Re: pride events, this is my grumpy Gen X take but I find it annoying how many millennial parents think every venue needs to be a family venue. Like, don’t take your kids to a bar or the Dyke March
"Outside" in general should always be family friendly. If you want to express yourself in lewd ways keep it to the bars or sex clubs. The sidewalk isn't for public displays of adult sexuality.
This isn't going to end well, there will be a backlash and it will be ugly.
I agree. If this explosion of Pride is trying to bring on a backlash, they may just get what they wish for. It is a historical truth when you study revolutions, that they sometimes are started by groups that want incremental change within the existing system. Then, after some initial success, radicals rise to power who want to burn down everything to achieve some type of utopia. They also force out the original revolutionaries. What inevitably happens next is a huge reaction from the established order who do not support the radicals.
I was a grumpy gen Xer when I was in my twenties. I will never forget trying to get home after a double shift at the hospital, and being unable to get to my apartment because the streets were filled with Pride revelers. At one point there were two half naked guys making out on the hood of my car. Please note: I wasn’t on the parade route!
It’s so annoying. Every brewery in my city looked like a daycare this past week, though honestly they generally do most of the time anyways... I don’t like it.
There is so much PRIDE going on during the month of June, it is almost too much to take. Like, ok, we get it. Gary rights and all! Still, NO OTHER MONTH IS LIKE THAT. It's July 5th, I don't see companies putting America's colors in their logo.
I hate to be that person. But, Jesse and Katie, I really believe you’d have a less cavalier attitude toward the inappropriateness of many Pride events if you were parents yourselves.
When you’re not looking at the world through the eyes of your own kid, you don’t see the world the way kids do.
Few parents feel it’s OK for their kids to listen to “WAP,” watch men in assless chaps twerking, see a person in a dog mask being led on a leash, or see men with titties strolling around wearing nothing but pasties on those titties.
This is stuff you routinely encounter at Pride events. It’s gross for kids.
Those same kids can be taken to Hooters, or allowed to watch the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, or be dressed in those terrible toddler t-shirts that read, "Lock up your daughters" or "Hot Stuff." Children in this society encounter sexualization ALL THE TIME, and not just in June. It's gross but it's omnipresent, and certainly not restricted to Pride events.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels incredibly weirded out by those baby clothes with stupid sayings on them. I also have to hide my disgust when people say things like, “oh he’s flirting/he’s a flirt!” when a baby smiles at an adult. I know it’s innocent dumb banter, but... No. That’s gross. Stop.
There does seem to be a kind of “arms race” going on in society. Heterosexual displays are all over the place as you say and that in turn must force the Pride radicals to go more extreme. You go back in time to a more sexually repressed era and all that the pride people would have to do is kiss on the sidewalk to shock the world.
I have to be honest, this post gave me a bit of a “how are you doing, fellow kids” laugh. Hooters girls and Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders are like the tamest possible (hetero) sexy things I can think of - odd examples to pick. You can see worse (and actually targeted at teens) on any show on the CW, for example.
I think the point was that no one is forcing people to take kids, and you personally don’t have to go to pride. Plus, my city has explicitly “family-friendly” pride events, and most are labeled. Adults who don’t attend pride watching videos of pride events to freak themselves out is weird. I don’t take my kids out to public events anyway because it is hot and crowded and expensive but I’m less worried about pride than what YouTube shorts might be recommending next following a video my son wants to watch of a gamer playing Minecraft. The trends on YouTube, Roblox, chats with randos in Xbox Live with people playing some COD zombie game, the Wild West nature of TikTok.... these are real concerns. Some people are distracting themselves from the reality that banning nudity in Anne Frank books, railing against a gay-themed parade that has been happening once a year for decades, and worrying about story time in libraries--all of that is shouting into the wind while we are in the midst of a tornado. That seems to be Katie’s point.
Do you find that the “family friendliness” is well enforced? Honestly a lot of the lewd stuff at pride is less about the “official” performances/events and more just the attendees themselves. Do they actually get bounced from the “family” events? Even if they don’t, public transportation for several miles around any big pride event is often a (not family friendly) show in itself.
Hardly anyone uses public transportation in my city. I think it is true that there are probably people who try to crash “family friendly” events to be edgy or transgressive. I don’t know though, I haven’t been in years. I think I would probably go to the annual zoo family friendly event rather than a downtown parade.
I agree that many Pride events are gross for kids. And so do many of my gay and lesbian friends who are parents. I know a lot of places do have Pride events that are family friendly but a lot of people I know gave up on Pride events when it got more visibly associated with BDSM and public sex. Or they go to the laid back parade/events in a smaller town vs. hitting the main March in Seattle. Now every single suburb and municipality around here seeming has their own Pride event.
I think many pride events are gross for adults. I fail to see the connection between the uncontroversial position that people deserve equal civil rights and public displays of sexual fetishes.
Can someone explain what one has to do with the other?
If you’re gay, just like a straight person, you potentially/hopefully will find a long term relationship with someone of the same sex. In which case those people would want to live their lives openly just like a heterosexual couple, and they should have that right. The sexual behaviors of a couple needn’t be publicized no matter the orientation. Full stop. Obviously we all know that romantic relationships involve sexual acts, but until recently that was understood among adults and never explicitly shoved into anyone’s face. Now the sex part seems to have become the focus of pride, and I think that’s why people are so annoyed.
Being into bondage, s&m, diapers, leather, whatever the fuck else gets you going sexually has NOTHING to do with civil rights. I don’t feel the need for government to condone the public sexual gratification of fetishists. And I’m having a hard time finding the purpose of a bondage parade that isn’t solely linked to the sexual gratification of the participants.
What happened with Pride anyway? It was super progressive to go. Then when people were really pushing for equsl marriage the parade became very family friendly. And now it is very...not family friendly. I dunno
Several of my gay and lesbian friends and family members who have kids posted a family picture of a tame daytime Pride parade. I might ask my brother next time we get together if he thinks it was less family friendly this year. He is and has always been the least transgressive person I know in terms of temperament. I couldn’t convince him to even try a cigarette growing up. Now he has a normie life with a husband and kid in the suburbs. Some of my friends attended a Pride-related spin class, changed their Facebook profile to a rainbow and bought rainbow stuff to wear as a way to celebrate pride without going to a parade. I probably would have done the same but just got caught up in work and then all of the sudden June was over!
We went to a super small and inclusive event which was family friendly according to the flyer…but there were still some pretty inappropriate things going on. I always only took my kid to kid friendly pride events but now I feel uncomfortable doing so. I wonder how many other queer parents feel this way these days…
Yeah this is their biggest blind spot, though given the parents who take their kids to these events, I’m not sure parenthood would change either Jesse’s or Katie’s minds. Maybe if it were inappropriate for dogs?
There's also a simpler argument: if X behavior wouldn't be okay with someone who wasn't gay, or it wouldn't be okay during an event that wasn't a pride festival, why is it okay now?
Heterosexual public displays are always based on female sensuality. Women’s breasts and asses. Hooters and exotic dance clubs are all women displaying their bodies because men will pay to look at them. It is totally rare to see heterosexual men strutting around undressed. Men like to look at undressed women and women aren’t as interested in seeing undressed men. That’s the way it goes. Women are not as interested.
It seems in the gay world, it is men who are the stars of the show. Buff men strutting around and men dressed like women too. Gay women are not as demonstrative like men and mostly don’t display like men.
What is consistent in all this is male sexual interest dominates everywhere.
Gay men like to see gay men strut. The most militant trans people are men who say they are women. Heterosexual men like to see women strut. It is male sexual desire that runs underneath everywhere. Testosterone. Gay or heterosexual testosterone rules.
Respectfully, parents also don't see the world the way kids do. They think they do, but they're often, possibly most of the time, wrong.
Asking sincerely because I don't know: what is the harm done to the kids by witnessing this kind of thing? Morals and ethics are based on harm. What is the harm?
>"I am obviously not comparing these kids to Maoists" -Jesse
Umm that is absolutely what they are. This is literally the Cultural Revolution Part II. Now the US is a less fucked up place than mid 20th century China, so they aren't like murdering anyone, but lord knows they would like to if they could get away with it.
Academia really does seem like it has taken a torpedo and is going to sink in its current form, because while the sane seem to have fought back some. The sane all mostly seem older, and the crazy mostly seem to have a near monopoly of the power among the grad shcool and young prof cohorts.
I finally figured out why Jesse has been annoying me so much lately. He has been much more critical of conservatives without realizing that he really is in a progressive bubble, while Katie does regularly interact with people with very different political takes. And then the whole "no, the real wasn't so good," but then talking confidently about things you do not know much about.
And by not know much about zi mean conservative takes on race and diversity. What exactly does being conservative have to do with valuing diversity? This is not ,1999
No one is denying the existence of racism, the argument is about what to do about it.
I would say that the difference between a conservative and progressive in this instance would be that a progressive thinks that racial diversity is the ultimate goal while a conservative thinks the best person is right, regardless of race. And we should seek diversity but not at the expense of qualifications.
About the post grad. If what Halevy said was true, by what post modern logic was she at a meeting at all?
I have a really weird experience being a conservative from a family of conservatives dropped in a progressive echo chamber at work and in our state with progressive in laws. It is baffling to me some of the stuff my in laws take away (and my family to a way lesser extent)
Even though I'm faculty, I'm way more temperamentally comfortable with the staff and techs.
I don't think Jesse has ever experienced. The Navy town k lives in is certainly closer to normies. So I think you are totally right. (but I did like the episode overall)
Sometimes I feel it’s a little like being bilingual. I’m always translating back and forth. I’m of the Right certainly but I’ve always had “misaligned positions” like being pro gay marriage back when the Democrats were pushing don’t ask don’t tell. (wtf was that btw) The Right knows way more about the Left though because they own media and entertainment so their sermons are unavoidable. If you’re like Jesse your bubble can be thick and snuggly.
The other day some wiseacre on our company slack made several snide comments about Republicans in Texas just not liking Mexicans as the reason they are against illegal immigration. Mind you this guy is in France- big ole bubble boy. I finally had to point out to him that if you’re from Texas you almost certainly have a Mexican branch (or two in my case) of your family and how absurd his silly comments were. My question of how many Mexicans he ate Christmas dinner with was met with “maybe we’d better change the subject…” Yeah, no shit. Bubbles are bad unless dogs are chasing them in the park.
Well. To be fair....Democrats pushed DADT because conservatives were pushing for continuing the ban. DADT was framed as a "innocent till proven guilty" privacy policy.
If conservatives in the military agreed to stop arbitrary investigations into private lives and unprovoked interrogation of service men, then gay service men agreed not to "flaunt" their gayness.
One of the main concerns of conservative leadership was knowing someone was gay would make others feel icky and "watched".
Anyway, it's all well documented since there were multiple public hearings if I recall. . . . and was a decent first step to get the military to throttle back on the gay witch hunts.
Yeah, I was there. Democrats were overwhelmingly against it too. Look at any polling from anyone at the time. Even Pres Obama was against it (until he was for it) probably because the public was against it. The best case to be made is that they were for gay marriage but were cowards. That all gets re-written now but over and over every prominent Democrat who could have been brave and made a difference tucked their tales and scampered away. Don’t ask don’t tell actually made things worse - pushing people back in who were already out. It was a shit show.
I think Jesse grew up in a liberal bubble as an upper middle class child of professionals and a lot of his takes stem from that & I don't think he interacts a ton with people who aren't educated and probably from similar backgrounds. It doesn't annoy me, but I do sometimes have to remind myself of that like about the stuff he said when talking about shoplifting. Katie talked about it on A Special Place in Hell episode she was on and it explained some of it to me.
ETA: Katie discussed their backgrounds a tiny bit on the podcast and I went oh that explains it.
“I was there” in this case pretty clearly just meant “I was a grad student at UCLA” (and I guess got things second hand rather than third hand?) but combined with the “inappropriate comments” thing shows she clearly also intended it to be ambiguous.
As a long-time Very Bad Wizards listener, the best part of that VBW episode for me was the schadenfreude I got from Tamler fucking finally admitting there *just might* be a problem. He's been staunchly "cancel culture isn't a thing and the kids are alright" for a decade now. His mother-in-law is Christina Hoff-Sommers, a fairly well-known centrist-lib who has cancel culture takes, and he's had a few arguments with her about it. I had a brief exchange with him on Reddit a few months ago when he said, a direct quote, "I love when people tell me what's going on in my own profession." I always knew this day would come because I know campus insanity isn't a myth.
That said, I absolutely adore both Tamler and Dave from VBW and I love what they do. I *strongly* recommend both VBW and one of their side projects, The Ambulators, in which they analyze each episode of the best TV show of all time ever, Deadwood.
Dave also has a small podcast called "Psych" with his friend Paul Bloom, another excellent podcast guest, discussing basic psychology. I highly recommend all the above, please give them a try, especially the Ambulators if it gets you to watch Deadwood, which is simply the GoAT.
Omfg. Deadwood. There is an amazing TWENTY MINUTE video of all the times they said fuck on that show. I think it is like 30 seconds into the first episode. Omfg. Ha.
Also. The blowjob monologues are some of the funniest things ever
Also. I love that Veronica Mars was on that show. Also Matt Seracen's mom as well. Amazing actors on that show
I never liked the word cocksucker until that show
Oh. And doc's monologue about the suffering during the Civil War was truly amazing.
It has some of the most beautifully written dialogue in all visual media, and it does so while including a lot of the indulgent vulgarity you mention. Effectively every episode, the whole episode, is the peak of what modern English communication is capable of. If it sounds like I'm exaggerating, just watch the show, paying close attention to the prose, and you'll see what I mean. Just an all around banger of a show.
Deadwood was *the* one tv show my late brother and I both agreed was fantastic. "Those fucking fucking fuckers" was his mantra after awhile after each rewatch.
True, VBW said there is no harm in these enforced statements and the people who complain are the real cringe. It's frustrating to see people see the issue and then turn around and say: well anyway.
The grad students’ reactions (the letter but also the criticism of the department) makes me think that Yoel Inbar dodged a bullet and its only the long-distance relationship that makes this loss bad.
I would’t want to work somewhere where people seem to be looking for any small mistakes and then going nuclear on you--and being listened to by people in authority for doing so.
The trouble is that almost all psych departments these days have the potential for this kind of drama. If he's found one that relatively reasonable, he should stay put.
The trouble is academia as a whole, which was one of our most valuable institutions, is collapsing in value both as a venue for learning and good research.
It is absolutely filled with the type of cancel culture denying "everything is fine dog" liberal nitwits like the hosts of VBW or Jesse/Katie.
I have a best?? friend who is a tenured professor and well respected. He has long been firmly of the belief that "everything is fine" (his wife is super woke). Yet he is constantly frustrated by not being able to speak freely during staff meetings on anything remotely politically touchy (in a fucking philosophy department), frustrated with ~80% of his peers' apparent blind adherence to woke/DEI nonsense, and the administration's constant siding with crazy/lazy/terrible students against the faculty.
And yet HE doesn't really think anything is really wrong or speak up himself. So for all his peers know, he is part of that 80% too.
He will say stupid stuff like "academic freedom is fine there are no problems with professors getting cancelled". And then I will ask him if he would feel comfortable publishing research that at in any way negative about some sacred cow of feminists/woke/whatever and he is alike "absolutely not I could never publish anything like that without severe career consequences and several people in my field unpersoning me. Maybe I could get a woman to publish it. Wow when you put it that way things do seem really bad and restrictive".
It is fucking bonkers, but he has been frog boiled into it over 20 years he can barely even see it other than the day-to-day frustrations.
It is like he doesn't allow himself to have a category in his brain where "conservative complaints about the liberal bent of academia being a problem might be true.". iIt is simply not a mental space he allows himself access to despite his clear total agreement with it.
It’s crazy, isn’t it? I live in this world too but no one discusses it. The best I can do is walk away when people start talking in a certain way. I am surprised by my own timidness, to be honest, and have sooo much respect for people who stood up in the past. This takes huge guts. I will lose my job if I say, hey, saying the reason that a certain initiative failed is not because of white men but because the idea and/or the execution didn’t make much sense.
I had a friend who was super woke at one point and I couldn’t talk to her about stuff (of this nature) for a couple of years. Kind of like religion I figured, which was fine. She’s a therapist and recently said - I’m getting more and more people from academia telling me things… like the weird rules and the oppressive environment… is this true? I mean, this sounds like they’re making it up but they are the same stories…
Yep. It’s true. I actually wish I was super woke because I feel like an alien
At the risk of sounding like a priggish, kink-shaming, conservative reactionary, there MIGHT be something deeply immoral about having sex with an animal that has nothing to do with cruelty to said animal. Perhaps something more depraved and degrading for the human being doing it than eating meat?
Lots of universities have done "partner hires" without regard to marital status. Progressive schools used to make a point of hiring same-sex partners in the days before same-sex marriage was legal. It's true that spousal hires are more common than unmarried partner hires.
I worked for the hiring dept for 3 years prior to legalization of gay marriage at one of the UCs (hint: Whale’s vagina) and reviewed packages for new hires and for retainment. There were a handful for spouses, none for girlfriends or boyfriends. Not saying it never happens, but if it does— it’s *extremely* rare and the fact his girlfriend worked at UCLA probably would’ve been meaningless
Did you have involvement in hiring profs? In my experience as a college prof, the decision is made by the people who will be the candidate's colleagues. HR has only minimal involvement, and they certainly don’t have any sway in the hiring decision.
No, I wasn't involved in the decision making process. In the UC system, at least 8 years ago, the way it worked was that someone applied for the job or someone(s) from the dept made a recommendation for an individual for a job. A lot of people would be hired from other universities. That recommendation would go to the Dept Chair person who then makes the recommendation to the Dean who then goes to the HR dept (aka the office of the Provost, Vice Provost, a ton of other admins whose titles I forget). In my position, I only saw new job offers and retention offers that had made it to the Provost's office. The professors in the department wouldn't have a say in whether a new professor gets hired or not in the UC system (at least 8 years ago). For all serious offers: the Vice Provost, Provost, and HR personnel are the people who decide. They also control the $$$ package that is offered.
Edit: I believe the Dept Chair could also make a recommendation directly to the Provost's office.
2nd Edit: Oh and they would ask the person's current colleagues at whatever institution + the dept chair for letters of recommendation and justification for the new hire, "This person is a rising star in their field, blah blah blah". These were always good. I never saw the bad ones, probably never made it to the serious-approval stage.
My apologies for coming in so late with a reply; I was traveling and then totally pooped from traveling. (I'm getting old, lol.)
The standard procedure for a new faculty hire has two steps prior to the Chair making a recommendation. There's a hiring committee (usually just three people from the department, or - if an interdisciplinary hire - three people from the involved units). The committee creates a long list for a phone/Zoom interview (or in olden days, for an interview at the relevant academic conference such as the MLA). The committee whittles that down to a short list for on-campus interviews. Either the committee or the faculty in the involved unit(s) ranks the top three candidates after the campus visit; if the committee does the ranking, all eligible faculty must endorse it, typically. Usually the ratification/ranking process is limited to tenured or tenure-line faculty, but in some units like mine - which is interdisciplinary in its composition and relies heavily on scholars stuck in non-tenurable positions - all faculty are allowed an equal voice.
Only then does the chair push the recommendation to the Dean and then the Provost. No doubt both of those offices rely on labor from Associate Deans and Vice Provosts and the like. And yes, absolutely the Provost has control and final say over compensation! The Chair may go up the chain to negotiate more.
But this process is absolutely *standard* and if the UC system deviated from it, it would've made a splash, and I would've heard. I've logged a fair amount of time in fighting for shared faculty governance, trying to claw back more control to the faculty, so I'm attuned to news of outliers from this very basic, standard process.
I appreciate hearing your perspective from HR. I know that HR here believes we truly are treating our people equitably. (We aren't. Ask the adjuncts.) And so I know that HR at my institution, at least, is fairly insulated from truths that are obvious to faculty. But so are the faculty insulated from what HR sees, and so I truly learned from your angle.
I would be *very* curious to know more about what happens with retention offers!! Faculty know this is a thing. Many of us also observe that only stars get such offers. Loyalty and brilliant contributions to teaching and mentoring students count for nothing.
At my university, an utterly incompetent chief financial officer oversaw a multi-tens-of-millions miscalculation that led to retirement incentives that gutted our senior faculty. Instead of trying to keep them, leadership did the opposite. We can't even hire adjuncts unless we can show a plan for pedagogical malpractice! We've seen a few hires of NTT profs in high-demand programs, but even those areas - nursing, business, our growing arts programs - rely largely on adjuncts who teach online. (I'm in the parent FB group for my university, and if this trend continues, enrollments will plummet as our reputation nosedives.)
We are nominally an R1. Meanwhile, the CFO left with a golden parachute. And I - with an Ivy PhD and 20 years at this institution, plus glowing student reviews - still haven't cracked $55k annually. I don't think my uni is atypical of lower-rung R1s. While I'm not above whining about my situation, the larger point is that universities are chewing up their most important human capital, and not just spitting it out but acting like their instructors are an obstinate hairball.
I did not plan to close this comment with a rant; but people like me are legion, and the current situation is utterly unsustainable. Yoel Inbar got screwed, and I feel for him. But below him in the academic food chain are those who don't even have real academic freedom or long-term security, and that is the larger issue. Yoel can stay where he is and enjoy the protections of tenure. People in positions like mine are the new faculty majority, and we will be used as a battering ram to hollow out tenure, academic freedom, and any form of decency beyond that according to an employee at McDonald's.
I knew a few partner hires when I was at UCLA. No context on the hiring process. But it was generally known when one professor was the primary one recruited.
In my limited experience relationships that were on a clear path to marriage were more or less treated the same as marriages as long as they were many years old. Like two unmarried 30 year olds would be treated as a "partner group" in part because one of the things keeping them from getting married is often having jobs on opposite sides of the country. Of course they don't always get hired.
I reviewed probably 100+ new hires and retentions, none were for boyfriends or girlfriends of professors. If it happens, it’s extremely rate. Also: Professors don’t get to vote on who gets hired or not— the description Jesse gave suggests the the person was not a serious contender for the job.
UCLA received hundreds of CVs for professor jobs. Hundreds
I’d push back a bit on references to grad students being “kids”. They’re almost all definitionally 22 or older, right? If you sign your name to something you didn’t read because of pressure, how should I feel if your name appears at the top of an academic paper?
In the last few days Ice Poseidon and some other streamers travelled to Thailand and visited a 5 star hotel where one of them put on ladies lingerie and they were being loud and obnoxious. After they were asked to stop it, Ice locked the room, put on the ladies underwear and was simulating giving his girlfriend a lap dance they were rubbing food on each other and generally acting like assholes and streaming the whole time. The hotel manager ended up calling security and the police said they were disrespecting Thai people and they have spent a couple of days at police station, they had to pay $2k each ($12k total for 6 of them) to get out of jail and looks like they will be in court over this in a month or so. Quite glad to see them facing consequences for their shitty behaviour for once.
Thai culture is not okay with drunkenness, nudity and open sexual display, despite being a famous sex tourist destination. I’ve noticed this can be a shock to some.
I read about it and the fact that the girlfriend had a low-cut dress might be the most egregious crime here is annoying. Yeah they were doing obnoxious stuff and I'm not a fan of Ice Poseidon but what law(s) did they break? My Berkeley hippie uncle moved to Bangkok several years ago and he's a real law-and-order worshipper so talking to him about this is useless; he loves authoritarianism especially if it means his house is cheap, his wife is young and impressionable and he can pass himself off as a Buddhist
So the prank genre has always horrified me--yes, it's partly generational, I'm sure, but it's also partly disgust at the idea of laughing at people who are distressed.
A breaking point for me was seeing a David Dobrik video in which he pranked a friend by paying an actor to break into her apartment and threaten her with an actual gun. One of my students showed it in class as part of an assignment. As the friend in the video was crying and screaming and falling on to the floor in the fetal position in complete and utter fear and terror that she would be shot, my student and her classmates laughed. This wasn't fiction or acting--the woman in the video was actually terrified and my students thought it was funny. I asked her to stop the video (I felt nauseated) but the student explained it wasn't over yet. And the class kept laughing.
Dobrik later got into trouble over one of his prank videos (IIRC a woman alleged sexual assualt during the filming of one). Clearly there are too many people who enjoy watching others suffer--not pretending to suffer, but actually suffering. Ugh.
Even reading this made me sick. I’ve said it before - I think the biggest divide right now is those who enjoy causing/watching suffering and those who don’t. So freaking horrible.
My kids who are otherwise quite well adjusted and great, will "prank" each other and their friends (and sometimes parents) by faking truly horrible injuries.
I was listening to comedian Tim Dillon’s podcast and he made a very insightful point. Consider Pete Buttigieg. He is gay and married and secretary of Transportation. 50 years ago this would have been impossible and the gay rights movement achieved such an outcome. An absolute dream come true of acceptance of a gay man and a gay man married to a gay man. Also a top job in the government.
But what do we see now? A hyper radical gender ideological pride movement that seems determined to embarrass and offend the “normies” and fire up a right wing reaction.
The pride movement won and now they are destroying themselves. It seems they want to destroy the Pete Buttigieges and burn down 50 years of progress. They will reap what they have sown.
My dogs trip over their feet, couldnt catch a frisbee if their life depended on it, always look like they’ve been dragged through ten miles of bushes and their burps - routinely directed towards my face - smell like goose shit (they love the stuff).
I suspect Katie resents collies for the same reason I do
Re: pride events, this is my grumpy Gen X take but I find it annoying how many millennial parents think every venue needs to be a family venue. Like, don’t take your kids to a bar or the Dyke March
"Outside" in general should always be family friendly. If you want to express yourself in lewd ways keep it to the bars or sex clubs. The sidewalk isn't for public displays of adult sexuality.
This isn't going to end well, there will be a backlash and it will be ugly.
I agree. If this explosion of Pride is trying to bring on a backlash, they may just get what they wish for. It is a historical truth when you study revolutions, that they sometimes are started by groups that want incremental change within the existing system. Then, after some initial success, radicals rise to power who want to burn down everything to achieve some type of utopia. They also force out the original revolutionaries. What inevitably happens next is a huge reaction from the established order who do not support the radicals.
Careful what you wish for.
I was a grumpy gen Xer when I was in my twenties. I will never forget trying to get home after a double shift at the hospital, and being unable to get to my apartment because the streets were filled with Pride revelers. At one point there were two half naked guys making out on the hood of my car. Please note: I wasn’t on the parade route!
That peaked me, circa 1993.
Also yes-- have pride parades contained to certain areas for drunken revelry for sure. That sounds annoying
It’s so annoying. Every brewery in my city looked like a daycare this past week, though honestly they generally do most of the time anyways... I don’t like it.
There is so much PRIDE going on during the month of June, it is almost too much to take. Like, ok, we get it. Gary rights and all! Still, NO OTHER MONTH IS LIKE THAT. It's July 5th, I don't see companies putting America's colors in their logo.
I hate to be that person. But, Jesse and Katie, I really believe you’d have a less cavalier attitude toward the inappropriateness of many Pride events if you were parents yourselves.
When you’re not looking at the world through the eyes of your own kid, you don’t see the world the way kids do.
Few parents feel it’s OK for their kids to listen to “WAP,” watch men in assless chaps twerking, see a person in a dog mask being led on a leash, or see men with titties strolling around wearing nothing but pasties on those titties.
This is stuff you routinely encounter at Pride events. It’s gross for kids.
Those same kids can be taken to Hooters, or allowed to watch the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, or be dressed in those terrible toddler t-shirts that read, "Lock up your daughters" or "Hot Stuff." Children in this society encounter sexualization ALL THE TIME, and not just in June. It's gross but it's omnipresent, and certainly not restricted to Pride events.
I will support making Hooters 18+ if we can make that deal right now.
Throw in banning both children performing drag and child beauty pageants and I think we can make a deal.
Done
I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels incredibly weirded out by those baby clothes with stupid sayings on them. I also have to hide my disgust when people say things like, “oh he’s flirting/he’s a flirt!” when a baby smiles at an adult. I know it’s innocent dumb banter, but... No. That’s gross. Stop.
There does seem to be a kind of “arms race” going on in society. Heterosexual displays are all over the place as you say and that in turn must force the Pride radicals to go more extreme. You go back in time to a more sexually repressed era and all that the pride people would have to do is kiss on the sidewalk to shock the world.
Damn I didn’t know the waitresses at hooters were wearing assless chaps, dildos and mock sex acts, it sure has changed since I last went
I, like you, appreciate this sort of pedantry.
That said, I do think “assless chaps” is a useful shorthand for “wearing chaps with no pants” thus exposing the ass.
Shouldn’t it then be “bareass chaos” or something? Assless makes me think the person has a flat ass.
There's a universe in which "assless chaps" just means British dudes with weak glutes.
Chaps* bareass chaos sounds like a band name
I have to be honest, this post gave me a bit of a “how are you doing, fellow kids” laugh. Hooters girls and Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders are like the tamest possible (hetero) sexy things I can think of - odd examples to pick. You can see worse (and actually targeted at teens) on any show on the CW, for example.
I think the point was that no one is forcing people to take kids, and you personally don’t have to go to pride. Plus, my city has explicitly “family-friendly” pride events, and most are labeled. Adults who don’t attend pride watching videos of pride events to freak themselves out is weird. I don’t take my kids out to public events anyway because it is hot and crowded and expensive but I’m less worried about pride than what YouTube shorts might be recommending next following a video my son wants to watch of a gamer playing Minecraft. The trends on YouTube, Roblox, chats with randos in Xbox Live with people playing some COD zombie game, the Wild West nature of TikTok.... these are real concerns. Some people are distracting themselves from the reality that banning nudity in Anne Frank books, railing against a gay-themed parade that has been happening once a year for decades, and worrying about story time in libraries--all of that is shouting into the wind while we are in the midst of a tornado. That seems to be Katie’s point.
Do you find that the “family friendliness” is well enforced? Honestly a lot of the lewd stuff at pride is less about the “official” performances/events and more just the attendees themselves. Do they actually get bounced from the “family” events? Even if they don’t, public transportation for several miles around any big pride event is often a (not family friendly) show in itself.
Hardly anyone uses public transportation in my city. I think it is true that there are probably people who try to crash “family friendly” events to be edgy or transgressive. I don’t know though, I haven’t been in years. I think I would probably go to the annual zoo family friendly event rather than a downtown parade.
OMG i felt like I needed an adult after watching the WAP video.
And the safe for radio dub made it somehow worse: “ wet and gushy”
"wet and gushy" makes me think of a big open wound. It's so gross.
I agree that many Pride events are gross for kids. And so do many of my gay and lesbian friends who are parents. I know a lot of places do have Pride events that are family friendly but a lot of people I know gave up on Pride events when it got more visibly associated with BDSM and public sex. Or they go to the laid back parade/events in a smaller town vs. hitting the main March in Seattle. Now every single suburb and municipality around here seeming has their own Pride event.
I think many pride events are gross for adults. I fail to see the connection between the uncontroversial position that people deserve equal civil rights and public displays of sexual fetishes.
Can someone explain what one has to do with the other?
If you’re gay, just like a straight person, you potentially/hopefully will find a long term relationship with someone of the same sex. In which case those people would want to live their lives openly just like a heterosexual couple, and they should have that right. The sexual behaviors of a couple needn’t be publicized no matter the orientation. Full stop. Obviously we all know that romantic relationships involve sexual acts, but until recently that was understood among adults and never explicitly shoved into anyone’s face. Now the sex part seems to have become the focus of pride, and I think that’s why people are so annoyed.
Being into bondage, s&m, diapers, leather, whatever the fuck else gets you going sexually has NOTHING to do with civil rights. I don’t feel the need for government to condone the public sexual gratification of fetishists. And I’m having a hard time finding the purpose of a bondage parade that isn’t solely linked to the sexual gratification of the participants.
I quite miss the days when we had “private” personal lives.
What happened with Pride anyway? It was super progressive to go. Then when people were really pushing for equsl marriage the parade became very family friendly. And now it is very...not family friendly. I dunno
Several of my gay and lesbian friends and family members who have kids posted a family picture of a tame daytime Pride parade. I might ask my brother next time we get together if he thinks it was less family friendly this year. He is and has always been the least transgressive person I know in terms of temperament. I couldn’t convince him to even try a cigarette growing up. Now he has a normie life with a husband and kid in the suburbs. Some of my friends attended a Pride-related spin class, changed their Facebook profile to a rainbow and bought rainbow stuff to wear as a way to celebrate pride without going to a parade. I probably would have done the same but just got caught up in work and then all of the sudden June was over!
We went to a super small and inclusive event which was family friendly according to the flyer…but there were still some pretty inappropriate things going on. I always only took my kid to kid friendly pride events but now I feel uncomfortable doing so. I wonder how many other queer parents feel this way these days…
Yeah this is their biggest blind spot, though given the parents who take their kids to these events, I’m not sure parenthood would change either Jesse’s or Katie’s minds. Maybe if it were inappropriate for dogs?
So pride with fireworks.
There's also a simpler argument: if X behavior wouldn't be okay with someone who wasn't gay, or it wouldn't be okay during an event that wasn't a pride festival, why is it okay now?
Heterosexual public displays are always based on female sensuality. Women’s breasts and asses. Hooters and exotic dance clubs are all women displaying their bodies because men will pay to look at them. It is totally rare to see heterosexual men strutting around undressed. Men like to look at undressed women and women aren’t as interested in seeing undressed men. That’s the way it goes. Women are not as interested.
It seems in the gay world, it is men who are the stars of the show. Buff men strutting around and men dressed like women too. Gay women are not as demonstrative like men and mostly don’t display like men.
What is consistent in all this is male sexual interest dominates everywhere.
Gay men like to see gay men strut. The most militant trans people are men who say they are women. Heterosexual men like to see women strut. It is male sexual desire that runs underneath everywhere. Testosterone. Gay or heterosexual testosterone rules.
Respectfully, parents also don't see the world the way kids do. They think they do, but they're often, possibly most of the time, wrong.
Asking sincerely because I don't know: what is the harm done to the kids by witnessing this kind of thing? Morals and ethics are based on harm. What is the harm?
>"I am obviously not comparing these kids to Maoists" -Jesse
Umm that is absolutely what they are. This is literally the Cultural Revolution Part II. Now the US is a less fucked up place than mid 20th century China, so they aren't like murdering anyone, but lord knows they would like to if they could get away with it.
Academia really does seem like it has taken a torpedo and is going to sink in its current form, because while the sane seem to have fought back some. The sane all mostly seem older, and the crazy mostly seem to have a near monopoly of the power among the grad shcool and young prof cohorts.
I worry about what is going to happen when these people are in charge?
They are going to ruin academia. Full stop.
A decent chunk of them actually identify as Maoists. Several that I know.
I do not understand the urge to be incredibly obnoxious in public.
Exhibitionism is a sexual fetish.
I finally figured out why Jesse has been annoying me so much lately. He has been much more critical of conservatives without realizing that he really is in a progressive bubble, while Katie does regularly interact with people with very different political takes. And then the whole "no, the real wasn't so good," but then talking confidently about things you do not know much about.
And by not know much about zi mean conservative takes on race and diversity. What exactly does being conservative have to do with valuing diversity? This is not ,1999
No one is denying the existence of racism, the argument is about what to do about it.
I would say that the difference between a conservative and progressive in this instance would be that a progressive thinks that racial diversity is the ultimate goal while a conservative thinks the best person is right, regardless of race. And we should seek diversity but not at the expense of qualifications.
About the post grad. If what Halevy said was true, by what post modern logic was she at a meeting at all?
I have a really weird experience being a conservative from a family of conservatives dropped in a progressive echo chamber at work and in our state with progressive in laws. It is baffling to me some of the stuff my in laws take away (and my family to a way lesser extent)
Even though I'm faculty, I'm way more temperamentally comfortable with the staff and techs.
I don't think Jesse has ever experienced. The Navy town k lives in is certainly closer to normies. So I think you are totally right. (but I did like the episode overall)
Sometimes I feel it’s a little like being bilingual. I’m always translating back and forth. I’m of the Right certainly but I’ve always had “misaligned positions” like being pro gay marriage back when the Democrats were pushing don’t ask don’t tell. (wtf was that btw) The Right knows way more about the Left though because they own media and entertainment so their sermons are unavoidable. If you’re like Jesse your bubble can be thick and snuggly.
The other day some wiseacre on our company slack made several snide comments about Republicans in Texas just not liking Mexicans as the reason they are against illegal immigration. Mind you this guy is in France- big ole bubble boy. I finally had to point out to him that if you’re from Texas you almost certainly have a Mexican branch (or two in my case) of your family and how absurd his silly comments were. My question of how many Mexicans he ate Christmas dinner with was met with “maybe we’d better change the subject…” Yeah, no shit. Bubbles are bad unless dogs are chasing them in the park.
Well. To be fair....Democrats pushed DADT because conservatives were pushing for continuing the ban. DADT was framed as a "innocent till proven guilty" privacy policy.
If conservatives in the military agreed to stop arbitrary investigations into private lives and unprovoked interrogation of service men, then gay service men agreed not to "flaunt" their gayness.
One of the main concerns of conservative leadership was knowing someone was gay would make others feel icky and "watched".
Anyway, it's all well documented since there were multiple public hearings if I recall. . . . and was a decent first step to get the military to throttle back on the gay witch hunts.
Yeah, I was there. Democrats were overwhelmingly against it too. Look at any polling from anyone at the time. Even Pres Obama was against it (until he was for it) probably because the public was against it. The best case to be made is that they were for gay marriage but were cowards. That all gets re-written now but over and over every prominent Democrat who could have been brave and made a difference tucked their tales and scampered away. Don’t ask don’t tell actually made things worse - pushing people back in who were already out. It was a shit show.
Right! Aka, she lied.
Well. She is presumably a woman of color. The concept of truth is a tool of white supremacy.
I think Jesse grew up in a liberal bubble as an upper middle class child of professionals and a lot of his takes stem from that & I don't think he interacts a ton with people who aren't educated and probably from similar backgrounds. It doesn't annoy me, but I do sometimes have to remind myself of that like about the stuff he said when talking about shoplifting. Katie talked about it on A Special Place in Hell episode she was on and it explained some of it to me.
ETA: Katie discussed their backgrounds a tiny bit on the podcast and I went oh that explains it.
It only started annoying me in the last 3 or 4 months. Not sure what happened
“I was there” in this case pretty clearly just meant “I was a grad student at UCLA” (and I guess got things second hand rather than third hand?) but combined with the “inappropriate comments” thing shows she clearly also intended it to be ambiguous.
What was the dog wearing?
Literally nothing except bondage gear.
🥵🥵🥵
As a long-time Very Bad Wizards listener, the best part of that VBW episode for me was the schadenfreude I got from Tamler fucking finally admitting there *just might* be a problem. He's been staunchly "cancel culture isn't a thing and the kids are alright" for a decade now. His mother-in-law is Christina Hoff-Sommers, a fairly well-known centrist-lib who has cancel culture takes, and he's had a few arguments with her about it. I had a brief exchange with him on Reddit a few months ago when he said, a direct quote, "I love when people tell me what's going on in my own profession." I always knew this day would come because I know campus insanity isn't a myth.
That said, I absolutely adore both Tamler and Dave from VBW and I love what they do. I *strongly* recommend both VBW and one of their side projects, The Ambulators, in which they analyze each episode of the best TV show of all time ever, Deadwood.
Dave also has a small podcast called "Psych" with his friend Paul Bloom, another excellent podcast guest, discussing basic psychology. I highly recommend all the above, please give them a try, especially the Ambulators if it gets you to watch Deadwood, which is simply the GoAT.
Omfg. Deadwood. There is an amazing TWENTY MINUTE video of all the times they said fuck on that show. I think it is like 30 seconds into the first episode. Omfg. Ha.
Also. The blowjob monologues are some of the funniest things ever
Also. I love that Veronica Mars was on that show. Also Matt Seracen's mom as well. Amazing actors on that show
I never liked the word cocksucker until that show
Oh. And doc's monologue about the suffering during the Civil War was truly amazing.
It has some of the most beautifully written dialogue in all visual media, and it does so while including a lot of the indulgent vulgarity you mention. Effectively every episode, the whole episode, is the peak of what modern English communication is capable of. If it sounds like I'm exaggerating, just watch the show, paying close attention to the prose, and you'll see what I mean. Just an all around banger of a show.
Deadwood was *the* one tv show my late brother and I both agreed was fantastic. "Those fucking fucking fuckers" was his mantra after awhile after each rewatch.
Deadwood was great.
True, VBW said there is no harm in these enforced statements and the people who complain are the real cringe. It's frustrating to see people see the issue and then turn around and say: well anyway.
The grad students’ reactions (the letter but also the criticism of the department) makes me think that Yoel Inbar dodged a bullet and its only the long-distance relationship that makes this loss bad.
I would’t want to work somewhere where people seem to be looking for any small mistakes and then going nuclear on you--and being listened to by people in authority for doing so.
The trouble is that almost all psych departments these days have the potential for this kind of drama. If he's found one that relatively reasonable, he should stay put.
The trouble is academia as a whole, which was one of our most valuable institutions, is collapsing in value both as a venue for learning and good research.
It is absolutely filled with the type of cancel culture denying "everything is fine dog" liberal nitwits like the hosts of VBW or Jesse/Katie.
I have a best?? friend who is a tenured professor and well respected. He has long been firmly of the belief that "everything is fine" (his wife is super woke). Yet he is constantly frustrated by not being able to speak freely during staff meetings on anything remotely politically touchy (in a fucking philosophy department), frustrated with ~80% of his peers' apparent blind adherence to woke/DEI nonsense, and the administration's constant siding with crazy/lazy/terrible students against the faculty.
And yet HE doesn't really think anything is really wrong or speak up himself. So for all his peers know, he is part of that 80% too.
He will say stupid stuff like "academic freedom is fine there are no problems with professors getting cancelled". And then I will ask him if he would feel comfortable publishing research that at in any way negative about some sacred cow of feminists/woke/whatever and he is alike "absolutely not I could never publish anything like that without severe career consequences and several people in my field unpersoning me. Maybe I could get a woman to publish it. Wow when you put it that way things do seem really bad and restrictive".
It is fucking bonkers, but he has been frog boiled into it over 20 years he can barely even see it other than the day-to-day frustrations.
It is like he doesn't allow himself to have a category in his brain where "conservative complaints about the liberal bent of academia being a problem might be true.". iIt is simply not a mental space he allows himself access to despite his clear total agreement with it.
It’s crazy, isn’t it? I live in this world too but no one discusses it. The best I can do is walk away when people start talking in a certain way. I am surprised by my own timidness, to be honest, and have sooo much respect for people who stood up in the past. This takes huge guts. I will lose my job if I say, hey, saying the reason that a certain initiative failed is not because of white men but because the idea and/or the execution didn’t make much sense.
I had a friend who was super woke at one point and I couldn’t talk to her about stuff (of this nature) for a couple of years. Kind of like religion I figured, which was fine. She’s a therapist and recently said - I’m getting more and more people from academia telling me things… like the weird rules and the oppressive environment… is this true? I mean, this sounds like they’re making it up but they are the same stories…
Yep. It’s true. I actually wish I was super woke because I feel like an alien
"Frog-boiled" is going in the lexicon.
At the risk of sounding like a priggish, kink-shaming, conservative reactionary, there MIGHT be something deeply immoral about having sex with an animal that has nothing to do with cruelty to said animal. Perhaps something more depraved and degrading for the human being doing it than eating meat?
Thank you! It’s got just as much to do with the clearly mentally ill lunatic than it does the animal!
Right? I feel like our hosts took a sharp left turn off the deep end there.
It’s somewhat common to hear a professor get a new job at a university and for their spouse to also get a job there via that connection— yes.
It is *not* normal for this to happen with girlfriends or boyfriends. I worked for admin at a UC for hiring, and I never saw this happen. Ever.
p.s. The word “nepotism” is rooted in the Italian word that means “nephew”, so it fits Hasan Piker quite well.
Lots of universities have done "partner hires" without regard to marital status. Progressive schools used to make a point of hiring same-sex partners in the days before same-sex marriage was legal. It's true that spousal hires are more common than unmarried partner hires.
I worked for the hiring dept for 3 years prior to legalization of gay marriage at one of the UCs (hint: Whale’s vagina) and reviewed packages for new hires and for retainment. There were a handful for spouses, none for girlfriends or boyfriends. Not saying it never happens, but if it does— it’s *extremely* rare and the fact his girlfriend worked at UCLA probably would’ve been meaningless
Did you have involvement in hiring profs? In my experience as a college prof, the decision is made by the people who will be the candidate's colleagues. HR has only minimal involvement, and they certainly don’t have any sway in the hiring decision.
No, I wasn't involved in the decision making process. In the UC system, at least 8 years ago, the way it worked was that someone applied for the job or someone(s) from the dept made a recommendation for an individual for a job. A lot of people would be hired from other universities. That recommendation would go to the Dept Chair person who then makes the recommendation to the Dean who then goes to the HR dept (aka the office of the Provost, Vice Provost, a ton of other admins whose titles I forget). In my position, I only saw new job offers and retention offers that had made it to the Provost's office. The professors in the department wouldn't have a say in whether a new professor gets hired or not in the UC system (at least 8 years ago). For all serious offers: the Vice Provost, Provost, and HR personnel are the people who decide. They also control the $$$ package that is offered.
Edit: I believe the Dept Chair could also make a recommendation directly to the Provost's office.
2nd Edit: Oh and they would ask the person's current colleagues at whatever institution + the dept chair for letters of recommendation and justification for the new hire, "This person is a rising star in their field, blah blah blah". These were always good. I never saw the bad ones, probably never made it to the serious-approval stage.
My apologies for coming in so late with a reply; I was traveling and then totally pooped from traveling. (I'm getting old, lol.)
The standard procedure for a new faculty hire has two steps prior to the Chair making a recommendation. There's a hiring committee (usually just three people from the department, or - if an interdisciplinary hire - three people from the involved units). The committee creates a long list for a phone/Zoom interview (or in olden days, for an interview at the relevant academic conference such as the MLA). The committee whittles that down to a short list for on-campus interviews. Either the committee or the faculty in the involved unit(s) ranks the top three candidates after the campus visit; if the committee does the ranking, all eligible faculty must endorse it, typically. Usually the ratification/ranking process is limited to tenured or tenure-line faculty, but in some units like mine - which is interdisciplinary in its composition and relies heavily on scholars stuck in non-tenurable positions - all faculty are allowed an equal voice.
Only then does the chair push the recommendation to the Dean and then the Provost. No doubt both of those offices rely on labor from Associate Deans and Vice Provosts and the like. And yes, absolutely the Provost has control and final say over compensation! The Chair may go up the chain to negotiate more.
But this process is absolutely *standard* and if the UC system deviated from it, it would've made a splash, and I would've heard. I've logged a fair amount of time in fighting for shared faculty governance, trying to claw back more control to the faculty, so I'm attuned to news of outliers from this very basic, standard process.
I appreciate hearing your perspective from HR. I know that HR here believes we truly are treating our people equitably. (We aren't. Ask the adjuncts.) And so I know that HR at my institution, at least, is fairly insulated from truths that are obvious to faculty. But so are the faculty insulated from what HR sees, and so I truly learned from your angle.
I would be *very* curious to know more about what happens with retention offers!! Faculty know this is a thing. Many of us also observe that only stars get such offers. Loyalty and brilliant contributions to teaching and mentoring students count for nothing.
At my university, an utterly incompetent chief financial officer oversaw a multi-tens-of-millions miscalculation that led to retirement incentives that gutted our senior faculty. Instead of trying to keep them, leadership did the opposite. We can't even hire adjuncts unless we can show a plan for pedagogical malpractice! We've seen a few hires of NTT profs in high-demand programs, but even those areas - nursing, business, our growing arts programs - rely largely on adjuncts who teach online. (I'm in the parent FB group for my university, and if this trend continues, enrollments will plummet as our reputation nosedives.)
We are nominally an R1. Meanwhile, the CFO left with a golden parachute. And I - with an Ivy PhD and 20 years at this institution, plus glowing student reviews - still haven't cracked $55k annually. I don't think my uni is atypical of lower-rung R1s. While I'm not above whining about my situation, the larger point is that universities are chewing up their most important human capital, and not just spitting it out but acting like their instructors are an obstinate hairball.
I did not plan to close this comment with a rant; but people like me are legion, and the current situation is utterly unsustainable. Yoel Inbar got screwed, and I feel for him. But below him in the academic food chain are those who don't even have real academic freedom or long-term security, and that is the larger issue. Yoel can stay where he is and enjoy the protections of tenure. People in positions like mine are the new faculty majority, and we will be used as a battering ram to hollow out tenure, academic freedom, and any form of decency beyond that according to an employee at McDonald's.
Nice anchorman reference
I knew a few partner hires when I was at UCLA. No context on the hiring process. But it was generally known when one professor was the primary one recruited.
In my limited experience relationships that were on a clear path to marriage were more or less treated the same as marriages as long as they were many years old. Like two unmarried 30 year olds would be treated as a "partner group" in part because one of the things keeping them from getting married is often having jobs on opposite sides of the country. Of course they don't always get hired.
I was thinking the same thing - unless maybe it is for "partners"?
Untrue, I know personally a partner case where they were unmarried at the time of the hires
I reviewed probably 100+ new hires and retentions, none were for boyfriends or girlfriends of professors. If it happens, it’s extremely rate. Also: Professors don’t get to vote on who gets hired or not— the description Jesse gave suggests the the person was not a serious contender for the job.
UCLA received hundreds of CVs for professor jobs. Hundreds
I’d push back a bit on references to grad students being “kids”. They’re almost all definitionally 22 or older, right? If you sign your name to something you didn’t read because of pressure, how should I feel if your name appears at the top of an academic paper?
The same way maybe not surprisingly.
In the last few days Ice Poseidon and some other streamers travelled to Thailand and visited a 5 star hotel where one of them put on ladies lingerie and they were being loud and obnoxious. After they were asked to stop it, Ice locked the room, put on the ladies underwear and was simulating giving his girlfriend a lap dance they were rubbing food on each other and generally acting like assholes and streaming the whole time. The hotel manager ended up calling security and the police said they were disrespecting Thai people and they have spent a couple of days at police station, they had to pay $2k each ($12k total for 6 of them) to get out of jail and looks like they will be in court over this in a month or so. Quite glad to see them facing consequences for their shitty behaviour for once.
Thai culture is not okay with drunkenness, nudity and open sexual display, despite being a famous sex tourist destination. I’ve noticed this can be a shock to some.
I read about it and the fact that the girlfriend had a low-cut dress might be the most egregious crime here is annoying. Yeah they were doing obnoxious stuff and I'm not a fan of Ice Poseidon but what law(s) did they break? My Berkeley hippie uncle moved to Bangkok several years ago and he's a real law-and-order worshipper so talking to him about this is useless; he loves authoritarianism especially if it means his house is cheap, his wife is young and impressionable and he can pass himself off as a Buddhist
Interesting. Thanks for writing this - made me question my own views on this. (Really love this forum)
So the prank genre has always horrified me--yes, it's partly generational, I'm sure, but it's also partly disgust at the idea of laughing at people who are distressed.
A breaking point for me was seeing a David Dobrik video in which he pranked a friend by paying an actor to break into her apartment and threaten her with an actual gun. One of my students showed it in class as part of an assignment. As the friend in the video was crying and screaming and falling on to the floor in the fetal position in complete and utter fear and terror that she would be shot, my student and her classmates laughed. This wasn't fiction or acting--the woman in the video was actually terrified and my students thought it was funny. I asked her to stop the video (I felt nauseated) but the student explained it wasn't over yet. And the class kept laughing.
Dobrik later got into trouble over one of his prank videos (IIRC a woman alleged sexual assualt during the filming of one). Clearly there are too many people who enjoy watching others suffer--not pretending to suffer, but actually suffering. Ugh.
Even reading this made me sick. I’ve said it before - I think the biggest divide right now is those who enjoy causing/watching suffering and those who don’t. So freaking horrible.
We have to hope that this isn't a real divide, because if it devolves into conflict, we know who will win.
Shit, I hadn’t taken it that far in my head… that’s so true.
My kids who are otherwise quite well adjusted and great, will "prank" each other and their friends (and sometimes parents) by faking truly horrible injuries.
It is never funny.
I was listening to comedian Tim Dillon’s podcast and he made a very insightful point. Consider Pete Buttigieg. He is gay and married and secretary of Transportation. 50 years ago this would have been impossible and the gay rights movement achieved such an outcome. An absolute dream come true of acceptance of a gay man and a gay man married to a gay man. Also a top job in the government.
But what do we see now? A hyper radical gender ideological pride movement that seems determined to embarrass and offend the “normies” and fire up a right wing reaction.
The pride movement won and now they are destroying themselves. It seems they want to destroy the Pete Buttigieges and burn down 50 years of progress. They will reap what they have sown.
All these streamers AND all of their viewers need to go get real jobs. What the hell is wrong with young men.
These streamers are pathetic; the young dudes in their audience, far more so.
I've put up with a lot of bad takes over the years, but Katie's anti-collie stance is taking it too far.
Collies are beautiful, intelligent and athletic.
My dogs trip over their feet, couldnt catch a frisbee if their life depended on it, always look like they’ve been dragged through ten miles of bushes and their burps - routinely directed towards my face - smell like goose shit (they love the stuff).
I suspect Katie resents collies for the same reason I do
Yeah/ I couldn’t tell if she thought collies were too precious to harm or she didn’t like them.
I would ask what collies have ever done to her, but given the context...maybe it's better not to.
Big talk from a doodle owner.