Updates on old episodes: Jesse learns Katie has a dog, it nearly dies, Katie discovers a fake doctor cabal, and the insane incompetence in the Loudon County case escalates to criminal charges
I loved this but I think you are slightly missing the story on Loudoun County. This is a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. No one wants to say what is obvious. The kid was manipulating the "good liberals" out of punishing him and protecting the female victim. The trans community, as y'all know, are incredibly strident in their policing of these kinds of facts -- men pretending to be trans and getting into female prisons, etc. This is the exact phenom that is in the TERF debate: how to protect girls from men pretending to be trans. It seems to me that you guys were downplaying that so as not to come out as conservative. If this boy was an obvious Trump supporter none of this would have happened. The fact is that activists are too worried about creating yet more stigma around trans kids to have protected the girls involved.
“It seems to me that you guys were downplaying that so as not to come out as conservative.” 🎯
I’m listening to it now and getting that same impression.
How many girls have to be assaulted before people will realize that no one will have to waste time worrying about whether a male enby or another one that says he’s a girl is “really” trans/NB if we just stop letting males into female spaces?
Jesse & Katie are so terrified of saying anything that some easily-offended lib will say sounds conservative that they end up sounding ridiculous, hedging here & there (Katie “well, maybe it’s reasonable that the school kept the father of the rape victim out of the school at first because of rules... “ as if the main office couldn’t text/radio school security to know that her family would be arriving? Or how the principal spent part of the day of the assault trying to make sure the Dad would be kept away...).
To steal a line from the overly sensitive Twitter crowd, "I’m just so tired" as a mother of daughters listening to left-leaning people care more about the feelings of confused teenaged males than about the actual safety (as well as privacy & dignity) of girls (nope, I didn’t forget the word “cis” -- I reject it). Real girls.
I too am a mother of a daughter, but I feel like I listened to a different episode. What I heard was harsh criticism of a school administration that let a sociopath get shuffled from one school to another with little or no consequences for his violent actions. I didn't hear anything dismissive of the need to protect women and girls from assault. The thing they said was reasonable was that you would ask for ID of anyone entering school property. I have no problem with that, because if we've learned anything from BARpod, it's that people sometimes claim to be someone they're not.
I heard it more as: this had nothing to do with trans kids in the bathrooms ergo trans kids in a bathroom is a no-problem.
This SEEMS to not have to do with trans in women’s bathrooms but is exactly that:
as no one can question ANYONE coming into the girls and women’s spaces - even though they’d look like a bearded supermegaalphamale.
So if the boy here had a skirt on sometimes, many people were probably scared to question anything of his behavior to not make a headline out of that, and same attitude towards bathroombusiness then.
And if it got mentioned in the school communication as such a topic, might have even been that the boy could had hinted on such (an other info said about the boy being manipulative).
The problem of men claiming trans to get into women’s spaces already exists (prisons, bathrooms, spa’s, rape shelters etc) and now it’s even difficult to report on all the cases where transwomen assault women as no one wants to be called a terf and attacked themselves.
This case only shows just how easily any man wanting to do such stuff will have it after selfID’s and all. No one can stop you and a slap on the wrist.
It is a piece if fact to really consider before allowing natal men into women’s spaces, and it has not been risk-evaluated but silenced.
"This SEEMS to not have to do with trans in women’s bathrooms but is exactly that: as no one can question ANYONE coming into the girls and women’s spaces."
We are teaching a generation of girls to ignore their intuition when their gut says that they're in danger from males, because they are getting the message that schools won't back them up, and everyone will think they're bigots for questioning whether a guy in a skirt with she/her pronouns is in their bathroom/locker room for the "right" reasons.
I read an interesting thread earlier by a journalist in Belgium who started asking questions as to whether there had been any women harmed in prisons by trans-identified males. She was told they don't record whether TIMs are in prisons, but found out from people working in that field that there are indeed, and things have happened but they can't talk about it. She tried to find out of there has been an increase in sex crimes reportedly perpetrated by women, but was told they don't categorize crimes by sex. A lot of people unwilling to talk about what's really going on because the implications would ruin the narrative that trans-identified males are women just like any other women (aside from the male pattern criminality). https://twitter.com/RoisinMichaux/status/1604200438403805184?s=20&t=8l74ZPAyPUiGHYPOiTiv7g
Whoa. We must have listened to two different episodes. I heard it as this is not a trans story so no need to worry about boys in girls spaces in this case. Not that it is not an issue, period
Hear, hear. I think it makes perfect sense for a large public high school to ask for ID to come on campus; given the horrors that have happened in American schools the past couple decades, they have reason to be cautious.
Seems like some people just wanna see rhetorical napalming of anyone who isn’t sufficiently incensed at every single moment, and y’know, fine, but I don’t get why you’d listen to J&K if that’s what you were after. They’re capable of nuance, after all, and we can’t have that.
For me it is logical to ask people coming into schools in US of ID, and the problem is the LACK of nuance and analysis/consequence of opening up women’s and girls spaces to anyone.
Other themes are nicely covered with nuance mostly, so the contrast in this is popping out as a very sharp contrast to that, which I think is the reason many react and wonder why this theme is not covered with the same touch of nuance and wish for due process.
I've been reading both Katie and Jesse's work for at least five years and have never gotten the sense that either one of them fails to take issues like women's prisons seriously. For instance, they've both taken a fair amount of heat for defending JK Rowling's criticisms of self-ID and the danger she says that introduces into female-only spaces like women's shelters.
Due process and all that stuff but if my kid had been assaulted and someone was keeping me from them because of some policy then they are getting knocked out or whatever I have to do to be with my kid. That’s just genetic. The problem is that this is an entirely reasonable feeling for anyone to have and you can’t just make a policy and say “well someone approved this so I’m sorry the natural thing you’re feeling right now is invalid.”
Due process does not preclude the use of interim measures to protect complainants.
In the many false accusation horror stories, schools make findings of fact which are incorrect and which they are unqualified to judge in the first place. This is not the same as the entirely sensible thought that perhaps a school should temporarily remove a student from contact with others (without rendering any sort of verdict) while a legal process plays out.
I went to an all girl’s school most of my school life. There were fights, bullying, and teasing. Never once heard of a sexual assault, or really any sexual impropriety beyond gossiping/teasing girls who got boobs earlier (me) and calling some girls lezzers (again, me). I’m not aware of the actual data, but I would assume sexual assault from girls is *very* rare.
Never happened to me, or any if my friends (at least in my friendships we do talk about such and would most certainly have told if anything like that ever had happen as it would have been a major social faux pas).
I know only ONE womanfriend who was grabbed and commented lewdly at by another woman, at a bar when adult.
To compare: ALL of my womanfriends have been in SOME way harassed/grabbed/stalked/followed/raped/coerced/catcalled/screamed sexual things at in a harassing way etc by men. Also way back in school.
Plus, of course, many times the chance to fight back and get away/win, is MUCH higher if it’s a woman-much more even.
COULD be a higher statistics nowadays but that could be affected by so many taking T too-but that we could bot know as any bad changes due to trans does not get recorded properly, researched, or followed up analytically in the right way.
From everything I know, sexual assaults and stranger attacks are nearly universally committed by males. I would expect some physical fights between girls who know each other and of course social and emotional bullying but I don’t think female-on-female sexual assault is that much more underreported than male on female (male on male might be).
Never heard of it and never experienced it. I was a wild teen and raped several times. Never assaulted by girls or women. Maybe in a prison? But not out in the world.
It’s an even bigger problem. Violent, mentally ill students are now mainstreamed. It is very difficult to get them moved to alternative schools. It is not really about trans issues, imo. I think it has to do with disability laws. Disabled students must be put in the “least restrictive environment “. That is great for many disabled students, but it now includes students who have all manner of extreme mental and psychological issues. It’s bad. And teachers seem proud of mainstreaming these kids. I expressed surprise that a violent kid was still at our school and told smugly that “Of course he is! He is doing better.” And no matter how much kids lie or manipulate, many teachers take them at their word. It’s so dysfunctional.
In my experience, most teachers want these kids to be placed elsewhere. It's the administration that resists, for financial reasons.
The cost of placing a violent, mentally ill student in an alternative school for just one year can be the cost of hiring a teacher. Smaller and poorer districts have to make these trade-offs all the time. Place a violent kid somewhere else and you lose the funding for that second reading specialist or special ed teacher.
Good point. But, I wonder how brainwashed some teachers are on this point. Most teachers are soft-hearted and when they are repeatedly told that mainstreaming is best, they internalize that. The ideology is really deep-seated at this point. Teachers are trained to accept and advocate for mainstreaming. I recently got into a very frustrating conversation with a public health researcher who focuses on services for disabled people. When I said that co-locating students with severe disabilities who yell and scream all day, often in school hallways, with mainstream schools was dumb and upsetting for students and teachers, she said “It’s complicated.” Is it? Kindergartners having to listen to screaming fits for hours a day？ Everyone is so steeped in ideology that common sense is gone. I get really annoyed and frustrated by this. And this is a third rail. No one wants to sound like they are somehow “against” the interests of disabled students. But it is really extreme and the definition of disability has extended to anti-social behavior. I am not against appropriate mainstreaming, but it’s gone too far so that the education and well-being of the many is being sacrificed for the few. And, when I look out the window at Portland, I see the same thing writ large. Because people are disabled by their mental illness and addiction, we have to tolerate their destructive behavior and the majority of people live in the detritus of the dysfunction of a small minority. In the name of kindness and inclusion. It’s madness.
This happens a lot. They take a reasonable thing and take it to the extreme. They don't have the strength of mind or values to make discernments and say no. And anyone who does is a monster.
Also - one of the district employees who pulled together the meeting (can't remember which employee) stated the incident (and therefore the meeting) was about the transgender bathroom policy, which was controversial.
So....clearly some people in the district thought it was about that policy.
They chose protection of that policy (or attempts to squash any controversy associated with the policy) over the safety of girls after multiple red flags about this particular kid. THEN just sent him along to another school - where apparently complete incompetence regarding the safety of girls is the norm.
Sasha wrote exactly what I was thinking! THANK YOU. I’m only a little more than halfway through but was so exasperated at the willful obtuseness that I just had to check comments.
I get that J + K aren’t parents. That’s ok. But it’s less understandable that they ignore our pushback, not even bothering to respond to us. If their attitude was based on a strongly held beliefs -- say against helicopter parents--I could at least respect their point of view even if I disagreed with it. But neither Jesse nor Katie ever questions their
Agree on the ignoring us part. I don’t expect them to change their thinking, but I think they should at least ACKNOWLEDGE us in good faith. Another week or two goes by, another dismissive mention of a “moral panic.” At least some other podcasters with Substack interact with their community here & there (a simple “like”). But they’re too good for that (well, I may have seen Jesse like a comment or two).
I’m thinking of taking my Substack dollars elsewhere. The Free Press or The Fifth Column...
I would miss your input to our conversations if you left.
Personally I'm fine with J&K having their own opinions and largely ignoring us. Better than the opposite extreme (audience capture). I suppose there is an ideal middle ground, but I don't need it to be ideal. But I respect your desire for more interaction with the groundlings.
So, full disclosure: I have not really looked into the Loudon County case. But based on the information in the podcast and that I've absorbed via news osmosis, I don't really see the adults trying to avoid punishing a "trans" kid. I just see selfish, myopic bureaucrats who want to hide a rape under the rug. It doesn't really seem like the little sociopath in question would have been dissuaded by a "no boys in the girls' bathroom" policy. Like, when I was in school, there was no "inclusive bathroom policy" and people still hooked up in the bathrooms. Not often, but it happened.
Essentially, I agree with J&K's reframing of this incident as a "rape culture" failing, where adults covered up the rape of a girl to save *their own skins* and avoid public relations awkwardness, rather than a "woke adults catering to child pretending to be trans" situation.
That's definitely the position Katie and Jesse are taking, but I can tell you that in the post-Me Too era, even before that, there is a lot of attention placed on boys when they are that touchy with girls. There seemed to be a hesitancy there that wouldn't have been there otherwise in today's climate when boys are seen as rapists. There is more to this story regarding that. I can smell it. It would come down to good intentions gone wrong, their desire not to harm the trans community. But it would ultimately put the girl in harm's way.
Barpod has been consistently downplaying the bathroom safety issue, and iirc they did not defend JKR’s opinions but her right to hold and express them.
As for this case, there can be a rape culture issue AND a trans issue; one does not negate the other. We don’t know if there was an informal bathroom policy at the school that let students self-ID into the bathroom of choice and if that’s why the rapist wore a skirt. Given the witness tampering, we may never know. We do know that the employee who could have stopped the rape says she assumed two women were in the stall. That suggests that men identifying as males did not as a rule go into the women’s room.
I get that there is a good case to be made to protect female-only spaces and that unquestioning obeisance to someone's stated gender identity can lead to some real problems. However, I still fail to see how this particular case is so "obviously" related.
There was some initial reporting that connected the dots in such a way, but that reporting seemed to be pretty shoddy. I haven't heard anything since that would justify the connection.
Now, if the claim is that the connection is more ephemeral- that it's all all connected through a general culture of trans acceptance, then I think I'd need a lot more evidence than what I've seen. Arguments like this make me think of people who refer to "systemic white supremacy". Maybe it's true, and maybe it's causally related to the thing we're talking about, but it's reasonable to withhold judgment and is not at all obvious.
"However, I still fail to see how this particular case is so "obviously" related."
Prior to schools enacting policies that allowed for students to access bathrooms/locker rooms of the opposite sex, there was an easy way to get boys out of bathrooms (and the like): "Get out! This is the girls' room." If school staff encounters four feet in one stall, and one pair is attached to a male -- as it is now the staff member has no idea if the kid is there because they're allowed now because of their "gender identity," or if they're just hooking up a girl. I would assume that staff don't want to get accused of harassing a student who is allowed there because of updated policies re: gender -- so they don't challenge anyone.
If girls have an awkward guy in the girls' room now that makes them uncomfortable because he's leering at them, they would be right to worry that the school wouldn't back them up. Just look at what happened to the girls from the volleyball team at a school in Vermont. The trans-identified male was reportedly sitting there leering at them while they changed. The girls reported it and the school punished THEM, and was going to make them sit through a training session to work on their biases... and only backed down after the ADF said it would file a suit against the school. Girls see what's happening across the country. There is no way to escape males if you're a teenaged girl. The bathroom was a place to escape. If a boy came in for any reason, girls knew they could tell a teacher/staff member and he'd be removed. Those days are gone.
Maybe I'm not explaining this well because I don't see how this ISN'T connected to the changes in policies that allow males into female-only spaces. Yes, people always respond "if a male wants to hurt a girl/woman he will." Yes, we know that. But before if other girls were around there was the chance they'd unite to Get the Boy Out. Now with kids like the teen rapist, we have awkward males saying they're girls, or non-binary (in which case why would they have an issue using the boy's room?) -- will the other girls speak up to get a boy out of the bathroom/locker room?
Look at UPenn. The women on the swimming team there were instructed by the UNIVERSITY that if they had a problem changing with Lia Thomas, an intact male, that they should access the LGBTQ+ group at the university to learn about inclusion, and oh, psychological counseling is available, too. I think we had a few girls speak up from UPenn but I believe they did so anonymously, because the school had already told them they'd risk their chances at grad school, jobs, etc. They were told that they need to stay quiet. We only got girls willing to speak up from other schools that DID support their female athletes - Riley Gaines at the University of Kentucky. If the rule changes to Title IX that the Biden admin is trying to push through (bypassing the legislature at the Dept of Ed), will the University of Kentucky STILL back up their female athletes when it will result in them being accused of violating Title IX by discriminating on the basis of gender identity?
If college girls aren't able to speak up at their own school about how these policies affect them, why would high school girls?
I am bringing my own anecdotal information after having worked at a public elementary school as an aide back in the Obama era, way before Me Too, wake before the Great Awokening. What happened in this case was this kid was untouchable in ways people sometimes are in schools if they have IEPs, meaning they have autism or something like that. Then whatever violence they cause in schools they are treating differently than any boy would be. This story sounded like one of those stories except that in this case he was being protected for a different reason.
His own mother says schools protected him and allowed him to be manipulative. That word makes me think he's smart enough to know that wearing a skirt or perhaps referring to himself as non-binary (though we haven't heard that yet in the story) would give him a shield that would protect him. No one wants to be dragged out in the press on this topic.
The silence around the case is what makes me think there is more to the story and given that the word "manipulative" was used that indicates we're not talking about an IEP here. We're talking about something else.
It isn't fair, IMO, that girls are not being protected because people are too afraid of the trans community. I am not a TERF in that I've never taken a stand, not like the one JK Rowling has taken. But I think this is one example where fear has held back the truth. I don't know if it will ever be fully told in such a climate of fear as we're living through now. Though I doubt this will be the only time something like this happens.
The attacker claims to be trans, is male but was registered at the school as female, and was referred to as female throughout police reports. His parent confirmed he identifies as transgender. It annoys me that J&K assumed he isn't trans because people stopped mentioning it, not because they thoroughly researched the case and found out it wasn't true. It is true, and this is absolutely a case of how these policies harm female people and reduce consequences for males.
I'm not the OP, but perhaps she meant that the LGBTQ+$ activists are committed to presenting "trans kids" as victims. If anything comes out that proves gender critics were right and there IS a downside to letting anyone access female spaces on self-ID, it would ruin their narrative that there is no conflict of rights.
As it relates to the Daily Wire's reporting, I think Jesse also ignores / glosses over that a big part of the story there is that the Dad was the national media posterboy (literally, his picture was used) for angry parents disrupting schoolboard meetings. A major part of the story is simply why he was there (e.g., not just a racist parent who hates teaching diversity, as was initially portrayed). Then need to remember the letter that went to DOJ asking that they investigate said parents.
Kids will never think adults are cool no matter what they do. Trying to force it only makes things worse. Kids can smell a tryhard like a shark can smell blood in the ocean.
I don’t think most of the adults on libsoftiktoks are child abusers, but I definitely put almost all of them in this category. Lonely people looking for validation, who don’t have enough money or wherewithal to subscribe to a Substack and pay for a subscription.
I don't think they are abusive in the same way as someone who commits sexual or physical abuse, but there is something really fucked up about the way some of the teachers or parents seem to be using the kids in their care for validation or narcissistic supply, and I think some of it could definitely be classed as emotionally abusive at least
We did have one pill popper teacher in my high school who kind of similarly was seeking validation from kids. Wanted to be cool so bad she showed up high and drunk every day. My last year the video production class stole some of her muumuus and made a movie where they dressed up as her and took some flinstone vitamins and went on a psychedelic journey. So I guess they at least learned something.
I don’t know if we can really fully stop crazy people getting jobs as teachers because people are crazy and sometimes they just go crazy but I do wish there was a bit more power for someone to yank them out of the classroom when they start to meltdown.
The Loudoun County rape case is exactly what is meant by rape culture: people who talk a good game about morals/dei/feminism who look the other way when a sexual assault complicates their world view. It crosses political lines, and is the same as the Catholic Church and the Rotherham grooming gangs in the UK.
The number of gems from this podcast cannot be overstated. Sitting here in a wash tub filled with baked beans right now! I've pulled the shades to reduce light and added a couple of eucalyptus-scented candles the enhance the tactile-kinesthetic-olfactory effects of this DIY stress reliever. A second listen to today's episode, while sitting in the beans, and I'll be energized and refreshed for another day battling this odd world.
I commented last week that my psych prof partner felt like Jesse was being too uncritical of the journal editor in this situation, since Fiedler totally breached the normal peer review protocol. Kudos to Jesse for reading those critical emails about his depiction of the Fiedler-Roberts-Mule controversy that make this point. This why I trust and respect Jesse as a journalist!
Heh, if you oust people who take that kind of accusation seriously from academia, you'll have precious few academics under age 50 left in the social sciences and humanities.
Have you considered the idea that Basecamp simply wanted to lay off some staff because its payroll was bloated but for a lot of reasons it needed a smoke screen to do it. Reasons such as not to signal their financial weakness to the market and their sad outlook. So get a large percentage of the workforce to take a severance package and no one will notice that you didn't bother to actually replace any of them.
Have you noticed all the downsizing going on but only Elon is guilty for laying of staff for no good reason. Staff who were busy doing nothing beneficial to the bloated tech stock boosted bubble company with no good business model.
I think this is what every tech company has been doing this year. The economy provides a perfect cover for them to clean house and improve their balance sheet.
And making it about "arguing about politics at work" helps them pretend it's not about the economy or their balance sheet and that they're still a DEI company unconcerned with profits.
I thought of that when reading about John Carmack’s (voluntary) departure from Meta where he’s quoted as writing that the company “has “a ridiculous amount of people and resources”
You might be on to something. I heard about the Basecamp story because the CTO of a company I worked out spoke out against their no-politics policy. This of course made me sign up for Basecamp's job openings newsletter. Basecamp let those people leave the company, but the job openings news letter has been really slow for the last year and a half.
On the most minor point of the Loudon County schools recap: I can confirm that your typical public school tends to be very strict about enforcing its policy of not letting parents (or anyone else) into the building without ID. When I lived in a very small town where everyone knew each other, my kid's school was more lax about security, but that was unusual. Any medium to large district is going to be very uptight about locked-door and entrance policies.
I get that this seems mind-bogglingly incongruous with the obvious disregard by LCPS staff in the story for safety issues like a male and female student in a bathroom stall together.
Could they not send a message from the main office to the security staff by text/radio/whatever that a student had been assaulted and that her family would be showing up? It seems really unbelievable that they can't adapt on the fly in light of a violent assault on a student.
In my daughter's school a couple parents came up to the school weilding a hammer threatening to kick the ass of the student who jumped their kid the previous day.
Administration actually successfully held them off, the cops were called. (my kid happened to be near the front of the building when this happened and witnessed it.)
All that to say - some crazy stuff happens at schools.
I'm actually not defending the school. This whole story is crazy, the lack of concern for the girls involved, the chances the kid got to repeatedly be in school and have access to girls is mind boggling. I completely understand the anger of this parent. The attempts to cover it up are criminal.
I just suddenly remembered the story of my kid's school and...damn. I definitely wouldn't want to be a school administrator.
Yeah, a mentally deranged parent at an elementary school in my mom’s district entered the school with a claw hammer and attacked an innocent little girl (literally bashed her skull in in front of the rest of the third graders), almost killing her. My mom was sent in to do the trauma counseling for the kids and teachers/administrators because of that monster.
A lot of adults/parents are fucking insane. I’m in no way defending the school but if you don’t have an ID, are acting like an upset father (which is completely understandable), and the mom is already there — I don’t think delaying how long it took for the dad to be let in, or being on alert that he was (again, understandably) outraged is what we should be critiquing in this case.
What we should be critiquing and criticizing is how this kid was allowed to stay at the school, to say nothing of being sent to another school — when every public school system I’ve ever heard of has either specific schools for violent kids or has a way to have them home schooled while an investigation takes place. We should be criticizing the cover up of the situation and the period of ignored warnings from the bastard’s teachers and own family members. But not letting the dad inside immediately without an ID or putting security on alert for a guy that (again, understandably) was almost certainly making what the school saw as verbal threats and could be a physical risk, yeah, sorry, that seems fine to me.
It has gotten really out of control. Last year police were called to my kids highschool and lock down was in effect about 5 times (that I'm aware of)last fall. Other schools throughout the metro area having similar issues.
Maybe he heard that his daughter was hurt at school and left wherever he was at the time in a hurry. People don't always think clearly when their child has been hurt.
I went back and forth on whether he is. Do we know otherwise? It’s been several months now, right? Isn’t that enough if he’s trolling them? Kids are still being asked to be in an environment with someone dressed as a caricature of womanhood.
He’s got to ride that shit to retirement then go back to being a regular shop teacher guy but call it being “Beyond Gay.” I would pay $100 to see him speak in person about he became so trans he eventually became cis again.
Re. Loudon County, according to Reduxx the male who committed the assault absolutely is and continues to identify as transgender, and wasn't just "a boy who sometimes wore a skirt". From Reduxx's report: "The officer attending the incident reported there was confusion over the perpetrator’s gender identity but it was later discovered that, despite being male, he had been registered on school documents as female. His parent, on arrival at the school to collect him, confirmed that he identifies as transgender.
The alleged perpetrator has been charged with Assault and Battery and Disorderly Conduct. He was referred to with female pronouns throughout the police report."
It is almost certain, given how trans males who have committed assault have used their identity in the past to shield themselves (very effectively) from more harsh penalties, that this particular assailant's trans identity constituted a protective factor in how the school board treated him, and essentially enabled him to assault another girl.
Banning political talk at work (and offering severance to those who don’t like that) is definitely being done to cut the fat before real layoffs begin. In the tech industry, there has been tremendous growth over the past few years. Many expanded too much or too fast, and there is now a focus on performance and results instead of headcounts.
I used to work for a large tech company who has a ceo that used to be very political and that trickled down to our internal messaging system. It didn’t help that there was a channel called airing of grievances where people would complain all day everyday. It was like Twitter but worse.
There was one guy who looked like a real life wojak (glasses, receding hairline and patchy beard) who would shame people for having different opinions to the point where he was reporting anyone who gave his posts about gun control a thumbs down emoji to HR. He would also non-ironically talk about his wife’s boyfriend.
Another woman would get into constant fights about politics. If someone disagreed she would also report them to HR. She was actually suspended from work for several weeks for being so disruptive; fun fact her last post before getting suspended was “Come at me HR!” She also got to take paid medical leave because “she couldn’t be her authentic self at work” which meant she had to work and couldn’t whine about abortion all day.
There were myriad others. People talking in public groups about their various sexual partners, how they got so much “euphoria” from people being unable to figure out their gender and someone having to explain that they were a genderfuck. There was also someone who would endlessly quote Ana Mardoll in some of the channels to convince people there is a transgender genocide occurring.
I didn’t leave because of that but honestly it was hilarious watching people make absolute fools of themselves all day everyday. I also didn’t necessarily disagree with some posts, but I don’t think the workplace is a great place to talk about abortion, whether you support it or not.
Although there was never a formal banning of political discussions, there were some changes made. They had to ban people from commenting at all in the approved main channels. The CEO also announced they weren’t going to make political donations anymore. These changes were of course deemed ableist and neurotypical supremacy.
And I am so glad I don't work in one of them. I'll stop complaining about my company's IT problems for a couple of days because that's nothing in comparison.
I am intrigued by the logic that not making political donations is ableist. Or I guess not commenting in the main channel is ableist. Which...I do not get.
I should have written that better; the introduction of locking channels and chat etiquette were ableist. The reasoning (again by a very small number of people who as far as I know still work there, not me) was that autistic and / or ADHD individuals don’t understand nuance, that things they say may not please other people, and that work isn’t the best place to be political. Therefore, it was discriminatory to force people to behave like adults and focus on work not the outrage of the day during work hours.
The removal of political donations and statements was tacit approval of genocide.
No, I did not think you endorsed the position. Your explanation ..I kind of get it. I fo not see how telling people not to talk about politics would be difficult for someone with autism to understand. Also. Every autistic person I met. They were literal. Not incapable of understanding human interaction
People can be such jackasses. I would bet these were younger - perhaps less than 25 - employees?
I loved this but I think you are slightly missing the story on Loudoun County. This is a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. No one wants to say what is obvious. The kid was manipulating the "good liberals" out of punishing him and protecting the female victim. The trans community, as y'all know, are incredibly strident in their policing of these kinds of facts -- men pretending to be trans and getting into female prisons, etc. This is the exact phenom that is in the TERF debate: how to protect girls from men pretending to be trans. It seems to me that you guys were downplaying that so as not to come out as conservative. If this boy was an obvious Trump supporter none of this would have happened. The fact is that activists are too worried about creating yet more stigma around trans kids to have protected the girls involved.
“It seems to me that you guys were downplaying that so as not to come out as conservative.” 🎯
I’m listening to it now and getting that same impression.
How many girls have to be assaulted before people will realize that no one will have to waste time worrying about whether a male enby or another one that says he’s a girl is “really” trans/NB if we just stop letting males into female spaces?
Jesse & Katie are so terrified of saying anything that some easily-offended lib will say sounds conservative that they end up sounding ridiculous, hedging here & there (Katie “well, maybe it’s reasonable that the school kept the father of the rape victim out of the school at first because of rules... “ as if the main office couldn’t text/radio school security to know that her family would be arriving? Or how the principal spent part of the day of the assault trying to make sure the Dad would be kept away...).
To steal a line from the overly sensitive Twitter crowd, "I’m just so tired" as a mother of daughters listening to left-leaning people care more about the feelings of confused teenaged males than about the actual safety (as well as privacy & dignity) of girls (nope, I didn’t forget the word “cis” -- I reject it). Real girls.
I too am a mother of a daughter, but I feel like I listened to a different episode. What I heard was harsh criticism of a school administration that let a sociopath get shuffled from one school to another with little or no consequences for his violent actions. I didn't hear anything dismissive of the need to protect women and girls from assault. The thing they said was reasonable was that you would ask for ID of anyone entering school property. I have no problem with that, because if we've learned anything from BARpod, it's that people sometimes claim to be someone they're not.
I heard it more as: this had nothing to do with trans kids in the bathrooms ergo trans kids in a bathroom is a no-problem.
This SEEMS to not have to do with trans in women’s bathrooms but is exactly that:
as no one can question ANYONE coming into the girls and women’s spaces - even though they’d look like a bearded supermegaalphamale.
So if the boy here had a skirt on sometimes, many people were probably scared to question anything of his behavior to not make a headline out of that, and same attitude towards bathroombusiness then.
And if it got mentioned in the school communication as such a topic, might have even been that the boy could had hinted on such (an other info said about the boy being manipulative).
The problem of men claiming trans to get into women’s spaces already exists (prisons, bathrooms, spa’s, rape shelters etc) and now it’s even difficult to report on all the cases where transwomen assault women as no one wants to be called a terf and attacked themselves.
This case only shows just how easily any man wanting to do such stuff will have it after selfID’s and all. No one can stop you and a slap on the wrist.
It is a piece if fact to really consider before allowing natal men into women’s spaces, and it has not been risk-evaluated but silenced.
"This SEEMS to not have to do with trans in women’s bathrooms but is exactly that: as no one can question ANYONE coming into the girls and women’s spaces."
THIS. Schools are going along with this, many on their own, others likely because the Biden Administration said it would take away federal support for school lunch programs if schools didn't jump through hoops to prove they aren't discriminating on the basis of "gender identity." https://www.salon.com/2022/07/27/attorneys-general-biden-administration-over-school-lunch-policy/
We are teaching a generation of girls to ignore their intuition when their gut says that they're in danger from males, because they are getting the message that schools won't back them up, and everyone will think they're bigots for questioning whether a guy in a skirt with she/her pronouns is in their bathroom/locker room for the "right" reasons.
I read an interesting thread earlier by a journalist in Belgium who started asking questions as to whether there had been any women harmed in prisons by trans-identified males. She was told they don't record whether TIMs are in prisons, but found out from people working in that field that there are indeed, and things have happened but they can't talk about it. She tried to find out of there has been an increase in sex crimes reportedly perpetrated by women, but was told they don't categorize crimes by sex. A lot of people unwilling to talk about what's really going on because the implications would ruin the narrative that trans-identified males are women just like any other women (aside from the male pattern criminality). https://twitter.com/RoisinMichaux/status/1604200438403805184?s=20&t=8l74ZPAyPUiGHYPOiTiv7g
Yeah, the connection with the idiocy of self-ID is unavoidable.
Whoa. We must have listened to two different episodes. I heard it as this is not a trans story so no need to worry about boys in girls spaces in this case. Not that it is not an issue, period
Hear, hear. I think it makes perfect sense for a large public high school to ask for ID to come on campus; given the horrors that have happened in American schools the past couple decades, they have reason to be cautious.
Seems like some people just wanna see rhetorical napalming of anyone who isn’t sufficiently incensed at every single moment, and y’know, fine, but I don’t get why you’d listen to J&K if that’s what you were after. They’re capable of nuance, after all, and we can’t have that.
For me it is logical to ask people coming into schools in US of ID, and the problem is the LACK of nuance and analysis/consequence of opening up women’s and girls spaces to anyone.
Other themes are nicely covered with nuance mostly, so the contrast in this is popping out as a very sharp contrast to that, which I think is the reason many react and wonder why this theme is not covered with the same touch of nuance and wish for due process.
I’m probably inferring because I’ve listened to them enough to know they wouldn’t defend female-only spaces.
I've been reading both Katie and Jesse's work for at least five years and have never gotten the sense that either one of them fails to take issues like women's prisons seriously. For instance, they've both taken a fair amount of heat for defending JK Rowling's criticisms of self-ID and the danger she says that introduces into female-only spaces like women's shelters.
Due process and all that stuff but if my kid had been assaulted and someone was keeping me from them because of some policy then they are getting knocked out or whatever I have to do to be with my kid. That’s just genetic. The problem is that this is an entirely reasonable feeling for anyone to have and you can’t just make a policy and say “well someone approved this so I’m sorry the natural thing you’re feeling right now is invalid.”
Due process does not preclude the use of interim measures to protect complainants.
In the many false accusation horror stories, schools make findings of fact which are incorrect and which they are unqualified to judge in the first place. This is not the same as the entirely sensible thought that perhaps a school should temporarily remove a student from contact with others (without rendering any sort of verdict) while a legal process plays out.
Yes, yes, 1,000 times yes!
This comment has me wondering: do girls not physically/sexually assault other girls in the bathroom? Is it just underreported?
I went to an all girl’s school most of my school life. There were fights, bullying, and teasing. Never once heard of a sexual assault, or really any sexual impropriety beyond gossiping/teasing girls who got boobs earlier (me) and calling some girls lezzers (again, me). I’m not aware of the actual data, but I would assume sexual assault from girls is *very* rare.
Never happened to me, or any if my friends (at least in my friendships we do talk about such and would most certainly have told if anything like that ever had happen as it would have been a major social faux pas).
I know only ONE womanfriend who was grabbed and commented lewdly at by another woman, at a bar when adult.
To compare: ALL of my womanfriends have been in SOME way harassed/grabbed/stalked/followed/raped/coerced/catcalled/screamed sexual things at in a harassing way etc by men. Also way back in school.
Plus, of course, many times the chance to fight back and get away/win, is MUCH higher if it’s a woman-much more even.
COULD be a higher statistics nowadays but that could be affected by so many taking T too-but that we could bot know as any bad changes due to trans does not get recorded properly, researched, or followed up analytically in the right way.
From everything I know, sexual assaults and stranger attacks are nearly universally committed by males. I would expect some physical fights between girls who know each other and of course social and emotional bullying but I don’t think female-on-female sexual assault is that much more underreported than male on female (male on male might be).
Yeah that's probably the case.
I think you'd be surprised at the sexual assault stats from places like the DRC. The amount of female offenders was way higher than I expected.
Never heard of it and never experienced it. I was a wild teen and raped several times. Never assaulted by girls or women. Maybe in a prison? But not out in the world.
It’s an even bigger problem. Violent, mentally ill students are now mainstreamed. It is very difficult to get them moved to alternative schools. It is not really about trans issues, imo. I think it has to do with disability laws. Disabled students must be put in the “least restrictive environment “. That is great for many disabled students, but it now includes students who have all manner of extreme mental and psychological issues. It’s bad. And teachers seem proud of mainstreaming these kids. I expressed surprise that a violent kid was still at our school and told smugly that “Of course he is! He is doing better.” And no matter how much kids lie or manipulate, many teachers take them at their word. It’s so dysfunctional.
Yeah. There is ongoing collapse of boundaries. Just everywhere.
In my experience, most teachers want these kids to be placed elsewhere. It's the administration that resists, for financial reasons.
The cost of placing a violent, mentally ill student in an alternative school for just one year can be the cost of hiring a teacher. Smaller and poorer districts have to make these trade-offs all the time. Place a violent kid somewhere else and you lose the funding for that second reading specialist or special ed teacher.
Good point. But, I wonder how brainwashed some teachers are on this point. Most teachers are soft-hearted and when they are repeatedly told that mainstreaming is best, they internalize that. The ideology is really deep-seated at this point. Teachers are trained to accept and advocate for mainstreaming. I recently got into a very frustrating conversation with a public health researcher who focuses on services for disabled people. When I said that co-locating students with severe disabilities who yell and scream all day, often in school hallways, with mainstream schools was dumb and upsetting for students and teachers, she said “It’s complicated.” Is it? Kindergartners having to listen to screaming fits for hours a day？ Everyone is so steeped in ideology that common sense is gone. I get really annoyed and frustrated by this. And this is a third rail. No one wants to sound like they are somehow “against” the interests of disabled students. But it is really extreme and the definition of disability has extended to anti-social behavior. I am not against appropriate mainstreaming, but it’s gone too far so that the education and well-being of the many is being sacrificed for the few. And, when I look out the window at Portland, I see the same thing writ large. Because people are disabled by their mental illness and addiction, we have to tolerate their destructive behavior and the majority of people live in the detritus of the dysfunction of a small minority. In the name of kindness and inclusion. It’s madness.
This happens a lot. They take a reasonable thing and take it to the extreme. They don't have the strength of mind or values to make discernments and say no. And anyone who does is a monster.
What do school administrators do? I had an aunt who was one and it mainly seemed she just prevented people from doing things that are sensible.
Also - one of the district employees who pulled together the meeting (can't remember which employee) stated the incident (and therefore the meeting) was about the transgender bathroom policy, which was controversial.
So....clearly some people in the district thought it was about that policy.
They chose protection of that policy (or attempts to squash any controversy associated with the policy) over the safety of girls after multiple red flags about this particular kid. THEN just sent him along to another school - where apparently complete incompetence regarding the safety of girls is the norm.
Sasha wrote exactly what I was thinking! THANK YOU. I’m only a little more than halfway through but was so exasperated at the willful obtuseness that I just had to check comments.
I get that J + K aren’t parents. That’s ok. But it’s less understandable that they ignore our pushback, not even bothering to respond to us. If their attitude was based on a strongly held beliefs -- say against helicopter parents--I could at least respect their point of view even if I disagreed with it. But neither Jesse nor Katie ever questions their
assumption that this is just a moral panic.
Agree on the ignoring us part. I don’t expect them to change their thinking, but I think they should at least ACKNOWLEDGE us in good faith. Another week or two goes by, another dismissive mention of a “moral panic.” At least some other podcasters with Substack interact with their community here & there (a simple “like”). But they’re too good for that (well, I may have seen Jesse like a comment or two).
I’m thinking of taking my Substack dollars elsewhere. The Free Press or The Fifth Column...
I would miss your input to our conversations if you left.
Personally I'm fine with J&K having their own opinions and largely ignoring us. Better than the opposite extreme (audience capture). I suppose there is an ideal middle ground, but I don't need it to be ideal. But I respect your desire for more interaction with the groundlings.
Or Taibbi. Fifth Column guys are good but I can sustain my fix with their fairly long free podcasts.
Maybe. I remember hearing Katie mention the sub-Reddit at some point & I wondered if she looked at that more than Substack.
So, full disclosure: I have not really looked into the Loudon County case. But based on the information in the podcast and that I've absorbed via news osmosis, I don't really see the adults trying to avoid punishing a "trans" kid. I just see selfish, myopic bureaucrats who want to hide a rape under the rug. It doesn't really seem like the little sociopath in question would have been dissuaded by a "no boys in the girls' bathroom" policy. Like, when I was in school, there was no "inclusive bathroom policy" and people still hooked up in the bathrooms. Not often, but it happened.
Essentially, I agree with J&K's reframing of this incident as a "rape culture" failing, where adults covered up the rape of a girl to save *their own skins* and avoid public relations awkwardness, rather than a "woke adults catering to child pretending to be trans" situation.
That's definitely the position Katie and Jesse are taking, but I can tell you that in the post-Me Too era, even before that, there is a lot of attention placed on boys when they are that touchy with girls. There seemed to be a hesitancy there that wouldn't have been there otherwise in today's climate when boys are seen as rapists. There is more to this story regarding that. I can smell it. It would come down to good intentions gone wrong, their desire not to harm the trans community. But it would ultimately put the girl in harm's way.
So J&K did the follow-up research and presented their findings but you're not satisfied with it because you can "smell" something more is afoot...
Great, thanks for your input.
Barpod has been consistently downplaying the bathroom safety issue, and iirc they did not defend JKR’s opinions but her right to hold and express them.
As for this case, there can be a rape culture issue AND a trans issue; one does not negate the other. We don’t know if there was an informal bathroom policy at the school that let students self-ID into the bathroom of choice and if that’s why the rapist wore a skirt. Given the witness tampering, we may never know. We do know that the employee who could have stopped the rape says she assumed two women were in the stall. That suggests that men identifying as males did not as a rule go into the women’s room.
I get that there is a good case to be made to protect female-only spaces and that unquestioning obeisance to someone's stated gender identity can lead to some real problems. However, I still fail to see how this particular case is so "obviously" related.
There was some initial reporting that connected the dots in such a way, but that reporting seemed to be pretty shoddy. I haven't heard anything since that would justify the connection.
Now, if the claim is that the connection is more ephemeral- that it's all all connected through a general culture of trans acceptance, then I think I'd need a lot more evidence than what I've seen. Arguments like this make me think of people who refer to "systemic white supremacy". Maybe it's true, and maybe it's causally related to the thing we're talking about, but it's reasonable to withhold judgment and is not at all obvious.
"However, I still fail to see how this particular case is so "obviously" related."
Prior to schools enacting policies that allowed for students to access bathrooms/locker rooms of the opposite sex, there was an easy way to get boys out of bathrooms (and the like): "Get out! This is the girls' room." If school staff encounters four feet in one stall, and one pair is attached to a male -- as it is now the staff member has no idea if the kid is there because they're allowed now because of their "gender identity," or if they're just hooking up a girl. I would assume that staff don't want to get accused of harassing a student who is allowed there because of updated policies re: gender -- so they don't challenge anyone.
If girls have an awkward guy in the girls' room now that makes them uncomfortable because he's leering at them, they would be right to worry that the school wouldn't back them up. Just look at what happened to the girls from the volleyball team at a school in Vermont. The trans-identified male was reportedly sitting there leering at them while they changed. The girls reported it and the school punished THEM, and was going to make them sit through a training session to work on their biases... and only backed down after the ADF said it would file a suit against the school. Girls see what's happening across the country. There is no way to escape males if you're a teenaged girl. The bathroom was a place to escape. If a boy came in for any reason, girls knew they could tell a teacher/staff member and he'd be removed. Those days are gone.
Maybe I'm not explaining this well because I don't see how this ISN'T connected to the changes in policies that allow males into female-only spaces. Yes, people always respond "if a male wants to hurt a girl/woman he will." Yes, we know that. But before if other girls were around there was the chance they'd unite to Get the Boy Out. Now with kids like the teen rapist, we have awkward males saying they're girls, or non-binary (in which case why would they have an issue using the boy's room?) -- will the other girls speak up to get a boy out of the bathroom/locker room?
Look at UPenn. The women on the swimming team there were instructed by the UNIVERSITY that if they had a problem changing with Lia Thomas, an intact male, that they should access the LGBTQ+ group at the university to learn about inclusion, and oh, psychological counseling is available, too. I think we had a few girls speak up from UPenn but I believe they did so anonymously, because the school had already told them they'd risk their chances at grad school, jobs, etc. They were told that they need to stay quiet. We only got girls willing to speak up from other schools that DID support their female athletes - Riley Gaines at the University of Kentucky. If the rule changes to Title IX that the Biden admin is trying to push through (bypassing the legislature at the Dept of Ed), will the University of Kentucky STILL back up their female athletes when it will result in them being accused of violating Title IX by discriminating on the basis of gender identity?
If college girls aren't able to speak up at their own school about how these policies affect them, why would high school girls?
I am bringing my own anecdotal information after having worked at a public elementary school as an aide back in the Obama era, way before Me Too, wake before the Great Awokening. What happened in this case was this kid was untouchable in ways people sometimes are in schools if they have IEPs, meaning they have autism or something like that. Then whatever violence they cause in schools they are treating differently than any boy would be. This story sounded like one of those stories except that in this case he was being protected for a different reason.
His own mother says schools protected him and allowed him to be manipulative. That word makes me think he's smart enough to know that wearing a skirt or perhaps referring to himself as non-binary (though we haven't heard that yet in the story) would give him a shield that would protect him. No one wants to be dragged out in the press on this topic.
The silence around the case is what makes me think there is more to the story and given that the word "manipulative" was used that indicates we're not talking about an IEP here. We're talking about something else.
It isn't fair, IMO, that girls are not being protected because people are too afraid of the trans community. I am not a TERF in that I've never taken a stand, not like the one JK Rowling has taken. But I think this is one example where fear has held back the truth. I don't know if it will ever be fully told in such a climate of fear as we're living through now. Though I doubt this will be the only time something like this happens.
The attacker claims to be trans, is male but was registered at the school as female, and was referred to as female throughout police reports. His parent confirmed he identifies as transgender. It annoys me that J&K assumed he isn't trans because people stopped mentioning it, not because they thoroughly researched the case and found out it wasn't true. It is true, and this is absolutely a case of how these policies harm female people and reduce consequences for males.
What is the stigma around trans kids? Seriously. I only see them elevated.
I'm not the OP, but perhaps she meant that the LGBTQ+$ activists are committed to presenting "trans kids" as victims. If anything comes out that proves gender critics were right and there IS a downside to letting anyone access female spaces on self-ID, it would ruin their narrative that there is no conflict of rights.
As it relates to the Daily Wire's reporting, I think Jesse also ignores / glosses over that a big part of the story there is that the Dad was the national media posterboy (literally, his picture was used) for angry parents disrupting schoolboard meetings. A major part of the story is simply why he was there (e.g., not just a racist parent who hates teaching diversity, as was initially portrayed). Then need to remember the letter that went to DOJ asking that they investigate said parents.
Thanks Sasha, I came on here to say pretty much the same thing!
I would just like for there to be a class of adults who don’t care if kids think they are cool. I feel like that would solve a lot of problems.
Kids will never think adults are cool no matter what they do. Trying to force it only makes things worse. Kids can smell a tryhard like a shark can smell blood in the ocean.
The best way to be cool to kids is to be a self assured grown up who will look good in their memories as adults.
This. So many adults are failing so hard. In just adulting.
Adults may be physically mature and not mentally mature. The self absorption levels are incredible.
I don’t think most of the adults on libsoftiktoks are child abusers, but I definitely put almost all of them in this category. Lonely people looking for validation, who don’t have enough money or wherewithal to subscribe to a Substack and pay for a subscription.
I don't think they are abusive in the same way as someone who commits sexual or physical abuse, but there is something really fucked up about the way some of the teachers or parents seem to be using the kids in their care for validation or narcissistic supply, and I think some of it could definitely be classed as emotionally abusive at least
Fair.
We did have one pill popper teacher in my high school who kind of similarly was seeking validation from kids. Wanted to be cool so bad she showed up high and drunk every day. My last year the video production class stole some of her muumuus and made a movie where they dressed up as her and took some flinstone vitamins and went on a psychedelic journey. So I guess they at least learned something.
I don’t know if we can really fully stop crazy people getting jobs as teachers because people are crazy and sometimes they just go crazy but I do wish there was a bit more power for someone to yank them out of the classroom when they start to meltdown.
Sigh. It’s Switzerland that does euthanasia, not Sweden. In Sweden, we treasure our miserable, angst filled lives.
Sweden is the one with the cheese & chocolate right?
Also, no need for euthanasia when you can just stand outside in winter for a while... :)
You don’t go to Sweden for euthanasia. Katie and Jesse are thinking of Switzerland.
Greetings from Sweden, where euthanasia is *not* legal. 😬🇸🇪
Another thing I was wondering about!
The Loudoun County rape case is exactly what is meant by rape culture: people who talk a good game about morals/dei/feminism who look the other way when a sexual assault complicates their world view. It crosses political lines, and is the same as the Catholic Church and the Rotherham grooming gangs in the UK.
Sign that I've listened to too much of your podcast: when you said 'first reported by Fortune' I heard 'first reported by 4chan.'
ME TOO!
Wow, this Loudon County kid sounds like a serial killer in the making....
The number of gems from this podcast cannot be overstated. Sitting here in a wash tub filled with baked beans right now! I've pulled the shades to reduce light and added a couple of eucalyptus-scented candles the enhance the tactile-kinesthetic-olfactory effects of this DIY stress reliever. A second listen to today's episode, while sitting in the beans, and I'll be energized and refreshed for another day battling this odd world.
But how do you keep the beans warm through two whole listens?
Heating pads underneath the wash tub!
I commented last week that my psych prof partner felt like Jesse was being too uncritical of the journal editor in this situation, since Fiedler totally breached the normal peer review protocol. Kudos to Jesse for reading those critical emails about his depiction of the Fiedler-Roberts-Mule controversy that make this point. This why I trust and respect Jesse as a journalist!
Heh, if you oust people who take that kind of accusation seriously from academia, you'll have precious few academics under age 50 left in the social sciences and humanities.
Have you considered the idea that Basecamp simply wanted to lay off some staff because its payroll was bloated but for a lot of reasons it needed a smoke screen to do it. Reasons such as not to signal their financial weakness to the market and their sad outlook. So get a large percentage of the workforce to take a severance package and no one will notice that you didn't bother to actually replace any of them.
Have you noticed all the downsizing going on but only Elon is guilty for laying of staff for no good reason. Staff who were busy doing nothing beneficial to the bloated tech stock boosted bubble company with no good business model.
I think this is what every tech company has been doing this year. The economy provides a perfect cover for them to clean house and improve their balance sheet.
And making it about "arguing about politics at work" helps them pretend it's not about the economy or their balance sheet and that they're still a DEI company unconcerned with profits.
I thought of that when reading about John Carmack’s (voluntary) departure from Meta where he’s quoted as writing that the company “has “a ridiculous amount of people and resources”
The 10 billion/year investment into the Metaverse vs the quality of the result is just insane.
You might be on to something. I heard about the Basecamp story because the CTO of a company I worked out spoke out against their no-politics policy. This of course made me sign up for Basecamp's job openings newsletter. Basecamp let those people leave the company, but the job openings news letter has been really slow for the last year and a half.
Katie once again arguing for protecting young people from rape like the right wing extremist she is.
On the most minor point of the Loudon County schools recap: I can confirm that your typical public school tends to be very strict about enforcing its policy of not letting parents (or anyone else) into the building without ID. When I lived in a very small town where everyone knew each other, my kid's school was more lax about security, but that was unusual. Any medium to large district is going to be very uptight about locked-door and entrance policies.
I get that this seems mind-bogglingly incongruous with the obvious disregard by LCPS staff in the story for safety issues like a male and female student in a bathroom stall together.
Could they not send a message from the main office to the security staff by text/radio/whatever that a student had been assaulted and that her family would be showing up? It seems really unbelievable that they can't adapt on the fly in light of a violent assault on a student.
In my daughter's school a couple parents came up to the school weilding a hammer threatening to kick the ass of the student who jumped their kid the previous day.
Administration actually successfully held them off, the cops were called. (my kid happened to be near the front of the building when this happened and witnessed it.)
All that to say - some crazy stuff happens at schools.
I'm actually not defending the school. This whole story is crazy, the lack of concern for the girls involved, the chances the kid got to repeatedly be in school and have access to girls is mind boggling. I completely understand the anger of this parent. The attempts to cover it up are criminal.
I just suddenly remembered the story of my kid's school and...damn. I definitely wouldn't want to be a school administrator.
Yeah, a mentally deranged parent at an elementary school in my mom’s district entered the school with a claw hammer and attacked an innocent little girl (literally bashed her skull in in front of the rest of the third graders), almost killing her. My mom was sent in to do the trauma counseling for the kids and teachers/administrators because of that monster.
A lot of adults/parents are fucking insane. I’m in no way defending the school but if you don’t have an ID, are acting like an upset father (which is completely understandable), and the mom is already there — I don’t think delaying how long it took for the dad to be let in, or being on alert that he was (again, understandably) outraged is what we should be critiquing in this case.
What we should be critiquing and criticizing is how this kid was allowed to stay at the school, to say nothing of being sent to another school — when every public school system I’ve ever heard of has either specific schools for violent kids or has a way to have them home schooled while an investigation takes place. We should be criticizing the cover up of the situation and the period of ignored warnings from the bastard’s teachers and own family members. But not letting the dad inside immediately without an ID or putting security on alert for a guy that (again, understandably) was almost certainly making what the school saw as verbal threats and could be a physical risk, yeah, sorry, that seems fine to me.
OMG.
Is that little girl OK now?
Scary
It has gotten really out of control. Last year police were called to my kids highschool and lock down was in effect about 5 times (that I'm aware of)last fall. Other schools throughout the metro area having similar issues.
Maybe he heard that his daughter was hurt at school and left wherever he was at the time in a hurry. People don't always think clearly when their child has been hurt.
Reasons to homeschool something something.
Update on the Canadian size Z shop teacher https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11542587/amp/Students-threatened-suspension-photograph-trans-teacher-huge-prosthetic-breasts.html
Also being open reactionaries now we need a super gay why i left the left video and it has to be extremely incoherent
That f'ing guy. Of course the school is protecting him. 🙄
This is wrong and hypocritical but if that guy is doing it just to fuck with the system… it makes my heart grow three sizes.
I went back and forth on whether he is. Do we know otherwise? It’s been several months now, right? Isn’t that enough if he’s trolling them? Kids are still being asked to be in an environment with someone dressed as a caricature of womanhood.
Also good timing on your comment we have The Grinch on right now.
He’s got to ride that shit to retirement then go back to being a regular shop teacher guy but call it being “Beyond Gay.” I would pay $100 to see him speak in person about he became so trans he eventually became cis again.
Dudes rock!
I wondered what happened about this fool, and am disappointed the answer is nothing. He and this story are just so grotesque.
It’s always beets.
https://youtu.be/Kw2WsXIgO6A
Arrghh! You beet me to it!
Outstanding! Thanks, Matt.
Re. Loudon County, according to Reduxx the male who committed the assault absolutely is and continues to identify as transgender, and wasn't just "a boy who sometimes wore a skirt". From Reduxx's report: "The officer attending the incident reported there was confusion over the perpetrator’s gender identity but it was later discovered that, despite being male, he had been registered on school documents as female. His parent, on arrival at the school to collect him, confirmed that he identifies as transgender.
The alleged perpetrator has been charged with Assault and Battery and Disorderly Conduct. He was referred to with female pronouns throughout the police report."
It is almost certain, given how trans males who have committed assault have used their identity in the past to shield themselves (very effectively) from more harsh penalties, that this particular assailant's trans identity constituted a protective factor in how the school board treated him, and essentially enabled him to assault another girl.
Banning political talk at work (and offering severance to those who don’t like that) is definitely being done to cut the fat before real layoffs begin. In the tech industry, there has been tremendous growth over the past few years. Many expanded too much or too fast, and there is now a focus on performance and results instead of headcounts.
I used to work for a large tech company who has a ceo that used to be very political and that trickled down to our internal messaging system. It didn’t help that there was a channel called airing of grievances where people would complain all day everyday. It was like Twitter but worse.
There was one guy who looked like a real life wojak (glasses, receding hairline and patchy beard) who would shame people for having different opinions to the point where he was reporting anyone who gave his posts about gun control a thumbs down emoji to HR. He would also non-ironically talk about his wife’s boyfriend.
Another woman would get into constant fights about politics. If someone disagreed she would also report them to HR. She was actually suspended from work for several weeks for being so disruptive; fun fact her last post before getting suspended was “Come at me HR!” She also got to take paid medical leave because “she couldn’t be her authentic self at work” which meant she had to work and couldn’t whine about abortion all day.
There were myriad others. People talking in public groups about their various sexual partners, how they got so much “euphoria” from people being unable to figure out their gender and someone having to explain that they were a genderfuck. There was also someone who would endlessly quote Ana Mardoll in some of the channels to convince people there is a transgender genocide occurring.
I didn’t leave because of that but honestly it was hilarious watching people make absolute fools of themselves all day everyday. I also didn’t necessarily disagree with some posts, but I don’t think the workplace is a great place to talk about abortion, whether you support it or not.
Although there was never a formal banning of political discussions, there were some changes made. They had to ban people from commenting at all in the approved main channels. The CEO also announced they weren’t going to make political donations anymore. These changes were of course deemed ableist and neurotypical supremacy.
I cannot believe that there are actually workplaces like that!
And I am so glad I don't work in one of them. I'll stop complaining about my company's IT problems for a couple of days because that's nothing in comparison.
I am intrigued by the logic that not making political donations is ableist. Or I guess not commenting in the main channel is ableist. Which...I do not get.
I should have written that better; the introduction of locking channels and chat etiquette were ableist. The reasoning (again by a very small number of people who as far as I know still work there, not me) was that autistic and / or ADHD individuals don’t understand nuance, that things they say may not please other people, and that work isn’t the best place to be political. Therefore, it was discriminatory to force people to behave like adults and focus on work not the outrage of the day during work hours.
The removal of political donations and statements was tacit approval of genocide.
No, I did not think you endorsed the position. Your explanation ..I kind of get it. I fo not see how telling people not to talk about politics would be difficult for someone with autism to understand. Also. Every autistic person I met. They were literal. Not incapable of understanding human interaction
People can be such jackasses. I would bet these were younger - perhaps less than 25 - employees?
Oh no the youngest was probably mid 30s.