In responding to the backlash about their handling of the Citibike Karen story, Jesse made two statements: we didn’t get anything wrong factually or made a final verdict, and this is a nothing story.
For the nothing factually incorrect and didn’t make a final verdict remark...what the hell is a final verdict? This is a podcast, not AP News. That’s some moving the goalpost bullshit. As far as factually correct, there have been dozens of episodes on this podcast about narratives creating facts.
The NewsOne story that is at the heart of this fuck up “came out May 25th, the day we are recording.” Jesse calls it a “slightly weird article, but the long and the short or it is there seems to be a lot of evidence that it was his bike. He was there first.” Then Jesse talks about a Citibike Angel program that doesn’t matter at all, which I appreciate he corrected in this episode. Later when the woman comes over: “this woman apparently came and sort of reached over and scanned it and it looks like she acted like she was the victim. I found this to be a compelling article. What do you think?”
Well Jesse, I think you used a bullshit source published the same day you were recording, got criticized for your fuck up by a community that supports you, and then you responded by saying it’s nothing so who cares.
Later in the first episode, Katie then tries to throw you a life preserver by pointing out the article’s author and NewsOne’s bias in covering this story, and you respond “no one can just like be a bad person anymore.”
I encourage everyone to read the NewsOne article. If you follow this podcast or are interesting in how media perpetuates narratives which create facts for everyone, it’s a delight.
I’m happy Katie called him out on the second remark of this episode: why are we doing two stories on a nothing story? But BAR makes it living on nothing stories. There have been some episodes on doll making subculture blowups, adult baby diaper lovers, rage on remaking a dress from a hundred years ago. The podcast says it’s about “internet bullshit,” but it’s a media criticism podcast focusing on stories of the internet’s role in manufacturing consent. Jesse was unprepared for the segment, got rolled by an incredibly shitty source, and became indignant at being questioned. You didn’t understand the impassioned response from the community you built, and so you dismissed it. I’m happy it’s resolved for you.
And Jesse didn't even mention the kids calling the woman's baby retarded or the lack of NBC's initial coverage of the kids' slander, or the total lack of curiosity for how her workplace reacted. https://twitter.com/sniffdodoubleg/status/1659489063919910913
Jesse, the story wasn't a big deal, but you trying to deflate it is now the story. Why not call a spade a spade and say these kids were wrong and this woman got way more hate than she deserved because of our pathetic discourse and media coverage of race?
Maybe Taylor Lorenz or one of his crazy friends is big on the idea that the kids are amazing hero’s and he doesn’t want to burn bridges. This is a pretty sad showing from him and makes you wonder about his overall radar for bullshit.
I listened three times - He may have said they were wrong, but he caveated it so much, diminished the issue and falsely equated the boy and woman such that I did not walk away with that as the takeaway on any of my listens.
"No one did anything worse here other than a minor breach of politeness or citibike etiquette... [A cop would say] it's a nothing incident." Direct quotes from Jesse.
When one listener emailed with the "retarded" quote, he said "I guess that was chatter from the video." Why wasn't Jesse more thorough about this story? And how does the media get away with calling her a Karen when a kid called her unborn child retarded? I initially thought Jesse was going to focus on the media's coverage of the event, rather than his issue his own take.
And that's my big problem - he basically said they were both in the wrong and it wasn't a big deal because he didn't want to engage deeply with this story. But I think that is not a fair and informed take. It was a huge deal for this woman. A group of teenage boys intimidated a pregnant woman, said awful shit to her, and posted a video online that they knew would ruin her life. Saying they were being "dicks" doesn't cover the specifics, not by a longshot. And if he had covered the specifics, maybe I'd have learned more about the kids trying to diffuse the situation!
So to clarify my statement, I wish he would have either laid out all the facts explicitly for us (beginning of this segment was better for that but not sufficient), including the shit the kids said and did. Or, if he really believed the kids were in the wrong, he should have taken a stand and said, yes, these kids were unambiguously wrong. I just completely disagree with his characterization that this was a nothingburger and unimportant - it hurt her a lot (not just disproportionately), and it's squarely within the purview of the podcast.
Holy crap. I listened to the video again and you’re right. “I don’t give a fuck if you cry. Get the fuck out of here. Your baby gonna come out retarded like you.” Saying this stuff while they’ve got her surrounded, giggling and smiling.
I’m even less inclined now to believe their version of events of what transpired before the recording started. What a group of vicious bullies. That goes way beyond teenagers being “dicks.”
I used to look forward to this podcast to come out a couple of weeks after a dust up to give more perspective to a topic poisoned by narrative building. With the subway story, the Holmes article, and this one, I have been waiting for someone else to fix their knee jerk takes. Incuriousness has taken hold here too of late.
I think the downturn in quality is them outsourcing pitches and initial research to their assistants. The assistants are doing their jobs fine. Jesse isn’t.
IMHO, saying that her baby would "come out retarded" seems egregious. It's relevant because it shows the adversarial situation this woman was in. Not one centrist or left-leaning publication that covered this incident mentioned it.
Well... I feel like at least in this episode that is indeed the conclusion he reached. And sort of pretended was the conclusion he reached before, which is not precisely true, but hey.
“Why not call a spade a spade and say these kids were wrong and this woman got way more hate than she deserved because of our pathetic discourse and media coverage of race?”
He... did exactly this? He said those two things in almost exactly those words. Multiple times, actually.
I completely agree. Jesse did say the kids were wrong...but just for squatting on the bikes. He didn't seem to grok anything about the e-bike v. pedal bike scenario, which is actually crucial to the story. Nor did he address the kids' comments or behavior. As Katie said, very low-effort.
There’s a lot of weird new racism against white people and it’s like people don’t know how to acknowledge it especially when it gets put into the smoothie of anti black racism and it’s justifiably upsetting to everyone. I think Jesse got a bit awkward because it doesn’t quite fit into his world model but he also doesn’t have decades with an anti white, yet Hitler loving, Micronesian stepfather where he had to figure out “what it all means.”
The boys were super rude, the virality of the clip brought out a lot of the new aforementioned anti white racism from everyone jumping in on the lady, which I think is the part everyone is most upset about now that I’ve had a week to chew on it, and I think everyone is trying to understand what that means.
Yes, before anyone replies, I know people individually not liking white people isn’t new in itself but it’s become a more prominent social trend and that piece is new.
It's a natural growth of the tautological "racism=power+prejudice" idea - in that formulation, only white people have power (no comment on whether idk black supreme court justices have more power than a white Iowa gas station employee), and they're the only ones capable of racism.
To people who buy that premise, this all went the way it was supposed to go. That lady should have known better and not been white 🙄
Yeah that’s a dumb premise even if granted because of course human dynamics are complicated and even if you have more power in one dimension you probably have less in another.
I also like the idea people are saying “See? I walk around with a heart full of hate and that’s okay because I have no power.”
This is one of the main things I don’t understand. Right now the left is literally a celebration of hate, in large part directed at societies largest ethnicity group and society itself. And somehow millions of people think that is possibly going to lead to a good place.
It's like they're wishing actual "white nationalism" into existence, and I usually feel completely baffled as to why they think it's a good idea. I think a chunk is masochistic self-flagellation and a chunk "I'm secure and nothing will ever actually change, and this is a fun pose to take."
But then of course if you read Will Durant he will tell you how this exact same thing happened in Rome, with elite Romans becoming increasingly oikophobic and mocking their own "cultureless culture", adopting the dress and style of "the other" (in that case, Persia, The Orient, and Gaul), and ultimately sort of dissolving into that ultimate "other," the weird new religion of Christianity. It feels pretty familiar 🤷♂️
I wonder what powerlessness+prejudice adds up to... Terrorism and riots? Which are totally justified because the poor dears have had power withheld from them.
Actually now that I type that, it is literally the excuse that people so inclined use to handwave terrorism and riots 😬
Yes! Everything starts from that premise - power is everything, so fighting against power is always justified, no matter how you fight. Gandhi is rolling over in his grave.
I supported Jesse when his fans got too gender critical (IMHO), I supported Katie's stance on outlets for helping pedophiles, I supported them often when they had good faith takes that just differed from their fans. But this one he just got utterly wrong. I wish he'd own up to it more. Dibs is not a valid concept and the boy was actually being incredibly rude and heartless to squat on this bike. Come on Jesse, do better (unironically).
Jesse got two things wrong even in this segment, and they're very relevant to understand what the kid was doing and why he was so upset when someone checked out "his" bike.
He wasn't riding at a merely reduced rate, he was riding for free. He's part of a program for low-income folks that lets them check bikes out for free for up to 45 minutes at at ime. Normally only pedal bikes are free, with e-bikes available at a reduced rate. However, if the dock has no pedal bikes and only e-bikes, then the e-bikes are free as well.
This goes into the second thing that Jesse got wrong this time: the e-bikes don't become available for free again after 10-15 minutes. They become free again when there are no pedal bikes docked at the station. From the receipts we can see that the e-bike in the middle of the controversy was checked in about 40 minutes before the unfortunate PA checked it out. [edit: I got this wrong, looks like this was five minutes, the 40 minutes of wait time came after the confrontation]
The receipts are congruent with the kid just out having fun, riding with his friends for free. They had likely had docked the exact amount of e-bikes needed to transport the friend group and were waiting for someone to clean out the pedal bikes so they could get another round of free rides. Otherwise, why would the kid even care?
In taking one of the e-bikes, the PA was getting the way of their good time.
These could be interesting details — and Jesse needs to come down off of his horse and do an in-depth, on-the-ground, first-person investigation for the next Primo episode — but the receipts clearly show that five minutes, not 40 minutes, had transpired between dockings (7:19 and 7:24 p.m.).
However the boy’s receipts show that after thr kerfuffle, he only checked the bike out for six minutes and redocked it at same location. Citibike does not charge in this case, bc often the reason is a defective bike. Next, the boy waited about 40 minutes bf checking out the bike again and riding off. This ride was also free, so there were no regular bikes left at that location when he left. It’s not much of a stretch to guess he was waiting for regulsr bikes to be checked out.
I guess that's where I got the 40 minutes from, looking at the timelines it looks like I was wrong on the delta between the kid and the PA having the bike checked out.
The reason this story is so infuriating to me is that an actual real person was hurt. She is on leave from her job, possibly fired. A hospital lost a valuable caregiver. Did she lose her health insurance in the last weeks of pregnancy over this mess? Those are real harms. And what is the end result? Women are being told to shut up and accept being bullied on the street or they might go viral and their lives will be destroyed. That is really fucked up.
And, for the record, if my 17 year old son did this, I would be furious at him and demand that he issue a public apology. Acting like shits to a pregnant adult is inexcusable. I teach HS. I am the parent of a teen. THIS BEHAVIOR IS NOT OK. Why are people excusing it? I’m not saying it’s abnormal. Teen boys are morons. But the adults in the world need to say that they were being total assholes and that is not acceptable behavior in NYC or anywhere else.
Yeah, it’s a nothing story to Jesse because people are mad at him. It’s behavior that reminds me of how the teenager and his family were trying to spin the story. No one forced the teenager to post the video of him being an asshole to the woman. Once there is some blowback, then it’s “why is everyone mad at me, everyone is racist, here’s my gofundme.”
No one forced Jesse to go half cocked at this story. Once there is some blowback, then it’s, “why is everyone mad, the community that supports me is crazy, if you want to be a primo then go to…”
I teach high school a few blocks from where this happened. I think I responded so negatively to BAR’s covering of the subway killing and Citibike stories was that neither of them take care of anyone and no one takes care of them. Every day I take care of my family and the kids I teach. Jesse, given his upper middle class upbringing and solely white collar jobs, is unburdened by anything but transactional relationships. If you take care of other people day in and day out, these episodes sound almost alien.
This take may be a bit harsh, but I’m trying to understand my disconnect from this show of late. I got a lot out of listening to these two people for a long time.
“Jesse, given his upper middle class upbringing and solely white collar jobs, is unburdened by anything but transactional relationships.”
No offense, but I think this is way, way off. You can’t presume to know what kinds of relationships someone you only know from a podcast currently has in his life or has had in the past.
I agree. I know I'm off about that and it's a shitty thing to say; it's stupid to condemn anyone for how they were raised or how they make money. I've been pretty irritated thinking about this podcast of late, and when you're at your angriest you're at your stupidest.
About the relationship line, I should have said something along the lines that your thinking changes when you have loved ones who can't fend for themselves in the situations covered in the past couple of episodes (subway killing and Citibike), and that is a blinder this show suffers from given the two hosts being about 40 with no kids, no elderly family to support, and living in relative financial comfort.
These past few episodes have had class at the forefront, and the divide between their takes and seemingly a lot of people who pay to listen has been pronounced.
Journalism has become an upper middle class profession, and BAR is not an exception (Katie's parents were professors and Jesse's parents were attorneys). Katie has seen enough of how the other half lives and has lived it herself, so her bullshit detector is much stronger and she doesn't get rolled like Jesse does. I listened to the first part of the theft episode, and Katie rags on Jesse for not having had any menial jobs, and Jesse defends himself by saying he delivered pizzas twice and was a roofer for six weeks (a job he got from his friends dad).
Just like my priors informed the shitty line you rightly called me out for, I think the same is true for Jesse.
For the original Elizabeth Holmes article, the contrived conflict for the NYTimes writer was "is this woman who wouldn't have minded killing thousands of people so she could be on some more magazine covers really evil?--she has a nice house and is well spoken and attentive and upper class like me, so she's a good person....right?" You don't have this conflict if you don't have every reporter coming from an Ivy League school and a ton of money.
BAR had a go around of outlets accusing the NYTimes of presenting Holmes in a light too gracious given her actions and made fun of them for trying to pile on for someone who just made some mistakes. If you've read anything about Holmes, the mealy-mouthed treatment of her on this podcast is a total misunderstanding of the person and the culture that celebrated her.
The subway story was treated by BAR and many other outlets with a separateness and aloofness that is possible usually because it's something you didn't have to deal with growing up or have loved ones who can't take care of themselves in these situations. And if you're in a city seeing subway conflicts happen and are in journalism, it seems to be treated as a way to demonstrate your sagacity and empathy rather than confront the horrible zero-sum nature of what's going on the in the subways since covid where the freedom of the mentally ill and the safety of the public are at odds, to put it too simply.
In the Citibike story, the fact that the teenager came from an immigrant family seemed to have been the deciding--and irrelevant--reason why the hospital worker was in the wrong for Jesse. It demonstrates a bigotry of low expectations, which tends to happen with people without much interaction with people across the economic spectrum. I teach down the block from where this happened, and I knew the teenager was full of shit the second he started filming and laughing at the woman. I also knew he had some good friends, given they tried to deescalate the situation and one of them gave his bike to the woman. But those nuances don't get seen because of an aloof, theoretical treatment of these stories according to language of the discourse: immigrant, Black, Karen, white tears etc. And that aloofness is what's drawing my time with this podcast that has been pretty great for a while to a close.
I sort of agree that it’s sometimes annoying to hear their opinions come from very real ignorance about how others move through the world. But I’d rather they not pretend to understand people they don’t seem to have an interest in anyway. Combined with the shoddy reporting here I get why it may not be worthy of listening to.
I guess all I’m saying is maybe it’s better to support differing viewpoints than expect them to see the world as we do all of the time.
I think in pretty much any culture throughout history, it would be utterly unacceptable for a teenage boy to violently block a pregnant woman from travelling around because she was interfering with his fun.
The reason this is a valid news story is because so many people are saying: "Actually, she's the aggressor, because he's from a more oppressed group. And she must be punished." I find that a worrying development.
And it's also pretty bewildering to react with: "Eh. No big deal. Boys will be boys."
Ok, I've asked this nicely twice in other threads so I'll be blunt. What is your beef with PAs? What is the problem with a medical professional on a level between nurses and physicians?
It seems like it might be personal, so I'll be up front that my query is personal as well as I shepherded my ex through the PA application process.
Wait this is a fascinating theory I’ve never heard before so I have no idea if it’s unhinged or not. Can you tell me what are “mid levels” and what are wrong with them?
Indeed. The dispute about the bike may have been no big deal, the public vilification of an exhausted pregnant physician’s assistant as a dreaded racist Karen who deserves to be doxed and lose her job is a notable story. It’s also a classic BAR story.
Here’s another relevant factor Jesse could have actually reported on: as soon as the woman paid for the bike she was liable for it. If the teen had initially tried to take the bike (pre re-docking it) she would have had legit fears that she would have to deal with lawyers and billing departments and the police. If the bike isn’t returned within 24 hours she can be charged $1,200. Is that what initially happened when she started to get emotional?
Jesse keeps framing it as the kid “squatting” on the bike. Once she paid for the bike and he tried to grab it the situation changed. It would be like if she rented a car and he grabbed the keys. She wouldn’t have known his intentions, only that she was liable.
Despite what he says (and may want to believe), Jesse is likely less “grossed out” by the story, itself, than by the prospect that he has stumbled onto a well paying career that frequently involves taking on dubious accusations of racism promulgated by incompetent journalists working the race beat. It’s not what he wants to do with his life. It makes him uncomfortable and seems icky.
Credit to Katie for calling out Jesse on both the weirdness and total half-assed approach of this follow-up.
EDIT: originally mistakenly had woman’s job as less well paying “medical assistant.” Have just changed to “physician’s assistant” after being corrected in comment below.
"Once she paid for the bike and he tried to grab it the situation changed. It would be like if she rented a car and he grabbed the keys. She wouldn’t have known his intentions, only that she was liable."
Yep, 100%. The video widely circulated after the bike had been re-docked and she was understandably already emotional and upset. Plus being ganged up on and surrounded by a group of young men who proceed to start moving you around on a bike is weird and threatening behaviour to any woman.
If Jesse is "grossed out" by the story, then he should be "grossed out" by the kids who recorded it and put it on the internet with no context in the first place so they could get "support."
Hit the nail on the head. The story that Jesse would like this to be isn't the story it actually is. This is less of a "both sides" or "it's complicated" story but rather a case of a victim and aggressor being opposite how it was initially reported. You can nitpick the PA's actions, but blame falls 99%+ on the teenagers, not just for their initial actions, but also for releasing the video and starting this shitstorm.
I do think that is partly what they are and actually something the world badly needs. Sucks for Jesse if that isn’t the job he wants. Maybe he can carve the niche a different shape, though I suspect you lose some people in the process.
There is a real vacuum of voices not on one side or the other examining the culture war.
This story is arguably more important than the Roblox thing and most of the stories covered here that don't involve youth gender medicine or institutional capture.
The title of the NewsOne article was “Mother of Teen in Citibike Video Speaks Out: No One Bothered to Ask Him What Happened.”
The kid edited and released the video to fuck with someone he already fucked with. The video is his side. The subheading says the woman has been “‘rewarded’ for her antics while he and his family are suffering.” Yes, getting suspended, labeled a racist, and death threats are rewards. And this is the shit Jesse thought was “compelling.” Really sad shit.
Also I'm trying to imagine a sub-head like "WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ONE WHITE BOY IN AMERICA" and how racist the outlet would have to be to write such a sub-head 😂
Yes, the mealy-mouthed bit by Jesse in this episode has lead me to cancel my subscription. The show is literally about internet bullshit, so hand-waving away substantive criticisms on how he covered it through "this isn't something serious that we should be talking about" is Michael Hobbesian levels of disingenuous.
Fare the well BARpod, you were interesting and different once.
The story was never important- it was the media blow up about it that is important. A woman was nationally vilified and in danger of losing her job because of it. That’s why it matters.
The villification of the woman is disgusting, as is media apologia for the teen boys.
Excusing shit like this will lead to a right-wing backlash. I'm not blaming Jesse and Katie for anything that happens, politically speaking (this podcast is not that important), but this episode/issue will no doubt be a kind of final straw that breaks the camel's back, and causes people to reject the Dems and vote GOP.
In fairness, to Jesse he does think that's a bad thing and has been quite clear about it. He's vague about who was in the wrong but, his position seems to be that even if Sarah was in the wrong she didn't deserve that level of vitriol.
The "villain" being a teenager also makes it kinda unappetizing to join the pile-on. I kinda got the impression that's why Jesse was hesitant to engage further.
There is some ferociously racist stuff about this kid on the grosser right wing places, just as much about the lady (though her facing employment changes is unconscionable). The less attention given to this the better.
I don't know why he thinks it's significant that the boys are from an "immigrant family", like so what, like most Americans? Especially in New York, that's not particularly rare. It's not a license to be rude and attempt to weaponize social media. Even if you're a teenager.
Maybe he thinks it's significant in that it might mean they don't understand our norms? Indeed- they really don't seem to. The teenager takes advantage of a handout- the free or reduced fare thing- hogs a bike all day- and acts like an asshole to a pregnant woman. And his mom thought that behavior was OK!
We have enough home grown assholes; we don't need more.
Repeating myself from another thread, but the podcast has generally been off its game since Jesse went to HIPPA jail. Both hosts are hedging and pulling punches, as if trying to recover some lefty bona fides. A year ago they would have covered the bike story as another media failure engendered by a tricky racial dynamic, like they did with Central Park Karen. Maybe time for a break to work up some new, fresh topics, or maybe dial back and drop some easy content for awhile while they do so (follow-ups on subjects of past episodes? More Q and A’s?)
Right, and The Fifth Column does the same thing and is much more entertaining about it. The reason I liked this podcast was that they covered the culture war and internet stuff that The Fifth Column tends to avoid.
Did they ever mention the replacement costs for a citibike? Any bike taken out on your account is your responsibility with replacement costing $1200. There’s a lot of money at stake in a dispute over an undocked citibike that helps explain some of the intensity in the incident.
Jessie perpetrates the exact bullshit this show exists to call out, then when people push back against it, he's all "oh I dunno why everyone's mad? This is all stupid, I didn't do anything". Lol, give me a break dude.
The problem is deeper with him and it's related to his whining about Twitter, the shit he talks about when it comes to the neighborhood he lives in/how he goes out for drinks.
He's upset about these things because he desperately wants to be a part of that Brooklyn hipster/writer/intellectual/podcaster/whatever in group. And having to do stories like these honestly, he sees his chance of acceptance slipping away. That's what bothers him. That's also why he gets so flustered when these same types of people criticize him on Twitter. The other people in that group don't have these problems, he shouldn't either right?
Which is fine, if he wants to go do that thing, he should go do that thing. The problem for him is though that he can't do both.
Either way, this is his job, so he should be expected to get baseline facts correct. That's a part of the job. If he can't be bothered to do that, then why/what am I paying for?
Idk, people can have their own opinions. That's mine.
I absolutely agree and understand why you don’t wanna pay for half baked reporting because that’s free everywhere. I just think the reason he didn’t try so hard may not be so deep. Or maybe it is. But he didn’t really say much other than he thought it was stupid.
I had to peek at NewsOne today just to see what kinds of "news stories" they're running. I've never head of them before the Citi Bike thing.
They have this long piece lamenting that "white people" raise more money on GoFundMe, GiveSendGo, etc, than "black people." This is, in their words "unfair" and "proves" that not only do white people hate black people, but is an example of "the lengths they'll go to protect each other"
See: "GoFundMe, GiveSendGo And The White Privilege Of Raising Funds Online"
I started reading the Crowdfunding White Privilege article and the first tweet they link to is from someone with the pronouns "they/them/tired." That one hurt.
The conclusion of the article is that "crowdfunding operates largely as a popularity contest, distributing help in deeply inequitable ways" and so "leaving it up to the public to pick who should have access to basic rights leads to deeply unfair outcomes." To be fair, the last gofundme I contributed to was to a white woman who was an ESL teacher at my school who died of cancer at 34, and she was pretty popular, which is pretty unfair.
But as Jesse said about the Citibike article, "I found this to be a compelling article. What do you think?"
The Crowdfunding article is reposted from another dogshit site call The Conversation with a similar jigsaw puzzle of sadness aesthetic. I clicked around and found a website called Flipboard where you can have stories curated, and here are the categories for NewsOne: Jordan Neely, Obamas after the White House, Tribute to Harry Belafonte, Don Lemon's Most Memorable Moments, Jemel Hill, and Black Folklore.
There's no problem that websites like these around; I'm sure the right has similar in number and ridiculousness. But these websites have an answer seeking out questions. And if you have a media criticism podcast, and this is not something you can detect before blasting it out, then....well...that sucks.
I can't write anymore about this. I believe I had a small but impactful stroke at the pronouns they/them/tired and just realized it. I'll link my gofundme when the time comes, which I hope, for my family's sake, has deeply unequal outcomes.
I wonder who their audience is? I'm not sure it's African Americans, I think it's white people who want something slightly more activist than DailyKos, etc.
I found this podcast a little after it started when I started freaking out that I was turning into a conservative when media I would normally read lost their god damned minds. This podcast and other independent outlets helped me get back on solid ground, which was more or less where I started. The impact of narrative perpetually reinforced is wildly destructive. From the comments here, it looks like there are reasonable people here who can go back and forth on a topic without invective. I selfishly would like to that is the audience. Maybe there are a thousand of those and 11,000 paying subs screaming for Libs of TikTok bullshit, or maybe 11,000 pay subs screaming for NewsOne.
The other thing Jesse ignored or at least downplayed is that the teens themselves are the reason this blew up, because they recorded it and posted it. They weren’t “just” squatting on a bike, they were harassing a woman who called them on it and THEN they were directly responsible for this getting spread online.
So if Jesse really does think this is a nothing story, he should blame the teens for boosting it.
The response to the Citibike fuck-up would have been very disappointing if it wasn't exactly what I expected.
K&J once again pointedly ignored the existence of their thoughtful subscribers in favor of quoting at length from reddit. The "amazing community"' here is worth acknowledging only when asking for subscriptions and is apparently too deplorable to consider otherwise.
Jesse proceeds to selectively (and once again, wrongly) distort the facts which have come out (and which were available at the time of the original fuck-up, had he decided to apply some reading comprehension to this story in the first place). Superficiality is suddenly a valid excuse from someone who has repeatedly (and correctly) accused other journalists of laziness.
He still fails to mention, omits or misinterprets details in order to minimise any errors (the timeline, the authorship of the NEWSONE article; how Comrie wasn't "caught on video" - which implies something neutral like a surveillance camera when she was filmed by one of the kids and the video was shared by them in order to defame Comrie as a racist; that they didn't just "push the bike" back in the dock - which also depersonalises the situation and implies they were just moving an object when in fact they forced HER - a person - and the bike she was already on back into the dock; etc)
He then devotes even longer to bemoaning how he is "grossed out by this whole thing" and the "cavalcade of commentary" over something "that's not a story" and that "we end up getting dragged into it as a show" What the actual fuck? Who put a gun to his head, dragged him into the studio and made him feature this non-story on the show? It was HIS choice to focus on it. The hypocrisy of these grandstanding denunciations is what's grossing ME out.
Katie then pipes in to say "There were hundreds of comments in the reddit thread. I didn't read them. I was hoping you would have something more substantive that we got wrong than just like, it's a matter of opinion. Frankly, I'm not sure that I trust your analysis of this." No shit. To which Jesse's response is that it's "so discouraging that we're now litigating this". What is discouraging is that instead of a simple "I got X and Y wrong and should probably read things more thoroughly and critically next time" we're treated to a lot of self-serving obfuscation and deflection.
People get things wrong. It happens. Those with integrity own their mistakes. Others continue to evade or minimise them and attempt to shift focus by whining "why is everyone even talking about this?!". I have very little respect for the latter.
I've turned off my subscription renewal and only mention that (here, knowing they don't even read this) because I will miss you smart and witty people, your variety of perspectives and the intelligent discussions. But I'm done supporting lazy, self-serving and contemptuous bullshit. Summer is coming, I'm going to touch a LOT of grass and use the BARpod money for an ice cream cone.
"she was filmed by one of the kids and the video was shared by them in order to defame Comrie as a racist"
I can't believe he didn't mention this - this is why people are outraged, c'mon Jesse! This isn't weaponizing white tears, it's red meat for race-baiting hyper-online progressives, and at least one of these kids realized that it would be popular or they wouldn't have posted it!!
I am almost with you on cancelling my subscription. But yess. It is such fucking bullshit for Jesse to say Citibikes is a nothing story when they chose to cover it
And yeah. This has been bothering me for the last few months - all the fucking asking for subscribers and then. .not reading the threads?
I think on this occasion it was fair to refer to the reddit thread. It's a pretty long post and provided a lot more detail in its reasons for disagreement.
Yeah, I sort of couldn’t believe that comment. Jesse could even walk down the street to a CitiBike location where this same thing is happening and ask someone how it works…
Right. The point where the video was posted online with the intent of defaming Comrie is where it moved beyond "a couple of people were jerks to each other," and is also *how* it got national attention.
100% with you. The two of them have made a lot of money dunking on shitty journalism, and the ride has been fun. I don’t want to spend money on them to lazily use shitty journalism to dismiss the people who support them.
I cannot believe that Jesse, a guy who made his bones on the most toxic culture war bullshit and who spent years fighting online against hundred of bad faith zealots, wipes his hands clean of people who support his work over him doing lazy journalism. They have made a lot of calls I don’t agree with over the years, but they backed their shit up and did their homework. I respected them for that. This upper crust dismissive bullshit ain’t it for me.
I've also turned off my subscription renewal. For me, it started with their episode on immigration where they came off as totally uninformed and unresponsive to feedback. The constant referring to reddit and not the primos thread was another thing that irked me. Plus, the "we're such a lazy and unprepared podcast hahaha" is sort of funny at first, but got old real quick.
It's too bad. Love the community here. Genuinely like Katie and Jesse. But they're making unforced errors and acting oblivious to how fortunate they are to earn 6 figures for 2 hours of content a week...
With the help of Trace and Lex, I'm gonna guess less than the 40-50 hrs most workers put in a week... All I'm saying is that, according to their own words, they have a great source of income compared to other journalists.
Maybe you disagree, but I think it gives them a responsibility to appropriately research what they put out there, especially when their brand is in part to criticize how shady so many journalists are...
They pay Trace and Lex, which is an expense your average worker doesn't have.
They're also earning better money than most journalists because they're way more talented than most journalists, which is something that happens within the mainstream media as well -- the stars make the big bucks.
As I said above, I have zero problem with people leaving if the content no longer lives up to the expectations nor do I have problems with people giving their reasons for leaving. I can understand why someone would be turned off by a lack of research.
What I don't get is the concern with their six figure incomes and that they should demonstrate gratitude for their good fortunes. When people unsubscribe from traditional media, they don't say it's because the editors and writers are too highly paid, don't work enough hours, and need to be more grateful. They stick to their unhappiness with the product.
It's not a concern Ann. I have no problem with them making a great living, if I did, I wouldn't be contributing to it :)
All I was saying by mentioning the six figure income is not that they should show gratitude to us, but that they're in a great position that allows them to properly research and prepare for this podcast. Other (less talented) journalists would kill for this opportunity.
Their earnings is only relevant in the sense that if they earned very little from the podcast, the inadequate research they've shown on some topics would be more understandable.
Someone had written a long post on reddit which provided some links and further analysis. I think on this occasion it was fair to refer to reddit because although there was disagreement here no-one provided the same level of additional reporting (for want of a better word).
I generally agree with you but this seems unfair "K&J once again pointedly ignored the existence of their thoughtful subscribers in favor of quoting at length from reddit" and maybe not the best reason to cancel your subscription.
I am a subscriber and I read these threads *and* everything on the reddit forum. The reddit post that Jesse low-key dismissed was actually well written and thoughtful and provided information he should have known, had he actually done anything close to due diligence for this segment. There's no comparable feature on substack (unfortunately).
TL;DR Yes, the subreddit has a brash and sometimes straight-up offensive contingency, but I find the snobbery here regarding it over the top (not you, specifically, but this is a theme that comes up a lot). If you feel like you need to unsubscribe, more power to you, but I don't think the subreddit should be a factor.
Ok, that's a valid point. I wrote my comment right after listening to the episode and didn't formulate it in the most nuanced and clear way so allow me to elaborate:
1) you are absolutely right - the reddit post Jesse low-key dismissed was very good, full of factual info, laid out the timeline and basically did Jesse's homework for him. It was probably the best factual rundown to be found on either forum and worth referencing. I didn't have a problem with that, although I see how my phrasing may have implied I did. But there was a lot of overlap between the commentary on the two forums and here, on Substack, there was also a lot of contextual discussion which would have helped him understand not just *what* he got wrong but *why* so many people took issue with his take.
2) this was the fifth or sixth episode where K&J chose to reference feedback or suggestions they got from reddit while ignoring Substack comments; that is, until that point in the show where they use the "awesome community" as a selling point for subscriptions. The contrast becomes noticeable with repetition. If you're going to ask people for money, rely on their support and laud how awesome the resulting community is, to then thoroughly ignore it *while often engaging with reddit* leaves a bad taste. The vibe that comes across (and it is subjective, I know) is a bit exploitative and contemptuous of those who do pay up.
3) that said, it's the least of my objections. The laziness is basically the main reason I'm opting out of the subscription. To keep paying would be to keep encouraging it. I can keep listening to the free episodes and check reddit (for free as well).
One thing I don't really recall being touched on in the original episode and certainly not in this one is that the PA had every right to feel threatened by a group of strange men. Jesse's got his dudely privilege on display here, he doesn't realize how unsettling that can be (I'm not saying there's no risk for men but it's very, very different).
I don't know, seems like Jesse is being willfully obtuse about this.
Yes, being accosted by a group of mildly aggressive teenage boys can be scary until you get out of the situation, and the same people who spent years hashtagging this kind of incident as MeToo are now dismissing it because of the races of the individuals involved.
I agree that this shouldn't have been a national news story IF a video hadn't been posted and IF the PA hadn't been put on leave. When irritating interactions with teen boys have occasionally happened to me, they didn't make the news or ruin my day. But nobody was trying to make me a pariah or get me fired, either.
Jesse is a 6-foot-something man. No matter how beta his personality may be, his experience navigating the world will look a lot different than the experience of a smaller woman. I know that the concept of privilege has been beaten to death in the past few years, but I think he needs to acknowledge that he has a blind spot in that regard.
I get what you are saying about feeling more vulnerable as a woman, but the truth is men are much more likely to be victimized by strangers.
I say this not because the woman here shouldn't have felt like she was potentially in danger, but because people often don't know women are on the whole less likely to be targeted.
It's not "feeling" more vulnerable, though, it's *being* more vulnerable. Men attacked by other men have some chance of defending themselves; women largely don't. You can't know what that feels like unless you've lived it.
I can assure you being confronted by a group, bigger person, or someone with a weapon who you think is willing got commit violence is basically equally "i'm in danger" whether you're a man or a woman.
Most women are less capable of defending themselves from men than most men. We walk through the world knowing this. It's ok to acknowledge this difference.
Jesse, people were mad at you because in the previous episode you said “turns out she was acting like a karen” and used a completely biased article to reach that conclusions
I think this is the key criticism that was missed (or ignored because it was mostly discussed here and not on the subreddit - ick, subreddits). Jesse basically accepted the newsone article when the writer of said article was instrumental in the anti Comrie shitstorm, and didn't mention that then or now. And this was crazy stuff, dragging her husband into it, really playing up the race angle... That seems like something BARpod usually cares about or at least notices.
Anyway, whatever, they're done with it now, hopefully Comrie can just move past it too. It's just internet bullshit, after all.
Not mentioning that the news one author led the pile on is a pretty big oversight. In years past they would have jumped all over that. I don’t know if Reddit pointed that out but we discuss f it here! They should read Substack comments more maybe?!
That's my issue here as well, and I didn't even think it was really worth getting upset about it after the first episode. However now after the correction I'm kind of pissed off about it, it's one thing to be lukewarm on taking a hard stance against the teenagers, it's another thing to get called out for it, make a correction, and completely fail to correct yourself while doubling down on the original problem.
LOL isn't the advice of everyone, including K&J, that when the mob comes calling, never to apologize?
Not that I really think their comments section is "a mob". Even the most upset/angry/intense B&R thread is like Kant, compared to most internet comments secctions.
Re: Citi Bike - let us all remember how shitty you feel when you’re pregnant. She was probably getting off a 12-hour shift, feeling sick, and her feet were killing her. These kids were being assholes, but they’ve never been pregnant, so they don’t know. Anyway, I’m not surprised she went a little crazy. I probably would have done the same. But then again I am a white cisheteronormative woman, so.. we all know how bad I suck.
I think I once read that women's serum testosterone increases by 70% during pregnancy. I hate to admit this, but I sometimes became a fucking rage monster when I was pregnant.
Truly monstrous. Maybe she was just hungry the poor thing. A friend of mine was about 8 months pregnant when Panera ran out of orange scones. She started sobbing and yelled “if I’d wanted a fu**ing cinnamon roll I would have went to Cinnabon bi*ch!” at the woman taking orders. She’s never yelled at anyone that I know of before or since. I helped by bursting into mad cackles. I’ve never been pregnant but if I missed my nap AND had to go shopping you could get disemboweled for pulling a face much less being a chinchilla denier. Your wife must be lovely ;)
9/11 and vaccines couldn’t make me a denier but that chinchilla flipped me immediately.
After her sobbing got real bad I said I would go and get it but then she didn’t want it anymore and what hurt the most was not being supported but also I had to be the leader and make sure nothing crazy happened.
Okay initially I was on your side, because I thought a chinchilla was some kind of disgusting small yappy dog, but now that I’ve googled “chinchilla” I think she had a point.
Same! And after I delivered! I actually heard on the Huberman podcast yesterday that one of the chemicals infants’ heads secrete increases maternal aggression. So it’s not our fault. Ha!
The story isn't that there was an altercation over a bike. The story is that one party of that altercation uploaded a video which prompted other people to get the other party doxxed and suspended from their job.
Unfortunately, part of that story is determining the facts of the altercation.
I feel like people in the comments here FREAKING OUT about this and cancelling subscriptions are illustrating unfortunately why this is a story. It's a story because it's been cherry picked out of 1000 similar interactions and amplified because it stokes ALL of the endorphin / rage machine buttons that it can.
This is a story about two people being a bit rude. And somehow the rage machine forces us to talk about it like it is ESSENTIAL to show which one of them are more wrong. NO. It's just bullshit.
If people are yelling about canceling their subscription because Jesse or Katie picked the bad person instead of the good person, then I agree with your criticism. I don’t know the split between those comments and the ones I have been trying to make to voice my discontent.
I listen to this podcast for media criticism. I appreciated the topics they covered and how they focused on how narratives are used to shroud events in a haze of illiberal ideology across the political spectrum.
I would have preferred if the Citibike story focused on what has made me a loyal listener: how the media creates and perpetuates outrage, causing discourse to become both lose your job serious and over-the-top pro-wrestling ridiculous.
For the past few stories they (mostly Jesse) have tried to thumb the shit-covered scale of discourse one way or another, and that’s not what I signed up for. My emotional reaction to the past few stories is rooted in their laziness of research, focusing on who the bad person is rather than the media’s role in making everyone the bad person for profit, and Jesse’s petulance at being called out for reliance on incredibly biased sources (NewsOne). I will admit I’m a New Yorker, and the laziness of reporting on topics here has been especially grating.
I wish the Citibike episode was about the rage machine, as so many stories in the past have been about.
I agree that could have been an interesting piece and more along the lines of the kind of content we like to hear on this pod. E.g. "here's where the media went wrong in covering this" similar to the Central Park Karen ep. But I really do think that most of the angry comments are people who are furious that Jesse didn't more firmly pick the "right side".
The Lululemon story and the reaction our hosts had to it is illustrative of some of the conservative / liberal divide.
Jesse was puzzled at why someone would care about something that doesn't have a material impact on them. The reaction that conservatives have to stories like this isn't about the material impact. It's about the differing treatment between people who are pro-social and anti-social, an inversion of how they ought to be treated.
The shoplifters are defecting on society and its rules. They're placing their own material benefit ahead of the good of society. The workers are apparently obeying the rules in working a job. They're also chastising the rule breakers.
Lululemon, in its non-confrontation policy, is also defecting. As the hosts acknowledge, they've made a calculation and determined that their own benefit is maximized through a non-confrontation policy.
I think there's widespread agreement that thieving is a moral wrong, with narrow life-and-death loaf-of-bread exceptions. I think there's also agreement that telling a thief to get out is morally permissible, probably even praiseworthy.
And yet, we see the retailer punishing the pro-social and telling its workers they have to let the anti-social go without even a tsk. This inversion is the outrage.
I think conservatives are likely puzzled at how liberals can reduce these stories to mere material terms. It's not about the material goods. If they were stealing far cheaper or far more expensive things, I think the reaction from conservatives would be the same. In this case they stole $7,000 worth of clothes.
Imagine instead each thief stuffed a single Lululemon keychain, priced at $24, down his pants. The employees yelled at them to get out and followed them. Lululemon fired the employees. The reaction would have been the same.
Came here to say this exact thing. Ordinary people being expected to follow the rules (and getting punished, fired, and shamed when they break the rules in service of the law) while anti-social thieves are allowed to run free just makes normal, rule-following people feel angry and demoralized, as if we're suckers for still abiding by the social contract.
Yeah. Fucking weird. . I was at a Rite Aid near my old job, which was near-hood. Dude came in grabbed an umbrella and ran out. No one blinked an eye except one guy who tried to run after them. Everyone was black. Except the cashier was Bengali and I am white
I don't care about one person stealing one thing. This is organized crime. And no one cares. And then stores close down and then it's because of white supremacy. It's funny I guess, for employees, when it's not awful for anyone wanting to do business in "deserts".
And a whole bunch of stores have shut down because of theft. Making it worse is that due to the theft, they put shit under lock, so then people do not want to shop.
Several years ago I remember reading an article about how racist Walgreens was for putting certain merchandise in locked cases because some of it was hair product that was almost exclusively used by black women. I could not and cannot wrap my head around that logic. Loss prevention departments do not randomly choose items to lock down. They do it based on what gets stolen the most. How about chastising the people who are shoplifting and making life harder for everyone else?
Your points are well taken, but you don't need conservative values to think that stealing is bad. If this sort of theft becomes normalized, prices go up for everyone, which is bad for the person who's on the margin of being able to buy these things. Stores close (as is apparently the case in San Fransisco right now in particular), people lose their jobs, customers lose access, the neighborhood becomes a ghost town. Lululemon isn't that important, but this same mentality is how food deserts happen.
I also think there are many examples of things that have been going on for a while, but which have created new controversies simply because of our new social media environment. Just because corporations were doing "X" 20 years ago doesn't make it good. Corporations were doing a lot of bad shit 20 years ago. In fact, back then, being against corporations was cool.
Everyone is getting mad at Jesse for the Citibike part of the episode, but I thought his "don't the stores have insurance" was a far more egregious comment.
I'm not saying that only conservatives think stealing is wrong, I'm saying they're especially disgusted by the inversion of appropriate consequences. The theft isn't the story here, it's the company's response to it.
A similar situation is schools with zero tolerance no fighting policies. A kid can be physically bullied and the school will do little or nothing to punish the bully. But if the kid strikes back, it becomes a fight, and he gets the same punishment as the bully.
In my experience conservatives align more on the "it is right to punch back and the bullied kid shouldn't be punished for it" side, and liberals on the "violence is never the answer" side.
Yes, thank you for this comment, especially this statement: "And yet, we see the retailer punishing the pro-social and telling its workers they have to let the anti-social go without even a tsk. This inversion is the outrage."
I was waiting for them to acknowledge that stealing is generally considered morally wrong. They kind of got there at the end with the near-anarchy / why should we have to pay if everyone just steals idea, but I was kind of frustrated by the limited moral / pro-social perspective here. (They don't have to believe that it's wrong, but they could at least acknowledge that some people might feel that way.)
I've read this thread multiple times on multiple days because I have a problem, and this is the first time I realized that you wrote that the shoplifters are "defecting" not "defecating".
It would appear my problems are bigger than I thought.
The weird thing here is the cons are supposed to be pro-corporation. The corporations have these policies because it is in their financial interest. Primarily it's in their interest because of the shitty ways that conservative politicians have shaped the landscapes for corporations in order to give their buddies unfair advantages. They can write off theft losses. They can fire employees at will. Etc.
None of this is about the individual interaction - it's about the corporate policies which are a result of corporations getting basically whatever they want from our political systems.
I don't think you understand what write offs are nor how they work...
"writing off" theft losses is the same impact as realizing the cost of the item at time of sale, just with no associated revenue. It's very much a bad thing.
This episode pushed me 1 step closer to unsubscribing entirely . For only the second time I fastfowarded through the preliminary banter. And the reading of the bad reviews was just ...why.
The part about the bike race was pretty fucking funny.
However. What really pissed me off is Jesse being like why was the Citibike story national news and I don't get why people on Reddit were mad at us. Well. First. If you don't know why it is a national story, why the hell did you cover the story at all? Second. Did you read the substack comments at all? Where people are paying and as you say you wouldn't be able to do all this work without the paying subscribers. Because here, I didn't see anyone mad. Mostly it was just confusion as to how you could read these stories and think the woman was at fault at all. There was no anger just confusion. Which is honestly what I saw on Reddit too
Third. You groaned about the author of the News One story comparing what happened with CitiBikes to Emmett Till, but it was HER story that led you to say that maybe the woman did do something wrong. But maybe just maybe the fact that a reporter would make such over the top claims would lead you to carefully analyze what she was saying.
Fourth and final. No one was asking you to revisit the story. I honestly just expected you to say we read the timeline wrong. We were wrong. That is it. 30 seconds
The second half was pretty good. Iwould just add that employees might not want to see people stealing because they find it morally offensive
Not that I'm mad but I agree, I don't understand why J & K or Lex or Tracing don't read comments on the podcasts. I get not reading the weekly threads but you'd think they would be interested in reactions to their product. I don't expect them to directly comment to posts but just be aware.
I do biological monitoring, which involves a lot of sitting in the car wondering why I went to college instead of becoming a deckhand on a tramp steamer.
This podcast is basically a business expense. This podcast and paying for extra lives on Two Dots.
Agree plus it was especially enjoyable when Katie joined in on the Jesse pile-on multiple times. How can I even be mad at Jesse when I'm also happily laughing at him. The fun of BARpod for me is half reporting and half fun bantering between two amusing people. If one aspect isn't at its highest level, the other usually makes up for it. Jesse messed up, bur more importantly, I laughed a lot in this episode.
Do we really know this? I guess I'm just gobsmacked that this could possibly be true. I don't know what the perma-banneds are paying but if they have only about 12,000 primos and also pay two employees...also I've never met anyone IRL who's heard of this podcast
On a long drive yesterday, my husband couldn't understand why I wanted to listen to a new BARpod episode right away, before listening to a fairly dry nonfiction book (Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World). Then he started criticizing Jesse for continuing to discuss the CitiBike story while saying it wasn't worth discussing. Of course the criticism was justified, but I had to defend Jesse.
Sad to say, Katie and Jesse and their devoted fans are kind of like the family I used to have, where everyone was free to say what they thought, and it was OK if you messed up sometimes as long as you could still laugh at yourself and make other people laugh. (Maybe it's no coincidence that "primo" means cousin!) Get-togethers with my actual family have become such a minefield of potential misgenderings and worse. I think it will take a lot of missteps and disappointments for me to unsubscribe.
Yes. I found this very unsatisfying. Jesse, maybe don’t joke around so much about your low-effort work product if you care about keeping your paying subscribers.
The wait staff is not a good analogy. They have thousands of subscribers. The power imbalance of one or a few primos saying they'll unsubscribe isn't like a customer berating a minimum wage wait staff. And no one is saying you have to be rude to them.
What we're saying is that we pay to support quality content. If the content isn't up to par, it's totally appropriate to stop paying for it. Explaining why you stop paying for it, when done in good faith, may even help the content creator question some errors they may have made.
We have a weird parasocial relationship though. Even when they say stuff where I’m like “nope!” about pedo stuff I try to remember they are still people and doing their best.
I'll cut people a great deal of slack if they're doing their best, even if they come up a bit short. This was an admittedly "low effort" update, that even Katie (who made no effort on her part) called out. Sorry, but criticism is well within bounds here.
I totally agree that we're paying for quality content and that explaing why you've stopped paying, when done in good faith, is fine.
What I don't like is when people get into "this isn't right for people nearing 40" or "they're making six figures so they should do better" territory. That's where the waitstaff comparison comes into it.
I agree with you about the age thing Ann, that's really uncalled for.
What they earn is only relevant in the sense that this is basically their full time job (I know Jesse has his newsletter and Katie sporadically writes articles). If they made 20k a year from the podcast, the lack of research would be more understandable. But here, they earn enough to make this their full focus, have 1-2 assistants...
That's great! That's why I was a subscriber from the beginning. I want them to take the time to research what they want. But shouldn't quality and expectations for the content produced then also be higher than if this was a side hustle?
They have both at times seemed exhausted and I think they are going through the newly successful business person thing where they haven’t figured out they need to take vacations and built out a support team. Like they should have regular co hosts where they can just take off for a week or two a few times a year and for the most part they don’t.
I've just been paying for jokes and banter the whole time. I'm not looking to K & J for big-time journalism, although some of their stories have been great. (I loved the Unitarian episode.)
I didn’t threaten to unsubscribe, so I don’t know why you’re directing this at me, Ann, and also, no it is not like being rude to waitstaff. This is requesting a certain level of effort and attention to a product we pay for. Jesse was poorly prepared to present this story, and it’s fine to point that out.
I actually unsubscribed around nine months ago and only resubscribed for this single month. I mostly did so because listening tended to make me anxious / mad due to how close I was to some of the crazy stuff they were talking about. Not really their fault, though the lads at TFC manage to talk about similar stuff in a much more enjoyable way.
The other big turn-off was how obviously unprepared they were for a lot of episodes and how they'd joke about that. I get that I was only paying $5/mo, and I think I got my money's worth. However, for two people nearing 40, joking about being unprofessional rubbed me the wrong way, especially as there pod is probably one of the biggest on Substack.
$60 a year could buy you five subscriptions to glossy magazines that did journalism back in the day. And they ran more than 4 stories per month.
I know it's not fair exactly to expect the same level as that but I'm buying about $300/yr worth of independent journalist output because I enjoy them more than the current output by the glossies.
On Jesse's "I don't get why this is a national story."
True. It shouldn't be. But lots of stuff that is really just dumb interpersonal drama becomes national news because of the underlying dynamics. This pod has at times been good at unpacking why people are so enraged about a conflict between a bird-watcher and dog-walker. The fact that millions of people are enraged at bullshit is interesting in and of itself. As others have stated: reporting on dumb internet bullshit is the entire point of this pod.
Exactly. It is just a little baffling that he asks why it is a national story when he covered the story.
But I do think it became a national story in part because liberal or maybe progressive America is very focused on the idea that we are still in 1955 and white women hate black boys. Just a nicer face
I really think this has gotten worse because of the pandemic. Journalists mostly worked from home and so they didn't get out and didn't have the opportunity to do more traditional reporting. Most of their friends and relatives were also white collar workers who were working from home and weren't really involved in the real world outside of their homes. They were spending a lot of time on the internet and on social media sites and their friends were the same. So journalists ended up reporting more on stupid internet stuff. Unfortunately, they're not going back to reporting on the real world stuff.
you probably should unsubscribe. you’re wasting a lot of energy into a podcast that’s supposed to be fun. take a break, and when you start to miss our favorite horse fucker and lesbian, come on back.
I am really not. I live in NYC. There is a CitiBike dock down the street from me. And I agree it is supposed to be fun .But it isn't always .I will probably unsubscribe soon but I am not ready yet. It is overall too good
This isn't a fandom question. Parasocial relationships require an emotional interest/obsession with Katie and Jesse's personas. That's not what people are doing here. They're criticizing arguments made by the hosts.
So let me get this straight, when people pay a subscription to a podcast and comment on how much they love it, do they care too much?
Because people stopping to pay for same podcast and explaining what they found lacking is the same thing.
You're talking about hills to die on, triggers, pettiness... Dude, you can act above the fray all you want, that people care too much, but you're taking this too seriously too. People you don't know made comments about the show you felt compelled to respond to, and we're having a conversation about it. It's not that deep.
Me? Haha I’m far more chaotic. But if you’d like you can look through for comments of me going “yay team” and you won’t find any. So yeah. Saying “I love this thing so much” without any added value is utterly masturbatory. I just heard about the outrage and wanted to see it. It’s funny to me because it’s funny. It is objectively funny that this causes any consternation on people.
I just like pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. And this whole nothing burger has no bun.
People don’t like that. I think it’s hilarious they don’t like it.
Even the response I get? Meh. It’s uninteresting.
Respond if ya want but I’m prolly done with this. There’s a piece of toast I have to go watch toast.
The opening two banter stories were a dramatic enactment of the little-known Dr. Seuss book, “Shoo Flies, Jew Flies”. Sadly, Disney just closed its attractions based on the tale, in favor of the new animatronic extravaganza, “Dr. Strangio and the Multiverse of Pronouns.”
This is a story about two people being a bit rude, tens of thousands of similar interactions are happening all over the internet. The fact that one of them was probably more of a dickhead than the other should be immaterial. none of us would care if ti weren't for the algorithm pushing this shit at us primarily because it's an interaction between people of different races, which is really awful when you think about it. There probably was a white kid doing this exact thing to a white dude 2 blocks away but no one hears about it - Heck that kid might have done the same and tried to make his video go viral too, but it didn't because it doesn't stoke the culture wars.
The whole point I heard Jesse making is that if we had just collectively ignored it the whole world would be a better, less racist place.
I do of course agree that J&K should stop reading reddit any stick with us, we are clearly superior, more intellectual, and all around sexier.
You make a good point. The problem though is why did Jesse cobet it then? Like I only heard about this because of the podcast and I live in Manhattan. Actually. No. I heard about it on the ipen thread here and then the podcast covered it.
I should be clear. What pissed me off was not the original coverage of the stiry. I was a bit flummoxed how he could read the News One article and come to the conclusion he did. It made no sense to me. What pissed me off is - if it is that much of a nothing story, then do not cover it. And also do not decide that ok maybe the woman really was a Karen based on an article that was clearly a hatchet job
I tend to agree, in that it overall was not a story they needed to cover and by only kinda covering it they seem to have really annoyed some people.
But, I do feel like it was really a very tiny mention it in the first episode it was in, and therefore was confused by the vehemence of the backlash (which actually I wasn't aware of as I don't read reddit and the response here was much milder, until this response).
Guys! Don't read reddit they don't even pay for the pod!!
Also! You don't have to respond to every criticism. C'mon Jesse, you got off twitter for a reason!
Jesse on the citibike story think you missed the part where the kids sister is online being a massive racist demanding that Sarah lose her job and have her crowdfunding money revoked. On another note the reason this is a national story is because the left has a racial grifting problem that you could address.
I’m not canceling anything. I still like the show and “ants on the keyboard” was really funny. However, I’m bummed that the fact that the Newsone article was written by someone who led the pile on against Comrie didn’t get mentioned. That is a really interesting angle, and it’s the kind of journalistic ethic (or complete lack there of) that this podcast has covered in the past. Even if it is a “non-story,” the journalist’s attack on Comrie is a meaty subject, because a journalist shouldn’t do that and still call themselves a journalist. I hope you aren’t resting on your laurels, because that would be boring.
I think it's even more specific than that. Ian Miles Cheong posted years ago about having an ant problem, and someone or other jokingly exaggerated that to imply he is covered in a layer of ants at all times. As always it's tough to peel back the layers of irony and exaggeration, but I think an older ep of barpod had a timeline of The Ant Joke.
Ok- does Jesse seriously not understand why an employee would be upset about shop lifting?? I’m pissed off hearing about it third hand!! It’s a moral injury. Societies can’t function in an atmosphere of rampant theft. It’s like one of the most basic rules of the social contract.
There is a reason why in the old
times horse theives were hanged and pick pockets got their hands cut off.
Yeah I was confused by that as well. I would consider it part of my job to try protect my employer’s property if I could reasonably safely. It’s weird that you would just not care? Do you not care if your neighbor is getting robbed either? You’re supposed to just stay out of it? I don’t get where a lot of people are coming from these days on what seem like such basic issues of morality and decency. It’s like I’m from another planet or something. But then I’m almost always on team Karen when these stories come up.
Def agree with you here. I'll add that not everyone working in retail is a burnout who hates their job, boss and company.
Even people who work in retail (from time to time) take pride in their work and their ability to maintain a nice-looking, well-functioning store. You don't have to make $100s an hour to take pride in your work and to want your efforts to be respected. Retail workers spend a lot of time in theses stores putting up displays, doing inventory, cleaning, training, working etc... And yes they do it bc it's part of the job and would get fired if they didnt. But is it so crazy to think that there is a group of people who prefer to not show up at work wishing they weren't there and coping by getting high and slacking off? IMO it's understandably exasperating to get fired bc you're fed up with people coming into your workplace to do illegal shit and to disrespect you and the social contract.
Exactly this! Example; at work we had a colleague that didn't do his part of work as a team member for a collective project. The part of work he chose not to do had a cascading impact on absolutely everyone on our team. The good part is that we pulled together and took over his portion of the work to meet a deadline, albeit at longer hours and greater stress for all of us. The 'bad' part is that he received no repercussions, no consequences for kind of deflecting and putting this last-minute high-stress pressure on everyone. The result? A genuine apathy has settled on the team, an idea of 'why work so hard and commit to something as a team whereby we are paid the same and treated the same, whether we show up or not?' This is the same - you cannot foster a sense of trust in a team or organization when witnessing a lapse in morality that has no consequences else how does it benefit the totality? It only tends to fosters what I saw it did; resentment and apathy.
It seemed like they came around to acknoedging that, but it took them a while. I think he was initially asking if the robbery impacts the workers' pay or in any other material way and if that would be the motive for them intervening.
I share some of your criticisms of the way Jesse framed the Citibike story and his comments in the correction this episode. However I think it would be a mistake to make comments about unsubscribing from the podcast.
If we go down that road just because we're not happy about the coverage of one or two stores, then we're no better than twitter. We are all wrong from time to time so I think it might be a good idea if you're feeling frustrated to keep in mind all the great stories Jesse and Katie have brought to us. And even when they do get it wrong, you can always find a good discussion here or on the Reddit.
I have no problem disagreeing with their perspective; I think that is good and healthy. But it is irksome for them to be so flippant about how poorly they covered a story they admit they put very little effort into. Do it thoroughly, or don’t do it at all. Not every story needs the in-depth investigative work of the UU Church episode (which was very good!), but a TikTok video and a cursory read of a biased article from a ridiculous source doesn’t cut it.
Yeah, totally get where you're coming from. Jesse's response did not come across the way he probably intended. And I don't think he responded to the most substantive claims from the pushback.
But I think it's also helpful to remember that even if they botch a story completely (facts, opinion and framing), the podcast as a whole has added a lot more good to the world than it subtracted. Like you said, it's important that the audience can communicate and give them feedback when it looks like a mistake or a poor framing. That way, people can draw there own conclusions when mistakes happen. But if we threaten to unsubscribe every time, I think we'd be disregarding all of their good work. We'd probably also prevent them from discussing stories where there's a chance we might disagree.
I suppose that's my main point. Everybody makes mistakes and we need to give Jesse and Katie the freedom to be wrong occasionally. Because we're grading them against Michael Hobbes and NPR.
I agree at least for now. The messaging value of reducing their income by $5/mo isn't yet worth missing out on bonus episode releases.
That said, your post being the ONLY one in this entire thread "Liked by Jesse Singal" is pretty insulting.
Of course he doesn't want people to unsubscribe and "likes" calls to not unsubscribe but one of the top comments on this thread is an unsubscriber who early on in their complaint mentioned, "K&J once again pointedly ignored the existence of their thoughtful subscribers in favor of quoting at length from reddit. The "amazing community"' here is worth acknowledging only when asking for subscriptions and is apparently too deplorable to consider otherwise."
So Jesse then chooses to 'show presence and attention' by ignoring every post other than the one that suggests people just keep their subscription going and move on rather than "doing a cancel" by choosing not to continue giving money to people as their product quality drops....
Regarding the fact that he liked my post, I personally don't think it's as nefarious as that. When you get a wall of criticism (regardless of whether or not it's warranted), it's tough to absorb all at once.
I know that when my work gets edited, I tend to retreat for a while and lick my wounds. Often, when I return to the criticism, I can read it in a more detached way.
So if I had to guess, I would wager that Jesse just appreciated hearing a positive note amongst the negative ones. I would recommend giving him some time and trying to guard against assigning negative intentions to his actions. Being generous with others is one way we can show the strength of our community and distinguish ourselves from the people on Twitter who only know how to tear things down.
Sure, this is just like if Jesse had once liked a tweet using racial slurs and we're all calling his employer to have him fired and/or bullying advertisers to cancel contracts with him.
Your use of woke mob is as useless and diluted as current accusations of karendom.
Specific as in "analyzing the social media likes"?
Not like I went on his page and dug around to see what all he's liked lately to try and dig up dirt. I pointed out the single, golden "Liked by Jesse Singal" badge because it prominently sticks out while reading the discussion here.
If his like showed up like everybody else's, it wouldn't be noticeable or worth pointing out but again it's a big, golden "Liked by Jesse Singal" badge.
I really fail to see how you think it's at all comparable.
I would bet that for every person who has unsubscribed, it was not just one or two episodes. But I am continuing to subscribe even though a lot has been annoying me for awhile
Yes precisely. I've disagreed plenty of times over the years but up until recently they've always been genuinely curious about what they're talking about. Last few months there's been ever-increasing amount of incurious throat-clearing going on
Supported. Like I assume good faith even when they say shit about pedo stuff. Can’t we all just find it in ourselves to think, even if we are convinced we are totally correct, that maybe the person who is wrong is just having an off day?
On one hand I see why people want to express their frustration along with the concrete action they're willing to take. Our relationship with Katie and Jesse is financial. Subscribers fund their project, and if the project isn't meeting expectations, pulling funding is the appropriate response.
But on the other hand, I agree with your broader point. So much of the outpouring against coverage of the Citibike drama has a tinge of parasocial expectation about it. People seem to feel personally betrayed because the Citibike segment and follow-up didn't meet expectations. They didn't meet my expectations either, but I'm not about to jump to a conclusion on what this implies about J or K's character, upbringing, or perspective. And we should all take heart that Katie was so clear and forceful about her own dissatisfaction with the follow-up. Nobody's perfect. Jesse was clear that he didn't place a high priority on this story and didn't look into many of the details, which is unfortunate, since so much of it rests in the particulars of how the interaction went down beat-by-beat, what Citibike's policies and terms of service are, what the common etiquette is, and how the online shitstorm developed. As far as I'm concerned, all those aspects went underreported across the original segment and follow-up. But hey that Spire ain't gonna Slay itself (don't get me wrong i fucking love Slay The Spire too, I am a fellow Spire Slayer).
In the end, I do have to agree that BaRpod's coverage of this story has left a lot to be desired. I would have liked to see more in-depth coverage in the following specific ways:
- Clarify exactly how the Citibike system works. What was the legal status of the bike during the incident?
- Layout a timeline of known events during the incident.
- Explore the NewsOne article through the lens of the author's twitter activity
Is this sort of a vulgar, small story being blown out of proportion? Sure. But the reason that can happen is because the story represents something else to people. It is culturally shocking that teenagers can belittle a pregnant woman on camera and receive an outpouring of support, while she is reflexively suspended from her means of supporting her family. It says something about the nature of power, which is a subject that's inherently worth examining. It's also a little weird to think, but Citibike's are a community resource, and this story represents a failure of community participation in sharing that resource fairly. There are angles here that aren't just the same race-baiting people participate in every day on twitter, and even if I haven't been blown away by K&S's coverage of the story, I have learned a lot from the community posts about it here and on Reddit.
Really not sure why K+J didn’t actually talk about how to respond to the bike criticism or re-record the segment once Katie heard what Jesse was adding. Should have been a clarification with a brief acknowledgement that they got criticism and moved on. Instead I feel like this is only going to chum the waters. Seems like Katie thought the same and probably wanted to ignore it, which would have been better than this. But I also think that if someone is thinking of unsubscribing over this I imagine they’ve been moving in that direction for a bit and the general response on Reddit is being used as justification.
Personally I did feel that their take on the story didn’t make sense. How does one person using a single bike all day help a program that is meant to distribute bikes? If it was “his” then why could she scan it in the first place? Seemed like pretty obvious questions to ask if you’re going to cover the story. I appreciated them providing more clarity since the interpretation in the original episode was off, but the execution seems pretty botched to me.
Many of their "corrections", have been non acknowledgements, and I get the impression I am being gaslit about not only what they said, but also what the community actually took issue with. It always seems like it it meant to convince some third party that things are cool now, not actually address the criticism.
Not directly related to this episode, but speaking of Lululemon: In 2011 at a Lululemon store in Maryland, one Lululemon employee, Brittany Norwood, murdered her coworker, Jayna Murray, after Jayna caught Brittany stealing merchandise and called the manager. Brittany was a black woman, Jayna was a white woman. Brittany initially staged the scene to make it look like there was a violent break-in, but once it became clear that there was no break-in and she was the murderer, even her own family sided against her. The CEO of Lululemon spoke at Jayna's funeral and the company erected a beautiful mural at the front of the store in her memory.
It's difficult not to look back at that story and wonder if the public would've responded differently if it had happened now. I'm sure a lot of people would've considered Jayna a Karen, maybe even tried to justify or excuse Brittany killing her. Would the company have honoured Jayna's memory to the extent they did in 2011? I somewhat doubt that they would. IDK, maybe I'm overthinking it.
Do we have any recent examples of jury members being attacked for their verdict, or any examples of jury members citing the political climate as a reason not to convict in a clear-cut murder case?
I mean there are plenty of well-documented examples of intimidation and manipulation of juries. If I had an example like what you're talking about, I would not above have used the words "not sure"
If white teen boys did this to a black woman, there would be no debate, even if the white boys were technically in the right. We would call these boys thugs.
It is a failure of civility and chivalry. No man can ever use intimidation and fear to settle a dispute with a woman.
Just reverse the races and tell me this is a trivial story.
Yup, there it is. The “switch race & reassess” razor clears it right up. It was the same in this episode with the making fun of catholics vs making fun of muslims. This race razor illustrates hypocrisy quick, easy & stark.
I agree on the hypocrisy of the roles being switched, but being raised Catholic, making fun of religion was kind of a "thing" for us. I'm areligious now but my mom is still Catholic and loves "ribbing" it; it's almost like it's so ingrained that it couldn't be offensive and one kind of desires a "release valve" as it were. My husband's family is Jewish and likewise they never seem to tire of joking about religion. I don't know if it belongs at a baseball game--I struggle to see the context there--but in general I think it's healthier to joke about than not.
Totally agree (if Im anything I’m an absurdist) and personally I DGAF if they make fun of any religion, hell make it a skit before every game like the national anthem. My thing is just that if you couldn’t make fun of Islam because its adherents would get bent out of shape then Catholics being pissed is also fair play (pun intended). (Also, Sullivan’s point that they aren’t edgy or transgressive to make fun of Christians they’re hypocrites for refusing to do the same to Islam out of a legit fear of reprisal)
"...they aren’t edgy or transgressive to make fun of Christians they’re hypocrites for refusing to do the same to Islam out of a legit fear of reprisal" YES.
Civility and chivalry! Exactly! I wonder if Jesse has lived in cities so long that he is immune to seeing this. But would he want his mother or sister-in-law to be subjected to this? Especially her work suspension? Come on, Jesse.
here's the deal though. If we all just ignored this equally regardless of the race of the people involved everyone would be better off.
Instead we amplify the story and get enraged it's a story and have to find out who the baddest guy is just to prove the point. You don't actually have to engage in the culture war. Most sane people don't.
I think both the Citibike story and the Lululemon story are related, and I haven't seen this point yet in the comments.
Both have to do with the idea of societal standards of what is right and wrong. So much of what is going on today (and in Jesse and Katie's stories) involves denying, ignoring, or destroying cultural and other norms of behavior. We used to have shared values in this country that most (not all) people could agree with most (not all) of the time. For example, you don't steal other peoples' stuff. Contrary to the progressive line, this is not a white supremacist value: I would bet that, 30 years ago, the vast majority of people of all races, religions, etc., would agree with that statement.
But now, in the name of equity, or inclusion, or non-judgmentalism, or whatever else, we're told none of these norms apply anymore. Shut up about my penis, I'm a woman you bigot! If you complain about setting a building on fire during a riot you're a racist. You can't say that, it might offend someone.
I'm a libertarian, but even I can agree we need SOME standards of conduct.
No, this is not an "important" story. But once it's in the news, it becomes a crucible (or as one person put it, a Rorschach test). for all of us to hammer out our beliefs.
So that's why Jesse's take pissed me off a little too. Can't we just agree that the boys were wrong, and she was right? The violation is separate from the punishment. We can say both that the boys were wrong, and that no, it's not the biggest deal in the world and they shouldn't get 30 years in jail. But there is a party who was "right" and another one that was "wrong."
Is it that hard to say, Jesse? Yeah, teenagers are assholes. They are also wrong sometimes. (Although, I don't think Jesse would have been as dismissive if 4 white kids were hassling a black, pregnant nurse practitioner. I also think it was a cop out to say the Go Fund Me was "weird." I submit it's worse than "weird." But Jesse doesn't want to say what it really is.). They broke the rules. Just say it--it doesn't make you a racist. The fact that it is a minor story does not preclude us from deciding what is the right side of the line.
Similarly, the outrage over Lululemon is about standards. Have we really fallen so far that people can just walk in and steal shit whenever they want, and we're like, "Meh...?" (You know who pays for all those insurance claims, don't you?) I mean, ultimately, it's a slippery slope. If you can disregard a store's right to own property, can't you disregard my right to own property?
I think Katie's take on these issues is much closer to the 'normie' take, on both sides of the political spectrum. She sees the bullshit. Jesse, while really bright, sometimes has a tough time looking past his own subjective context.
All that being said, I'm not going anywhere. I love the podcast. It's good for me to listen to smart people articulate ideas I generally disagree with.
I see this public schools, too. In the name of “equity” all kids can wander around all day, yell at teachers, swear freely and often (I hear fuck all day), wear bikini tops to school, sleep in class, just total disregard for traditional standards of behavior. I’m sure those kids go to a school where bad behavior is considered “a form of communication“ and rewarded with kind attention and treats. People who know me as a blowhard liberal laugh when I say I’ve become a conservative because of this insane cultural disintegration, but I’m dead serious.
If you raise the issue about what the kids are (not) wearing you get called sexist and misogynistic. As though it’s a victory for feminism for girls to be at school with nearly no clothes on.
Or maybe we should relieve kids from the social pressure to put their bodies on full display.
Also, at my son’s high school there was a girl who often wore a shirt that read “Men are trash”. I would not let my son out of the house in a shirt that said the reverse nor do I expect that he would have gone unnoticed and unpunished by his school had he printed such a sentiment on a shirt.
TBH I don't think Jesse was making a normative value judgement that 'Stealing isn't wrong' I think he's making a defense for employees that don't try to stop shoplifting which is fair and that ultimately it's not their responsibility. Retail work sucks. No-one should be expected to physically stop thefts to protect their asshole manager. Wait till they step out of the store and call the cops maybe also try to get the color of their car and license plate number.
That's a completely fair point. Although, as a lawyer, I am not sure how I could "prove" anything in a comment thread on a podcast. I mean, who is the finder of fact? :)
Seriously, though, I suppose I could try to Google it, and provide links that say, for example, that before 2020, the vast majority of people in this country believed that men have penises, and women have babies, or some survey that said that support for free speech has declined. I think most of that stuff is unconvincing anyway, so I will just go with, "That is my opinion."
In responding to the backlash about their handling of the Citibike Karen story, Jesse made two statements: we didn’t get anything wrong factually or made a final verdict, and this is a nothing story.
For the nothing factually incorrect and didn’t make a final verdict remark...what the hell is a final verdict? This is a podcast, not AP News. That’s some moving the goalpost bullshit. As far as factually correct, there have been dozens of episodes on this podcast about narratives creating facts.
The NewsOne story that is at the heart of this fuck up “came out May 25th, the day we are recording.” Jesse calls it a “slightly weird article, but the long and the short or it is there seems to be a lot of evidence that it was his bike. He was there first.” Then Jesse talks about a Citibike Angel program that doesn’t matter at all, which I appreciate he corrected in this episode. Later when the woman comes over: “this woman apparently came and sort of reached over and scanned it and it looks like she acted like she was the victim. I found this to be a compelling article. What do you think?”
Well Jesse, I think you used a bullshit source published the same day you were recording, got criticized for your fuck up by a community that supports you, and then you responded by saying it’s nothing so who cares.
Later in the first episode, Katie then tries to throw you a life preserver by pointing out the article’s author and NewsOne’s bias in covering this story, and you respond “no one can just like be a bad person anymore.”
I encourage everyone to read the NewsOne article. If you follow this podcast or are interesting in how media perpetuates narratives which create facts for everyone, it’s a delight.
I’m happy Katie called him out on the second remark of this episode: why are we doing two stories on a nothing story? But BAR makes it living on nothing stories. There have been some episodes on doll making subculture blowups, adult baby diaper lovers, rage on remaking a dress from a hundred years ago. The podcast says it’s about “internet bullshit,” but it’s a media criticism podcast focusing on stories of the internet’s role in manufacturing consent. Jesse was unprepared for the segment, got rolled by an incredibly shitty source, and became indignant at being questioned. You didn’t understand the impassioned response from the community you built, and so you dismissed it. I’m happy it’s resolved for you.
And Jesse didn't even mention the kids calling the woman's baby retarded or the lack of NBC's initial coverage of the kids' slander, or the total lack of curiosity for how her workplace reacted. https://twitter.com/sniffdodoubleg/status/1659489063919910913
Jesse, the story wasn't a big deal, but you trying to deflate it is now the story. Why not call a spade a spade and say these kids were wrong and this woman got way more hate than she deserved because of our pathetic discourse and media coverage of race?
It's obvious he's still doing everything he can to not just come right out and say that the boys were wrong.
Maybe Taylor Lorenz or one of his crazy friends is big on the idea that the kids are amazing hero’s and he doesn’t want to burn bridges. This is a pretty sad showing from him and makes you wonder about his overall radar for bullshit.
I listened three times - He may have said they were wrong, but he caveated it so much, diminished the issue and falsely equated the boy and woman such that I did not walk away with that as the takeaway on any of my listens.
"No one did anything worse here other than a minor breach of politeness or citibike etiquette... [A cop would say] it's a nothing incident." Direct quotes from Jesse.
When one listener emailed with the "retarded" quote, he said "I guess that was chatter from the video." Why wasn't Jesse more thorough about this story? And how does the media get away with calling her a Karen when a kid called her unborn child retarded? I initially thought Jesse was going to focus on the media's coverage of the event, rather than his issue his own take.
And that's my big problem - he basically said they were both in the wrong and it wasn't a big deal because he didn't want to engage deeply with this story. But I think that is not a fair and informed take. It was a huge deal for this woman. A group of teenage boys intimidated a pregnant woman, said awful shit to her, and posted a video online that they knew would ruin her life. Saying they were being "dicks" doesn't cover the specifics, not by a longshot. And if he had covered the specifics, maybe I'd have learned more about the kids trying to diffuse the situation!
So to clarify my statement, I wish he would have either laid out all the facts explicitly for us (beginning of this segment was better for that but not sufficient), including the shit the kids said and did. Or, if he really believed the kids were in the wrong, he should have taken a stand and said, yes, these kids were unambiguously wrong. I just completely disagree with his characterization that this was a nothingburger and unimportant - it hurt her a lot (not just disproportionately), and it's squarely within the purview of the podcast.
"I listened three times - He may have said they were wrong, but he caveated it so much"
Did you forget that Jesse is a pervert for nuance? Don't yuck his yum!!!!
Holy crap. I listened to the video again and you’re right. “I don’t give a fuck if you cry. Get the fuck out of here. Your baby gonna come out retarded like you.” Saying this stuff while they’ve got her surrounded, giggling and smiling.
I’m even less inclined now to believe their version of events of what transpired before the recording started. What a group of vicious bullies. That goes way beyond teenagers being “dicks.”
I used to look forward to this podcast to come out a couple of weeks after a dust up to give more perspective to a topic poisoned by narrative building. With the subway story, the Holmes article, and this one, I have been waiting for someone else to fix their knee jerk takes. Incuriousness has taken hold here too of late.
I think the downturn in quality is them outsourcing pitches and initial research to their assistants. The assistants are doing their jobs fine. Jesse isn’t.
Terrible on that awful garbage puff piece on ‘Liz’ Holmes. Shockingly ignorant of the case.
IMHO, saying that her baby would "come out retarded" seems egregious. It's relevant because it shows the adversarial situation this woman was in. Not one centrist or left-leaning publication that covered this incident mentioned it.
Well... I feel like at least in this episode that is indeed the conclusion he reached. And sort of pretended was the conclusion he reached before, which is not precisely true, but hey.
“Why not call a spade a spade and say these kids were wrong and this woman got way more hate than she deserved because of our pathetic discourse and media coverage of race?”
He... did exactly this? He said those two things in almost exactly those words. Multiple times, actually.
I completely agree. Jesse did say the kids were wrong...but just for squatting on the bikes. He didn't seem to grok anything about the e-bike v. pedal bike scenario, which is actually crucial to the story. Nor did he address the kids' comments or behavior. As Katie said, very low-effort.
There’s a lot of weird new racism against white people and it’s like people don’t know how to acknowledge it especially when it gets put into the smoothie of anti black racism and it’s justifiably upsetting to everyone. I think Jesse got a bit awkward because it doesn’t quite fit into his world model but he also doesn’t have decades with an anti white, yet Hitler loving, Micronesian stepfather where he had to figure out “what it all means.”
The boys were super rude, the virality of the clip brought out a lot of the new aforementioned anti white racism from everyone jumping in on the lady, which I think is the part everyone is most upset about now that I’ve had a week to chew on it, and I think everyone is trying to understand what that means.
Yes, before anyone replies, I know people individually not liking white people isn’t new in itself but it’s become a more prominent social trend and that piece is new.
It's a natural growth of the tautological "racism=power+prejudice" idea - in that formulation, only white people have power (no comment on whether idk black supreme court justices have more power than a white Iowa gas station employee), and they're the only ones capable of racism.
To people who buy that premise, this all went the way it was supposed to go. That lady should have known better and not been white 🙄
Yeah that’s a dumb premise even if granted because of course human dynamics are complicated and even if you have more power in one dimension you probably have less in another.
I also like the idea people are saying “See? I walk around with a heart full of hate and that’s okay because I have no power.”
This is one of the main things I don’t understand. Right now the left is literally a celebration of hate, in large part directed at societies largest ethnicity group and society itself. And somehow millions of people think that is possibly going to lead to a good place.
It's like they're wishing actual "white nationalism" into existence, and I usually feel completely baffled as to why they think it's a good idea. I think a chunk is masochistic self-flagellation and a chunk "I'm secure and nothing will ever actually change, and this is a fun pose to take."
But then of course if you read Will Durant he will tell you how this exact same thing happened in Rome, with elite Romans becoming increasingly oikophobic and mocking their own "cultureless culture", adopting the dress and style of "the other" (in that case, Persia, The Orient, and Gaul), and ultimately sort of dissolving into that ultimate "other," the weird new religion of Christianity. It feels pretty familiar 🤷♂️
I wonder what powerlessness+prejudice adds up to... Terrorism and riots? Which are totally justified because the poor dears have had power withheld from them.
Actually now that I type that, it is literally the excuse that people so inclined use to handwave terrorism and riots 😬
Yes! Everything starts from that premise - power is everything, so fighting against power is always justified, no matter how you fight. Gandhi is rolling over in his grave.
And no matter how benevolent the power is.
I also just realized that if this equation is true, then
Racism - prejudice = power 😮
Very esoteric
I would like to hear more about the experiences with the Micronesian stepfather. Sounds like there’s a lot going on there.
I supported Jesse when his fans got too gender critical (IMHO), I supported Katie's stance on outlets for helping pedophiles, I supported them often when they had good faith takes that just differed from their fans. But this one he just got utterly wrong. I wish he'd own up to it more. Dibs is not a valid concept and the boy was actually being incredibly rude and heartless to squat on this bike. Come on Jesse, do better (unironically).
Yes, a Twitter-arian comment about her defying the legitimacy of dibs-law was one that made me lol.
You'd think someone who was locked in the Hippo slammer would be more sympathetic to someone being punished for merely violating stupid social norms.
Jesse got two things wrong even in this segment, and they're very relevant to understand what the kid was doing and why he was so upset when someone checked out "his" bike.
He wasn't riding at a merely reduced rate, he was riding for free. He's part of a program for low-income folks that lets them check bikes out for free for up to 45 minutes at at ime. Normally only pedal bikes are free, with e-bikes available at a reduced rate. However, if the dock has no pedal bikes and only e-bikes, then the e-bikes are free as well.
This goes into the second thing that Jesse got wrong this time: the e-bikes don't become available for free again after 10-15 minutes. They become free again when there are no pedal bikes docked at the station. From the receipts we can see that the e-bike in the middle of the controversy was checked in about 40 minutes before the unfortunate PA checked it out. [edit: I got this wrong, looks like this was five minutes, the 40 minutes of wait time came after the confrontation]
The receipts are congruent with the kid just out having fun, riding with his friends for free. They had likely had docked the exact amount of e-bikes needed to transport the friend group and were waiting for someone to clean out the pedal bikes so they could get another round of free rides. Otherwise, why would the kid even care?
In taking one of the e-bikes, the PA was getting the way of their good time.
"This goes into the second thing that Jesse got wrong this time: the e-bikes don't become available for free again after 10-15 minutes."
Thank you for clarifying, I thought this sounded wrong.
It was funny how confident Jesse was about this yet so unwilling to actually look it up
Lol that was pretty funny.
Jesse: “Yeah I’m not exactly sure but it’s like 10-15 minutes. It’s easy to look up.”
Katie: “...hmmm k.”
These could be interesting details — and Jesse needs to come down off of his horse and do an in-depth, on-the-ground, first-person investigation for the next Primo episode — but the receipts clearly show that five minutes, not 40 minutes, had transpired between dockings (7:19 and 7:24 p.m.).
However the boy’s receipts show that after thr kerfuffle, he only checked the bike out for six minutes and redocked it at same location. Citibike does not charge in this case, bc often the reason is a defective bike. Next, the boy waited about 40 minutes bf checking out the bike again and riding off. This ride was also free, so there were no regular bikes left at that location when he left. It’s not much of a stretch to guess he was waiting for regulsr bikes to be checked out.
I guess that's where I got the 40 minutes from, looking at the timelines it looks like I was wrong on the delta between the kid and the PA having the bike checked out.
The reason this story is so infuriating to me is that an actual real person was hurt. She is on leave from her job, possibly fired. A hospital lost a valuable caregiver. Did she lose her health insurance in the last weeks of pregnancy over this mess? Those are real harms. And what is the end result? Women are being told to shut up and accept being bullied on the street or they might go viral and their lives will be destroyed. That is really fucked up.
And, for the record, if my 17 year old son did this, I would be furious at him and demand that he issue a public apology. Acting like shits to a pregnant adult is inexcusable. I teach HS. I am the parent of a teen. THIS BEHAVIOR IS NOT OK. Why are people excusing it? I’m not saying it’s abnormal. Teen boys are morons. But the adults in the world need to say that they were being total assholes and that is not acceptable behavior in NYC or anywhere else.
Yeah, it’s a nothing story to Jesse because people are mad at him. It’s behavior that reminds me of how the teenager and his family were trying to spin the story. No one forced the teenager to post the video of him being an asshole to the woman. Once there is some blowback, then it’s “why is everyone mad at me, everyone is racist, here’s my gofundme.”
No one forced Jesse to go half cocked at this story. Once there is some blowback, then it’s, “why is everyone mad, the community that supports me is crazy, if you want to be a primo then go to…”
I teach high school a few blocks from where this happened. I think I responded so negatively to BAR’s covering of the subway killing and Citibike stories was that neither of them take care of anyone and no one takes care of them. Every day I take care of my family and the kids I teach. Jesse, given his upper middle class upbringing and solely white collar jobs, is unburdened by anything but transactional relationships. If you take care of other people day in and day out, these episodes sound almost alien.
This take may be a bit harsh, but I’m trying to understand my disconnect from this show of late. I got a lot out of listening to these two people for a long time.
“Jesse, given his upper middle class upbringing and solely white collar jobs, is unburdened by anything but transactional relationships.”
No offense, but I think this is way, way off. You can’t presume to know what kinds of relationships someone you only know from a podcast currently has in his life or has had in the past.
I agree. I know I'm off about that and it's a shitty thing to say; it's stupid to condemn anyone for how they were raised or how they make money. I've been pretty irritated thinking about this podcast of late, and when you're at your angriest you're at your stupidest.
About the relationship line, I should have said something along the lines that your thinking changes when you have loved ones who can't fend for themselves in the situations covered in the past couple of episodes (subway killing and Citibike), and that is a blinder this show suffers from given the two hosts being about 40 with no kids, no elderly family to support, and living in relative financial comfort.
These past few episodes have had class at the forefront, and the divide between their takes and seemingly a lot of people who pay to listen has been pronounced.
Journalism has become an upper middle class profession, and BAR is not an exception (Katie's parents were professors and Jesse's parents were attorneys). Katie has seen enough of how the other half lives and has lived it herself, so her bullshit detector is much stronger and she doesn't get rolled like Jesse does. I listened to the first part of the theft episode, and Katie rags on Jesse for not having had any menial jobs, and Jesse defends himself by saying he delivered pizzas twice and was a roofer for six weeks (a job he got from his friends dad).
Just like my priors informed the shitty line you rightly called me out for, I think the same is true for Jesse.
For the original Elizabeth Holmes article, the contrived conflict for the NYTimes writer was "is this woman who wouldn't have minded killing thousands of people so she could be on some more magazine covers really evil?--she has a nice house and is well spoken and attentive and upper class like me, so she's a good person....right?" You don't have this conflict if you don't have every reporter coming from an Ivy League school and a ton of money.
BAR had a go around of outlets accusing the NYTimes of presenting Holmes in a light too gracious given her actions and made fun of them for trying to pile on for someone who just made some mistakes. If you've read anything about Holmes, the mealy-mouthed treatment of her on this podcast is a total misunderstanding of the person and the culture that celebrated her.
The subway story was treated by BAR and many other outlets with a separateness and aloofness that is possible usually because it's something you didn't have to deal with growing up or have loved ones who can't take care of themselves in these situations. And if you're in a city seeing subway conflicts happen and are in journalism, it seems to be treated as a way to demonstrate your sagacity and empathy rather than confront the horrible zero-sum nature of what's going on the in the subways since covid where the freedom of the mentally ill and the safety of the public are at odds, to put it too simply.
In the Citibike story, the fact that the teenager came from an immigrant family seemed to have been the deciding--and irrelevant--reason why the hospital worker was in the wrong for Jesse. It demonstrates a bigotry of low expectations, which tends to happen with people without much interaction with people across the economic spectrum. I teach down the block from where this happened, and I knew the teenager was full of shit the second he started filming and laughing at the woman. I also knew he had some good friends, given they tried to deescalate the situation and one of them gave his bike to the woman. But those nuances don't get seen because of an aloof, theoretical treatment of these stories according to language of the discourse: immigrant, Black, Karen, white tears etc. And that aloofness is what's drawing my time with this podcast that has been pretty great for a while to a close.
I sort of agree that it’s sometimes annoying to hear their opinions come from very real ignorance about how others move through the world. But I’d rather they not pretend to understand people they don’t seem to have an interest in anyway. Combined with the shoddy reporting here I get why it may not be worthy of listening to.
I guess all I’m saying is maybe it’s better to support differing viewpoints than expect them to see the world as we do all of the time.
I think in pretty much any culture throughout history, it would be utterly unacceptable for a teenage boy to violently block a pregnant woman from travelling around because she was interfering with his fun.
The reason this is a valid news story is because so many people are saying: "Actually, she's the aggressor, because he's from a more oppressed group. And she must be punished." I find that a worrying development.
And it's also pretty bewildering to react with: "Eh. No big deal. Boys will be boys."
Ok, I've asked this nicely twice in other threads so I'll be blunt. What is your beef with PAs? What is the problem with a medical professional on a level between nurses and physicians?
It seems like it might be personal, so I'll be up front that my query is personal as well as I shepherded my ex through the PA application process.
Wait this is a fascinating theory I’ve never heard before so I have no idea if it’s unhinged or not. Can you tell me what are “mid levels” and what are wrong with them?
Indeed. The dispute about the bike may have been no big deal, the public vilification of an exhausted pregnant physician’s assistant as a dreaded racist Karen who deserves to be doxed and lose her job is a notable story. It’s also a classic BAR story.
Here’s another relevant factor Jesse could have actually reported on: as soon as the woman paid for the bike she was liable for it. If the teen had initially tried to take the bike (pre re-docking it) she would have had legit fears that she would have to deal with lawyers and billing departments and the police. If the bike isn’t returned within 24 hours she can be charged $1,200. Is that what initially happened when she started to get emotional?
Jesse keeps framing it as the kid “squatting” on the bike. Once she paid for the bike and he tried to grab it the situation changed. It would be like if she rented a car and he grabbed the keys. She wouldn’t have known his intentions, only that she was liable.
Despite what he says (and may want to believe), Jesse is likely less “grossed out” by the story, itself, than by the prospect that he has stumbled onto a well paying career that frequently involves taking on dubious accusations of racism promulgated by incompetent journalists working the race beat. It’s not what he wants to do with his life. It makes him uncomfortable and seems icky.
Credit to Katie for calling out Jesse on both the weirdness and total half-assed approach of this follow-up.
EDIT: originally mistakenly had woman’s job as less well paying “medical assistant.” Have just changed to “physician’s assistant” after being corrected in comment below.
"Once she paid for the bike and he tried to grab it the situation changed. It would be like if she rented a car and he grabbed the keys. She wouldn’t have known his intentions, only that she was liable."
Yep, 100%. The video widely circulated after the bike had been re-docked and she was understandably already emotional and upset. Plus being ganged up on and surrounded by a group of young men who proceed to start moving you around on a bike is weird and threatening behaviour to any woman.
If Jesse is "grossed out" by the story, then he should be "grossed out" by the kids who recorded it and put it on the internet with no context in the first place so they could get "support."
Hit the nail on the head. The story that Jesse would like this to be isn't the story it actually is. This is less of a "both sides" or "it's complicated" story but rather a case of a victim and aggressor being opposite how it was initially reported. You can nitpick the PA's actions, but blame falls 99%+ on the teenagers, not just for their initial actions, but also for releasing the video and starting this shitstorm.
I think your second to last graph is why Jesse has been off his game lately. He doesn’t like the role he is getting paid for.
Katie’s fear for the show is simply that they’re going to recycle the same stories, topics & guests as other heterodox podcasts.
It would seem Jesse’s much greater fear is that they are becoming a classier version of “Libs of Tik Tok.’ A telling analogy he used in passing once.
I do think that is partly what they are and actually something the world badly needs. Sucks for Jesse if that isn’t the job he wants. Maybe he can carve the niche a different shape, though I suspect you lose some people in the process.
There is a real vacuum of voices not on one side or the other examining the culture war.
This story is arguably more important than the Roblox thing and most of the stories covered here that don't involve youth gender medicine or institutional capture.
My mistake. Just fixed, acknowledging the edit/change of jobs (after your correction) at bottom of original comment.
That NewsOne article was... Propaganda? I'm not sure what to call such a one sided piece of "journalism"
The title of the NewsOne article was “Mother of Teen in Citibike Video Speaks Out: No One Bothered to Ask Him What Happened.”
The kid edited and released the video to fuck with someone he already fucked with. The video is his side. The subheading says the woman has been “‘rewarded’ for her antics while he and his family are suffering.” Yes, getting suspended, labeled a racist, and death threats are rewards. And this is the shit Jesse thought was “compelling.” Really sad shit.
Oh, well, if his mommy says her boy is a perfect angel and everyone is being mean to him for no reason, then it must be true
Also I'm trying to imagine a sub-head like "WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ONE WHITE BOY IN AMERICA" and how racist the outlet would have to be to write such a sub-head 😂
The "journalist" who wrote the article tweeted some seriously nasty stuff about the pregnant PA, including openly calling her a "bitch"
Yes, the mealy-mouthed bit by Jesse in this episode has lead me to cancel my subscription. The show is literally about internet bullshit, so hand-waving away substantive criticisms on how he covered it through "this isn't something serious that we should be talking about" is Michael Hobbesian levels of disingenuous.
Fare the well BARpod, you were interesting and different once.
I don’t think this is at all important. At all. In the least. The whole story is embarrassing and it’s embarrassing to care about. For every side.
The story was never important- it was the media blow up about it that is important. A woman was nationally vilified and in danger of losing her job because of it. That’s why it matters.
The villification of the woman is disgusting, as is media apologia for the teen boys.
Excusing shit like this will lead to a right-wing backlash. I'm not blaming Jesse and Katie for anything that happens, politically speaking (this podcast is not that important), but this episode/issue will no doubt be a kind of final straw that breaks the camel's back, and causes people to reject the Dems and vote GOP.
In fairness, to Jesse he does think that's a bad thing and has been quite clear about it. He's vague about who was in the wrong but, his position seems to be that even if Sarah was in the wrong she didn't deserve that level of vitriol.
The "villain" being a teenager also makes it kinda unappetizing to join the pile-on. I kinda got the impression that's why Jesse was hesitant to engage further.
How can someone be piled-on when nobody knows that who that person is?
Also, as far as I've seen, no one cares about the person per se, it's about the person's actions.
There is some ferociously racist stuff about this kid on the grosser right wing places, just as much about the lady (though her facing employment changes is unconscionable). The less attention given to this the better.
I've not seen this at all. Do you have any links to back that up?
I can only imagine. Eww.
What "pile on"??
The woman was suspended from her job, publicly named and smeared all over the internet.
You don't care that a woman was suspended from her job and was totally and utterly smeared in the media and online? Odd stance.
Nonsense.
They literally describe themselves as a podcast about internet bullshit.
I don't know why he thinks it's significant that the boys are from an "immigrant family", like so what, like most Americans? Especially in New York, that's not particularly rare. It's not a license to be rude and attempt to weaponize social media. Even if you're a teenager.
My guess is this shitty behavior toward an adult would not be tolerated in the country they immigrated from. They should know better.
Maybe he thinks it's significant in that it might mean they don't understand our norms? Indeed- they really don't seem to. The teenager takes advantage of a handout- the free or reduced fare thing- hogs a bike all day- and acts like an asshole to a pregnant woman. And his mom thought that behavior was OK!
We have enough home grown assholes; we don't need more.
From your description it sounds like he's thoroughly assimilated - he's acting like every other American teenage boy
Not mine though! He’s 22 now- just graduated from college and is going to start work as an ICU nurse soon.
Anyway, he wouldn’t have acted like that - nor his two best friends. They all have good manners and are respectful.
Repeating myself from another thread, but the podcast has generally been off its game since Jesse went to HIPPA jail. Both hosts are hedging and pulling punches, as if trying to recover some lefty bona fides. A year ago they would have covered the bike story as another media failure engendered by a tricky racial dynamic, like they did with Central Park Karen. Maybe time for a break to work up some new, fresh topics, or maybe dial back and drop some easy content for awhile while they do so (follow-ups on subjects of past episodes? More Q and A’s?)
Couldn't agree with this comment any more.
Right, and The Fifth Column does the same thing and is much more entertaining about it. The reason I liked this podcast was that they covered the culture war and internet stuff that The Fifth Column tends to avoid.
Lol yeah I didn’t like that whole thing.
“Idk why everyone’s mad at me this isn’t even a big deal chill out guys why are we even still talking about this?”
His weenie-ness bugs the shit out of me sometimes.
Did they ever mention the replacement costs for a citibike? Any bike taken out on your account is your responsibility with replacement costing $1200. There’s a lot of money at stake in a dispute over an undocked citibike that helps explain some of the intensity in the incident.
Jessie perpetrates the exact bullshit this show exists to call out, then when people push back against it, he's all "oh I dunno why everyone's mad? This is all stupid, I didn't do anything". Lol, give me a break dude.
The problem is deeper with him and it's related to his whining about Twitter, the shit he talks about when it comes to the neighborhood he lives in/how he goes out for drinks.
He's upset about these things because he desperately wants to be a part of that Brooklyn hipster/writer/intellectual/podcaster/whatever in group. And having to do stories like these honestly, he sees his chance of acceptance slipping away. That's what bothers him. That's also why he gets so flustered when these same types of people criticize him on Twitter. The other people in that group don't have these problems, he shouldn't either right?
Which is fine, if he wants to go do that thing, he should go do that thing. The problem for him is though that he can't do both.
That man hasn’t really talked enough about his personal life for this to be a reasonable conclusion lol
Ehhh.
Maybe you're right.
Either way, this is his job, so he should be expected to get baseline facts correct. That's a part of the job. If he can't be bothered to do that, then why/what am I paying for?
Idk, people can have their own opinions. That's mine.
I absolutely agree and understand why you don’t wanna pay for half baked reporting because that’s free everywhere. I just think the reason he didn’t try so hard may not be so deep. Or maybe it is. But he didn’t really say much other than he thought it was stupid.
Doesn't the news one author also like have all sorts of race war baiting tweets calling for white genocide or something like that?
I had to peek at NewsOne today just to see what kinds of "news stories" they're running. I've never head of them before the Citi Bike thing.
They have this long piece lamenting that "white people" raise more money on GoFundMe, GiveSendGo, etc, than "black people." This is, in their words "unfair" and "proves" that not only do white people hate black people, but is an example of "the lengths they'll go to protect each other"
See: "GoFundMe, GiveSendGo And The White Privilege Of Raising Funds Online"
https://newsone.com/4599955/crowdfunding-white-privilege/
They're also spitting mad that there's a new dictionary of African American English, from Oxford Press:
"Does Oxford’s New African American Dictionary Honor Or Appropriate Black Culture?"
https://newsone.com/playlist/oxford-african-american-dictionary/item/1
I started reading the Crowdfunding White Privilege article and the first tweet they link to is from someone with the pronouns "they/them/tired." That one hurt.
The conclusion of the article is that "crowdfunding operates largely as a popularity contest, distributing help in deeply inequitable ways" and so "leaving it up to the public to pick who should have access to basic rights leads to deeply unfair outcomes." To be fair, the last gofundme I contributed to was to a white woman who was an ESL teacher at my school who died of cancer at 34, and she was pretty popular, which is pretty unfair.
But as Jesse said about the Citibike article, "I found this to be a compelling article. What do you think?"
The Crowdfunding article is reposted from another dogshit site call The Conversation with a similar jigsaw puzzle of sadness aesthetic. I clicked around and found a website called Flipboard where you can have stories curated, and here are the categories for NewsOne: Jordan Neely, Obamas after the White House, Tribute to Harry Belafonte, Don Lemon's Most Memorable Moments, Jemel Hill, and Black Folklore.
There's no problem that websites like these around; I'm sure the right has similar in number and ridiculousness. But these websites have an answer seeking out questions. And if you have a media criticism podcast, and this is not something you can detect before blasting it out, then....well...that sucks.
I can't write anymore about this. I believe I had a small but impactful stroke at the pronouns they/them/tired and just realized it. I'll link my gofundme when the time comes, which I hope, for my family's sake, has deeply unequal outcomes.
I wonder who their audience is? I'm not sure it's African Americans, I think it's white people who want something slightly more activist than DailyKos, etc.
I found this podcast a little after it started when I started freaking out that I was turning into a conservative when media I would normally read lost their god damned minds. This podcast and other independent outlets helped me get back on solid ground, which was more or less where I started. The impact of narrative perpetually reinforced is wildly destructive. From the comments here, it looks like there are reasonable people here who can go back and forth on a topic without invective. I selfishly would like to that is the audience. Maybe there are a thousand of those and 11,000 paying subs screaming for Libs of TikTok bullshit, or maybe 11,000 pay subs screaming for NewsOne.
The other thing Jesse ignored or at least downplayed is that the teens themselves are the reason this blew up, because they recorded it and posted it. They weren’t “just” squatting on a bike, they were harassing a woman who called them on it and THEN they were directly responsible for this getting spread online.
So if Jesse really does think this is a nothing story, he should blame the teens for boosting it.
The response to the Citibike fuck-up would have been very disappointing if it wasn't exactly what I expected.
K&J once again pointedly ignored the existence of their thoughtful subscribers in favor of quoting at length from reddit. The "amazing community"' here is worth acknowledging only when asking for subscriptions and is apparently too deplorable to consider otherwise.
Jesse proceeds to selectively (and once again, wrongly) distort the facts which have come out (and which were available at the time of the original fuck-up, had he decided to apply some reading comprehension to this story in the first place). Superficiality is suddenly a valid excuse from someone who has repeatedly (and correctly) accused other journalists of laziness.
He still fails to mention, omits or misinterprets details in order to minimise any errors (the timeline, the authorship of the NEWSONE article; how Comrie wasn't "caught on video" - which implies something neutral like a surveillance camera when she was filmed by one of the kids and the video was shared by them in order to defame Comrie as a racist; that they didn't just "push the bike" back in the dock - which also depersonalises the situation and implies they were just moving an object when in fact they forced HER - a person - and the bike she was already on back into the dock; etc)
He then devotes even longer to bemoaning how he is "grossed out by this whole thing" and the "cavalcade of commentary" over something "that's not a story" and that "we end up getting dragged into it as a show" What the actual fuck? Who put a gun to his head, dragged him into the studio and made him feature this non-story on the show? It was HIS choice to focus on it. The hypocrisy of these grandstanding denunciations is what's grossing ME out.
Katie then pipes in to say "There were hundreds of comments in the reddit thread. I didn't read them. I was hoping you would have something more substantive that we got wrong than just like, it's a matter of opinion. Frankly, I'm not sure that I trust your analysis of this." No shit. To which Jesse's response is that it's "so discouraging that we're now litigating this". What is discouraging is that instead of a simple "I got X and Y wrong and should probably read things more thoroughly and critically next time" we're treated to a lot of self-serving obfuscation and deflection.
People get things wrong. It happens. Those with integrity own their mistakes. Others continue to evade or minimise them and attempt to shift focus by whining "why is everyone even talking about this?!". I have very little respect for the latter.
I've turned off my subscription renewal and only mention that (here, knowing they don't even read this) because I will miss you smart and witty people, your variety of perspectives and the intelligent discussions. But I'm done supporting lazy, self-serving and contemptuous bullshit. Summer is coming, I'm going to touch a LOT of grass and use the BARpod money for an ice cream cone.
"she was filmed by one of the kids and the video was shared by them in order to defame Comrie as a racist"
I can't believe he didn't mention this - this is why people are outraged, c'mon Jesse! This isn't weaponizing white tears, it's red meat for race-baiting hyper-online progressives, and at least one of these kids realized that it would be popular or they wouldn't have posted it!!
I am almost with you on cancelling my subscription. But yess. It is such fucking bullshit for Jesse to say Citibikes is a nothing story when they chose to cover it
And yeah. This has been bothering me for the last few months - all the fucking asking for subscribers and then. .not reading the threads?
I think on this occasion it was fair to refer to the reddit thread. It's a pretty long post and provided a lot more detail in its reasons for disagreement.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/13t7c75/bar_botched_the_citi_bike_karen_story_what_they/
To my mind this is just as much if not more of a story than Keffals, is all I'm saying. I felt like it was 2020 up in here.
Yeah, I sort of couldn’t believe that comment. Jesse could even walk down the street to a CitiBike location where this same thing is happening and ask someone how it works…
Right. The point where the video was posted online with the intent of defaming Comrie is where it moved beyond "a couple of people were jerks to each other," and is also *how* it got national attention.
100% with you. The two of them have made a lot of money dunking on shitty journalism, and the ride has been fun. I don’t want to spend money on them to lazily use shitty journalism to dismiss the people who support them.
I cannot believe that Jesse, a guy who made his bones on the most toxic culture war bullshit and who spent years fighting online against hundred of bad faith zealots, wipes his hands clean of people who support his work over him doing lazy journalism. They have made a lot of calls I don’t agree with over the years, but they backed their shit up and did their homework. I respected them for that. This upper crust dismissive bullshit ain’t it for me.
I've also turned off my subscription renewal. For me, it started with their episode on immigration where they came off as totally uninformed and unresponsive to feedback. The constant referring to reddit and not the primos thread was another thing that irked me. Plus, the "we're such a lazy and unprepared podcast hahaha" is sort of funny at first, but got old real quick.
It's too bad. Love the community here. Genuinely like Katie and Jesse. But they're making unforced errors and acting oblivious to how fortunate they are to earn 6 figures for 2 hours of content a week...
How long do you think it takes to produce two hours of content?
With the help of Trace and Lex, I'm gonna guess less than the 40-50 hrs most workers put in a week... All I'm saying is that, according to their own words, they have a great source of income compared to other journalists.
Maybe you disagree, but I think it gives them a responsibility to appropriately research what they put out there, especially when their brand is in part to criticize how shady so many journalists are...
They pay Trace and Lex, which is an expense your average worker doesn't have.
They're also earning better money than most journalists because they're way more talented than most journalists, which is something that happens within the mainstream media as well -- the stars make the big bucks.
As I said above, I have zero problem with people leaving if the content no longer lives up to the expectations nor do I have problems with people giving their reasons for leaving. I can understand why someone would be turned off by a lack of research.
What I don't get is the concern with their six figure incomes and that they should demonstrate gratitude for their good fortunes. When people unsubscribe from traditional media, they don't say it's because the editors and writers are too highly paid, don't work enough hours, and need to be more grateful. They stick to their unhappiness with the product.
It's not a concern Ann. I have no problem with them making a great living, if I did, I wouldn't be contributing to it :)
All I was saying by mentioning the six figure income is not that they should show gratitude to us, but that they're in a great position that allows them to properly research and prepare for this podcast. Other (less talented) journalists would kill for this opportunity.
Their earnings is only relevant in the sense that if they earned very little from the podcast, the inadequate research they've shown on some topics would be more understandable.
At this point I'm unlikely to renew, though it's still a few months away, so I'll hold out hope the recent drop in quality reverses itself.
Someone had written a long post on reddit which provided some links and further analysis. I think on this occasion it was fair to refer to reddit because although there was disagreement here no-one provided the same level of additional reporting (for want of a better word).
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/13t7c75/bar_botched_the_citi_bike_karen_story_what_they/
So. Leave.
I generally agree with you but this seems unfair "K&J once again pointedly ignored the existence of their thoughtful subscribers in favor of quoting at length from reddit" and maybe not the best reason to cancel your subscription.
I am a subscriber and I read these threads *and* everything on the reddit forum. The reddit post that Jesse low-key dismissed was actually well written and thoughtful and provided information he should have known, had he actually done anything close to due diligence for this segment. There's no comparable feature on substack (unfortunately).
TL;DR Yes, the subreddit has a brash and sometimes straight-up offensive contingency, but I find the snobbery here regarding it over the top (not you, specifically, but this is a theme that comes up a lot). If you feel like you need to unsubscribe, more power to you, but I don't think the subreddit should be a factor.
Ok, that's a valid point. I wrote my comment right after listening to the episode and didn't formulate it in the most nuanced and clear way so allow me to elaborate:
1) you are absolutely right - the reddit post Jesse low-key dismissed was very good, full of factual info, laid out the timeline and basically did Jesse's homework for him. It was probably the best factual rundown to be found on either forum and worth referencing. I didn't have a problem with that, although I see how my phrasing may have implied I did. But there was a lot of overlap between the commentary on the two forums and here, on Substack, there was also a lot of contextual discussion which would have helped him understand not just *what* he got wrong but *why* so many people took issue with his take.
2) this was the fifth or sixth episode where K&J chose to reference feedback or suggestions they got from reddit while ignoring Substack comments; that is, until that point in the show where they use the "awesome community" as a selling point for subscriptions. The contrast becomes noticeable with repetition. If you're going to ask people for money, rely on their support and laud how awesome the resulting community is, to then thoroughly ignore it *while often engaging with reddit* leaves a bad taste. The vibe that comes across (and it is subjective, I know) is a bit exploitative and contemptuous of those who do pay up.
3) that said, it's the least of my objections. The laziness is basically the main reason I'm opting out of the subscription. To keep paying would be to keep encouraging it. I can keep listening to the free episodes and check reddit (for free as well).
One thing I don't really recall being touched on in the original episode and certainly not in this one is that the PA had every right to feel threatened by a group of strange men. Jesse's got his dudely privilege on display here, he doesn't realize how unsettling that can be (I'm not saying there's no risk for men but it's very, very different).
I don't know, seems like Jesse is being willfully obtuse about this.
Yes, being accosted by a group of mildly aggressive teenage boys can be scary until you get out of the situation, and the same people who spent years hashtagging this kind of incident as MeToo are now dismissing it because of the races of the individuals involved.
I agree that this shouldn't have been a national news story IF a video hadn't been posted and IF the PA hadn't been put on leave. When irritating interactions with teen boys have occasionally happened to me, they didn't make the news or ruin my day. But nobody was trying to make me a pariah or get me fired, either.
Even during #metoo it was problematic and often seen as racist to denounce street harassment done by PoC and people from marginalized identities.
Jesse is a 6-foot-something man. No matter how beta his personality may be, his experience navigating the world will look a lot different than the experience of a smaller woman. I know that the concept of privilege has been beaten to death in the past few years, but I think he needs to acknowledge that he has a blind spot in that regard.
Yes exactly it's so weird!
I get what you are saying about feeling more vulnerable as a woman, but the truth is men are much more likely to be victimized by strangers.
I say this not because the woman here shouldn't have felt like she was potentially in danger, but because people often don't know women are on the whole less likely to be targeted.
It's not "feeling" more vulnerable, though, it's *being* more vulnerable. Men attacked by other men have some chance of defending themselves; women largely don't. You can't know what that feels like unless you've lived it.
I can assure you being confronted by a group, bigger person, or someone with a weapon who you think is willing got commit violence is basically equally "i'm in danger" whether you're a man or a woman.
Most women are less capable of defending themselves from men than most men. We walk through the world knowing this. It's ok to acknowledge this difference.
Did you read the part where I said I wasn't saying there is no risk for men but that it is different? That was for comments like yours.
Jesse, people were mad at you because in the previous episode you said “turns out she was acting like a karen” and used a completely biased article to reach that conclusions
I think this is the key criticism that was missed (or ignored because it was mostly discussed here and not on the subreddit - ick, subreddits). Jesse basically accepted the newsone article when the writer of said article was instrumental in the anti Comrie shitstorm, and didn't mention that then or now. And this was crazy stuff, dragging her husband into it, really playing up the race angle... That seems like something BARpod usually cares about or at least notices.
Anyway, whatever, they're done with it now, hopefully Comrie can just move past it too. It's just internet bullshit, after all.
Not mentioning that the news one author led the pile on is a pretty big oversight. In years past they would have jumped all over that. I don’t know if Reddit pointed that out but we discuss f it here! They should read Substack comments more maybe?!
That's my issue here as well, and I didn't even think it was really worth getting upset about it after the first episode. However now after the correction I'm kind of pissed off about it, it's one thing to be lukewarm on taking a hard stance against the teenagers, it's another thing to get called out for it, make a correction, and completely fail to correct yourself while doubling down on the original problem.
LOL isn't the advice of everyone, including K&J, that when the mob comes calling, never to apologize?
Not that I really think their comments section is "a mob". Even the most upset/angry/intense B&R thread is like Kant, compared to most internet comments secctions.
The mob referred to there is the outrage mob coming for your rep/job, not your paying subscribers / customers who are asking you to do your job.
Yeah, I think this is the issue: AFAICT the woman *didn’t do anything wrong*, and the ep seemed to say that she did.
Re: Citi Bike - let us all remember how shitty you feel when you’re pregnant. She was probably getting off a 12-hour shift, feeling sick, and her feet were killing her. These kids were being assholes, but they’ve never been pregnant, so they don’t know. Anyway, I’m not surprised she went a little crazy. I probably would have done the same. But then again I am a white cisheteronormative woman, so.. we all know how bad I suck.
Anyway. Why is this even a story.
I think I once read that women's serum testosterone increases by 70% during pregnancy. I hate to admit this, but I sometimes became a fucking rage monster when I was pregnant.
My wife started crying in the middle of the Trader Joe’s Parking Lot because I said she couldn’t have a chinchilla.
You should have bought her the chinchilla, dude.
I cried once because I ordered a sandwich with no onions and they put onions.
Oh there was lots of that too.
You bastard!
She was heavily pregnant and I kept trying to tell her she wouldn’t want it after the baby came but I guess I was just a monster that day.
Truly monstrous. Maybe she was just hungry the poor thing. A friend of mine was about 8 months pregnant when Panera ran out of orange scones. She started sobbing and yelled “if I’d wanted a fu**ing cinnamon roll I would have went to Cinnabon bi*ch!” at the woman taking orders. She’s never yelled at anyone that I know of before or since. I helped by bursting into mad cackles. I’ve never been pregnant but if I missed my nap AND had to go shopping you could get disemboweled for pulling a face much less being a chinchilla denier. Your wife must be lovely ;)
9/11 and vaccines couldn’t make me a denier but that chinchilla flipped me immediately.
After her sobbing got real bad I said I would go and get it but then she didn’t want it anymore and what hurt the most was not being supported but also I had to be the leader and make sure nothing crazy happened.
Chinchillas are small, quiet, and tend to live less than 10yrs. Honestly, a reasonable request. How dare you?!
I'm thinking this needs to be relitigated.
Okay initially I was on your side, because I thought a chinchilla was some kind of disgusting small yappy dog, but now that I’ve googled “chinchilla” I think she had a point.
Fair
Same! And after I delivered! I actually heard on the Huberman podcast yesterday that one of the chemicals infants’ heads secrete increases maternal aggression. So it’s not our fault. Ha!
The story isn't that there was an altercation over a bike. The story is that one party of that altercation uploaded a video which prompted other people to get the other party doxxed and suspended from their job.
Unfortunately, part of that story is determining the facts of the altercation.
I feel like people in the comments here FREAKING OUT about this and cancelling subscriptions are illustrating unfortunately why this is a story. It's a story because it's been cherry picked out of 1000 similar interactions and amplified because it stokes ALL of the endorphin / rage machine buttons that it can.
This is a story about two people being a bit rude. And somehow the rage machine forces us to talk about it like it is ESSENTIAL to show which one of them are more wrong. NO. It's just bullshit.
If people are yelling about canceling their subscription because Jesse or Katie picked the bad person instead of the good person, then I agree with your criticism. I don’t know the split between those comments and the ones I have been trying to make to voice my discontent.
I listen to this podcast for media criticism. I appreciated the topics they covered and how they focused on how narratives are used to shroud events in a haze of illiberal ideology across the political spectrum.
I would have preferred if the Citibike story focused on what has made me a loyal listener: how the media creates and perpetuates outrage, causing discourse to become both lose your job serious and over-the-top pro-wrestling ridiculous.
For the past few stories they (mostly Jesse) have tried to thumb the shit-covered scale of discourse one way or another, and that’s not what I signed up for. My emotional reaction to the past few stories is rooted in their laziness of research, focusing on who the bad person is rather than the media’s role in making everyone the bad person for profit, and Jesse’s petulance at being called out for reliance on incredibly biased sources (NewsOne). I will admit I’m a New Yorker, and the laziness of reporting on topics here has been especially grating.
I wish the Citibike episode was about the rage machine, as so many stories in the past have been about.
I agree that could have been an interesting piece and more along the lines of the kind of content we like to hear on this pod. E.g. "here's where the media went wrong in covering this" similar to the Central Park Karen ep. But I really do think that most of the angry comments are people who are furious that Jesse didn't more firmly pick the "right side".
The Lululemon story and the reaction our hosts had to it is illustrative of some of the conservative / liberal divide.
Jesse was puzzled at why someone would care about something that doesn't have a material impact on them. The reaction that conservatives have to stories like this isn't about the material impact. It's about the differing treatment between people who are pro-social and anti-social, an inversion of how they ought to be treated.
The shoplifters are defecting on society and its rules. They're placing their own material benefit ahead of the good of society. The workers are apparently obeying the rules in working a job. They're also chastising the rule breakers.
Lululemon, in its non-confrontation policy, is also defecting. As the hosts acknowledge, they've made a calculation and determined that their own benefit is maximized through a non-confrontation policy.
I think there's widespread agreement that thieving is a moral wrong, with narrow life-and-death loaf-of-bread exceptions. I think there's also agreement that telling a thief to get out is morally permissible, probably even praiseworthy.
And yet, we see the retailer punishing the pro-social and telling its workers they have to let the anti-social go without even a tsk. This inversion is the outrage.
I think conservatives are likely puzzled at how liberals can reduce these stories to mere material terms. It's not about the material goods. If they were stealing far cheaper or far more expensive things, I think the reaction from conservatives would be the same. In this case they stole $7,000 worth of clothes.
Imagine instead each thief stuffed a single Lululemon keychain, priced at $24, down his pants. The employees yelled at them to get out and followed them. Lululemon fired the employees. The reaction would have been the same.
Came here to say this exact thing. Ordinary people being expected to follow the rules (and getting punished, fired, and shamed when they break the rules in service of the law) while anti-social thieves are allowed to run free just makes normal, rule-following people feel angry and demoralized, as if we're suckers for still abiding by the social contract.
I 100% agree with this- it’s exactly how I feel. The fucking inversion! I guess I’m conservative now.
Yeah. Fucking weird. . I was at a Rite Aid near my old job, which was near-hood. Dude came in grabbed an umbrella and ran out. No one blinked an eye except one guy who tried to run after them. Everyone was black. Except the cashier was Bengali and I am white
What color was the umbrella?
I don't care about one person stealing one thing. This is organized crime. And no one cares. And then stores close down and then it's because of white supremacy. It's funny I guess, for employees, when it's not awful for anyone wanting to do business in "deserts".
It was blue actually.
And a whole bunch of stores have shut down because of theft. Making it worse is that due to the theft, they put shit under lock, so then people do not want to shop.
Several years ago I remember reading an article about how racist Walgreens was for putting certain merchandise in locked cases because some of it was hair product that was almost exclusively used by black women. I could not and cannot wrap my head around that logic. Loss prevention departments do not randomly choose items to lock down. They do it based on what gets stolen the most. How about chastising the people who are shoplifting and making life harder for everyone else?
Lol “hood adjacent”.
Your points are well taken, but you don't need conservative values to think that stealing is bad. If this sort of theft becomes normalized, prices go up for everyone, which is bad for the person who's on the margin of being able to buy these things. Stores close (as is apparently the case in San Fransisco right now in particular), people lose their jobs, customers lose access, the neighborhood becomes a ghost town. Lululemon isn't that important, but this same mentality is how food deserts happen.
I also think there are many examples of things that have been going on for a while, but which have created new controversies simply because of our new social media environment. Just because corporations were doing "X" 20 years ago doesn't make it good. Corporations were doing a lot of bad shit 20 years ago. In fact, back then, being against corporations was cool.
Everyone is getting mad at Jesse for the Citibike part of the episode, but I thought his "don't the stores have insurance" was a far more egregious comment.
Morality is not conservative, and mass stealing is wrong for everybody.
I'm not saying that only conservatives think stealing is wrong, I'm saying they're especially disgusted by the inversion of appropriate consequences. The theft isn't the story here, it's the company's response to it.
A similar situation is schools with zero tolerance no fighting policies. A kid can be physically bullied and the school will do little or nothing to punish the bully. But if the kid strikes back, it becomes a fight, and he gets the same punishment as the bully.
In my experience conservatives align more on the "it is right to punch back and the bullied kid shouldn't be punished for it" side, and liberals on the "violence is never the answer" side.
Yes, thank you for this comment, especially this statement: "And yet, we see the retailer punishing the pro-social and telling its workers they have to let the anti-social go without even a tsk. This inversion is the outrage."
I was waiting for them to acknowledge that stealing is generally considered morally wrong. They kind of got there at the end with the near-anarchy / why should we have to pay if everyone just steals idea, but I was kind of frustrated by the limited moral / pro-social perspective here. (They don't have to believe that it's wrong, but they could at least acknowledge that some people might feel that way.)
I've read this thread multiple times on multiple days because I have a problem, and this is the first time I realized that you wrote that the shoplifters are "defecting" not "defecating".
It would appear my problems are bigger than I thought.
The weird thing here is the cons are supposed to be pro-corporation. The corporations have these policies because it is in their financial interest. Primarily it's in their interest because of the shitty ways that conservative politicians have shaped the landscapes for corporations in order to give their buddies unfair advantages. They can write off theft losses. They can fire employees at will. Etc.
None of this is about the individual interaction - it's about the corporate policies which are a result of corporations getting basically whatever they want from our political systems.
"They can write off theft losses."
I don't think you understand what write offs are nor how they work...
"writing off" theft losses is the same impact as realizing the cost of the item at time of sale, just with no associated revenue. It's very much a bad thing.
This episode pushed me 1 step closer to unsubscribing entirely . For only the second time I fastfowarded through the preliminary banter. And the reading of the bad reviews was just ...why.
The part about the bike race was pretty fucking funny.
However. What really pissed me off is Jesse being like why was the Citibike story national news and I don't get why people on Reddit were mad at us. Well. First. If you don't know why it is a national story, why the hell did you cover the story at all? Second. Did you read the substack comments at all? Where people are paying and as you say you wouldn't be able to do all this work without the paying subscribers. Because here, I didn't see anyone mad. Mostly it was just confusion as to how you could read these stories and think the woman was at fault at all. There was no anger just confusion. Which is honestly what I saw on Reddit too
Third. You groaned about the author of the News One story comparing what happened with CitiBikes to Emmett Till, but it was HER story that led you to say that maybe the woman did do something wrong. But maybe just maybe the fact that a reporter would make such over the top claims would lead you to carefully analyze what she was saying.
Fourth and final. No one was asking you to revisit the story. I honestly just expected you to say we read the timeline wrong. We were wrong. That is it. 30 seconds
The second half was pretty good. Iwould just add that employees might not want to see people stealing because they find it morally offensive
Geez, you guys. I feel bad about the harshing on Jesse! We pay $5 a month- it's worth at least that.
Katie and Jesse make me laugh, which is sort of priceless.
Admittedly, I laughed VERY loud (outside, while walking my dog) at the accidentally non-binaried gravel biker.
Valid point. I guess the last couple of episodes haven't made me laugh but it definitely is still worth it to me
I do not mean to be harsh on Jesse. I wish they would take substack comments seriously though
Not that I'm mad but I agree, I don't understand why J & K or Lex or Tracing don't read comments on the podcasts. I get not reading the weekly threads but you'd think they would be interested in reactions to their product. I don't expect them to directly comment to posts but just be aware.
The image of Katie being pulled by Moose on skis didn’t make you laugh?!
It did.
Agreed! Even when I disagree - and I did with Jesse on this one - I’m still entertained. It’s worth the 5$ to me for sure.
I do biological monitoring, which involves a lot of sitting in the car wondering why I went to college instead of becoming a deckhand on a tramp steamer.
This podcast is basically a business expense. This podcast and paying for extra lives on Two Dots.
I should get a tax write off.
What is biological monitoring?
Looking for bird nests, telling dudes with heavy equipment to keep their shit out of the creek, taking occasional photos, listening to podcasts.
I wish I worked on a boat.
can't you transfer your job skills to a job on a boat?
I would guess sailing around on a boat and catching fish or plankton or something and counting them. Maybe chemical tests.
The first eight minutes of the podcast were comedy gold. The nonbinary cyclist?? 😂
I laughed out loud at the "Please take it." Like, even the organizers knew their bullshit category was in fact bullshit.
+1 for the healing power of laughter
Agree plus it was especially enjoyable when Katie joined in on the Jesse pile-on multiple times. How can I even be mad at Jesse when I'm also happily laughing at him. The fun of BARpod for me is half reporting and half fun bantering between two amusing people. If one aspect isn't at its highest level, the other usually makes up for it. Jesse messed up, bur more importantly, I laughed a lot in this episode.
They make hundreds of thousands of dollars on this podcast. They can try to take it as seriously as a real job.
Do we really know this? I guess I'm just gobsmacked that this could possibly be true. I don't know what the perma-banneds are paying but if they have only about 12,000 primos and also pay two employees...also I've never met anyone IRL who's heard of this podcast
12,000*5*12 is a lot of dough.
Yeah it is.
On a long drive yesterday, my husband couldn't understand why I wanted to listen to a new BARpod episode right away, before listening to a fairly dry nonfiction book (Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World). Then he started criticizing Jesse for continuing to discuss the CitiBike story while saying it wasn't worth discussing. Of course the criticism was justified, but I had to defend Jesse.
Sad to say, Katie and Jesse and their devoted fans are kind of like the family I used to have, where everyone was free to say what they thought, and it was OK if you messed up sometimes as long as you could still laugh at yourself and make other people laugh. (Maybe it's no coincidence that "primo" means cousin!) Get-togethers with my actual family have become such a minefield of potential misgenderings and worse. I think it will take a lot of missteps and disappointments for me to unsubscribe.
I love hanging with you guys here!
I laughed out loud when I read the title of that non fiction book- oh my sweet lord.
I pray it was better than it sounds .
It's actually a pretty interesting and well-written book, even entertaining at times. But it doesn't fill my need for a make-believe family.
Yes. I found this very unsatisfying. Jesse, maybe don’t joke around so much about your low-effort work product if you care about keeping your paying subscribers.
I kind of hate it when people threaten they will unsubscribe to a podcast.
It’s not that I object to the idea of unsubscribing if something is no longer of value. Or even to laying out the reasons.
It’s the I’m-paying-so-I can-throw-my-weight-around aspect.
It’s like being rude to wait staff because you’re the customer.
The wait staff is not a good analogy. They have thousands of subscribers. The power imbalance of one or a few primos saying they'll unsubscribe isn't like a customer berating a minimum wage wait staff. And no one is saying you have to be rude to them.
What we're saying is that we pay to support quality content. If the content isn't up to par, it's totally appropriate to stop paying for it. Explaining why you stop paying for it, when done in good faith, may even help the content creator question some errors they may have made.
We have a weird parasocial relationship though. Even when they say stuff where I’m like “nope!” about pedo stuff I try to remember they are still people and doing their best.
I'll cut people a great deal of slack if they're doing their best, even if they come up a bit short. This was an admittedly "low effort" update, that even Katie (who made no effort on her part) called out. Sorry, but criticism is well within bounds here.
Disagreement and critique are fine. Adding some weird low stakes financial threat to convince someone to agree with you is both weird and ineffective.
I totally agree that we're paying for quality content and that explaing why you've stopped paying, when done in good faith, is fine.
What I don't like is when people get into "this isn't right for people nearing 40" or "they're making six figures so they should do better" territory. That's where the waitstaff comparison comes into it.
I agree with you about the age thing Ann, that's really uncalled for.
What they earn is only relevant in the sense that this is basically their full time job (I know Jesse has his newsletter and Katie sporadically writes articles). If they made 20k a year from the podcast, the lack of research would be more understandable. But here, they earn enough to make this their full focus, have 1-2 assistants...
That's great! That's why I was a subscriber from the beginning. I want them to take the time to research what they want. But shouldn't quality and expectations for the content produced then also be higher than if this was a side hustle?
They have both at times seemed exhausted and I think they are going through the newly successful business person thing where they haven’t figured out they need to take vacations and built out a support team. Like they should have regular co hosts where they can just take off for a week or two a few times a year and for the most part they don’t.
I have responded elsewhere on the thread.
Aren't you doing the same exact thing?
Nope
I've just been paying for jokes and banter the whole time. I'm not looking to K & J for big-time journalism, although some of their stories have been great. (I loved the Unitarian episode.)
I didn’t threaten to unsubscribe, so I don’t know why you’re directing this at me, Ann, and also, no it is not like being rude to waitstaff. This is requesting a certain level of effort and attention to a product we pay for. Jesse was poorly prepared to present this story, and it’s fine to point that out.
Thank you for being gracious, Ann. I do disagree but I regret being snappy and am sorry about that.
Apologies. I meant to reply to Not aTrue Scotsman, who likely won't see my comment. Double my bad.
Also if the wait staff sucks you should let them know.
I actually unsubscribed around nine months ago and only resubscribed for this single month. I mostly did so because listening tended to make me anxious / mad due to how close I was to some of the crazy stuff they were talking about. Not really their fault, though the lads at TFC manage to talk about similar stuff in a much more enjoyable way.
The other big turn-off was how obviously unprepared they were for a lot of episodes and how they'd joke about that. I get that I was only paying $5/mo, and I think I got my money's worth. However, for two people nearing 40, joking about being unprofessional rubbed me the wrong way, especially as there pod is probably one of the biggest on Substack.
$60 a year could buy you five subscriptions to glossy magazines that did journalism back in the day. And they ran more than 4 stories per month.
I know it's not fair exactly to expect the same level as that but I'm buying about $300/yr worth of independent journalist output because I enjoy them more than the current output by the glossies.
They don't usually get it this wrong.
On Jesse's "I don't get why this is a national story."
True. It shouldn't be. But lots of stuff that is really just dumb interpersonal drama becomes national news because of the underlying dynamics. This pod has at times been good at unpacking why people are so enraged about a conflict between a bird-watcher and dog-walker. The fact that millions of people are enraged at bullshit is interesting in and of itself. As others have stated: reporting on dumb internet bullshit is the entire point of this pod.
Exactly. It is just a little baffling that he asks why it is a national story when he covered the story.
But I do think it became a national story in part because liberal or maybe progressive America is very focused on the idea that we are still in 1955 and white women hate black boys. Just a nicer face
I really think this has gotten worse because of the pandemic. Journalists mostly worked from home and so they didn't get out and didn't have the opportunity to do more traditional reporting. Most of their friends and relatives were also white collar workers who were working from home and weren't really involved in the real world outside of their homes. They were spending a lot of time on the internet and on social media sites and their friends were the same. So journalists ended up reporting more on stupid internet stuff. Unfortunately, they're not going back to reporting on the real world stuff.
you probably should unsubscribe. you’re wasting a lot of energy into a podcast that’s supposed to be fun. take a break, and when you start to miss our favorite horse fucker and lesbian, come on back.
I am really not. I live in NYC. There is a CitiBike dock down the street from me. And I agree it is supposed to be fun .But it isn't always .I will probably unsubscribe soon but I am not ready yet. It is overall too good
Jesse only fucks female Christian conservative horses because he’s a red-blooded American.
The weird parasocial relationships are being oddly tested in this one.
This isn't a fandom question. Parasocial relationships require an emotional interest/obsession with Katie and Jesse's personas. That's not what people are doing here. They're criticizing arguments made by the hosts.
Only because they care too much and are peacocking. Full stop. That’s all. So yeah. I stand by my statement.
It’s a petty hill to die on. Obsessively petty.
But hey. Everyone can have their weird triggers. People are more than welcome to take their ball and go home.
I’m sure tears will be shed.
So let me get this straight, when people pay a subscription to a podcast and comment on how much they love it, do they care too much?
Because people stopping to pay for same podcast and explaining what they found lacking is the same thing.
You're talking about hills to die on, triggers, pettiness... Dude, you can act above the fray all you want, that people care too much, but you're taking this too seriously too. People you don't know made comments about the show you felt compelled to respond to, and we're having a conversation about it. It's not that deep.
Me? Haha I’m far more chaotic. But if you’d like you can look through for comments of me going “yay team” and you won’t find any. So yeah. Saying “I love this thing so much” without any added value is utterly masturbatory. I just heard about the outrage and wanted to see it. It’s funny to me because it’s funny. It is objectively funny that this causes any consternation on people.
I just like pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. And this whole nothing burger has no bun.
People don’t like that. I think it’s hilarious they don’t like it.
Even the response I get? Meh. It’s uninteresting.
Respond if ya want but I’m prolly done with this. There’s a piece of toast I have to go watch toast.
Yes, I see you, and that little trite shtick you've got going on. Boring indeed. No point in interacting. Now go watch that toast buddy ;)
The opening two banter stories were a dramatic enactment of the little-known Dr. Seuss book, “Shoo Flies, Jew Flies”. Sadly, Disney just closed its attractions based on the tale, in favor of the new animatronic extravaganza, “Dr. Strangio and the Multiverse of Pronouns.”
yes but like. why do we care.
This is a story about two people being a bit rude, tens of thousands of similar interactions are happening all over the internet. The fact that one of them was probably more of a dickhead than the other should be immaterial. none of us would care if ti weren't for the algorithm pushing this shit at us primarily because it's an interaction between people of different races, which is really awful when you think about it. There probably was a white kid doing this exact thing to a white dude 2 blocks away but no one hears about it - Heck that kid might have done the same and tried to make his video go viral too, but it didn't because it doesn't stoke the culture wars.
The whole point I heard Jesse making is that if we had just collectively ignored it the whole world would be a better, less racist place.
I do of course agree that J&K should stop reading reddit any stick with us, we are clearly superior, more intellectual, and all around sexier.
You make a good point. The problem though is why did Jesse cobet it then? Like I only heard about this because of the podcast and I live in Manhattan. Actually. No. I heard about it on the ipen thread here and then the podcast covered it.
I should be clear. What pissed me off was not the original coverage of the stiry. I was a bit flummoxed how he could read the News One article and come to the conclusion he did. It made no sense to me. What pissed me off is - if it is that much of a nothing story, then do not cover it. And also do not decide that ok maybe the woman really was a Karen based on an article that was clearly a hatchet job
I tend to agree, in that it overall was not a story they needed to cover and by only kinda covering it they seem to have really annoyed some people.
But, I do feel like it was really a very tiny mention it in the first episode it was in, and therefore was confused by the vehemence of the backlash (which actually I wasn't aware of as I don't read reddit and the response here was much milder, until this response).
Guys! Don't read reddit they don't even pay for the pod!!
Also! You don't have to respond to every criticism. C'mon Jesse, you got off twitter for a reason!
Jesse on the citibike story think you missed the part where the kids sister is online being a massive racist demanding that Sarah lose her job and have her crowdfunding money revoked. On another note the reason this is a national story is because the left has a racial grifting problem that you could address.
I'm not normally one to think someone should sue at the drop of a hat, but I think Comrie should look into a defamation suit.
I’m not canceling anything. I still like the show and “ants on the keyboard” was really funny. However, I’m bummed that the fact that the Newsone article was written by someone who led the pile on against Comrie didn’t get mentioned. That is a really interesting angle, and it’s the kind of journalistic ethic (or complete lack there of) that this podcast has covered in the past. Even if it is a “non-story,” the journalist’s attack on Comrie is a meaty subject, because a journalist shouldn’t do that and still call themselves a journalist. I hope you aren’t resting on your laurels, because that would be boring.
I didn’t get the ants joke. I’m guessing I forgot or missed something.
They were basically implying trust Ian Myles Cheong eats over his keyboard all the time, because he never logs off, and thus has ants.
I think it's even more specific than that. Ian Miles Cheong posted years ago about having an ant problem, and someone or other jokingly exaggerated that to imply he is covered in a layer of ants at all times. As always it's tough to peel back the layers of irony and exaggeration, but I think an older ep of barpod had a timeline of The Ant Joke.
Ha, thank you!
Implying that
It's shitting on Ian Miles Cheong, or it's banter, whatever.
Really? How was Taylor Lorenz a big part of the story?
Ok- does Jesse seriously not understand why an employee would be upset about shop lifting?? I’m pissed off hearing about it third hand!! It’s a moral injury. Societies can’t function in an atmosphere of rampant theft. It’s like one of the most basic rules of the social contract.
There is a reason why in the old
times horse theives were hanged and pick pockets got their hands cut off.
You'd think he'd be appalled by horse thievery.
And yet, neigh.
I don't get the horse fucking jokes. Can someone point me to the episode where this started, because it's weird.
It's why they have to do all the throat-clearing.
Amazing
Yeah I was confused by that as well. I would consider it part of my job to try protect my employer’s property if I could reasonably safely. It’s weird that you would just not care? Do you not care if your neighbor is getting robbed either? You’re supposed to just stay out of it? I don’t get where a lot of people are coming from these days on what seem like such basic issues of morality and decency. It’s like I’m from another planet or something. But then I’m almost always on team Karen when these stories come up.
very good points about this expanding to caring about your neighbors, etc.
Who the fuck is going to get blamed for shrinkage?
"Don't chase shoplifters"
plus
"Shrinkage is your responsibility"
What the actual
Def agree with you here. I'll add that not everyone working in retail is a burnout who hates their job, boss and company.
Even people who work in retail (from time to time) take pride in their work and their ability to maintain a nice-looking, well-functioning store. You don't have to make $100s an hour to take pride in your work and to want your efforts to be respected. Retail workers spend a lot of time in theses stores putting up displays, doing inventory, cleaning, training, working etc... And yes they do it bc it's part of the job and would get fired if they didnt. But is it so crazy to think that there is a group of people who prefer to not show up at work wishing they weren't there and coping by getting high and slacking off? IMO it's understandably exasperating to get fired bc you're fed up with people coming into your workplace to do illegal shit and to disrespect you and the social contract.
Exactly this! Example; at work we had a colleague that didn't do his part of work as a team member for a collective project. The part of work he chose not to do had a cascading impact on absolutely everyone on our team. The good part is that we pulled together and took over his portion of the work to meet a deadline, albeit at longer hours and greater stress for all of us. The 'bad' part is that he received no repercussions, no consequences for kind of deflecting and putting this last-minute high-stress pressure on everyone. The result? A genuine apathy has settled on the team, an idea of 'why work so hard and commit to something as a team whereby we are paid the same and treated the same, whether we show up or not?' This is the same - you cannot foster a sense of trust in a team or organization when witnessing a lapse in morality that has no consequences else how does it benefit the totality? It only tends to fosters what I saw it did; resentment and apathy.
It seemed like they came around to acknoedging that, but it took them a while. I think he was initially asking if the robbery impacts the workers' pay or in any other material way and if that would be the motive for them intervening.
Hi everyone,
I share some of your criticisms of the way Jesse framed the Citibike story and his comments in the correction this episode. However I think it would be a mistake to make comments about unsubscribing from the podcast.
If we go down that road just because we're not happy about the coverage of one or two stores, then we're no better than twitter. We are all wrong from time to time so I think it might be a good idea if you're feeling frustrated to keep in mind all the great stories Jesse and Katie have brought to us. And even when they do get it wrong, you can always find a good discussion here or on the Reddit.
Be kind to each other and Jessie and Katie too 💖
I have no problem disagreeing with their perspective; I think that is good and healthy. But it is irksome for them to be so flippant about how poorly they covered a story they admit they put very little effort into. Do it thoroughly, or don’t do it at all. Not every story needs the in-depth investigative work of the UU Church episode (which was very good!), but a TikTok video and a cursory read of a biased article from a ridiculous source doesn’t cut it.
Yeah, totally get where you're coming from. Jesse's response did not come across the way he probably intended. And I don't think he responded to the most substantive claims from the pushback.
But I think it's also helpful to remember that even if they botch a story completely (facts, opinion and framing), the podcast as a whole has added a lot more good to the world than it subtracted. Like you said, it's important that the audience can communicate and give them feedback when it looks like a mistake or a poor framing. That way, people can draw there own conclusions when mistakes happen. But if we threaten to unsubscribe every time, I think we'd be disregarding all of their good work. We'd probably also prevent them from discussing stories where there's a chance we might disagree.
I suppose that's my main point. Everybody makes mistakes and we need to give Jesse and Katie the freedom to be wrong occasionally. Because we're grading them against Michael Hobbes and NPR.
I don’t think even 5% of the criticism has been because they were “wrong”. That is just a big misreading of what people are/were saying.
If I unsubscribed from interacting with everyone who annoyed me sometimes I would live a lonely existence!
A lot of people are living that existence these days.
I agree at least for now. The messaging value of reducing their income by $5/mo isn't yet worth missing out on bonus episode releases.
That said, your post being the ONLY one in this entire thread "Liked by Jesse Singal" is pretty insulting.
Of course he doesn't want people to unsubscribe and "likes" calls to not unsubscribe but one of the top comments on this thread is an unsubscriber who early on in their complaint mentioned, "K&J once again pointedly ignored the existence of their thoughtful subscribers in favor of quoting at length from reddit. The "amazing community"' here is worth acknowledging only when asking for subscriptions and is apparently too deplorable to consider otherwise."
So Jesse then chooses to 'show presence and attention' by ignoring every post other than the one that suggests people just keep their subscription going and move on rather than "doing a cancel" by choosing not to continue giving money to people as their product quality drops....
Regarding the fact that he liked my post, I personally don't think it's as nefarious as that. When you get a wall of criticism (regardless of whether or not it's warranted), it's tough to absorb all at once.
I know that when my work gets edited, I tend to retreat for a while and lick my wounds. Often, when I return to the criticism, I can read it in a more detached way.
So if I had to guess, I would wager that Jesse just appreciated hearing a positive note amongst the negative ones. I would recommend giving him some time and trying to guard against assigning negative intentions to his actions. Being generous with others is one way we can show the strength of our community and distinguish ourselves from the people on Twitter who only know how to tear things down.
Sure, this is just like if Jesse had once liked a tweet using racial slurs and we're all calling his employer to have him fired and/or bullying advertisers to cancel contracts with him.
Your use of woke mob is as useless and diluted as current accusations of karendom.
Specific as in "analyzing the social media likes"?
Not like I went on his page and dug around to see what all he's liked lately to try and dig up dirt. I pointed out the single, golden "Liked by Jesse Singal" badge because it prominently sticks out while reading the discussion here.
If his like showed up like everybody else's, it wouldn't be noticeable or worth pointing out but again it's a big, golden "Liked by Jesse Singal" badge.
I really fail to see how you think it's at all comparable.
I would bet that for every person who has unsubscribed, it was not just one or two episodes. But I am continuing to subscribe even though a lot has been annoying me for awhile
Yes precisely. I've disagreed plenty of times over the years but up until recently they've always been genuinely curious about what they're talking about. Last few months there's been ever-increasing amount of incurious throat-clearing going on
Maybe they are losing interest but stuck because of the money. Happens to lots of people and generally the work product starts tanking.
It’s not about his take, it’s about how poorly thought out it was.
I endorse this!
Supported. Like I assume good faith even when they say shit about pedo stuff. Can’t we all just find it in ourselves to think, even if we are convinced we are totally correct, that maybe the person who is wrong is just having an off day?
On one hand I see why people want to express their frustration along with the concrete action they're willing to take. Our relationship with Katie and Jesse is financial. Subscribers fund their project, and if the project isn't meeting expectations, pulling funding is the appropriate response.
But on the other hand, I agree with your broader point. So much of the outpouring against coverage of the Citibike drama has a tinge of parasocial expectation about it. People seem to feel personally betrayed because the Citibike segment and follow-up didn't meet expectations. They didn't meet my expectations either, but I'm not about to jump to a conclusion on what this implies about J or K's character, upbringing, or perspective. And we should all take heart that Katie was so clear and forceful about her own dissatisfaction with the follow-up. Nobody's perfect. Jesse was clear that he didn't place a high priority on this story and didn't look into many of the details, which is unfortunate, since so much of it rests in the particulars of how the interaction went down beat-by-beat, what Citibike's policies and terms of service are, what the common etiquette is, and how the online shitstorm developed. As far as I'm concerned, all those aspects went underreported across the original segment and follow-up. But hey that Spire ain't gonna Slay itself (don't get me wrong i fucking love Slay The Spire too, I am a fellow Spire Slayer).
In the end, I do have to agree that BaRpod's coverage of this story has left a lot to be desired. I would have liked to see more in-depth coverage in the following specific ways:
- Clarify exactly how the Citibike system works. What was the legal status of the bike during the incident?
- Layout a timeline of known events during the incident.
- Explore the NewsOne article through the lens of the author's twitter activity
Is this sort of a vulgar, small story being blown out of proportion? Sure. But the reason that can happen is because the story represents something else to people. It is culturally shocking that teenagers can belittle a pregnant woman on camera and receive an outpouring of support, while she is reflexively suspended from her means of supporting her family. It says something about the nature of power, which is a subject that's inherently worth examining. It's also a little weird to think, but Citibike's are a community resource, and this story represents a failure of community participation in sharing that resource fairly. There are angles here that aren't just the same race-baiting people participate in every day on twitter, and even if I haven't been blown away by K&S's coverage of the story, I have learned a lot from the community posts about it here and on Reddit.
Really not sure why K+J didn’t actually talk about how to respond to the bike criticism or re-record the segment once Katie heard what Jesse was adding. Should have been a clarification with a brief acknowledgement that they got criticism and moved on. Instead I feel like this is only going to chum the waters. Seems like Katie thought the same and probably wanted to ignore it, which would have been better than this. But I also think that if someone is thinking of unsubscribing over this I imagine they’ve been moving in that direction for a bit and the general response on Reddit is being used as justification.
Personally I did feel that their take on the story didn’t make sense. How does one person using a single bike all day help a program that is meant to distribute bikes? If it was “his” then why could she scan it in the first place? Seemed like pretty obvious questions to ask if you’re going to cover the story. I appreciated them providing more clarity since the interpretation in the original episode was off, but the execution seems pretty botched to me.
Many of their "corrections", have been non acknowledgements, and I get the impression I am being gaslit about not only what they said, but also what the community actually took issue with. It always seems like it it meant to convince some third party that things are cool now, not actually address the criticism.
Not directly related to this episode, but speaking of Lululemon: In 2011 at a Lululemon store in Maryland, one Lululemon employee, Brittany Norwood, murdered her coworker, Jayna Murray, after Jayna caught Brittany stealing merchandise and called the manager. Brittany was a black woman, Jayna was a white woman. Brittany initially staged the scene to make it look like there was a violent break-in, but once it became clear that there was no break-in and she was the murderer, even her own family sided against her. The CEO of Lululemon spoke at Jayna's funeral and the company erected a beautiful mural at the front of the store in her memory.
It's difficult not to look back at that story and wonder if the public would've responded differently if it had happened now. I'm sure a lot of people would've considered Jayna a Karen, maybe even tried to justify or excuse Brittany killing her. Would the company have honoured Jayna's memory to the extent they did in 2011? I somewhat doubt that they would. IDK, maybe I'm overthinking it.
Came here to say I was surprised Katie didn’t list this among all of the Lululemon scandals! It’s a pretty shocking story.
I do remember that story now that you bring it up. If it were today, I'm not sure the jury would have even convicted.
Why do you think the jury wouldn't have convicted?
Fear for their lives. When we see some of the mass protests for other politically charged cases, it's not hard to imagine.
Do we have any recent examples of jury members being attacked for their verdict, or any examples of jury members citing the political climate as a reason not to convict in a clear-cut murder case?
I mean there are plenty of well-documented examples of intimidation and manipulation of juries. If I had an example like what you're talking about, I would not above have used the words "not sure"
i was waiting for them to mention this!
It sounds like the kid squatting on the Citibike was the Karen all along.
Jesse, you're still clueless.
If white teen boys did this to a black woman, there would be no debate, even if the white boys were technically in the right. We would call these boys thugs.
It is a failure of civility and chivalry. No man can ever use intimidation and fear to settle a dispute with a woman.
Just reverse the races and tell me this is a trivial story.
Yup, there it is. The “switch race & reassess” razor clears it right up. It was the same in this episode with the making fun of catholics vs making fun of muslims. This race razor illustrates hypocrisy quick, easy & stark.
I agree on the hypocrisy of the roles being switched, but being raised Catholic, making fun of religion was kind of a "thing" for us. I'm areligious now but my mom is still Catholic and loves "ribbing" it; it's almost like it's so ingrained that it couldn't be offensive and one kind of desires a "release valve" as it were. My husband's family is Jewish and likewise they never seem to tire of joking about religion. I don't know if it belongs at a baseball game--I struggle to see the context there--but in general I think it's healthier to joke about than not.
Totally agree (if Im anything I’m an absurdist) and personally I DGAF if they make fun of any religion, hell make it a skit before every game like the national anthem. My thing is just that if you couldn’t make fun of Islam because its adherents would get bent out of shape then Catholics being pissed is also fair play (pun intended). (Also, Sullivan’s point that they aren’t edgy or transgressive to make fun of Christians they’re hypocrites for refusing to do the same to Islam out of a legit fear of reprisal)
"...they aren’t edgy or transgressive to make fun of Christians they’re hypocrites for refusing to do the same to Islam out of a legit fear of reprisal" YES.
Civility and chivalry! Exactly! I wonder if Jesse has lived in cities so long that he is immune to seeing this. But would he want his mother or sister-in-law to be subjected to this? Especially her work suspension? Come on, Jesse.
PREACH!
here's the deal though. If we all just ignored this equally regardless of the race of the people involved everyone would be better off.
Instead we amplify the story and get enraged it's a story and have to find out who the baddest guy is just to prove the point. You don't actually have to engage in the culture war. Most sane people don't.
I think both the Citibike story and the Lululemon story are related, and I haven't seen this point yet in the comments.
Both have to do with the idea of societal standards of what is right and wrong. So much of what is going on today (and in Jesse and Katie's stories) involves denying, ignoring, or destroying cultural and other norms of behavior. We used to have shared values in this country that most (not all) people could agree with most (not all) of the time. For example, you don't steal other peoples' stuff. Contrary to the progressive line, this is not a white supremacist value: I would bet that, 30 years ago, the vast majority of people of all races, religions, etc., would agree with that statement.
But now, in the name of equity, or inclusion, or non-judgmentalism, or whatever else, we're told none of these norms apply anymore. Shut up about my penis, I'm a woman you bigot! If you complain about setting a building on fire during a riot you're a racist. You can't say that, it might offend someone.
I'm a libertarian, but even I can agree we need SOME standards of conduct.
No, this is not an "important" story. But once it's in the news, it becomes a crucible (or as one person put it, a Rorschach test). for all of us to hammer out our beliefs.
So that's why Jesse's take pissed me off a little too. Can't we just agree that the boys were wrong, and she was right? The violation is separate from the punishment. We can say both that the boys were wrong, and that no, it's not the biggest deal in the world and they shouldn't get 30 years in jail. But there is a party who was "right" and another one that was "wrong."
Is it that hard to say, Jesse? Yeah, teenagers are assholes. They are also wrong sometimes. (Although, I don't think Jesse would have been as dismissive if 4 white kids were hassling a black, pregnant nurse practitioner. I also think it was a cop out to say the Go Fund Me was "weird." I submit it's worse than "weird." But Jesse doesn't want to say what it really is.). They broke the rules. Just say it--it doesn't make you a racist. The fact that it is a minor story does not preclude us from deciding what is the right side of the line.
Similarly, the outrage over Lululemon is about standards. Have we really fallen so far that people can just walk in and steal shit whenever they want, and we're like, "Meh...?" (You know who pays for all those insurance claims, don't you?) I mean, ultimately, it's a slippery slope. If you can disregard a store's right to own property, can't you disregard my right to own property?
I think Katie's take on these issues is much closer to the 'normie' take, on both sides of the political spectrum. She sees the bullshit. Jesse, while really bright, sometimes has a tough time looking past his own subjective context.
All that being said, I'm not going anywhere. I love the podcast. It's good for me to listen to smart people articulate ideas I generally disagree with.
I see this public schools, too. In the name of “equity” all kids can wander around all day, yell at teachers, swear freely and often (I hear fuck all day), wear bikini tops to school, sleep in class, just total disregard for traditional standards of behavior. I’m sure those kids go to a school where bad behavior is considered “a form of communication“ and rewarded with kind attention and treats. People who know me as a blowhard liberal laugh when I say I’ve become a conservative because of this insane cultural disintegration, but I’m dead serious.
You aren't really allowed to suspend anyone anymore, and the parents do not back you up if you punish the student.
Yup
If you raise the issue about what the kids are (not) wearing you get called sexist and misogynistic. As though it’s a victory for feminism for girls to be at school with nearly no clothes on.
Or maybe we should relieve kids from the social pressure to put their bodies on full display.
Also, at my son’s high school there was a girl who often wore a shirt that read “Men are trash”. I would not let my son out of the house in a shirt that said the reverse nor do I expect that he would have gone unnoticed and unpunished by his school had he printed such a sentiment on a shirt.
TBH I don't think Jesse was making a normative value judgement that 'Stealing isn't wrong' I think he's making a defense for employees that don't try to stop shoplifting which is fair and that ultimately it's not their responsibility. Retail work sucks. No-one should be expected to physically stop thefts to protect their asshole manager. Wait till they step out of the store and call the cops maybe also try to get the color of their car and license plate number.
Bravissimo!
That's a completely fair point. Although, as a lawyer, I am not sure how I could "prove" anything in a comment thread on a podcast. I mean, who is the finder of fact? :)
Seriously, though, I suppose I could try to Google it, and provide links that say, for example, that before 2020, the vast majority of people in this country believed that men have penises, and women have babies, or some survey that said that support for free speech has declined. I think most of that stuff is unconvincing anyway, so I will just go with, "That is my opinion."