I am a liberal fan UFC and MMA and that quote just drives me bananas. I can’t think of a more positive version of masculinity than the group of guys at my Brazilian jujitsu gym. It is a safe supportive positive place about discipline and channeling aggression in useful ways all well making sure that your fellow classmates are safe. I think it’s the most positive vision of masculinity currently available. That dude on the New York Times podcast sounds like he just wants to be a sound bite on Fox News. And not in a good way.
Worth pointing out that these shrines, temples, and Torii gates in Japan are not, like, ancient relics of a bygone era. They’re active Shinto sites, and Shinto is the highly regulated state religion of Japan, from whence the Emperor derived his divine right of rulership. It’s really no different from doing a TikTok dance in St. Peter’s Basilica or the Wailing Wall or the Kaaba.
Japan is a real place with a real culture and real history and real people, not just the desu kawaii kiddie fantasyland of these westerners’ video game fueled dreams.
Klein gets a lot more respect because her crankery is the crankery of the educated leftist, the kind you encounter in the humanities and weaker social sciences. I remember seeing her interviewed on Jon Stewart or Colbert where she said something about how we needed the government to spend more money on arts and less on STEM, and this was in the context of what todo about climate change.
Her entire economic/social worldview. It’s a more environmentally-tinged Chomsky-ism.
One of the best credibility tests I have is if you were one of those who gushed over Hugo Chavez. That tells me a lot. His systematically destruction of Venezuela’s institutions, democracy, and economy, were clear to everyone paying attention. He didn’t try to hide them.
Fun bit of linguistic detail, both Mandarin and Korean have a word that is pronounced "nei gah." In Korean, it means "you," and in Mandarin it's sort of a filler word, akin to "like" or "you know."
So. This has led to a lot of cultural misunderstandings. It's also led to "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you"-esque provocation where Korean or Mandarin speakers will deliberately and loudly say the word around black people, both in the U.S. and abroad. It was a big issue in the very diverse school I spent much of my previous career as a teacher.
We're probably getting a bit afield of nuisance streamers but in the U.S., the history of relations between diaspora Asian communities and African Americans is...complex, to say the least. My (Cantonese) in-laws casually throw around slurs and stereotypes that wouldn't be out of place in Mississippi in the 1950s. The Rick Chow case, just concluded in South Carolina, is yet another chapter in this not-particularly-inspiring story.
Just a reminder that despite what the internet might have you believe, the US is just about the least racist place in the world. Maybe a few parts of the anglosphere or Western Europe are better, maybe, but that is about it.
ME, Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, South Asia, all wildly more racist.
My in-laws have lived in the U.S for decades. They experienced a ton of racism here as Asians in a Rust Belt city, my husband and his younger American-born relatives as well. The U.S. is full of racism from every group directed at every other group. It is what it is.
Lol this reminds me of when “Stop Asian Hate” was a thing for a while until they realized it was mainly black people hating the Asians so the term disappeared from everywhere.
- was it to a frequency that would warrant a deep enough concern to be afraid to walk outside?
At the time, loosely during the tail end of covid, I looked the crime statistics and ran analysis on the frequency of violent crimes committed against different demographics. While it is true that violent crime increased against Asians it was during a period with violent crime increased in general. And there was no statistical significance in the increase to Asians vs the general increase.
Also, in absolute terms, being Asian put you in the lowest risk of violence in the Bay Area than any other category tracked by a very large margin. . .. in other words, as an asian, you were statistically safer than any other race.
So, the evidence pointed in the opposite direction. Asians were not disproportionately targeted compared to other races and the frequency of violence should not have been of level to warrant the level of concern/fear.
It was all over the news. And the perpetrators were almost invariably mentally ill individuals in large urban areas. But it reminded me of the "Churches are burning!" wave of articles that seems to inevitably come right after a highly publicized racially motivated crime or controversy.
Data and evidence is really important in these things. You an even have individual incidents where right before attacking someone, the perpetrator says "I am attacking you because you are Chinese and you're the reason Covid is here. I hate Chinese.".....but that racist may have attacked someone anyway and was just using the current events as a convenient excuse.
Thats fascinating. Ita been my (at times surprising) experience that the shield of minority status has made minorities much more openly and kinda hilariously racist then your average whites (regardless of political leanings).
It doesn’t really have anything to do with “minority status.” Working class immigrant enclaves don’t care about the opinions of elite whites. It’s more that these communities are still pretty insular and speak languages that few outsiders understand.
You don’t think? I know in my family and friend groups, one of the elements of their vociferousness in racism is that they aren’t afraid of being called out like the white side is. That lack of fear always struck me as due in part to a minority shield that white America doesn’t have in terms of being called a racist.
I don’t think, no. Aside from me, my in-laws do not interact socially with non-Asian people and they don’t follow English language media. They’ve been in this country for decades. This is true for a lot of working class Chinese communities. It’s changing with the younger generations.
Who remembers circa 2020 the USC professor yanked from teaching for uttering the Chinese "nei-ge" in his class? (nei-ge means "that thing," very common word, and people also use it like "ummm")
"Professor Greg Patton of USC’s Marshall School of Business was teaching a communications class via Zoom call on August 20, according to the university. An online video recording of the call, which USC confirmed was authentic, shows Patton discussing the use of pauses while speaking, and giving an example of how Chinese speakers use filler words.
"The following day, a complaint was filed to the school administration, saying the term sounded like the N-word and that Patton had “offended all of the Black members of our class.”
"A week later, Marshall School Dean Geoffrey Garrett announced that a different professor would take over teaching Patton’s class for the rest of the semester.
Letter from the Dean: “Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that I am deeply sorry. It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students. We must and we will do better.”
I worked at a big tech corporation for some time where native mandarin speaking employees were very common...I want to say as much as 50% or more depending on the group you were in...
Anyway. . . it could have been a hip hop record there were so many n*'s dropped on the daily.
My first commercial job was in Shanghai. I discovered this phonetic-linguistic overlap on the ride to our first location. I pointed it out to my lovely Singaporean creative director and the whole car laughed and laughed. :)
so I have a serious obsession with internet trolls and lolcows and I've been watching the on goings and come uppances of Johnny for a while. I'm glad that South Korea is punishing him and its well deserved. I don't think Vitaly should have been released from the Philippines, from what I've seen he has learned nothing. I absolutely despise nuisance streamers and pranksters.
I honestly think the world would be better if people like this could be shot on sight. I am not joking. How many dead streamers would it take to stop this?
50, 100? And what would be lost? Nothing.
Also boy the hosts were really soft-pedaling the idiocy of the residential schools stuff in Canada given conversations they have previously had with guests about them.
I love you guys, but can you please dial back the AI slop? It was funny and novel 2 years ago, now it’s just needlessly wasting resources and empowering evil AI corporations
Their relationship with AI is fascinating. They've copped to using it for music, images, advice, feedback, therapy, redecorating, citation generation, searching their own emails, web searches in general, and as a conversation partner when another human being isn't handy, but they got VERY mad when I suggested they used it in their own writing.
I hate to jump on bandwagons, but I am increasingly joining the anti-AI revolt, such that anytime someone drops a Grok chat chain in my group text or an AI video in my chat stream I go berserk
Gee I wonder why these nuisance streamers don't try their antics in Singapore. I do not have any love for Singapore's authoritarian government, but someone ought to buy a couple of them tickets to Singapore.
An Australian influencer rushed a Wicked 2 event in Singapore to get a selfie with Ariana Grande last year. He got 9 days in jail and was banned from the country for life.
A French student in Singapore though it would be funny to put on his social media a video of himself licking a straw taken from a vending machine selling drinks and putting the straw back in the machine. He is being charged with public nuisance, mischief, and property damage, which could lead to up to a couple of years in prison and a fine.
Man, I went back and listened to episode 29. Things were so crazy back then. In particular it's kinda funny to remember that era and see how much of it is being memory-holed now.
Johnny is like the perfect MAGA American. Deeply contemptuous of any foreign culture, extremely proud of his American citizenship and feels it is both a shield and a weapon. He has much in common with JD Vance, I'm surprised the state Department hasn't tried to extricate him. Yet.
I would like to know more about Johnny Somali and where he came from and how big of a following he actually as. Having listened to this episode I don't feel like I have any deeper knowledge of him that I get from occasionally seeing his stuff pop up on the KiwiFarms Community Updates thread. I assume that's where Jesse got his info, as well.
Sorry to say it was a crappy episode. I'm a huge barpod fan, but there was half an hour of idle chitchat, interruptions, dissembling and irrelevancies, before discussion of nuisance streamers, who seem like the perfect barpod material.
So much info on Ramsey Khalid Ismael and they glossed over it, and there is much more and then there is Vitaly and other nuisance streamers.
The rolling stone kerfluffle (technical term) was a disaster. In addition to the publishing false, lurid, and unbelievable (in the literal sense) allegations, it accused identifiable people and groups of serious wrongdoing - both the supposed rape and university response. A lot of the claims would have easily been debunked, like a supposed annual frat party which didn’t happen, if checked before publication.
I also think that Erdely and rolling stone implicitly believed a lot of the bullshit claims about traumatic events that were part of the whole campus rape movement.
I do feel bad for her, and clearly the editorial process broke down. But if you publish defamatory or libelous statements, for which there is a very high bar in the United States*, there has to be consequences. The jury verdict was clearly sending a message.
*if you want to sue someone for libel, if you can find a hook to do so, file in the UK. The laws are far more friendly to the plaintiff.
And, similar to the Rolling Stone piece, people wanted that to be true. That was more egregious, in that Mike Nifong was basically trying to railroad a group of innocent people. He withheld exculpatory evidence-the DNA evidence, which didn’t belong to any of the accused - while defaming them to the community.
I teach high school journalism and that story wouldn't have gotten past first edit. It was single-sourced, exploitative and not-at-all believable. Can't imagine how RS editors not only let this disaster through but put it on the cover!
The reason nuisance streamers go to places like Japan is that they tend to have a greater tolerance to antisocial behaviour from foreigners than they would from ordinary Japanese citizens. My husband lived in Japan for 6 years and said he would see other foreigners (or "gaijin" in Japanese) doing stuff like playing frisbee across busy traffic crossings, whilst the local residents, and often the police, pointedly ignored them. East Asia tends also to have a more polite culture and public displays of aggression are rare. This means nuisance streamers think they can get away with whatever the fuck they like there, and that the reaction to them will be passive, muted and toothless.
I am a liberal fan UFC and MMA and that quote just drives me bananas. I can’t think of a more positive version of masculinity than the group of guys at my Brazilian jujitsu gym. It is a safe supportive positive place about discipline and channeling aggression in useful ways all well making sure that your fellow classmates are safe. I think it’s the most positive vision of masculinity currently available. That dude on the New York Times podcast sounds like he just wants to be a sound bite on Fox News. And not in a good way.
Every single person I know does jujitsu is the nicest most chill person ever.
MMA sits at the intersection of rape culture avenue and white supremacy boulevard!!! THE BOYS ARE DOING KARATE AND DOING CAT CALLS.
Worth pointing out that these shrines, temples, and Torii gates in Japan are not, like, ancient relics of a bygone era. They’re active Shinto sites, and Shinto is the highly regulated state religion of Japan, from whence the Emperor derived his divine right of rulership. It’s really no different from doing a TikTok dance in St. Peter’s Basilica or the Wailing Wall or the Kaaba.
Japan is a real place with a real culture and real history and real people, not just the desu kawaii kiddie fantasyland of these westerners’ video game fueled dreams.
>>Japan is a real place with a real culture and real history and real people
citation needed.
They still hunt citations
Naomi Klein and Wolf are both crack pots. Klein is a more serious crackpot.
Klein gets a lot more respect because her crankery is the crankery of the educated leftist, the kind you encounter in the humanities and weaker social sciences. I remember seeing her interviewed on Jon Stewart or Colbert where she said something about how we needed the government to spend more money on arts and less on STEM, and this was in the context of what todo about climate change.
To be fair this is just a stupid opinion, its not really crankery or conspiracyism.
The important thing was the world play!
Her entire economic/social worldview. It’s a more environmentally-tinged Chomsky-ism.
One of the best credibility tests I have is if you were one of those who gushed over Hugo Chavez. That tells me a lot. His systematically destruction of Venezuela’s institutions, democracy, and economy, were clear to everyone paying attention. He didn’t try to hide them.
Klein’s husband is Avi Lewis, who is the head of Canadian NDP, which definitely still believes fully in the Kamloops mass graves.
Pray-tell, what is Naomi Klein’s trademark crackpot position?
Fun bit of linguistic detail, both Mandarin and Korean have a word that is pronounced "nei gah." In Korean, it means "you," and in Mandarin it's sort of a filler word, akin to "like" or "you know."
So. This has led to a lot of cultural misunderstandings. It's also led to "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you"-esque provocation where Korean or Mandarin speakers will deliberately and loudly say the word around black people, both in the U.S. and abroad. It was a big issue in the very diverse school I spent much of my previous career as a teacher.
We're probably getting a bit afield of nuisance streamers but in the U.S., the history of relations between diaspora Asian communities and African Americans is...complex, to say the least. My (Cantonese) in-laws casually throw around slurs and stereotypes that wouldn't be out of place in Mississippi in the 1950s. The Rick Chow case, just concluded in South Carolina, is yet another chapter in this not-particularly-inspiring story.
To end this post on a more positive note, enjoy this earworm, courtesy of Chinese pop star Wowkie Zhang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG4iTGjuoKw
Just a reminder that despite what the internet might have you believe, the US is just about the least racist place in the world. Maybe a few parts of the anglosphere or Western Europe are better, maybe, but that is about it.
ME, Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, South Asia, all wildly more racist.
My in-laws have lived in the U.S for decades. They experienced a ton of racism here as Asians in a Rust Belt city, my husband and his younger American-born relatives as well. The U.S. is full of racism from every group directed at every other group. It is what it is.
Lol this reminds me of when “Stop Asian Hate” was a thing for a while until they realized it was mainly black people hating the Asians so the term disappeared from everywhere.
Maybe white people but that line of activism is still very common in the Asian community.
I had asian coworkers who were literally "afraid to go outside" for fear of being randomly attacked......
In the Bay Area.
I mean, that is a legitimate concern. Random attacks on Asian Americans do happen in the Bay Area.
Random attacks happen everywhere to anyone.
The questions are:
- were they being disproportionately targeted?
- was it to a frequency that would warrant a deep enough concern to be afraid to walk outside?
At the time, loosely during the tail end of covid, I looked the crime statistics and ran analysis on the frequency of violent crimes committed against different demographics. While it is true that violent crime increased against Asians it was during a period with violent crime increased in general. And there was no statistical significance in the increase to Asians vs the general increase.
Also, in absolute terms, being Asian put you in the lowest risk of violence in the Bay Area than any other category tracked by a very large margin. . .. in other words, as an asian, you were statistically safer than any other race.
So, the evidence pointed in the opposite direction. Asians were not disproportionately targeted compared to other races and the frequency of violence should not have been of level to warrant the level of concern/fear.
It was all over the news. And the perpetrators were almost invariably mentally ill individuals in large urban areas. But it reminded me of the "Churches are burning!" wave of articles that seems to inevitably come right after a highly publicized racially motivated crime or controversy.
Data and evidence is really important in these things. You an even have individual incidents where right before attacking someone, the perpetrator says "I am attacking you because you are Chinese and you're the reason Covid is here. I hate Chinese.".....but that racist may have attacked someone anyway and was just using the current events as a convenient excuse.
Sure, and subway crime is at an all-time low.
Absolute insanity.
Thats fascinating. Ita been my (at times surprising) experience that the shield of minority status has made minorities much more openly and kinda hilariously racist then your average whites (regardless of political leanings).
It doesn’t really have anything to do with “minority status.” Working class immigrant enclaves don’t care about the opinions of elite whites. It’s more that these communities are still pretty insular and speak languages that few outsiders understand.
You don’t think? I know in my family and friend groups, one of the elements of their vociferousness in racism is that they aren’t afraid of being called out like the white side is. That lack of fear always struck me as due in part to a minority shield that white America doesn’t have in terms of being called a racist.
I don’t think, no. Aside from me, my in-laws do not interact socially with non-Asian people and they don’t follow English language media. They’ve been in this country for decades. This is true for a lot of working class Chinese communities. It’s changing with the younger generations.
Who remembers circa 2020 the USC professor yanked from teaching for uttering the Chinese "nei-ge" in his class? (nei-ge means "that thing," very common word, and people also use it like "ummm")
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/us/usc-chinese-professor-racism-intl-hnk-scli
"Professor Greg Patton of USC’s Marshall School of Business was teaching a communications class via Zoom call on August 20, according to the university. An online video recording of the call, which USC confirmed was authentic, shows Patton discussing the use of pauses while speaking, and giving an example of how Chinese speakers use filler words.
"The following day, a complaint was filed to the school administration, saying the term sounded like the N-word and that Patton had “offended all of the Black members of our class.”
"A week later, Marshall School Dean Geoffrey Garrett announced that a different professor would take over teaching Patton’s class for the rest of the semester.
Letter from the Dean: “Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that I am deeply sorry. It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students. We must and we will do better.”
2020. Good times.
Literally the FIRST thing I thought about. Crazy times.
I worked at a big tech corporation for some time where native mandarin speaking employees were very common...I want to say as much as 50% or more depending on the group you were in...
Anyway. . . it could have been a hip hop record there were so many n*'s dropped on the daily.
My Chinese ESL student got me hooked on this song. 😂
My first commercial job was in Shanghai. I discovered this phonetic-linguistic overlap on the ride to our first location. I pointed it out to my lovely Singaporean creative director and the whole car laughed and laughed. :)
It honestly never crossed my mind when I was learning Chinese and living in China… Wuhan to be exact 🤣
I was thoroughly amused. I was like “What is that word you all keep saying…”
“this has led to a lot of cultural misunderstandings”
This has also led to a lot of videos of Chinese guys that teen boys find hilarious.
He wasn’t fired, he’s still at USC. He just stepped back from that one class that semester to avoid the drama.
Glad to hear it.
Oh man, fuck this guy.
And his house
Apparently the South Koreans are fucking him pretty hard. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
so I have a serious obsession with internet trolls and lolcows and I've been watching the on goings and come uppances of Johnny for a while. I'm glad that South Korea is punishing him and its well deserved. I don't think Vitaly should have been released from the Philippines, from what I've seen he has learned nothing. I absolutely despise nuisance streamers and pranksters.
This piece reminded me of Katie’s comment on pitching her essay to the NYT and having it rejected, then written by staff a few months later: https://phoebemaltzbovy.substack.com/p/smol-bean-big-receipt?r=20lulc&utm_medium=ios
I honestly think the world would be better if people like this could be shot on sight. I am not joking. How many dead streamers would it take to stop this?
50, 100? And what would be lost? Nothing.
Also boy the hosts were really soft-pedaling the idiocy of the residential schools stuff in Canada given conversations they have previously had with guests about them.
I love you guys, but can you please dial back the AI slop? It was funny and novel 2 years ago, now it’s just needlessly wasting resources and empowering evil AI corporations
Their relationship with AI is fascinating. They've copped to using it for music, images, advice, feedback, therapy, redecorating, citation generation, searching their own emails, web searches in general, and as a conversation partner when another human being isn't handy, but they got VERY mad when I suggested they used it in their own writing.
I hate to jump on bandwagons, but I am increasingly joining the anti-AI revolt, such that anytime someone drops a Grok chat chain in my group text or an AI video in my chat stream I go berserk
It’s all very Ouch My Balls coded. When I saw it 1,000 years ago, you couldn’t have paid me to believe I’d think about Idiocracy nearly every day
Gee I wonder why these nuisance streamers don't try their antics in Singapore. I do not have any love for Singapore's authoritarian government, but someone ought to buy a couple of them tickets to Singapore.
An Australian influencer rushed a Wicked 2 event in Singapore to get a selfie with Ariana Grande last year. He got 9 days in jail and was banned from the country for life.
A French student in Singapore though it would be funny to put on his social media a video of himself licking a straw taken from a vending machine selling drinks and putting the straw back in the machine. He is being charged with public nuisance, mischief, and property damage, which could lead to up to a couple of years in prison and a fine.
Man, I went back and listened to episode 29. Things were so crazy back then. In particular it's kinda funny to remember that era and see how much of it is being memory-holed now.
Johnny is like the perfect MAGA American. Deeply contemptuous of any foreign culture, extremely proud of his American citizenship and feels it is both a shield and a weapon. He has much in common with JD Vance, I'm surprised the state Department hasn't tried to extricate him. Yet.
I would like to know more about Johnny Somali and where he came from and how big of a following he actually as. Having listened to this episode I don't feel like I have any deeper knowledge of him that I get from occasionally seeing his stuff pop up on the KiwiFarms Community Updates thread. I assume that's where Jesse got his info, as well.
Sorry to say it was a crappy episode. I'm a huge barpod fan, but there was half an hour of idle chitchat, interruptions, dissembling and irrelevancies, before discussion of nuisance streamers, who seem like the perfect barpod material.
So much info on Ramsey Khalid Ismael and they glossed over it, and there is much more and then there is Vitaly and other nuisance streamers.
Seattle is also hosting the world cup pride match between Iran and Egypt. which is an excellent commitment to the bit
The rolling stone kerfluffle (technical term) was a disaster. In addition to the publishing false, lurid, and unbelievable (in the literal sense) allegations, it accused identifiable people and groups of serious wrongdoing - both the supposed rape and university response. A lot of the claims would have easily been debunked, like a supposed annual frat party which didn’t happen, if checked before publication.
I also think that Erdely and rolling stone implicitly believed a lot of the bullshit claims about traumatic events that were part of the whole campus rape movement.
I do feel bad for her, and clearly the editorial process broke down. But if you publish defamatory or libelous statements, for which there is a very high bar in the United States*, there has to be consequences. The jury verdict was clearly sending a message.
*if you want to sue someone for libel, if you can find a hook to do so, file in the UK. The laws are far more friendly to the plaintiff.
People *wanted* it to be true, just like the contemporaneous Duke lacrosse hoax. It validated their pre-existing beliefs about jocks and frat bros.
I just looked that up--Duke lacrosse team hoax happened in 2006, eight years earlier.
And, similar to the Rolling Stone piece, people wanted that to be true. That was more egregious, in that Mike Nifong was basically trying to railroad a group of innocent people. He withheld exculpatory evidence-the DNA evidence, which didn’t belong to any of the accused - while defaming them to the community.
Everything is contemporaneous on a cosmic scale.
Wait I was told that journalists never lie and always check their sources with a robust fact checking apparatus...
I teach high school journalism and that story wouldn't have gotten past first edit. It was single-sourced, exploitative and not-at-all believable. Can't imagine how RS editors not only let this disaster through but put it on the cover!
The reason nuisance streamers go to places like Japan is that they tend to have a greater tolerance to antisocial behaviour from foreigners than they would from ordinary Japanese citizens. My husband lived in Japan for 6 years and said he would see other foreigners (or "gaijin" in Japanese) doing stuff like playing frisbee across busy traffic crossings, whilst the local residents, and often the police, pointedly ignored them. East Asia tends also to have a more polite culture and public displays of aggression are rare. This means nuisance streamers think they can get away with whatever the fuck they like there, and that the reaction to them will be passive, muted and toothless.
The Chinese and Japanese used to call foreigners: Barbarians. Accurate term to this day.
Would you be willing to send batches of Moose hair over the next year or two until i have enough to sew a complete suit?
Asking for a friend.
Trace?