checked” for my bingo card.
I’m more angry at their lack of effort to get a deeper story than just hand waving away concerns people had. J&K mailed it in on this one. Sciencing_Bi is rolling in their pretend grave
First the art institute, now Christie’s: BARpod following all of my workplace drama 💯
Signed, A non-pedophile art specialist who supported firing the docents
So I checked out the statues Milo is selling. Design is pretty standard. Some deception imho re: what it’s made of. The statue Milo was praising is described as “cold-cast bronze” which is a just “colored polyresin” with a metallic coating.
Do you remember Milo saying that the statue wouldn’t be too heavy? Of course polyresin wouldn’t be heavy! Bronze would be heavy; both website and Milo seem to be implying the statue has real bronze in its composition
Re: price: polyresin statues at catholiccompany dot com (albeit with an ivory tone) are about $35 compared to the $105 for the model Milo was hawking. So Milo s Milo.
However, judging by the stuff ppl drop off at the parish center when their relative dies, it’s not so bad looking, even if Katie does find it phallic If some credulous person bought the overpriced “cold-cast bronze” statue and got solace from it, I see no harm.
I also don’t think any of us can tell if Milo is sincere or bullshitting about his Catholic devotion. Possibly a combination of both. That’s between him and whoever he goes to confession to
(So much content in this episode, I hate to spam this forum. And absolutely not to Jewsplain to anyone who actually had a bar mitzvah. But—)
In fairness to Milo on the Jewish Question, it can be hard to figure out Jewish heritage. Although Ashkenazi Jews have pretty straightforward genetic evidence, that’s still up in the air for other Jewish people. Sephardi Conversos, for example, largely just have clues like gifting gelt during winter holidays or covering mirrors during mourning. Frida Kahlo, for example, believed her family had secret jewish heritage, although any concrete answers were lost to time.
There are pretty straightforward genetic clues for all Jews - Yemeni, Polish, etc. The thing with conversos is we are talking 500 years or so. So that is a bunch of Jews from the 1600s hiding their Jewishness and marrying Catholics generation after generation, so that their descendents ARE Catholic and by no halakhic definition are they Jews.
It is possible that Milo's mom maybe thought her family had been Jewish at some point in time. That is assuming he is telling the truth. That does not make him Jewish in any way shape or form, unless we were to go by a strict halakhic definition, and it was say his mother's mother's mother who had been a Jew.
Aside from which, not sure ot really matters. It seems loke he is pretty anti Semitic. And just hateful to a lot of groups. People should be allowed to hear him if they want but that is it.
Yeah, I feel like you can divide it into three groups: Jews who mostly kept in contact with each other (European and most Mizrahi communities, and then later Sephardi/Ashkenazi/Mizrahi), groups that were separated from other Jews but kept a strong mesorah mostly in line with the rest of world Jewry, and groups that claim some Jewish heritage (likely true) but have lost enough of their mesorah that what they're practicing isn't really recognizably "Judaism" anymore or there's no way to verify that they're halachically Jewish. I mean there are some gray areas, especially between groups two and three, but that's sort of how it seems to me.
And then there are the people who maybe had some Jewish ancestor or relative but have really no strong connection or Jewish identity, and that person is not a maternal ancestor, but they still will tell people they're Jewish. I feel like Milo is probanly one of those. Just a gut feeling.
The "Baalenciaga" police tape roll in the one photo seems a little sus.
In 2009, Garfunkel and Oates did a skit, "Who said it: Kanye or Hitler?" https://www.facebook.com/garfunkelandoates/posts/we-did-a-mini-version-of-our-game-who-said-it-kanye-or-hitler-in-nyc-check-it-ou/167396585918/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RMdwA8GWB8
I guess this means he hasn't changed as much as people think?
I very much dislike shoeonhead, she changes her political beliefs according to what is currently popular. She used to hang out with the YouTube skeptics/anti SJW types,then became a Bernie bro and now she's fixated in on pedophilia. i used to watch her but it's obvious that shes a leaf in the wind.
"[C]ringe-worthy stand-up" is a little how I feel about the first segment of this episode.
I was grossed out.
Whitney Cummings is now CANCELLED! How DARE you not enjoy Blocked and Reported!!! You brought this on yourself!
At the risk of kicking off another bout of accent discourse, does anyone else think Milo has a touch of Australian?
Wikipedia has him, since June, working unpaid for Marjorie Taylor Wotsit. Space lasers for the space cadet.
I'm not actually very invested in this story, but there does seem to be some actual children in suspicious looking headgear shenanigans:
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1597453494189195266?t=QrePq8PFkXXKrkT2xFdh5g&s=19
The rapper who regularly made grandiose claims & opaque pronouncements was perceived as speaking truth to power--until he wasn’t
Imma let you finish, but...
Katie - "Shoe's politics are weird". They are weird because she is (self admittedly) stupid. The absolute definition of vibes based politics. Every few months she posts something lacking context (or flatout wrong) which goes viral. This has been happening for 7 years.
This tweet thread she posted after yet another controversy in May is a good summary of her thought process (https://i.redd.it/3f51srdwge491.png).
The TDLR of the May controversy - https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/v76hbl/comment/ibkqp7f/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
I have to admit that I really liked her circa 2015/2016 videos making fun of wokeism.
But her shift towards - how can I put it? - uninformed socialism is a bit annoying.
She’s an edgelord or rather an edgelady.
What a wild ride.
Katie actually makes a point I’ve wondered about for a while re: ticket cameras. Cars don’t commit infractions, people do. So how do you justify ticketing the driver based on a license plate photo? And isn’t the burden of proof on the accuser? If I claim I wasn’t driving, is it not the city’s/state’s job to prove I was? Would be really curious to hear a lawyer’s perspective on that. Maybe the standard is preponderance of evidence or something.
Also, Crocs made their own high heels for years (google the Sassari, the Cypress), they just weren’t stilettos!
At least in Washington, it's treated the same as a parking ticket. It's not attributed to you, it's attributed to your car, but you are responsible for your car. If you loaned your car to a friend and they got a parking ticket, you can recover from your friend, but you can't invalidate the parking ticket.
Not a lawyer, and not a fan of the face capture at redlight cameras but--you'd have to tell them who may have borrowed your car or whether it was stolen no? Seems to me the whole point of registration and insurance is to pinpoint the locus of responsibility for this kind of thing.
Imagine robbing a liquor store in a mask then getting into your car and driving home then trying to argue it wasn't you. We all know it's you driving your car. If it wasn't you driving, then please explain who had access to your car. Why are you guys acting like you found a loophole here? Like you'd have to be a real moron to buy this argument.
Well fortunately for all of us, the burden of proof falls upon the state to prove criminal infractions. Robust protection for the accused is kind of a major tenet of our justice system and “Obviously we know it was you, because... common sense!” Is not sufficient evidence of a crime. We should be grateful for that, even when it irks our common sense.
I don’t think I did. Your comment was that only a moron would think he could go into court and argue “You cannot prove it was me.”
But that in fact is exactly what a person could do, and they’d probably win- so long as they had an attorney to do it for them.
So I guess I agree with you that only a moron would spend a couple grand in attorney fees to avoid a $100 fine.
But take your argument about the more serious accusation of armed robbery where your car was seen leaving the liquor store.
A decent attorney could poke some holes there if that was the only evidence, and that would probably be a pretty good use of $$.
The argument of “Come the fuck on. We all KNOW it was you.” would not get the prosecution very far.
Lots of arguments are used in court and it's hard to parse this argument farther given it's very abstract. But my initial comment was actually intended to convey it is *very silly* to wear a mask thinking this will somehow get you out of a traffic ticket. It's so silly I'm still not sure if Katie was being earnest. Such a scenario is never going to occur. If it did occur, it would generally not be that hard to prove who was driving the car.
Yes legal arguments are things that happen but it's kind of a separate issue. Maybe activists will win a case they chose carefully based on specific wording in a law they take issue with.
But day-to-day these systems are populated by human beings who aren't complete morons. I have been to traffic courts and seen this play out a dozen times. If Katie gets a traffic ticket she's simply going to pay it. If she's incredibly stubborn and somehow does end up in a traffic court, most likely the judge will look at her and say: "This seems like a waste of time, are you really going to tell me you weren't the one driving?" Katie will feel uncomfortable and ridiculous and she will admit it was her and pay the ticket and go home. It's completely infantile to think it would play out other way.
I'm sure you internet warriors can find some court case that plays out like your fantasy here, but I'm equally certain you have never sat in a courtroom and witnessed such an argument play out. It doesn't happen that way for 99% of people 99% of the time.
Lol. I wonder if you’re the comment troll they alluded to in the last podcast...
I’m not an “internet warrior.” This is a discussion thread- hence people here discuss the various aspects of topics brought up on the show.
Just because the vast majority of people who get traffic camera tickets pay them and move on with their lives doesn’t mean there isn’t an argument against the legal validity of the measure.
Most people pay the ticket because the cost of hiring a lawyer to argue you out of it would exceed the fine and 99% of people 99% of the time are mostly just interested in avoiding the financial punishment.
But the fact is, organizations HAVE taken up the cause and won. So it’s not a moronic fantasy argument; it’s just not a hill most people care to die on.
I'm not trolling anyone. weird way to admit I was right.
And the argument of “You cannot prove I was the one driving.” actually has been successfully argued in courts, so there’s that.
Yeah. They are point-free violations. However the ticket cameras here were disabled a few years ago based on a lawsuit claiming exactly as you said.
I'm all for edgy art and and dark humour, but there's a time and a place. There is something I find extremely distasteful about a luxury fashion brand making ads which seem to have a theme of "TROLLOLOL KIDDY PORN!!!" Even though I find similar humour funny when it comes from, say, Katie & Jesse. I don't think anyone needs to end up in court. But perhaps they do deserve to lose business.
As a Brit I'm also somewhat wary of dismissing these conspiracy theories. I remember the paedophilia episode of Brass Eye, and having a good laugh at the expense of paranoid nutters and their moral panic about paedophiles. Only for it to turn out several years later that in fact, there were paedophile rings operating with impunity at high levels of various institutions.
Shoe just dropped a video update on the Balenciaga-gate thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0GeDNP_2mw
https://youtu.be/0RMdwA8GWB8
I’m just surprised nobody’s pointed out what happens when you google “Melania +balenciaga”
Ok maybe I hav different filters on but all I have to say is...I kind of like the jacket?
"Look at me!"
Yeah, and even my beloved MPR here in MN is totally captured. They did a somewhat "Strangers in Their Own Land"-type podcast in 2017 called "Flyover Country", where they stopped at various places along the length of the Mississippi, and had sorta public conversations about shared river issues but also local issues. (They might even
have had Arlie Russell Hochschild on an episode.)
Since then, though, they've grown as insufferable as anything NPR produces.
Hm, really? I’d pegged it on a couple of pricing algorithms being pointed at each other in a feedback loop. I’ve seen it happen with books before - each algo is set to price the merch a few percent more than their direct competitor, and no-one realises that they are just cranking the price higher and higher every time they refresh until you end up with a pair of slightly worn second hand booked priced at over a million dollars.
I’m amazed by the amounts some people spend on furniture. I have kids and cats, I’m not getting a $10,000 couch.
"it's also complicated"