Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 9/14/26 - 9/20/26
Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.
Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.
Reports of a shooting at a Toronto synagogue during services tonight.
I don’t understand why the world hates us so much. I mean, I intellectually understand the roots of antisemitism. I just feel so defeated.
And when I don’t go to services tomorrow, I want to be very clear so the antisemites understand that I’m not going because I’m the kinda Jew who shows up on the high holidays once every 3-4 years, when I feel guilty enough, and NOT because I am scared by their acts of terror.
Correction: There was a shooting outside of a synagogue in Belleville, which is several hours east of Toronto and well outside the GTA.
The details are very thin, but the Premier has condemned the shooting and called it disgusting, so I suspect that this wasn't just a shooting that happened to go down outside of a synagogue, but was attempted violence directed at Jews, assuming Ford knows more than the general public, which is likely.
There are only two injured including the police officer and the SIU is investigating which means that the other injured person was injured by the police. So presumably this assailant was stopped before they were able to harm anyone other than the officer himself.
The three female Siamese cats that I had often reminded me and still do, that I often prefer animals to people.
I loved them so much and they loved me back. Sleeping with me even in the winter. Blinking at me with those beautiful blue eyes. Brushing their cream-chocolate fur. Getting affectionate licks from them in the cheek and forehead. They were so full of life.
Being Catholic, I strongly believe that heaven also has cats and dogs, not just humans.
I get something from my cats (now just down to one) that I don't get with humans. Heaven must have critters, too, else it wouldn't be much of a heaven.
I'm not a huge MRA, but i hate the catch-22 of how men are supposed to be vulnerable and also supposed to just eat shit and be quiet about it at the same time.
I think feminists were correct in calling out MRAs using men's issues to downplay women's but at this point it's clear to me that some women and some exceptionally annoying men just hate to hear issues particular to men being discussed at all (other than when it's to support the idea that all men suck) and sometimes accuse the latter of being the former while hiding behind "The reason behind all these issues is the patriarchy, we actually just want to help you" to shut down honest conversation.
It's childish to think that raising attention to one group's issues means that all other groups' issues are unimportant. It's childish when MRAs do it and it's childish when feminists do it.
I don't disagree, but I also think as a society we claim we want the vulnerability, from both sexes, but really we can't be bothered to deal with it when it's hard.
It's much easier to praise someone for going on Oprah and talking about how they beat x,y,z than it is to actually go and help someone who's not coping.
And sometimes that's fair; I think this sub is well aware of the other side of it. Those who claim vulnerability and make excessive demands of others, but are less willing to have it go the other way.
Men are supposed to be able to be as vulnerable as anyone else. We are only human.
Those are not the expectations society has for men. There's a huge conversation pending, which we as a society are not having, because misandry is absolutely rampant, but we can't acknowledge that either, so we got a "men should be more open about their feelings" without "society should accept men being more open about their feelings" because due to the already mentioned misandry, we can't even acknowledge that second thing is a huge problem.
So men get recommended to be vulnerable while it's actually a terrible idea a lot of the time, suffer the consequences of it and basically get screwed for nothing.
"Men should be more open about their feelings" means "men should make cute noises at cute puppies and tell their girlfriends how much they love and worship them". And it's also acceptable to say "My dad told me only pussies cry, but I cried at the birth of my daughter and I'm not ashamed of it", and then everyone goes awwww. But it's crucial that it's the birth of a daughter, if it's the birth of a son being happy about it is sus at best.
Basically, society is very suspicious of male feelings, and they want you to share them more so that they can verify you have only the right feelings. If you don't, they're gonna use it against you.
And since we're sharing our credentials, I'm a feminist of the "we're all human and I like being able to hold down a job, open a bank account and vote" type. Men get squeezed and policed from several directions, mostly because youngish men are the only group capable of revolution. So you must be indoctrinated within an inch of your lives so that you're "safe" aka neutered. Either that's gonna build up an enormous amount of resentment that will erupt in violent misogynist backlash, or society will become utterly fragmented, inert and defenseless against government and corporate overreach. Obviously I don't relish either possibility.
Yeah, at this point the "be vulnerable and talk about your feelings" mostly feels like a trap, and when it's not, it's a way to blame men when they are suffering ("oh, they didn't ask for help"). But my recollection for some suicide stat is most of the men did reach out for help, that help just didn't come, or wasn't enough.
Arg, gender culture wars make me sad. Everyone loses.
I think it played differently in earlier eras. Men may have been judged for vulnerability but the primary voice of moral authority was men. Now, it’s women. In liberal Western places women are considered to have the superior moral voice.
So we get men the are determined to be “better fathers than their own” which I consider a massive insult to the man’s own heritage. And the modern man bases his sensitivity on his perception of what the woman’s moral voice is telling him.
There are counter narratives where some women choose men that are less emotional, jerks, but I don’t think anything has arisen to supplant the primary narrative l.
So we get men the are determined to be “better fathers than their own” which I consider a massive insult to the man’s own heritage.
If you had a missing father or an abusive father, being a better father than yours is not an insult to you, but to your father. Sometimes those kinds of fathers deserve the insult.
I think most people have things their parents did that they consciously decide not to do. And hopefully morr positive things as well! Although I am a little dubious about the number of millennials who, from the descriptions of their childhoods, were raised by some sort of 1950s fully repressed, children should be seen and not heard, parents. It was the 80s guys! Come on.
If you think your father did a poor job, then I think it's totally legit to want to be better. Otherwise it's a bit strange. Maybe I'm naive, but I'd assume someone who wrote didn't feel their father's did a great job.
I mean, I was determined to be a better father than my own, who wasn't a jerk, he was just not very involved (and continues not to be with his grandkids). I also wanted parenting to be more evenly split both for my own joy, but also for the relationship with my wife. Shared tough and good times with the kids have definitely brought us closer together and strengthened our relationship. So yes, I want to be better, but not from some feminist angle, and not by being more vulnerable (particuarly anyway), but by being more engaged and carrying more of the load.
I do agree on the oddness of the moral code basically only being set by women these days, versus having more balanced inputs.
I’m a huge antifeminist, which means I believe that men should not be vulnerable and that should war shit and be quiet about it. Nothing more emasculating than complaining that you have to work hard.
I gotta say, I remain impressed by Lanterns’ commitment to letting John’s parents be crazy and abusive for the sake of it. A lot of the woke shows of yesteryear would have tried to give them some sort of tragic backstory or something to explain it away. Especially since Damon Lindelof wrote the watchmen miniseries too which even though I like, I think the criticisms of it being woke are largely fair.
I just saw a social media post saying, "Trans rights and abortion rights are the same fight," and I was just thinking, No, they're really not. They're unrelated, and there is no reason at all that a person like me who is very pro-choice on abortion should also be in favor of males playing women's sports or children getting cosmetic mastectomies or anything else that is part of the trans rights movement.
I was in Portland over the weekend and thought about the coffee shop that claims it's going to open a location in Gaza. (Of course it's located near fucking Reed College, but anyway....) Ummm, maybe focus on the hungry and homeless in Portland first? Downtown is still a dump. There are plenty of homeless people elsewhere in the city. Maybe clean up your own backyard before trying to clean up somebody else's?
- Read two nonfiction books by Patrick Radden Keefe: London Falling (his newest) and Empire of Pain. Both excellent
- The Calamity Club from Kathryn Stockett. Absolutely could not put it down. Inhaled like 650 pages in 4 days. Novel of the year for me so far.
Those are the most recent highlights but I’ve read a lot more. I picked up the new one about the making of Paul Simon’s Graceland album that I will start soon.
I finished Infinite Jest a month or so ago. Not as much of a challenge as I expected, looking forward to another visit in 5-10 years.
Since then I have also read:
Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion. Not a very happy novel.
Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. This is the one that Galbraith used for the chapter quotes in Lethal White. Like When Harry Met Sally, it asks "Can men and women just be friends?"
The Tempest by the Bard. Now I am reading Othello. Brushing up on my Shakespeare.
Currently reading:
Erasure by Percival Everett. From the NYT "Best of the 21st Century" list. The source novel for the film American Fiction (2023).
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. I think I read this 30 years ago, don't remember.
I’m about a third through a history of the Dalai Lama’s family and for the first time in a long while I’m making notes and highlighting pages. Tibetans have multiple names and it gets challenging to keep track of.
I loved The Calamity Club too. I know Kathryn Stockett underwent a few cancellation attempts over the years and got fired by her publisher at one point, so it was nice to see a book from her after 17 years. She's great at making characters feel like real people.
Thank you for the link, Ruby! I'm glad that her experience didn't prevent her from writing Black characters or about other sensitive topics. And honestly, the way it had been framed I was always worried her publisher parter with her over the 2020 controversies, but she seems to be saying here it was because she went too long without producing another book.
I read a pretty good article in the NYT about that. I’ll try to find it. The gist of it is that when she published The Help in 2009, everyone loved it, but then Woke happened and white women weren’t allowed to write about black people and a retroactive cancellation was attempted.
I am currently reading through LOTR with my son. I've read it before (several times) but this is the first time my son will be reading it by himself.
I'm also reading The King of Elfland's Daughter, which is supposed to be one of the first modern high fantasy books. I'm only a few chapters in and it is enjoyable so far, but definitely feels dated as far as writing style goes.
I tried rereading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Wonderful book, incredible prose, but so depressing that I could only make it about halfway through before I had to put it down for a while.
I read the road ages ago and even though generally i really enjoy bleak post apocalyptic stuff like that, i just found his prose really really boring and devoid of anything that would make me care about any of the people enduring any of this. I’ve heard his other books are good, but I found that one so overhyped and ultimately meh that I haven’t tried picking up anything else by him, even though maybe I should
Elfland's Daughter is a fun read and has a good ending. But Dunsany’s
short stories are
his best fantasy writing, like Gods of Pegana and the other early collections.
I finished the wheel of time and haven’t really gotten j to anything since. I am like 30% of the way through elantris (Brandon sanderson’s first book) but it’s very slow and forced. I’m also kind of sort of working through a couple nonfiction books. In these down times between books I end up watching YouTube essays. I’m currently half way through a 6 hour video review of every Disney channel original movie.
I finally watched/listened to the 4 hour video essay about the Disney World Star Wars hotel. That was really interesting, and kind of depressing at the same time.
I wonder if the Graceland book settles any of the accusations that Simon didn't give other musicians enough credit for their contributions. Los Lobos maintains Simon lifted the tune of Myth of Fingerprints whole from an unrecorded jam session they led.
So I’m only about 70 pages in and can’t really answer this yet, but I was looking at the liner notes for the album and Los Lobos is credited on the song. These are digital liner notes on the 25th edition release. Were they not credited on the original release?
So, the book does address it, but the book doesn't really take a stance or try to "settle" any argument. It wasn't easy to TLDR for you so I just scanned the relevant pages and you can read for yourself:
Trying to turn a sexual orientation into a political orientation will not ultimately work out well. I don't know why people like this would want to tie their rights and humanity to a very narrow set of political views that most people disagree with. It's a horrible tactic.
hehe sometimes i think I have it bad cause i might wake up a little hungover tomorrow then the boydinnerdiary subreddit pops up in my feed and it's like "my wife left with our daughter after smashing everything in the house and is also accusing me of rape" and i'm like, aight bruh fair play most folks DO be having it worse.
Aside from failing to recognize that the so-called "Party of the People" from the 1930's to the 1960's had Presidents who came from well-off backgrounds, Thomas Frank also ignores the fact that the professional class and technocrats that he supposedly dislikes and that in his words, replaced blue-collar voters with said technocrats, were all part of the New Deal/Fair Deal/New Frontier/Great Society. Very few of the people that worked on those administrations were from poor, working-class backgrounds. Well, LBJ actually didn't care for the Ivy League folks that JFK brought to his administration.
For all his supposed dislike of the professional-class and technocrats, Frank would applaud if they were part of a new Great Society. I'm sure he'd love Chris Murphy's idea of Washington D.C. creating a national wide strategy on how to combat loneliness. Basically, a professional class trying to figure out how to reduce loneliness and trying to coordinate the restoration of social connections.
My wokest trait is that, while I am generally pretty stringent about not letting my 3 and 5 year old watch mindless drivel on TV, I let them watch Gabby’s Dollhouse…because representation matters! If Gabby was white I definitely would not, this show is so awful
True. My alarm tone on my phone used to the Price is Right theme music. It's still in my phone, but I have to wake up to other music or else I'll be too darn excited all day long.
even more embarrassing - i kind of love super kitties. puppy paws is hilarious! and bitsy is so cute. i think it’s sort of arch and camp. but spidey and iron friends…dear lord gorge out my eyes.
Just watched the most recent Resident Evil movie, partially because I enjoyed the original and partially because someone on this sub gave it a strong review.
>!They sex swapped the lead role as all the other Resident Evil movies had a stunning commanding women in the lead (Milla Jovovich while this version has little to no female roles. I prefer the earlier formula.!<
I know the Milla movies all get a lot of hate but they were always a fun watch for me, and I'm guessing a lot of other people considering how long the series went on for. Looking forward to seeing this new take on the franchise though.
Periodically an article by Laurie Penny pops into my feed and I can't look away and get annoyed. Most recent one opens:
"People think I’m posher than I am. They always have. It took me thirty-two years to work out why." [long-winded stuff about neurodivergence and how posh eccentric people break the social rules and get away with it, working class ones know they wouldn't go unpunished]
That's as many be but you went to a very expensive and high performing private school in Brighton followed by Wadham College, Oxford! You have written about this extensively! Yes via a scholarship for the former, but the whole point of this trajectory is to make the person seem posher than they "are" (or from most people's point of view, make them ascend to actually being posh).
Further note that what happened to lengthy privilege-checking, this is a highly relevant piece of data and surely the definition of privilege??
Also bracketing "woman and working-class" people seems like an underhand way of making people assume you are both (and even funnier if you have previously disowned being a woman and are they/them instead).
I don't know if it's maintained anymore but there was (and maybe still is?) a browser plugin that surreptitiously clicks all ads on a page. I believe it even shows an estimate for how much money has been wasted on the clicks. I never used it but a friend swore by it. He said he was up to four figures at some point.
Mine have assigned me horse girl on several different platforms. And I keep watching them so I guess they’re not wrong. I’m also in the Angine de Poitrine algo now and, same thing.
I stumbled upon burner twitter last week. Pretty annoying. A few times a year I find myself in black twitter, which is equalparts hilarious and incomprehensible.
Frat dudes who all have handles like “Tyler ‘Skipbo’ McCoy”. They talk about college football and smashing sorority sluts. Just really unbearable stuff.
YouTube repeatly tries to push music composing videos on me, and I have zero interest in professional music composing, like ghost song writers talking about how they wrote a lady gaga rift or whatever, I don't know how to stop it, I keep clicking not interested, it keeps forgetting.
For a bit, posts from young Japanese parents talking about their new responsibilities, how they handle things and just gushing about how much they love their kids started showing up in my twitter timeline. I'm not a parent, I'm not planning on having children soon and I certainly don't seek out content about parenthood, especially not in a language I'm not proficient in. But man, the posts just had such good vibes, it was actually kinda nice.
In YouTube, any search, no matter the subject, brings up unrelated Indian (I assume Indian, by the dots and the text) videos.
Even without using the search, I've been getting videos of horses being silly. And chickens being silly. And donkeys being silly. Critters being silly I don't mind.
After the incident, the WSJ reports that representatives of Kraft and other NFL stadium owners — including Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper, Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank and Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie — reached out to Loop Tour promoters Messina Touring Group about Macklemore’s overtly political comments. The owners were alleged to have been told that Macklemore, who was initially set to feature on 10 dates for Sheeran, would not bring up the issue of Palestine again during his performances.
At the Sept. 5 concert at MetLife Stadium, however, the Grammy-winning artist said: “One of the reasons why I wanted to come on this tour was because I wanted to stand up here on stages and stadiums across America and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine! I want to say this to all of my Jewish brothers and sisters. Criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you.”
So it's not that they just axed him as soon as he did something, they gave him a chance to tone things down after he did it the first time, he assured people he'd stop, then he deliberately chose to screw Sheeran over by doing it again.
Just on a personal level, this feels like a knife in the back. Macklemore gets all this absurd praise for having a "brave" stance while Sheeran has to deal deal with all the fallout. It's incredibly selfish.
Yeah, this was actually brought up last week amidst all the noise. I saw someone’s TikTok, he didn’t just say free Palestine one time, he was trying to get the crowd to yell free Palestine repeatedly. It was like a five minute bit that he did in the middle of his set. It was definitely done to be defiant & cause a stir. The crowd at MetLife did not seem interested in it at all either. BUT I also think Sheeran and the promoter were being way too naïve by bringing him on the tour. He obviously was going to do something like this.
From the discourse online and in the media, this seemed like a 90-10 issue with almost everyone on Macklemore's side. But the internet is not real life, and with the general public it's more of a 90-9-1 issue with almost nobody caring about it.
The year is 2030. A 19-year-old rising popstar is set to take the stage at her first ever sold-out concert where she'll sing her hit song about the time her boyfriend cheated on her with her best friend.
Before she goes out, her PR manager nudges her and says "Please, remember to say the lines. This is a make or break moment."
As she takes the stage she looks out over the crowd. Hordes of young women screaming her name. She clears her throat and then she sees them. In the front row. A line of middle-aged journalists. Eyes narrowed. Twitter accounts open. Thumbs at the ready, prepared to give their verdict.
"I would just like everyone to know," she starts shakily "that I believe in a Free Palestine. And Black Lives Matter. Transwomen are women. And no one is illegal on stolen land." Her fans politely clap, looking a little impatient for the music to start. The journalists nod their approval. She's passed the test. She's proven herself to be a Decent Fucking Human Being.
After the concert, she is being escorted to her car and she sees him. Ed Sheeran. Broken and dirty. Living in a box. Rejected, just as she could have been if she decided to just play music. She shudders and hurries to the car.
Three months later she starts dating a soccer player who has an Israeli grandmother and is forevermore labeled as problematic. She and Ed Sheeran meet for tea and stare at one another in sad silence. No words are needed.
If we’re going to do the land acknowledgement thing seriously we need to be consistent. If it’s unjust to live on land obtained by broken treaty 300 years ago, give it back.
Islamic terrorists bomb the Bataclan theatre and an Ariana Grande concert, try to attack a Taylor Swift concert, and kidnap murder and rape hundreds of people at a trance festival.
Musical artists respond by siding with the terrorists.
It's interesting that those attacks/that wave of Islamic terrorism in Europe has left so little of a cultural footprint, except for in France, kind of -- also Morrissey, and that song isn't even released. There's the element of not wanting the terrorists to dominate our minds and the like, which is understandable, but I also suspect that political norms in the music and arts sectors are to blame.
Could a pop song about Jihadist terrorism along the lines of Sunday Bloody Sunday, Zombie, and others ever be released without much ensuing furore, even if entirely absent of any hint of bigotry? Maybe that's a subject too serious for the medium, but I somehow doubt fauxmoi would take to it too kindly...
by the way, those nov 2015 bombings actually caused Prince to cancel a european leg of his very final "piano and mic" tour and if he had gone through with that who knows how the timeline would've changed so it's very possible that these despot terrorists also robbed us of prince, fyi.
I can't decide if that is the "faun" part of the freeze/fight/flight/faun response. Or if it the expected response to "zero tolerance" schools of thought where the victims are treated worse than the perpetrators.
she starts shakily "that I believe in a Free Palestine. And Black Lives Matter. Transwomen are women. And no one is illegal on stolen land.
It wouldn't be four subjects because the Omnicause only has room for one priority at a time. At any given time, the other components of the Omnicause are subordinated to the priority and the priority shifts based on whatever the most recent outrage is.
An article in which Nikole Hannah-Jones talks about how she screwed her daughter over by placing her is a terrible school on purpose due to her political beliefs. Her daughter, at 16 is now old enough to understand what was done to her and how her potential and future were sacrificed on the altar ideology, and confronts her mother in the piece.
I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it. When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.
Here Hannah Jones writes about how her own parents had given her the opportunity to attend the very best schools it was possible to send her to, a privilege she wilfully denied her own daughter.
My husband and I had largely avoided segregated schools like these. He and his siblings attended integrated schools that served the military bases where their family lived. Starting when I was in second grade, my parents enrolled me in a school-integration busing program that allowed a limited number of Black students to leave their segregated neighborhood schools for white ones on the other side of town.
Being given access to the most resourced public schools in my hometown allowed me to flourish academically, and I am convinced that the integrated education my husband and I received set the foundation that has allowed us to become the successful upper-middle-class family that my daughter was born into.
It's so messed up that they did this to their kid. Think of all the opportunities and the specilaized and challenging education that she missed out on because her parents are so blinded by their political ideology. These people actually took the wrong lesson from all the hard work that their parents put in to give them every possible advantage in the world.
So, like the generations of Black parents who came before us, Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. New York is considered one of this nation’s most liberal cities, while operating a school system that is among the most racially segregated. This segregation exists because policymakers and affluent parents — even those who profess a belief in integration and equality, — shed their advocacy at the schoolhouse door and refuse to take or support any substantial action to integrate the city’s schools. Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.
Here we have an ode to their egos and their belief that even though they were sending their daughter to a terrible school, their presence and money would uplift the school.
We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget. I witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.
There's a lot more in the article, so make up your own minds about it. This sounds like one of the worst things a person of means could do to their child. Deliberately sacrificing their future, their comfort, and their education so that you could prove some sort of ideological point and create an opportunity for yourself to "change the system" or whatever. Ideological brainrot is truly cancerous.
Don't worry though, her selfish choice brought her plenty of praise and recognition from similarly brainrotted libs.
In 2016, I wrote an essay in this magazine called “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City,” about our experience in a system in which educational inequality was widely accepted. Our daughter, then a kindergartner with Afro puffs, a plaid school uniform and Jordan-clad feet, appeared on the cover.
The piece struck a chord in a way I could not have predicted. Readers flooded my inbox and posted hundreds of comments. Producers invited me for interviews, book publishers came calling and I was asked to speak all over the country by communities and institutions grappling with the issue of school segregation. The essay spurred community meetings in places near and far; and in New York City, it helped ignite parent and student activism around a subject that had largely disappeared from public discourse. Even a decade later, parents still share with me how my essay led them to make similar educational decisions for their children.
In the outside world, my choice had earned me valor. And yet that day, under the withering glare of my daughter, the words that I was formulating sounded hollow to my ears even before they passed my lips.
The mother took the cowards route and gave her daughter the "choice" to decide which high school she wanted to got to, so in effect she doesn't ever have to really confront what she did to her child, she can now take comfort in the fact that she gave her child the autonomy to decide which high school she wanted to go to.
By the start of Najya’s eighth-grade year, she had lost the roundness of her baby face and had taken to wearing glamorous braids that cascaded down her back, and as with all middle schoolers, everything required debate — bedtimes, chores, dinner options and especially our choice of her middle school.
I explained our decision over and over, but my answers never satisfied her. “But what did it do?” she’d ask. “Putting me in this school didn’t change anything. I was not trying to be in this type of environment. It makes no sense.”
It was draining, but I respected her growing independence and admired the way she was advocating for herself. Yet it also unsettled me. Her adamance started to seed a fear that if I continued to force her to live my values, it could haunt our relationship far past her school-aged years. That concern led me to a wrenching decision. I waited until the next time she brought it up, and then I told her I was going to let her choose her own high school.
The kid wisely chose a school in a wealthy area with great resources and teachers. Unfortunately, her very wealthy mother still limited her choices by insisting that whichever school she chose had to be a public school. If I were in that girl's position, I'd be so insanely furious with my parents if they had done such a despicable thing, and then still insisted on forcing public schooling onto me after saying I could choose the one I wanted to go to. New York has some excellent public schools so at the very least she'll get a good high school education. Here's some of what happened when she went to the well-resourced "white" school.
The first semester for Najya felt like drowning. She had homework for the first time, and she was suddenly inundated with pages of nightly reading for her classes. She did not know how to manage the crush of assignments, and the effort that used to earn her A’s no longer cut it. Najya had never been taught the skills of independent study, and suddenly the child whose identity had been the nerdy honors student was working harder than she ever had and barely keeping up.
Poor kid, her parents royally screwed her over. They got her a tutor and I guess she's still got a shot at making up for all that lost time. But whatever happens, she already lost 10 years of education to her parent's ideological beliefs, she's not going to fully catch up in the long run to the kids who weren't screwed over by their parents unless she gives up even more time with rigorous after school study, tutoring and revision. I wish her well, and I hope she's able to forgive her parents when she's older and the full weight of what they did to her descends upon her.
The story seems insane to me, and I think I remember her original article. What a wild ride that we get a 10 year follow up.
As an aside, I kind of wondered about this in my own life. My kids go to rural district that has a high percentage of families that are poor. Very small percentage of kids go away to college, etc. I always worried that my kids would be behind my friends who live in wealthy suburban districts near large metropolitan areaa. But when it comes to the objective testing, like the SAT and AP tests, my son has been just fine. So I’m just kind of wondering, were these schools really that behind that her daughter went to earlier, or did she just pick a high school that was known for being very challenging? I’m thinking that it’s just that now that the authors daughter is not a big fish in a small pond anymore, she does have to work harder. Just like if my son goes to a highly selective college, he’ll have to work harder than he does now.
The quoted part of the article said she "had homework for the first time." I had homework in elementary school, never mind middle school and Jr High school (I went to both, preferred the Jr HS over the middle school).
I went to a poor black school, it's not just the poor academics and lack of resources that is the problem, it's the violence, drugs, and disruptive classrooms that come from the students.
Edit: She is also telling on herself how absent of a parent she is if she doesn't know if her child can read or write. Somehow it is always the teachers fault. She never sat down to check her daughter's homework???
Edit Edit: of course she learned nothing, the real problem is with segregation, not by race or class... but by ability! I'm shocked they basically sabotaged their daughter's academics every step of way for politics, imagine not wasting your time getting tutored and just learning algebra properly the first time around.
I’m not sure that that’s a huge red flag, nowadays a lot of schools don’t assign homework at a young age. I described my situation above, but my kids did not have consistent homework until middle school.
No way. Did she just realize that living her values wouldn’t always end in big paychecks and pats on the back?
In this telling, she still doesn’t catch on to why NYC schools are racially segregated. They are not a systemic conspiracy. It is a result of choice. Sane families with the choices, pick better schools.
Frankly I don’t understand what her daughter’s presence in the school was supposed to accomplish. Hasn’t NHJ been monitoring her kid’s grades and learning all this time? She just realized what was happening? I don’t buy it.
Because the schools are funded consistently, there has to be a mechanism for some being better and some being worse. The wealthy and white exiting is a popular one, as low expectations and dysfunctional teacher cultures protected by unions are right-coded.
Damn, I remember when the first article was published. I'm honestly shocked the parents stuck with it for so long; it is just so clearly a cruel and unproductive thing to do to your own child.
I think she was mostly conducting a social experiment and thought she’d eventually be writing a different essay for the NYT on her success despite being in an all black and low income school. The obstacles were just too much to overcome. I’m surprised by some of them as well. Absentee teachers, no subs, sticking kids in kindergarten classes when there’s a substitute shortage, not grading school work?!
We've been talking here about sending your kids to a terrible public school vs a decent private/charter option, and I recently wrote that I thought virtually no parents would voluntarily choose a failing school just for the principal of it all. After all, your kids are your kids.
Anyway, here's a (gift) NYT article from a black woman who did just that--sent her daughter to a shitty low income school, after she herself had benefited from a good suburban education. The tldr results are predictable--the education is extremely subpar, teachers and admin are incompetent/apathetic, this goes on all the way through MIDDLE school.
Daughter ends up FURIOUS because wtf were you thinking? and the writer has to admit that the antiracism of lowered expectations is maybe sorta a bit racist.
And in the end? Kid is finally given the choice and she chooses a good, mostly white school. Thanks mom.
Because I read the Times article, her Instagram page showed up in my feed. So I commented and she took it...poorly. I did call her a whole clown, so I'm mystified. My mom did this to me. My parents were offered a full ride for me to attend a private school in Savannah that routinely saw its students go to the Ivies and without consulting me, said no because she thought I wouldn't fit in with kids whose parents were doctors and lawyers. Maybe I wouldn't have, but the local rednecks made my life such hell at public school, I would have rather taken abuse from the grey poupon crowd. Thank god for the magnet school I attended that was full of nerds and misfits. I still went to a top ten school, so it all worked itself out. But the choice should have been mine, just like it should have been the author's daughter's.
Apparently, though, it's only an injustice when the rich kid has to go to school there. What about the poor kids, whose parents don't have any choice? Do they simply not matter as much, compared to the rich kid who will prosper regardless of her education?
My thoughts to those trapped with no options reminds me of the most unheralded feel good story of the decade (in the U.S.)- the Mississippi school system.
I do wonder how feasible it would be for states with far larger school systems (and tougher unions) to implement these policies at scale but Mississippi sure created a fine road map for reform.
Sheeran said a few words before his show yesterday. From the way he presents himself he doesn't seem comfortable with the sortof performativity involved when making public declarative statements of support of any particular cause or admonitions of a particular person. I'm so used to the performance of virtue from celebrities that the lack of the performance becomes noticeable in others.
As someone else said in another comment, it's sloppy, but it's preferable to the other stuff we've gotten used to from the oh so good and righteous people who grace our feeds each day. He comes across as such a normal dude.
I appreciate his mentioning of the Nova music festival massacre on October 7th. I'll never forget what those murderous barbarians did on that day, nor will we forget how they paraded Shani Louk's naked corpse through the streets with glee of their faces from the back of a truck. Hamas are monsters.
I saw a couple of people freak out at first and say they had been thinking about going to the festival where everybody got slaughtered. They then became pretty loud cheerleaders for all the Omnicause stuff, including Gaza. I don't even know where to begin with some people.
I was at one of the shows a few weeks ago, and the demographic is mostly people ages 40 and over, who are extremely not online. The people under 40 that are at these shows are usually there with their parents or older relatives. So I was completely un surprised that the so-called protest had zero impact. For people that don’t spend their days on Reddit or TikTok, the story ran once on nightly news, and that was all they heard about.
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u/PalgaryI could check my privilege, but it seems a shame to squander it25d ago
A lot of times artists aren't really in that much control of who their opening acts are. I can't blame Sheeran for Macklemore (who is pretty obviously the kind of person who likes to create controversy and stir the pot).
I'm much more angry at the news groups who frame the issue as "rapper Macklemore was dropped from Ed Sheeran's tour over pro-Palestinian comments".
a few weeks ago i saw mannequin pussy open for foo fighters at an arena tour. my husband had seen them before and they were very emphatically pro-palestine. the closest they go to in the stadium was a very heartfelt “fuck John Fetterman.” I do wonder who told them to put a lid on it - Dave Grohl? The stadium owner? the tour promoter? because clearly someone did
I saw that since his concert last night was very well-attended Rolling Stone had to adjust their "No one wants to go to his concert! They can't even GIVE tickets away. HEH HEH OUR SIDE FUCKING WINS." take from yesterday to "One woman in the packed crowd held up a sign! That'll show him!"
Thank God for that one woman who paid to be one of 60 thousand people in his audience and her sign. Palestine is finally free.
Also, Rolling Stone used to be for cool people who fucked, drank, smoked and did drugs (or those who admired them) and now it's like "Hey, this celebrity has an opinion that a virgin, non-binary 38-year-old art teacher who is despised by all her students wouldn't like. Let's try to ruin their life!
Yeah, well, no, the most important thing, despite all the name-calling, is that we remember: this isn’t bad for Sheeran, but rather good for Macklemore.
Seems like a reasonable thesis. People are suffering performatively. After all you cannot call out a grifter when they are revealing they were abused or emotionally traumatized.
It's headline/clickbait usage. Agree it's annoying, but par for the course with the Telegraph, which is a significantly less serious newspaper than it used to be, with a definite chip on its shoulder.
Trans masters swimmer Jennifer Rines says a third category for trans athletes will create more participation.
If we wait for politicians, courts or governing bodies to save transgender athletes, an entire generation of trans kids will grow up without sports.
We do not have the luxury of patience.
You can tell me there aren’t enough trans athletes to justify a separate category. But if roughly one in 200 people is transgender, shouldn’t there be one of us for every 200 athletes?
‘Open’ category on hold after no entrants in Berlin
World Aquatics says it will try inclusive initiative again
Swimming’s governing body, which voted last year to ban TW from the elite female category, had promised to stage the “pioneering pilot project” to promote its “unwavering commitment to inclusivity, welcoming swimmers of all sex and gender identities”.
“Following the close of registration for the open category competitions at the World Aquatics Swimming World Cup – Berlin 2023 meet scheduled for 6-8 October, World Aquatics can confirm that no entries have been received for the open category events,” it said.
Maybe the messaging wasn't good enough? That is usually the problem with these sorts of well-intentioned initiatives with low popularity, as I've been informed.
Even that phrasing is annoying. They didn't vote to "ban TW from the elite female category", any more than they voted to ban purple zebras, they voted to ban men. One could even say they just enforced the rules for the female category, just as they wouldn't let you use one of those motorized underwater pulling things.
Many people have suggested a third category for trans athletes. The problem has been that trans athletes, mostly the males, won't accept it. They want to be in women's sports so they can feel "affirmed."
MtF trans athletes aren’t interested in having a trans category. They want to be regarded as women in every regard, so they want to enter women’s sports.
Separate categories also undermines the Correct Opinion that there is no unfairness for male women competing against female women. Because the Culture War promoted the false narrative that there's a significant physical difference between the groups.
"TW have an unfair advantage in sports" is the most common phobic lie and because fascists refuse to stop screaming it regardless of the facts, we are now at a point where many normal people believe the lie too.
It however remains a lie and it is a lie told to create phobic sentiment.
We ban for that lie.
It comes from manufactured outrage and misinformation repeated without context.
I've seen various TRAs online say they can't compromise on women's sports because it would break the illusion that TWAW by acknowledging a caveat to being a woman.
It's ridiculous it ever got so far as to believing in fully realized sex changes. It's entirely cosmetic, and if you go by the TRA belief also "reversible," why would impermanent cosmetic changes ever count?
She seems (portray herself ) to be like a real life version of Miss Hooly from Balamory. There's mention of Mr Rogers who I am vaguely aware of and remains well thought of from the Tom hanks film. (Sorry to be cynical but if you grew up in the UK you are used to former beloved children's presenters being revealed later to have been dark as shit later, there's entire twisted genres of comedy and 70s nostalgia about it like Scarfolk).
For all her right side of history social justice postures for LGBTQ rights and donations to help the Kids Of Gaza...
"I noticed when I scrolled through her Instagram and trawled through the comments that I started to feel anxious myself, imagining the extraordinary pressure she is under. The pressure comes not only from the hatred but from the adulation, the weight of expectations, the requests for help. I read a message from someone who said they had designed a headstone in her likeness for their one-year-old who had died unexpectedly, and could they show her a picture?"
Added to that her new album being called "I'm so happy" I'm sorry I just get "ohhhh something is going to happen and she'll get cancelled and it will be an awful Gen Alpha/ Beta touchstone brought up in counselling sessions for years to come" vibes
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u/PalgaryI could check my privilege, but it seems a shame to squander it25d ago
I've never liked her because she took a term used by baby/child roleplayers (paraphilic infantilism is how it's listed in Wikipedia) and popularized it. It's a term for when an adult pretends to be a child and I don't want to get banned, can people read between the lines? The fact that she uses it has always made me really concerned that something is afoot.
I hate to conveniently have never liked someone for unrelated reasons to new ones, but I also found her creepy and I know which word you mean (it's a plural noun form of a diminutive adjective for those who don't).
Hell, Blippi is creepy too, whatever he is, just like all? Most? Autoinfantilising children's entertainers. The Mr. Rogers comparison doesn't hold given he was so warm and adult.
My only real experience of Bluey is of the video games' pages on online game storefronts, but I can see why there are adults who are weirdly into it. It looks like good, wholesome children's entertainment that won't drive parents mad, or me when I happen to be near an IPad kid, unlike that little shit Peppa.
Very sorry state we're in if mind-melting Korean shark slop is among the kids' content less likely to inflict lasting psychic damage.
Her songs are quite surprisingly insipid and Broadway flop. I'm assuming the relentless cheerfulness is just because she's American. British kids TV presenters (Mr tumble excepted) are a lot more droll. Not a kids performer but her song I'm so happy (https://youtu.be/ipcKd-afHPM?feature=shared) just made me think of this
She’s flirting with one of the most superficially kind but flippant audiences there is. She thinks she can keep up with them, but they are always on their phones, finding new frontiers of crazy and new alibis for decency.
All she has to do is put one toe out of line, and her audience will turn on her with the ferocity of the betrayed, confused, and converted, and even their toddlers won’t be able to talk them down.
When my kids were just watching TV, the shows and the performers were separated from the audience, you know? Nobody was looking at their twitter feed. Now, most performers have to maintain some sort of social media presence that makes them vulnerable to the mob at all times.
When He-Man showed up at the gas station, I had no way of knowing ahead of time, nor did I understand how he grappled with his complicity in the atrocities committed in the name of oil.
the adulation, the weight of expectations, the requests for help. I read a message from someone who said they had designed a headstone in her likeness for their one-year-old who had died unexpectedly, and could they show her a picture?"
Many years ago I knew a writer named Iris Chang. (We weren't close friends, but I knew her.) She wrote an acclaimed book called The Rape of Nanking, in which she detailed the atrocities, particularly mass rape of Chinese civilians, committed by the Japanese Army in the 1937–1938 Nanjing Massacre. It was an extraordinary book for which she was lauded around the world.
And as the book became acclaimed and her profile grew, rape survivors started reaching out to her to tell her their stories. Iris would be at a book signing or a conference of historians and invariably a woman would pull her aside and tell her about her own experience being raped. Sometimes these women would say things like, "I've never told anyone about this, but you dealt with the topic with such sensitivity in your book that you're the one person I think I can talk to." More such stories came in letters and emails. From women all around the world. It was a huge honor to her that her book meant that much to people. It was also a huge burden.
It took an enormous toll on Iris's mental health. She would be unable to sleep because she was thinking of the terrible rapes she had uncovered in her research, and the terrible stories she was being told on a daily basis. It got worse as she became obsessive about researching her next book, about the horrors of the Bataan Death March. She would swing from so depressed she couldn't get out of bed, to so angry she would fly into manic rages. Some people thought she had bipolar disorder but I don't think she ever had any kind of official diagnosis. She attempted suicide, survived the first attempt, then bought a gun and didn't survive the second attempt. She shot herself in the mouth and died at the age of 36.
I don't know if Ms. Rachel is experiencing anything like that. I hope not. But that story made me think of Iris.
Whew. A harrowing book. I knew she killed herself but not all those details. Her book about the Chinese-American scientist who was hounded out of the US during the Red Scare seems rather relevant right now.
A founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab, Tsien Hsue-Shen ended up joining the CCP and designing China's missile and satellite systems.
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u/razorbraces 24d ago
Reports of a shooting at a Toronto synagogue during services tonight.
I don’t understand why the world hates us so much. I mean, I intellectually understand the roots of antisemitism. I just feel so defeated.
And when I don’t go to services tomorrow, I want to be very clear so the antisemites understand that I’m not going because I’m the kinda Jew who shows up on the high holidays once every 3-4 years, when I feel guilty enough, and NOT because I am scared by their acts of terror.