Episode 75: How To Deal With Transphobic Alters, How To Survive Your Newsroom's Awokening, And How To Get Ousted From The Screenwriting Industry (early access)

I read it as preowned lesbian at first!

Y'all are infamous - The Daily Mail! And Katie is renowned lesbian....well done.

Jo Lynn

I'm sorry you're sick - the delta variant has arrived in Oregon! I diagnosed (clinically, and then the PCR confirmed it) a 17 yr old who got her second dose in mid-June. Her father, who had only had one jab, was very ill and she drove him to the ER, where he was tested for COVID and found to have it. The next morning she woke up without her sense of smell. Her symptoms are mild: fatigue, headache. Still, it's disturbing. My understanding is that the delta variant can take residence in the nose of a vaccinated person, but isn't as successful moving through the rest of the body. I hope you get lots of rest and recover quickly!

Julia Mason

Does this mean everyone has to share their sexuality in their bios?? Can we take a giant step back and ask when THAT became okay?

Not on topic with the cast, but I received a positive Covid test today. I had the Moderna vaccine in May and only stopped masking about 3 weeks ago when the state (OR) lifted the mandates. I've been living like a recluse. The only places I've been are the supermarket, the dispensary, and some take out places. So far it feels like a bad flu. I've slept most of the last two days.

I’m a huge fan of Mike Pesca and can’t wait until his Hiatus is over. However, I have to say that his comments about not respecting non-binary identities weren’t necessarily leaked; they were brought up by him a couple of times on the podcast.

When Katie said she guessed "they" as the pronouns for the woman (?) who was discussing lesbians that don't want to have sex with male bodies I laughed so hard I almost dropped the dumb bells I was shoulder pressing on my head. Note to self, no more Blocked and Reported when lifting weights, it is too dangerous.

Can you explain how positive listening works

Does anyone else get the feeling that, maybe, in 2 generations or so there will be young'ns on the VR web screaming about how the lack of native American names in popular culture (like sports) and the fact that black roles are all one sided good guys shows how our generation white washed history? (Assuming we don't destroy ourselves in the interim of course.)

Knowing a bit about the subculture from overlap (you meet eccentrics in online D&D, say the least), yes and no. I suspect it's a subconscious thing rather than deliberate deception. They have this idea they feel that they cannot allow themselves to have, so some gears unperceived by conscious thought turn, turn and a "headmate" comes up with it for them.

R.S.

Re: CW TV shows - I watched them for a while and my big takeaway is that there are a lot more decent actors out there than there are decent writers. Some of the shows (Supergirl and, anecdotally Batwoman, which I haven’t watched) seem to forget “show, don’t tell” and get kind of preachy. That’s a common complaint online about most of the CW shows really. Superman and Lois is the first new CW show in a while getting consistent praise across the board and I have to wonder if that’s because writers like the one you mention are reined in. I do sympathize with her desire for non-villain black roles but when your show is about a white superhero family, the best remaining roles are probably going to be villains.

Michael

I finally got on board and signed up for your patreon. Thanks for the great content. Keep up the great work.

I hate to admit that I do something similar to this on Twitter all the time now by reading the tea leaves of people’s “following” lists. The “you and this account have X followers in common” feature is doing a lot of heavy lifting for me these days.

I’m waiting for the day that people think to go through my likes and notice that there are certain things I never comment on 😬

Yes, avoiding confrontation is key. And if you engage people right you yourself might learn something! For instance: I support socialized medicine. Circa 2009 many liberals believed GOP opposition to any socialization of medicine was because of Obama's race. If so the question I often asked was "were we wrong to elect a black man President? Did we squander a once-in-a-lifetime chance on a moral victory rather than a practical one?" Thats not accusing anyone of anything! That's asking people to reckon with the world. The responses were relatively interesting (so far as the low bar of internet commentary goes).

I try to do it so there’s no sense there’s a confrontation. I use two techniques, one I call positive listening (this is my own version of assuming good will) where no matter how self- contradictory or badly incorrect someone communicates something I just interpret in a way that I find to be intelligent and respond to that. I have never once had someone stop me and say “actually I was being an asshole and what I said was wrong.” The other thing I do i call preemptive agreement. Before someone has a chance to dig in their heels I’ll say something like “I absolutely agree with you that we need to use precise, quantifiable metrics to determine if we are being successful because we owe our society the same rigor and mindfulness we owe our customers” etc. Again, no one has ever stopped me and said “oh no i wasn’t going to say that at all, I really just wanted to scream at people to make myself feel like God” because while people get caught up in mania sometimes, 99.99% of people actually want to do something good for someone, they’ve just had their minds eaten by partisan politics and the Internet. If I’ve left space open for someone to behave correctly they’ve almost always take it. When they haven’t they certainly didn’t get the moral victory.

I dont think you're wrong but there's a corollary to your confrontation strategy which has worked for me. Which is, "follow the thought through". Is America a horrible place for black and brown people.... then shouldn't we discourage immigration here? By being pro immigration aren't we just throwing black and brown bodies into the American meatgrinder? etc.

On the wokening stuff, I try to be sincere and honest and assume positive intent especially if it isn’t there and suggest positive action and leave no space so the person is either forced to admit they’re not actually interested in helping anyone (I do a lot of career development stuff for people and always make sure to personally reach out to people I see as talented who might not see that in themselves because my brother and sister are minorities and I do get a lot of where woke stuff comes from before it was co-opted by sociopaths) or just go away. Actually caring works like a charm. I had a great uncle that liberated a Death Camp in WWII and never talked about it while he was alive because he just saw it as the right thing to do and not worth mentioning. None of the people who shout woke stuff on Twitter every time they theoretically imagine helping someone (and who are almost universally repulsed by engaging with actual people) remind me of him at all. I also know a lot of people who survived the Bosnian genocide and they all universally have told me that woke talk reminds them of what the instigators were saying right before everyone started killing each other. When people go woke I also give them the woke version of the Bechdel test. Is the action being proposed taking an actual person in a class that has been historically oppressed and improving their life in any material way outside of what that person will be there to take credit for (you give enduring help to an equal that you have genuine respect for) or just make some white people mad? If it’s all the latter and none of the former do you actually care about helping minorities? Being confronted with not actually giving a shit is the best way I’ve found to confront this kind of stuff. A lot of people do care, by the way, it’s just that like most people they never really thought through how yelling at people was supposed to actually make the problem better, so they spent their energy there instead of trying to help people move into better jobs, etc.

Aerospace Sapphic? Is that like Amelia Earhart? Either way, I'm here for it.

Klondike

The DID alter sounds to me like a float. Where you pretend to hate the idea you want. "I have this other personality that conditions sexual attraction on sexual genitalia. Thats crazy right?" Like, "If we drank that six pack my roommate left in the fridge we would be such assholes, right? No way we're jerks like that, right? Right?"

Seems to me conservatives if they were smart could use this in a way that might actually be good (gasp!) for everyone. There was always plausible deniability about a journalists political leanings. Now that that's gone and people can actually state their politics, why not condition funding on hiring a certain percentage of people who have, say, attended pro choice rallies or are NRA members or whatever?

I thought it meant like more electronic-y goth. Whereas regular goth would be like more rock band/ guitars.

Dark Wave as a genre is a classification of the post punk movement that gave way to gothic subcultures. Think Joy Division, Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and The Banshees. Contemporary evocations of the dark wave genre would be, for example, Drab Majesty, or Black Marble. There are multiple iterations of dark wave, as it is an amorphous umbrella term that can be applied to classifications like ‘new wave’, ‘cold wave’, and ‘goth rock’, among others. It is not ‘emo’ music as Katie states during the pod. :-)

I work on TV in a much less story-centered role and the concerns over content security are an ever present part of the job (including the usual NDAs etc), to the extent that I'd question the mental health of someone who would leak the way she did.

Andrew Del Monte

Any chance this is trolling? The grammar and spelling seemed too tight for a crazy internet person.

CAMAB means “coercively assigned male at birth.” On Tumblr in 2013, its use was a sure sign that OP was batshit insane. Dunno about now

For the record Darkwave is essentially a parallel/subsidiary of Goth..

They all do, my friend. They all do.

Joolz

That’s actually made me laugh out loud. I am now picturing a Midwife screaming at a howling newborn, “YES you ARE a male, so stop bloody CRYING!”

Joolz

If you guys dare, take a look at Chris-Chan and the (very messed-up) news that broke about them today. A insane and long running internet saga, that one, and it might have just reached its conclusion.

Manuel Fernandez

Imagine having a terf living rent-free in your head!

Who's going to start the Spartacus-esque "I'm Angela James" thread? Looks like it's me.

'CAMAB' is Coercively Assigned Male At Birth. My time on tumblr in the early 2010s was worthwhile.

Dealing with this now, sort of. This really helped. Thank you for writing.

LTO

I used to listen to NPR every day for hours. Like the hosts I just can’t listen to it anymore. I would fully support any conservative effort to defund it. I find it insulting that they don’t even pretend to be somewhere closer to the center as any publicly funded institution should be. The sheer contempt this new left has to anyone that thinks different is a mockery to the institutions they claim to represent. Likewise I wouldn’t care if conservatives did very well in 2022. I just feel so defeated. What happened to my side? We deserve to lose everything. At least I can take comfort that any conservatives in power will face a great deal of resistance and scrutiny (as should always be the case with those in power).

CTE

Mid-career trad-publication person (not speaking for anyone but myself, obviously) with some unsolicited advice for the anonymous journo: 1) if you choose to push back, be careful who your audience is and whether it’s someone you have a work-relationship with. Going off about a hot-button issue in a story meeting or a town hall or a Slack channel is going to offend somebody in a big group somehow, whereas if you’re discussing a story one on one with an editor or in a small group of people you work with often, it’s going to be received differently. 2) Don’t just look for allies among coworkers on your level. Many veterans in newsrooms are afraid that everyone younger than them is looking to claim scalps if they say the wrong thing. Let a manager know that you think there should be viewpoint diversity, and you might end up with a powerful mentor who’s grateful to find a kindred spirit and who can stick up for you even if you don’t 100% share the same politics. (I’m willing to bet that whatever older liberals and conservatives in newsrooms disagree about, the importance of viewpoint diversity isn’t one of them.) 3) Corny but true: find your people. If it’s your own team that you feel alienated from (as opposed to others within the institution you don’t interact with - just ignore those people) and you feel like you have to really fake it to fit in, you aren’t going to succeed, so start thinking about who you want to work with instead and how you can land a spot there. I know people who work for outlets whose politics they don’t agree with, but they tend not to be very passionate about their work in general, it’s just a job etc and that doesn’t sound like you. Good luck!

It's just more of the usual nonsense that people think they can put reformist pressure on institutions to treat marginalized people better now that the traditional left has been completely decimated by neoliberal capitalist social reformists.

These are the new NPR interns: https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-extra/2021/02/10/964116319/meet-the-2021-winter-npr-interns These are the latest NYT Fellows: https://www.nytco.com/careers/newsroom/newsroom-fellowship/2021-22-fellows/ Kudos to Andrew Sullivan for publicizing both of these. Katie brushes over the fact that NPR (like the NYT) doesn’t seem to be able to find any qualified straight non-Latino white men (and very few gay ones). Still, what’s happening is, at best, excruciating embarrassing. Not as ugly as how elite colleges treat Asian applicants, granted, but it’s similarly damning. Beyond the chance of political backlash, I wonder what the legal ramifications of NPR racial & gender policies in hiring are.

adding to show notes -j

Got a link for that Eoin Higgins Twitter likes story? I cant find it Edit: Found it https://theoutline.com/post/6708/marc-andreessen-twitter-faves-alt-right

To borrow another person's catchphrase be brave call bullshit. Also since woke people are apparently ripping their disliked colleagues on slack in these places, what's to stop someone from making their own slightly more anonymous version of a groupchat to discuss these issues? Maybe make a signal or telegram group and encourage anyone who joins to use a burner number? Setup a protonmail account that you circulate around for people to share horror stories and publish them anonymously on a blog. Worked for Chris rufo There is power in demonstrating the shitty atmosphere of a place even if no one wants to attach their name to it openly

Jesse's call for collective action is needed and a tonal shift I am very happy to see on the show. We all have to become braver about finding each other and building resources that can fight back. Keeping our heads down will only work in the short term, and only at the individual level. To that end, I would suggest if this person or any other journalist dares to stick their head up and gets knocked down, it will be imperative other journalists in Jesse and Katie's ilk work as their safety net. A recent guest on "The Fifth Column" pointed out that we are the snowflakes, the point being that it is our liberal, anti woke side that has chosen to hide and failed to organize openly. That has to change.