If I'm not mistaken, mogging comes from the term "AMOG" which means "Alpha Male of Group" which was popularized by the PUA book "The Game" by Neil Strauss. It was very popular amongst millennial males likes myself and introduced a lot of ideas now rightly viewed as toxic. The AMOG is basically the highest status male in a group that women gravitate towards, and to AMOG someone is to basically emasculate them. Mogged is an evolution of this term.
Damn, I had hoped that it was an Americanized bastardization of mugged off. "Mugged off" is British slang meaning to be treated poorly, made to look foolish, deceived, or taken advantage of, essentially being treated like a "mug" (a gullible person). It implies someone made you look stupid or disrespected you, often by lying, ignoring, or tricking you.
Terrific EP - the looksmaxing appetiser and the Brronie main course - that’s the shit we pay for. Nom nom.
A special shout out for the ceaselessly funny effect of Jesse sounding like a small boy not wanting to touch poo every time Katie makes him open a link.
Let me tell you all a story from the land of Outrageous Amounts of Autism. A land I know well. I don't know why I'm sharing this, TBH, beyond a terrible compulsion to show more normies a sliver of a world most unlike their own.
There is a video game, Hearts of Iron IV. A WWII grand strategy game that's more about the large-scale logistics and politicking of running a nation at war than managing individual battles. The player spends most of their time staring at a map of the world, constructing supply lines, directing research, designating front lines, and generally playing the part of "high command", with actual battles abstracted away, handed off to non-player generals/admirals. Its target audience, in short, is "kinda autistic" if not actual autists. (And I say that as a member of that audience!)
What does this have to do with the episode? Take a minute, see if you can guess.
One of its best and most popular "total conversion mods" -- a game modification that takes the game's mechanics and puts it in a totally different world -- takes the the game to the My Little Pony universe. Okay, strictly speaking, an "AU" (alternate universe) that greatly expands the setting -- a distant village visited in an episode becomes part of a nation-state, for instance -- and of course gives our poor ponies and other adorable quadrupeds guns, tanks, submarines, and the occasional nuke (magical or otherwise). So instead of managing the logistics of 1940s France or whatever, you are tracing out the railroads and frontlines of Equestria. Ya know, the land of magical ponies. To keep out changelings who have decided to skip the scheming manipulation thing they did in canon in favor of sending armored columns. Do you know how hard it is to make a bunch of happy colorful ponies build an army able to stand up against soul-hungry bug-ponies without the resident god-queen turning into an insane sun-monster?
And as you've probably guessed by now, despite having watch zero MLP, I've played Equestria at War. That's how they get us... all that weaponized autism has made a hell of a game for us map-staring weirdos.
For whatever reason, I actually never got into vanilla HoI4. But I'm a sucker for trying (and failing!) to navigate the abject insanity of Equestria of War. I'd have to check my Steam account. Not nearly as much as Crusader Kings III or Stellaris, though.
I tried the (base?) console version for a while on XBGP but couldn’t figure out what was supposed to be fun, and didn’t want to pay for DLC to find out.
I played Stellaris obsessively for about a week in 2021 and then ran into late game lag that made the game unfinishable. It broke the spell and I've never looked back.
The Hearts of Iron 4 modding community is a nominee for KiwiFarms' Lolcow of the Year (Community Category):
"Hearts of Iron 4 is a game where you pretend you could have managed World War 2 better and obviously [historical figure] could have [achieved impossible outcome] if only he had [done something only you could come up with because you're so smart]. The fool! Thankfully, with a text editor and a Discord server to help, you can finally achieve your dreams of mpreg catboy Goebbels managing the Burgundian Empire and doing away with the Swiss once and for all (while listening to slowed+reverb Nazi music because it's edgy but dw you're trans)."
I feel confident to say that most adults who watch cartoons have never heard of this guy or any other You Tube cartoon commentator. Most people just watch shows, not cartoon analyses. Also, saying anorexia is just about control is wildly reductive. Eating disorders are really complicated, multimodal, and often idiopathic.
I read an anorexia memoir, I only read it because I read the authors debut novel and loved it so much and the memoir was the only other thing they published.
She didn't have a unified theory of anorexia but one of the key factors for her was being the 'best' at something. First being the thinnest, then when the anorexia kicked in being the sickest. The competitive nature of anorexia is huge and well documented.
And they can absolutely be about looks as well. I was anorexic in the 90s/early 2000s and it was very much influenced by wanting to look like models in magazines. Control was a big part of it but if it hadn't been about looks I would have just had worse OCD and not starved myself
"“rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power” I am not sure why there even was a push to promote this idea. I don't think the motive makes the crime worse.
No, I strongly disagree. Yes they're complicated and have potentially several causes. The control part however co-occurs with other forms of self-harm. Being a teenager means being at the mercy of adult rules, institutions and ever-escalating expectations while also subject to vicious opinions from other teens. This has been studied, I conveniently can't find the citation, but there is plenty of support for the theory that what cutting, early drug dependency and anorexia have in common is being able to control one thing out of everything that you perceive happening to you. Source: was a teenage girl, read the book I can't find. I don't think that poo-pooing the control thesis adds anything to the conversation.
I was just poo-pooing reducing it to control. I think control is part of lots bad behavior, but it's not the only element and may not even be the main cause. We have a bad habit of flattening things because it's easier for us to fit into our narratives. It's like arguing rape is only about power or being a brony is only about sexual deviance. It's a problem with lived experience discourse. It's N1. We find someone that had our experience (N2), and we point to the screen like Leo and think this must be the truth for everyone. But honestly, despite saying you strongly disagreed, your explanation was consistent with my comment.
Not really? I don't read a 1 second aside from a podcast host as a definitive statement on a subject that the audience is already very likely to understand is complex. Anyway, I agree with the control framing much more than "trauma" or the dreaded "self-esteem".
I usually disagree with you but you speak absolute truth here! Although sometimes she does understand it correctly but then just dismisses other points of view.
There was actually a nazi problem in the Brony community, it was kind of a thing. You see fanart of those horses wearing SS uniforms often. It was the same group of people that did nazi furry stuff- plush mascot suits with swastika armbands walking around convention centers etc.
Incidentally, almost all bronies were furries after a certain point early in the fandom, and most furries are (if not fans) at least cognizant of My Little Pony fandom. Jenny Nicholson has a good video on the history of bronies from the perspective of a woman who was an MLP fan as a child and watched hordes of 4chan dudes blow the show up into a phenomenon.
I really liked that Jenny Nicholson video. I was a brony in middle school and actually loved the MLP content she made back in the day, even if she now is embarrassed about it
oh, i really hate this video. To me, it boils down to "men started liking OUR show and ruined it, women would never do something like that" (even though the HP fandom back in the day was full of grown women writing smut with underaged characters, but nobody batted an eye).
I’ve said this before, but I believe that barpod’s greatest contribution to society is that in documenting all of this madness it might serve as a blaring warning: stay off the internet!
What Dems didn’t realize when they legalized gay marriage is that there was an entire legion of closeted gay Republicans ready to be unleashed. (Although most of them prefer the term “groyper.”)
These looksmaxxers don’t have “male anorexia” as Katie said. They clearly have body Dysmorphia disorder- a disorder that actually affects a lot of men unlike anorexia. Basically it makes you hyper fixate and obsess over your appearance. That can include hair, body, face, snd specific features like nose or chin. For example, Michael Jackson had such bad body Dysmorphia about his nose that all the nose jobs he got famously caused him to end up with no nose because he ran out of usable cartilage. Many people with BDD obsess over plastic surgery and get lots of it. It’s actually a form of OCD because it causes you to compulsively fixate on “fixing” your face or body.
I actually miss the apolitical internet subculture freakshow.
In an age when everything is in some quadrant or political faction, it's good to see the old-fashioned freakish elements I miss about the old internet. More stories like this, please.
I knew some bronies in high school. They were 100% genuine. It didn’t really come across as sexual to me either (then again, furries and fanfiction weren’t as inherently sexual back then either).
It’s important to expose these false SA accusations, but at the same time, I feel like the focus on them gives a lot of people (men in particular) a skewed view of SA claims in general. Most accusations are true, which is why they don’t become BARPod stories. Right now we’re seeing a big resurgence of misogyny, at least online, and the idea that women are constantly accusing innocent men of assaulting them is one of the many things fueling it.
Sometimes I think there must be some big disconnect here.
Like maybe most accusations are true, but the accusations thrown around online, or accusations against mostly online middle class males, are mostly not true.
Like some sort of category error or availability bias..
A huge portion of the accusations I have encountered in my actual life with friends (or a couple times myself), were are at worst misunderstandings or boorish behavior blown up into something it wasn’t by a woman who was later vindictive and/or emotionally unstable, or sometimes maybe even just exaggerating for clout social standing.
I don’t doubt there are scummy things out there, seen that too. But so many accusations have so little there there.
One time there was a rumor going around I “SA” a girl (Jennifer) when what happened was I was giving her a ride home, asked her if she wanted to go park at an overlook right off our drive that was pretty. She said “no”. And then I continued to drive her home. Never touched her, didn’t whine or bring it up again, just one question, and was friends with her before and after for a year. Didn’t even explicitly propose anything sexual just “hey do you want to stop at this pretty lookout?”.
But two years later I find out she had changed that story in her mind somehow to I had sexually harassed her. After all she was propositioned in a way that made her feel uncomfortable and unsafe! I mean what are you even supposed to say to that? There is a kernel of truth there, but is kind of insulting to you. More importantly it is not how human interactions work if women want to be full members of society.
In college another girl onetime (granted a foreign student) reported a friend to the administration for harassing her when she asked for a ride back to her house and he offered one.
I was standing right there when it happened. Literally nothing happened, she asked a mixed group of people for a ride, a guy said “I’ll give you one”, she said “no thanks”and she complained to the school and he got a stern talking to.
Apparently it was inappropriate for an unattached male to offer to her a ride and he should watch his step! This was a public university. Wouldn’t be surprised to hear her telling people online she is a “survivor”.
Everything in this episode looks fucking awful and I can't wait to listen to every second of it.
OMG we finally got to bronies 😹
One of the Zizians went by the name “Fluttershy,” one of the main characters from My Little Pony; they later committed suicide.
I don't know whether to be disappointed or grateful that Katie never brought the jar up.
Of course there's a Zizian connection. Why wouldn't there be?
If I'm not mistaken, mogging comes from the term "AMOG" which means "Alpha Male of Group" which was popularized by the PUA book "The Game" by Neil Strauss. It was very popular amongst millennial males likes myself and introduced a lot of ideas now rightly viewed as toxic. The AMOG is basically the highest status male in a group that women gravitate towards, and to AMOG someone is to basically emasculate them. Mogged is an evolution of this term.
Damn, I had hoped that it was an Americanized bastardization of mugged off. "Mugged off" is British slang meaning to be treated poorly, made to look foolish, deceived, or taken advantage of, essentially being treated like a "mug" (a gullible person). It implies someone made you look stupid or disrespected you, often by lying, ignoring, or tricking you.
Terrific EP - the looksmaxing appetiser and the Brronie main course - that’s the shit we pay for. Nom nom.
A special shout out for the ceaselessly funny effect of Jesse sounding like a small boy not wanting to touch poo every time Katie makes him open a link.
Agreed! This is classic Blocked & Reported—there’s even a bit with Katie waxing nostalgic over journalists writing “Nazi problem” articles.
Really had me chuckling over the horror of it all—great stuff!!
Why don't the Minotaurs hook up with the My Little Ponies and cut out all the middle people?
Any AI that draws this “fan” art should be deleted.
It's a boundary crossover episode!
The middle people enjoy it.
Let me tell you all a story from the land of Outrageous Amounts of Autism. A land I know well. I don't know why I'm sharing this, TBH, beyond a terrible compulsion to show more normies a sliver of a world most unlike their own.
There is a video game, Hearts of Iron IV. A WWII grand strategy game that's more about the large-scale logistics and politicking of running a nation at war than managing individual battles. The player spends most of their time staring at a map of the world, constructing supply lines, directing research, designating front lines, and generally playing the part of "high command", with actual battles abstracted away, handed off to non-player generals/admirals. Its target audience, in short, is "kinda autistic" if not actual autists. (And I say that as a member of that audience!)
What does this have to do with the episode? Take a minute, see if you can guess.
One of its best and most popular "total conversion mods" -- a game modification that takes the game's mechanics and puts it in a totally different world -- takes the the game to the My Little Pony universe. Okay, strictly speaking, an "AU" (alternate universe) that greatly expands the setting -- a distant village visited in an episode becomes part of a nation-state, for instance -- and of course gives our poor ponies and other adorable quadrupeds guns, tanks, submarines, and the occasional nuke (magical or otherwise). So instead of managing the logistics of 1940s France or whatever, you are tracing out the railroads and frontlines of Equestria. Ya know, the land of magical ponies. To keep out changelings who have decided to skip the scheming manipulation thing they did in canon in favor of sending armored columns. Do you know how hard it is to make a bunch of happy colorful ponies build an army able to stand up against soul-hungry bug-ponies without the resident god-queen turning into an insane sun-monster?
And as you've probably guessed by now, despite having watch zero MLP, I've played Equestria at War. That's how they get us... all that weaponized autism has made a hell of a game for us map-staring weirdos.
There was also an extremely lengthy crossover fanfic between MLP and Fallout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout:_Equestria
I would expect nothing less.
How MUCH Equestria at War? As opposed to standard Hearts of Iron.
For whatever reason, I actually never got into vanilla HoI4. But I'm a sucker for trying (and failing!) to navigate the abject insanity of Equestria of War. I'd have to check my Steam account. Not nearly as much as Crusader Kings III or Stellaris, though.
EDIT: A mere 44 hours.
I was a big Stellaris fan for a while, but they have sort of wrecked it over time IMO.
Stellaris has been at least 3 games.
I tried the (base?) console version for a while on XBGP but couldn’t figure out what was supposed to be fun, and didn’t want to pay for DLC to find out.
I played Stellaris obsessively for about a week in 2021 and then ran into late game lag that made the game unfinishable. It broke the spell and I've never looked back.
I played a lot of HOI1 and 2, but then it lost me once I had kids, too time consuming.
> Its target audience, in short, is "kinda autistic" if not actual autists.
Not sure why'd you say that. Sounds like an awesome strategy game.
Oh I think the overlap between autists of one sort or another and people who like grand strategy games is fairly large.
Wry self-deprecation, mostly. Common in grand strategy fandoms like this.
The Hearts of Iron 4 modding community is a nominee for KiwiFarms' Lolcow of the Year (Community Category):
"Hearts of Iron 4 is a game where you pretend you could have managed World War 2 better and obviously [historical figure] could have [achieved impossible outcome] if only he had [done something only you could come up with because you're so smart]. The fool! Thankfully, with a text editor and a Discord server to help, you can finally achieve your dreams of mpreg catboy Goebbels managing the Burgundian Empire and doing away with the Swiss once and for all (while listening to slowed+reverb Nazi music because it's edgy but dw you're trans)."
I feel confident to say that most adults who watch cartoons have never heard of this guy or any other You Tube cartoon commentator. Most people just watch shows, not cartoon analyses. Also, saying anorexia is just about control is wildly reductive. Eating disorders are really complicated, multimodal, and often idiopathic.
I read an anorexia memoir, I only read it because I read the authors debut novel and loved it so much and the memoir was the only other thing they published.
She didn't have a unified theory of anorexia but one of the key factors for her was being the 'best' at something. First being the thinnest, then when the anorexia kicked in being the sickest. The competitive nature of anorexia is huge and well documented.
And they can absolutely be about looks as well. I was anorexic in the 90s/early 2000s and it was very much influenced by wanting to look like models in magazines. Control was a big part of it but if it hadn't been about looks I would have just had worse OCD and not starved myself
The “anorexia is about control” thing reminds me of the whole “rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power” debate. Why not both?
"“rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power” I am not sure why there even was a push to promote this idea. I don't think the motive makes the crime worse.
No, I strongly disagree. Yes they're complicated and have potentially several causes. The control part however co-occurs with other forms of self-harm. Being a teenager means being at the mercy of adult rules, institutions and ever-escalating expectations while also subject to vicious opinions from other teens. This has been studied, I conveniently can't find the citation, but there is plenty of support for the theory that what cutting, early drug dependency and anorexia have in common is being able to control one thing out of everything that you perceive happening to you. Source: was a teenage girl, read the book I can't find. I don't think that poo-pooing the control thesis adds anything to the conversation.
I was just poo-pooing reducing it to control. I think control is part of lots bad behavior, but it's not the only element and may not even be the main cause. We have a bad habit of flattening things because it's easier for us to fit into our narratives. It's like arguing rape is only about power or being a brony is only about sexual deviance. It's a problem with lived experience discourse. It's N1. We find someone that had our experience (N2), and we point to the screen like Leo and think this must be the truth for everyone. But honestly, despite saying you strongly disagreed, your explanation was consistent with my comment.
Not really? I don't read a 1 second aside from a podcast host as a definitive statement on a subject that the audience is already very likely to understand is complex. Anyway, I agree with the control framing much more than "trauma" or the dreaded "self-esteem".
So what are you disagreeing with me about? Just the fact that I addressed it?
> Also, saying anorexia is just about control is wildly reductive
I think that if one is going to say one thing in passing about the subject, I agree more with "control" than any other framing.
Yeah, I read one book about how this one lady says her anorexia was about control. Ergo all anorexia is about control. Case closed!
Katie does this all the time. She listens to a single podcast or reads a single book, misunderstands it, and that's her worldview now.
I usually disagree with you but you speak absolute truth here! Although sometimes she does understand it correctly but then just dismisses other points of view.
The idea that someone could regularly disagree with my entirely correct opinions is simply foolish.
I am shocked, SHOCKED that the adults obsessed with cartoons do not have the greatest mental stability.
What a shock The Free Press has no sense of humour
There was actually a nazi problem in the Brony community, it was kind of a thing. You see fanart of those horses wearing SS uniforms often. It was the same group of people that did nazi furry stuff- plush mascot suits with swastika armbands walking around convention centers etc.
Incidentally, almost all bronies were furries after a certain point early in the fandom, and most furries are (if not fans) at least cognizant of My Little Pony fandom. Jenny Nicholson has a good video on the history of bronies from the perspective of a woman who was an MLP fan as a child and watched hordes of 4chan dudes blow the show up into a phenomenon.
https://youtu.be/4fVOF2PiHnc?si=f2D1cTKpO7vDO7Hn
I really liked that Jenny Nicholson video. I was a brony in middle school and actually loved the MLP content she made back in the day, even if she now is embarrassed about it
oh, i really hate this video. To me, it boils down to "men started liking OUR show and ruined it, women would never do something like that" (even though the HP fandom back in the day was full of grown women writing smut with underaged characters, but nobody batted an eye).
I’ve said this before, but I believe that barpod’s greatest contribution to society is that in documenting all of this madness it might serve as a blaring warning: stay off the internet!
What Dems didn’t realize when they legalized gay marriage is that there was an entire legion of closeted gay Republicans ready to be unleashed. (Although most of them prefer the term “groyper.”)
These looksmaxxers don’t have “male anorexia” as Katie said. They clearly have body Dysmorphia disorder- a disorder that actually affects a lot of men unlike anorexia. Basically it makes you hyper fixate and obsess over your appearance. That can include hair, body, face, snd specific features like nose or chin. For example, Michael Jackson had such bad body Dysmorphia about his nose that all the nose jobs he got famously caused him to end up with no nose because he ran out of usable cartilage. Many people with BDD obsess over plastic surgery and get lots of it. It’s actually a form of OCD because it causes you to compulsively fixate on “fixing” your face or body.
I actually miss the apolitical internet subculture freakshow.
In an age when everything is in some quadrant or political faction, it's good to see the old-fashioned freakish elements I miss about the old internet. More stories like this, please.
I knew some bronies in high school. They were 100% genuine. It didn’t really come across as sexual to me either (then again, furries and fanfiction weren’t as inherently sexual back then either).
It’s important to expose these false SA accusations, but at the same time, I feel like the focus on them gives a lot of people (men in particular) a skewed view of SA claims in general. Most accusations are true, which is why they don’t become BARPod stories. Right now we’re seeing a big resurgence of misogyny, at least online, and the idea that women are constantly accusing innocent men of assaulting them is one of the many things fueling it.
>Most accusations are true
Sometimes I think there must be some big disconnect here.
Like maybe most accusations are true, but the accusations thrown around online, or accusations against mostly online middle class males, are mostly not true.
Like some sort of category error or availability bias..
A huge portion of the accusations I have encountered in my actual life with friends (or a couple times myself), were are at worst misunderstandings or boorish behavior blown up into something it wasn’t by a woman who was later vindictive and/or emotionally unstable, or sometimes maybe even just exaggerating for clout social standing.
I don’t doubt there are scummy things out there, seen that too. But so many accusations have so little there there.
One time there was a rumor going around I “SA” a girl (Jennifer) when what happened was I was giving her a ride home, asked her if she wanted to go park at an overlook right off our drive that was pretty. She said “no”. And then I continued to drive her home. Never touched her, didn’t whine or bring it up again, just one question, and was friends with her before and after for a year. Didn’t even explicitly propose anything sexual just “hey do you want to stop at this pretty lookout?”.
But two years later I find out she had changed that story in her mind somehow to I had sexually harassed her. After all she was propositioned in a way that made her feel uncomfortable and unsafe! I mean what are you even supposed to say to that? There is a kernel of truth there, but is kind of insulting to you. More importantly it is not how human interactions work if women want to be full members of society.
In college another girl onetime (granted a foreign student) reported a friend to the administration for harassing her when she asked for a ride back to her house and he offered one.
I was standing right there when it happened. Literally nothing happened, she asked a mixed group of people for a ride, a guy said “I’ll give you one”, she said “no thanks”and she complained to the school and he got a stern talking to.
Apparently it was inappropriate for an unattached male to offer to her a ride and he should watch his step! This was a public university. Wouldn’t be surprised to hear her telling people online she is a “survivor”.