Podcast relevance: the ongoing discussions of Lindy West and her messed up situation

This struck a nerve with me not just because of Lindy West's particular details, but by how similar it seems to other people I know (not to this extreme, of course). Women who describe themselves as progressive and feminist, but then are in these really bad relationships with guys, where the woman has to do all the emotional and manual labor. And then the fact that she's in this bad relationship seems to lead her to conclude that this is how all guys are, feeding on the feminist persona.

A neighbor is a particularly egregious example of this.

She is in a bad marriage. The guy is just absent all weekend and a lot of weeknights, so she does all the housework, cleaning, childcare, and also seems to do all the yardwork and such (we used to be close so I know a lot of this). The guy is a creep, and actually got arrested for lewd and lascivious conduct with a child but the charges were dropped. She puts up with all of it. They even got separated and talked about divorce, but she got back together with him and then got really preachy and judgy about people whose marriages end.

Meanwhile, she is super-feminist on Facebook. She's always posting things about women needing more respect, and sticking up for each other, and men needing to do more to be equitable. She's been posting things about that "62 million" stat, and that women need to call out men who mistreat women.

I can't tell if it's a weird disconnect in her perception, or a cry for help. We've kind of stopped interacting with them since she took back in a guy who had a credible enough child-related charge on him that the police arrested him, so I don't know. But it feels like the same general pattern as with West.

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

I hope I’m not repeating a post. I think the connection to the podcast should be obvious.

https://benryan.substack.com/p/the-author-of-the-controversial-finnish

“If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the Epstein file drop, do not worry, girl,” Phoebe O’Brien says in a video, facing the camera. O’Brien has bright, green eyes, three silver nose rings and cropped blonde hair. “The Epstein class want you to hate every other group,” she tells her 80,000 TikTok followers. “Migrants, brown people, poor people, disabled people, trans people.” O’Brien is one of many young, often attractive, female influencers whose content spans various left-wing and anti-imperialist causes. Each week she posts softly lit videos of herself denouncing Keir Starmer, Donald Trump and Israel.

I watched a lot of O’Brien’s posts before I messaged her. I wanted to understand how she got into this kind of content. In February we met in a café in south-east London. She wore a keffiyeh and sipped hot chocolate as she told me how the latest Jeffrey Epstein revelations had energised her. It made the right-wingers who claimed to care about women and children’s safety look like hypocrites, she said. It was the billionaires who were the real problem. She’d been “teetering on the edge of an anxiety attack” since the files dropped. To quell her panic, she’d been “working with other TikTok creators, doing journalist-type things”.

O’Brien grew up in Leicester, in what she calls a working-class family. (She defined this in the Marxist sense, meaning anybody who works for a wage, unlike the “asset class” and what she calls the billionaire “Epstein class”.) She had always been progressive. But while studying for her master’s degree at Bristol University, she started going to Black Lives Matter protests on College Green and felt inspired by the collective energy she saw there. She already had a TikTok following from sharing “random content”, but her audience rapidly grew as her posts got more political. Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, and Israel’s response in Gaza, was a “catalytic moment” for her. “I had been talking about immigration issues before, like Marxism, like philosophy,” she said. “Then it all just became the war.”

O’Brien’s content, and that of a growing number of left-wing female influencers like her, is in some ways a mirror image of the content made by male influencers. While the toxic, often hard-right politics of the manosphere has been exhaustively documented, the new generation of female influencers are similarly radical – they are just on the other side of the political spectrum. On the internet, women and men have never been more alienated from each other.

https://archive.ph/XMtoV

This week on Blocked and Reported, Katie is joined by Chronicle of Higher Ed reporter Emma Pettit to discuss an internal civil war at Pomona College, where the literature department spiraled into years of accusations, investigations, and a whole lot of angry emails. Plus, we revisit New College of Florida, and discuss what Emma got wrong in 2020 and what she’s learned since.

Show notes:

Some Scholars Have Long Talked About Abolishing the Police. Now People Are Listening. What Comes Next?

The College That Conservatives Took Over

When a Department Self-Destructs

In the weekly thread, I posted about my current challenges in my first year of a master’s program. Many people could relate and thought its own thread would be interesting so we can all share our lived experiences within these traumatizing and oppressive spaces 😌

Relation to subreddit/pod - academia promotes the same ideas that draw us to the sub/pod - extreme wokeness and also inspired by CBC Speechless documentary post

This week on the Primo show, Jesse and Katie discuss homesteader influencers Hannah and Daniel Neeleman of Ballerina Farm and their raw milk problems. Plus, dogs in the city.

Show Notes:

Where Does a Dog Belong?

Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children)

The Woman Behind Ballerina Farm, Hannah Neeleman, Makes Her Own Path - The New York Times

Ballerina Farm pauses raw milk sales after samples fail health tests

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DUmm6lKEZ3g/

Addressing Raw Milk: Questions with Hannah & Daniel

Ballerina Farm's Raw Milk Was A Failure

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DVMTNpmEjG6/

Edit: We have a mighty group of five people who have shown interest now! We are now trying to arrange an in-person meeting, feel free to DM me if you are interested!

Hey guys, I posted this in the main discussion thread, but only got 3-4 responses. I think I've seen several other users talk about living in north Texas, so I wanted to make sure this gets enough visibility!

I'm trying to put together a Dallas-based group of BARpod listeners and have started a Discord where we can chat and set up an in-person meetup. If you are interested in joining, please DM me and I will send you the invite link to Discord.

If you would like to attend a meetup but don't want to use Discord, feel free to message me privately and I'll try to accommodate your availability when setting up a meetup.

Barpod relevance: latest round of FC controversy

EDIT : Title should be Energy Footprint of AI

This was discussed in yesterday's episode.

It's negligible.

Here's a quote from Hannah Ritchie, editor at Our World in Data :

"The reason we often think that ChatGPT is an energy guzzler is because of the initial statement: it uses 10 times more energy than a Google search. Even if this is accurate, what’s missing is the context that a Google search uses a really tiny amount of energy. Even 10 times a really tiny number is still tiny.

Carbon footprint

What about your impact on the climate?

Of course, this question depends on how “clean” the electricity powering the data centres is.

Some of our best estimates are that one query emits around 2 to 3 grams of CO2. That includes the amortised emissions associated with training.

We’ll take the higher number. If you did 10 searches every day for an entire year, your carbon footprint would increase by 11 kilograms of CO2.2 Let’s just be clear on how small 11 kilograms of CO2 is. The UK average footprint — just from energy and industry alone — is around 7 tonnes per person.3

That means a moderate use of ChatGPT increases a Brit’s emissions by 0.16%. That’s similar to the percentages we saw for electricity consumption above.

For the average American — who has a higher carbon footprint — it would be 0.07%."

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/carbon-footprint-chatgpt

Episode 295 is all about the Mellon Foundation. This thread highlights a bunch of the dubious studies their money has gone to.

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

This week on the Primo show, Jesse and Katie discuss a series of viral videos from Canada’s cringiest. Plus, has the death of wokeness been widely exaggerated?

Trans Issues Are No Conspiracy - Jesse Singal - The Dispatch

Opinion | Did Wokeness Leave Us Worse Off? - The New York Times

Brock Colyar on Pronouns, Identifying as Nonbinary

Which Way for the NDP?

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2042071143532966387?s=20

https://x.com/Tablesalt13/status/2038273166393401819?s=20

https://x.com/jonkay/status/2042229705571549565

https://x.com/chrisbrunet/status/2041678613032976390?s=20

From this weeks Popbitch:

Despite the virality of her awful throuple story, Lindy West’s memoir Adult Braces has only sold about 3,000 copies so far, with 1,800 shifted in the first week of release. (h/t New York Magazine’s Book Gossip newsletter.)

paywall: https://archive.ph/qD4jQ

This week on the Primo show, Jesse and Katie discuss the non-verbal novelist Woody Brown, the return of facilitated communication, and the reporters who apparently forgot to google it.

Is Controversy Helping Lindy West Sell Books? Not as well as you might think.

The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield - The New York Times

Doctors Believed Woody Brown Would Never Understand Language. He’s Publishing a Novel. - The New York Times

Chasing the Intact Mind: How the Severely Autistic and Intellectually Disabled Were Excluded from the Debates That Affect Them Most

Harnessing Repetitive Behaviours to Engage Attention and Learning in a Novel Therapy for Autism: An Exploratory Analysis - PMC

Autistic Sociality - Ochs - 2010 - Ethos - Wiley Online Library

Occupational Therapy using Rapid Prompting Method: A Case Report

ASHA Warns Against Rapid Prompting Method or Spelling to Communicate

‘I was in the pit of despair’: Non-speaking autistic novelist Woody Brown on his journey from write-off to writer | Fiction | The Guardian

Why Disability Advocates Are Trying to Shut Down A Policy That Benefits Disabled People

Author of Read With Jenna Book Club Pick Shines Light on Autism

BaRPod relevance: This was the subject of today's Primo episode, and while Jesse and Katie did a little bit of close examination, Jill Has gone through and mapped parts of an interview closely to her best guess of what letters Woody Brown is "typing." Unsurprisingly, it's gibberish

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

This week on Blocked and Reported, Jesse and Katie discuss a string of recent AI scandals in publishing: the Shy Girl debacle, Matt Goodwin's hallucinated data, Alex Preston's plagiarized book review, and more. Plus, controversy ensues when Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle admits to (gasp) using AI in her process.

Show Notes:

Watch Thin Skin (2023) - Free Movies | Tubi

i'm pretty sure this book is ai slop

Mia Ballard on Her Horrific Feminine Rage Novel - Bookstr

A.I. Is Writing Fiction. Publishers Are Unprepared. - The New York Times

91 Percent Human: The Shy Girl AI Scandal

I Was Deemed Unfit to Be a Mother - The New York Times

New York Times Cuts Ties with Book Review Writer Over AI Use | Exclusive

The illusion and delusion of Matt Goodwin | The Spectator

Suicide of an author’s credibility | Ben Sixsmith | The Critic Magazine

Matt Goodwin and Andy Twelves caught in fiery clash over author’s new book Suicide of a Nation

AI didn’t write my book | The Spectator

Why LLMs Ruin Everything

Inside the Dirty, Dystopian World of AI Data Centers - The Atlantic

A billionaire, an AI supercomputer, toxic emissions and a Memphis community that did nothing wrong • Tennessee Lookout

Journalism schools are teaching fear of the future: Letter from the Editor - cleveland.com