The cafe's whole diversity thing is comical: Scotland, as of 2018, is 96.3% white. I love the fact you have these woke folk setting up a cafe in another country and then proceeding act as if Scotland is a settler colony and the ethnically Scottish somehow problematic -as in ,Scotland has to abide by US style-DEI stuff despite having a completely different history and disparate ethnic make-up to the United States. I actually finding kind of obnoxious they think they have the right to do that in my country.
Comical is right - this story would be ridiculous regardless of which city it was set in, but as a Glaswegian I was amused/appalled throughout Katie’s report at the thought of these cafe lunatics in close proximity to my fellow city dwellers.
For those who don’t know Glasgow, the yawning chasm between the cultural outlook of the multi pronouned -traumatised and injured-diversity spreadsheet updaters, and 99% of the Scottish population would be a wonder to behold. I’m imagining them inadvertently caught in the middle of an Old Firm football crowd - they’d suddenly learn the real meaning of trauma and injury!
Anyway, it was fun to hear a Barpod episode about Glasgow of all places, and if Jesse ever wants to host a meet up here I would be there in a heartbeat - I suspect he’d have a ball.
It doesn't make any sense in the US based on our ethnic make-up or history either. It's almost all bullshit here, let alone somewhere else. I promise you're not any more sick of it than I am, as an American.
Everything on TV, in advertising acts like this country is like 40% black (in advertising but in TV in general they said that 18% of TV characters are black men, which is not representative of the US), that there are more black people in the US than Hispanic or Latino people, and that there are equal numbers of Asian people and Hispanic or Latino people .
But I think it is even more intense in England and the UK.
There's a book coming out in a few days by Tomiwa Owolade called "This is not America" which is arguing exactly this - racial politics and dynamics that apply in the USA don't translate and in fact can be actively detrimental to the Black British community who have very different needs. I'm looking forward to reading it.
Completely agree, but I think a strong argument can be made that the large majority of SNP support comes despite the woke nonsense, rather than because of it.
I didn’t say they imported it from a political party, their student wing imported it from American colleges and social media. Also, they are less woke than the DSA-who are American and a political party.
Hahaha! If Taylor Swift or the widow of basketball legend Kobe Bryant made a political statement this afternoon if would have more public impact than anything the DSA has ever done as a formal entity in its existence! I am totally serious.
The DSA is a social movement and dream.The only time its members can do anything on a national scale, which is almost never, they have to do it as Democrats. (See Sanders, Bernie. Sanders voters had a tantrum when it seemed the moderate leaders of the Democratic Party were favoring Hilary Clinton in the Democratic primary system because they cynically thought she had a better chance against the Republican. It never occurred to them that if he was really a part of another party he wouldn’t even be in the Democratic primary. That’s cause he isn’t really.)
The name is a tribute to the defunct, early to mid 20th Century SPA, which actually was a force. The DSA are like a rock music tribute band. They play the old hits for very small audiences. (Okay, that might be too kind an example as people still like rock music: The DSA are like a tribute band that plays big band jazz to very small audiences.)
Brace yourself. I am now going to use the word “literally” in its formal sense. Ahem. Here goes …
The vast, vast majority of Americans literally do not even know the DSA exist!
Honestly, never heard them of them.
The SNP, on the other hand, run Scotland. Not only have people heard of them, they’re actually in charge!
Big picture: the specific rhetoric on race may be American and out of our history, but the impulse is worldwide.
Your “looney left” was there decades ago and was actually in charge of the Labour Party. The Labour Party actually is a big deal. My God, you just had Jeremy Corbyn!
George Galloway is Scottish!
Was George Galloway the puppet of woke American college students who had yet to be born or were toddlers?
As a Yank I’m willing to take the blame on a lot of things, but I draw the line on George Galloway! He’s yours, mate!
Do not try and change the point, you asked for an American party-I gave you one. Post Colonial studies originated in the US, critical theory and later critical legal studies and later still critical race theory originated in America. Twitter and Tumblr are American. This originated in America, if you think that to be wrong that’s between you and your psychiatrist. Get A Grip.
Even Jonathan Haidt says wokeness began in Ivy League universities and then spread to the rest of the English speaking. Wee tip -best not to argue with someone from a country about their country when you have never been: George Galloway is the most anti-woke politician going-he believes identity politics is a conspiracy by the ruling class. And, the SNP’s woke turn is new and opportunistic as they need to court the youth vote. Things you know actually living in a country, eh buddy boy?
Wow. I haven’t seen misplaced rage and indignation like this since someone didn’t know what the term “honor culture” meant! Geesh!
Oh, I’ve been to the UK (the actual name of the nation you live in) on numerous occasions. My godson and his brothers are there. I’ve been to Scotland more than once too. Strange that you would not just assume I hadn’t, but also put so much rhetorical capital in on your ill advised, ignorant guess.
I’m sorry you feel embarrassed and your feelings are hurt (yet again.) I hope when you calm down you feel better.
Don't know anything about anything else you write here, but YES: "he believes identity politics is a conspiracy by the ruling class." Occam's razor would suggest this is TRUE.
1. They should specialize in niche lefty coffeeshop drama, it's serious rich and unploughed terrain.
2. Both of them really letting their coastal-Millennial-media-classism show with Katie's remark of "everyone is broke at 28." I'm sure this marks me as a flyover rube but I know plenty of people who owned a home and had a couple of kids at that age.
3. The more I hear Jesse's takes on Judaism and his Jewish background, the more I want him to stop. Girl, we get it, you don't know anything and you don't care much to learn.
It’s weird that it is a coastal elite thing to be broke most of your early adult life but you’re correct. Somehow making $30k a year as a post doc is an elite signal. Which is a very retarded signal and explains a lot about our society.
I think the income marker is more about being a creative than location. There are plenty of very well-paid 28 year old engineers, corporate lawyers, management consultants, computer programmers and investment bankers.
Katie and Jesse live in a world where they don't interact with these types on a regular basis. (Especially Katie).
Katie is married to a nurse, though. I (a creative type) was in awe of the salaries that my 22-year-old BSN classmates were earning straight out of school. It wasn’t millionaire money, but it was sufficient to build a solid, middle class life and not be broke in your 20’s. Definitely better than “I’m going to wait tables or temp while I do this unpaid internship and hope my journalism career kicks off” money. Katie is familiar with “people who have useful, non-flashy professional skillsets who are always employable” because she lives with one.
Devil's advocate: Katie's wife got into nursing prior to the credentials change that led to big salary boosts.
(When I was high school in the late 1980s, classmates would go to a local "nursing school" and have an RN in two years. Now you must have a BSN.)
A few years ago my little sister explored one of those accelerated BSN programs for people who already have Non-STEM bachelor's degrees. After reading the brochure outlining the program, I joked "why don't you just go to medical school"?
I don't know hold old Katie's wife is or how long she's been a nurse. Just guessing.
I graduated college in the late 90’s, and even then, and entry level new grad nurse could earn a starting salary that seemed very much “not broke” to my English Major sensibilities. Katie is about 40, so unless she is in a major age gap relationship, her wife probably came into the nursing field after the time that you are talking about.
No offense, but I think you’re doing the rightwing thing where you assume anything you find exasperating or confusing or foreign that artsy liberals do can simply be dismissed as a status “signal.”
(Richard Hannani’s sincere belief that any cultural interest that wouldn’t appeal to a horny, male, U. of Chicago libertarian on the autism spectrum must be an affectation is probably the current great example. It’s a frequent source of much inadvertent comedy. Though admittedly he’s an extreme case.)
Here’s the thing: many people are genuinely interested in the arts. (Some have talent.) Journalism, not that long ago, was a real job with a future. There were even many actual decent-paying jobs in the arts. Things like musician or illustrator.
The people who pursued the arts and journalism these past few decades may have been foolish. Some may be poseurs.
But no one pursued them because they thought they’d be poorly paying and lack of money as adults would then give them cool points.
Yes, but it’s the fun we have along the way in the comments that counts.
I hear what you’re saying and sort of halfway agree with it. I’ve never considered myself an artist probably because I have some kind of cultural aversion to it as you mention but I’ve been more successful at it than most people I know who do it in real life. I did give it up as a sort of waste of time/just do it when I have time as a hobby because I didn’t see money in it to support a family. But also I did go to enough writing groups to meet people who come from affluent backgrounds who sincerely seemed to get off on the idea of being poor. It’s a weird world.
How old were you when you went to those writing workshops? Or — more significantly — how old were your fellow students? What part of the country?
Honestly, the only time I encountered serious hardcore dumbass romanticization of poverty was in and around indie/alt rock. I got a couple lifetime’s worth, sure. Still, it was all people still safe and snug in their 20s.
If ever there was a “that shit grows old fast” in life it’s not having money. And if there is any group of people on earth with little tolerance for not having the money of their peers it’s children.
Last thought: I failed to acknowledge how much people often hate 9 to 5. Maybe they’re spoiled entitled brats, but wanting to avoid that grind is, I think, a much greater motivator than any cubicle stigma.
I feel like this is a trick to make me think about how old I am. Washington state and Oregon. About fifteen years ago and ten years ago. Probably a dozen ish people across both fairly small groups who were in their mid and late twenties but they seemed to be able to assert some kind of control just through sheer numbers and recklessness. Also had a comp professor of the same genus. It was before I knew the word Woke but they were probably nascent wokesters who primarily contributed information on how everything was problematic but never wrote anything themselves.
What I mostly dislike/react to is the sense that there’s a class of people who think they are simultaneously too good to work or check their ideas against others but also highly capable and all knowing.
I probably *am* an art type if I lived in a different place, like I write poetry and shit, but I do find now that I somehow just can’t feel comfortable around art people.
Two thoughts (I’m a lot more confident that I’m right about the second):
1) I think the NW US where you’re from may be really unique in neither having the cultural insularity & alarmingly high rates of violence found in some rural homogenous communities (Ozark, Appalachia) nor the histories of racism and racial tension of the rest of the US. (Perhaps I’m being naive.)
You would know much better they me how that would play out, but I wonder if there might be an awareness of class, irrespective of race, that persists or persisted longer where you grew up. (In NYC the idea that Chinese or Russian or Irish-American kids in, say, an honors class may be working class or poor is provocative. And thus the very idea of poverty divorced from identity is.)
This awareness of class would seem to me to be a good thing, but it might also result in a romanticized view of poverty. One that you no longer have in most of the US.
Everything in much of the rest of the country is just about race. (Again: perhaps it is in the NW now too. I know there’s now more racial diversity & immigration.)
Also — and this is going to sound weird, but, oh, it’s true — communities with lots of immigrants and racial minorities tend to be extremely aspirational in way that is contemptuous of poverty. Neither rappers nor immigrant shopkeepers have any illusions about poverty. They want nothing to do with it. That results in a lot less overall romanticization about being financially strapped, but more vulgar materialism.
2) The lower the technical standards of entry for an art form are, the more clowns you’re going to get.
Portrait and landscape painting are going to have less clowns participating than abstract and conceptual art.
Rap MCs are going to have more clowns among their number than tenor sax players or gospel singers.
More poets are going to be clowns than novelists.
And more wannabe novelists are going to be clowns than actual (did the work) novelists.
But that doesn’t mean all poets (or wannabe poets) are clowns. Not at all. It just means the non-clown poets are going to deal with a lot more annoyance from their ostensible peers.
Sure, it beats the problems (tuberculosis, rats, starvation in garrets, no hot water, untreatable venereal diseases) poets often dealt with back when the rigor of rhyme & meter made the entry requirements higher, but it’s still going to be (as you found) incredibly annoying.
You’re right. It is weird. But I would say these people are “broke”, not broke.
Many jobs in media or the arts pay low because it’s a winner take all market. Two dozen playwrights will write bad plays for years in a bohemian community before someone emerges with a big hit and makes a ton of money.
You can only bide your time trying to become the winner while making $30K if you’ve got support from elsewhere.
tl;dr, only the rich can afford to be poor artists.
With respect to, “real rich kids”, I’d say it’s all relative.
The children of college grads much more likely to graduate college than the children of non college grads. More then 2:1. Among college students, the kids or degree holders are 2X as likely to attend a highly selective college than their first generation counterparts.
Finally, college educated households are 4 times wealthier than non college households.
Put it all together and we have this: graduates from highly selective schools come from dramatically more wealth than the average American. Even if they’re underemployed.
I gotcha. And rest assured, I only break these stats out online. I promise I don’t make a hobby out of telling underemployed art school grads how much better off they are than most people because like you said, it’s little comfort.
In medicine you’ve got six-figure loans and by the time you actually make money you’re locked into roughly the same salary as a teacher for several years, typically at least into your early 30’s.
People who went into tech or business often tell me we’re idiots for accepting this. I think they’re right.
I have a theory I came up with after CitiBikeGate, and I think it helps me a lot:
Jesse and Katie are good journalists, but their opinions are on average as dumb as mine or yours. When they're spouting their opinions, I pay attention to the funny ones and tune the rest out.
Eh, this is a comedy podcast. Some of the saltiness from more observant Jews towards him as of late reminds me of earlier when some of the Christians would get their panties in a twist over Jesus jokes.
Right. I'm a bit exhausted at the constant anger at K&J for not sharing the audience's exact opinions. I don't care if I disagree with them sometimes. I'm here because they are likeable and funny and they unearth internet/journalism silliness that I wouldn't know about otherwise.
I’m not sure I agree that this is a comedy podcast and I don’t particularly care of either host shares all of my opinions. Sorry you’re exhausted (y’all…), but I just find it obnoxious and juvenile.
Sometimes Jesse goes on about science which is fine I guess but not what I'm here for. But the rest of the time it's like if someone was narrating an online version of a Jerry Springer show. It's funny.
Well I gave it a like and then retracted it for #3 - I agree with Tess and am finding a lot of these 'Jesse isn't Jewish enough' comments slightly wearing.
So much of the 'millenial's are getting screwed' discourse is coming from people who are pursuing famously unremunerative professions like journalism and writting trying to live in one of the like three most expensive cities in the US. Like no shit you can't buy a house in New York on your unpaid interns salary...
Yeah, generational discourse of any sort is pretty tiresome to me. I know plenty of people in their 30s and 40s who are married, own homes, have kids, work good if unglamorous jobs, etc. It just so happens that the people most influential in setting the media "tone" are living the Jesse Singal life in Brooklyn et al.
Idk, I think the "broke till 28" probably depends on place a lot. I went to college in Michigan and worked there for a few years before I moved, and the job market was appalling at the time -- unless you were in medicine or tech, everything was like $9 an hour with no benefits. The few people I know who were able to buy a house before 28 were tech bros with rich families.
For me I was basically broke till 30, when I finally got a promotion to a newly created role at my current job that came with a $20K raise. I still can't afford a house because they start at half a million for a tiny studio in my city 😭
I was broke at 28 and had half of a modest-size joint mortgage at 34 - I think this is fairly typical of metropolitan-dwelling graduates who don't come from rich backgrounds. There's really no way to have a cushy life in your 20s unless you happen to land a really lucritive job straight out of college (banking or similar) which I didn't. Had I lived in a rural area it might have been a different story, and I knew plenty of people who had their own homes outside London by then. The perspectives are very different.
I think it's absolutely possible. I took out my first mortgage at 24--I'm about to turn 28, so borderline millennial/gen Z. I'm a geologist who works in the environmental field, which isn't known for making the big bucks like oil. But I also live in an affordable flyover state.
Heck, I’m a Millennial working in publishing and I’d bought my flat by 28. It’s certainly not the case that all Millennials struggles through their 20s despite the economic conditions.
I have to say I find the commentary from women that they find circumcised penises more attractive pretty gross. I wonder how these women would feel about men who make derogatory comments about women's "roast beef curtains" and if they think that women should get labiaplasty because some men find the inner labia unattractive.
Also, have these women actually seen an uncircumcised penis? I certainly remember thinking that it was "weird" when I was younger (largely because of that appalling Sex and the City episode) until I dated my college boyfriend at which point I realized that they literally look the same when erect. Who's being this picky over the appearance of their partner's flaccid penis?
"We should do cosmetic surgery on children because of my own sexual preferences". How can they write and send those emails and not realize how crazy that sounds
I have talked to women who've never seen an uncircumcised penis (often fellow American Southerners), and yeah, I wonder if they're imagining the difference to be much more significant than it is.
I think people are looking at like, a close-up picture of a flaccid ween on Wikipedia or something, and it's grossing them out and since that's their experience, they just think that's what it is... but a close-up medical-style picture of genitals is rarely charming or winsome
The clear implication being that women in Europe, Asia and South America are super grossed out by the men around them and nobody ever has sex. I am not a world-renowned sexologist or anything but, um, I don’t think that checks out?
It’s also isn’t a real thing, you cannot tell the difference when a penis is erect, and women don’t spend much time taking long ganders at flaccid penises if we can avoid it.
Uncircumcised penises are totally fine. I agree with you that’s it’s not cool to be unkind about body parts (male or female). We’re all flesh and blood.
Agreed. I've been intimate with both and they are both just fine. Actually, I'd say I prefer uncut (sorry, husband).
I was also confused by the statement regarding having to clean a baby's uncircumcised penis as if that's a big deal. The foreskin doesn't retract for a few years and it's just not difficult to clean them. You don't have to move the foreskin at all. The actual difficult part is when the toddler flings himself around because God forbid you wipe his poopy ass, but that has nothing to do with his penis.
One day we'll have to teach him how to clean his junk properly, and guess what - we'll have to with his sister, too! Wet washcloth, no soap, be gentle. It's just not a big deal.
Dated a Jewish guy in college, and now married to a European, and I honestly don’t even think about either’s dicks that much (I mean, my husband’s is attached to him, who I DO think about). I don’t even remember my high school boyfriend’s penis, though I saw it often.
I agree. If women have strong feelings about them and prefer circumcised ones for looks, that’s practically being in favor of genital mutilation for aesthetics.
Erect uncircumcised penises don’t look that different, or I’m outing myself as asexual because others more adventurous than I am may have more discriminating eyes. 🤷♀️
Not anti-circumcision, or for. Thankfully I had daughters so this wasn’t a decision I had to make, though I decided against piercing their ears even though many moms do when they’re young-- because of the bodily autonomy argument.
I honestly think they don't know the difference. I hooked up with a girl who said she only liked cut dicks, and she either didn't notice or didn't care. They look more or less the same when erect to the untrained eye.
Katie pronounced "Govanhill" correctly. What I really like is the lack of self-awareness: you have these bourgie, pretentious Americans coming to Scotland, unaware of the fact they are both gentrifying an area and engaging in cultural imperialism. Scotland is not America. Scotland is a thousand years older and has its own culture. Most people think the woke stuff is insufferable. Woke Americans are constantly scolding and lecturing everyone about cultural insensitivity, all the while acting as if other countries only exist as an extension of America. Also, I think, to describe handing in a dissertation as "traumatic" renders the class element of all this quite starkly; the cafe could only exist because of middle-class university students. One of the criticism of the SNP-despite being the Scottish National Party- is that they have imported and tried to implement this college campus stuff(the SNP has a large youth movement), and most Scots find it to be totally phoney.
Yeah, I'm married to a Scot and spent a fair chunk of my life in Glasgow. I listened to the whole thing thinking it was a miracle these characters managed to avoid getting unceremoniously chibbed by the locals.
They also seem unaware that JK Rolling, despite being a privately educated millionaire, is really rather popular in Scotland. More so than over-privileged kids and their confected gender distress.
As a patriotic and red blooded American I am honestly most embarrassed about that aspect of our culture. I get all the other criticisms and couldn’t give a fuck, but us basically shipping out all this crazy college horseshit to the rest of the world bothers the hell out of me.
I wish the rest of the world much luck in stemming the tide of extreme leftist insanity because I think we are fucked already.
My working theory is that sometime in the early 2000s an exasperated Parisian cafe owner, sick of cargo short and baseball cap wearing American family vacationers asking him in very loud, slow English, “which way to the Loo-ver?”, wished on a monkey paw for more educated Americans to come to Europe.
American mother of 2 British boys and married to an (uncircumcised) British man. My American parents had no experience with this and were super concerned about cleaning etc and they kept asking how to do it - when the kids were born they asked the midwife quite a few times about whether it was really enough to just soap a boy down and not retract the foreskin to clean.
The midwife just said "never, ever do that, you'll be far more likely to cause an infection if you do - it cleans itself if you leave it alone". And she was right!
In fact, as a mother of an intact penis-haver, I remember being told never to try to pull the foreskin back - it doesn’t fully separate from the head until the child is well into toddler years and if you try you just run the risk of tearing - which is what the letter writer did. Poor baby. Leave your baby’s foreskin alone people!
I'm an American, but also have two boys and never had issues keeping them clean either. They explained at the hospital how to clean but then I never seemed to do need to do anything in particular aside from changing their diapers. No idea what the big deal was.
Ditto - have never gone through any elaborate foreskin cleaning rituals with my sons, either. Basic hygiene approach for both sexes has been to make sure they wash all over. The non-religious reasons for being pro infant circumcision are striking me as quite... odd.
It's flabbergasting how this dude is so adamant that he should have access to anything designed for women. Like, bro, I fully understand that apps like Grindr are not for me, can you not understand that there might be apps and groups that are not for you? You have other apps and groups that ARE for you, but you'd rather sue women for not playing make believe with you.
It’s funny, feminists in the early 2000s were constantly on about how horrifying it was that “nice guys” felt “entitled” to sex if they ever complained about not getting laid, but here we see actual penis-owners actually acting entitled to sexual access to women.
I just can't get past "Tickle sued Giggle". Sounds like a court battle between two cartoon clowns.
Also I was just reminded of a video of Tickle from a while back being interviewed about playing in women's hockey. https://twitter.com/j__l__t__f/status/1654048596436860928 - says the men's changing room didn't feel right and he "didn't like the smells". Cos women's changing rooms smell like rose petals and fairy dust, amirite ladies? Now he can share the changing room with young teenage girls and women but god forbid an app doesn't let him register.
Customers have a right to complain though, and for something like a gay dating app, you can’t really just say “go somewhere else” because any specialized social network is going to tend to converge on a monopoly - having access to the biggest network is the killer app. It’s not clear there is anywhere else for customers to go, so they are naturally going to complain about changes that hurt their experience.
I worked at a badly-run Sbarros that nearly ran out of paper plates twice in the three months I worked under that general manager. He was also so rude I had a customer circle back to me to complain about him (I had thought he was smart enough to only be an asshole to his employees).
But yeah, I imagine this time it’s metaphorical spoons. And they had so few customers that sending the assistant manager to the nearest shop for an emergency purchase would work even better than it did at Sbarros.
I do wonder, given the reviews, who had worse customer service skills--the Sbarros manager or the crew of the Pink Peacock.
Unfair, crushing loneliness is the primary driver of male suicide, but it's also not any more legitimate as a political cudgel than when trans people do it.
And the failed trans/poly alpaca farmers with their CV's of illnesses/identities, both self-diagnosed and otherwise. I could listen to Katie read those descriptions daily.
I’ve really shifted the last few months to just wanting men with giant butterfly nets to make a comeback and round up the staff of all these cafes and take them away to a meditation retreat somewhere they aren’t allowed to leave. Don’t be a dick about it just tell them they are vital to queering the space through slam poetry and interpretive finger painting when they try to leave. When they no longer want to do those things we will know they are well.
On the Columbia adjunct: she’s a victim of and semi-beneficiary of the one of the current biggest scams in higher ed, expensive masters programs.
Several people did the math and she has six figures of debt. That’s impossible to wrack up as an undergrad--there are limits--but grad school loans are uncapped and Columbia is a notorious abuser of this fact. (They also probably lied about their student-faculty ratio and got caught by their own math professor.)
I felt a lot more angry at her before I learned she was an adjunct, but that just means she’s holding out hope of staying in academia.
This is just to say cap master’s degree loans and subject them to some kind of gainful employment rule. If community colleges have to prove their 10k welding program is worth federal loans Columbia should have to prove the same for its 100k journalism masters.
The Universities that are running these programs are almost completely ignored in these debates. As far as I'm concerned, they're the primary problem. Charging people six figures for degrees that don't really prepare them for a career or prepare them for a career that pays poorly is unethical, especially if you're also telling the students that these degrees will help their careers.
When you have an endowment the size of Columbia's, you probably don't need to charge six figures for an MFA, especially if the students are being taught by poorly paid adjuncts.
I'd be fine with a blanket loan forgiveness if it were accompanied by reform to the university system so that they're no longer running these questionable degree programs. Somehow I don't see that happening any time soon.
I think overcharging people for degrees that won’t pay off is a problem elsewhere, but below masters levels its most focused in the for profit sector which (a) got its lunch eaten by large online non-profits (and ASU) and (b) is on regulator’s radar as a problem. (Community college programs sometimes have poor pay off but at least they are cheap.)
The predatory masters are a problem at prestigious universities (who are banned from pulling the same tricks in undergrad by loan limits and the cutthroat rules of undergrad rankings). Those institutions are nearly immune from targeted regulation.
Yeah, students who took out loans for those types of undergrad or career programs should have their loans forgiven and the regulators need to hurry up and shut them down.
All great points. A lot of very talented writers (Flannery O’Connor was perhaps the first) came out of MFA writing programs in the second half of the 20th century, two in particular: Iowa and Columbia.
That said, they have long been pyramid schemes. Almost no one makes money writing literary fiction in 2023. They may get grants and fellowships, but primarily they get teaching jobs. That’s how they support themselves. Teaching Creative Writing. And those jobs are very hard to get.
Despite its staggering endowment, Columbia has maintained an outrageously high tuition. At a time when most MFA programs charged nominal amounts, often in affordable parts of the country, Columbia never faltered in milking its students for all it could.
I don’t think anyone who takes out loans for a masters degree is a victim. They are an adult making bad financial decisions. It takes a couple hours to do some googling and see how much you can expect to make with your masters vs the cost. A lot of these people are using magical thinking in order to stay in a suspended adolescence. At some point they have to come down to earth and work boring jobs like the rest of us. It’s called work for a reason.
Where the hell is all this gov’t loan money going? Clearly not to the people actually teaching the classes. I can sort of understand why my engineering degree was expensive - most of my last couple years I spent a lot of time in labs that clearly cost millions. But for an MFA, you need a room, some desks, and a professor. What’s the justification for that costing more than maybe $10k a year at the most?
I’m immensely frustrated that seemingly all the mainstream discussion is “why won’t the government pay for college?” instead of “why the hell does college cost so much, whoever is paying it?”. That a place with billions in the bank can be charging $60k for 15 or so hours a week in a classroom for 8 months, led by someone making $35k, is insane.
Take this with a grain of salt because I am not a higher ed finance person (because I value my sanity) but there are four things going on: the discount rate, cross-subsidy, administration costs, and capitol costs.
1) First: The Discount Rate. This refers to how much of the published tuition cost actually gets charged to the student, on average. Its no where near 100% and on an individual level can vary by academic achievement and family financial status. (This system has many flaws.) This is the most true at prestigious universities but it pervades the whole system.
On the whole, real undergraduate tuition has been stable to declining recently, and most undergraduate students leave with less than a third of the debt this woman has.
2) Cross subsidy: your tuition rate was likely very similar to that of your humanities major classmates but they used less of the expensive labs. Cross-subsidy is endemic across the university but figuring out what is actually net negative vs positive is a huge nightmare (it depends on how many majors the program brings in, how much they pay, etc). These predatory graduate programs absolutely do subsidize other programs--for one thing, they don’t do the tuition discounting (see above) that the undergraduate programs do.
3) Administration. Some of this is bloat, some of this is necessary for compliance (every time someone says they want “accountability”, someone has to start tracking that), some of its runs programs that either students or faculty genuinely appreciate (like the athletic center).
4) Capitol costs. All colleges are constantly building--there is always the oldest building on campus or a newer one that didn’t age well (like the athletic center). Besides construction, there’s maintenance, keeping current on technical equipment (very important for STEM and workforce programs), and utilities.
When I have seen comparative budgets, these elite universities do pour a lot of money into their students’ experience, and if you don’t find that valuable your local community college/public regional would love to have you.
I think it was a failed reform--the most recent study suggests that colleges raised prices in response but they didn’t increase access to college. Underprivileged MD students already had private loans.
Odd is a good description. Graduate loan policy seems geared around the idea that all graduate programs are the really high-potential professional programs but they aren’t and I am guessing the private options were readily available for those programs before Grad Plus.
(I went after but attended a cheap school that wouldn’t hit the limit of ordinary grad loans so I don’t have personal experience with either system.)
There’s a lot more restrictions/safety rails on undergraduate lending. I think the hope is that a bad master’s degree bet can be made up with the earning power or a BA but there are plenty of BA grads who would not easily find 1k a month.
If there was a podcast dedicated entirely to chronicling anarchist/lefty business venture meltdowns, and I would subscribe at the highest tier of their Patreon (or Substack or whatever). I kinda feel bad for how entertained I am by their downfall, but the characters involved are generally loathsome and the dysfunction is created entirely by their own deranged behavior.
The circumcision stuff is really really really annoying.
The anarchist cafe. The girls from Ask A Jew read some of the meeting minutes. It was surreal
Btw. Yiddishists can be batshit crazy. Not all of. Of course. But there is a type where view it as an anti colonialist language while Hebrew is The Worst.
ETA: Teshuva is repentance. Like improvement. And seriously fuck them regarding the Christian Chinese person. I wonder how many of the cafe people have actual connections to the Holocaust? Like. I dunno. I would bet if your grandparents' relatives were killed, you would feel touched by the card
Also. Wtf is a second generation immigrant? If you were born in the country in which you live, you are not an immigrant. At all
You're not immigrant if you were born in the country in which you live, but I think it's uncontroversial that the children of immigrants have a substantially different life experience than children whose family have lived in the country for several generations.
Of course. But I was born in this country. I am not an immigrant. I think second generation American or Scot or whatever nation your parents immigrated to covers that concept well.
My grandparents were refugees which I guess technically makes me a "second-generation immigrant." It's a bullshit term. I'm an American and my upbringing was American.
This has to be generational as my mom is not from this country and I mostly grew up with her and I and most of my children of immigrant friends would find the idea of us being immigrants insulting to our parents' struggle.
I kind of get it. Because it is not the same than if your grandparents immigrated and I imagine Scotland even more than England is a weird place to grow up as a child of immigrants
My mother was also an immigrant but my Dad wasn't, and I think 2nd gen is more of a thing when both your parents are from another country, one which has a very different religion/cultural norms, because then you have a substantially different home culture to other children. I think it's just a fact, and I also think it's good to have a name for a category of people who face different challenges/experiences/cultural expectations to those who aren't the children of immigrants. The tension these kids feel between wanting to please their parents and stay true to their ethnic culture, whilst also embracing their home country's social/cultural norms, is a real struggle, and it requires recognition. I don't know that there is a better name than 2nd gen immigrants to accurately reflect the situation.
I agree that when one parent is not an immigrant and another is, it makes a difference.
I absolutely felt different from other kids, in terms of food, language -;not the same as if both parents were immigrants but when my parents divorced it was the same.
I think referring to oneself as a second generation immigrant is one thing when you didn't learn English until you started school and your parents never really learned to speak it is one thing. Referring to others as second gen immigrants is a whole other thing.
Yeah, I agree with this take -- I also think this is different in different places. My gut says that poverty and exclusion causes it; like for example my grandmother grew up in the tenements in NYC, had Yiddish as a first language, and grew up in a neighborhood of Jewish immigrants. She considered herself a hyphenated american and was proud of being the daughter of an immigrant.
A lot of Swedes with non-European backgrounds don't feel like Swedes even if they were born there -- if you other people and don't integrate them, then it's not surprising they still feel like immigrants.
Or if they refuse to integrate themselves, that's a real thing too. Ethnic enclaves are cool, but there are limits and a certain amount of personal responsibility involved.
It is quite hard for some flavours of immigrant to integrate in nation states where the base population isn’t already set by colonial immigration. Which is a nice way of saying that outside the US/Canada/etc “indigenous population” tends to be a far-right talking point that is shared by some leftists, rather than a woke one.
This comports with my experience. I'm an immigrant in my country, although I can pass if I don't speak. My partner is also an immigrant, but he is visibly not from here. (OTOH, he has no accent!) HIS son was born and raised here, but I would not say that the kid is all that integrated with the majority culture. (In fact, at the ripe old age of 11, he is going through a phase(?) of strongly rejecting the majority culture and identifying with his dad's culture.) And because 1) he looks like his dad, and 2) he's got a foreign name, he is likely to experience just as much difficulty in the employment arena as any real immigrant.
Swedes are an ethnic group along with a nationality. I wouldn’t expect to move to Nigeria and fully ever feel or be considered Nigerian. I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with that.
“And seriously fuck them regarding the Christian Chinese person. I wonder how many of the cafe people have actual connections to the Holocaust? Like. I dunno. I would bet if your grandparents' relatives were killed, you would feel touched by the card.”
I’m middle-aged. My dad was a Jewish WW 2 refugee. I can not agree more or emphasize how true this is.
Also — just the loathing and disgust everyone would have had for someone who responded rudely to the sincere, well intentioned guy from a different religion & culture is literally beyond my ability to convey.
I originally had a longer comment (since deleted) where I tried to be funny about how crazy this stupid, cruel response would have driven my father, but I can’t express it.
Yeah. My grandparents survived the war in Siberia and my mom was born there after the war and partly grew up in Poland, then Israel. The cafe kids are so fucking obnoxious. Like I CANNOT with that kind of condescension to someone who was expressing kindness.
From what I can understand, there's a lot of animosity currently between the chassidim and the Black community in Brooklyn (maybe it's always been this way and it has flare ups)
That doesn't quite make sense, as the Satmar are in Williamsburg, which was never particularly black. BUT. I have heard that sone Satmar families have bought up properties in poor black Brooklyn communities, leading to gentrification. And/or they charge higher rents.
So I guess I kind of get it. Except those anti colonial Yiddishists tend to live in those neighborhoods too
"Tshuvah" in American Jewish usage means "repentance" though the word literally has meanings in the area of "return" and "answer"
Among American Ashkenazi Jews, the common meaning was probably influenced from Yiddish, where it only means "repentance"
It's used in these sense in the prayerbook liturgy and the Talmud.
Among modern Hebrew speakers, the word is commonly used for "answer". If I were to ask someone that I asked a question "What is your answer?" I'd say "מה התשובה שלך" ("Mah ha-Tshuvah Shelakh")
BTW: I highly doubt that Jesse was only taught how to sound out Hebrew words without learning the language. He just didn't bother to pay attention at all and still doesn't care about it.
I can't believe I'm playing Devil's Advocate for Jesse's Jewish knowledge, but my early (Reform) Hebrew education was entirely based on just being able to phonetically read the language (with vowel markings) rather than speak it. Only those who were actually interested in Hebrew continued into actually learning the language in middle school and beyond. So I believe him.
This was my exact experience at Hebrew school 3x/week at a Conservative synagogue in a suburb of San Diego (plus second and third grade at a Jewish day school). The instruction was really designed to allow us to participate in services and eventually prepare for our bar or bat mitzvahs. I’m sure there was a little bit of conversational Hebrew or reading comprehension but that was in no way the focus and I don’t remember it at all. But to this day, I can read Hebrew phonetically!
I assume “second generation immigrant” is a synonym for “first generation Scottish”. Which one is “better” is kinda boring semantics to me, tbh, though I could see it being an identity issue for some.
I am pretty sure first generation Scottish refers to the person who immigrated, , not their Scottish born children. And while they are synonymous, they are emphasizing opposite things
Tweet Court should be a regular feature on BaR wherein Jesse and Katie discuss someone dragged on Twitter and Judge Judy it to determine whether or not it was warranted.
Why are people stunned and horrified that they are expected to repay a LOAN they took out? It’s a LOAN. Library lady is definitely the dumbest and the most annoying IMO.
I sold my home to pay off my student loans. (A home that I was able to buy because I ate Ramen in the dark for a very long time while working 70 hours/week to come up with the down payment.) Everybody's situation is different. But I went through a lot and although perhaps it's petty of me, I'm not full of sympathy for people who just want a 100% discharge.
I'd say the same thing of most humanities PhDs, the one distinguishing factor being that most humanities PhDs are still technically funded (i.e., you don't take out loans to do them, generally, although there are some disciplines in which the PhDs are often unfunded).
I posted earlier about using IBR. I don’t feel like it was a fuck capitalism move. I’ve never really thought about economics that much. But over the years watching institutions (financial mainly) get bailed out for making stupid ass decisions, full well knowing that they’d get bailed out because they’re too big to fail, professional sports teams and corporations (owned by billionaires) basically holding cities hostage for tax breaks…I don’t feel too bad for having my loans forgiven and basically paying back 1/10 of what I actually owe. Fuck it. Use the system…tired of the rules for thee but not for me bs.
Yeah I’ve *almost* felt guilty a couple times over the years thinking about how little money I’ve actually paid back in relation to what I owe. But…that’s when the populist in me says “you know what, fuck that, there’s waayyy more well off people who screw the system and truly destroy peoples lives…I took advantage of a legit program…so screw it lol
Financial institutions were bailed out in 2008 to prevent cascading failures and a collapse of the global financial system. The bailout loans were paid back with interest. They should have never got themselves into that situation but hindsight is 20/20, and if anyone knew then what we know now, they would be extremely wealthy.
True statement. However, we must ask ourselves, how did the people we entrusted with financial fiduciaries in this case...taxpayers....push the world economy to the brink? Did all whose lives were destroyed by poor leadership in the financial sector get government assistance? Probably, some kind, but big business and finance seem to backstop very stupid decisions with taxpayer money. They’re subsidized by our government anytime poor judgement is used. I feel odd typing this response because I’m not an economic populist.
The government and lenders should have some culpability for underwriting a high five figure or low six figure liability on an 18 year old.
IBR and forgiveness is a nice step. That said, tweeting at the president when the government has already solved your problem is silly. No issues with this women being made fun of for it.
I do think people overestimate the sophistication and experience of first generation college kids. You get a piece of paper that says, “congratulations your education is fully funded here’s how much money you can get” that lists a couple different loan types and maybe some grants with what that means buried in fine print.
And a lot of people, especially those whose parents did not go to college and maybe don’t have baked in upper middle class financial habits literally do not realize how much of that is a loan, or that they don’t have to (and shouldn’t!) max out the amount of loan they accept. They just see “I can go (or send my baby to) college and it’s taken care of for now!”
Yes, people should take responsibility for their choices. But these government loan programs would be called predatory if they were private and for anything other than college.
Certainly someone who was smart enough to get into an Ivy League school--and then spend the rest of her life telling everyone she did--is smart enough to know what a loan is.
I’m in Britain where nobody is really circumcised. I have a two year old boy. I’ve never noticed any smegma, never heard it mentioned by any of my friends or family who have little boys and we talk about other problems with little boys bits all the time. I have no memory if it being mentioned at all really. I’ve never been told to clean it by a health visitor, doctor etc. I have a vague memory of being told not mess with his foreskin by the midwife in the hospital. Not an issue. Is it not more of thing that comes with puberty?
I didn’t even realise it was so prevalent in America until I was in University and my friends were fucking year abroad guys and complaining about how much harder it was to give them a handjob.
A theory about problems with uncircumcised little boys that I'm inclined to believe, provisionally, is that parents who have no experience with uncircumcised children may not know how to teach them appropriate hygiene. You don't have to do much to care for young boys' penises, because as you say smegma is an issue later. I wonder if some of these parents citing infections may have erroneously thought they were supposed to retract the foreskin and clean the young boy's penis and contributed to any problems themselves.
I believe this is one of the less consequential decisions most parents will make for their child, and I think it's important to respect parents' decisions in this area. But it really bothers me to see parents making decisions based on bad information. If hygiene is your concern, you can read up and/or get a good pediatrician.
Yes I can see that but it would be solved fairly quickly if people started to stop doing it. I think it’s one of those things that you can’t see how strange it is from the inside. The thought of handing my baby boy over to have a bit of his genitals cut off is honestly a bit grotesque to me. I certainly don’t judge individual parents for making a choice within a culture telling them it’s normal but it’s an extremely weird thing for a society to do to babies.
I think it's an important practice to protect for reasons of religious freedom--we'll never convince any community to change their longtime practices by getting the state involved--but I really object to the more crackpot reasons people come up with due to medical ignorance.
I mean, as soon as lads hit puberty the *last* piece of instruction that you need to give them is “Hey, could you make sure to thoroughly wash your dick a lot?”
Trust me, they are waaaaayyyyyyy ahead of you on that one.
You may be underestimating the number of “really circumcised” dudes in 2023 Britain. By a lot. England especially.
Also, as Yank I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that our lower Inevitable Alcohol Consumption Prior To Any Sexual Encounter Rate likely results in handjobs being successfully completed with a speed and ease fully commensurate with those performed on our fully intact, liquored-up Brit brethren.
Yeah- he had been in decline for awhile. It has been really fucking hard- but we did our best to make him comfortable at the end. He was a hell of a dad.
I just realised how callous my previous comment was. I was in debate mode and didn't register the actual content of what you said, and what happened to your father. I'm very sorry for your loss, and sorry for being such an idiot.
Yeah another female Brit here reading all the weird US comments about smegma and judgmental women and finding it all bizarre. All my partners have been uncircumcised and there's never been any problem with hygiene. I'm sure there are uncircumcised men with more general hygiene issues who don't wash their dicks properly but I'd imagine the same can be said for circumcised men.
It's odd how determined people become to protect dogma
This will be an unpopular comment I'm sure but this was also true for me (Brit) until I met my current partner, who was circumsised as a kid for medical reasons. I don't know the gory details, but it was done when he was about 5. And having gathered the relevant empirical evidence, I have to admit I prefer it. That's not to say I'd ask someone on a hypothetical first date if they'd been snipped - I'd just be quietly pleased if they had.
You're completely entitled to your preferences, of course. The question is whether some women's preferences (because many are indifferent, or prefer an intact foreskin) are a good reason to remove a child's body part without a medically necessary reason, and without the child's understanding or consent.
The cafe's whole diversity thing is comical: Scotland, as of 2018, is 96.3% white. I love the fact you have these woke folk setting up a cafe in another country and then proceeding act as if Scotland is a settler colony and the ethnically Scottish somehow problematic -as in ,Scotland has to abide by US style-DEI stuff despite having a completely different history and disparate ethnic make-up to the United States. I actually finding kind of obnoxious they think they have the right to do that in my country.
Comical is right - this story would be ridiculous regardless of which city it was set in, but as a Glaswegian I was amused/appalled throughout Katie’s report at the thought of these cafe lunatics in close proximity to my fellow city dwellers.
For those who don’t know Glasgow, the yawning chasm between the cultural outlook of the multi pronouned -traumatised and injured-diversity spreadsheet updaters, and 99% of the Scottish population would be a wonder to behold. I’m imagining them inadvertently caught in the middle of an Old Firm football crowd - they’d suddenly learn the real meaning of trauma and injury!
Anyway, it was fun to hear a Barpod episode about Glasgow of all places, and if Jesse ever wants to host a meet up here I would be there in a heartbeat - I suspect he’d have a ball.
It was very noticeable that there were no Glaswegian voices in the soundtrack to the bookburning video. Just privileged English and American.
It doesn't make any sense in the US based on our ethnic make-up or history either. It's almost all bullshit here, let alone somewhere else. I promise you're not any more sick of it than I am, as an American.
Everything on TV, in advertising acts like this country is like 40% black (in advertising but in TV in general they said that 18% of TV characters are black men, which is not representative of the US), that there are more black people in the US than Hispanic or Latino people, and that there are equal numbers of Asian people and Hispanic or Latino people .
But I think it is even more intense in England and the UK.
There's a book coming out in a few days by Tomiwa Owolade called "This is not America" which is arguing exactly this - racial politics and dynamics that apply in the USA don't translate and in fact can be actively detrimental to the Black British community who have very different needs. I'm looking forward to reading it.
The SNP are more woke than any political party in the US.
Completely agree, but I think a strong argument can be made that the large majority of SNP support comes despite the woke nonsense, rather than because of it.
I didn’t say they imported it from a political party, their student wing imported it from American colleges and social media. Also, they are less woke than the DSA-who are American and a political party.
Hahaha! If Taylor Swift or the widow of basketball legend Kobe Bryant made a political statement this afternoon if would have more public impact than anything the DSA has ever done as a formal entity in its existence! I am totally serious.
The DSA is a social movement and dream.The only time its members can do anything on a national scale, which is almost never, they have to do it as Democrats. (See Sanders, Bernie. Sanders voters had a tantrum when it seemed the moderate leaders of the Democratic Party were favoring Hilary Clinton in the Democratic primary system because they cynically thought she had a better chance against the Republican. It never occurred to them that if he was really a part of another party he wouldn’t even be in the Democratic primary. That’s cause he isn’t really.)
The name is a tribute to the defunct, early to mid 20th Century SPA, which actually was a force. The DSA are like a rock music tribute band. They play the old hits for very small audiences. (Okay, that might be too kind an example as people still like rock music: The DSA are like a tribute band that plays big band jazz to very small audiences.)
Brace yourself. I am now going to use the word “literally” in its formal sense. Ahem. Here goes …
The vast, vast majority of Americans literally do not even know the DSA exist!
Honestly, never heard them of them.
The SNP, on the other hand, run Scotland. Not only have people heard of them, they’re actually in charge!
Big picture: the specific rhetoric on race may be American and out of our history, but the impulse is worldwide.
Your “looney left” was there decades ago and was actually in charge of the Labour Party. The Labour Party actually is a big deal. My God, you just had Jeremy Corbyn!
George Galloway is Scottish!
Was George Galloway the puppet of woke American college students who had yet to be born or were toddlers?
As a Yank I’m willing to take the blame on a lot of things, but I draw the line on George Galloway! He’s yours, mate!
Do not try and change the point, you asked for an American party-I gave you one. Post Colonial studies originated in the US, critical theory and later critical legal studies and later still critical race theory originated in America. Twitter and Tumblr are American. This originated in America, if you think that to be wrong that’s between you and your psychiatrist. Get A Grip.
Even Jonathan Haidt says wokeness began in Ivy League universities and then spread to the rest of the English speaking. Wee tip -best not to argue with someone from a country about their country when you have never been: George Galloway is the most anti-woke politician going-he believes identity politics is a conspiracy by the ruling class. And, the SNP’s woke turn is new and opportunistic as they need to court the youth vote. Things you know actually living in a country, eh buddy boy?
Wow. I haven’t seen misplaced rage and indignation like this since someone didn’t know what the term “honor culture” meant! Geesh!
Oh, I’ve been to the UK (the actual name of the nation you live in) on numerous occasions. My godson and his brothers are there. I’ve been to Scotland more than once too. Strange that you would not just assume I hadn’t, but also put so much rhetorical capital in on your ill advised, ignorant guess.
I’m sorry you feel embarrassed and your feelings are hurt (yet again.) I hope when you calm down you feel better.
Don't know anything about anything else you write here, but YES: "he believes identity politics is a conspiracy by the ruling class." Occam's razor would suggest this is TRUE.
Three thoughts:
1. They should specialize in niche lefty coffeeshop drama, it's serious rich and unploughed terrain.
2. Both of them really letting their coastal-Millennial-media-classism show with Katie's remark of "everyone is broke at 28." I'm sure this marks me as a flyover rube but I know plenty of people who owned a home and had a couple of kids at that age.
3. The more I hear Jesse's takes on Judaism and his Jewish background, the more I want him to stop. Girl, we get it, you don't know anything and you don't care much to learn.
It’s weird that it is a coastal elite thing to be broke most of your early adult life but you’re correct. Somehow making $30k a year as a post doc is an elite signal. Which is a very retarded signal and explains a lot about our society.
I think the income marker is more about being a creative than location. There are plenty of very well-paid 28 year old engineers, corporate lawyers, management consultants, computer programmers and investment bankers.
Katie and Jesse live in a world where they don't interact with these types on a regular basis. (Especially Katie).
Katie is married to a nurse, though. I (a creative type) was in awe of the salaries that my 22-year-old BSN classmates were earning straight out of school. It wasn’t millionaire money, but it was sufficient to build a solid, middle class life and not be broke in your 20’s. Definitely better than “I’m going to wait tables or temp while I do this unpaid internship and hope my journalism career kicks off” money. Katie is familiar with “people who have useful, non-flashy professional skillsets who are always employable” because she lives with one.
Devil's advocate: Katie's wife got into nursing prior to the credentials change that led to big salary boosts.
(When I was high school in the late 1980s, classmates would go to a local "nursing school" and have an RN in two years. Now you must have a BSN.)
A few years ago my little sister explored one of those accelerated BSN programs for people who already have Non-STEM bachelor's degrees. After reading the brochure outlining the program, I joked "why don't you just go to medical school"?
I don't know hold old Katie's wife is or how long she's been a nurse. Just guessing.
I graduated college in the late 90’s, and even then, and entry level new grad nurse could earn a starting salary that seemed very much “not broke” to my English Major sensibilities. Katie is about 40, so unless she is in a major age gap relationship, her wife probably came into the nursing field after the time that you are talking about.
Now I'm stumped. Maybe Katie's wife worked at a free Medicaid clinic.
I mean yeah, she’s Irish.
No offense, but I think you’re doing the rightwing thing where you assume anything you find exasperating or confusing or foreign that artsy liberals do can simply be dismissed as a status “signal.”
(Richard Hannani’s sincere belief that any cultural interest that wouldn’t appeal to a horny, male, U. of Chicago libertarian on the autism spectrum must be an affectation is probably the current great example. It’s a frequent source of much inadvertent comedy. Though admittedly he’s an extreme case.)
Here’s the thing: many people are genuinely interested in the arts. (Some have talent.) Journalism, not that long ago, was a real job with a future. There were even many actual decent-paying jobs in the arts. Things like musician or illustrator.
The people who pursued the arts and journalism these past few decades may have been foolish. Some may be poseurs.
But no one pursued them because they thought they’d be poorly paying and lack of money as adults would then give them cool points.
Yes, but it’s the fun we have along the way in the comments that counts.
I hear what you’re saying and sort of halfway agree with it. I’ve never considered myself an artist probably because I have some kind of cultural aversion to it as you mention but I’ve been more successful at it than most people I know who do it in real life. I did give it up as a sort of waste of time/just do it when I have time as a hobby because I didn’t see money in it to support a family. But also I did go to enough writing groups to meet people who come from affluent backgrounds who sincerely seemed to get off on the idea of being poor. It’s a weird world.
How old were you when you went to those writing workshops? Or — more significantly — how old were your fellow students? What part of the country?
Honestly, the only time I encountered serious hardcore dumbass romanticization of poverty was in and around indie/alt rock. I got a couple lifetime’s worth, sure. Still, it was all people still safe and snug in their 20s.
If ever there was a “that shit grows old fast” in life it’s not having money. And if there is any group of people on earth with little tolerance for not having the money of their peers it’s children.
Last thought: I failed to acknowledge how much people often hate 9 to 5. Maybe they’re spoiled entitled brats, but wanting to avoid that grind is, I think, a much greater motivator than any cubicle stigma.
I feel like this is a trick to make me think about how old I am. Washington state and Oregon. About fifteen years ago and ten years ago. Probably a dozen ish people across both fairly small groups who were in their mid and late twenties but they seemed to be able to assert some kind of control just through sheer numbers and recklessness. Also had a comp professor of the same genus. It was before I knew the word Woke but they were probably nascent wokesters who primarily contributed information on how everything was problematic but never wrote anything themselves.
What I mostly dislike/react to is the sense that there’s a class of people who think they are simultaneously too good to work or check their ideas against others but also highly capable and all knowing.
I probably *am* an art type if I lived in a different place, like I write poetry and shit, but I do find now that I somehow just can’t feel comfortable around art people.
Two thoughts (I’m a lot more confident that I’m right about the second):
1) I think the NW US where you’re from may be really unique in neither having the cultural insularity & alarmingly high rates of violence found in some rural homogenous communities (Ozark, Appalachia) nor the histories of racism and racial tension of the rest of the US. (Perhaps I’m being naive.)
You would know much better they me how that would play out, but I wonder if there might be an awareness of class, irrespective of race, that persists or persisted longer where you grew up. (In NYC the idea that Chinese or Russian or Irish-American kids in, say, an honors class may be working class or poor is provocative. And thus the very idea of poverty divorced from identity is.)
This awareness of class would seem to me to be a good thing, but it might also result in a romanticized view of poverty. One that you no longer have in most of the US.
Everything in much of the rest of the country is just about race. (Again: perhaps it is in the NW now too. I know there’s now more racial diversity & immigration.)
Also — and this is going to sound weird, but, oh, it’s true — communities with lots of immigrants and racial minorities tend to be extremely aspirational in way that is contemptuous of poverty. Neither rappers nor immigrant shopkeepers have any illusions about poverty. They want nothing to do with it. That results in a lot less overall romanticization about being financially strapped, but more vulgar materialism.
2) The lower the technical standards of entry for an art form are, the more clowns you’re going to get.
Portrait and landscape painting are going to have less clowns participating than abstract and conceptual art.
Rap MCs are going to have more clowns among their number than tenor sax players or gospel singers.
More poets are going to be clowns than novelists.
And more wannabe novelists are going to be clowns than actual (did the work) novelists.
But that doesn’t mean all poets (or wannabe poets) are clowns. Not at all. It just means the non-clown poets are going to deal with a lot more annoyance from their ostensible peers.
Sure, it beats the problems (tuberculosis, rats, starvation in garrets, no hot water, untreatable venereal diseases) poets often dealt with back when the rigor of rhyme & meter made the entry requirements higher, but it’s still going to be (as you found) incredibly annoying.
You’re right. It is weird. But I would say these people are “broke”, not broke.
Many jobs in media or the arts pay low because it’s a winner take all market. Two dozen playwrights will write bad plays for years in a bohemian community before someone emerges with a big hit and makes a ton of money.
You can only bide your time trying to become the winner while making $30K if you’ve got support from elsewhere.
tl;dr, only the rich can afford to be poor artists.
With respect to, “real rich kids”, I’d say it’s all relative.
The children of college grads much more likely to graduate college than the children of non college grads. More then 2:1. Among college students, the kids or degree holders are 2X as likely to attend a highly selective college than their first generation counterparts.
Finally, college educated households are 4 times wealthier than non college households.
Put it all together and we have this: graduates from highly selective schools come from dramatically more wealth than the average American. Even if they’re underemployed.
I gotcha. And rest assured, I only break these stats out online. I promise I don’t make a hobby out of telling underemployed art school grads how much better off they are than most people because like you said, it’s little comfort.
In medicine you’ve got six-figure loans and by the time you actually make money you’re locked into roughly the same salary as a teacher for several years, typically at least into your early 30’s.
People who went into tech or business often tell me we’re idiots for accepting this. I think they’re right.
Yeah there are some job practices right now that aren’t even market driven. Or rather, the markets only work that way for insane reasons.
The median post doc salary is $71.5k. Not exactly matching Audi A8 in 4 car garage salary, but that's a really far shot from "poor".
If you marry another academic on the same track, that'd put your household income in the 150k/yr range. Or double the median household income.
Even on the West Coast that income makes you very solidly middle class.
I have a theory I came up with after CitiBikeGate, and I think it helps me a lot:
Jesse and Katie are good journalists, but their opinions are on average as dumb as mine or yours. When they're spouting their opinions, I pay attention to the funny ones and tune the rest out.
I want to give this extra likes just for #3. He doesn’t even seem to be aware that there could be a Jewish perspective worth considering.
Eh, this is a comedy podcast. Some of the saltiness from more observant Jews towards him as of late reminds me of earlier when some of the Christians would get their panties in a twist over Jesus jokes.
Right. I'm a bit exhausted at the constant anger at K&J for not sharing the audience's exact opinions. I don't care if I disagree with them sometimes. I'm here because they are likeable and funny and they unearth internet/journalism silliness that I wouldn't know about otherwise.
This is how audience capture works. I hope they just keep doing their thing and don't listen to us most of the time
Don’t worry, they only pay attention to the subReddit.
There are more comments there and more importantly they’re easier to find. Substack has a long way to go if it wants to be a social network.
I’m not sure I agree that this is a comedy podcast and I don’t particularly care of either host shares all of my opinions. Sorry you’re exhausted (y’all…), but I just find it obnoxious and juvenile.
I guess comedy can be relative, but I'd definitely consider this a humorous podcast at the very least. I listen because it makes me smile and laugh.
cool
Sometimes Jesse goes on about science which is fine I guess but not what I'm here for. But the rest of the time it's like if someone was narrating an online version of a Jerry Springer show. It's funny.
I come here to discover new lolcows
Well I gave it a like and then retracted it for #3 - I agree with Tess and am finding a lot of these 'Jesse isn't Jewish enough' comments slightly wearing.
So much of the 'millenial's are getting screwed' discourse is coming from people who are pursuing famously unremunerative professions like journalism and writting trying to live in one of the like three most expensive cities in the US. Like no shit you can't buy a house in New York on your unpaid interns salary...
Yeah, generational discourse of any sort is pretty tiresome to me. I know plenty of people in their 30s and 40s who are married, own homes, have kids, work good if unglamorous jobs, etc. It just so happens that the people most influential in setting the media "tone" are living the Jesse Singal life in Brooklyn et al.
Idk, I think the "broke till 28" probably depends on place a lot. I went to college in Michigan and worked there for a few years before I moved, and the job market was appalling at the time -- unless you were in medicine or tech, everything was like $9 an hour with no benefits. The few people I know who were able to buy a house before 28 were tech bros with rich families.
For me I was basically broke till 30, when I finally got a promotion to a newly created role at my current job that came with a $20K raise. I still can't afford a house because they start at half a million for a tiny studio in my city 😭
For real, “broke at 28” - I really hope to have a mortgage by then.
I was broke at 28 and had half of a modest-size joint mortgage at 34 - I think this is fairly typical of metropolitan-dwelling graduates who don't come from rich backgrounds. There's really no way to have a cushy life in your 20s unless you happen to land a really lucritive job straight out of college (banking or similar) which I didn't. Had I lived in a rural area it might have been a different story, and I knew plenty of people who had their own homes outside London by then. The perspectives are very different.
I was blessed enough to have an interest in IT at a young age that’s allowed me to get a tech job. That would definitely color my experience.
I think it's absolutely possible. I took out my first mortgage at 24--I'm about to turn 28, so borderline millennial/gen Z. I'm a geologist who works in the environmental field, which isn't known for making the big bucks like oil. But I also live in an affordable flyover state.
That’s awesome!
I posted above but I’m an IT guy. Currently just stowing away money as much as possible (25).
Good deal! I'd also wait for mortgage rates to go down, but I'm sure you'll be set to start looking.
Indeed! Hoping to start looking by September when my bonus comes but I’m pretty flexible with how rates are going; like you said.
I am co-signing #3
I can attest to number 2. As someone who's turning 28 next month, I have had a house since I was 24.
Heck, I’m a Millennial working in publishing and I’d bought my flat by 28. It’s certainly not the case that all Millennials struggles through their 20s despite the economic conditions.
I have to say I find the commentary from women that they find circumcised penises more attractive pretty gross. I wonder how these women would feel about men who make derogatory comments about women's "roast beef curtains" and if they think that women should get labiaplasty because some men find the inner labia unattractive.
Also, have these women actually seen an uncircumcised penis? I certainly remember thinking that it was "weird" when I was younger (largely because of that appalling Sex and the City episode) until I dated my college boyfriend at which point I realized that they literally look the same when erect. Who's being this picky over the appearance of their partner's flaccid penis?
"We should do cosmetic surgery on children because of my own sexual preferences". How can they write and send those emails and not realize how crazy that sounds
I have talked to women who've never seen an uncircumcised penis (often fellow American Southerners), and yeah, I wonder if they're imagining the difference to be much more significant than it is.
I think people are looking at like, a close-up picture of a flaccid ween on Wikipedia or something, and it's grossing them out and since that's their experience, they just think that's what it is... but a close-up medical-style picture of genitals is rarely charming or winsome
Ugh, yeah, we had medical journals lying around the house all the time when I was a kid, and those close-up photos can make any body part look gross.
Your childhood friends must have been scared of your coffee table.
Let me sent you up close of my weenus, you find very sexy, yes?
The clear implication being that women in Europe, Asia and South America are super grossed out by the men around them and nobody ever has sex. I am not a world-renowned sexologist or anything but, um, I don’t think that checks out?
Three billion cases of virgin birth. Only explanation.
It’s also isn’t a real thing, you cannot tell the difference when a penis is erect, and women don’t spend much time taking long ganders at flaccid penises if we can avoid it.
Uncircumcised penises are totally fine. I agree with you that’s it’s not cool to be unkind about body parts (male or female). We’re all flesh and blood.
Agreed. I've been intimate with both and they are both just fine. Actually, I'd say I prefer uncut (sorry, husband).
I was also confused by the statement regarding having to clean a baby's uncircumcised penis as if that's a big deal. The foreskin doesn't retract for a few years and it's just not difficult to clean them. You don't have to move the foreskin at all. The actual difficult part is when the toddler flings himself around because God forbid you wipe his poopy ass, but that has nothing to do with his penis.
One day we'll have to teach him how to clean his junk properly, and guess what - we'll have to with his sister, too! Wet washcloth, no soap, be gentle. It's just not a big deal.
Dated a Jewish guy in college, and now married to a European, and I honestly don’t even think about either’s dicks that much (I mean, my husband’s is attached to him, who I DO think about). I don’t even remember my high school boyfriend’s penis, though I saw it often.
I agree. If women have strong feelings about them and prefer circumcised ones for looks, that’s practically being in favor of genital mutilation for aesthetics.
Erect uncircumcised penises don’t look that different, or I’m outing myself as asexual because others more adventurous than I am may have more discriminating eyes. 🤷♀️
Not anti-circumcision, or for. Thankfully I had daughters so this wasn’t a decision I had to make, though I decided against piercing their ears even though many moms do when they’re young-- because of the bodily autonomy argument.
That said, if a guy wasn’t up with hygiene THEN I’d have a problem.
I can attest that they do not look any different when they are erect.
Completely agree.
I honestly think they don't know the difference. I hooked up with a girl who said she only liked cut dicks, and she either didn't notice or didn't care. They look more or less the same when erect to the untrained eye.
Katie pronounced "Govanhill" correctly. What I really like is the lack of self-awareness: you have these bourgie, pretentious Americans coming to Scotland, unaware of the fact they are both gentrifying an area and engaging in cultural imperialism. Scotland is not America. Scotland is a thousand years older and has its own culture. Most people think the woke stuff is insufferable. Woke Americans are constantly scolding and lecturing everyone about cultural insensitivity, all the while acting as if other countries only exist as an extension of America. Also, I think, to describe handing in a dissertation as "traumatic" renders the class element of all this quite starkly; the cafe could only exist because of middle-class university students. One of the criticism of the SNP-despite being the Scottish National Party- is that they have imported and tried to implement this college campus stuff(the SNP has a large youth movement), and most Scots find it to be totally phoney.
Yeah, I'm married to a Scot and spent a fair chunk of my life in Glasgow. I listened to the whole thing thinking it was a miracle these characters managed to avoid getting unceremoniously chibbed by the locals.
They also seem unaware that JK Rolling, despite being a privately educated millionaire, is really rather popular in Scotland. More so than over-privileged kids and their confected gender distress.
JK Rowling - although English-born and speaking with an English accent - also lives in Scotland.
Yes, I live in Scotland
As a patriotic and red blooded American I am honestly most embarrassed about that aspect of our culture. I get all the other criticisms and couldn’t give a fuck, but us basically shipping out all this crazy college horseshit to the rest of the world bothers the hell out of me.
I wish the rest of the world much luck in stemming the tide of extreme leftist insanity because I think we are fucked already.
My working theory is that sometime in the early 2000s an exasperated Parisian cafe owner, sick of cargo short and baseball cap wearing American family vacationers asking him in very loud, slow English, “which way to the Loo-ver?”, wished on a monkey paw for more educated Americans to come to Europe.
European mother of two boys here. No smegma issues. Have no idea what the writer was talking about. Have never heard mums discuss this here either.
Glad to act as foreign correspondent and speak on behalf of all European caretakers of penis-havers.
Thank you for your service
The notion that we foreskin-owners are forever having to go to hospital with emergency smegma issues was beyond bizarre.
Yup, ashamed to say I was a bit of a smeg-farmer as a scruffy youth, but never had to call an ambulance as a result.
American mother of 2 British boys and married to an (uncircumcised) British man. My American parents had no experience with this and were super concerned about cleaning etc and they kept asking how to do it - when the kids were born they asked the midwife quite a few times about whether it was really enough to just soap a boy down and not retract the foreskin to clean.
The midwife just said "never, ever do that, you'll be far more likely to cause an infection if you do - it cleans itself if you leave it alone". And she was right!
In fact, as a mother of an intact penis-haver, I remember being told never to try to pull the foreskin back - it doesn’t fully separate from the head until the child is well into toddler years and if you try you just run the risk of tearing - which is what the letter writer did. Poor baby. Leave your baby’s foreskin alone people!
I'm an American, but also have two boys and never had issues keeping them clean either. They explained at the hospital how to clean but then I never seemed to do need to do anything in particular aside from changing their diapers. No idea what the big deal was.
Ditto - have never gone through any elaborate foreskin cleaning rituals with my sons, either. Basic hygiene approach for both sexes has been to make sure they wash all over. The non-religious reasons for being pro infant circumcision are striking me as quite... odd.
I guess people would be ok with *some* lesbian dating apps also allowing trans women on if TRAs weren’t so adamant about destroying every single lesbian dating app that doesn’t let them on (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jun/01/female-only-app-giggle-for-girls-transgender-discrimination-suit-roxanne-tickle).
It's flabbergasting how this dude is so adamant that he should have access to anything designed for women. Like, bro, I fully understand that apps like Grindr are not for me, can you not understand that there might be apps and groups that are not for you? You have other apps and groups that ARE for you, but you'd rather sue women for not playing make believe with you.
It’s funny, feminists in the early 2000s were constantly on about how horrifying it was that “nice guys” felt “entitled” to sex if they ever complained about not getting laid, but here we see actual penis-owners actually acting entitled to sexual access to women.
So feminists were right all along!
Trans women seem pretty far removed from the “nice guy” stereotype, so it’s less “right” and more “right idea, wrong target.
I just can't get past "Tickle sued Giggle". Sounds like a court battle between two cartoon clowns.
Also I was just reminded of a video of Tickle from a while back being interviewed about playing in women's hockey. https://twitter.com/j__l__t__f/status/1654048596436860928 - says the men's changing room didn't feel right and he "didn't like the smells". Cos women's changing rooms smell like rose petals and fairy dust, amirite ladies? Now he can share the changing room with young teenage girls and women but god forbid an app doesn't let him register.
You’re right that people running the app make the rules
But existing customers are allowed to be upset and leave if an app is no longer the thing they wanted
Customers have a right to complain though, and for something like a gay dating app, you can’t really just say “go somewhere else” because any specialized social network is going to tend to converge on a monopoly - having access to the biggest network is the killer app. It’s not clear there is anywhere else for customers to go, so they are naturally going to complain about changes that hurt their experience.
The guy who tries to use woke language to condemn circumcision reminds me of some jokes I've made about using trans-like rhetoric for incels.
"denying me life-saving sex"
"the woman who stopped talking to me after I told her I was autistic is just one step away from throwing people like me into the oven"
EDIT: I am unsure if the cafe being closed due to a lack of spoons was due to a literal lack of spoons or a reference to the tumblr meme about spoons.
Definitely the latter. Spoons Discourse is endemic in that sort of circle.
I worked at a badly-run Sbarros that nearly ran out of paper plates twice in the three months I worked under that general manager. He was also so rude I had a customer circle back to me to complain about him (I had thought he was smart enough to only be an asshole to his employees).
But yeah, I imagine this time it’s metaphorical spoons. And they had so few customers that sending the assistant manager to the nearest shop for an emergency purchase would work even better than it did at Sbarros.
I do wonder, given the reviews, who had worse customer service skills--the Sbarros manager or the crew of the Pink Peacock.
Yeah, I remember it coming up in the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch episode. I don't think that Jesse and Katie got the reference.
Unfair, crushing loneliness is the primary driver of male suicide, but it's also not any more legitimate as a political cudgel than when trans people do it.
I love stories about anarchist coffee shops which fail miserably
And the failed trans/poly alpaca farmers with their CV's of illnesses/identities, both self-diagnosed and otherwise. I could listen to Katie read those descriptions daily.
I read the description and was seriously wondering “another??”
I’ve really shifted the last few months to just wanting men with giant butterfly nets to make a comeback and round up the staff of all these cafes and take them away to a meditation retreat somewhere they aren’t allowed to leave. Don’t be a dick about it just tell them they are vital to queering the space through slam poetry and interpretive finger painting when they try to leave. When they no longer want to do those things we will know they are well.
On the Columbia adjunct: she’s a victim of and semi-beneficiary of the one of the current biggest scams in higher ed, expensive masters programs.
Several people did the math and she has six figures of debt. That’s impossible to wrack up as an undergrad--there are limits--but grad school loans are uncapped and Columbia is a notorious abuser of this fact. (They also probably lied about their student-faculty ratio and got caught by their own math professor.)
I felt a lot more angry at her before I learned she was an adjunct, but that just means she’s holding out hope of staying in academia.
This is just to say cap master’s degree loans and subject them to some kind of gainful employment rule. If community colleges have to prove their 10k welding program is worth federal loans Columbia should have to prove the same for its 100k journalism masters.
The Universities that are running these programs are almost completely ignored in these debates. As far as I'm concerned, they're the primary problem. Charging people six figures for degrees that don't really prepare them for a career or prepare them for a career that pays poorly is unethical, especially if you're also telling the students that these degrees will help their careers.
When you have an endowment the size of Columbia's, you probably don't need to charge six figures for an MFA, especially if the students are being taught by poorly paid adjuncts.
I'd be fine with a blanket loan forgiveness if it were accompanied by reform to the university system so that they're no longer running these questionable degree programs. Somehow I don't see that happening any time soon.
I think overcharging people for degrees that won’t pay off is a problem elsewhere, but below masters levels its most focused in the for profit sector which (a) got its lunch eaten by large online non-profits (and ASU) and (b) is on regulator’s radar as a problem. (Community college programs sometimes have poor pay off but at least they are cheap.)
The predatory masters are a problem at prestigious universities (who are banned from pulling the same tricks in undergrad by loan limits and the cutthroat rules of undergrad rankings). Those institutions are nearly immune from targeted regulation.
Scrutinizing for profit schools while looking the other way at "nonprofits" was a classic example of 'Thanks, Obama".
Yeah, students who took out loans for those types of undergrad or career programs should have their loans forgiven and the regulators need to hurry up and shut them down.
All great points. A lot of very talented writers (Flannery O’Connor was perhaps the first) came out of MFA writing programs in the second half of the 20th century, two in particular: Iowa and Columbia.
That said, they have long been pyramid schemes. Almost no one makes money writing literary fiction in 2023. They may get grants and fellowships, but primarily they get teaching jobs. That’s how they support themselves. Teaching Creative Writing. And those jobs are very hard to get.
Despite its staggering endowment, Columbia has maintained an outrageously high tuition. At a time when most MFA programs charged nominal amounts, often in affordable parts of the country, Columbia never faltered in milking its students for all it could.
I don’t think anyone who takes out loans for a masters degree is a victim. They are an adult making bad financial decisions. It takes a couple hours to do some googling and see how much you can expect to make with your masters vs the cost. A lot of these people are using magical thinking in order to stay in a suspended adolescence. At some point they have to come down to earth and work boring jobs like the rest of us. It’s called work for a reason.
Where the hell is all this gov’t loan money going? Clearly not to the people actually teaching the classes. I can sort of understand why my engineering degree was expensive - most of my last couple years I spent a lot of time in labs that clearly cost millions. But for an MFA, you need a room, some desks, and a professor. What’s the justification for that costing more than maybe $10k a year at the most?
I’m immensely frustrated that seemingly all the mainstream discussion is “why won’t the government pay for college?” instead of “why the hell does college cost so much, whoever is paying it?”. That a place with billions in the bank can be charging $60k for 15 or so hours a week in a classroom for 8 months, led by someone making $35k, is insane.
Take this with a grain of salt because I am not a higher ed finance person (because I value my sanity) but there are four things going on: the discount rate, cross-subsidy, administration costs, and capitol costs.
1) First: The Discount Rate. This refers to how much of the published tuition cost actually gets charged to the student, on average. Its no where near 100% and on an individual level can vary by academic achievement and family financial status. (This system has many flaws.) This is the most true at prestigious universities but it pervades the whole system.
On the whole, real undergraduate tuition has been stable to declining recently, and most undergraduate students leave with less than a third of the debt this woman has.
2) Cross subsidy: your tuition rate was likely very similar to that of your humanities major classmates but they used less of the expensive labs. Cross-subsidy is endemic across the university but figuring out what is actually net negative vs positive is a huge nightmare (it depends on how many majors the program brings in, how much they pay, etc). These predatory graduate programs absolutely do subsidize other programs--for one thing, they don’t do the tuition discounting (see above) that the undergraduate programs do.
3) Administration. Some of this is bloat, some of this is necessary for compliance (every time someone says they want “accountability”, someone has to start tracking that), some of its runs programs that either students or faculty genuinely appreciate (like the athletic center).
4) Capitol costs. All colleges are constantly building--there is always the oldest building on campus or a newer one that didn’t age well (like the athletic center). Besides construction, there’s maintenance, keeping current on technical equipment (very important for STEM and workforce programs), and utilities.
When I have seen comparative budgets, these elite universities do pour a lot of money into their students’ experience, and if you don’t find that valuable your local community college/public regional would love to have you.
They are called grad plus loans and they are relatively new: https://www.lendingtree.com/student/grad-plus-loan/
I think it was a failed reform--the most recent study suggests that colleges raised prices in response but they didn’t increase access to college. Underprivileged MD students already had private loans.
Odd is a good description. Graduate loan policy seems geared around the idea that all graduate programs are the really high-potential professional programs but they aren’t and I am guessing the private options were readily available for those programs before Grad Plus.
(I went after but attended a cheap school that wouldn’t hit the limit of ordinary grad loans so I don’t have personal experience with either system.)
There’s a lot more restrictions/safety rails on undergraduate lending. I think the hope is that a bad master’s degree bet can be made up with the earning power or a BA but there are plenty of BA grads who would not easily find 1k a month.
If there was a podcast dedicated entirely to chronicling anarchist/lefty business venture meltdowns, and I would subscribe at the highest tier of their Patreon (or Substack or whatever). I kinda feel bad for how entertained I am by their downfall, but the characters involved are generally loathsome and the dysfunction is created entirely by their own deranged behavior.
I absolutely would subscribe as well. There's something about reality smacking people like this in the face that's irresistible.
The circumcision stuff is really really really annoying.
The anarchist cafe. The girls from Ask A Jew read some of the meeting minutes. It was surreal
Btw. Yiddishists can be batshit crazy. Not all of. Of course. But there is a type where view it as an anti colonialist language while Hebrew is The Worst.
ETA: Teshuva is repentance. Like improvement. And seriously fuck them regarding the Christian Chinese person. I wonder how many of the cafe people have actual connections to the Holocaust? Like. I dunno. I would bet if your grandparents' relatives were killed, you would feel touched by the card
Also. Wtf is a second generation immigrant? If you were born in the country in which you live, you are not an immigrant. At all
You're not immigrant if you were born in the country in which you live, but I think it's uncontroversial that the children of immigrants have a substantially different life experience than children whose family have lived in the country for several generations.
Of course. But I was born in this country. I am not an immigrant. I think second generation American or Scot or whatever nation your parents immigrated to covers that concept well.
My grandparents were refugees which I guess technically makes me a "second-generation immigrant." It's a bullshit term. I'm an American and my upbringing was American.
It's a form of biculturalness, but also often a difference in access vis a vis the integrated population. It's definitely a thing.
This has to be generational as my mom is not from this country and I mostly grew up with her and I and most of my children of immigrant friends would find the idea of us being immigrants insulting to our parents' struggle.
I kind of get it. Because it is not the same than if your grandparents immigrated and I imagine Scotland even more than England is a weird place to grow up as a child of immigrants
My mother was also an immigrant but my Dad wasn't, and I think 2nd gen is more of a thing when both your parents are from another country, one which has a very different religion/cultural norms, because then you have a substantially different home culture to other children. I think it's just a fact, and I also think it's good to have a name for a category of people who face different challenges/experiences/cultural expectations to those who aren't the children of immigrants. The tension these kids feel between wanting to please their parents and stay true to their ethnic culture, whilst also embracing their home country's social/cultural norms, is a real struggle, and it requires recognition. I don't know that there is a better name than 2nd gen immigrants to accurately reflect the situation.
I agree that when one parent is not an immigrant and another is, it makes a difference.
I absolutely felt different from other kids, in terms of food, language -;not the same as if both parents were immigrants but when my parents divorced it was the same.
I think referring to oneself as a second generation immigrant is one thing when you didn't learn English until you started school and your parents never really learned to speak it is one thing. Referring to others as second gen immigrants is a whole other thing.
My children are completely embarrassed by my immigrant-ness.
Yeah, I agree with this take -- I also think this is different in different places. My gut says that poverty and exclusion causes it; like for example my grandmother grew up in the tenements in NYC, had Yiddish as a first language, and grew up in a neighborhood of Jewish immigrants. She considered herself a hyphenated american and was proud of being the daughter of an immigrant.
A lot of Swedes with non-European backgrounds don't feel like Swedes even if they were born there -- if you other people and don't integrate them, then it's not surprising they still feel like immigrants.
"if you other people and don't integrate them"
Or if they refuse to integrate themselves, that's a real thing too. Ethnic enclaves are cool, but there are limits and a certain amount of personal responsibility involved.
It is quite hard for some flavours of immigrant to integrate in nation states where the base population isn’t already set by colonial immigration. Which is a nice way of saying that outside the US/Canada/etc “indigenous population” tends to be a far-right talking point that is shared by some leftists, rather than a woke one.
This comports with my experience. I'm an immigrant in my country, although I can pass if I don't speak. My partner is also an immigrant, but he is visibly not from here. (OTOH, he has no accent!) HIS son was born and raised here, but I would not say that the kid is all that integrated with the majority culture. (In fact, at the ripe old age of 11, he is going through a phase(?) of strongly rejecting the majority culture and identifying with his dad's culture.) And because 1) he looks like his dad, and 2) he's got a foreign name, he is likely to experience just as much difficulty in the employment arena as any real immigrant.
That’s interesting, A weakness of mine is that most of my perspectives are inevitably amerocentric Still, I’m not sure I’m getting your meaning.
Swedes are an ethnic group along with a nationality. I wouldn’t expect to move to Nigeria and fully ever feel or be considered Nigerian. I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with that.
“And seriously fuck them regarding the Christian Chinese person. I wonder how many of the cafe people have actual connections to the Holocaust? Like. I dunno. I would bet if your grandparents' relatives were killed, you would feel touched by the card.”
I’m middle-aged. My dad was a Jewish WW 2 refugee. I can not agree more or emphasize how true this is.
Also — just the loathing and disgust everyone would have had for someone who responded rudely to the sincere, well intentioned guy from a different religion & culture is literally beyond my ability to convey.
I originally had a longer comment (since deleted) where I tried to be funny about how crazy this stupid, cruel response would have driven my father, but I can’t express it.
Anyway, you’re 100% right.
Yeah. My grandparents survived the war in Siberia and my mom was born there after the war and partly grew up in Poland, then Israel. The cafe kids are so fucking obnoxious. Like I CANNOT with that kind of condescension to someone who was expressing kindness.
I never thought about that re “second generation immigrants”. Good point.
Hilarious to me that the same people calling Yiddish anti-colonialist hate the Satmars with a burning passion
I did NOT know that. But I am guessing the Satmars are too....patriarchal and homophobic?
From what I can understand, there's a lot of animosity currently between the chassidim and the Black community in Brooklyn (maybe it's always been this way and it has flare ups)
That doesn't quite make sense, as the Satmar are in Williamsburg, which was never particularly black. BUT. I have heard that sone Satmar families have bought up properties in poor black Brooklyn communities, leading to gentrification. And/or they charge higher rents.
So I guess I kind of get it. Except those anti colonial Yiddishists tend to live in those neighborhoods too
"Tshuvah" in American Jewish usage means "repentance" though the word literally has meanings in the area of "return" and "answer"
Among American Ashkenazi Jews, the common meaning was probably influenced from Yiddish, where it only means "repentance"
It's used in these sense in the prayerbook liturgy and the Talmud.
Among modern Hebrew speakers, the word is commonly used for "answer". If I were to ask someone that I asked a question "What is your answer?" I'd say "מה התשובה שלך" ("Mah ha-Tshuvah Shelakh")
BTW: I highly doubt that Jesse was only taught how to sound out Hebrew words without learning the language. He just didn't bother to pay attention at all and still doesn't care about it.
Also see:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%AA%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%91%D7%94
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repentance_in_Judaism
I can't believe I'm playing Devil's Advocate for Jesse's Jewish knowledge, but my early (Reform) Hebrew education was entirely based on just being able to phonetically read the language (with vowel markings) rather than speak it. Only those who were actually interested in Hebrew continued into actually learning the language in middle school and beyond. So I believe him.
This was my exact experience at Hebrew school 3x/week at a Conservative synagogue in a suburb of San Diego (plus second and third grade at a Jewish day school). The instruction was really designed to allow us to participate in services and eventually prepare for our bar or bat mitzvahs. I’m sure there was a little bit of conversational Hebrew or reading comprehension but that was in no way the focus and I don’t remember it at all. But to this day, I can read Hebrew phonetically!
Ha. My mom is Israeli.i am the worst
I have only heard Teshuva to mean return or repentance which I guess means the same thing.
My dad can read Hebrew but he has no clue what he is reading. But he was traumatized by Hebrew School in the 1950s .
Jesse is like 21st century Philip Roth.
I assume “second generation immigrant” is a synonym for “first generation Scottish”. Which one is “better” is kinda boring semantics to me, tbh, though I could see it being an identity issue for some.
I am pretty sure first generation Scottish refers to the person who immigrated, , not their Scottish born children. And while they are synonymous, they are emphasizing opposite things
Tweet Court should be a regular feature on BaR wherein Jesse and Katie discuss someone dragged on Twitter and Judge Judy it to determine whether or not it was warranted.
Yeah that was a really good bit.
Why are people stunned and horrified that they are expected to repay a LOAN they took out? It’s a LOAN. Library lady is definitely the dumbest and the most annoying IMO.
The best part is when they say that if you’ve paid you’re off, you’re a ghoul for thinking others should pay theirs too.
I sold my home to pay off my student loans. (A home that I was able to buy because I ate Ramen in the dark for a very long time while working 70 hours/week to come up with the down payment.) Everybody's situation is different. But I went through a lot and although perhaps it's petty of me, I'm not full of sympathy for people who just want a 100% discharge.
Unfortunately, the "Why should I have to pay back my loans? Blah blah blah fuck capitalism" view is an especially common one among MFA holders.
Relatedly, I fully endorse Meghan Daum's evisceration of MFA programs in the second half of this essay: https://meghandaum.substack.com/p/who-killed-creative-writing.
I'd say the same thing of most humanities PhDs, the one distinguishing factor being that most humanities PhDs are still technically funded (i.e., you don't take out loans to do them, generally, although there are some disciplines in which the PhDs are often unfunded).
I posted earlier about using IBR. I don’t feel like it was a fuck capitalism move. I’ve never really thought about economics that much. But over the years watching institutions (financial mainly) get bailed out for making stupid ass decisions, full well knowing that they’d get bailed out because they’re too big to fail, professional sports teams and corporations (owned by billionaires) basically holding cities hostage for tax breaks…I don’t feel too bad for having my loans forgiven and basically paying back 1/10 of what I actually owe. Fuck it. Use the system…tired of the rules for thee but not for me bs.
Yeah, I have no problem with working the system as it's designed to be worked.
Yeah I’ve *almost* felt guilty a couple times over the years thinking about how little money I’ve actually paid back in relation to what I owe. But…that’s when the populist in me says “you know what, fuck that, there’s waayyy more well off people who screw the system and truly destroy peoples lives…I took advantage of a legit program…so screw it lol
Financial institutions were bailed out in 2008 to prevent cascading failures and a collapse of the global financial system. The bailout loans were paid back with interest. They should have never got themselves into that situation but hindsight is 20/20, and if anyone knew then what we know now, they would be extremely wealthy.
True statement. However, we must ask ourselves, how did the people we entrusted with financial fiduciaries in this case...taxpayers....push the world economy to the brink? Did all whose lives were destroyed by poor leadership in the financial sector get government assistance? Probably, some kind, but big business and finance seem to backstop very stupid decisions with taxpayer money. They’re subsidized by our government anytime poor judgement is used. I feel odd typing this response because I’m not an economic populist.
Wait until you find out about MPH’s or MBA’s. You don’t have to have a bachelor’s of science to have a BS degree.
If they do student loan forgiveness anyone who went to a top 50 school shouldn’t be included.
You made your freaking bed.
The government and lenders should have some culpability for underwriting a high five figure or low six figure liability on an 18 year old.
IBR and forgiveness is a nice step. That said, tweeting at the president when the government has already solved your problem is silly. No issues with this women being made fun of for it.
I do think people overestimate the sophistication and experience of first generation college kids. You get a piece of paper that says, “congratulations your education is fully funded here’s how much money you can get” that lists a couple different loan types and maybe some grants with what that means buried in fine print.
And a lot of people, especially those whose parents did not go to college and maybe don’t have baked in upper middle class financial habits literally do not realize how much of that is a loan, or that they don’t have to (and shouldn’t!) max out the amount of loan they accept. They just see “I can go (or send my baby to) college and it’s taken care of for now!”
Yes, people should take responsibility for their choices. But these government loan programs would be called predatory if they were private and for anything other than college.
I know people who've skipped the country (partly) to get out of repaying it...
Certainly someone who was smart enough to get into an Ivy League school--and then spend the rest of her life telling everyone she did--is smart enough to know what a loan is.
One would think so yes.
“It was alcohol-free, everything was vegan-“
“Oh God. Jesus.”
I mean, this would also be my reaction if I had to interact with these people in a place with no alcohol and no cheese.
I’m in Britain where nobody is really circumcised. I have a two year old boy. I’ve never noticed any smegma, never heard it mentioned by any of my friends or family who have little boys and we talk about other problems with little boys bits all the time. I have no memory if it being mentioned at all really. I’ve never been told to clean it by a health visitor, doctor etc. I have a vague memory of being told not mess with his foreskin by the midwife in the hospital. Not an issue. Is it not more of thing that comes with puberty?
I didn’t even realise it was so prevalent in America until I was in University and my friends were fucking year abroad guys and complaining about how much harder it was to give them a handjob.
"complaining about how much harder it was to give them a handjob."
The loss of institutional memory in academia is always a blow and can be hard-on us all.
A theory about problems with uncircumcised little boys that I'm inclined to believe, provisionally, is that parents who have no experience with uncircumcised children may not know how to teach them appropriate hygiene. You don't have to do much to care for young boys' penises, because as you say smegma is an issue later. I wonder if some of these parents citing infections may have erroneously thought they were supposed to retract the foreskin and clean the young boy's penis and contributed to any problems themselves.
I believe this is one of the less consequential decisions most parents will make for their child, and I think it's important to respect parents' decisions in this area. But it really bothers me to see parents making decisions based on bad information. If hygiene is your concern, you can read up and/or get a good pediatrician.
Yes I can see that but it would be solved fairly quickly if people started to stop doing it. I think it’s one of those things that you can’t see how strange it is from the inside. The thought of handing my baby boy over to have a bit of his genitals cut off is honestly a bit grotesque to me. I certainly don’t judge individual parents for making a choice within a culture telling them it’s normal but it’s an extremely weird thing for a society to do to babies.
I think it's an important practice to protect for reasons of religious freedom--we'll never convince any community to change their longtime practices by getting the state involved--but I really object to the more crackpot reasons people come up with due to medical ignorance.
I mean, as soon as lads hit puberty the *last* piece of instruction that you need to give them is “Hey, could you make sure to thoroughly wash your dick a lot?”
Trust me, they are waaaaayyyyyyy ahead of you on that one.
I first heard of it watching BBC sci fi series Red Dwarf as a kid: they use the word "smeg" as a futuristic swear word.
You may be underestimating the number of “really circumcised” dudes in 2023 Britain. By a lot. England especially.
Also, as Yank I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that our lower Inevitable Alcohol Consumption Prior To Any Sexual Encounter Rate likely results in handjobs being successfully completed with a speed and ease fully commensurate with those performed on our fully intact, liquored-up Brit brethren.
It can be overblown. But my dad died a few months ago from urosepsis stemming from an infection from his uncircumcised penis. It happens.
Bloody hell. That's awful.
Yeah- he had been in decline for awhile. It has been really fucking hard- but we did our best to make him comfortable at the end. He was a hell of a dad.
I'm so sorry. It's a great thing that you were there for him at the end though.
I just realised how callous my previous comment was. I was in debate mode and didn't register the actual content of what you said, and what happened to your father. I'm very sorry for your loss, and sorry for being such an idiot.
Yeah another female Brit here reading all the weird US comments about smegma and judgmental women and finding it all bizarre. All my partners have been uncircumcised and there's never been any problem with hygiene. I'm sure there are uncircumcised men with more general hygiene issues who don't wash their dicks properly but I'd imagine the same can be said for circumcised men.
It's odd how determined people become to protect dogma
This will be an unpopular comment I'm sure but this was also true for me (Brit) until I met my current partner, who was circumsised as a kid for medical reasons. I don't know the gory details, but it was done when he was about 5. And having gathered the relevant empirical evidence, I have to admit I prefer it. That's not to say I'd ask someone on a hypothetical first date if they'd been snipped - I'd just be quietly pleased if they had.
You're completely entitled to your preferences, of course. The question is whether some women's preferences (because many are indifferent, or prefer an intact foreskin) are a good reason to remove a child's body part without a medically necessary reason, and without the child's understanding or consent.