This week on Blocked and Reported, Jesse re-examines the case of the Citibike Karen who wasn’t. Or was she? Then, Katie tells Jesse about the outrage over two Lululemon employees who were unjustly fired for reporting thieves to the police. Or were they?
Become a Primo here.
NY Post: “NYC hospital ‘Karen’ paid for Citi Bike at center of viral fight with black man: lawyer”
NBC New York: “Bellevue Worker in Citi Bike Fight Video Has Receipts Showing She Rented It: Lawyer”
NewsOne: “Mother Of Teen In Citi Bike Video Speaks Out: ‘No One Bothered To Ask Him What Happened’”
The Guardian: “Billion-dollar Lululemon under fire for promoting 'resist capitalism' event”
National Review: “Lululemon Fires Atlanta Employees for Calling Police During Robbery”
Business Insider: “Ex-Lululemon staffers say they were fired for reporting robbery to police”
Sky New Australia: “'Absolute insanity’: Lululemon staff fired for calling cops to report robbery”
Free Beacon: “Lululemon Fires Two Employees Who Called Police on Masked Robbers”
11 Alive News: “Lululemon employees fired after robbery for breaking policy, they say”
In responding to the backlash about their handling of the Citibike Karen story, Jesse made two statements: we didn’t get anything wrong factually or made a final verdict, and this is a nothing story.
For the nothing factually incorrect and didn’t make a final verdict remark...what the hell is a final verdict? This is a podcast, not AP News. That’s some moving the goalpost bullshit. As far as factually correct, there have been dozens of episodes on this podcast about narratives creating facts.
The NewsOne story that is at the heart of this fuck up “came out May 25th, the day we are recording.” Jesse calls it a “slightly weird article, but the long and the short or it is there seems to be a lot of evidence that it was his bike. He was there first.” Then Jesse talks about a Citibike Angel program that doesn’t matter at all, which I appreciate he corrected in this episode. Later when the woman comes over: “this woman apparently came and sort of reached over and scanned it and it looks like she acted like she was the victim. I found this to be a compelling article. What do you think?”
Well Jesse, I think you used a bullshit source published the same day you were recording, got criticized for your fuck up by a community that supports you, and then you responded by saying it’s nothing so who cares.
Later in the first episode, Katie then tries to throw you a life preserver by pointing out the article’s author and NewsOne’s bias in covering this story, and you respond “no one can just like be a bad person anymore.”
I encourage everyone to read the NewsOne article. If you follow this podcast or are interesting in how media perpetuates narratives which create facts for everyone, it’s a delight.
I’m happy Katie called him out on the second remark of this episode: why are we doing two stories on a nothing story? But BAR makes it living on nothing stories. There have been some episodes on doll making subculture blowups, adult baby diaper lovers, rage on remaking a dress from a hundred years ago. The podcast says it’s about “internet bullshit,” but it’s a media criticism podcast focusing on stories of the internet’s role in manufacturing consent. Jesse was unprepared for the segment, got rolled by an incredibly shitty source, and became indignant at being questioned. You didn’t understand the impassioned response from the community you built, and so you dismissed it. I’m happy it’s resolved for you.
And Jesse didn't even mention the kids calling the woman's baby retarded or the lack of NBC's initial coverage of the kids' slander, or the total lack of curiosity for how her workplace reacted. https://twitter.com/sniffdodoubleg/status/1659489063919910913
Jesse, the story wasn't a big deal, but you trying to deflate it is now the story. Why not call a spade a spade and say these kids were wrong and this woman got way more hate than she deserved because of our pathetic discourse and media coverage of race?
It's obvious he's still doing everything he can to not just come right out and say that the boys were wrong.
Maybe Taylor Lorenz or one of his crazy friends is big on the idea that the kids are amazing hero’s and he doesn’t want to burn bridges. This is a pretty sad showing from him and makes you wonder about his overall radar for bullshit.
I listened three times - He may have said they were wrong, but he caveated it so much, diminished the issue and falsely equated the boy and woman such that I did not walk away with that as the takeaway on any of my listens.
"No one did anything worse here other than a minor breach of politeness or citibike etiquette... [A cop would say] it's a nothing incident." Direct quotes from Jesse.
When one listener emailed with the "retarded" quote, he said "I guess that was chatter from the video." Why wasn't Jesse more thorough about this story? And how does the media get away with calling her a Karen when a kid called her unborn child retarded? I initially thought Jesse was going to focus on the media's coverage of the event, rather than his issue his own take.
And that's my big problem - he basically said they were both in the wrong and it wasn't a big deal because he didn't want to engage deeply with this story. But I think that is not a fair and informed take. It was a huge deal for this woman. A group of teenage boys intimidated a pregnant woman, said awful shit to her, and posted a video online that they knew would ruin her life. Saying they were being "dicks" doesn't cover the specifics, not by a longshot. And if he had covered the specifics, maybe I'd have learned more about the kids trying to diffuse the situation!
So to clarify my statement, I wish he would have either laid out all the facts explicitly for us (beginning of this segment was better for that but not sufficient), including the shit the kids said and did. Or, if he really believed the kids were in the wrong, he should have taken a stand and said, yes, these kids were unambiguously wrong. I just completely disagree with his characterization that this was a nothingburger and unimportant - it hurt her a lot (not just disproportionately), and it's squarely within the purview of the podcast.
"I listened three times - He may have said they were wrong, but he caveated it so much"
Did you forget that Jesse is a pervert for nuance? Don't yuck his yum!!!!
Holy crap. I listened to the video again and you’re right. “I don’t give a fuck if you cry. Get the fuck out of here. Your baby gonna come out retarded like you.” Saying this stuff while they’ve got her surrounded, giggling and smiling.
I’m even less inclined now to believe their version of events of what transpired before the recording started. What a group of vicious bullies. That goes way beyond teenagers being “dicks.”
I used to look forward to this podcast to come out a couple of weeks after a dust up to give more perspective to a topic poisoned by narrative building. With the subway story, the Holmes article, and this one, I have been waiting for someone else to fix their knee jerk takes. Incuriousness has taken hold here too of late.
I think the downturn in quality is them outsourcing pitches and initial research to their assistants. The assistants are doing their jobs fine. Jesse isn’t.
Terrible on that awful garbage puff piece on ‘Liz’ Holmes. Shockingly ignorant of the case.
IMHO, saying that her baby would "come out retarded" seems egregious. It's relevant because it shows the adversarial situation this woman was in. Not one centrist or left-leaning publication that covered this incident mentioned it.
Well... I feel like at least in this episode that is indeed the conclusion he reached. And sort of pretended was the conclusion he reached before, which is not precisely true, but hey.
“Why not call a spade a spade and say these kids were wrong and this woman got way more hate than she deserved because of our pathetic discourse and media coverage of race?”
He... did exactly this? He said those two things in almost exactly those words. Multiple times, actually.
I completely agree. Jesse did say the kids were wrong...but just for squatting on the bikes. He didn't seem to grok anything about the e-bike v. pedal bike scenario, which is actually crucial to the story. Nor did he address the kids' comments or behavior. As Katie said, very low-effort.
There’s a lot of weird new racism against white people and it’s like people don’t know how to acknowledge it especially when it gets put into the smoothie of anti black racism and it’s justifiably upsetting to everyone. I think Jesse got a bit awkward because it doesn’t quite fit into his world model but he also doesn’t have decades with an anti white, yet Hitler loving, Micronesian stepfather where he had to figure out “what it all means.”
The boys were super rude, the virality of the clip brought out a lot of the new aforementioned anti white racism from everyone jumping in on the lady, which I think is the part everyone is most upset about now that I’ve had a week to chew on it, and I think everyone is trying to understand what that means.
Yes, before anyone replies, I know people individually not liking white people isn’t new in itself but it’s become a more prominent social trend and that piece is new.
It's a natural growth of the tautological "racism=power+prejudice" idea - in that formulation, only white people have power (no comment on whether idk black supreme court justices have more power than a white Iowa gas station employee), and they're the only ones capable of racism.
To people who buy that premise, this all went the way it was supposed to go. That lady should have known better and not been white 🙄
Yeah that’s a dumb premise even if granted because of course human dynamics are complicated and even if you have more power in one dimension you probably have less in another.
I also like the idea people are saying “See? I walk around with a heart full of hate and that’s okay because I have no power.”
This is one of the main things I don’t understand. Right now the left is literally a celebration of hate, in large part directed at societies largest ethnicity group and society itself. And somehow millions of people think that is possibly going to lead to a good place.
It's like they're wishing actual "white nationalism" into existence, and I usually feel completely baffled as to why they think it's a good idea. I think a chunk is masochistic self-flagellation and a chunk "I'm secure and nothing will ever actually change, and this is a fun pose to take."
But then of course if you read Will Durant he will tell you how this exact same thing happened in Rome, with elite Romans becoming increasingly oikophobic and mocking their own "cultureless culture", adopting the dress and style of "the other" (in that case, Persia, The Orient, and Gaul), and ultimately sort of dissolving into that ultimate "other," the weird new religion of Christianity. It feels pretty familiar 🤷♂️
I wonder what powerlessness+prejudice adds up to... Terrorism and riots? Which are totally justified because the poor dears have had power withheld from them.
Actually now that I type that, it is literally the excuse that people so inclined use to handwave terrorism and riots 😬
Yes! Everything starts from that premise - power is everything, so fighting against power is always justified, no matter how you fight. Gandhi is rolling over in his grave.
And no matter how benevolent the power is.
I also just realized that if this equation is true, then
Racism - prejudice = power 😮
Very esoteric
I would like to hear more about the experiences with the Micronesian stepfather. Sounds like there’s a lot going on there.
I supported Jesse when his fans got too gender critical (IMHO), I supported Katie's stance on outlets for helping pedophiles, I supported them often when they had good faith takes that just differed from their fans. But this one he just got utterly wrong. I wish he'd own up to it more. Dibs is not a valid concept and the boy was actually being incredibly rude and heartless to squat on this bike. Come on Jesse, do better (unironically).
Yes, a Twitter-arian comment about her defying the legitimacy of dibs-law was one that made me lol.
You'd think someone who was locked in the Hippo slammer would be more sympathetic to someone being punished for merely violating stupid social norms.
Jesse got two things wrong even in this segment, and they're very relevant to understand what the kid was doing and why he was so upset when someone checked out "his" bike.
He wasn't riding at a merely reduced rate, he was riding for free. He's part of a program for low-income folks that lets them check bikes out for free for up to 45 minutes at at ime. Normally only pedal bikes are free, with e-bikes available at a reduced rate. However, if the dock has no pedal bikes and only e-bikes, then the e-bikes are free as well.
This goes into the second thing that Jesse got wrong this time: the e-bikes don't become available for free again after 10-15 minutes. They become free again when there are no pedal bikes docked at the station. From the receipts we can see that the e-bike in the middle of the controversy was checked in about 40 minutes before the unfortunate PA checked it out. [edit: I got this wrong, looks like this was five minutes, the 40 minutes of wait time came after the confrontation]
The receipts are congruent with the kid just out having fun, riding with his friends for free. They had likely had docked the exact amount of e-bikes needed to transport the friend group and were waiting for someone to clean out the pedal bikes so they could get another round of free rides. Otherwise, why would the kid even care?
In taking one of the e-bikes, the PA was getting the way of their good time.
"This goes into the second thing that Jesse got wrong this time: the e-bikes don't become available for free again after 10-15 minutes."
Thank you for clarifying, I thought this sounded wrong.
It was funny how confident Jesse was about this yet so unwilling to actually look it up
Lol that was pretty funny.
Jesse: “Yeah I’m not exactly sure but it’s like 10-15 minutes. It’s easy to look up.”
Katie: “...hmmm k.”
These could be interesting details — and Jesse needs to come down off of his horse and do an in-depth, on-the-ground, first-person investigation for the next Primo episode — but the receipts clearly show that five minutes, not 40 minutes, had transpired between dockings (7:19 and 7:24 p.m.).
However the boy’s receipts show that after thr kerfuffle, he only checked the bike out for six minutes and redocked it at same location. Citibike does not charge in this case, bc often the reason is a defective bike. Next, the boy waited about 40 minutes bf checking out the bike again and riding off. This ride was also free, so there were no regular bikes left at that location when he left. It’s not much of a stretch to guess he was waiting for regulsr bikes to be checked out.
I guess that's where I got the 40 minutes from, looking at the timelines it looks like I was wrong on the delta between the kid and the PA having the bike checked out.
The reason this story is so infuriating to me is that an actual real person was hurt. She is on leave from her job, possibly fired. A hospital lost a valuable caregiver. Did she lose her health insurance in the last weeks of pregnancy over this mess? Those are real harms. And what is the end result? Women are being told to shut up and accept being bullied on the street or they might go viral and their lives will be destroyed. That is really fucked up.
And, for the record, if my 17 year old son did this, I would be furious at him and demand that he issue a public apology. Acting like shits to a pregnant adult is inexcusable. I teach HS. I am the parent of a teen. THIS BEHAVIOR IS NOT OK. Why are people excusing it? I’m not saying it’s abnormal. Teen boys are morons. But the adults in the world need to say that they were being total assholes and that is not acceptable behavior in NYC or anywhere else.
Yeah, it’s a nothing story to Jesse because people are mad at him. It’s behavior that reminds me of how the teenager and his family were trying to spin the story. No one forced the teenager to post the video of him being an asshole to the woman. Once there is some blowback, then it’s “why is everyone mad at me, everyone is racist, here’s my gofundme.”
No one forced Jesse to go half cocked at this story. Once there is some blowback, then it’s, “why is everyone mad, the community that supports me is crazy, if you want to be a primo then go to…”
I teach high school a few blocks from where this happened. I think I responded so negatively to BAR’s covering of the subway killing and Citibike stories was that neither of them take care of anyone and no one takes care of them. Every day I take care of my family and the kids I teach. Jesse, given his upper middle class upbringing and solely white collar jobs, is unburdened by anything but transactional relationships. If you take care of other people day in and day out, these episodes sound almost alien.
This take may be a bit harsh, but I’m trying to understand my disconnect from this show of late. I got a lot out of listening to these two people for a long time.
“Jesse, given his upper middle class upbringing and solely white collar jobs, is unburdened by anything but transactional relationships.”
No offense, but I think this is way, way off. You can’t presume to know what kinds of relationships someone you only know from a podcast currently has in his life or has had in the past.
I agree. I know I'm off about that and it's a shitty thing to say; it's stupid to condemn anyone for how they were raised or how they make money. I've been pretty irritated thinking about this podcast of late, and when you're at your angriest you're at your stupidest.
About the relationship line, I should have said something along the lines that your thinking changes when you have loved ones who can't fend for themselves in the situations covered in the past couple of episodes (subway killing and Citibike), and that is a blinder this show suffers from given the two hosts being about 40 with no kids, no elderly family to support, and living in relative financial comfort.
These past few episodes have had class at the forefront, and the divide between their takes and seemingly a lot of people who pay to listen has been pronounced.
Journalism has become an upper middle class profession, and BAR is not an exception (Katie's parents were professors and Jesse's parents were attorneys). Katie has seen enough of how the other half lives and has lived it herself, so her bullshit detector is much stronger and she doesn't get rolled like Jesse does. I listened to the first part of the theft episode, and Katie rags on Jesse for not having had any menial jobs, and Jesse defends himself by saying he delivered pizzas twice and was a roofer for six weeks (a job he got from his friends dad).
Just like my priors informed the shitty line you rightly called me out for, I think the same is true for Jesse.
For the original Elizabeth Holmes article, the contrived conflict for the NYTimes writer was "is this woman who wouldn't have minded killing thousands of people so she could be on some more magazine covers really evil?--she has a nice house and is well spoken and attentive and upper class like me, so she's a good person....right?" You don't have this conflict if you don't have every reporter coming from an Ivy League school and a ton of money.
BAR had a go around of outlets accusing the NYTimes of presenting Holmes in a light too gracious given her actions and made fun of them for trying to pile on for someone who just made some mistakes. If you've read anything about Holmes, the mealy-mouthed treatment of her on this podcast is a total misunderstanding of the person and the culture that celebrated her.
The subway story was treated by BAR and many other outlets with a separateness and aloofness that is possible usually because it's something you didn't have to deal with growing up or have loved ones who can't take care of themselves in these situations. And if you're in a city seeing subway conflicts happen and are in journalism, it seems to be treated as a way to demonstrate your sagacity and empathy rather than confront the horrible zero-sum nature of what's going on the in the subways since covid where the freedom of the mentally ill and the safety of the public are at odds, to put it too simply.
In the Citibike story, the fact that the teenager came from an immigrant family seemed to have been the deciding--and irrelevant--reason why the hospital worker was in the wrong for Jesse. It demonstrates a bigotry of low expectations, which tends to happen with people without much interaction with people across the economic spectrum. I teach down the block from where this happened, and I knew the teenager was full of shit the second he started filming and laughing at the woman. I also knew he had some good friends, given they tried to deescalate the situation and one of them gave his bike to the woman. But those nuances don't get seen because of an aloof, theoretical treatment of these stories according to language of the discourse: immigrant, Black, Karen, white tears etc. And that aloofness is what's drawing my time with this podcast that has been pretty great for a while to a close.
I sort of agree that it’s sometimes annoying to hear their opinions come from very real ignorance about how others move through the world. But I’d rather they not pretend to understand people they don’t seem to have an interest in anyway. Combined with the shoddy reporting here I get why it may not be worthy of listening to.
I guess all I’m saying is maybe it’s better to support differing viewpoints than expect them to see the world as we do all of the time.
That’s a incredibly sensible point of view. There still is the problem of journalists mostly coming from one strata of society which makes finding those different viewpoints a little tougher, but your point is well taken.
I think in pretty much any culture throughout history, it would be utterly unacceptable for a teenage boy to violently block a pregnant woman from travelling around because she was interfering with his fun.
The reason this is a valid news story is because so many people are saying: "Actually, she's the aggressor, because he's from a more oppressed group. And she must be punished." I find that a worrying development.
And it's also pretty bewildering to react with: "Eh. No big deal. Boys will be boys."
Ok, I've asked this nicely twice in other threads so I'll be blunt. What is your beef with PAs? What is the problem with a medical professional on a level between nurses and physicians?
It seems like it might be personal, so I'll be up front that my query is personal as well as I shepherded my ex through the PA application process.
Wait this is a fascinating theory I’ve never heard before so I have no idea if it’s unhinged or not. Can you tell me what are “mid levels” and what are wrong with them?
Indeed. The dispute about the bike may have been no big deal, the public vilification of an exhausted pregnant physician’s assistant as a dreaded racist Karen who deserves to be doxed and lose her job is a notable story. It’s also a classic BAR story.
Here’s another relevant factor Jesse could have actually reported on: as soon as the woman paid for the bike she was liable for it. If the teen had initially tried to take the bike (pre re-docking it) she would have had legit fears that she would have to deal with lawyers and billing departments and the police. If the bike isn’t returned within 24 hours she can be charged $1,200. Is that what initially happened when she started to get emotional?
Jesse keeps framing it as the kid “squatting” on the bike. Once she paid for the bike and he tried to grab it the situation changed. It would be like if she rented a car and he grabbed the keys. She wouldn’t have known his intentions, only that she was liable.
Despite what he says (and may want to believe), Jesse is likely less “grossed out” by the story, itself, than by the prospect that he has stumbled onto a well paying career that frequently involves taking on dubious accusations of racism promulgated by incompetent journalists working the race beat. It’s not what he wants to do with his life. It makes him uncomfortable and seems icky.
Credit to Katie for calling out Jesse on both the weirdness and total half-assed approach of this follow-up.
EDIT: originally mistakenly had woman’s job as less well paying “medical assistant.” Have just changed to “physician’s assistant” after being corrected in comment below.
"Once she paid for the bike and he tried to grab it the situation changed. It would be like if she rented a car and he grabbed the keys. She wouldn’t have known his intentions, only that she was liable."
Yep, 100%. The video widely circulated after the bike had been re-docked and she was understandably already emotional and upset. Plus being ganged up on and surrounded by a group of young men who proceed to start moving you around on a bike is weird and threatening behaviour to any woman.
If Jesse is "grossed out" by the story, then he should be "grossed out" by the kids who recorded it and put it on the internet with no context in the first place so they could get "support."
Hit the nail on the head. The story that Jesse would like this to be isn't the story it actually is. This is less of a "both sides" or "it's complicated" story but rather a case of a victim and aggressor being opposite how it was initially reported. You can nitpick the PA's actions, but blame falls 99%+ on the teenagers, not just for their initial actions, but also for releasing the video and starting this shitstorm.
I think your second to last graph is why Jesse has been off his game lately. He doesn’t like the role he is getting paid for.
Katie’s fear for the show is simply that they’re going to recycle the same stories, topics & guests as other heterodox podcasts.
It would seem Jesse’s much greater fear is that they are becoming a classier version of “Libs of Tik Tok.’ A telling analogy he used in passing once.
I do think that is partly what they are and actually something the world badly needs. Sucks for Jesse if that isn’t the job he wants. Maybe he can carve the niche a different shape, though I suspect you lose some people in the process.
There is a real vacuum of voices not on one side or the other examining the culture war.
This story is arguably more important than the Roblox thing and most of the stories covered here that don't involve youth gender medicine or institutional capture.
My mistake. Just fixed, acknowledging the edit/change of jobs (after your correction) at bottom of original comment.
That NewsOne article was... Propaganda? I'm not sure what to call such a one sided piece of "journalism"
The title of the NewsOne article was “Mother of Teen in Citibike Video Speaks Out: No One Bothered to Ask Him What Happened.”
The kid edited and released the video to fuck with someone he already fucked with. The video is his side. The subheading says the woman has been “‘rewarded’ for her antics while he and his family are suffering.” Yes, getting suspended, labeled a racist, and death threats are rewards. And this is the shit Jesse thought was “compelling.” Really sad shit.
Oh, well, if his mommy says her boy is a perfect angel and everyone is being mean to him for no reason, then it must be true
Also I'm trying to imagine a sub-head like "WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ONE WHITE BOY IN AMERICA" and how racist the outlet would have to be to write such a sub-head 😂
The "journalist" who wrote the article tweeted some seriously nasty stuff about the pregnant PA, including openly calling her a "bitch"
Yes, the mealy-mouthed bit by Jesse in this episode has lead me to cancel my subscription. The show is literally about internet bullshit, so hand-waving away substantive criticisms on how he covered it through "this isn't something serious that we should be talking about" is Michael Hobbesian levels of disingenuous.
Fare the well BARpod, you were interesting and different once.
I don’t think this is at all important. At all. In the least. The whole story is embarrassing and it’s embarrassing to care about. For every side.
The story was never important- it was the media blow up about it that is important. A woman was nationally vilified and in danger of losing her job because of it. That’s why it matters.
The villification of the woman is disgusting, as is media apologia for the teen boys.
Excusing shit like this will lead to a right-wing backlash. I'm not blaming Jesse and Katie for anything that happens, politically speaking (this podcast is not that important), but this episode/issue will no doubt be a kind of final straw that breaks the camel's back, and causes people to reject the Dems and vote GOP.
In fairness, to Jesse he does think that's a bad thing and has been quite clear about it. He's vague about who was in the wrong but, his position seems to be that even if Sarah was in the wrong she didn't deserve that level of vitriol.
The "villain" being a teenager also makes it kinda unappetizing to join the pile-on. I kinda got the impression that's why Jesse was hesitant to engage further.
How can someone be piled-on when nobody knows that who that person is?
Also, as far as I've seen, no one cares about the person per se, it's about the person's actions.
There is some ferociously racist stuff about this kid on the grosser right wing places, just as much about the lady (though her facing employment changes is unconscionable). The less attention given to this the better.
I've not seen this at all. Do you have any links to back that up?
I hesitate to even post this but here, enjoy https://twitter.com/vdare/status/1665177429453750274?s=20
I can only imagine. Eww.
What "pile on"??
The woman was suspended from her job, publicly named and smeared all over the internet.
You don't care that a woman was suspended from her job and was totally and utterly smeared in the media and online? Odd stance.
Nonsense.
They literally describe themselves as a podcast about internet bullshit.
I don't know why he thinks it's significant that the boys are from an "immigrant family", like so what, like most Americans? Especially in New York, that's not particularly rare. It's not a license to be rude and attempt to weaponize social media. Even if you're a teenager.
My guess is this shitty behavior toward an adult would not be tolerated in the country they immigrated from. They should know better.
Maybe he thinks it's significant in that it might mean they don't understand our norms? Indeed- they really don't seem to. The teenager takes advantage of a handout- the free or reduced fare thing- hogs a bike all day- and acts like an asshole to a pregnant woman. And his mom thought that behavior was OK!
We have enough home grown assholes; we don't need more.
From your description it sounds like he's thoroughly assimilated - he's acting like every other American teenage boy
Not mine though! He’s 22 now- just graduated from college and is going to start work as an ICU nurse soon.
Anyway, he wouldn’t have acted like that - nor his two best friends. They all have good manners and are respectful.
Repeating myself from another thread, but the podcast has generally been off its game since Jesse went to HIPPA jail. Both hosts are hedging and pulling punches, as if trying to recover some lefty bona fides. A year ago they would have covered the bike story as another media failure engendered by a tricky racial dynamic, like they did with Central Park Karen. Maybe time for a break to work up some new, fresh topics, or maybe dial back and drop some easy content for awhile while they do so (follow-ups on subjects of past episodes? More Q and A’s?)
Couldn't agree with this comment any more.
Right, and The Fifth Column does the same thing and is much more entertaining about it. The reason I liked this podcast was that they covered the culture war and internet stuff that The Fifth Column tends to avoid.
Lol yeah I didn’t like that whole thing.
“Idk why everyone’s mad at me this isn’t even a big deal chill out guys why are we even still talking about this?”
His weenie-ness bugs the shit out of me sometimes.
Did they ever mention the replacement costs for a citibike? Any bike taken out on your account is your responsibility with replacement costing $1200. There’s a lot of money at stake in a dispute over an undocked citibike that helps explain some of the intensity in the incident.
Jessie perpetrates the exact bullshit this show exists to call out, then when people push back against it, he's all "oh I dunno why everyone's mad? This is all stupid, I didn't do anything". Lol, give me a break dude.
The problem is deeper with him and it's related to his whining about Twitter, the shit he talks about when it comes to the neighborhood he lives in/how he goes out for drinks.
He's upset about these things because he desperately wants to be a part of that Brooklyn hipster/writer/intellectual/podcaster/whatever in group. And having to do stories like these honestly, he sees his chance of acceptance slipping away. That's what bothers him. That's also why he gets so flustered when these same types of people criticize him on Twitter. The other people in that group don't have these problems, he shouldn't either right?
Which is fine, if he wants to go do that thing, he should go do that thing. The problem for him is though that he can't do both.
That man hasn’t really talked enough about his personal life for this to be a reasonable conclusion lol
Ehhh.
Maybe you're right.
Either way, this is his job, so he should be expected to get baseline facts correct. That's a part of the job. If he can't be bothered to do that, then why/what am I paying for?
Idk, people can have their own opinions. That's mine.
I absolutely agree and understand why you don’t wanna pay for half baked reporting because that’s free everywhere. I just think the reason he didn’t try so hard may not be so deep. Or maybe it is. But he didn’t really say much other than he thought it was stupid.
Doesn't the news one author also like have all sorts of race war baiting tweets calling for white genocide or something like that?
I had to peek at NewsOne today just to see what kinds of "news stories" they're running. I've never head of them before the Citi Bike thing.
They have this long piece lamenting that "white people" raise more money on GoFundMe, GiveSendGo, etc, than "black people." This is, in their words "unfair" and "proves" that not only do white people hate black people, but is an example of "the lengths they'll go to protect each other"
See: "GoFundMe, GiveSendGo And The White Privilege Of Raising Funds Online"
https://newsone.com/4599955/crowdfunding-white-privilege/
They're also spitting mad that there's a new dictionary of African American English, from Oxford Press:
"Does Oxford’s New African American Dictionary Honor Or Appropriate Black Culture?"
https://newsone.com/playlist/oxford-african-american-dictionary/item/1
I started reading the Crowdfunding White Privilege article and the first tweet they link to is from someone with the pronouns "they/them/tired." That one hurt.
The conclusion of the article is that "crowdfunding operates largely as a popularity contest, distributing help in deeply inequitable ways" and so "leaving it up to the public to pick who should have access to basic rights leads to deeply unfair outcomes." To be fair, the last gofundme I contributed to was to a white woman who was an ESL teacher at my school who died of cancer at 34, and she was pretty popular, which is pretty unfair.
But as Jesse said about the Citibike article, "I found this to be a compelling article. What do you think?"
The Crowdfunding article is reposted from another dogshit site call The Conversation with a similar jigsaw puzzle of sadness aesthetic. I clicked around and found a website called Flipboard where you can have stories curated, and here are the categories for NewsOne: Jordan Neely, Obamas after the White House, Tribute to Harry Belafonte, Don Lemon's Most Memorable Moments, Jemel Hill, and Black Folklore.
There's no problem that websites like these around; I'm sure the right has similar in number and ridiculousness. But these websites have an answer seeking out questions. And if you have a media criticism podcast, and this is not something you can detect before blasting it out, then....well...that sucks.
I can't write anymore about this. I believe I had a small but impactful stroke at the pronouns they/them/tired and just realized it. I'll link my gofundme when the time comes, which I hope, for my family's sake, has deeply unequal outcomes.
I wonder who their audience is? I'm not sure it's African Americans, I think it's white people who want something slightly more activist than DailyKos, etc.
I found this podcast a little after it started when I started freaking out that I was turning into a conservative when media I would normally read lost their god damned minds. This podcast and other independent outlets helped me get back on solid ground, which was more or less where I started. The impact of narrative perpetually reinforced is wildly destructive. From the comments here, it looks like there are reasonable people here who can go back and forth on a topic without invective. I selfishly would like to that is the audience. Maybe there are a thousand of those and 11,000 paying subs screaming for Libs of TikTok bullshit, or maybe 11,000 pay subs screaming for NewsOne.
The other thing Jesse ignored or at least downplayed is that the teens themselves are the reason this blew up, because they recorded it and posted it. They weren’t “just” squatting on a bike, they were harassing a woman who called them on it and THEN they were directly responsible for this getting spread online.
So if Jesse really does think this is a nothing story, he should blame the teens for boosting it.
The response to the Citibike fuck-up would have been very disappointing if it wasn't exactly what I expected.
K&J once again pointedly ignored the existence of their thoughtful subscribers in favor of quoting at length from reddit. The "amazing community"' here is worth acknowledging only when asking for subscriptions and is apparently too deplorable to consider otherwise.
Jesse proceeds to selectively (and once again, wrongly) distort the facts which have come out (and which were available at the time of the original fuck-up, had he decided to apply some reading comprehension to this story in the first place). Superficiality is suddenly a valid excuse from someone who has repeatedly (and correctly) accused other journalists of laziness.
He still fails to mention, omits or misinterprets details in order to minimise any errors (the timeline, the authorship of the NEWSONE article; how Comrie wasn't "caught on video" - which implies something neutral like a surveillance camera when she was filmed by one of the kids and the video was shared by them in order to defame Comrie as a racist; that they didn't just "push the bike" back in the dock - which also depersonalises the situation and implies they were just moving an object when in fact they forced HER - a person - and the bike she was already on back into the dock; etc)
He then devotes even longer to bemoaning how he is "grossed out by this whole thing" and the "cavalcade of commentary" over something "that's not a story" and that "we end up getting dragged into it as a show" What the actual fuck? Who put a gun to his head, dragged him into the studio and made him feature this non-story on the show? It was HIS choice to focus on it. The hypocrisy of these grandstanding denunciations is what's grossing ME out.
Katie then pipes in to say "There were hundreds of comments in the reddit thread. I didn't read them. I was hoping you would have something more substantive that we got wrong than just like, it's a matter of opinion. Frankly, I'm not sure that I trust your analysis of this." No shit. To which Jesse's response is that it's "so discouraging that we're now litigating this". What is discouraging is that instead of a simple "I got X and Y wrong and should probably read things more thoroughly and critically next time" we're treated to a lot of self-serving obfuscation and deflection.
People get things wrong. It happens. Those with integrity own their mistakes. Others continue to evade or minimise them and attempt to shift focus by whining "why is everyone even talking about this?!". I have very little respect for the latter.
I've turned off my subscription renewal and only mention that (here, knowing they don't even read this) because I will miss you smart and witty people, your variety of perspectives and the intelligent discussions. But I'm done supporting lazy, self-serving and contemptuous bullshit. Summer is coming, I'm going to touch a LOT of grass and use the BARpod money for an ice cream cone.
"she was filmed by one of the kids and the video was shared by them in order to defame Comrie as a racist"
I can't believe he didn't mention this - this is why people are outraged, c'mon Jesse! This isn't weaponizing white tears, it's red meat for race-baiting hyper-online progressives, and at least one of these kids realized that it would be popular or they wouldn't have posted it!!
I am almost with you on cancelling my subscription. But yess. It is such fucking bullshit for Jesse to say Citibikes is a nothing story when they chose to cover it
And yeah. This has been bothering me for the last few months - all the fucking asking for subscribers and then. .not reading the threads?
I think on this occasion it was fair to refer to the reddit thread. It's a pretty long post and provided a lot more detail in its reasons for disagreement.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/13t7c75/bar_botched_the_citi_bike_karen_story_what_they/
To my mind this is just as much if not more of a story than Keffals, is all I'm saying. I felt like it was 2020 up in here.
Yeah, I sort of couldn’t believe that comment. Jesse could even walk down the street to a CitiBike location where this same thing is happening and ask someone how it works…
Right. The point where the video was posted online with the intent of defaming Comrie is where it moved beyond "a couple of people were jerks to each other," and is also *how* it got national attention.
100% with you. The two of them have made a lot of money dunking on shitty journalism, and the ride has been fun. I don’t want to spend money on them to lazily use shitty journalism to dismiss the people who support them.
I cannot believe that Jesse, a guy who made his bones on the most toxic culture war bullshit and who spent years fighting online against hundred of bad faith zealots, wipes his hands clean of people who support his work over him doing lazy journalism. They have made a lot of calls I don’t agree with over the years, but they backed their shit up and did their homework. I respected them for that. This upper crust dismissive bullshit ain’t it for me.
I've also turned off my subscription renewal. For me, it started with their episode on immigration where they came off as totally uninformed and unresponsive to feedback. The constant referring to reddit and not the primos thread was another thing that irked me. Plus, the "we're such a lazy and unprepared podcast hahaha" is sort of funny at first, but got old real quick.
It's too bad. Love the community here. Genuinely like Katie and Jesse. But they're making unforced errors and acting oblivious to how fortunate they are to earn 6 figures for 2 hours of content a week...
How long do you think it takes to produce two hours of content?
With the help of Trace and Lex, I'm gonna guess less than the 40-50 hrs most workers put in a week... All I'm saying is that, according to their own words, they have a great source of income compared to other journalists.
Maybe you disagree, but I think it gives them a responsibility to appropriately research what they put out there, especially when their brand is in part to criticize how shady so many journalists are...
They pay Trace and Lex, which is an expense your average worker doesn't have.
They're also earning better money than most journalists because they're way more talented than most journalists, which is something that happens within the mainstream media as well -- the stars make the big bucks.
As I said above, I have zero problem with people leaving if the content no longer lives up to the expectations nor do I have problems with people giving their reasons for leaving. I can understand why someone would be turned off by a lack of research.
What I don't get is the concern with their six figure incomes and that they should demonstrate gratitude for their good fortunes. When people unsubscribe from traditional media, they don't say it's because the editors and writers are too highly paid, don't work enough hours, and need to be more grateful. They stick to their unhappiness with the product.
It's not a concern Ann. I have no problem with them making a great living, if I did, I wouldn't be contributing to it :)
All I was saying by mentioning the six figure income is not that they should show gratitude to us, but that they're in a great position that allows them to properly research and prepare for this podcast. Other (less talented) journalists would kill for this opportunity.
Their earnings is only relevant in the sense that if they earned very little from the podcast, the inadequate research they've shown on some topics would be more understandable.
At this point I'm unlikely to renew, though it's still a few months away, so I'll hold out hope the recent drop in quality reverses itself.
Someone had written a long post on reddit which provided some links and further analysis. I think on this occasion it was fair to refer to reddit because although there was disagreement here no-one provided the same level of additional reporting (for want of a better word).
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/13t7c75/bar_botched_the_citi_bike_karen_story_what_they/
So. Leave.
I generally agree with you but this seems unfair "K&J once again pointedly ignored the existence of their thoughtful subscribers in favor of quoting at length from reddit" and maybe not the best reason to cancel your subscription.
I am a subscriber and I read these threads *and* everything on the reddit forum. The reddit post that Jesse low-key dismissed was actually well written and thoughtful and provided information he should have known, had he actually done anything close to due diligence for this segment. There's no comparable feature on substack (unfortunately).
TL;DR Yes, the subreddit has a brash and sometimes straight-up offensive contingency, but I find the snobbery here regarding it over the top (not you, specifically, but this is a theme that comes up a lot). If you feel like you need to unsubscribe, more power to you, but I don't think the subreddit should be a factor.
Ok, that's a valid point. I wrote my comment right after listening to the episode and didn't formulate it in the most nuanced and clear way so allow me to elaborate:
1) you are absolutely right - the reddit post Jesse low-key dismissed was very good, full of factual info, laid out the timeline and basically did Jesse's homework for him. It was probably the best factual rundown to be found on either forum and worth referencing. I didn't have a problem with that, although I see how my phrasing may have implied I did. But there was a lot of overlap between the commentary on the two forums and here, on Substack, there was also a lot of contextual discussion which would have helped him understand not just *what* he got wrong but *why* so many people took issue with his take.
2) this was the fifth or sixth episode where K&J chose to reference feedback or suggestions they got from reddit while ignoring Substack comments; that is, until that point in the show where they use the "awesome community" as a selling point for subscriptions. The contrast becomes noticeable with repetition. If you're going to ask people for money, rely on their support and laud how awesome the resulting community is, to then thoroughly ignore it *while often engaging with reddit* leaves a bad taste. The vibe that comes across (and it is subjective, I know) is a bit exploitative and contemptuous of those who do pay up.
3) that said, it's the least of my objections. The laziness is basically the main reason I'm opting out of the subscription. To keep paying would be to keep encouraging it. I can keep listening to the free episodes and check reddit (for free as well).
One thing I don't really recall being touched on in the original episode and certainly not in this one is that the PA had every right to feel threatened by a group of strange men. Jesse's got his dudely privilege on display here, he doesn't realize how unsettling that can be (I'm not saying there's no risk for men but it's very, very different).
I don't know, seems like Jesse is being willfully obtuse about this.
Yes, being accosted by a group of mildly aggressive teenage boys can be scary until you get out of the situation, and the same people who spent years hashtagging this kind of incident as MeToo are now dismissing it because of the races of the individuals involved.
I agree that this shouldn't have been a national news story IF a video hadn't been posted and IF the PA hadn't been put on leave. When irritating interactions with teen boys have occasionally happened to me, they didn't make the news or ruin my day. But nobody was trying to make me a pariah or get me fired, either.
Even during #metoo it was problematic and often seen as racist to denounce street harassment done by PoC and people from marginalized identities.
Jesse is a 6-foot-something man. No matter how beta his personality may be, his experience navigating the world will look a lot different than the experience of a smaller woman. I know that the concept of privilege has been beaten to death in the past few years, but I think he needs to acknowledge that he has a blind spot in that regard.
Yes exactly it's so weird!
I get what you are saying about feeling more vulnerable as a woman, but the truth is men are much more likely to be victimized by strangers.
I say this not because the woman here shouldn't have felt like she was potentially in danger, but because people often don't know women are on the whole less likely to be targeted.
It's not "feeling" more vulnerable, though, it's *being* more vulnerable. Men attacked by other men have some chance of defending themselves; women largely don't. You can't know what that feels like unless you've lived it.
I can assure you being confronted by a group, bigger person, or someone with a weapon who you think is willing got commit violence is basically equally "i'm in danger" whether you're a man or a woman.
Most women are less capable of defending themselves from men than most men. We walk through the world knowing this. It's ok to acknowledge this difference.
Did you read the part where I said I wasn't saying there is no risk for men but that it is different? That was for comments like yours.
Jesse, people were mad at you because in the previous episode you said “turns out she was acting like a karen” and used a completely biased article to reach that conclusions
I think this is the key criticism that was missed (or ignored because it was mostly discussed here and not on the subreddit - ick, subreddits). Jesse basically accepted the newsone article when the writer of said article was instrumental in the anti Comrie shitstorm, and didn't mention that then or now. And this was crazy stuff, dragging her husband into it, really playing up the race angle... That seems like something BARpod usually cares about or at least notices.
Anyway, whatever, they're done with it now, hopefully Comrie can just move past it too. It's just internet bullshit, after all.
Not mentioning that the news one author led the pile on is a pretty big oversight. In years past they would have jumped all over that. I don’t know if Reddit pointed that out but we discuss f it here! They should read Substack comments more maybe?!
That's my issue here as well, and I didn't even think it was really worth getting upset about it after the first episode. However now after the correction I'm kind of pissed off about it, it's one thing to be lukewarm on taking a hard stance against the teenagers, it's another thing to get called out for it, make a correction, and completely fail to correct yourself while doubling down on the original problem.
LOL isn't the advice of everyone, including K&J, that when the mob comes calling, never to apologize?
Not that I really think their comments section is "a mob". Even the most upset/angry/intense B&R thread is like Kant, compared to most internet comments secctions.
The mob referred to there is the outrage mob coming for your rep/job, not your paying subscribers / customers who are asking you to do your job.
Yeah, I think this is the issue: AFAICT the woman *didn’t do anything wrong*, and the ep seemed to say that she did.
Re: Citi Bike - let us all remember how shitty you feel when you’re pregnant. She was probably getting off a 12-hour shift, feeling sick, and her feet were killing her. These kids were being assholes, but they’ve never been pregnant, so they don’t know. Anyway, I’m not surprised she went a little crazy. I probably would have done the same. But then again I am a white cisheteronormative woman, so.. we all know how bad I suck.
Anyway. Why is this even a story.
I think I once read that women's serum testosterone increases by 70% during pregnancy. I hate to admit this, but I sometimes became a fucking rage monster when I was pregnant.
My wife started crying in the middle of the Trader Joe’s Parking Lot because I said she couldn’t have a chinchilla.
You should have bought her the chinchilla, dude.
I cried once because I ordered a sandwich with no onions and they put onions.
Oh there was lots of that too.
You bastard!
She was heavily pregnant and I kept trying to tell her she wouldn’t want it after the baby came but I guess I was just a monster that day.
Truly monstrous. Maybe she was just hungry the poor thing. A friend of mine was about 8 months pregnant when Panera ran out of orange scones. She started sobbing and yelled “if I’d wanted a fu**ing cinnamon roll I would have went to Cinnabon bi*ch!” at the woman taking orders. She’s never yelled at anyone that I know of before or since. I helped by bursting into mad cackles. I’ve never been pregnant but if I missed my nap AND had to go shopping you could get disemboweled for pulling a face much less being a chinchilla denier. Your wife must be lovely ;)
9/11 and vaccines couldn’t make me a denier but that chinchilla flipped me immediately.
After her sobbing got real bad I said I would go and get it but then she didn’t want it anymore and what hurt the most was not being supported but also I had to be the leader and make sure nothing crazy happened.
Don’t mess with pregnant women is the lesson I think we’ve all learned here.
this thread was hilarious, according to this never-pregnant middle aged cis woman
:) lol!
Chinchillas are small, quiet, and tend to live less than 10yrs. Honestly, a reasonable request. How dare you?!
I'm thinking this needs to be relitigated.
Okay initially I was on your side, because I thought a chinchilla was some kind of disgusting small yappy dog, but now that I’ve googled “chinchilla” I think she had a point.
Fair
Same! And after I delivered! I actually heard on the Huberman podcast yesterday that one of the chemicals infants’ heads secrete increases maternal aggression. So it’s not our fault. Ha!
The story isn't that there was an altercation over a bike. The story is that one party of that altercation uploaded a video which prompted other people to get the other party doxxed and suspended from their job.
Unfortunately, part of that story is determining the facts of the altercation.
I feel like people in the comments here FREAKING OUT about this and cancelling subscriptions are illustrating unfortunately why this is a story. It's a story because it's been cherry picked out of 1000 similar interactions and amplified because it stokes ALL of the endorphin / rage machine buttons that it can.
This is a story about two people being a bit rude. And somehow the rage machine forces us to talk about it like it is ESSENTIAL to show which one of them are more wrong. NO. It's just bullshit.
If people are yelling about canceling their subscription because Jesse or Katie picked the bad person instead of the good person, then I agree with your criticism. I don’t know the split between those comments and the ones I have been trying to make to voice my discontent.
I listen to this podcast for media criticism. I appreciated the topics they covered and how they focused on how narratives are used to shroud events in a haze of illiberal ideology across the political spectrum.
I would have preferred if the Citibike story focused on what has made me a loyal listener: how the media creates and perpetuates outrage, causing discourse to become both lose your job serious and over-the-top pro-wrestling ridiculous.
For the past few stories they (mostly Jesse) have tried to thumb the shit-covered scale of discourse one way or another, and that’s not what I signed up for. My emotional reaction to the past few stories is rooted in their laziness of research, focusing on who the bad person is rather than the media’s role in making everyone the bad person for profit, and Jesse’s petulance at being called out for reliance on incredibly biased sources (NewsOne). I will admit I’m a New Yorker, and the laziness of reporting on topics here has been especially grating.
I wish the Citibike episode was about the rage machine, as so many stories in the past have been about.
I agree that could have been an interesting piece and more along the lines of the kind of content we like to hear on this pod. E.g. "here's where the media went wrong in covering this" similar to the Central Park Karen ep. But I really do think that most of the angry comments are people who are furious that Jesse didn't more firmly pick the "right side".
The Lululemon story and the reaction our hosts had to it is illustrative of some of the conservative / liberal divide.
Jesse was puzzled at why someone would care about something that doesn't have a material impact on them. The reaction that conservatives have to stories like this isn't about the material impact. It's about the differing treatment between people who are pro-social and anti-social, an inversion of how they ought to be treated.
The shoplifters are defecting on society and its rules. They're placing their own material benefit ahead of the good of society. The workers are apparently obeying the rules in working a job. They're also chastising the rule breakers.
Lululemon, in its non-confrontation policy, is also defecting. As the hosts acknowledge, they've made a calculation and determined that their own benefit is maximized through a non-confrontation policy.
I think there's widespread agreement that thieving is a moral wrong, with narrow life-and-death loaf-of-bread exceptions. I think there's also agreement that telling a thief to get out is morally permissible, probably even praiseworthy.
And yet, we see the retailer punishing the pro-social and telling its workers they have to let the anti-social go without even a tsk. This inversion is the outrage.
I think conservatives are likely puzzled at how liberals can reduce these stories to mere material terms. It's not about the material goods. If they were stealing far cheaper or far more expensive things, I think the reaction from conservatives would be the same. In this case they stole $7,000 worth of clothes.
Imagine instead each thief stuffed a single Lululemon keychain, priced at $24, down his pants. The employees yelled at them to get out and followed them. Lululemon fired the employees. The reaction would have been the same.
Came here to say this exact thing. Ordinary people being expected to follow the rules (and getting punished, fired, and shamed when they break the rules in service of the law) while anti-social thieves are allowed to run free just makes normal, rule-following people feel angry and demoralized, as if we're suckers for still abiding by the social contract.
I 100% agree with this- it’s exactly how I feel. The fucking inversion! I guess I’m conservative now.
Yeah. Fucking weird. . I was at a Rite Aid near my old job, which was near-hood. Dude came in grabbed an umbrella and ran out. No one blinked an eye except one guy who tried to run after them. Everyone was black. Except the cashier was Bengali and I am white
What color was the umbrella?
I don't care about one person stealing one thing. This is organized crime. And no one cares. And then stores close down and then it's because of white supremacy. It's funny I guess, for employees, when it's not awful for anyone wanting to do business in "deserts".
It was blue actually.
And a whole bunch of stores have shut down because of theft. Making it worse is that due to the theft, they put shit under lock, so then people do not want to shop.
Several years ago I remember reading an article about how racist Walgreens was for putting certain merchandise in locked cases because some of it was hair product that was almost exclusively used by black women. I could not and cannot wrap my head around that logic. Loss prevention departments do not randomly choose items to lock down. They do it based on what gets stolen the most. How about chastising the people who are shoplifting and making life harder for everyone else?
Lol “hood adjacent”.
Your points are well taken, but you don't need conservative values to think that stealing is bad. If this sort of theft becomes normalized, prices go up for everyone, which is bad for the person who's on the margin of being able to buy these things. Stores close (as is apparently the case in San Fransisco right now in particular), people lose their jobs, customers lose access, the neighborhood becomes a ghost town. Lululemon isn't that important, but this same mentality is how food deserts happen.
I also think there are many examples of things that have been going on for a while, but which have created new controversies simply because of our new social media environment. Just because corporations were doing "X" 20 years ago doesn't make it good. Corporations were doing a lot of bad shit 20 years ago. In fact, back then, being against corporations was cool.
Everyone is getting mad at Jesse for the Citibike part of the episode, but I thought his "don't the stores have insurance" was a far more egregious comment.
Morality is not conservative, and mass stealing is wrong for everybody.
I'm not saying that only conservatives think stealing is wrong, I'm saying they're especially disgusted by the inversion of appropriate consequences. The theft isn't the story here, it's the company's response to it.
A similar situation is schools with zero tolerance no fighting policies. A kid can be physically bullied and the school will do little or nothing to punish the bully. But if the kid strikes back, it becomes a fight, and he gets the same punishment as the bully.
In my experience conservatives align more on the "it is right to punch back and the bullied kid shouldn't be punished for it" side, and liberals on the "violence is never the answer" side.
Yes, thank you for this comment, especially this statement: "And yet, we see the retailer punishing the pro-social and telling its workers they have to let the anti-social go without even a tsk. This inversion is the outrage."
I was waiting for them to acknowledge that stealing is generally considered morally wrong. They kind of got there at the end with the near-anarchy / why should we have to pay if everyone just steals idea, but I was kind of frustrated by the limited moral / pro-social perspective here. (They don't have to believe that it's wrong, but they could at least acknowledge that some people might feel that way.)
I've read this thread multiple times on multiple days because I have a problem, and this is the first time I realized that you wrote that the shoplifters are "defecting" not "defecating".
It would appear my problems are bigger than I thought.
The weird thing here is the cons are supposed to be pro-corporation. The corporations have these policies because it is in their financial interest. Primarily it's in their interest because of the shitty ways that conservative politicians have shaped the landscapes for corporations in order to give their buddies unfair advantages. They can write off theft losses. They can fire employees at will. Etc.
None of this is about the individual interaction - it's about the corporate policies which are a result of corporations getting basically whatever they want from our political systems.
"They can write off theft losses."
I don't think you understand what write offs are nor how they work...
"writing off" theft losses is the same impact as realizing the cost of the item at time of sale, just with no associated revenue. It's very much a bad thing.
This episode pushed me 1 step closer to unsubscribing entirely . For only the second time I fastfowarded through the preliminary banter. And the reading of the bad reviews was just ...why.
The part about the bike race was pretty fucking funny.
However. What really pissed me off is Jesse being like why was the Citibike story national news and I don't get why people on Reddit were mad at us. Well. First. If you don't know why it is a national story, why the hell did you cover the story at all? Second. Did you read the substack comments at all? Where people are paying and as you say you wouldn't be able to do all this work without the paying subscribers. Because here, I didn't see anyone mad. Mostly it was just confusion as to how you could read these stories and think the woman was at fault at all. There was no anger just confusion. Which is honestly what I saw on Reddit too
Third. You groaned about the author of the News One story comparing what happened with CitiBikes to Emmett Till, but it was HER story that led you to say that maybe the woman did do something wrong. But maybe just maybe the fact that a reporter would make such over the top claims would lead you to carefully analyze what she was saying.
Fourth and final. No one was asking you to revisit the story. I honestly just expected you to say we read the timeline wrong. We were wrong. That is it. 30 seconds
The second half was pretty good. Iwould just add that employees might not want to see people stealing because they find it morally offensive
Geez, you guys. I feel bad about the harshing on Jesse! We pay $5 a month- it's worth at least that.
Katie and Jesse make me laugh, which is sort of priceless.
Admittedly, I laughed VERY loud (outside, while walking my dog) at the accidentally non-binaried gravel biker.
Valid point. I guess the last couple of episodes haven't made me laugh but it definitely is still worth it to me
I do not mean to be harsh on Jesse. I wish they would take substack comments seriously though
Not that I'm mad but I agree, I don't understand why J & K or Lex or Tracing don't read comments on the podcasts. I get not reading the weekly threads but you'd think they would be interested in reactions to their product. I don't expect them to directly comment to posts but just be aware.
The image of Katie being pulled by Moose on skis didn’t make you laugh?!
It did.
Agreed! Even when I disagree - and I did with Jesse on this one - I’m still entertained. It’s worth the 5$ to me for sure.
I do biological monitoring, which involves a lot of sitting in the car wondering why I went to college instead of becoming a deckhand on a tramp steamer.
This podcast is basically a business expense. This podcast and paying for extra lives on Two Dots.
I should get a tax write off.
What is biological monitoring?
Looking for bird nests, telling dudes with heavy equipment to keep their shit out of the creek, taking occasional photos, listening to podcasts.
I wish I worked on a boat.
can't you transfer your job skills to a job on a boat?
I would guess sailing around on a boat and catching fish or plankton or something and counting them. Maybe chemical tests.
The first eight minutes of the podcast were comedy gold. The nonbinary cyclist?? 😂
I laughed out loud at the "Please take it." Like, even the organizers knew their bullshit category was in fact bullshit.
+1 for the healing power of laughter
Agree plus it was especially enjoyable when Katie joined in on the Jesse pile-on multiple times. How can I even be mad at Jesse when I'm also happily laughing at him. The fun of BARpod for me is half reporting and half fun bantering between two amusing people. If one aspect isn't at its highest level, the other usually makes up for it. Jesse messed up, bur more importantly, I laughed a lot in this episode.
They make hundreds of thousands of dollars on this podcast. They can try to take it as seriously as a real job.
Do we really know this? I guess I'm just gobsmacked that this could possibly be true. I don't know what the perma-banneds are paying but if they have only about 12,000 primos and also pay two employees...also I've never met anyone IRL who's heard of this podcast
12,000*5*12 is a lot of dough.
Yeah it is.
On a long drive yesterday, my husband couldn't understand why I wanted to listen to a new BARpod episode right away, before listening to a fairly dry nonfiction book (Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World). Then he started criticizing Jesse for continuing to discuss the CitiBike story while saying it wasn't worth discussing. Of course the criticism was justified, but I had to defend Jesse.
Sad to say, Katie and Jesse and their devoted fans are kind of like the family I used to have, where everyone was free to say what they thought, and it was OK if you messed up sometimes as long as you could still laugh at yourself and make other people laugh. (Maybe it's no coincidence that "primo" means cousin!) Get-togethers with my actual family have become such a minefield of potential misgenderings and worse. I think it will take a lot of missteps and disappointments for me to unsubscribe.
I love hanging with you guys here!
I laughed out loud when I read the title of that non fiction book- oh my sweet lord.
I pray it was better than it sounds .
It's actually a pretty interesting and well-written book, even entertaining at times. But it doesn't fill my need for a make-believe family.
Yes. I found this very unsatisfying. Jesse, maybe don’t joke around so much about your low-effort work product if you care about keeping your paying subscribers.
I kind of hate it when people threaten they will unsubscribe to a podcast.
It’s not that I object to the idea of unsubscribing if something is no longer of value. Or even to laying out the reasons.
It’s the I’m-paying-so-I can-throw-my-weight-around aspect.
It’s like being rude to wait staff because you’re the customer.
The wait staff is not a good analogy. They have thousands of subscribers. The power imbalance of one or a few primos saying they'll unsubscribe isn't like a customer berating a minimum wage wait staff. And no one is saying you have to be rude to them.
What we're saying is that we pay to support quality content. If the content isn't up to par, it's totally appropriate to stop paying for it. Explaining why you stop paying for it, when done in good faith, may even help the content creator question some errors they may have made.
We have a weird parasocial relationship though. Even when they say stuff where I’m like “nope!” about pedo stuff I try to remember they are still people and doing their best.
I'll cut people a great deal of slack if they're doing their best, even if they come up a bit short. This was an admittedly "low effort" update, that even Katie (who made no effort on her part) called out. Sorry, but criticism is well within bounds here.
Disagreement and critique are fine. Adding some weird low stakes financial threat to convince someone to agree with you is both weird and ineffective.
Disagree that it's a "threat" in any way. People are free to express opinions on what they're willing to spend money on and where they believe that quality has been lacking. Not very different than writing a restaurant review. Personally, my main issue is NOT that I disagree with J&K (though I do in some cases), but rather that (IMO) the quality and effort has had a noticeable decline over the past few months.
We all are free to say whatever we want at businesses we go to for the service. But let’s say you’ve been going to the same Italian restaurant for years, you know the owner and staff, and one day your spaghetti is bullshit. Do you immediately jump on poor Giuseppe and tell him he has failed you or do you politely and firmly let him know there’s a problem with the spaghetti and listen to hear if maybe his beloved mother Maria went to see Saint Peter and he’s grappling with being the only half of their emotionally incestuous relationship this side of heaven?
There is tact is all I’m saying.
This is a very different scenario though. I don't know Jesse or Katie, our relationship is purely transactional. They make a podcast, I subscribe to it and have since Day 1 back on Patreon. Quality has been good up until recently, which is why I provided my feedback when it's dropped. They can listen to it or not. I'll make my decision not based on whether they agree with me, but whether the value is high enough to justify the cost, nothing more complicated than that.
I can see your perspective, I just don’t live that way. I know the names of all the cashiers at my grocery store. I am very personable with people because I think those interactions are the fundamental unit of living a good life. I’m here because I live in the middle of nowhere and miss office chatter. If you are here for the news I get it but they share stuff about their lives and to me that makes it different.
I totally agree that we're paying for quality content and that explaing why you've stopped paying, when done in good faith, is fine.
What I don't like is when people get into "this isn't right for people nearing 40" or "they're making six figures so they should do better" territory. That's where the waitstaff comparison comes into it.
I agree with you about the age thing Ann, that's really uncalled for.
What they earn is only relevant in the sense that this is basically their full time job (I know Jesse has his newsletter and Katie sporadically writes articles). If they made 20k a year from the podcast, the lack of research would be more understandable. But here, they earn enough to make this their full focus, have 1-2 assistants...
That's great! That's why I was a subscriber from the beginning. I want them to take the time to research what they want. But shouldn't quality and expectations for the content produced then also be higher than if this was a side hustle?
They have both at times seemed exhausted and I think they are going through the newly successful business person thing where they haven’t figured out they need to take vacations and built out a support team. Like they should have regular co hosts where they can just take off for a week or two a few times a year and for the most part they don’t.
I have responded elsewhere on the thread.
Aren't you doing the same exact thing?
Nope
I've just been paying for jokes and banter the whole time. I'm not looking to K & J for big-time journalism, although some of their stories have been great. (I loved the Unitarian episode.)
I didn’t threaten to unsubscribe, so I don’t know why you’re directing this at me, Ann, and also, no it is not like being rude to waitstaff. This is requesting a certain level of effort and attention to a product we pay for. Jesse was poorly prepared to present this story, and it’s fine to point that out.
Thank you for being gracious, Ann. I do disagree but I regret being snappy and am sorry about that.
Apologies. I meant to reply to Not aTrue Scotsman, who likely won't see my comment. Double my bad.
Also if the wait staff sucks you should let them know.
I actually unsubscribed around nine months ago and only resubscribed for this single month. I mostly did so because listening tended to make me anxious / mad due to how close I was to some of the crazy stuff they were talking about. Not really their fault, though the lads at TFC manage to talk about similar stuff in a much more enjoyable way.
The other big turn-off was how obviously unprepared they were for a lot of episodes and how they'd joke about that. I get that I was only paying $5/mo, and I think I got my money's worth. However, for two people nearing 40, joking about being unprofessional rubbed me the wrong way, especially as there pod is probably one of the biggest on Substack.
$60 a year could buy you five subscriptions to glossy magazines that did journalism back in the day. And they ran more than 4 stories per month.
I know it's not fair exactly to expect the same level as that but I'm buying about $300/yr worth of independent journalist output because I enjoy them more than the current output by the glossies.
They don't usually get it this wrong.
On Jesse's "I don't get why this is a national story."
True. It shouldn't be. But lots of stuff that is really just dumb interpersonal drama becomes national news because of the underlying dynamics. This pod has at times been good at unpacking why people are so enraged about a conflict between a bird-watcher and dog-walker. The fact that millions of people are enraged at bullshit is interesting in and of itself. As others have stated: reporting on dumb internet bullshit is the entire point of this pod.
Exactly. It is just a little baffling that he asks why it is a national story when he covered the story.
But I do think it became a national story in part because liberal or maybe progressive America is very focused on the idea that we are still in 1955 and white women hate black boys. Just a nicer face
I really think this has gotten worse because of the pandemic. Journalists mostly worked from home and so they didn't get out and didn't have the opportunity to do more traditional reporting. Most of their friends and relatives were also white collar workers who were working from home and weren't really involved in the real world outside of their homes. They were spending a lot of time on the internet and on social media sites and their friends were the same. So journalists ended up reporting more on stupid internet stuff. Unfortunately, they're not going back to reporting on the real world stuff.
you probably should unsubscribe. you’re wasting a lot of energy into a podcast that’s supposed to be fun. take a break, and when you start to miss our favorite horse fucker and lesbian, come on back.
I am really not. I live in NYC. There is a CitiBike dock down the street from me. And I agree it is supposed to be fun .But it isn't always .I will probably unsubscribe soon but I am not ready yet. It is overall too good
Jesse only fucks female Christian conservative horses because he’s a red-blooded American.
The weird parasocial relationships are being oddly tested in this one.
This isn't a fandom question. Parasocial relationships require an emotional interest/obsession with Katie and Jesse's personas. That's not what people are doing here. They're criticizing arguments made by the hosts.
Only because they care too much and are peacocking. Full stop. That’s all. So yeah. I stand by my statement.
It’s a petty hill to die on. Obsessively petty.
But hey. Everyone can have their weird triggers. People are more than welcome to take their ball and go home.
I’m sure tears will be shed.
So let me get this straight, when people pay a subscription to a podcast and comment on how much they love it, do they care too much?
Because people stopping to pay for same podcast and explaining what they found lacking is the same thing.
You're talking about hills to die on, triggers, pettiness... Dude, you can act above the fray all you want, that people care too much, but you're taking this too seriously too. People you don't know made comments about the show you felt compelled to respond to, and we're having a conversation about it. It's not that deep.
Me? Haha I’m far more chaotic. But if you’d like you can look through for comments of me going “yay team” and you won’t find any. So yeah. Saying “I love this thing so much” without any added value is utterly masturbatory. I just heard about the outrage and wanted to see it. It’s funny to me because it’s funny. It is objectively funny that this causes any consternation on people.
I just like pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. And this whole nothing burger has no bun.
People don’t like that. I think it’s hilarious they don’t like it.
Even the response I get? Meh. It’s uninteresting.
Respond if ya want but I’m prolly done with this. There’s a piece of toast I have to go watch toast.
Yes, I see you, and that little trite shtick you've got going on. Boring indeed. No point in interacting. Now go watch that toast buddy ;)
The opening two banter stories were a dramatic enactment of the little-known Dr. Seuss book, “Shoo Flies, Jew Flies”. Sadly, Disney just closed its attractions based on the tale, in favor of the new animatronic extravaganza, “Dr. Strangio and the Multiverse of Pronouns.”
yes but like. why do we care.
This is a story about two people being a bit rude, tens of thousands of similar interactions are happening all over the internet. The fact that one of them was probably more of a dickhead than the other should be immaterial. none of us would care if ti weren't for the algorithm pushing this shit at us primarily because it's an interaction between people of different races, which is really awful when you think about it. There probably was a white kid doing this exact thing to a white dude 2 blocks away but no one hears about it - Heck that kid might have done the same and tried to make his video go viral too, but it didn't because it doesn't stoke the culture wars.
The whole point I heard Jesse making is that if we had just collectively ignored it the whole world would be a better, less racist place.
I do of course agree that J&K should stop reading reddit any stick with us, we are clearly superior, more intellectual, and all around sexier.
You make a good point. The problem though is why did Jesse cobet it then? Like I only heard about this because of the podcast and I live in Manhattan. Actually. No. I heard about it on the ipen thread here and then the podcast covered it.
I should be clear. What pissed me off was not the original coverage of the stiry. I was a bit flummoxed how he could read the News One article and come to the conclusion he did. It made no sense to me. What pissed me off is - if it is that much of a nothing story, then do not cover it. And also do not decide that ok maybe the woman really was a Karen based on an article that was clearly a hatchet job
I tend to agree, in that it overall was not a story they needed to cover and by only kinda covering it they seem to have really annoyed some people.
But, I do feel like it was really a very tiny mention it in the first episode it was in, and therefore was confused by the vehemence of the backlash (which actually I wasn't aware of as I don't read reddit and the response here was much milder, until this response).
Guys! Don't read reddit they don't even pay for the pod!!
Also! You don't have to respond to every criticism. C'mon Jesse, you got off twitter for a reason!
Jesse on the citibike story think you missed the part where the kids sister is online being a massive racist demanding that Sarah lose her job and have her crowdfunding money revoked. On another note the reason this is a national story is because the left has a racial grifting problem that you could address.
I'm not normally one to think someone should sue at the drop of a hat, but I think Comrie should look into a defamation suit.
I’m not canceling anything. I still like the show and “ants on the keyboard” was really funny. However, I’m bummed that the fact that the Newsone article was written by someone who led the pile on against Comrie didn’t get mentioned. That is a really interesting angle, and it’s the kind of journalistic ethic (or complete lack there of) that this podcast has covered in the past. Even if it is a “non-story,” the journalist’s attack on Comrie is a meaty subject, because a journalist shouldn’t do that and still call themselves a journalist. I hope you aren’t resting on your laurels, because that would be boring.
I didn’t get the ants joke. I’m guessing I forgot or missed something.
They were basically implying trust Ian Myles Cheong eats over his keyboard all the time, because he never logs off, and thus has ants.
I think it's even more specific than that. Ian Miles Cheong posted years ago about having an ant problem, and someone or other jokingly exaggerated that to imply he is covered in a layer of ants at all times. As always it's tough to peel back the layers of irony and exaggeration, but I think an older ep of barpod had a timeline of The Ant Joke.
Ha, thank you!
Implying that
It's shitting on Ian Miles Cheong, or it's banter, whatever.
Really? How was Taylor Lorenz a big part of the story?
Ok- does Jesse seriously not understand why an employee would be upset about shop lifting?? I’m pissed off hearing about it third hand!! It’s a moral injury. Societies can’t function in an atmosphere of rampant theft. It’s like one of the most basic rules of the social contract.
There is a reason why in the old
times horse theives were hanged and pick pockets got their hands cut off.
You'd think he'd be appalled by horse thievery.
And yet, neigh.
I don't get the horse fucking jokes. Can someone point me to the episode where this started, because it's weird.
It's why they have to do all the throat-clearing.
Amazing
Yeah I was confused by that as well. I would consider it part of my job to try protect my employer’s property if I could reasonably safely. It’s weird that you would just not care? Do you not care if your neighbor is getting robbed either? You’re supposed to just stay out of it? I don’t get where a lot of people are coming from these days on what seem like such basic issues of morality and decency. It’s like I’m from another planet or something. But then I’m almost always on team Karen when these stories come up.
very good points about this expanding to caring about your neighbors, etc.
Who the fuck is going to get blamed for shrinkage?
"Don't chase shoplifters"
plus
"Shrinkage is your responsibility"
What the actual
Exactly this! Example; at work we had a colleague that didn't do his part of work as a team member for a collective project. The part of work he chose not to do had a cascading impact on absolutely everyone on our team. The good part is that we pulled together and took over his portion of the work to meet a deadline, albeit at longer hours and greater stress for all of us. The 'bad' part is that he received no repercussions, no consequences for kind of deflecting and putting this last-minute high-stress pressure on everyone. The result? A genuine apathy has settled on the team, an idea of 'why work so hard and commit to something as a team whereby we are paid the same and treated the same, whether we show up or not?' This is the same - you cannot foster a sense of trust in a team or organization when witnessing a lapse in morality that has no consequences else how does it benefit the totality? It only tends to fosters what I saw it did; resentment and apathy.
It seemed like they came around to acknoedging that, but it took them a while. I think he was initially asking if the robbery impacts the workers' pay or in any other material way and if that would be the motive for them intervening.
Hi everyone,
I share some of your criticisms of the way Jesse framed the Citibike story and his comments in the correction this episode. However I think it would be a mistake to make comments about unsubscribing from the podcast.
If we go down that road just because we're not happy about the coverage of one or two stores, then we're no better than twitter. We are all wrong from time to time so I think it might be a good idea if you're feeling frustrated to keep in mind all the great stories Jesse and Katie have brought to us. And even when they do get it wrong, you can always find a good discussion here or on the Reddit.
Be kind to each other and Jessie and Katie too 💖
I have no problem disagreeing with their perspective; I think that is good and healthy. But it is irksome for them to be so flippant about how poorly they covered a story they admit they put very little effort into. Do it thoroughly, or don’t do it at all. Not every story needs the in-depth investigative work of the UU Church episode (which was very good!), but a TikTok video and a cursory read of a biased article from a ridiculous source doesn’t cut it.
Yeah, totally get where you're coming from. Jesse's response did not come across the way he probably intended. And I don't think he responded to the most substantive claims from the pushback.
But I think it's also helpful to remember that even if they botch a story completely (facts, opinion and framing), the podcast as a whole has added a lot more good to the world than it subtracted. Like you said, it's important that the audience can communicate and give them feedback when it looks like a mistake or a poor framing. That way, people can draw there own conclusions when mistakes happen. But if we threaten to unsubscribe every time, I think we'd be disregarding all of their good work. We'd probably also prevent them from discussing stories where there's a chance we might disagree.
I suppose that's my main point. Everybody makes mistakes and we need to give Jesse and Katie the freedom to be wrong occasionally. Because we're grading them against Michael Hobbes and NPR.
I don’t think even 5% of the criticism has been because they were “wrong”. That is just a big misreading of what people are/were saying.
If I unsubscribed from interacting with everyone who annoyed me sometimes I would live a lonely existence!
A lot of people are living that existence these days.
I agree at least for now. The messaging value of reducing their income by $5/mo isn't yet worth missing out on bonus episode releases.
That said, your post being the ONLY one in this entire thread "Liked by Jesse Singal" is pretty insulting.
Of course he doesn't want people to unsubscribe and "likes" calls to not unsubscribe but one of the top comments on this thread is an unsubscriber who early on in their complaint mentioned, "K&J once again pointedly ignored the existence of their thoughtful subscribers in favor of quoting at length from reddit. The "amazing community"' here is worth acknowledging only when asking for subscriptions and is apparently too deplorable to consider otherwise."
So Jesse then chooses to 'show presence and attention' by ignoring every post other than the one that suggests people just keep their subscription going and move on rather than "doing a cancel" by choosing not to continue giving money to people as their product quality drops....
Regarding the fact that he liked my post, I personally don't think it's as nefarious as that. When you get a wall of criticism (regardless of whether or not it's warranted), it's tough to absorb all at once.
I know that when my work gets edited, I tend to retreat for a while and lick my wounds. Often, when I return to the criticism, I can read it in a more detached way.
So if I had to guess, I would wager that Jesse just appreciated hearing a positive note amongst the negative ones. I would recommend giving him some time and trying to guard against assigning negative intentions to his actions. Being generous with others is one way we can show the strength of our community and distinguish ourselves from the people on Twitter who only know how to tear things down.
Sure, this is just like if Jesse had once liked a tweet using racial slurs and we're all calling his employer to have him fired and/or bullying advertisers to cancel contracts with him.
Your use of woke mob is as useless and diluted as current accusations of karendom.
Specific as in "analyzing the social media likes"?
Not like I went on his page and dug around to see what all he's liked lately to try and dig up dirt. I pointed out the single, golden "Liked by Jesse Singal" badge because it prominently sticks out while reading the discussion here.
If his like showed up like everybody else's, it wouldn't be noticeable or worth pointing out but again it's a big, golden "Liked by Jesse Singal" badge.
I really fail to see how you think it's at all comparable.
I would bet that for every person who has unsubscribed, it was not just one or two episodes. But I am continuing to subscribe even though a lot has been annoying me for awhile
Yes precisely. I've disagreed plenty of times over the years but up until recently they've always been genuinely curious about what they're talking about. Last few months there's been ever-increasing amount of incurious throat-clearing going on
Maybe they are losing interest but stuck because of the money. Happens to lots of people and generally the work product starts tanking.
It’s not about his take, it’s about how poorly thought out it was.
I endorse this!
Supported. Like I assume good faith even when they say shit about pedo stuff. Can’t we all just find it in ourselves to think, even if we are convinced we are totally correct, that maybe the person who is wrong is just having an off day?
On one hand I see why people want to express their frustration along with the concrete action they're willing to take. Our relationship with Katie and Jesse is financial. Subscribers fund their project, and if the project isn't meeting expectations, pulling funding is the appropriate response.
But on the other hand, I agree with your broader point. So much of the outpouring against coverage of the Citibike drama has a tinge of parasocial expectation about it. People seem to feel personally betrayed because the Citibike segment and follow-up didn't meet expectations. They didn't meet my expectations either, but I'm not about to jump to a conclusion on what this implies about J or K's character, upbringing, or perspective. And we should all take heart that Katie was so clear and forceful about her own dissatisfaction with the follow-up. Nobody's perfect. Jesse was clear that he didn't place a high priority on this story and didn't look into many of the details, which is unfortunate, since so much of it rests in the particulars of how the interaction went down beat-by-beat, what Citibike's policies and terms of service are, what the common etiquette is, and how the online shitstorm developed. As far as I'm concerned, all those aspects went underreported across the original segment and follow-up. But hey that Spire ain't gonna Slay itself (don't get me wrong i fucking love Slay The Spire too, I am a fellow Spire Slayer).
In the end, I do have to agree that BaRpod's coverage of this story has left a lot to be desired. I would have liked to see more in-depth coverage in the following specific ways:
- Clarify exactly how the Citibike system works. What was the legal status of the bike during the incident?
- Layout a timeline of known events during the incident.
- Explore the NewsOne article through the lens of the author's twitter activity
Is this sort of a vulgar, small story being blown out of proportion? Sure. But the reason that can happen is because the story represents something else to people. It is culturally shocking that teenagers can belittle a pregnant woman on camera and receive an outpouring of support, while she is reflexively suspended from her means of supporting her family. It says something about the nature of power, which is a subject that's inherently worth examining. It's also a little weird to think, but Citibike's are a community resource, and this story represents a failure of community participation in sharing that resource fairly. There are angles here that aren't just the same race-baiting people participate in every day on twitter, and even if I haven't been blown away by K&S's coverage of the story, I have learned a lot from the community posts about it here and on Reddit.
Really not sure why K+J didn’t actually talk about how to respond to the bike criticism or re-record the segment once Katie heard what Jesse was adding. Should have been a clarification with a brief acknowledgement that they got criticism and moved on. Instead I feel like this is only going to chum the waters. Seems like Katie thought the same and probably wanted to ignore it, which would have been better than this. But I also think that if someone is thinking of unsubscribing over this I imagine they’ve been moving in that direction for a bit and the general response on Reddit is being used as justification.
Personally I did feel that their take on the story didn’t make sense. How does one person using a single bike all day help a program that is meant to distribute bikes? If it was “his” then why could she scan it in the first place? Seemed like pretty obvious questions to ask if you’re going to cover the story. I appreciated them providing more clarity since the interpretation in the original episode was off, but the execution seems pretty botched to me.
Many of their "corrections", have been non acknowledgements, and I get the impression I am being gaslit about not only what they said, but also what the community actually took issue with. It always seems like it it meant to convince some third party that things are cool now, not actually address the criticism.
Not directly related to this episode, but speaking of Lululemon: In 2011 at a Lululemon store in Maryland, one Lululemon employee, Brittany Norwood, murdered her coworker, Jayna Murray, after Jayna caught Brittany stealing merchandise and called the manager. Brittany was a black woman, Jayna was a white woman. Brittany initially staged the scene to make it look like there was a violent break-in, but once it became clear that there was no break-in and she was the murderer, even her own family sided against her. The CEO of Lululemon spoke at Jayna's funeral and the company erected a beautiful mural at the front of the store in her memory.
It's difficult not to look back at that story and wonder if the public would've responded differently if it had happened now. I'm sure a lot of people would've considered Jayna a Karen, maybe even tried to justify or excuse Brittany killing her. Would the company have honoured Jayna's memory to the extent they did in 2011? I somewhat doubt that they would. IDK, maybe I'm overthinking it.
Came here to say I was surprised Katie didn’t list this among all of the Lululemon scandals! It’s a pretty shocking story.
I do remember that story now that you bring it up. If it were today, I'm not sure the jury would have even convicted.
Why do you think the jury wouldn't have convicted?
Fear for their lives. When we see some of the mass protests for other politically charged cases, it's not hard to imagine.
Do we have any recent examples of jury members being attacked for their verdict, or any examples of jury members citing the political climate as a reason not to convict in a clear-cut murder case?
I mean there are plenty of well-documented examples of intimidation and manipulation of juries. If I had an example like what you're talking about, I would not above have used the words "not sure"
i was waiting for them to mention this!
It sounds like the kid squatting on the Citibike was the Karen all along.
Jesse, you're still clueless.
If white teen boys did this to a black woman, there would be no debate, even if the white boys were technically in the right. We would call these boys thugs.
It is a failure of civility and chivalry. No man can ever use intimidation and fear to settle a dispute with a woman.
Just reverse the races and tell me this is a trivial story.
Yup, there it is. The “switch race & reassess” razor clears it right up. It was the same in this episode with the making fun of catholics vs making fun of muslims. This race razor illustrates hypocrisy quick, easy & stark.
I agree on the hypocrisy of the roles being switched, but being raised Catholic, making fun of religion was kind of a "thing" for us. I'm areligious now but my mom is still Catholic and loves "ribbing" it; it's almost like it's so ingrained that it couldn't be offensive and one kind of desires a "release valve" as it were. My husband's family is Jewish and likewise they never seem to tire of joking about religion. I don't know if it belongs at a baseball game--I struggle to see the context there--but in general I think it's healthier to joke about than not.
Totally agree (if Im anything I’m an absurdist) and personally I DGAF if they make fun of any religion, hell make it a skit before every game like the national anthem. My thing is just that if you couldn’t make fun of Islam because its adherents would get bent out of shape then Catholics being pissed is also fair play (pun intended). (Also, Sullivan’s point that they aren’t edgy or transgressive to make fun of Christians they’re hypocrites for refusing to do the same to Islam out of a legit fear of reprisal)
"...they aren’t edgy or transgressive to make fun of Christians they’re hypocrites for refusing to do the same to Islam out of a legit fear of reprisal" YES.
Civility and chivalry! Exactly! I wonder if Jesse has lived in cities so long that he is immune to seeing this. But would he want his mother or sister-in-law to be subjected to this? Especially her work suspension? Come on, Jesse.
PREACH!
here's the deal though. If we all just ignored this equally regardless of the race of the people involved everyone would be better off.
Instead we amplify the story and get enraged it's a story and have to find out who the baddest guy is just to prove the point. You don't actually have to engage in the culture war. Most sane people don't.
I think both the Citibike story and the Lululemon story are related, and I haven't seen this point yet in the comments.
Both have to do with the idea of societal standards of what is right and wrong. So much of what is going on today (and in Jesse and Katie's stories) involves denying, ignoring, or destroying cultural and other norms of behavior. We used to have shared values in this country that most (not all) people could agree with most (not all) of the time. For example, you don't steal other peoples' stuff. Contrary to the progressive line, this is not a white supremacist value: I would bet that, 30 years ago, the vast majority of people of all races, religions, etc., would agree with that statement.
But now, in the name of equity, or inclusion, or non-judgmentalism, or whatever else, we're told none of these norms apply anymore. Shut up about my penis, I'm a woman you bigot! If you complain about setting a building on fire during a riot you're a racist. You can't say that, it might offend someone.
I'm a libertarian, but even I can agree we need SOME standards of conduct.
No, this is not an "important" story. But once it's in the news, it becomes a crucible (or as one person put it, a Rorschach test). for all of us to hammer out our beliefs.
So that's why Jesse's take pissed me off a little too. Can't we just agree that the boys were wrong, and she was right? The violation is separate from the punishment. We can say both that the boys were wrong, and that no, it's not the biggest deal in the world and they shouldn't get 30 years in jail. But there is a party who was "right" and another one that was "wrong."
Is it that hard to say, Jesse? Yeah, teenagers are assholes. They are also wrong sometimes. (Although, I don't think Jesse would have been as dismissive if 4 white kids were hassling a black, pregnant nurse practitioner. I also think it was a cop out to say the Go Fund Me was "weird." I submit it's worse than "weird." But Jesse doesn't want to say what it really is.). They broke the rules. Just say it--it doesn't make you a racist. The fact that it is a minor story does not preclude us from deciding what is the right side of the line.
Similarly, the outrage over Lululemon is about standards. Have we really fallen so far that people can just walk in and steal shit whenever they want, and we're like, "Meh...?" (You know who pays for all those insurance claims, don't you?) I mean, ultimately, it's a slippery slope. If you can disregard a store's right to own property, can't you disregard my right to own property?
I think Katie's take on these issues is much closer to the 'normie' take, on both sides of the political spectrum. She sees the bullshit. Jesse, while really bright, sometimes has a tough time looking past his own subjective context.
All that being said, I'm not going anywhere. I love the podcast. It's good for me to listen to smart people articulate ideas I generally disagree with.
I see this public schools, too. In the name of “equity” all kids can wander around all day, yell at teachers, swear freely and often (I hear fuck all day), wear bikini tops to school, sleep in class, just total disregard for traditional standards of behavior. I’m sure those kids go to a school where bad behavior is considered “a form of communication“ and rewarded with kind attention and treats. People who know me as a blowhard liberal laugh when I say I’ve become a conservative because of this insane cultural disintegration, but I’m dead serious.
You aren't really allowed to suspend anyone anymore, and the parents do not back you up if you punish the student.
Yup
If you raise the issue about what the kids are (not) wearing you get called sexist and misogynistic. As though it’s a victory for feminism for girls to be at school with nearly no clothes on.
Or maybe we should relieve kids from the social pressure to put their bodies on full display.
Also, at my son’s high school there was a girl who often wore a shirt that read “Men are trash”. I would not let my son out of the house in a shirt that said the reverse nor do I expect that he would have gone unnoticed and unpunished by his school had he printed such a sentiment on a shirt.
TBH I don't think Jesse was making a normative value judgement that 'Stealing isn't wrong' I think he's making a defense for employees that don't try to stop shoplifting which is fair and that ultimately it's not their responsibility. Retail work sucks. No-one should be expected to physically stop thefts to protect their asshole manager. Wait till they step out of the store and call the cops maybe also try to get the color of their car and license plate number.
Bravissimo!
That's a completely fair point. Although, as a lawyer, I am not sure how I could "prove" anything in a comment thread on a podcast. I mean, who is the finder of fact? :)
Seriously, though, I suppose I could try to Google it, and provide links that say, for example, that before 2020, the vast majority of people in this country believed that men have penises, and women have babies, or some survey that said that support for free speech has declined. I think most of that stuff is unconvincing anyway, so I will just go with, "That is my opinion."
“If the rule is that clear you should follow it.”
Like- don’t shoplift?
They should not have been fired. They should not have even been suspended. A reprimand and reminder of corporate policy would have been appropriate.
I wish your correction to the bike story was like “we were mistaken and our last segment on the story inaccurately portrayed the situation surrounding the interaction” rather than “I was barely even wrong and even if I was wrong it doesn’t matter. You people are just obsessed with race”
Seriously. This could have been a 45 second update, making a brief statement that acknowledged the coverage fell short, outlined the inaccuracies and then mention some links in the show notes. That's all that was needed.
What surprises me the most is that they didn't re-record that update after Katie realized it was subpar.
Exactly!
In regards to the shoplifting incident, I worked in retail for almost ten years, half of which was as Loss Prevention.
While insurance does cover losses for the company as a whole, the loss still counts against the store specifically. Audits of inventory are done and loss is reported. The stores loss effects things like promotions, raises, and hiring.
Of the places I've worked and/or interacted with, stores with hands on policies in regards to catching and arresting shoplifters will have less thefts or at least not as many instances of people just filling up garbage bags and walking out the door. I worked during the period when more and more stores were going to a hands off approach due to the fear of lability and saw those stores have huge problems with people feeling emboldened to steal.
This also went for things like identify theft and credit card theft. While you used to be able to arrest or at least deter if you knew for a fact someone was using someone else's credit card(example: we were on the phone with the card holder), most stores stopped apprehensions on it. This led to more and more people walking in, racking up huge bills, and smiling at loss prevention and security as they did it knowing employees couldn't stop it.
That is enraging.
My daughter works at lululemon in nyc and says there’s an undercover inventory control person in the store who watches a camera in the back and comes out when they think something is about to happen. She says this guys follows thieves out and retrieves the stolen merchandise on the sidewalk.
So most places will still have loss prevention/security. They are still in charge of loss both internal and external as well as things like sensors, alarms, audits, general store security/safety.
With the stores that don't allow their security to apprehend shoplifters, they are told to either "give great customer service" which means pretty much being up their ass and hope they get spooked enough to give up, or have security make themselves obvious to the point the shoplifter bails. Most of the people that do this for a living now however know LP/security can't touch them and don't get scared off.
Enough with this above it all attitude. I heard the same sort of thing listening to the Fifth Column earlier(they on the Bud Light business). Things like the bike story are important and that's why you guys are covering them in the first place.
Lol, had the exact same reaction to the latest fifth column episode, if Moynahan says one more time "I don't really care"...
The more he says that, the more I suspect he actually does (considering a the more unguarded comments he’s slipped in a time or three).
There's a certain brand of leftist that gets annoyed by the excesses of the most extreme left, but who saves their most severe animus for anyone who actually does anything about it.
"Yeah sure, the kids were wrong, and every left-leaning news organization used it as an opportunity to foment a racial narrative; but the real problem is the conservatives who pointed it out."
Republicans pounce!
That’s exactly what popped into my head too. So much pouncing!
Don't forget to mix in some "siezeing" for good measure
These people love commenting on the New York Times. And they love hurling accusations of "both-sidesism" but seem to have never heard of "whataboutism."
This comment is not about Citibike Karen.
It may amuse the audience that the Japanese are based as hell and can take a joke, or at least the Gamers among them can. During the Lululemon segment, Katie invites Jesse to pronounce Lululemon in a Japanese accent, and he declines. One of the largest Magic: the Gathering teams/ shops in the world is "Hareruya". As in Hallelujah. https://article.hareruyamtg.com/article/article_en_226/?lang=en
In other words, a very successful Japanese brand already took 3 L's, turned them into 2 R's, and is internationally renowned as a major force in their niche.
That’s amazing! I like people who can laugh at themselves.
ARG. This episode is awful. You are overintellectualizing stuff and it is getting weird. Touch grass, rent a bike, or work in a store.
Working for "a corporation" is not a reason to get fired for being decent. Similarly, employees should not need to consult the handbook when laws are being openly broken in front of them. I am no lawyer, and I will not complain about the legality of Lululemon's shitty rule, but firing employees for reporting illegal activity to the police is straight dystopian. The fact that these policies have been around forever (at least the 90s!) is not a reason to defend them.
If you work for shit wages at a store and are then fired for trying to prevent theft by calling the police and using a camera that is straight fucked. Forget the legal and historical context. Sometimes things are just fucked. That's fucked. If you try to rent a bike and someone makes you an internet famous bigot, that is also fucked.
I count on your podcast to see the fuckery, not defend it.
Very strange take from Jesse.
He says "no one did anything here worse than a minor breach of politeness". This is a situation where a business is offering a service to the public and some third party has taken it upon themselves to prevent others from using that service, with means up to and including using physical force (forcing an already-rented bike back into the dock). That goes way beyond some sort of social impropriety.
I agree that it's stupid that it became a national news story, but which of the two sides chose to publicize it this way, and what was their motive?
Also, posting the video online was a major breach of politeness.
You bungled the bike story. Since you do not read the comments, I will be short: Your podcast is about internet bullshit. You ignored the internet and focused on the bullshit. It made for a bad podcast.
Determining who is in the wrong is as dumb as you paint it (it was the kid calling dibs on a rental bike he had not rented) but it would have ended that day in the old world. He released a video painting her as a bigot and now her life is fucked. That is the story. Focus on that. Forget the other stuff. You missed the point badly.
Jesse: "If it was ridiculing Islam, which is, like Chrisitanity, a very powerful force in the world, people would lose their shit."
Exactly!
Islamists would start chopping off the heads of random people, while traditional Catholics would bitch about it on Twitter.
Why do we have to pretend that they are the same thing?
And why are the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence mainstream now? I'm tired of pretending that these groups who are championed by powerful corporate interests are somehow the underdog.
I know about them because of studying the history of the AIDS epidemic. The AIDS poster boy, Bobby Campbell, was a Suster
The only interesting thing about the Citibike story was how it became viral. Who posted the video originally? Which blog or influencer saw it? Did Twitter amplify it???
There IS something so infuriating about the way Jesse brushes stuff off. “You have one job” (or if you’re sick of this gig, let Katie find another sidekick)
Person whose literal job is “digging deep into mostly pointless internet/culture war minutiae” confused/mad that they are expected to dig deep into said minutiae.
Literally the core service this podcast provides is doing the research so others don’t have to. If you fuck up the research that’s a problem, especially if it is pure laziness.
You aren’t that charming, it’s not an entertainment podcast.
I guess I'm in the minority here, but I mostly liked the way they went back to the CitiBike story. I didn't love how Jesse tried to minimize the earlier episode's flaws, but I generally agree that the real issue was the media coverage. Still, this show's success is based on Jesse and Katie being able and willing to dismantle shitty coverage, and they seemed to fall down here pretty hard (Jesse in particular).
All that said, the idea that this is "just" a story about two people having an altercation is wrong. It should never have been a major story, not because it was a routine bad interaction, but because it was an attempted character assassination.
Consider why we know anything at all about this story: the boys took and then shared the video of the interaction. That they took it is not the issue; what matters is that they spread it. There was no reason to do that other than to harm the physician's assistant (my apologies to Katie's wife for previously calling her a nurse). Had she made a police report or something, then ok, there would at least have been an argument that they genuinely (thought almost certainly not legitimately) believed they were in the right and needed to share their side of the story. But it seems like she just wrote it off as a bad event she wanted to leave behind her, until she went viral. And I can't conceive of any plausible explanation for sharing the video other than to harm her. Jesse is right that this is fundamentally a media-fucked-up story, and he's right that it would never have exploded had they not had the particular phenotypes they have. But it's not a media-fucked-up story because the interaction doesn't matter, it's a media-fucked-up story because the boys and their supporters were able to take advantage of an environment where videos like this can not only go wide, but can really hurt someone.
Again, Jesse is correct to note that she has a lawyer and a genuine need for one while the main guy's family doesn't have one because they have no need for one. However, he seems to mistakenly believe that the reason she has one is because of the viral nature of the video, which is only half-right. If it was just "there's a video out there," there would be no need for a lawyer. She needs one because she has an actual employment problem now; that's why she has an employment lawyer. And that's why they shared this video: to cause her problems in her real life.
Just imagine the cruelty on display here. The boys won; they got their fucking bikes, which they were squatting on in order to circumvent a payment model based on time spent riding. The pregnant lady had to take another bike, and it seems likely that she had to use one that requires more labor to power than the e-bike she was after, and which she had every reasonable expectation that she'd be able to use. Fine, I guess. They're kids acting shitty, and water is wet. But then, having behaved like shitty kids and gotten everything they wanted out of the encounter, they put this woman on blast. That would be bad enough if she just had to tolerate an internet mob, but no, it metastasized into her real life, all because forcing her to forego a bike she had every right to rent and making the pregnant woman pedal home on the normal bike didn't scratch their itch enough.
I'm more confused about how that doesn't rate a mention because it reminds me of the story they did a while back about the kid who put his classmate on blast that went viral in NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/us/mimi-groves-jimmy-galligan-racial-slurs.html#click=https://t.co/csK06Cqg8e
In that episode, Jesse and Katie expressed some confusion as to why people were irritated with the slant of the article, which I think pretty obviously favors the canceller; Jesse specifically noted that he wanted to kid not to come in for harassment online, which it seemed he viewed as roughly equivalent to what the girl he cancelled experienced. Except, that is totally insane: the NYT writer specifically noted hearing an audio recording of an admissions officer from the college she got accepted to telling her to withdraw her application, because "alumni, students and the public" were "'angry, and they want to see some action.'" The boy started his freshman year at college, she got kicked off a cheer team and out of college, and as of the time of the article was taking online classes from a community college.
Shit like that is why the CitiBike story matters: it's not the interaction itself, it's how the media is essentially a gun into which malicious actors can load videos and blow apart people's lives. I don't know how Mimi Groves, the girl in the earlier story, has fared since then, or how Jimmy Galligan, the asshole from the same story, has turned out. I do know that at the time, he was very happy with himself for his shitty stunt, and it seems like the kids in this case are feeling similarly. And why wouldn't they? They wouldn't have done it in the first place if they didn't want to fuck up someone's life, and they succeeded, so yeah, we should expect them to feel good about that. But we also have to note that the reason they're able to do it, the reason why these stories happen even though they feel like nothing serious, is that people want to use the media to attack other people. Bonus points if you get someone fired, and a gold fucking star if they kill themselves.
That was lot angrier than I meant it to be when I started writing this comment, and I actually did like this episode, but it's weird to me how Jesse and Katie are essentially PHDs of Cancellation Studies, but miss this point. Over at the Fifth Column, they also remarked that it's a nothing story. But they're wrong. The stories are advertisements to sociopaths: send us your video now, we'll help you get a pregnant nurse fired!
FYI, one of the other kids gave the PA his bike at the end. (He’s in the back who tells the dude just to give her the bike).
I missed that, damn! Good for him
Really? That's good to hear.
Hi K and J,
I just want to say that I am in Atlanta and I know that shopping center. It is in a very nice area and we take our kids there as they have many events for kids throughout the year so i was a bit shocked that this is going on in such a family friendly area. Also one thing you left out was that this was not the first time this store has been burglarized. It had become a regular thing for these guys. I could understand being fed up as I have also worked in retail, but at least when I did, the thieves would try to hide it as a courtesy.
Also you forgot to mention that these guys were actually caught THANKS to the video that these women took.
Atlanta has started to become the Chicago of the south. And no I’m not trying to be hyperbolic but I do get notices every day (from the AJC, so hardly a biased news source..but instead a local one) about a shooting death. Many of these are innocent black lives. Some of them children. I don’t understand why there is little to zero coverage on a national scale. People are being burglarized left and right. In nicer parts of town too. Black and white alike. A colleague of mine was shot to death at a medical office in Midtown a few weeks ago along with three other innocent people and it was in the news for about a day. No protests. No democrats flailing their arms about gun reforms. Nothing. This is why (I am guessing) there is probably particular outrage at stories such as these currently. Atlanta is a great place to live. But recently it’s gotten a bit lawless and unpredictable. Seemingly innocuous things such as a walk in a park or shopping with your kids or going to a medical appointment have now become “do at your own risk.” But like you said, the media cares more about reporting a scuffle over a city bike.
I’m a gun violence researcher and I created a (free) Substack because the national news media refuses to cover the massive increase in firearm violence that’s been playing our cities since 2020. I analyze shooting and homicide data and create visualizations that depict trends at the city, state, and national level. Most recently, I made a map of the over 800 shootings that occurred across the country on Memorial Day weekend. (A story no national media outlet except WSJ and Forbes covered). Feel free to check it out: https://open.substack.com/pub/1000citiesproject?r=d65gn&utm_medium=ios
Thank you for this important work! By the way, I do believe that most of these shootings are by guns obtained illegally. Therefore more gun legislation is not the answer. I am not a hardline 2nd amendment defender, just think we need real solutions that “both sides” are blatantly refusing to look for due to their own political tag lines getting in the way of common sense.
Thank you! Your belief is correct. Most people who shoot people are also never caught and prosecuted because it’s super resource intensive to investigate routine community gun violence that often happens outside with many witnesses who won’t cooperate. We have lots of gun laws and we could enact more, but the current fashion is to reduce not enhance penalties for violating them. Additionally, murdering/injuring someone is against the law, too. People just know they’re highly unlikely of being caught and prosecuted especially in large cities with huge backlogs and too few skilled detectives.
I want more “shooter control” so people know they’re likely to be caught and removed from society if they commit violence. Less than 1% of any community actually perpetrates gun violence. Find, remove, rehab if possible. Public safety is a human right.
Amen ! I wish I heard this type of logic more often. Don’t people understand the “we need to enact more gun laws to stop gun violence” sounds like “we need to ban Muslims to stop terrorism” and likewise “we need to ban abortion so people stop having unprotected sex”? Its all become so trite. Also goes without saying that those who would chose to enact more gun laws must also accept that will most likely lead to increased racial profiling and unjust incarceration of minorities, the thing they claim to want to reduce. Policies have consequences and there are no quick fixes. Unfortunately politicians that would be willing to listen to good ideas are least likely to win elections. If I sound cynical, it’s because I am 😞
I think it'd be a better (clearer) test case if the women had filmed from a distance and gone outside to video the car they went to all without direct confrontation.
I have a hard time blaming a corporation for specifically a non-confrontation policy for employees who aren't trained to perform security. The people were committing theft >$5000 which is a hefty felony most places. It's hardly a leap to think maybe one of them has a weapon and might use it against someone who's interfering with their felonious activity.
That’s awful.
I just came here to say, I think the unsubscribing talk is unfortunate. Its of course, ones right to do so but it seems kinda brittle. I’m a centrist, I’ve never agreed totally with anyone and certainly not with K&J. Frankly, TFC is more my speed but I support Barpod because I think the reporting is valuable and interesting and J&K need the support more (til Moynihan got canned anyway) and I appreciate the comment section community (lol who *clearly* often disagrees with me)
So, I’m staying and IMO everyone else should too, you poor bastards are stuck with me.
That is all.
Three thoughts:
1) re: citibike and also the q&a: During the Q&A you guys said you didn't want to have on conservatives because (more or less) your show is not about debating. And the response from commenters was basically that we don't really care about hearing you debate, but sometimes you get the conservative perspective really wrong and it would be nice to hear you have a dialogue with someone who can explain to you their actual perspective.
It's worth thinking about, if all the top comments in the subreddit and here have an unusual amount of upvotes and are about how you got the story wrong but even after reading them you still didn't really feel like you got the story wrong, maybe it would have been worth it to have someone on who felt like you got the story wrong.
I understand that part of what landed you in this niche in the first place is being able to be faced with a tremendous amount of people telling you how much they think you're wrong and still being able to stand strong in your beliefs. But you don't want to lose your ability to engage with people who disagree with you and be at least a little open to changing your mind.
2) re: Sisters of....Indulgence. Yes, maybe it's not appropriate at a baseball game. But I think it's interesting that a lot of the pushback cited basically made the argument that we wouldn't stand for this for Muslims, so we shouldn't stand for it for Catholics either. But I came to the opposite conclusion--people and their personal religious beliefs should absolutely be respected, but it's ridiculous that a drag show featuring men in hijab would be seen as racist/xenophobic. I'm not in general a huge fan of drag (bc it often has undertones of misogyny) but as an orthodox Jewish woman who is pretty fundie, I would find a (good) drag show of gay men dressed like the ladies in Williamsburg hilarious. (And even if I wouldn't, I don't think they should be seen as bigoted for doing it.)
3) re:Lululemon. My parents lived in NYC in the seventies and eighties, so I was raised with a healthy amount of "if anyone ever tries to rob you, whether it's your money or you're working the cash register, just give it to them. Whatever is in there, it's not worth your life." And when I became a manager, I told my employees the same thing, even though AFAIK there was nothing in the handbook about it. (Honestly, who reads that thing?)
But when the store got robbed and I wasn't there, one of my employees reached for the knife. You know why? Because it's a crazy situation and you never know how you'll react. Even if you can't see if the person is armed, even if you're not really in life-threatening danger, there's a ton of adrenaline and fear and people do dumb things.
So while I understand the policy, and I agree that it seems the firing was legally defensible, it's just a crappy thing to do to someone.
I saw the Sisters of Indulgence at the big March for Women’s Lives in the 2000’s. Granted I wasn’t Catholic yet but they didn’t do anything offensive. They acted like church ladies in habits. However since then--in addition to becoming Catholic--I’ve seen videos of the “nuns” pole dancing to the crucifix and dancing in an overtly sexual manner. Now, religious sisters in the Catholic Church ARE brides of Christ, but they’re also celibate. And for centuries there have been anti-Catholic “memes” about dissolute nuns having sex with priests. I’ve heard horror stories about nuns; I’ve also read about how they were the backbone of Catholic social services, providing low paid labor in schools, hospitals, etc. A bunch of men affectionately dressing like religious sisters? Sure. A bunch of men mocking and profaning women who devote their lives to service? Not so great.
And WTF does it have to do with baseball?
I did see a video of a real religious sister throwing the first pitch bf a baseball game. And #SuperBowlInTheConvent is one of the few remaining highlights of twitter
I like nuns.
My sister is a Sister (similar to, bit different from, a nun; but most non-Catholics don't realize there's a difference. Maybe even most Catholics.)
Lol I live in the Midwest too! Missouri. Maybe Midwesterners (even transplanted North Carolinans like me) are more tolerant than other folk
This is in the same zone as expecting GWAR to open for the Buffalo Bills. Wrong act for the wrong venue, as much as I might personally enjoy it.
a frum drag troupe would be hilarious
In regards to people talking about unsubscribing, I understand the notion of voting with your dollar but we need to be careful about issues like this where people are threatening to unsubscribing due to disagreement regarding a single tactic.
We've seen how media outlets and companies have become hostage to the threats of paying subscribers, eventually straight up ignoring realize news stories and inconvenient narratives the readers don't want to see out of fear they will lose readers.
It is one of the major reasons so many outlets have become so partisan in their reporting. They are trying to hold onto their reader base and are terrified to make any of them uncomfortable.
I disagree with Jesse's framing of the story and his characterization of it but nothing in his past reporting has made me question his integrity on reporting. We disagree on this topic. That's human.
I don't plan on unsubbing, but I don't see why people should be cautious about voicing their problems with the quality of their reporting. I listen to this podcast because they do coverage of media, and deep dives on internet BS.
If the ethic behind episodes going forward is going to be "its a dumb story bro" or "I didn't technically say anything that want factual" then why am I here?
They get it wrong from time to time, thats fine. But every time they do If they actually address it, it sounds like one of the shit eating corrections you get from outlets they rail against.
I definitely don't think people should be cautious about voicing their opinions. The great thing about the rise in social media/independent journalism is that everyone has a voice.
I am just making this statement because I saw multiple comments that appeared to be borderline "threats"(I know this word is too aggressive but I can't think of another at the moment) where subs would stop paying because of how Jesse covered this topic.
I strongly disagree with his framing of the issue but I don't think he's being wilfully dishonest or unethical. .
A huge issue with main stream outlets nowasays is the audience capture they've fallen into. They rely on subscribers that threaten to leave them as soon as they publish an article that is even somewhat out of line with what the approved narrative is.
The reason most of us are here is because of our lost trust in msm and our belief in independent journalism that this medium is providing.
Nah. Everyone has their own reasons for subscribing in the first place and they’ll have their reasons for quitting too.
I don’t care if I disagree with J or K’s take on things; I just want to feel like they’ve done the work to present the story as well as possible.
I get the sense they do that for the wildly obscure internet beef stories.
Recently, especially regarding stories in the mainstream news, they don’t sound like they know wtf they’re talking about. When that happens, the fact that I disagree with their conclusions becomes unbelievably irritating and I feel like I don’t want to pay $5 a month to be irritated.
Yes!! TWO HOURS on Patrick Tomlinson (which, I’m sorry, but who fucking cares), but Jesse cannot summon his full reading comprehension skills for the CitiBike incident.
Yeah it’s really lame. It’s one of many stories lately that required zero investigative journalism, just some basic critical reading and media skepticism
Amen
I'm not going to go unsubscribing yet. I've always respectfully disagreed with Jesse & Katie on things. But I've usually respected their arguments. Whereas I'm noticing more and more issues recently which they just don't seem to have analyzed in requisite depth before jumping to a conclusion. Which is odd since they have two researchers now, and Jesse's time is no longer consumed by Twitter.
Hard agree. I don't want to be in a bubble, as much as I can help it. I subscribe to The Glenn Show, FFS! Supporting (some of) those with whom one disagrees seems like a good way to do that
Completely agree re bubble--commenters here were pushing back on K&J's comments about Tucker Carlson and while their take was also mine and I just glossed over it, I was really interested to hear from people weighing in here in the comments with more nuance. I wouldn't say I've changed my mind about him because I didn't trust the platform he was on and he currently doesn't have one, and I'd need to know more, but it was a good reminder that "It's Complicated!" and we all could use a silo-check once in awhile.
Re: retail places and docked pay. They won’t dock you for the actual theft, but you can lose bonuses and even hours allotted to the store if you don’t sell enough. Presumably if people are stealing large swaths of your merchandise, that’s stuff you simply can’t sell to make your goals. My sister worked at Pier 1 (rip) and they got punished for all returns including stuff bought online and during Covid. Another retailer she worked at didn’t count online shopping returns against them but didn’t allot extra hours for dealing with the crazy amount of them they got during Covid, and that became thing with regional.
Also it’s probably disruptive/scary to the customers in the store (plus staff) and also a huge pain in the ass to redo the displays/figure out what to put there, etc. Plus corporate does close stores especially now because of losses. Maybe it’s not true but a lot of places said this store had been robbed like this several times recently, which if that’s the case, I would lose my temper too.
Jesse - I know someone who’s taken that Newark-Philly flight, but she’s a pregnant PA, so you wouldn’t believe her. ;-)
The plot thickens. Sam Brinton was in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence DC Chapter. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/may/25/sam-brinton-led-dcs-sisters-perpetual-indulgence-r/
How many of their costumes are now missing?
Just imagine all the good swag he got when he stole their luggage.
Surprise, surprise.
He can't keep getting away with it!
My objection to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is that they're so yesterday. I remember seeing Sisters in San Francisco in the early 70's. They were bearded, wore nuns' habits, and travelled on rollerscates. Back then, they were fresh and funny. Now, they're just boring old queens in drag.
I agree. Yeah, they make fun of Catholicism in a way that would be met with outrage if it were aimed at Islam, but this is more a problem with parts of Islam than either Catholicism or the Sisters. Their main problem is that they're like South Park if they only made one episode but kept playing it over and over.
Yes, it's as if they had their one good episode 50 years ago.
Yes! And you had to go to San Francisco to see them. They didn't pop up at a baseball game.
So tired.
You people are all insane. Jesse conceded that the kids were in the wrong. He was just annoyed at having to talk about this story again because this fight is far too stupid to be a national news story to begin with. There's hundreds of people piling on Jesse here because he committed the unforgivable crime of falling to match the energy of the most passionate people in the comments.
Take a moment to reflect on the irony of the host of an anti-internet- mobbing podcast being mobbed on the internet by his own fans over a difference of tone and emphasis. When Jesse gets mobbed from the left for inadequate enthusiasm for his support of left wing causes, everyone here's got his back. But when be shows inadequate support for a right-coded position, it's fire and pitchforks and hundreds of people jumping in to say "Yeah, fuck that guy."
Look at the comments on this page. The dynamics here should be totally familiar to anyone who listens to the show regularly.
If civil comments that have voiced thoughtful critiques about the standards of journalism we expect from Jesse (because he too expects them from others and has spent many hours on the pod complaining about lazy journalism) are "fire and pitchforks" to you and a supportive (by definition!) subscriber comment section is a mob, then maybe the only audience feedback you'd be comfortable with is the kind provided by trained seals.
I don't think it is a stupid story though. A bunch of teenage boys violently blocked a pregnant woman from a public service because she would've interfered with their fun.
I think until very recently, the universal reaction across all cultures and generations would be something along the lines of "Those louts need to be taught a lesson in basic civility."
It's worrying to me that so many people had the reaction of "Actually, she was the aggressor. Because the kids are from a more oppressed group. And she must be punished." That worldview is a recipe for social fragmentation.
But the only reason anyone is talking about this is because the hate machine that is the internet caused it to be amplified which makes us all crazier. That is everyone's fault and also no ones' because this type of content is designed to hit us right in the amygdala. Three streets down the exact same interaction likely occurred with less inflammatory different races/genders combination and no one even noticed let alone came down on one side or another.
Right. But then even though "This thing happened." is not particularly newsworthy beyond the local area. What is kind-of newsworthy is: "This thing happened and lots of people are condemning the victim for bizarre and concerning political reasons."
I believe the accusation is that if a white woman complains about a black man in public, that is tantamount to exposing him to the risk of being lynched or shot by policemen, so that is how race comes into it.
People were comparing this to Emmett Till.
This has to stop.
It's going to make people start to doubt the Emmett Till story, too.
Emmett Till wasn’t even the lady’s fault. She said nothing but a bystander told her husband about it. People just like blaming everything on women.
Multiple commenters, include me, have made the point that this is a recent pattern, so much so that there were comments last week predicting Jesse's exacting response.
So no, you are not actually reading the substance of the comments.
They don't want to be captured by their audience. Meaning, fuck you, they're still teenagers even though they're 40 ish. They'll do what they want.
I have a complaint about the Citibike Karen story, and it's for everyone:
PA stands for *Physician Assistant,* not "Physician's Assistant." I haven't seen or heard a single person get this correct.
It's because Physician's assistant makes more sense! It's what they are!
They're actually trying to change it to "Physician Associate". As well as substantively expanding their role. Whether they are "assisting" physicians is very much a matter of perspective. It also varies considerably by state (PA licenses are a matter of state law).
Typically, they're kind of like what I am (a resident physician) who is basically practicing medicine with supervision. And they're always trying to reduce the requirements for supervision.
I like NP's more. More experience, more training.
I tend to agree. Of course, the terminology gets even more confusing because there are dozens of types of Advance Practice Registered Nurses, all with their own acronyms.
And to be clear, I like all of my allied health professionals, but I also have concerns about their reach exceeding their grasp.
Too many syllables. Who came up with that term? It's terrible. Nurse practitioner is bad too. Maybe they should meld into one profession and adopt a two- or three-syllable name like "grand-nurse" or "microdoc."
NP's are substantially different from PA's. You have to actually be a nurse before you can be an NP. It grants a lot of skills and perspective.
I actually used to ask my father, who was working as an RN at the time, when he was going to get promoted to doctor. It made sense, from a child's point of view.
Ok, but I stand by changing the names to grand-nurse and microdoc. Or maybe supernurse and semidoc. Or mid-med. I don't know...I just hate having to slog through syllables and then resort to calling everything by meaningless initials.
There isn’t really a colloquially intelligible word for these people, so it’s a constant battle as they try to find one. I know one state just banned NP’s from referring to themselves as “doctor” (increasingly, the schools are awarding doctorates of nursing practice now, so NP’s are often doctors in the sense that a PhD or DPT would be, but they are not physicians).
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hospital-management-administration/unfiltered-the-medical-jargon-healthcare-leaders-hate-most.html
Newark is one of United's hubs. It's likely that a lot of flights from the West Coast or Midwest would go to Newark and then transfer. Yeah, it's a bit of a pain, but United still uses the hub and spoke model, so this is how it's done. Besides, all of us from the West Coast are used to having major cities be a six to ten hour drive apart and don't really understand why you East Coasters even need so many cities.
Yeah it's also connection point for international flights on United, so people going from (for example) Paris to Philly on United are likely to go via Newark.
In addition to hub and spoke model, flight networks are complex optimization problems that have numerous other factors to consider. For example, what may seem like an absurdly short flight in isolation, may make sense when you consider maximum allowable flight hours for a crew. Maybe something like Los Angeles -> Newark -> Philadelphia makes sense to maximize crew availability / hours (that you're paying for anyway), in addition to adding a spoke to the hub (e.g., allowing folks from Philly to fly to Los Angeles, connecting through Newark, in this example)
I thought the Neely discussion was just as bad as the Citibike discussion, it just happened to be more comment-section-friendly. In both cases we got the shallow-research hot take, which isn’t worth much. In the Citibike case, the information seemed to be out there if you just looked - I didn’t until I saw links in the comments. In the Neely case, there is simply no evidence in the public record that tells you anything useful - the witness statements will have more, but for now we just don’t know. We can all make up a story, but making up stories is how we got into this mess.
However…. I don’t really listen for the hot takes. I mostly subscribe to support critical coverage of gender issues, and on all other topics I don’t expect much better than coin-flip accuracy, because (with all due respect) J/K are generalist reporters without deep research and fact-checking staff. What they do is cover topics that the NYT etc are afraid to, without a bunch of activist nonsense.
I’m not offended by the sometime wrongness of the hot takes, but I don’t think they add much to the show, and clearly they have potential to piss people off, so I dunno, maybe just don’t wade into the controversy du jour without deeper research? Or do, I’m a commenter, not a cop.
Yes, exactly. I wish people weren't piling on Jesse like this. I didn't like his coverage of the Citibike story, but I completely agree with you that they are generalists and commentators rather than investigative journalists. Since they get most of their stuff right the majority of the time, I'm not too bothered if they get something wrong occasionally.
Re: unsubscribing: I have in the past unsubscribed from barpod in a fit of pique. Once I even canceled-canceled a yearly subscription rather than just letting the subscription run out. Some months later I sheepishly re-subscribed (monthly) so barpod was the winner, profit wise. Right now I have a yearly subscription with auto-renewal turned off. I reckon a podcast that challenges me enough to want to hit the cancel button is good for me.
So I sympathize with the commentators who are fed up as well as those who are saying “chill.” I’m uncomfortable, however, with the censorious tone taken by the “chill” camp. Subscribers to publications have been writing cancellation letters to editors since newspapers first rolled off the printing press. The difference here is that we are seeing many of them and Katie-Jesse are talking about them. Dismissively.
However, lately I’m not getting mad but bored. Barpod is less interesting and not only due to careless mistakes. I found that recent two part series (Ep 164-65) unlistenable. It sounded like a homework assignment. And this is happening when there’s more and more competition in the podcast market. Sooner or later the dissatisfaction that I and others are expressing will lead to decreasing profits.
I don’t have a parasocial relationship with either Jesse or Katie; I have no desire to hang out with either of them, and I don’t think my $5/month entitles me to dictate their content. But I did set my yearly subscription to expire so I have to re-evaluate bf I renew, based on the quality of the content. I need to enjoy at least one episode a month as much as a latte made by an indifferent barista with over-roasted coffee beans
It's entertainment that makes me think. For that it's good. And I like the forums!
I don't think Jesse is evil, just naive. So I won't be unsubscribing as long as they keep producing podcasts on a regular schedule.
I've been thinking that coming up with an internet drama story or two a week for years must become really boring after a while, so maybe K&J are not as interested in the subject as they were before, which would explain why it's been a bit lackluster lately.
I have also cancelled and restarted my subscription a couple of times this year, not sure why. Maybe I'm just getting bored of the subject?
Maybe they should have more guests? Or expand the subject a bit?
The citibike Karen story is peak slacktivism.
Video goes viral within a group of ideologically aligned culture warriors before being captured and monetized by prominent influencer. Influencer predictably presents the incident in whatever way generates the most views from their loyal followers. Once the story starts trending on Twitter, the mainstream media picks it up and presents influencers opinion as fact. Predictably, sometime later important new details emerge completely exonerating the villain and shifting blame to the former victim. Now both sides are incensed and gofundme pages for the victims emerge so culture warriors may signal allyship. Occasionally, stupid corporations get involved and manage to piss off both sides.
Rinse and repeat.
Jesse - retailers don’t have Insurance against shoplifting. But that is beside the point, which is, commercial and personal insurance policies don’t work the way you think. Shoplifting is a cost of business borne by the retailer and passed on to you. Even if they had insurance for it, the same situation holds, only worse, because the insurance company would also need to make money.
“It’s insured” is late-stage capitalist thinking, like “it’s a write-off”. It means “I don’t understand taxes, insurance, or business in general.”
I feel like such a proud merch papa ❤️
Let me inhabit the persona of whiny adult man-baby for a moment to say yeah, I agree with some of the criticisms of the Citibike coverage - mostly because I took the initial report of "pregnant lady was probably Karening" at face value. Returning to find that it was *COMPLICATED* and leaning in the other direction based on info available when the show about it was made bums me out. I try to contain my culture war time wasting to when I'm enjoying/commenting on this show, and if I have to double check the stuff you say it is an unacceptable increase in culture-war-hours in my week 😂
I'm not about to unsubscribe or anything - you've built a reputation as truth-seeking, thoughtful people and sketchy coverage of one thing isn't going to change that. Plus you crack me up which is invaluable.
There are a couple of outlets that often publish stuff that I like reading, like Unherd and The Free Press, that have absolutely unhinged comment sections. Reading the responses to the e-bike-gate segment today feels like deja vu. I’m not digging it.
I actually thought Jesse had a great point: THIS is what we’re yelling about? Well, apparently we are.
This thread (or any recent) is absolutely nothing like The FP, in my experience. Do you have any specific examples of truly unhinged comments?
FP has a lot of deranged commenters and a lot of really long comments that make it difficult to find anyone you'd actually want to read. B&R has a weird mix of people, but I don't think it's the same at all.
maybe the comparison to the FP is misplaced, but, i think the sentiment is that the comment section here has took a sharp turn in recent episodes. my 2 cents is that it’s unfounded but hey, times change.
Listening to the Lululemon story reminds me of when I worked at CVS. I was told that the amount and price of shoplifted items could affect budget for hours, and even hours of operation (which sucked when trying to become full time or remain full time). So while they weren’t my items, it did always feel personal when someone shoplifted 🤷🏼♀️ even worse when someone who worked there did it (which also happened when I worked there 🙄)
I originally thought the Bike Karen story was fine, but I think the follow-up shows that you did botch it in some key ways. The biggest one BY FAR is not properly explaining the Citi Bike system. I was fully under the impression that the kid docked it for a second to immediately take it back out. That makes the woman seem super shitty! But the follow-up revealed that no, the kid planned on just sitting on the bike in the dock for upwards of 15 minutes, preventing other people from using it. This is a crappy thing to do. My entire impression of who was in the wrong was changed simply by more clear accounting of what happened. I am very glad you followed up on this.
I’m canceling my subscription too.
You can’t go on about how great the “community” here is, and then continually overlook it in favour of reddit.
People have gently, respectfully pointed out things you have misinterpreted etc, and all you do is some hand-waving bullshit and carry on as you were. It’s just fucking rude tbh.
It’s just been week after week of lazy, shoddy journalism. In this economy there’s better things to spend money on.
later!!!!
Shavua Tov! Let's all have another great week. Just turning back on after shabbos.
Just started the podcast, and read some of the comments, and I'm getting more and more disappointed in Jesse each week. I, too, think he's wrong about the Citi Bike Karen. Those teenagers were using intimidation to steal free rides. And it's just as wrong to stand near a Citi Bike station and intimidate people as it is to stand near an ATM or a Metrocard machine and beg for money. NYC Law distinguishes between passive panhandling and "aggressive panhandling". Their actions could be construed as "aggressive panhandling". They're trying to coerce people in order to obtain goods, services, or money. NYC tells people to call 911 when this happens https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-02272
But what really bugs me about Jesse isn't this. It's his cluelessness about his Jewish roots. He said in a throwaway comment that he has some "Polish" and "Ukrainian" and "Russian" ancestry.
No Jewish person with immediate ancestors from Eastern Europe would consider himself "Polish", "Russian", or "Ukranian", if he had ever considered the issue at all.
When my grandparents were living among Lithuranians or Belarusians, they were never considered as such; they were "the Jews". They didn't even speak their languages!
I've visited the towns where my grandparents lived in Lithuania and Belarus, and it's nothing like, say, an Italian American person going to Italy, or an Irish American visiting Ireland. There's no relatives to look up, no family homes or farms, no happy reunions. Instead there are mass burial mounds in the middle of forests to see. The Jews of my grandparents' towns were simply taken to the forests and shot.
In these towns I met a few very old timers who remembered "the Jews" but most don't (they were half the population in the town my grandfather came from) -- they know something about an overgrown cemetary on the edge of the town where the Jews who died before the Germans marched in are resting.
(I'm always slightly amused, if I were to mention my Eastern Europe trips to non-Jews, when they inevitably ask: "Did you meet any of your relatives there?" The U.S. education system doesn't do a good job. (See https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/holocaust-student-education-jewish-anti-semitism/673488/)
It shows a massive naïveté for Jesse to claim these nations as part of his heritage. (Also judging from his clueless comments about Israel last year).
I think you're extrapolating too far from your own anecdotal family history. Not all Jews in Eastern Europe were ultra Orthodox segregationists living in isolated towns where they didn't even speak the language of the country they were in.
In Poland, especially at the end of the 19th and beginning of 20th century there was also a vibrant assimilationist Jewish-Polish current that produced hundreds of artists, poets, writers, published the most influential literary journal of Poland in the pre-war period, and whose social and political views were distinctly Polish-patriotic, to the irritation of both anti-semitic nationalists in Polish society AND Zionist segregationists in the Jewish community. If you'd like to learn a bit more about that, I would recommend starting here: https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Polish_Literature
and maybe also reading about the General Jewish Labor Bund and their perspective on Jewish citizenship and belonging in Eastern European society at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Jewish_Labour_Bund
My grandmother, who spoke perfect Polish (her Polish American neighbors were amazed) had no illusions of being a Pole. On the contrary, when she lived in Poland (until age 19), she was told early and often that she was a Jew, not a Pole.
One instance does not make a truth, but it doesn't make a falsehood either.
I do not question that anti-semites and Nazis told Polish Jews regardless of whether they were Haredi, Zionist, assimilated or patriotic that they were not really Polish. I questioned why Reuven was so adamant to do the same. He/she edited the comment an hour ago but yesterday, when I responded, it said something along the lines of "no real Jew would claim heritage of these nations" (sorry I can't produce the exact words because it's been edited), upset that Jesse had actually done so (to make a joke).
I provided contrary evidence - there are dozens of linked names of Polish-Jewish writers there you can click on. Bolesław Leśmian, Jan Brzechwa, Antoni Lange, are important figures in *Polish* literature (and were Jewish and targeted by anti-semitism but also felt strongly about their Polish identity and wrote about it).
But here we are, descending into a No True Jew (because, my grandma) fallacy.... oy.
Understood. Perhaps the differences in Poland (as in so many countries) is how the intelligentsia were treated (and saw themselves) and how the Am Ha'Aretz (the common person) felt.
Yes, Reuven was too strong in his post, but there was a great deal of truth there too.
Thanks for the edifying post. And if you haven't read Chaim Grade's books, they are a real treat.
I have not but am adding him to my reading list now. Thanks!
Try The Yeshiva. Wonderful
That is true. But they never considered themselves Polish or Russian. Not even the Bundists.
That's projecting and insisting on imposing YOUR perspective not only on your dad (who as you mention above tells you he considers himself Russian because that is a part of his heritage), but onto ALL Jews - when they had (and still have) an ostensibly (as the Bund shenanigans show) huge and often conflicting range of perceptions about their national, cultural and political identities.
You don't get to decide that people who were born in Poland, were Polish citizens, participated actively in Polish society, influenced Polish culture, wrote at length in Polish about their own patriotism and sense of national belonging, and considered themselves Polish AND Jewish were in fact not so, or that their descendants should cleave their identity in half and abandon the part that you find inconvenient to your narrative.
I get that after the horrors of the war, the Holocaust and then the Soviet occupation, many today feel understandably conflicted and betrayed by the Eastern European places their families once called home and you and Reuven have every right to reject that identification. I'm just asking you to consider that you don't get to decide for everyone and some can very well want to hold on to a more dual or more complicated sense of identity. Their descendants have every right to claim their Polish heritage if they want.
I am projecting nothing. And I said nothing about whether Polish Jews were Polish citizens or not. Of course they were. I said that they would not have called themselves Polish. I have never met a Polish or Russian Jew who didn't call themselves Russian or Polish Jews. Not Russian. It is their American descendents who did so
It IS true that in the 1920s and onward there were Polish Jews who made sure their children spoke Polish and not Yiddish and considered themselves Polish. That was a minority.
Obviously people will call themselves whatever they want. The point is Jesse is American and it is highly highly highly unlikely that his immigrant ancestors called themselves Ukrainian of Lithuanian.
I was annoyed at Jesse's naïveté before when he returned from a junket to Israel (his first trip, apparently) and felt obligated to tow the progressive line, in a desperate attempt to keep some of his lefty cred. On that episode of BaR he said that "some of what Israel does is like apartheid".
That means that Jesse beleives the Jews in Israel are just some Polish and Ukranians who decided to hop down to Israel to "LARP" as some ancient Jerusalem religion. It makes me sad to think that Jesse thinks the Jews in Israel are exactly like the Dutch in South Africa, and that the disputes between the Jews and Arabs there are based on skin color. He obviously never spent any time at all considering these issues. He's probably not even aware that slightly more than half of Jews in Israel today are decendants of those who were kicked out of neighboring Arab nations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world#:~:text=The%20first%20large%2Dscale%20exoduses,to%20Israel%20from%20Arab%20countries. ) He has to be quite a fool not to know that there has been a continuous Jewish presence there for thousands of years.
There's a pattern. For things he hasn't bothered to think through, he'll take the extreme Left position all the time. This is why he refuses to consider that any African American teenager can be wrong. He doesn't really care about this issue, so he'll accept the progressive positition that to challenge an African American--especially if it means reporting an incident to the police--is something a white or white-adjacent person should never do. (He took a similar stand with shoplifting in this episode.)
Reuven- I like you! But your last sentence is really mean and terrible.
Jesse is not religious as far as I know; we don't know the circumstances of his family and upbringing.
He has mentioned that his mother had significant mental illness; I can 100% understand why he would not feel close to that side of his family.
Having a parent who is mentally ill is a trauma. I suspect that he had enough ongoing trauma growing up without going into past generational trauma.
Fair enough! Let's just say that whoever was in charge of providing Jesse an education didn't do a thorough job.
But traditional observance is orthogonal to a person's Jewish idenity. I know plenty of non-observant people who know what being Jewish is about.
Right on אחי. In a history of the Battle of Stalingrad, one general was quoted as something like “The Russians fought well, and so did the Jews”
Um you might not know this but his mother passed away recently. Maybe reconsider bringing his parents into it.
Agreed. I cut that out.
It's complicated, or at least more complicated than how you presented it.
My bonus mom's mother was a Swedish nurse who worked at one of the convalescent centers that was set up to rehabilitate Holocaust survivors after the war. (The Swedish Red Cross' White busses, if you know that story) The one she worked at served Jewish victims.
There was absolutely animosity between the different groups of Jews - to the point they had to be housed in different wings from each other. Maybe this wasn't perfectly matched onto national state identities, but from her perspective, it looked like it was.
Sidenote: a long running argument between my bubbe and her sisters was where the family was from. Bubbe was adamant we were from "Austria-Hungary" (technically true!), her sister Ruth was like "It was Poland." (Aunt Ruth was also the one who taught me European geography by how they treated the Jews after the 2nd worth war. Not a fan of Poland). It's kind of irrelevant though, considering how much the border moved in those times! But Great-grandma Rosie/Rivka was directly from the shetl, and bubbe's first language was Yiddish. But the national origin thing us part of them being Americans, not being Jews. I doubt Rosie cared at all, she was too busy learning English at night school and keeping food on the table.
At least the way I heard that comment was Jessie suggesting that he was (like many Americans) multi-ethnic, and had some Ashkenazi ancestry, as well as separate ancestry from people who would have been recognized as the prevailing ethnic groups in some of those other places.
If your interpretation is correct, I would agree that it's misleading to state that "the Jews" are interchangable with people from all of those places.
I am pretty sure Jesse is 100% Jewish and was talking about the countries his great grandparents came from.
Jesse is very very American and I mention this because my parents are ethnically the same but my mom grew up in Poland and says she is from Poland initially and is a Jew. My dad and his parents were born here and my dad says he is Russian. And I have explained to him that his grandmother never would have referred to herself as Russian. She was a Jew
This is a very American way of thinking about your country. Like you are American because you are born here. Which is not true in most places
Right I agree with you. I was thinking about myself. Where I am only 10% Ashkenazi, and have various other European ancestry. I don’t think of myself, as really being “from” anywhere.
great discussion thread in this post. i’ll just plug the book The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelssohn for people interested in the relationships between Eastern European Jews and their neighbors. the audiobook was beautifully narrarated.
also throwing out the genetic fact that Jews mostly cluster with other levantine populations, not slavic ones. a Russian Jew and a Yakut person in Siberia (assuming the traditional endogamy) are not ethnically Russian, they both are just part of a multi-ethnic empire.
I would imagine that given the area a pretty significant fraction of the Dodgers fans in attendance would be (1) Latino (2) Catholic and (3) families with children which would suggest being somewhat careful in this situation.
Yeah, I was really surprised that no one thought about what would happen to the bottom line if parents stopped taking kids to Dodgers games.
While no team wants empty seats, the real money is in tv rights. Followed by radio and streaming. Gate receipts, $10 beers, $25 t-shirts and $20 parking spaces are all gravy..
The TV money is only like half the money.
I really can't understand why so many people are getting upset to the point of unsubscribing. I don't agree with their take either, but do you really require the hosts to have takes you agree with every single time? Really you ought to be thrilled they aren't backing down: audience capture would destroy the value of the podcast to you, the listener. Middling take, stupid story, life goes on.
You really aren't reading the substance of the criticism are you Nick
I think I am. You can tell me if you think this is an unfair summary of the main points:
-Singal failed to do proper research, relying upon a single source of dubious veracity.
-Singal failed to properly consider the criticism, instead doubling down on his inadequate research.
-Singal mocked people for being upset about his take, implicitly rejecting the prior two criticisms.
If this was just the latest in a pattern of bad behavior, I'd get it. But it isn't and so far as I can tell no one is claiming it is. The guy had an at best middling take and didn't go back on it. No one's perfect. If he does it again, or more to the point does it with a topic that is actually important, I'll join in. Until then, I think the reaction is overwrought.
It's not the first time Nick. It's happened more lately. If you want a specific example, go look at the immigration/Tucker Carlson podcast and related primo threads. They:
- Failed to do any sort of research on how some mass migration affects working/poor residents of a particular city.
- Failed to consider the overwhelmingly negative response to that episode.
If you read that thread, you'll see that the issue wasn't "do you really require the hosts to have takes you agree with every single time?". It was the lack of curiosity and preparation they did to tackle a complicated topic.
I read those criticisms and simply did not find them compelling; they looked like hair splitting to me. To each their own.
Though it must say, it is refreshingly charming to be addressed by my user name! It makes the online world feel a cozier place.
I’m with you Nick, there’s been a lot of clutched pearls in the comments lately.
As a longtime listener I agree with others that Jesse handled the story poorly. I also think this was not an appropriate follow-up story. Comrie paid for the bike and the teens were gaming the system to try to get the bikes for free and this is not just hurting her but all other riders. Katie called this one right trying to bully a pregnant lady out of a bike she is entitled to by calling 'dibs' like a juvenile is really bad and much worse than anything Comrie did.
"I thought insurance covered it." Jesse, do you think insurance is free? Do you think that security costs nothing? OF COURSE there's a danger of losing your employment if your store is a regular victim of theft, even if you're not "fired because you let people steal." Use your brain, dude.
If the Citbike story really is "so dumb" and *not at all* emblematic of, say, the the decay of social norms, or social racial tensions, then why the fuck did J&K include it in their podcast (twice)?
Seems a stretch to say someone guarding a bike has a claim to it. When the rules set up are specifically to prevent people from doing exactly what he was (monopolizing a bike all day).
Ppl are still arguing about that on Twitter. It’s like the argument about who has dibs on the space taken up by a reclined chair on an airplane.
Those both seem pretty damned clear cut, regardless of what the Twitter dumpster fire says.
You pay for a ticket for a seat. The seat reclines. You paid for the ability to recline and by virtue of that the space that function takes up.
You released a bike. It is officially and legally not yours. You can reclaim the bike and pay for it. If you don't want the bike now, you can't squat on the bike for 20m until you get a cheaper fair.
People can argue all they want about that, but it's literally written down unambiguously.
People can argue the normative that it's not how it *should be*. That the current policy is unfair. But the status quo is not a matter of opinion, but empirical fact.
Though, I'd say making that argument is idiotic. I mean....just how long can someone physically fend off people from a bike until they feel like paying for it? An hour? Days? How physical are they justified in being guarding a resource that legally belongs to someone else that they have not paid for?
They only have to guard the ebikes until all the regular bikes are checked out. Then they can ride for 45 mins and stop somewhere else
BarPOD implied there's a lag time between sessions.
Regardless it still stands. How long is that going to be? You can't just play defense on bikes that you have no actual claim to (since you haven't paid for the time).
They literally don't own the bikes. They're up for rent and they have the opportunity to pay to lease them. But they were instead blocking people who wanted to lease them until they could get them for free.
It'd be like going to the grocery store and pushing people away from the mango's until they go on sale.
Rereading all the comments this morning (because I wake up at 5am) Jesus can we all not be so nasty?
I think that it's mainly newcomers having a snit fit. Hopefully things will settle down.
“Sir, I have contributed literally dozens of dollars to your income! Agree with me on all things at once!”
I'd push back respectfully and without nastiness on this ;)
You're kinda setting up a strawman. If you read the comments, people aren't so much upset at K&J disagreeing with them, they're upset at the shoddy research and lack of thought they've put on some topics lately.
They still cover most stories well, but we've seen cases where they lazily give opinions based on very little understanding of facts or the other side's argument.
It seems to happen most when a story is pushed on them by the news cycle instead of their own interest in the story... Maybe they should avoid those kinds of stories, or bring on someone to explain the other side's argument.
Critique and disagreement are fine. Adding some weird threat to convince someone to agree is weird.
I've seen many comments by screen names I recognize, and made several myself, so I'd push back against "mainly newcomers".
I will even second the "chill out" sentiments others have made, even though I strongly disagree with the way B&R (especially Jesse) covered the Citibike fiasco. I can disagree, and even be annoyed, without being so upset that I desire to cancel my sub.
with you on this. the drama is high for a reason i can’t understand. it’s a podcast, not a religion. people are out here with out here with their pitchforks threatening to put *five dollars a month* back in their wallets.
guess i am salty because i actually used to find some comfort in this comment section. i guess i can always go touch grass instead though 🙃
Yeah the hostility seems disproportionate to the “offense.”
It’s like screaming at someone you only agree with them 99.9% of the time.
The narcissism of small differences.
Now I finally understand why last Sunday a table of old men was talking about Lululemon at the local Panera in my very red county.
I think the stomach pump story started with Rod Stewart.
When I first heard the stomach-pump story, it was Marc Almond, so that was probably Phase II.
Me too - I heard it when I was at school, and at that time it was definitely Marc Almond of Soft Cell, back in about 1981/2.
I thought it was Boy George.
Or maybe it was George Michaels.
Yeah, I remember it as a Rod Stewart story too. Definitely 1980s or maybe even 1970s?
I’ve heard it attributed to Elton John, too
I was just thinking, “how did Elton John be left out of this.”
Late to the party but just started listening and...Jesse and Katie, I love you, but everyone knows you never go full out-of-touch coastal liberal. It sounded like a parody.
Jesse- My beau just flew the Newark-Philly flight yesterday as a connecting flight that originated in Kansas City. I doubt many people are choosing to fly as their commute for this route, but your flippancy that they should ‘just drive’ (2 hours) and that there are ‘other ways to get around’ was oblivious at best and, frankly, obnoxious. We are located in Philly and, in the case of flying, leaving from Newark was not only more expensive, it would have entailed a 2 hour drive (sans traffic) and airport parking. Public transit there was also not remotely feasible. This is not rocket science and it’s the first time I felt I could smell Brooklyn on you through my phone.
Katie, your undying love for Moose is inspirational and sometimes hilarious. But leaving a party to get your dog (when clearly your wife was fine if he wasn’t there) and lamenting that your state doesn’t allow dogs *everywhere* (including letting them drag you on x-country tracks?) is a bit much, and I’m pretty sure you weren’t being tongue in cheek.
Onward to the rest of the ep, but YIKES.
“I could smell Brooklyn on you”, got the lol.
You're being a little harsh on Jesse. Unless I mis-heard, I thought he acknowledged that Newark to Philly flights make sense for connections.
Fair enough, I may have missed that and went full snark (another point, never go full snark)
To me, the citibike story might shouldn't be important but they made it important by making it national news with the racebaiting. With the framing her for something she didn't do and threatening her livelihood. It's important to highlight a woke trend to hunger for Karens to hate that's leading to real dehumanizing harm without evidence and real-world consequences to undeserving people. It might be internet bullshit but the podcast is on internet bullshit
A lot of stores do have monetary rewards for reducing shrink witch includes shoplifting. Shoplifting also creates work for employees. Also it's just plain wrong.
Does anyone remember when Lululemon had Atlas Shrugged works on their bags? That's was the first controversy I remembered.
Yes, the bags had "Who Is John Galt?" or something. I'm surprised they didn't mention it.
RE: Jesse's comment at around 1:03:45: regular shoplifting isn't usually covered by insurance. Merchandise theft from some situations like after hours break-ins or armed robbery may be covered depending on the policy.
RE: Citi Bike: Don't feel like you have to spend a lot of time responding to criticism unless you botched a story or got a major detail wrong. I don't usually give advice on how to run your podcast, (you've got a lot of listeners so you're clearly doing something right) but listening to 20 minutes of Citi Bike discussion that barely covered any new ground was really tedious.
Agreed on city bike. I think the conclusion Jesse had was the right one: this is a dumb subject.
The point of this podcast is laughing at the absurdity of internet drama, not to get swept up in it. Ultimately who cares about a badly behaved teen fighting with a grumpy woman over a damn bike?
the left that's still pushing for the woman to lose her job.
Who cares about internet drama?
Also I feel it important to state: there is a hearty overlap in the venn diagram of those things I disagree with but also appreciate that you bring to light. I would never “cancel” on you guys because you feel like my only rational lefty pals that are willing to see the side of all without the instant “label and discard” attitude I see in both conservative and progressive spaces these days.
One thing that would’ve been cool to mention about the Lululemon mess is that clearly the conservatives mad about a common retail policy have clearly never worked for a big store because they aren’t working class. As is every culture warrior.
I haven’t read all the comments, so apologies if this is a repeat.
The first rumor of a celebrity getting rushed to the hospital to have gallons of semen pumped from his stomach was Rod Stewart. This one made the rounds of my 6th grade class in the early 80s, long before Alannis Morisette.
The Rod Stewart rumor dates back to the late 1970s. Followed a few years later by the Richard Gere gerbil rumor.
Ninja'd by hours but these urban legends need to be written into history books so they don't happen again.
YES!!! How I remember that one. I remember being about 13-14 and thinking ... wait, what? Why? How?
Late to the party, let me express my outside view. (Sorry for any mistake and missplelling, I'm Italian and writing from mobile with Italian spell-check ....). The anger against the hosts that I have seen in comments is, from outside the US culture wars, totally out of proportion. From outside It is clear what commenters are angry about is J&K not taking their Side, not really about the lululemon or citybike stuff (even if, in this case, a little less sloppyness in J. could have helped...). These are, clearly, non-stories, with no relevance at all. They are used as ammunition by one side or the other of the culture war, but are not even really connected to the culture wars topics themselves. i think what many listeners ask ti this podcast is ti confirm their position, but J&K are really a little more "on the left" and more cynical than their fan base ...
While I think that's a lot of the story, I also think the frustration people felt was compounded by the sense that their criticisms weren't being accurately heard or represented. Similarly, I see a lot of comments about the fact that the response was based on reddit comments and didn't seem to take into account the comments here.
I think it's quite natural that people feel extra frustrated in arguments where it's not just that the other party disagrees with them, but that (they perceive, at least) that party isn't able or willing to reflect back the position they are disagreeing with in a fair and accurate way. People don't like feeling unheard.
As I fellow European I can only agree. The outrage here seems totally baffling. I fail to understand what could possibly be so offensive about Jesse's take (I of course understand that you could disagree with him).
It makes me a little bit sad this audience practically demands a form of audience capture and fails to see the irony in that.
Both urban crime and efforts to address America’s horrific racial history (often misguided and counter-productive) are huge issues in the U.S. and have been since the 1960s.
If you don’t understand how this plays out, that’s fine. (It is quite complicated.) But don’t mistake your confusion and ignorance for evidence that there’s nothing there.
The problem isn’t that the hosts aren’t taking my side. The problem is that the discussion of the doxing, suspension and public vilification of an innocent woman (that followed the bike incident) is lazy to the point of dishonesty and seemingly made in bad faith.
Maybe I was not clear, sorry but English is not my first language. I understand how these two stories are contextualized and used by both sides and I get someone can be disappointed by how the host managed the city bike story. I get that the stories are used as examples or larger problems (urbano crimes, racial issues), however It seems to me that before being used as such, there was nothing here to discuss: a fight between a rude kide and a stressed out older woman (i take the Side of the woman, I am older and I understand being stressed), and a company covering its ass with a dumb policy. The connection with the larger US problems IS (or at least: It looks to me) artificial and created just to propel a fight between the two sides.
Sorry if I seemed rude. Your English is excellent and I should have been less curt.
The Lululemon theft was, indeed, trivial and, yes, it is being exploited by the right. It resonates with people because it concerns crime, urban chaos and social norms. (People on here are perhaps reacting excessively because they are exasperated with Jesse for other reasons I will now try to explain.)
The initial bike incident was also trivial. But it was exploited by people on the political left in ways they would not (and could not) have even five years ago. What was then done in the name of social justice was far from trivial. That’s key.
All too often in recent years attempts have been made (often successful, often against the innocent) at public shaming and the destroying of careers. The notion of racism frequently is trivialized in the process.
The manslaughter death on the subway (another recent story that frustrated listeners), on the other hand, was a very serious matter from the get-go, It was literally a matter of life and death, But it, too, was cynically exploited by people ostensibly of the left in an effort to destroy someone’s life on dubious grounds of racism.
(For what it’s worth, I am probably to the political left of Katie today, though perhaps not Jesse.)
As you point out, all this leads to counter moves by the political right.
Where once Jesse Singal strove to distinguish the truth in the midst of the noise and turmoil he seems in recent weeks to be taking a break from thorough, honest examination.
I suspect the real reasons for this are twofold. One, in the age of Trump (and a morally bankrupt Republican Party) he is frustrated that he is always taking on the left and giving ammunition to the right. Two, given how awful (and often evil) America’s history of treating black people has been and how many problems so many black communities still face he is made uncomfortable by constantly finding himself disputing ostensible instances of anti-black racism, pointing out that certain activists are (to use his term) “grifters”, and highlighting instances when minority reporters are incompetent.
I sympathize with Jesse. I, too, would find it profoundly distasteful.
But I think where you’re mistaken is in viewing the bike story as solely about what happened during the dispute. The real story is what happened after: the journalist who doxed the woman’s husband, the hospital that suspended the woman, the way it was portrayed in prominent media, the efforts to brand this woman a racist and damage her life and reputation.
Jesse is likely less “grossed out” by the story, itself, than by the part he now finds himself playing.
It’s just not a both sides story. And the Jesse of 2021 would have acknowledged that.
There’s a cliche American parents and teachers often say to children whom they’ve scolded for bad behavior. They tell them “I’m not mad at you. I’m just disappointed.”
That’s how I feel about BAR this month. I am not mad, just disappointed.
I genuinely believe Jesse is tired of reaching the same verdicts (no, it wasn’t egregious racism; the activist is dishonest; the journalist is incompetent) on media stories that touch on race. And, without fully realizing it, he has decided to put his critical faculties on hold.
Maybe he should just take a break from these stories altogether.
Thank you for your very thoughtful answer! I think what's different in our approach is simply my bewilderment in events like these being used in such a virulent way instead of being forgotten in minutes. It hurts a lot that what I would perceive like the side I'm theoretically closer to (liberals/ lefties) is doing such a poor job in being at least decent. For the trumpian right, I never had any expectation, so there's no disappointment, there.
And I think you are probably right in decoding why Jesse is avoiding expressing always the same conclusion.
It is totally possible, as a foreigner maybe I don't get It. i understand these stories are pushed into narratives in the culture wars, but what I mean is: city bike it's simply a fight between a rude kid and a stressed-out adult, lululemon is a company covering its ass.
The best thing about the controversial Target bathing suits is that there were some really stupid woke mistakes in the design. I went down to my local Target to see what was so terrible before they pulled them from the shelves, and there were two “tuck friendly” adult bathing suits. One was a one piece, the other a two piece. But the best part is that the tag on the matching top for the “tuck friendly” bottoms said that it had a “light binding effect.” Because what transgender women really want is to wear tucking bottoms and a binder.
I thought that the merch designed by the trans guy looked pretty shitty too. I just want corporations to stay out of all this stuff going forward.
I think it’s perfectly fine for corporations to make pride merch. I think it’s perfectly fine for them to sell products aimed specifically at the needs of trans people. I just think that a choice like that demonstrates the degree to which they’re just doing it because the aesthetic has seemed like good branding.
I've been on the flight from Newark to Philly. I wanted to fly to Pittsburgh but it was cheaper to take the flight from Newark that stops in Philly than get on the same flight in Philly.
This was another unforced barpod error. Does Jesse really believe an airline would schedule flights that weren’t profitable? Ppl must have reasons to book seats. Parking costs come to mind. It might be easier to go through security. Etc.
As I mentioned in another comment, it's largely due to the hub-spoke model, with some other considerations lumped in (airline scheduling is a super complex optimization problem which needs to consider precedent and antecedent routes, crew scheduling, maintenance & fueling requirements, gate taxes and fees, etc.)
Near the end of the episode Katie glibly dismissed the idea that poverty could be the cause of the uptick in shoplifting, but that's ignoring the general situation in the economy. At a time of rapidly rising prices and stagnating wages, why *wouldn't* you expect an increase in petty theft?
I'm not saying all (or even most) shoplifters are poverty-stricken poor souls who have to resort to stealing just to avoid literally starving to death, but everything keeps getting more expensive. People's income buys less than it has, and unless you have a substantial financial cushion, this will translate to a decrease in one's standard of living. Small luxuries that you could allow yourself just a couple of years ago become unaffordable because your bare necessities eat up more of your monthly budget.
And, of course, there ARE those who have to resort to stealing to keep themselves from going homeless.
You can't just handwave this away. Because if you don't accept this explanation, the only alternative is a fundamentally Conservative framework where people just turn "bad" because of cultural shifts or moral degeneration or whatever.
Once you recognize that rising costs of living are a major factor in this phenomenon, you HAVE to start talking about economic policy and, yes, "capitalism". Maybe not in the most radical Marxist sense, but there's no escaping the fact that governments *could* do more to soften the blow of this incoming recession by increasing social spending (financed by increased taxes on the rich), but are instead choosing not to. Trying to delink the SYMPTOMS of wealth inequality from the CAUSES leaves you with nothing to work with and no possible solutions, other than media moralizing and stricter security measures at all levels of society. And that is the path to dystopia. Because yes, locking up everything behind glass doors and placing armed security guards at the entrance to every public store would work to decrease rates of shoplifting, but it would hardly make for a better society or contribute to a feeling of safety.
I agree to an extent, but there are some other factors, including the reduction in criminal penalties and the development of resale networks (especially on Facebook). People don’t have to become “worse”; when it becomes easier and more profitable to steal, more people will do it.
RE: Reduced criminal penalties
Do you have some examples/sources? I'd be curious to read them.
Regardless, I'm generally skeptical of the impact that penalties have on the crime rate, especially when it comes to petty crimes like shoplifting (and I seem to recall reading studies that corroborate this). I did have contact with people (well, person) who would regularly shoplift to save up costs on certain items, so things like alcohol, electric toothbrushes, razor blades, cleaning detergents, cookware/tableware and other relatively small and infrequently-bought items that seem to cost far beyond what may seem reasonable for some. The logic never seemed to be "if I get caught, how much can I be expected to be fined or how long the prison sentence would be?" but rather "WILL I be caught, and would anyone bother pressing charges?". So the real mitigating factor here is actual enforcement, not potential punishment. Nobody wants to get in trouble with the law, no matter how small the expected penalty is.
Of course that doesn't apply to professional thieves who shoplift for profit rather than for personal use, but my gut feeling is that the real increase in shoplifting is mostly the latter sort of deal. Some delinquent college kid must choose between buying condoms or going out for drinks that night, so he/she just grabs the condoms and leaves without paying, knowing no one is really going to start a police investigation over a pack of Durex. If said college kid is suddenly strapped for cash because rent's recently gone up, the chances of this happening naturally increase.
That said, I have no doubt that stealing goods for profit is also becoming more common. I've heard a story about a guy who loaded up an entire cart full of baby formulas and left the store without paying. The store attendants noticed him but decided to let it slide because they just assumed he needed the stuff to feed his kid, but the manager called up the police and the guy was caught. As it turns out he didn't even have children and was planning to resell it all online. But then again you must stop and ask yourself whether the parents who buy from him would ever even bothered had they had the financial means to just go into the store and buy the stuff legitimately.
Prop 47 in California, for starters.
Well said. If nothing gets addressed economically and the stores are locked down there will just have to be other ways to get a dime (crime).
My guess is that Lululemon is a decent target for boosting. I’ve bought stolen luxury goods myself, the money isn’t bad if you can do it consistently and get good stuff.
Hi love your podcast. Slight ethnic critique here. Jesse, Jews from Poland are not ‘Polaks’ even if their last name is literally ‘’Polak’. Jews from Eastern Europe never absorbed the ethnicity of the country of their birth. They were always ‘Jew’ the other. That’s the whole thing of antisemitism. You are not part Russian or Ukrainian or whatever if you are Jewish.
I understand where you're coming from and the history but I live in Hungary and if someone said today to the president of MAZSIHISZ, András Heisler that he's not hungarian, it would be an antisemitic insult.
His nationality is Hungarian. His ethnicity isn't. Polack is a an ethnic slur, not a national-origin slur, and when Americans refer to their ancestors' origins we generally mean their ethnicity, not their nationality or citizenship. If Heisler has distant American cousins, they might consider themselves Hungarian Jews, but never just Hungarian-Americans.
So Zelensky is not Ukranian?
The swallowed semen thing was a Rod Stewart rumor. Same time as the Richard Gere gerbil rumor.
People have no sense of history anymore.
When I first heard it in the early 80's, it was about Barry Manilow.
Not Barry!! Never Barry.
I first heard the semen-stomach pump about Troy Aikmen (so?) in the 80s
Haha. I had to fly into Newark once, on my way back from London, to catch a connecting flight to Philadelphia. That flight turned out to be two hours delayed, at which time I came to the same conclusion as Jesse, rented a car, and drove the distance. I got home before my connecting flight was even scheduled to take off.
It turned out that my refunded ticket for the Newark-to-Philadelphia flight was about twice what it cost me to rent the car. So I somehow made a profit from flying back from the UK, and got home faster. I figure if I do that several hundred times a year I can retire ten minutes early.
Am I the only person here who still doesn't understand what actually happened with the bike? Logistically all this docking, re-docking, and swiping makes no sense to me.
I might cancel my subscription if I don't get a visual timeline in the next show notes.
This should be the way Primos make requests of our hosts (and one another) from now on. For example, “I might cancel my subscription if the next meet up doesn’t have hookers…and blackjack.”
It’s over for you Jesse. Your audience has had ENOUGH. Give Katie the keys.
The women's clothing being more expensive & yoga pants thing reminds me of this time a gym rat friend of mine dragged me to his favorite big box sporting goods store. We were walking past tall shelves of sports gear and my friend started walking slower so I matched his speed and he said, “So…if there’s a *war of the sexes* we’ve won it”.
I laughed and said, “yeah? How you figure?”
He waited til we passed a big shelf and the store opened up into women’s clothing and he swept his arm up to a wall full of brightly colored scraps of lycra and said, “I present to you, the *sports-thong*”.
Can you two just cut the banter? It’s annoying and not what I pay for. It’s the reason I don’t listen to 5th column or The Weeds.
Ha this is exactly why I don't listen to The Fifth Column, but I guess because I've been listening to BARPod the whole way I haven't really registered or minded the "banter creep." I'm actually genuinely intrigued by what kind of crazy screenless, doors-ajar, racists-and-unhinged-stalkers-adjacent living situation Katie has (and that her wife can be a nurse yet abscond across the country to wrassle goats for months at a time), and the fact that Jesse seems to constantly be jet-setting hither and yon.
Maybe The Unspeakable (I see l'a m already listens), or Maiden, Mother, Matriarch, or even Uncomfortable Conversations (though Josh can monologue with the best of them) would be more either of your tastes?
I find the banter of B&R and TFC part of the charm. I like the personalities of everyone involved, so I enjoy listening to them talk, even if it's just about random ass shit.
I do too re BARPod, it is part of the charm. I keep meaning to go back to TFC. I can see how if someone came in now cold to BARPod they might be lost with the references which is a bit how I feel with TFC, like I walked in on a party not knowing anyone. I do like The Unspeakable.
I tolerated it for a bit. But getting the same crap that I’d get from Greenwald and their general smugness was too much so I dipped. The incessant crosstalk was also aggravating. TBH BARPOD is the only dual host podcast I listen to because those issues aren’t as prevalent.
This and True Crime Garage are the only dual-host podcasts I listen to.
Nine minutes of banter this week is way too much.
I'm so confused.
For the forest service roads you say on the left side they are dog friendly, but not on the right.
Wouldn't this be dependent on which direction you were going?
Is that the joke, and I'm just stupid?
Completely baffled.
I think the idea was that you can take your dog on the trail. Opposite side, you cannot.
Does that mean when walking on the trail you keep your dog on the left side? I suppose that would make sense.
It sounded like if youre were driving down the road, the trails on the left are dog friendly. Which didn't make sense. Because it would be dependent on which direction you were coming from. I.E. if you were traveling north, the west trails are dog friendly, but if you're traveling south, the east trails are dog friendly...
So if you want to go down a specific trail, but it's not on your left. You just have to make sure you do a U-Turn before parking your car.
You walk on what's left of the road. Hope that helps.
Please don’t issue corrections based on the redditors. Redditors - even the ones on the BARpod sub - are automatically wrong due to the social network they subscribe to, much like twitterers.
(Also the sub sometimes has a really worrying subtext when it discusses racial issues)
I normally base my opinion on the substance, or otherwise, of a comment. Do you do this in real life too? Disregard anything Someone says if they are wearing the wrong kind of clothes perhaps?
Yeah, this is how I live my life. I couldn't possibly have been been purposefully hyperbolic for effect (especially because my comment is clear that I, also, use Reddit).
I follow both substack and the BAR pod subreddit and I'd advise you not to turn your nose up at the reddit crowd. The only real difference I observed between the the forums is that the redditors tend to be younger.
Maybe. I've definitely noticed a trend every episode where someone on Reddit will post "Jesse/Katie got it wrong and here's why!", when the topic is subjective and it's just a different viewpoint. Also, I stand by the fact that sub seems overflowing with "race realist" types and I always get worried when the episode touches on racial topics, because it draws them out of the woodwork.
BTW for flies, well of course A) get some screens made, they’re pretty cheap, but B) if you’re squeamish about killing insects and spiders (which I am too), use a stick vacuum like a Dyson to sneak up on them and suck them up. Then they can live a long and happy life in the vacuum canister, or at least that’s what I tell the kids.
This is true but I've prevoously discovered, to my visceral horror, that insects can not only live a full life inside the vacuum cleaner, but also successfully create bountiful progeny therein. While I felt less bad for sucking them up following this discovery, the unexpected sight of their bustling insect society was quite scarring.
I’ve substantially cut out a lot of social media from my life and really only use substack for a few subscriptions. So, I’ve been the most relaxed I’ve been in years. The bike story bruhaha didn’t bother me so much maybe because I’m not online as much and not preemptively charged up. It sounded bad for the woman, but I also felt similar to Jesse? Seeing everyone up in arms is sorta baffling considering everything else going on.
Re the Lulu Lemon story, I am pretty certain that back when I was growing up in the '90's on several occasions there were stories about retail workers getting fired after they foiled a robbery or stopped a shoplifter. They ended up on the evening news and there was much outrage that these "hero" workers had been fired for "doing the right thing". And these were local stories so it was probably very common.
In each case, the company defended firing the employee because they had a policy of non-confrontation because no company wants the publicity of an employee getting killed on the job for preventing robbers from getting away with $10,000.
Anyway, the Lulu Lemon story makes it sound like conservatives don't understand how the retail world works. And also that they don't watch enough crime movies. Like, how many times do the bank robbers shoot customers when the security guard tries to take the robber down?
> In each case, the company defended firing the employee because they had a policy of non-confrontation because no company wants the publicity of an employee getting killed on the job for preventing robbers from getting away with $10,000.
I think this is 90% of it, still today. They don't want gunfights in their stores, and they don't want their employees killed.
The conservatives may have a _slight_ point, though. This used to be 100% the reason for these policies. Today, it's also because they don't want the bad publicity of apprehending someone who's likely to be a young person and a minority.
I predict that stores will start re-evaluating shoplifting policies when the costs get too high. Suspect the stores closing down branches had multiple reasons for doing so.
Shutting down stores, or going like the new Brooklyn(?) Walgreens(?) where there are only two aisles of the store open, and customers have to order their items online.
ETA: Walgreens in Chicago https://blockclubchicago.org/2023/06/02/at-new-chicago-walgreens-you-can-only-browse-two-aisles-the-rest-of-the-store-is-locked-away/
And its what they want to do anyway. Friends went to a taco bell recently that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) open their dining room cause they couldn’t staff it. Its gonna be ordering kiosks and drive thru from now on its just more cost effective, if we want “fine dining” we’re gonna pay through the nose for it.
I'm done with Jesse. Just turned off auto renew for the BAR subscription. It's obvious they don't even read our comments here.
Moving my subscription over to Coleman Hughes.
That is one thing I don't get, and I'm not complaining because any of MY comments have never been addressed. I truly just don't understand why J&K would look to the B&R sub-reddit, rather than their own comments section, for feedback.
I wonder if they read Reddit because they want to know what they need to do to get more subscriber's. We are already paying
Perhaps. IDK how choosing reddit comments to respond to would get them more subscribers, though.
I'm not sure. I think they should refer to the substack primo thread more, but at the same time the subreddit allows for posts about all sorts of things related to the podcast (rather than just an episode thread and open thread). The subreddit post criticizing this episode was very well done and garnered a huge response very much echoing what was posted here. There's no way to do the same thing on substack.
I hadn't thought of this angle. But most successful organizations understand that they can't ignore current supporters in the quest for new ones. You have to keep tending those existing relationships if you don't want to lose them.
I’ve flown from Philly to Newark as part of a longer flight when I lived in the Philly area and the reason I did it was because of parking. I could get a ride to the Philly airport but if I went to Newark, I’d have to drive there and park there and spend a lot to park my car for two weeks. It’s so much easier just to fly.
FWIW, the first version of the "drank two litres" I remember circulating was in the 1980s and it was Marc Almond. It was usually immediately followed by the story of Richard Gere and a hamster. So it must be true, right?
I remember hearing it about Rod Stewart in the 80s and he discussed it in his autobiography. Apparently a disgruntled publicist made up a story that he serviced so many sailors in a bar in San Diego that he had to go to hospital and have his stomach pumped.
I’m pretty sure his book is the only celebrity autobiography to ever include the line “I have never orally pleasured even a single sailor.”
Yes! Rod Stewart is the one I remember from the '80s.
Fun facts: ejaculation volume is somewhere between 2-10 ml, let's go with 6. Two liters = 2000 ml. So it would take about 333 happy endings to equal 2 liters. Stomach capacity is somewhere between 2-4 liters (golly!).
Given the time factor, I call shenanigans. The stomach would be emptying its load (hurr), and even so, one could still be making many sailors happy without overloading it.
Gotta say, I may yak, but I do appreciate the math!
What the absolute fuck is this in response to? I haven't listened to the episode yet, and now I'm very afraid of doing so.
Katie mentioned the rumor from ages ago that Alanis Morissette had to have her stomach pumped because it was too full of semen.
Rod Stewart's account of how this rumor started is in this snopes entry. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rock-star-stomach-pump/
It's so weird how stupid rumours spread almost instantaneously even pre internet. I always think of how (as far as I know) everyone in every school in the Anglosphere was successfully convinced within the space of about 2 months in the early '00s than Marilyn Manson had 2 of his ribs removed so that he could suck himself off.
I was logging in to say that Marc Almond in late 1981 was when I first heard that stomach-pump story. I was 10, and can remember someone having to explain it to me. I wished they hadn’t.
Wow, Paul Tomkins of The Tomkins Times is here. It’s a crazy mixed up world.
Love your work, Paul. Hope the Reds are better next season
Cheers! I’ve barely used Twitter for a year, so I have to hang around on various Substacks these days 😜 (Not that I tend to post much of any of them.) At least I still have a tick on Substack!
I heard this story in 8th grade (c. 2000), but it was about Britney Spears.
I'm just hear to laugh! It's going to be okay everyone :)
I'd like to note that as dog-friendly as Oregon can be, in the greater portland area it can be surprisingly hard to find rental homes that allow dogs or that don't have significant restrictions on them. Moving from minneapolis we were sort of shocked by how limited we were because of a 20 pound and forty pound dog, even being willing to pay whatever for a pet deposit.
And they're good boys, oh yes they are, aren't they? yes they are such good dogs, good dog, sit
I agree with the former LuluLemon CEO -- not everyone should wear yoga pants. (I have a lot of LuluLemon clothes and they suit me just fine!)
You know what? Fuck that CEO. I hate Lululemon. I went there to buy a pair of yoga pants with my teenage daughter. She is 5'6", 115 lbs. In other words, skinny. The yoga pants on offer would fit a child of around seven. We left there with her in tears because she thought she was overweight.
What the hell is with women's clothing sizing? JFC
It’s insane!
And I’m. not nuts- the pants out in the floor of the Shadyside Lululemon were so fucking tiny. Like normal clothes but shrunken.
and expensive
I'm trying to come up with names for the backlash to Jesse's position about all of this. Citibikepocalypse? Citibikegate? Something with 'Nuance'?
The Citibike thing should have stayed at Seinfeld level.
I will totally back up Katy on the retail angle. In the late 90’s the policy of Barnes and Noble, Best Buy and a few other retailers in my area was absolutely to leave shoplifters alone. Barnes and Noble wanted staff to literally do nothing (AFAIK).
Best Buy wanted staff to repeatedly talk to shoplifters and ask if they needed help, but to in no way acknowledge the shoplifting or attempt to stop anyone. Even the person at the desk with the alarm beeper was not supposed to actually do anything if people ignored them. We were supposed to call the cops and had security cameras, but this often didn’t get a lot of results.
Staff also got bonuses based on overall shrink levels and they were always stressing that even with the huge amount of theft in the store, employee theft was an even bigger problem.
I worked at a Gap 7 years ago. It had the highest rate of theft of any Gap in Minnesota. We were trained to make “recovery statements” like “would you like me to start a fitting room?” or “would you like me to hold that at the register while you shop?” to let them know that we saw the theft without making an accusation.
WHAT. Workers have said that to me. I guess they thought I was stealing :((
Well those would be normal things to ask a customer anyway— the point was just to make sure to do it immediately with someone who was stealing, in a way that made it clear you knew they had merchandise.
Ah ok I see.
From my own experience as a subscriber, it's a bummer to see the comments section taken over by reddit/Twitter types. I think Jesse should go full Katie and just ignore the reddit posts and comments section.
Isn't the comment section here only open to subscribers?
Yup. The reddit hate here is kind of nuts.
Has that happened? I don't use either, so I don't know how either compare to Substack.
Regarding the Citibike incident, it's always important to set the record straight when the media gets something wrong. Yes, this would've never been national news if not for the race angle - but that's also true for much higher stakes incidents in which so many in the media got the story wrong that they could be accused of (in some cases still) pushing a false narrative. Michael Brown and Jacob Blake come to mind. Those initially appeared to be stories about racism, which later turned out to actually be stories about bias and just plain bullshittery in the media. At least in this case no one was shot.
And for the people that are paying attention and not stuck in their priors, this now goes from being an incident that adds to the "climate of racism" in America to one that doesn't go much beyond "sometimes people kinda suck" - which all in all is a better place to live. That's where its value lies.
I, for one, am glad time was taken to address this further and provide additional clarity even though it would have had no bearing on my life whatsoever regardless of what the truth actually turned out to be.
No it definitely still adds to the climate of racism. Just the kind of racism that most people feel is A-OK.
Painless fly solution -- use your vacuum.
Doesn’t sound very painless for the fly.
Fair, but in a vacuum (bag) no one can hear you scream.
We stayed for a while at a house with a fruit fly infestation. My husband kept a very loud portable vacuum next to his desk, and about every five minutes, he would turn the damn thing on for a few seconds to catch a fly. He also used it on larger insects That Shall Not Be Named, which required keeping it on for longer so that he was sure they were dead. Ick. I don't know if the insects were in pain or stressed out by this, but I sure was.
REMINDER ABOUT NYC MEETUP TONIGHT:
For BARPod fans who are in the NYC area, a few of us will be going bowling on the Lower East Side this Tuesday night at 6p--and we’re happy to meet up with other like-minded, or *even unlike-minded*, area folk.
https://www.thegutterbarles.com/lower-east-side
Tuesday, June 6th at 6pm ET – THAT’S RIGHT, *DURING PRIDE!*
You can RSVP or ask questions here: 646-455-9017
Note for *you ageist monsters* that our little group trends Gen Xward, in case you're looking for a competitive advantage. Also note that this space is furry-inclusive, but not necessarily bowler-inclusive.
I wish I could be there. It is guaranteed to be a great time!
Blown up domestic news stories (citibike, lululemon) are the Rorschach tests most people aren’t aware they are taking.
Will the next story be societal decline, over reactive wokism, or a silly cat face that might also be a butterfly ?
Dear Jesse,
Depending on traffic, that drive from Newark to Philly can take upwards of four hours.
Flying from Newark to Philly puts you in the position of having access to downtown Philly within ten minutes because you’ll be avoiding potential snafus like the Schuylkill Expressway.
It seems silly, but as someone who lives between Newark and Philly, I can say that flying from Newark to Philly is a pretty good idea.
Love the podcast. Enjoyed your book.
Best,
Dan
Black bachelorette parties.
That was Newark-Atlantic City, Atlantic City-Newark
440 comments and 41 likes, I notice before listening. Uh-oh, but I think I'll probably like nonetheless.
Jesse states that the kid "just waited for this period to elapse so that he could check it [the bike] out again for free."
Can someone say in NYC say if this is true or not? Is there a "cooling off" period before you can check out bikes again for people who have this reduced rate?
It doesn't really change anything - he's still squatting on the bike, refusing to allow others to use it which is a dick move - but I am curious if this is true.
There are detailed explanations on Twitter about how e-bikes normally cost extra UNLESS no regular bikes are available. So if you and your chums with monthly plans sit on docked e-bikes until all the other bikes checked out, you can ride free for another 45 minutes. Rinse & repeat.
That’s not what Jesse said. He said that the boys would have to wait a certain period of time before taking the bikes out again for a reduced rate.
I think the wait time is 2 minutes but it’s complicated and Jesse’s account lacks the scrutiny he gives to stuff he thinks is important.
This is the best explainer. youtu.be/zv5wCPQNkkw
Gotcha
I'm not in NYC, but per the receits provided by the teen, it's possible to see any cooldown period can't be more than 2 minutes since two of his rides are separated by 2 minutes.
I flew from LaGuardia to Philadelphia to make a connecting flight, I’m not sure we ever got up to normal cruising and there was no drink service because the flight was around 40 minutes in the air.
"The Shortest Routes of the Major US Carriers"
https://airlinegeeks.com/2021/07/02/deep-dive-the-shortest-routes-of-the-major-us-carriers/
Great link; thanks for sharing!
I would get in a FedEx box and fly cargo before I'd drive from LaGuardia to Philly, but I see your point.
Almost every flight I take out of Madison, Wisconsin, includes a flight like this to Chicago. It's incredibly short, with no drink service, and often in a smaller, puddle-jumper-type plane.
The first gallon pumping sucking celebrity rumor i heard back in the Pleistocene era was (sorry ladies) Rod Stewart.
My biggest problem in the previous episode was Jesse saying the bike was 'his' (meaning the kid). This is factually and morally incorrect. I think he corrected that sufficiently here so I have no further issues. I agree it should not have been a story and only became one because of race baiters on Twitter.
If the gravel bike murder story Katie briefly mentioned is the one I’m thinking of, that also led me to learn a lot about gravel cycling because I went to HS with the murderer 😬
I've never heard of gravel cycling before, and this week both TFC and B&R mentioned it. So random!
Oh you’re right! So weird! And google let me know that today is world bicycle day, on top of it all...
Jesse is a former roofer and Katie is Irish.
Truly, Josh has smiled on this day.
For context, this would just be how the word “hallelujah” would be written in Japanese. There are no L sounds in Japanese, so both R sounds and L sounds are rendered as R. So not really sure it’s a joke
heyo primos - re: retail theft, thoughts on this? do you think this kind of store is economically viable / the future of big retail? https://www.audacy.com/wbbm780/news/local/downtown-walgreens-tries-out-new-shopping-system imho, it looks - to use an overused term - dystopian af.
Reminds me of a Venezuelan I know’s description of “bodegones”, these high end corner groceries with heavy security. The rich get their super inflated quotidian items while the poor just suffer.
I have a photo of Jessie from high school how can I upload it here
The most obvious reason y’all are seeing more conservative outrage on twitter is blue check marks. Check marks get boosted visibility and the left has basically boycotted them. I don’t know how much blue checks are boosted over non checkmark accounts, but it would take much (maybe 25%?) to make a significant change to your timeline.
Wouldn’t take much*
There is no reason whatsoever to fly from Newark to Philadelphia. The amount of time spent going through security at both airports can be spent driving or taking the Acela.
Hell you could probably even Uber. It's just down 95.
You could hitchhike and it would take less time but it would be a little less secure.
I flew from NYC to Philadelphia once for a connecting flight to Detroit because it was cheaper than flying direct, and I was at a point in my life where I was willing to lose the time and deal with the inconvenience to save a few bucks. Unfortunately, this was the weekend of Hurricane Irene, so my flight out of Philadelphia was canceled and I wound up having to cancel my trip entirely and take a train back to New York from Philadelphia. So I probably would have been better off flying direct to begin with!
Ouch!
I’m frankly outraged. For Pete’s sake, it’s OR-ee-gun, not OR-gun, im-PORT-ent, not im-port-ANT. Unsubscribing!
A lot of Barpod listeners are not from NYC. Jesse has lived here for years and has a much better understanding of the dynamic on the streets here. It is common here to see pregnant white women start altercations with groups of black teenaged boys. Those of you from more cloistered areas would not understand this.
Jesse wouldn't have fired the women, for trying to prevent a crime... he'd just have suspended them for a week.
The Gap Founding Fathers writing the Customer Bill of Rights: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1104589318275743775/1115036919714291712/DJUNGELSKOG_Imagine_a_scene_set_in_the_late_18th_century_where__ac94bd10-bdce-4673-a12d-0d8b2b117b22.png
Maybe the video of the Lululemon incident that Blocked and Reported linked to was misleading, but it sounded like the one woman who was fired was not at the store during the robbery, so... I don't know, maybe there's more to this story.
Finally listened to this episode. I’m with Jesse on the Citibike story. He was initially incorrect, and they then corrected. They did discuss the shittyness of the teens and essentially vindicated the woman. Case closed. Why are people so irrationally upset? As someone who lives next to teens just like this (in uptown NYC), I think there’s a disconnect of experience here with most of the audience. NYC apathy can be bad, but sometimes it brings real clarity to situations like this - wtf should we do about it? Arrest the kids? Drag them online? Talk about how outraged we are? All pointless. The kids are clearly dicks. People defending them are clearly idiots. People still outraged about it are clearly addicted to outrage. When I experience or see something similar on the street (last year this happened to a white kid in Harlem out my window, almost exact same circumstances) all of these conversations i see in the comments go through my head. They’re all kind of pointless in that moment. I think Jesse, being a NYer must feel similar. People who never see shit like this are likely to salivate at the outrageousness. People who do experience this all the time just know that once it’s over, dwelling is pointless unless there’s action to be taken.
It's hilarious that Katie thinks you just "cut the bottom" of long hair and it's easy. This is all.
Okay, here's why I thought Jesse's take on the Citibike story was bullshit.
But first, I actually agree that normal people having a shitty interaction like this should never have been news.
But it was news, and a woman was financially harmed unjustly because of it. Also, you can't just come in saying "seems like the kids were in the right" or "everybody sucks here." The kids (who should remain anonymous and face no public or legal harassment for their shitty adolescent behavior) where 100% in the wrong.
Dibs is not a right, harassing a pregnant woman to preserve your dibs is not okay, starting an online harassment campaign against that woman is wrong, trying to raise money off your own shitty behavior is wrong.
Jesse could have said all the other stuff he said about the story and none of it would have annoyed me, if he'd just admitted that "dibs" isn't a thing and the kids were in the wrong.
Can anyone please tell me what Bulwark episode Katie was talking about? Never heard of Bulwark but am writing about the predictability of Backlash movements making it a handy excavation tool. I endured a full episode of Next Level which was painfully cliched and smug. But maybe an off day. Can anyone direct me to the specific segment?
I thought Katie's story was a little underreported, kind of like Jesse's bike story last time.
- In general, I'm realizing that Katie and Jesse are good journalists, but their opinions are more or less as dumb as mine. Katie didn't mention whether she tried to interview anybody, so this was pretty much a summary of what's going on on Twitter, Katie's opinion as a former shoplifter, and a section of the Lululemon manual.
- As a result, I'm not sure that Katie delivered on her implication that conservative criticism was misplaced. She's right that a couple details of the story were wrong, but I'd expect that in any word of mouth story. If I understand correctly, it sounds like the employee was probably fired for leaving the store to video record the shoplifters, but probably not for calling the police, and this is a long time Lululemon policy, not a recent one. So what? I imagine most conservatives are still critical even with those corrections. (Also, Katie points out that these shoplifters were quickly caught - did the video that got the clerk fired help catch them? If so, that's one point for people who don't like Lululemon's policy, if not, one point against.)
Newark Drug Dealer red eye
Can anyone point me to this animation that a listener made that has been mentioned a few times? Can't find anything.
I can't find this on any timeline, it was a very good animation of Katie getting bored with Jesse's description of Slay the Spire or whatever the fuck it is.
I do not know why this is so super secret that it's no longer available on Earth.
I think Jesse said that it would be in the show notes but it never appeared.
I'm OK with the lawn chairs in one specific case: where there has been heavy snow, and you dig out a space and then put a chair there because you are returning soon. It can take two hours sometimes to dig a space out. So it sucks for a neighbor to them take that space rather than dig their own out.
Depends on how long and how many seats. If you're just using your jacket to claim a seat for one other person then that's fine.
"Those who can't do, teach" - the adage emerged from a long ago observable fact
I think that's unfair to teachers. "Those who can't do, become education administrators" is far more accurate.
> After some time to think on the Sisters drag debacle,
The "Sisters" that I met in the early 80s in SF were Catholics. I'm not sure if that's true now. But during the time when the Church was hostile to gay men, I would have to say that it's completely appropriate for members of a particular faith to engage in a form of satirical fun protest against their own Church.
That being said, while I smile when I saw the sisters at a gay event (this was before the "Lesbian and Gay" advocacy groups became an all encompassing home for any oddball) I do agree that there may be better choices to represent at a baseball game. How about having the LA Gay Men's Chorus sing the national anthem and throw out the first pitch?
Absolutely - it feels like Jesse is forcing a contrarian take to stay above the fray and out of the controversy. Yes Jesse, it shouldn't have made the news, but the point of this podcast is to cover things that shouldn't have made the news, so here we are.
Let's at least acknowledge the outrage over the issue is legitimate, even if we don't like the people who are outraged - namely, that recording a white woman in any confrontation with a non-white person these days can ruin her life, even if she didn't do anything wrong. That's the story here.
Yes Jesse, it shouldn't have made the news, but the point of this podcast is to cover things that shouldn't have made the news, so here we are.
Exactly
I think the story is sort of becoming a valve for white/black race relations generally and because it’s also not the totality of race relations it’s hard to say anything about it that pleases anyone. Like yes those kids shouldn’t just squat on the bike and they were acting like dicks. That deserves a chewing out and an apology. It’s also common teenage behavior. The lady was tired and pregnant and wasn’t diplomatic, but then she shouldn’t have really needed to be. But once you have national attention it’s hard to take things back down to the personal level of “hey kids don’t do that” because the outside world has made it about something else. I think this following the subway stuff is what put a lot of emotion behind it.
I was thinking if you step back from the race-baiting, this story was a typical example of shit that happens in NYC all the time. People employing a rocket-science level of studiousness to game a system and other people being so fed up with inconsiderate assholes that they’ll dig in on things that people from less cutthroat climes wouldn’t dream of. It’s kind of what Seinfeld was about, if anything.
I don’t know how people live in big cities and just stay normal.
I sure didn't; I was turning into a complete asshole and moved to Wyoming. Now I'm a (western) Masshole.
Ugh a western masshole?
The worst.
Yeah, we drive slow!
Lol, was just messing around, Western Mass is quite nice.
I'm a RI'er and I think we may actually be the worst, especially when it comes to driving.
That's a good point about how Jordan Neely's death influenced the response to the CitiBike incident.
Yep, and here we see another parallel to the Amy Cooper / Christian Cooper story.
Kinda sorta thought about it right after it happened but it seemed like the bike story was picking up a lot of the emotional slack. Then got busy.