Give Me All Your Podcasts

I listened to a bit. Dude seems good, but he seriously needs to be part of a duo for his podcast.

"The Fall of Civilizations" seemed appropriate at this point. I've been watching it on Youtube rather than just listening as a podcast, but its available either way.  

Vox has a podcast Land of the Giants. The current subject is Netflix. I have found it interesting, especially the episode where Blockbuster ultimately fails to compete with them.  And, also, a couple of episodes feature our own swagonion.

Any of the maximum fun listening contingent have thoughts on John Roderick’s CanOpenerGate? I’ll admit I’m a bit torn because he’s always seemed a bit the pretentious ass when he’d guest on stuff I listen to and even his version of the story on Twitter sounds like him being a real dick to his kid, but the cries of “child abuse” a bit much.

Do I want to look into who/what John Roderick and "CanOpenerGate" are at all?

It was all revealed in the Shoutbox immediately after I made that post.

I'm a lefty who, thanks to playing an instrument, managed to develop some rudimentary gross motor skills in my right hand. I can use one of those manual can openers, but it's very uncomfortable and it kind of stresses me out every time I have to.

The dude's entire "Give a man a fish you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime. Toss a bunch of fishing nets at a man's feet and tell him, 'Figure it out fucker!' and you...uh...um...teach them self-reliance or something?" shtick just came off as incredibly shitty. Like he didn't actually teach her anything except maybe that her dad's a douchelord who would rather work on a jigsaw puzzle for six hours than take 10 seconds to either open a can of beans for his child or 3 seconds to show her how the can opener worked so she could do it herself or even be like, "Someone on YouTube probably has a tutorial up you could watch." She figured out how to use the can opener on her own via trial and error. Many years ago my brother and I were fucking around with bo staffs in our living room and ended up putting a hole in the ceiling. My father was pretty annoyed with us and informed us that we would be repairing the hole and procured some spackle and a trowel and then proceeded to show us how to patch the hole with it before telling us to have at it. I learned how to spackle that day and do not harbor any ill-will towards my father since he wasn't a dick about.

I do believe that Dionne Warwick has the best response to all of this, and one that people would probably do well to mimic when dealing with most social media stuff.

Owl, why couldn't he just stop building his jigsaw puzzle for a few minutes to cook food for his child that he chose to help raise?

Dad, how do I tie a necktie?

Why do we wear neckties? Are they primarily practical or decorative? What are all the possible ways we might go about looping a piece of fabric around the neck?...

Dad, I just cut myself really badly with this knife! What do I do?

First, consider the knife, its component parts such has blade, handle, and tang, and the various processes that comprise the art of metalworking and knifesmithing...

Dad, I'm being framed for a crime I didn't commit!

Let us begin with an overview of the criminal justice system, American jurisprudence, and its origins in English common law...

Yea, there’s an object lesson on mediocre white male privilege in his ability to ingratiate himself with otherwise talented, non-shitty people for sure.

Also, those tweets aren’t that old, he was already an allegedly progressive man in his forties when he made them. A dumb kid figuring out acceptable humor he was not.

Yeah, agreed.  He wasn't an idiot teenager when he posted all this, or even a guy just getting his start as a public figure; he was a middle-aged man, who among other things explained why the n-word is a slur (while nevertheless actually writing the entire word out) but neverthless thinks it's OK to use homophobic and ableist language in a pejorative sense back in 2013.  Like, in said tweet, I think he was trying to argue that "gay" can be used in a pejorative sense if it's being used in a context divorced from someone's sexual orientation.  Which, while obviously still bullshit, is an argument I've heard people use before, but one which, on top of the fact that Roderick was saying this in his 40s, had really fallen out of fashion in the sort of discourse that he would have been engaging with in 2013. 

Also, this is far from the most salient thing about his Twitter behavior, but one of the tweets I saw from a few years back was just some horseshoe theory bullshit basically arguing "When leftists critique capitalism it's really veiled antisemitism; the far right on the other hand, simply baldly state that they hate Jewish people," which is really wild given that all the tweets he made saying incredibly anti-semitic stuff in an ostensible attempt at parodying anti-semitic right wingers.  Which shows that, for all the bad-faith criticism of centrist libs about the Left's problem with racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia/anti-semitism/etc., this is probably a worse problem among such centrist libs complaining about bigotry on the Left.