But the Libs account isn’t run by a trained journalist, so why would there be any presumption of truth or fact-checking to their posts? Shouldn’t we be skeptical of everything a random person posts on the internet? I guess to me this is the problem—even someone like Nellie Bowles (who should know better) thinks of the Libs poster as a “j…
But the Libs account isn’t run by a trained journalist, so why would there be any presumption of truth or fact-checking to their posts? Shouldn’t we be skeptical of everything a random person posts on the internet? I guess to me this is the problem—even someone like Nellie Bowles (who should know better) thinks of the Libs poster as a “journalist.” The site is definitely treated like a news source by some outlets. I feel like journalists are becoming ignorant of what actually constitutes a credible news source — which damages their own credibility (and that of the field).
(I haven’t listened to the podcast yet; I don’t know if they talk about this.)
I'm not sure I get the point of the prank, and then the subsequent reporting of the prank here.
The prank was partially inspired by what Jesse calls the pee pad video, which appears to be fake. So you sent something fake to a platform that has low verification standards, and then they posted it?
The person who runs it fucked up. I think the problem is that, say, teaching third graders about pronouns - that is fucked up. Being upset about it is not a moral panic.
Both conservatives and progressives are Batshit crezy and they are spurting each other on.
The lesson is that if the attorney general of Texas wants to protect kids his staff should ascertain all stories.
Non-political lessons on pronouns aren’t the thing being discussed. Read examples of how gender identity & pronouns are shown in these lessons. If it was all about parts of speech people would applaud the schools.
Here's why "teaching third graders about pronouns" – compelled speech – is evil: "consider this editorial from the LA Times about the Wi Spa affair, in which a “transwoman” (a man, in other words) stripped naked and went into the women’s section of a Korean spa, where many women and young girls were also entirely naked. According to eyewitness accounts, his penis was semi-erect as he lounged on the edge of a hot tub (he’s since been charged with indecent exposure). A woman complained to the reception staff, calling the man a man—which, incredibly, was regarded as a serious infraction.
This editorial doesn’t make a sensible argument, albeit couched in confusing language; it simply makes no sense. That’s clear when you edit it to replace gender-based pronouns by sex-based ones, and have the guts to state the consequences of what you’re advocating for:
“The rights of transgender people to act in accordance with their gender identity is fortunately gaining acceptance in many corners—including at the U.S. Supreme Court, which just last week handed a major victory to transgender students seeking to use the schools bathrooms of their choice,”
becomes:
“The rights of trans-identified people to force everyone else to pretend they are the sex they are not are being imposed by many authorities—including the U.S. Supreme Court, which just last week enabled students of one sex to force themselves into school bathrooms supposedly reserved for students of the other.”
Similarly,
“There is no doubt that Wi Spa did the right thing in defending the right of a transgender customer to be nude in the women’s area, even though the sight of male-appearing genitalia discomfited at least one female customer, who complained at the front desk,”
becomes:
“This paper applauds Wi Spa for siding with a man who committed indecent exposure in front of naked women and girls in a space supposedly reserved for women and girls, even though the sight of a man’s genitalia discomfited at least one of the women who had just been victimised by him.”
Humans have a cognitive ability called sex pattern recognition. It’s a skill that most children acquire early, and females have been shown to have a greater accuracy at it than males.
Any school that puts a priority on teaching children to deny what their eyes/brains tell them is truth - to align with a political view that one’s gender identity, which sounds nothing more than “the sex stereotypes I’m comfortable with” - is doing harm to children.
In the UK the NHS hospitals seem to have sex segregated floors for patients. People are accustomed to this. Yet NHS hospitals changed that to allow anyone that says they’re a woman to be placed on a woman’s floor. Sounds nice and inclusive until a woman was raped during a hospital stay by a trans identified male patient (MTF). The woman’s claims weren’t taken seriously because she was told “there was no male patient on the floor.” A rape victim is gaslit by a hospital telling her the man who raped her was a woman (in UK law rape is crime that can only be perpetuated by men, sexual abuse is a different crime, is my understanding).
Teaching children not to trust what their brains are telling them is true by the cognitive process of sex pattern recognition is setting up a generation of kids for a lifetime of manipulation. It’s indoctrination of kids, far more heinous than some person with a Twitter account falling for a story on furries.
During the Satanic Panic people were jailed, some for decades, for implausible, seemingly impossible crimes. Despite years of investigating, the FBI was unable to find any evidence to support notion that a vast network of Satanists were abusing children & sacrificing newborns.
QAnon is an echo of the Satanic Panic, the idea that child trafficking is going on everywhere, that children are being held captive in underground bunkers.
That children are being taught unsubstantiated theories about gender and sexuality, that public schools are hiding pupils' social transitions from their parents, supplying them with clothes from a 'transition closet', that 13 year old children can obtain puberty blockers without parental consent in California--these are things which are happening, which are documented by many legitimate journalists.
LoT re-posts videos, she's curating the stuff, not making it up. Should she have questioned this submission, not posted it? Yes, she shouldn't have.
If my autistic daughter is seduced by the Trans Church cult at school and decides she’s a boy, it’s a violation of federal law for her teacher to tell me about it. Yes, I wish this was right wing propaganda BS.
As a mom of 2 high schoolers and friend to many moms, I have no doubt that there is a lot of pressure on kids to be anything but "cis." Gender ideologues have kids constantly policing gender norms. I was a lot more open-minded a few years ago, but watching what my lesbian daughter has been subjected to has been eye-opening. She has been called a genital fetishist. She has been told she must be a boy. After years of this, she is starting to believe it. Trans "girls" who were boys just a few minutes ago have pressured her to date them in a way that echoes every date-rapey tactic I had to fend off as a young woman. You can pretend this is a moral panic, but given the potential lifelong consequences of this whole project, parents have good reason to panic. And if you're old enough to remember recovered memories and the Satanic Panic, you will have no doubt about the fallibility and gullibility of psych and medical authorities.
Said by someone who I’ll guess is not a parent. When you hear about states like California taking kids away from parents based on what a school says about a kid’s gender, you start to worry about whether it could happen in your state.
She's entitled to her opinion. I don't agree with it, but she's entitled to voice it.
Does the lack of restraint, the extremism degrade "our" discourse? The world is full of people I don't agree with, the wisdom is knowing when it's worthwhile to engage with it. She's proving herself to be unreliable and unreasonable--given enough rope they hang themselves. We're watching it happen in real time.
Reasonable people know there have always been gay teachers, and gay people, and they are not, by default, pedophiles. (When I was in high school, a boy was being harassed unmercifully by other boys--the kindness of the gay teachers who reached out to him, at great personal risk to themselves, amazes me, forty years later.) Reasonable people are also concerned about the 4000+% increase in adolescent girls identifying as trans, and the automatic affirmation towards a medicalized pathway which they are receiving at schools.
The Trevor Project now: “if your son is effeminate or your daughter is a tomboy- watchful waiting instead of immediate affirmation is killing your kid, bigot.”
If activists & educators can’t see that this ideology is going to result in a serious backlash against all LGBs thanks to forced teaming with the TQ- as is already happening, they’re negligent.
I posted this on the episode thread but I’m copying it here:
“Also waiting to see how they respond. I’m glad they have help with research, but I signed up to hear J & K. There’s a big difference between what Lindsay & Pluckrose did with Cynical Theories -- showing how utterly captured some academic journals are by their own ideas -- & fooling a lady on Twitter that gives more attention to some foolish teachers seeking attention in TikTok. I think Trace put J & K in a bit of a bind, even though they didn’t know until afterwards, and I wonder if they felt like they had no choice but to react somewhat positively.
As a parent I think it’s kind of easy to take shots at LoTT, but there seems to be a clear intent coming from more people than is comfortable in public education. Parents are seen as an obstacle to be dealt with rather than as partners -- especially how some schools are hiding information about young people’s possible mental health matters when it comes to gender dysphoria - totally different than kids just being LGB bc they may end up on a path to medicalization. Parents seek out info at school board meetings for that and other matters relating to CRT -- and the Biden administration gets them likened to terrorists. I’m a pre-COVID homeschooler so this doesn’t affect me personally, but I can understand why people seek out LoTT when it seems like (some) schools are being opaque.
I was thinking about this after the LoTT episode recently when K was saying it was an opportunity for understanding why people like LoTT... which gave me flashbacks to after Trump was elected and the press was doing the “how could these people support that man” thing for months. It gives the impression that only yokels could possibly have reasons for following LoTT.”
Re: “grooming” I see people going along with redefinition of universal words like “man” and “woman” in the spirit of “language changes!” -- yet seem keen to ignore that the word “groomer,” when you pay attention to context, does not (for most people using it, as far as I can tell) mean “to make a child a potential victim” but to indoctrinate children at a young age to accept these incoherent theories while they’re in the magical thinking stage of development. It may not be about pedophilia but it’s still unethical.
Particularly after the actually true story they talked about teaching 2nd and 3rd graders about things like "two spirit" right before it, is it really that unbelievable that this would be in schools? It literally only takes one activist teacher for this to have been real.
The entire problem here is that satire truly is dead. If I had seen this, I would have believed its was entirely possible. Maybe out of context, but definitely possible.
This really seemed like a pointless detour on the podcast, and pretty off brand. I'm really curious how they would have approached this if the producer of this hoax had been a conservative group trying to foment some shit, and not nominally attached to their brand.
The Democratic Party shouldn’t be basing their policies on a denial of reality. Seriously. Democrat for over twenty years but their detachment from objective truth & the unwillingness to engage the topic in a good faith way, because they’re beholden to the HRC, GLAAD, and the pharmaceutical industry dreaming of profits from lifelong patients-- I’m done.
To be fair, it was clear in the episode that Trace did this on his own, it had nothing to do with this podcast. They interviewed him, but did not have anything to do with planning or implementing the prank and mildly admonished him for it.
I agree that it's pretty odd to consider that account as journalism. While, yes, we should all be skeptical of everything on the internet, I think the point is that a lot of influential people, including institutional journalists are not exercising that skepticism towards content they want to believe is real.
>I feel like journalists are becoming ignorant of what actually constitutes a credible news source — which damages their own credibility (and that of the field).
I don't know what it means to be a "trained journalist", or how that would help here - the names of highly-paid professional reporters who fell for similar cons, or just outright lied to help their preferred faction, are legion.
I guess that’s one of my points … why should a Twitter account run by a (formerly anonymous) real estate agent with conservative views be expected to “fact check” their posts? Because the account is popular? Because it purports to be on a mission to expose actual liberal excesses? Those are good reasons to verify, but I don’t think one can expect them to do this out of some professional or ethical obligation. Doctors, journalists, engineers, etc. have some standards of ethics as professionals … random Twitter accounts do not. Ideally they would, but I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation (unfortunately).
Because the mainstream press is studiously ignoring the legitimate craziness in public schools. That leaves the Rufos, Ngos, and LoTTs of the world to fill the reporting vacuum.
Then mainstream media complains that the reporting filling the vacuum is irresponsible.
Citation needed. Literally everything I've seen is running interference for public schools, like Michelle Goldberg putting out revisionist history about Randi Weingarten ostensibly fighting to keep schools open when in reality she fought to close them.
The mainstream press talking points on schools is "everything is fine and anyone who says otherwise is a hateful bigot"
Which then leaves a sizable vacuum for Rufo and LoTT to fill
But the Libs account isn’t run by a trained journalist, so why would there be any presumption of truth or fact-checking to their posts? Shouldn’t we be skeptical of everything a random person posts on the internet? I guess to me this is the problem—even someone like Nellie Bowles (who should know better) thinks of the Libs poster as a “journalist.” The site is definitely treated like a news source by some outlets. I feel like journalists are becoming ignorant of what actually constitutes a credible news source — which damages their own credibility (and that of the field).
(I haven’t listened to the podcast yet; I don’t know if they talk about this.)
I'm not sure I get the point of the prank, and then the subsequent reporting of the prank here.
The prank was partially inspired by what Jesse calls the pee pad video, which appears to be fake. So you sent something fake to a platform that has low verification standards, and then they posted it?
I was thinking the same thing. But also. This was ridiculous and clearly fake. And yet there are stories that are equally ridiculous but are real.
The person who runs it fucked up. I think the problem is that, say, teaching third graders about pronouns - that is fucked up. Being upset about it is not a moral panic.
Both conservatives and progressives are Batshit crezy and they are spurting each other on.
The lesson is that if the attorney general of Texas wants to protect kids his staff should ascertain all stories.
Non-political lessons on pronouns aren’t the thing being discussed. Read examples of how gender identity & pronouns are shown in these lessons. If it was all about parts of speech people would applaud the schools.
Here's why "teaching third graders about pronouns" – compelled speech – is evil: "consider this editorial from the LA Times about the Wi Spa affair, in which a “transwoman” (a man, in other words) stripped naked and went into the women’s section of a Korean spa, where many women and young girls were also entirely naked. According to eyewitness accounts, his penis was semi-erect as he lounged on the edge of a hot tub (he’s since been charged with indecent exposure). A woman complained to the reception staff, calling the man a man—which, incredibly, was regarded as a serious infraction.
This editorial doesn’t make a sensible argument, albeit couched in confusing language; it simply makes no sense. That’s clear when you edit it to replace gender-based pronouns by sex-based ones, and have the guts to state the consequences of what you’re advocating for:
“The rights of transgender people to act in accordance with their gender identity is fortunately gaining acceptance in many corners—including at the U.S. Supreme Court, which just last week handed a major victory to transgender students seeking to use the schools bathrooms of their choice,”
becomes:
“The rights of trans-identified people to force everyone else to pretend they are the sex they are not are being imposed by many authorities—including the U.S. Supreme Court, which just last week enabled students of one sex to force themselves into school bathrooms supposedly reserved for students of the other.”
Similarly,
“There is no doubt that Wi Spa did the right thing in defending the right of a transgender customer to be nude in the women’s area, even though the sight of male-appearing genitalia discomfited at least one female customer, who complained at the front desk,”
becomes:
“This paper applauds Wi Spa for siding with a man who committed indecent exposure in front of naked women and girls in a space supposedly reserved for women and girls, even though the sight of a man’s genitalia discomfited at least one of the women who had just been victimised by him.”
https://www.thehelenjoyce.com/joyce-activated-issue-3/
Humans have a cognitive ability called sex pattern recognition. It’s a skill that most children acquire early, and females have been shown to have a greater accuracy at it than males.
Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15249109/
Any school that puts a priority on teaching children to deny what their eyes/brains tell them is truth - to align with a political view that one’s gender identity, which sounds nothing more than “the sex stereotypes I’m comfortable with” - is doing harm to children.
In the UK the NHS hospitals seem to have sex segregated floors for patients. People are accustomed to this. Yet NHS hospitals changed that to allow anyone that says they’re a woman to be placed on a woman’s floor. Sounds nice and inclusive until a woman was raped during a hospital stay by a trans identified male patient (MTF). The woman’s claims weren’t taken seriously because she was told “there was no male patient on the floor.” A rape victim is gaslit by a hospital telling her the man who raped her was a woman (in UK law rape is crime that can only be perpetuated by men, sexual abuse is a different crime, is my understanding).
Source: http://archive.today/ZFrLA
Hit send too soon.
Teaching children not to trust what their brains are telling them is true by the cognitive process of sex pattern recognition is setting up a generation of kids for a lifetime of manipulation. It’s indoctrination of kids, far more heinous than some person with a Twitter account falling for a story on furries.
During the Satanic Panic people were jailed, some for decades, for implausible, seemingly impossible crimes. Despite years of investigating, the FBI was unable to find any evidence to support notion that a vast network of Satanists were abusing children & sacrificing newborns.
QAnon is an echo of the Satanic Panic, the idea that child trafficking is going on everywhere, that children are being held captive in underground bunkers.
That children are being taught unsubstantiated theories about gender and sexuality, that public schools are hiding pupils' social transitions from their parents, supplying them with clothes from a 'transition closet', that 13 year old children can obtain puberty blockers without parental consent in California--these are things which are happening, which are documented by many legitimate journalists.
LoT re-posts videos, she's curating the stuff, not making it up. Should she have questioned this submission, not posted it? Yes, she shouldn't have.
If my autistic daughter is seduced by the Trans Church cult at school and decides she’s a boy, it’s a violation of federal law for her teacher to tell me about it. Yes, I wish this was right wing propaganda BS.
“Revealing a student’s transgender status to…PARENTS…may violate the federal educational privacy law…unless the student has given them permission to share it.” https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/ED-DCL-Fact-Sheet.pdf
Oh, sorry, I meant to say "seduced by the cult of trans at school"
As a mom of 2 high schoolers and friend to many moms, I have no doubt that there is a lot of pressure on kids to be anything but "cis." Gender ideologues have kids constantly policing gender norms. I was a lot more open-minded a few years ago, but watching what my lesbian daughter has been subjected to has been eye-opening. She has been called a genital fetishist. She has been told she must be a boy. After years of this, she is starting to believe it. Trans "girls" who were boys just a few minutes ago have pressured her to date them in a way that echoes every date-rapey tactic I had to fend off as a young woman. You can pretend this is a moral panic, but given the potential lifelong consequences of this whole project, parents have good reason to panic. And if you're old enough to remember recovered memories and the Satanic Panic, you will have no doubt about the fallibility and gullibility of psych and medical authorities.
Aww... show us on your genderbread person where it hurts...
I take it you don't live in a blue state and have kids in school. I wouldn't believe it myself if it weren't happening to our family.
Said by someone who I’ll guess is not a parent. When you hear about states like California taking kids away from parents based on what a school says about a kid’s gender, you start to worry about whether it could happen in your state.
https://presscalifornia.com/2022/03/17/teen-suicide-transgenderism/
Different family, this time in Washington state:
https://www.city-journal.org/transgender-identifying-adolescents-threats-to-parental-rights
She's entitled to her opinion. I don't agree with it, but she's entitled to voice it.
Does the lack of restraint, the extremism degrade "our" discourse? The world is full of people I don't agree with, the wisdom is knowing when it's worthwhile to engage with it. She's proving herself to be unreliable and unreasonable--given enough rope they hang themselves. We're watching it happen in real time.
Reasonable people know there have always been gay teachers, and gay people, and they are not, by default, pedophiles. (When I was in high school, a boy was being harassed unmercifully by other boys--the kindness of the gay teachers who reached out to him, at great personal risk to themselves, amazes me, forty years later.) Reasonable people are also concerned about the 4000+% increase in adolescent girls identifying as trans, and the automatic affirmation towards a medicalized pathway which they are receiving at schools.
The Trevor Project then: “it gets better.”
The Trevor Project now: “if your son is effeminate or your daughter is a tomboy- watchful waiting instead of immediate affirmation is killing your kid, bigot.”
If activists & educators can’t see that this ideology is going to result in a serious backlash against all LGBs thanks to forced teaming with the TQ- as is already happening, they’re negligent.
Please point me to journalists on the education beat covering these issues in a nuanced way without showing bias. I can wait.
I posted this on the episode thread but I’m copying it here:
“Also waiting to see how they respond. I’m glad they have help with research, but I signed up to hear J & K. There’s a big difference between what Lindsay & Pluckrose did with Cynical Theories -- showing how utterly captured some academic journals are by their own ideas -- & fooling a lady on Twitter that gives more attention to some foolish teachers seeking attention in TikTok. I think Trace put J & K in a bit of a bind, even though they didn’t know until afterwards, and I wonder if they felt like they had no choice but to react somewhat positively.
As a parent I think it’s kind of easy to take shots at LoTT, but there seems to be a clear intent coming from more people than is comfortable in public education. Parents are seen as an obstacle to be dealt with rather than as partners -- especially how some schools are hiding information about young people’s possible mental health matters when it comes to gender dysphoria - totally different than kids just being LGB bc they may end up on a path to medicalization. Parents seek out info at school board meetings for that and other matters relating to CRT -- and the Biden administration gets them likened to terrorists. I’m a pre-COVID homeschooler so this doesn’t affect me personally, but I can understand why people seek out LoTT when it seems like (some) schools are being opaque.
I was thinking about this after the LoTT episode recently when K was saying it was an opportunity for understanding why people like LoTT... which gave me flashbacks to after Trump was elected and the press was doing the “how could these people support that man” thing for months. It gives the impression that only yokels could possibly have reasons for following LoTT.”
Re: “grooming” I see people going along with redefinition of universal words like “man” and “woman” in the spirit of “language changes!” -- yet seem keen to ignore that the word “groomer,” when you pay attention to context, does not (for most people using it, as far as I can tell) mean “to make a child a potential victim” but to indoctrinate children at a young age to accept these incoherent theories while they’re in the magical thinking stage of development. It may not be about pedophilia but it’s still unethical.
Particularly after the actually true story they talked about teaching 2nd and 3rd graders about things like "two spirit" right before it, is it really that unbelievable that this would be in schools? It literally only takes one activist teacher for this to have been real.
The entire problem here is that satire truly is dead. If I had seen this, I would have believed its was entirely possible. Maybe out of context, but definitely possible.
This really seemed like a pointless detour on the podcast, and pretty off brand. I'm really curious how they would have approached this if the producer of this hoax had been a conservative group trying to foment some shit, and not nominally attached to their brand.
The Democratic Party shouldn’t be basing their policies on a denial of reality. Seriously. Democrat for over twenty years but their detachment from objective truth & the unwillingness to engage the topic in a good faith way, because they’re beholden to the HRC, GLAAD, and the pharmaceutical industry dreaming of profits from lifelong patients-- I’m done.
Specifically, they have called BARpod an “internet bullshit” podcast. This episode is perfectly in line with that description.
Except they are *contributing* to the bullshit with this stunt.
To be fair, it was clear in the episode that Trace did this on his own, it had nothing to do with this podcast. They interviewed him, but did not have anything to do with planning or implementing the prank and mildly admonished him for it.
Yes, but they come at it with experience as journalists. Is Trace trained in journalism, or just extremely online?
My thoughts exactly.
I agree that it's pretty odd to consider that account as journalism. While, yes, we should all be skeptical of everything on the internet, I think the point is that a lot of influential people, including institutional journalists are not exercising that skepticism towards content they want to believe is real.
>I feel like journalists are becoming ignorant of what actually constitutes a credible news source — which damages their own credibility (and that of the field).
You can shout that from the mountain top.
I don't know what it means to be a "trained journalist", or how that would help here - the names of highly-paid professional reporters who fell for similar cons, or just outright lied to help their preferred faction, are legion.
I guess that’s one of my points … why should a Twitter account run by a (formerly anonymous) real estate agent with conservative views be expected to “fact check” their posts? Because the account is popular? Because it purports to be on a mission to expose actual liberal excesses? Those are good reasons to verify, but I don’t think one can expect them to do this out of some professional or ethical obligation. Doctors, journalists, engineers, etc. have some standards of ethics as professionals … random Twitter accounts do not. Ideally they would, but I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation (unfortunately).
Both.
Because the mainstream press is studiously ignoring the legitimate craziness in public schools. That leaves the Rufos, Ngos, and LoTTs of the world to fill the reporting vacuum.
Then mainstream media complains that the reporting filling the vacuum is irresponsible.
Same overall trend as BARPod has discussed here https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/pl3st2/patronsonly_episode_how_andy_ngo_literally/
Exactly. Step up to the plate and cover the issues without bias, and people won’t feel they need Rufo, NGO, or LoTT.
Citation needed. Literally everything I've seen is running interference for public schools, like Michelle Goldberg putting out revisionist history about Randi Weingarten ostensibly fighting to keep schools open when in reality she fought to close them.
The mainstream press talking points on schools is "everything is fine and anyone who says otherwise is a hateful bigot"
Which then leaves a sizable vacuum for Rufo and LoTT to fill
This particular case was mostly about LoTT but if you read the whole article there's a lot of gullibility out there.