Dear Prudence, Help! I Can't Stop Pretending To Be A Texas Abortion Bounty Hunter Online (early access, ad-free)

I would totally have a masked one night stand with a hottie. Could be kinky. And also probably safer for preventing the transmission of not just COVID, but many orally-transmitted STDs as well. 🔥😷🔥

Katie struck me as particularly funny tonight. Love you both and pleased to kick off my weekend listening to you.

Plot twist: she turns him in to the sheriff and collects a bounty.

Look, Danny Lavery is by no means my favorite person, but I've listened to a few episodes of the Dear Prudence podcast in the past, and the pithy one-liner statements quoted in the Gawker piece didn't seem characteristic of Lavery's often long-winded advice-giving style (at least in audio format). So after reading the Gawker piece on him, I listened to some of the podcast episodes linked within. While he definitely does praise the demon-child and dismiss IQ as fake and racist, he also follows that by taking time to a. explain what IQ is (well actually, Grace Lavery does this) and b. offer both "letter writers" some extended advice. Is it good advice? That's up for debate, but it does at least answer the question. So I would say this Gawker piece, while interesting, is definitely misleading.

Hmm, which is more outrageous? 1. Some internet "reporter" falls for a troll and puts it on blast or 2. the fucking law that spawned this? This is why we have no more nice things. Priorities are all fucked up.

DavidtheG

“Is it unethical by bounty hunter standards to hunt a woman I myself impregnated?” Hahaha! I bet some of my coworkers moonlight as those bounty hunters though grrrr…..

Me too! I love the personals. Katie and Jesse have such clever and funny listeners.

Oh HELL YEAH Ken M!!

DrSmart

I second the recommendation. The guest for this episode was Katherine Dee.

100%

I was even more disappointed that Gamer Jesse hasn't played Untitled Goose. C'mon man, your cheeto-stained fingers should be all over that action.

Yeah but he was trolling an advice column, not really the pinnacle of journalism.

Tom

So many things to say. 1) On trolling, let me recommend the works of the great Ken M. #24 is my all time favorite. https://www.boredpanda.com/trolling-people-internet-funny-ken-m/ 2) I'm not sure if it will help, but if Katie needs an intro into Untitled Goose Game, here's a Stupendium song from the perspective of Untitled Goose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjhfDQbJ3Lk

Katie sounded genuinely disappointed to hear that there was more context to the Lavery goose story. Aren’t we supposed to like context on this pod, Katie? Lol

I think journalists who censor their work for fear of giving the other side ammunition are not journalists but propagandists.

Tom

I feel the response to the troll from r/drama that Katie got an email interview with was too sympathetic and credulous. He deserved more push back for supporting the idea that blatantly lying about things is a completely harmless bit of fun. Yeah none of us like self-righteous people and to an extent we all want to show them to be the hypocritical tools they are. I get it. But I really can't see how this is much better than Trump constantly lying about literally everything for example. Is the media culpable for writing articles about every single one of Trumps stupid tweets and thus spreading the disinformation? Yes. But is Trump for sure culpable? Yes,1000%. Much more because he lied to begin with! Trolling really isn't harmless. News agencies have to get much better at fact checking etc of course, just like 30 years ago they wouldn't take any random prank call to the station as fact just because they liked the story, they shouldn't take any random internet post as fact. But the people making the prank calls are culpable too - they are wasting time and effort from honest journalists actually having to do the checking. And likely this IS happening, we are just unlikely to hear about it because the result of good fact checking is NOT reporting on a topic. There are plenty of outlets who are recognizing the trolls for what they are, doing the due diligence, spending a day fo work figuring out its nonsense, and ultimately NOT writing the article. Trolls have wasted their time. Less actual news gets researched because of it, and we are all less well informed and more confused than we would be otherwise. Fuck the trolls.

Dearest Katie; One of the things that has made me such a fan over the last 1.5 years is your willingness to tell the truth and expose reality, regardless of where it fits in the dominant political narrative. For the love of God, DO NOT start censoring yourself simply because you worry that Fox News or Ben Shapiro is going to tout your findings. That type of censorship is one of the reasons that our social and political discourse is in the gutter. Smart, brave people like yourself need to keep shouting from the mountaintops. The benefits of telling the truth greatly outweigh negative effect of having Bow-Tie Tucker agree with you.

Never heard of it before but I am an immediate fan

DrSmart

It’s more than self-censorship bc it’s for the express reason that you fear your good work will be used by bad people. Not for fear of job or something like that.

Isn't another plot hole that if the bounty hunter drove her "from the clinic directly to the county sheriff" he would have then abetted her abortion and thus be liable to be bounty hunted himself?

Probably quicker just to skip through them than to look up and track to specific timestamp.

I don’t think Lavary or Carlson cared about the authenticity of the letters.

Michael

They didn't. It was a damage control response to a wave of attacks from grace lavery Jude doyle et al crew

Jordan Bickett

What the hell is going on at sub-stack that they thought acquiring Dan Lavery was worth$400K?

For some things - e.g. the fake academic papers scandal - I think that has merit. But I don’t believe r/drama has that as their aim, and those who spread the misinformation they create will never ‘discover the lie’ and certainly will not publicise or learn from it. So if the aim is to encourage critical thinking, it’s a poor tool. Edit: was in response to Andy

What about when the aim is to highlight someone's poor fact-checking or critical thinking? I'm torn between how much I value truth and honesty, and how much I kind-of enjoy a good hoax.

The Terrence Higgins Trust did the same thing. A charity who usually give advice about avoiding HIV and other STDs. I suppose it might not be entirely stupid from a harm-reduction perspective, if it's with a casual or occasional partner.

Spreading lies on the internet and then reacting with glee when people take them seriously is no more morally defensible when the aim is to create ‘drama’ than it is when the aim is to smear a political opponent, undermine a political cause that costs your business money, or damage the reputation of an enemy. This ‘the internet is the wild west’ nonsense is a truly bizarre way to rationalise that kind of behaviour. Especially when we’ve seen this year how misinformation costs lives in the US and beyond. The dude who says ‘in real life I am a democrat on the internet I am a misogynist blah blah’ is an absolute moron. What he means is, ‘on the internet I can be a misogynist, I can be a liar, and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop me.’ This idea that’s not ‘who you are in real life’ is self-deluding teenage level nonsense.

FYI the stuff about COVID sex tips is NOT entirely a strawman. In the early days of the Pandemic the CDC in British Columbia kept putting out these bits of advice for 'safe sex during COVID-19' which included saying that you should wear masks during sex, avoid kissing, and use glory holes (yes, they used the words 'glory holes'). All of this is still up on their website though they've re-written the stuff around it to make it look more reasonable take a look: http://www.bccdc.ca/health-info/diseases-conditions/covid-19/prevention-risks/covid-19-and-sex

Tiberius is a comedic genius.

Susannah

I could listen to a whole episode of the personals

Well, Jesse, the twin relationship column could very well be real. I saw a 1970s pornomentary on identical twins (look, my artsy college friends and I took John Waters films as a gateway drug— it was an escalatingly raunchy few years), and that film claimed about 1% of identical twins are in longterm romantic relationships with each other. What data were these filmmakers pouring over, I don’t know. But I believe identical twin relationships are uniquely close, and wouldn’t doubt that stat. And while I am taking advantage of the inability to downvote comments on Patreon, can I say I kinda enjoy the personals? Some of these are really clever.

For reference the woman on Meghan Daums podcast that talked about incels is Naama Kates and rather than a book, she has a podcast called Incel project , it's worth a listen

Griffia

The reason for this is that if the penalty was on the mother then it would have been immediately overturned because of roe v Wade.

As far as I know the only person that can't get sued is the woman who gets the abortion.

Thanks for reading my personal. I’m the history teacher who has low standards

Are you going to publish the chat with SCD in article form anywhere?

Self-censorship?

Regarding what Katie said about when people ask if she fears conservatives will use her writing for their own purposes - what is the name for this phenomenon? Bari Weiss talked about this w/Abigail Schrier and others, Ayaan Hirshi Ali has talked about it, but is there a name for it? Basically, it the decision people make to NOT study/research/write about certain topics because of the fear that bad actors will abuse your work (and potentially get lumped in with them.) Not saying conservatives are always bad actors here, that’s just what Katie had mentioned in the podcast, the bad actors might be racists/xenophobes/transphobe etc.

I came across the word in books written in the 1930s, when according to various web dictionaries, the word was coined. Possibly it came from “poker faced.” That was a period in Britain when divorce court was a public entertainment and people simultaneously enjoyed loosening of social taboos and disapproving of same. A precursor to cancel culture?

Grace M-Thérèse

The episode in which Jesse finally admits to being KKK adjacent. #BarpodOutOfContext

Eric Carlsen

Right after Yom Kippur, no less!

Eric Carlsen

I still say post the BARPod personals Google doc.

Kat Rosenfield had a good discussion with her last guest on the Feminine Chaos pod about among other things this mechanism by which media writers (can't really call them journalists) lacking time will write about any thing that could spark "engagement" they find on the internet. Even if that thing is minuscule and caused by trolls. But then it makes it a real topic that people will take position about and ends up having real consequences.

I feel the need to be a pedant and say that the Supreme Court did not uphold the abortion law but instead did not pre-emptively block it for procedural reasons. The majority was explicit that they were not ruling on the constitutionality of the law itself but chose not to block it in advance of a full review.

Bennett madison seems like fun guy, hates tucker *and* 'progressive' social media zealots pretty cool.

Positivelypolarized69

Can you start including time stamps so I can skip the stupid fucking personal ads?

Another fun wrinkle is that Lavery had a brief pre-Toast stint at Gawker.

Was thinking a lot about that meghan daum episode on incels during this reddit discussion, highly recommended

Did he fool them or do they not care if the letters are fake? My assumption when reading or listening to advice segments is that they’re about entertainment, not genuine advice. I’ve always thought that the advice givers themselves just make up most of the “letters” they receive. It ain’t that serious.

Also, now that I’ve heard part 2: excellent piece on internet trolling & media hystereactions. As a 90s internet snob I would like to blame AOL for both 1) popularizing the Internet before society was ready with enough critical thought to handle it and 2) unwittingly handing the car keys to a generation of teen trolls, but Jesse’s revelation of his shameful past in the anti-Semitic culinary dark web shows that there is always hope such terrible, terrible people can turn their lives around to become productive podcasting members of society.

rdrama on blocked and reported , we've made the big leagues.

Erik D

I don’t know it it came from any comment of mine (don’t think I ever commented on it), but I’m still going to take Katie’s correct pronunciation of “niche” as a win, not just personally but also for Canada as a nation and for the entire Commonwealth of English-speaking nations. Now that we have a media influencer like her onside, the rest of the US is sure to fall in line with the correct pronunciation. If only we can also tackle the American pronunciation of “clique” and “shone”, my heart can finally be at peace.

I can call it: even from that brief line, that goose thing was 100% an Untitled Goose Game reference.

R.S.

Poor Jesse's dad. To have a son who, in spite of being a Yale Law School grad, CHOOSES to be a lowly podcaster, must feel unbelievably shameful. Is there any amount of atonement that can rectify this great ongoing injustice?

Just to let you know that “po-faced” is a British term describing someone “having an assumed solemn, serious, or earnest expression or manner : piously or hypocritically solemn”. A good description of ideologues!

Thank Christ. I’m listening to my high school rock band’s rehearsals on cassette. You saved me from a shit version of “Boys of Summer”. Although I WAS a badass kid guitarist, we were uggggghhhly.

Todd Rush