And I'm a fantastic fucking judge of what's funny.
Heebie-geebie for Daily Show correspondent!
And I'm a fantastic fucking judge of what's funny.
So, "Opinionated" modifier: funny?
I hesistate to write her off without seeing her work
I thought you understood how this internet argument thing worked. Uninformed commentary forever!
Eh, based on the linked bit, it seems like pretty standard Daily Show writing, with a delivery designed to undermine some of the audience's expectations. So, nu, it could always be worse.
My plan of summarily executing by firing squad everyone ever involved with Gawker Media would solve this entire problem.
6: I'm sensing some hostility, Robert.
"Women Gawker Media-sponsored blog dramatics are considered deep--why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women Gawker Media-sponsored blog dramatics are not even shallow."
The interview with her did evoke some sympathy as it must be hard to be told that one's success is due more to a willingness to degrade oneself than to pure talent, but then she lost me by lashing out, rather than engaging in self-reflection (at least in that interview).
I've only ever seen her in the clip you link, but from that, I must say I'm not particularly impressed with her comedic timing.
I sort of miss the days when I watched the Daily Show regularly. Somehow, the last time I moved, that habit got dropped, even though the commute, job, A/V setup, and so forth all remained the same.
Gay sex ed instructed by mimes: funny?
From the interview:
And [her abusive stepfather] actually would only marry Asian women, I think, because he thought they were oppressed and seemed submissive.
And then she found success playing down to geeks. Still, she obviously values being chosen by Stewart for her talent, emphasizing he hadn't seen her dressed as Wonder Woman, so it'll be interesting to see how she performs.
If she ends up being funny, I'll approve. If she's not, I won't. And I'm a fantastic fucking judge of what's funny.
Having:not watched the Daily Show even once in my life;not heard of Olivia Munn;not clinking through any of the links;no interest in schtick or standup comedy;a humility about my feminist instincts...
...I defer to heebies deferred judgement and will wait to decide if there is funny to be found until heebie tells me.
emphasizing he hadn't seen her dressed as Wonder Woman
Link?
You do have to wonder whether the Daily Show tried to hire Sarah Haskins, and if not, why not. If they didn't try to hire her, that'd be far more damning to me than anything involving Olivia Munn.
I'm not particularly impressed with her comedic timing.
Yeah, but that's about par for the course there right now. Wyatt Cenac almost always seems clunky to me. Aziz Ansari only nails it about half the time. John Oliver is more consistent than those two, but is kind of a one-noter overall. Stewart is probably part of the problem. He's very, very good at what he does and sharing a stage with him has to be like hitting the clubs with your professional dancer friend.
I'd have to go back and watch old shows to get a good feel for past correspondents, because it might be like SNL. I remember what most people would call the golden age of that show, but when I've gone back and watched those shows, they weren't nearly as funny as I remembered them being.
I firmly believe they could have found someone like Sarah Haskins if they'd wanted to. I'm sure the marketing department had a hand in skewing the selection towards sexy.
I still remember the one where Steven Cobert hit on a lesbian and asked a minister when orange juice turned him gay. I think the golden age was as good as you remember.
One woman quoted in the original Jezebel piece that ideas for segments involving 'women's humor' weren't welcome:
I would pitch something like, can I do a segment on women's self help or on fitness. And they didn't want anything like that...Ed Helms got to have his mole removed [in a segment], but they weren't going to do, a women goes to the gynecologist. They felt like at the time it wasn't their audience.
If 'woman goes to the gynecologist' isn't their thing, I can see why Sarah Haskins wouldn't be on their radar.
But Sarah Haskins shtick of turning the media's stupidity back on itself is so similar to the Daily Show's modus operandi, that if they're not interested in her because her material is too "female" then they really are being sexist.
And John Oliver's shtick seems to consist entirely of being loud, with an accent.
I think he's hit and miss. Sometimes he makes me laugh.
To make an unfair comparison, Jason Jones is no Stephen Colbert.
I wish they would use Larry Wilmore more, though.
Is there a sound business reason why Stewart's videos are embargoed outside the US? Is there a rational policy? Is it generic to whichever network owns his soul or just his idea?
Enquiring minds would like to know.
Stephen Colbert is one of the geniuses of our time, it's indeed hardly fair to expect new correspondents to measure up to him. But getting people of say Rob Corddry's caliber shouldn't be so hard.
It's hard to know what portion is poor writing - is it harder to write for the correspondents? - and what portion is poor improv/sense of comic enhancement.
Very possibly the whole correspondent structure is just too drawn out to be as funny. Stewart gets to hop from topic to topic at a great pace.
I was just about to type 31. He's consistently hilarious.
So what actually did happen with Samantha Bee? It seems as if she's left the show? She, I thought, was pretty good.
Sam Bee is still with the show as far as I know.
She has a new book ou that's supposed to be very good, neb.
Ok, I haven't seen it in a while and some of the commentary gave me that impression.
She's still a correspondent, but she's on her third pregnancy in three years and is developing a sitcom with Jason Jones, so I guess she's busy.
33: Agreed. It was kind of painful when they tried to continue This Week in God after he left.
Replacing him, Carrell, Helms and Cordry with the likes of Rob Riggle and Jones left a lot of the segments feeling like they were just a few roofies short of a frat house.
I liked it better with Craig Kilborn.
Beth Littleford was funny as he'll. Looking at this list, and given the letter sent by women who work there, this whole thing leaves me provisionally unconvinced.
I would pitch something like, can I do a segment on women's self help or on fitness. And they didn't want anything like that...Ed Helms got to have his mole removed [in a segment], but they weren't going to do, a women goes to the gynecologist. They felt like at the time it wasn't their audience.
Given the sort of things Sam Bee has done on the show, especially during her pregnancies, I'm not sure this seems too plausible. Then again, what do I know?
I have to say that the Colbert/Helms/Cordry era was very much a golden age when it comes to correspondents, although I am a big fan of Oliver, Hodgman, Wilmore and Schaal. But apart from Oliver, they're used pretty sparingly and feel a bit tokenistic (of course, with Wilmore that's pretty much the joke).
Is there a sound business reason why Stewart's videos are embargoed outside the US? Is there a rational policy? Is it generic to whichever network owns his soul or just his idea?
I'm pretty sure it's to do with licensing issues - eg in the UK More 4 air the Daily Show and I'm sure their contract prevents CC from showing the internet version in the UK. Also Comedy Central itself is on Sky - who knows what their contract says. For other countries, I don't know, but maybe they're too lazy to region lock that specifically. Anyway, it's pretty easy to get around with a proxy.
I have a friend who worked on the Daily Show for a while, and she told me, years ago now, that Jon Stewart was one of those men who doesn't think women can be funny. Depressing.
(Bonjour from Saint-Denis-de-Brompton.)
Gah, I can't believed I broke my self-imposed internet abstention to read any of this fracas (not that I'm blaming you, Heebie, I blame my weak-willed reading of Slate yesterday). About a year ago I decided to stop reading most blogs (except to lurk here and EotAW) because I felt that they were exhausting me emotionally and eating up too many of my mental resources. My Outrage-O-Meter was constantly going off, and it wasn't even productive outrage. I also was getting bummed out that any sort of writing on gender seemed to occur in some "pink ghetto"--an offshoot site on a major online mag (Slate's XX, Salon's Broadsheet), or else was just Nick Denton douchery masquerading as feminism. Jezebel is the most pernicious of them all (gah! did I just link to Hirshman?!).
Ok, back to studying for the bar and looking for jobs. I miss you, internet buddies.
I was never that enamored of the non-Stewart segments, even in the "golden days," since so much is interviews based on the comedy of awkwardness, which I receive in the standard Mineshaft fashion.
Stewart is probably part of the problem. He's very, very good at what he does
Also, a camera hog. One reason he's a crappy interviewer is that he can't share a spotlight.
which I receive in the standard Mineshaft fashion
In the butt?
which I receive in the standard Mineshaft fashion
Full in the face?
51, 52: Every Friday is two-for-one night.
I never ventured into the feminist blogosphere, mostly because I didn't think I had the training for it. Seemed to me that without a theory class that explained to me where themes came from and taught me at least some of the pro and cons for the different themes, I'd just be sent spinning off into outrage land. When I started law school, I was always dismayed that I pretty much agreed with whichever side of the case I'd read most recently, which doesn't say much for my internal compass. I figured that's how I'd react to the feminist blogs as well.
Then I sorta kinda tried to make FTA feminist, in my clumsy way, by being into the things that interest me and not bashing women. Presumably there's a feminist wave for that too, but I don't know what it is named.
I'm sort of conflicted about the Olivia Munn thing. I honestly don't feel it's my business to decide whom TDS should hire. Was Munn hired for being sexy? Sure! Was she also hired because she has some experience making jokes and speaking clearly on TV? Yep!
The only thing that bothers me about it is that, as Lindsay points out, 9/10 of her schtick is being a total cunt to and about women. The sexy thing doesn't bother me. But it's her go-to joke all the time. Women are bitches. Women be shoppin'. Women call her fat. In one of the interviews L links to, she comes back again and again to the "joke" that the only thing she would never ever do in bed is lick a woman's vagina, because that's fucking disgusting. Ha ha! I don't want to take it too seriously because she's obviously joking, but she thinks she's Sarah Silverman, but just doesn't get it. There's a reason why it's tempting as a woman to talk shit about women.
And I don't know why everyone above hates Wyatt Cenac. I love him.
||
The subtitles here seem to be a brilliant example of "wreck a nice beach". "American Airlines in Helvetica" becomes "how many Kenyans in November" at around 5:15. There was also something about "putting their wives in our hands".
|>
(Bonjour from Saint-Denis-de-Brompton.)
Patron saint of folding bicycles?
57: AWB, did you ever see the movie Medicine for Melancholy with Wyatt Cenac? I sort of liked it.
I saw it and I thought it wasn't very good at all!
60: No! I just watched the trailer; it looks good!
I did like the segment with Cenac and Oliver about not-so-veiled violent threats from the right in which Cenac said, basically, let's go; we've got guns too.
I don't want to take it too seriously because she's obviously joking, but she thinks she's Sarah Silverman, but just doesn't get it.
Now, if TDS had hired Silverman, that I could get behind.
I only see the Daily Show via the random internet clip.
But, I love it. I am not shocked that some are in poor taste or that some are not funny.
The average of the clips that I see are so much better than anything else on tv on the vast majority of the issues.
64: Silverman's already too big to be a correspondent, right? She would have been a great hire pre-aristocrats, but her rise after that was too fast for the Daily Show to have a chance.
Aziz Ansari only nails it about half the time.
Yeah. I have issues with Silverman, in that I don't think racism, ironic or not, is funny, but one gets the sense that she's actually thought things out, and there is more to her than chink-jokes. Take away Munn's misogyny and I'm not sure there's much there.
that I could get behind
Or in front of. It depends on if you're a nosflovite or an apostropharian.
68: Crap. That wasn't even close.
Silverman would never have been a good hire for the daily show, since her style would absolutely not fit there.
since her style would absolutely not fit there
That's sort of the puzzle about Munn: her style seems absolutely not to fit there. So either she's going to be called upon to change her style, if that's possible for her*, or the show's just doing something, well, puzzling.
* It's occurred to me that she may crash and burn, and be, er, let go fairly quickly. She may not, of course.
I agree wholeheartedly with 74. Or really that she's massively overrated as funny, and massively underrated as a non-ironic racist.
74: Sorry, nosflow, you're not qualified to make that judgment. Are you a FFJOWF? I think not.
I'm fucking Matt Damon was pretty damn funny.
Yeah, that was pretty funny, as are a few other things I can think of. Which is why I'd probably go with "overrated" rather than "not funny."
What bothers me is the fact that her being overrated is so deeply linked to the critics' love for the supposedly liberating power of her (ironic! remember they are ironic!) racist jokes. Without that, she'd just be seen as a pretty OK comedian.
Without that, she'd just be seen as a pretty OK comedian
Ambiguous!
He means she's attractive and from Oklahoma, I think.
I dunno, to me the three most memorable Sarah Silverman routines (The Aristocrats, "Please let there be semen in my dead grandma's vagina," and "I'm fucking Matt Damon") aren't racist humor. (Though I forget the details of the second routine, I might be forgetting some ironic racism there.)
Whenever I've seen Silverman perform in the UK [on TV, I mean] the 'racist' stuff hasn't seemed a very central part of her shtick. Instead, it's been driven more by sexual material, and the faux-naif egotistical self-regard. It's fairly funny, at least some of the time.
That might just be how she's edited for British TV, or a reflection of a different choice of material she's making for a different audience.
Ok, so I followed the links except the Slate one about feminist blogs which wouldn't open, and I still don't care very much because I have like no sense of humor but...
...I trust my humorless pseudo-feminist instincts and have great faith in human intelligence and compassion and if I found Munn's schtick obviously ironic and interrogative of the male gaze I can presume many or most of the geeks in her audience saw what I did.
Like much of post-modern humor, what is funny about the dangling hotdogs involves a scathing contempt for any sexist segment of the audience that finds the hotdogs unironically funny, and b) Munn's liberation, in that she just doesn't give a flying fuck what the sexists or the feminists think.
I like Munn. I didn't think she was funny, but she is smart and interesting.
Stewart is a prick, and I can't stand him.
I think the stuff mentioned in 85 is a bigger part of her act than the race stuff, even here. But I do think that the "OMG Sarah Silverman comic genius" meme -- which I think is fading; this was more of an issue 2-3 years ago or so -- is largely based on her particular twist on the old fashioned racist joke.
I always thought the "OMG Sarah Silverman comic genius" meme was based on her performance in "The Aristocrats." The timing was right. And delivering the most memorable joke in a documentary about comedians is the sort of thing you'd expect to make a splash.
I am reminded of the end segment of this Sandra Bernhard film, from fucking twenty years ago, for gawds sake.
The film is notorious for a finale in which Bernhard wears nothing but pasties and an extremely skimpy g-string (in an American Flag print,) and proceeds to go-go dance to the song "Little Red Corvette" by Prince.
Bernhard had the bored contempt of a "exotic dancer" down, lighting was harsh, no audience etc. It was not sexy. But it has been twenty years, and if we can't take the irony up another notch, we have not been making progress.
I would agree that she's only occasionally funny, although I think she went from overrated to underrated, but I could see her persona, as Ttam describes it, working pretty well for a correspondent. I don't know if she could pull it off, but naive, self-regarding egocentrism describes Colberts character fairly well.
89:And delivering the most memorable joke
Arguable. No, pseudo-feminist bullshit. It was not unexpected from Silverman and would only be considered "special" to someone with essentialist ideas about women.
Saget and Gottfried were far more "memorable."
I don't really endorse the rest of Bob's comment, but I thought that Saget was funnier in the Aristocrats, too. IMO what made Silverman so good in that film was that she made fun of the entire premise of the movie, which, by the time she appears, had already grown quite tiresome.
I liked: George Carlin; Gilbert Gottfried; Jason Alexander.
Right now, I think of George Carlin as the guy who narrates Thomas the Tank Engine, so it's probably just as well I didn't see him to The Aristocrats.
17: "not watched the Daily Show even once in my life"
86: "Stewart is a prick, and I can't stand him."
Just out of curiosity, what do you base the latter on, given the former?
91: I thought the top three were Sarah Silverman, the mime, and whoever did the Christopher Walken routine.
96: Come on, apo, you know about bob's infallible intuition.
I have to say that the Colbert/Helms/Cordry era was very much a golden age
You left out Steve Carrell. The Carrell/Colbert combination was special in a way the show is unlikely to ever match.
Right now, I think of George Carlin as the guy who narrates Thomas the Tank Engine, so it's probably just as well I didn't see him to The Aristocrats.
You didn't get Ringo?
99: Btw, Carrell was on Colbert's show last night.
100: No. Carlin and Baldwin, mostly. There's some other guy now, but I don't know his name.
I have issues with Silverman, in that I don't think racism, ironic or not, is funny,
I think the uncomfortable truth is that your opinion here is not only a minority one but factually incorrect.
Just out of curiosity, what do you base the latter on, given the former?
103.1: How is my opinion factually incorrect? She makes racist jokes, but I think she thinks about it. It's just not a decision I would make myself, having grown up around real racism.
The Carrell/Colbert combination was special in a way the show is unlikely to ever match.
To be fair, I only caught the tail end of Colbert/Carrell, but from what I saw then and what I've seen of Carrell's work since, I'm just not much of a fan.
And I don't know why everyone above hates Wyatt Cenac. I love him.
AWB is correct, haters.
The notion that a racist joke can't be funny is obviously wrong -- Chris Rock, for example, makes "racist" jokes. But they have to be handled right!
What's so annoying about Silverman is that IMO she is actually a white racist, but uses the ironic twist to get away with it, and that hipsters find this funny. I don't give her as much credit for thoughtfulness -- unless, by thoughtfulness, you mean strategy, which she clearly has thought about a lot -- as AWB does.
Sarah Silverman, the mime, and whoever did the Christopher Walken routine walk into a bar . . .
Racism is funny.
The specific discomfort zone that Silverman lands in isn't funny to you, but I bet there is one that works for you. I bet there is a white comedian alive who can do edgy race-based humor that works for you.
There's definitely humor that's too racist for me -- and not just GOP watermelon email forwards, but "edgy" club stuff, and I sit on my hands for it. But the topic is full enough of human hypocrisy and frailty that it's going to be fodder for comedy, and some of it won't land right, and some of it will, and some of it will be on the knife edge where you don't entirely feel comfortable judging the intentions of the comic either way.
109: But it's still not factually inaccurate to say that it's not funny to me, at least not as a general category of humor. I'm lying when I speak for myself.
I confess to hyperbole. (No fun!)
Although perhaps 112 was a telling slip. Hmm?
My favorite Silverman routine is this one:
Sarah Silverman: [talking about her niece] She called me up and she's like, "Aunt Sarah, did you know that Hitler killed sixty million Jews." And I corrected her and I said, "You know, I think he's responsible for killing six million Jews." And she said, "Oh yeah! Six million! I knew that but seriously, I mean, what's the difference?" "Uh, the difference is sixty million is unforgivable, young lady!"
IMO she is actually a white racist
See, this doesn't compute for me, any more than all the commentators here making Mineshaft references are homophobes. I've known plenty of honest-to-god racists in my life and Silverman's stuff lacks the malicious edge that the real stuff carries.
This is the bit that caused some controversy for Silverman around using racist stereotypes.
My friend said, "Why don't you write something really inappropriate on the [jury duty] form, like, 'I hate chinks.'" I wanted to do it, but then I was thinking, "I don't want people to think I'm racist, or anything, I just want to get out of jury duty." So I filled out the form and I said, "I love chinks."
OK, the thing about racist jokes, rape jokes, tranny jokes, fag jokes, etc. that really gets to me is that if you don't laugh, there's this insistence on trying again and again, trying to find some kind of racist/rape/tranny/fag joke that will really work this time. It's reasonable not to laugh at jokes in general. If you don't get a grammar-based joke, the joke-teller doesn't go, "Come ON, you KNOW you find grammatical solecisms hilarious! I'm going to find one that finally makes you laugh so you admit it!" But not personally having a side-split hoo-boy-you-got-me-there reaction to racist/rape/tranny/fag jokes seems to produce this response every time. I didn't say everyone who makes these jokes is evil. I just said they don't generally tickle me.
The notion that a racist joke can't be funny is obviously wrong -- Chris Rock, for example, makes "racist" jokes. But they have to be handled right!
Michael Richards is quite deft, as I recall.
Seriously, if this is the best a person can do cherry-picking Silverman's "racist" material, the charge won't stick: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3RYrQSir7k
115: Wait, the Mineshaft is a real place? Then maybe we are homophobes.
115 -- I just disagree. I mean, I don't think she's going to be showing up at Klan rallies or anything (the term "racist" covers so much ground these days as to be pretty useless). But I do think that her act contains a general vibe of what I think of as a kind of smug white hipster racism; it's not like she's doing political or more activist comedy that could make the joke cited in 116 more palpable. Nor has she given much evidence that she's particularly thoughtful on the issue. I think the point of that joke is to make people think "finally, we can say that word" and that's certainly what a lot of the reception of her stuff has pointed to.
YMMV, of course -- I'm not trying to suggest that finding her funny is racist, just to explain the feeling that I get.
I'm in camp Sarah Silverman, but I've always found Michael Richards annoying, starting with Kramer.
Did anyone hear the Louis C.K. interview on NPR yesterday? He's really fucking funny. The 'faggot' excerpt from his new TV show was well done and made me laugh a lot.
6: My plan of summarily executing by firing squad everyone ever involved with Gawker Media would solve this entire problem.
YES. THIS. There will be much rejoicing.
106: Straightforwardly racist humor of the "two black guys walk into a bar" variety isn't typically funny. Humor that takes the piss out of racism can be funny, though. Silverman's pretty good at satirizing the racist thought process and at sort of a wink-wink-nudge-nudge-don't-we-all-think-racism-is-dead schtick. Which I think is pretty funny, and moreover I think she's a hugely skilled performer for making it work. Not an easy tightrope to walk. She's a damn sight funnier than Sascha Baron Cohen (who mostly sells straightforward caricature dressed up as satire and irony).
In a lot of ways she's not dissimilar from what Dave Chappelle does with race, actually; he's often the black version of that same sort of slightly-uncomfortable laughing-at-our-own-assholishness schtick. It's hugely difficult to pull this sort of thing off: Richard Pryor bombed when he tried it late in his career (at least it's some of the worst stand-up I ever saw him do); Chris Rock attempted it with "black people versus niggers" but had to drop that bit when rednecks started quoting it at him in bars. Now Rock makes jokes about how your wife would rather be screwing DMX. Much safer.
122.2: I was going to link to that clip from the show. I liked it too.
122: His new TV show is fantastic.
125: We've got it in our Hulu qeue.
117: That's more of a problem with the joke-tellers, not the jokes. It's almost certainly true that people who tell r/r/t/f jokes are likely to be assholes (and it's okay to not be comfortable with the genre, as a result).
I'm curious about the mineshaft's opinion on Daniel Tosh. He tells rather straightforwardly racist and misogynist jokes, but his delivery seems so completely lacking in animosity that they don't usually trigger a reaction in me, but I could easily be innappropriately insensitive.
Chris Rock does not handle racist jokes right. Whoever just implied that is totally fired. Chris Rock is how not to do it.
Went to get groceries, slowburnt in the Dallas sun, and decided to join the fray because I am getting pissed off and Sandra Bernhard and Gilbert Gottfried made me cry.
that she made fun of the entire premise of the movie, which, by the time she appears, had already grown quite tiresome.
Tiresome is what is about. Of course the "Aristocrats" joke gets boring, repetitive and hackneyed. That is part of the point. There are aspects to the joke that point to "Why did the chicken cross the road" and Martin's arrow thru the head.
Okay. Gilbert Gottfried in the Aristocrats. Starts telling dark 9/11 jokes on like 9/15 and the audience goes all "oh noes" and "too soon" on him. And Gottfried gives them a stare (you chickenshit *selfish* motherfuckers) and goes into the Aristocrats. Now I can't begin to explore all the depths of what was going on there, but here is one:
Comedy is about trust
OK, some comedy sometimes. But if WC Fields really hated kids, if Don Rickles really wanted to hurt people, they wouldn't be funny.
Do her feminist critics *trust* Olivia Munn? Trust her to know what she is doing, to have integrity and self-respect? Do the feminist have any trust in her audience? Do they think, that I for instance, got a hardon with the dangling hotdogs? Are all men worthless pigs, or just most of them?
It isn't a lack of humor that is the problem here. It is a certain set of feminists that treasure their victimhood and ressentiment at the cost of respecting other human beings, apparently both male and female.
And oh yeah, was Sandra Bernhard objectifying women, reinforcing stereotypes back in 1990?
That routine may be on youtube, but I have never bothered with an adult registration.
It's on Hulu? Yay, more time-wasting!
CK was the favorite comic of my brother and me when we were growing up. I enjoyed reading the Onion AV Club interview with him, in which he talked about doing new material for every tour, rather than doing popular bits over and over. He seems to work really hard.
I guess a lot of the response to Silverman is whether you see her as sincerely parodying real racists (which is one way to see her shtick) or as providing a way to get away with racism by dressing it up as an ironic parody of racists (this is what I think of as hipster-ironic racism). I very much see the latter with her, but of course I can see an argument for the former.
Do they think, that I for instance, got a hardon with the dangling hotdogs?
Do you really have this poor an understanding of feminism?
130 -- Yeah, that was me, and I felt that was wrong as soon as I wrote it.
121: There's a point where irony stops being interesting, or where the conviction that what you're doing is "ironic" can blind you to the fact that you're doing the same damn thing the unironic people before you were doing. That said, I think Silverman's schtick is a bit more interesting and complicated than you're making out; it's not unadulterated CocoRosie Syndrome.
It's a schtick, though. There's nothing particularly redemptive about it. But that's okay: if I want racially activist comedians I'll find me some Paul Mooney.
I think the point of that joke is to make people think "finally, we can say that word"
Really? I mean, it can only conceivably work as a joke (and personally I think it does) if people don't think we can say that word.
And, AWB, I certainly wouldn't suggest that everybody should find her funny or even acceptable. Just that I do, most of the time.
Silverman is more in the category of "viscerally unbearable" to me, so I can't dissect the lack of appeal any further. About as entertaining as "Wonder Showzen", "TV Funhouse" or "Superjail". They all seem to have in common an inhuman sort of selfishness also found in the libertarian-free speech-dogma episodes of "South Park" which have come to dominate "South Park" entirely as far as I can tell.
Oh, Ned. Hate on Sarah Silverman all you want, but Wonder Showzen was teh awesome.
138: the libertarian-free speech-dogma episodes of "South Park" which have come to dominate "South Park" entirely as far as I can tell.
Didn't this always dominate South Park entirely?
134:Is it a club? Will there be a test?
The Bernhard bit has made me think for twenty years. It also comes up in socialism.
Comedy is hard. Revolution is hard.
The Bernahard schtick is to all appearances a nonironic titty-bar dance, and the only interrogation comes from within those watching it, i.e., this is Sandra Bernhard.
I have become ever more convinced that you really can't tell or teach anyone anything, and the best bet is to push the stereotypes so hard and so unironically, so devoid of context, that the audience, or some sane portion of it, starts to question themselves.
Which looks like what Munn is doing.
It is the equivalent of doing a Stepin Fetchit or Amos & Andy routine in 2010.
I never really liked South Park, but it's gotten totally unwatchable recently.
I do have a sense of humor, I swear!
"Recently" s/b "over the past ten years"
It is the equivalent of doing a Stepin Fetchit or Amos & Andy routine in 2010.
I think it would be great if you wrote a fan letter to Olivia Munn making this comparison and saying how much you enjoy her postmodern twist on unbearable sexist stereotypes of the long-ago past.
Bob, I think you should go out and get some more sunstroke and then come back and comment some more. Not for any particular reason, I just think it would be awesome.
And 141 pertains to some of my schtick.
Of course I know that calling for Violent Revolution Now is ridiculous. I want those who read me to ask themselves why they think it has become ridiculous.
But now I've spoiled the joke.
Comedy is hard
Dying is easy. Quit stepping on my lines, bob.
144:Sorry. I am not a fan.
She's fat.
Does 148 make you laugh or make you mad?
Comedy is fucking dangerous.
148 made me laugh. Score one for comedy bob.
The line between commie bob and comedy bob is a subtle demarcation.
148 would be better without 149. But I feel like a housepainter lecturing Rembrandt on composition.
White guys just aren't all that funny.
doing new material for every tour, rather than doing popular bits over and over
This is another problem with Sarah Silverman. I liked her on Larry Sanders (no racism, just sex), then saw her live a few years later and all those jokes were still in her act. Several also appear in the bits of Jesus Is Magic that I've caught on cable, from a few years after that. I think she writes about two jokes a year.
151. We have comedy comity.
151: Comity bob is nowhere in sight, though.
||
The heavens have just opened wide with an absolutely torrential rain. I would offer to send some to cool off y'all back east, but you'd have to watch out for the flash floods.
|>
What Ned said: Silverman is more in the category of "viscerally unbearable" to me, so I can't dissect the lack of appeal any further.
Thanks, Ned. I couldn't find a way to say it, and just kept stalling out with, "But she's so annoying."
Louis CK is awesome. His Being White routine is excellent, as is his Broke routine.
41:
Is anybody going to mention Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show?
Bamboozled is a fantastic mess and a great exploration of the limits of "irony."
If anyone hasn't read enough about Olivia Munn, I recommend the Pandagon thread.
I think I may have experienced The Aristocrats in a unique way, in that I find scatological humor mortifying and unfunny, but the way they all went in for the kill with it kind of overloaded my circuits (like the 52 Queens of Hearts breaking Laurence Harvey's brain in The Manchurian Candidate) and I laughed more at that movie than any movie I can recall.
Medicine for Melancholy on the other hand felt like, well, an inside joke I wasn't in on. I wanted to think this was because I don't know San Francisco well and don't have much of a personal mythology of the place rather than: I am a white person who can't identify with a movie about two black people, but who knows.
122: I got linked to the "faggot" thing from the show and had a complicated reaction to it, starting with my maybe problematic idea that things like sex clubs are perfectly fine for the gay community not to talk much about and ending with the fact that the discussion of the word "faggot" misses the point in an enormous way, in my infallible opinion. But the tone of the thing was really interesting and, I think, well-thought-through.
162: Really? The post calls Gould's "real" argument a less clever version of Rush Limbaugh, then goes on to complain about her being "ungenerous" and accuses her of painting Jezebel's bloggers as secretly conspiring to screw women over (an argument explicitly disavowed in the article it's talking about). Is there something interesting in the comments thread or did you find the post impressive?
DS, don't get into it. Once they all go to the firing squad, no one will ever have to care.
Halford, does your Gawker firing squad foment bob's revolution, or is it part of the general mayhem?
libertarian-free speech-dogma episodes
I had to think about this for a minute before I realized it wasn't about the episodes with no libertarians and lots of grammar lessons.
Also, how does one get on the firing squad?
Munn is not funny enough for me to watch enough of her to decide whether watching her is politically acceptable. I did notice that she is smoking hot, and that counts as a legitimate route to TV success.
I loved the Sarah Silverman bit about her pet name for her pussy..."faggot". There are a lot of layers in that joke. Can only take about five or ten minutes at a time of her though.
Haven't been impressed by any of the Daily Show correspondents since the golden age of Carrell and Colbert. The funniest stuff on the Daily Show is the clips from Fox and CNN.
165: Sorry, yeah, I was thinking of the thread much more than the post. I thought there were some interesting tendrils in there about liberal, funny guys who are nevertheless tone-deaf to their own sexism; about what kind of humor women are expected/allowed to perform; about the irritatingly-still-relevant issues of tokenism.
I don't know or care much about the politics; I don't actually read Jezebel and I don't know either of the people that Amanda Marcotte is writing about in the main post. I just thought it was a good conversation (in part) about how a group of folks who are running something brave and funny and insightful like the The Daily Show can also be just as vulnerable to the structural frailities of our society as, well, anybody else.
I have seen Sarah Silverman a couple of times at the gym. She is very small.
Also, how does one get on the firing squad?
Right place, right time, BYOR. Second Amendment absolutists welcome.
172: Well, I think there might be an interesting conversation to be had about the drooling sexism of geekdom which Munn has made a career from exploiting, and about the parameters of women's comedy more generally. It's just a shame Jezebel went right past that and straight to "the Seekrit Sexism of the Daily Show" angle; since 40% of The Daily Show's employees are women and on record as finding her argument to be laughable bullshit, Gould's citation of the outrage-driven blogging model seems to be pretty much on point.
There is just something profoundly depressing about the very existence of Olivia Munn's career. I think it is the way her fans from G4 seem so sublimely untroubled by any awareness of being crassly pandered to that most makes my teeth itch. I'm not sure why that is -- it's not as if humans don't generally take being pandered to as their unquestioned due.
it's not as if humans don't generally take being pandered to as their unquestioned due
...given the opportunity.
I think the Gawker firing squad could fit in as a minor incident subsumed within the great Bob revolution. As far as I understand Bob's plan, it is to destroy all business except Hollywood, and then shower the masses with money and subscriptions to Turner Classic Movies. Sounds good to me. I think I could sign on early for a military role, rise through the ranks, and then direct my Gawker Media firing squad project more or less independently.
As for who gets to join, the more rifles the better. We're not an exclusionary crew.
If anyone hasn't read enough about Olivia Munn, . . .
I liked the most recent post by Sady at Tiger Beatdown.
It is, perhaps, overly long but I found it a useful primer on the topic, not having been previously familiar with Olivia Munn.
176: The thing is that geeks (especially the male ones) are really horrible, horrible people. I mean, not all of them, obviously. Unfogged has great geeks for the most part. But a lot of them. They're what happens when it becomes possible for an entire sector of a culture to convince itself that lacking social skills is a virtue.
DS and Halford, united in being jocks.
The thing is that geeks (especially the male ones) are really horrible, horrible people. ... They're what happens when it becomes possible for an entire sector of a culture to convince itself that lacking social skills is a virtue.
I could not endorse this position more enthusiastically without a truckload of rotten tomatoes, an air cannon and a ticket to San Diego Comic-Con.
Male geeks : lack of social skills :: academics of a certain era : madness?
175: The issue is women with on-screen time, so the 40% behind the scenes doesn't really factor into it.
I think Jezebel is overstating things, but there's clearly a real issue.
Good to see togolosh is adhering to the new CMS rules for styling the names of blogs.
The thing is that geeks (especially the male ones) are really horrible, horrible people.
I will make my obligatory comment on this: DS may be correct, but that isn't my personal experience. I know a number of male geeks, many of whom are great people, and only a couple of whom have behaved in ways that greatly bothered me.
Now, that may not be probably isn't a representative sample, but the quoted comment does not match my experience.
They're what happens when it becomes possible for an entire sector of a culture to convince itself that lacking social skills is a virtue.
Maybe I'm just not hanging out with the wrong people, but this doesn't describe anyone I've ever met.
This blog died some time ago, but in its time it was an amusing catalogue of some of the nerd community's particular offenses.
We had a thread less than a month ago about whether "geek" and "computer programmer" and "libertarian" and "asshole who uses Asperger's as an excuse for being an asshole" were all subsets of each other and why nobody seemed to care that such claims were anti-male. It seems like a pretty dumb discussion to have but maybe DS wasnt part of the last one.
why nobody seemed to care that such claims were anti-male
Oh come fucking on.
After reading the very informative post linked in 179 I now hate everyone. Including the person who wrote said post, for using words like "anti-girl" and "hateyness". But yes, now that I am familiar with the O. Munn persona I think less of the Daily Show for assimilating that persona into itself.
162: If anyone hasn't read enough about Olivia Munn, . . .
I have now read entirely too much about Munn. I've seen both here Daily Show segments (the first one was better than the second), I've seen her eat the hot dogs, I've seen her jump into the pie, I've seen the balloon pop, I've seen her blog, I've seen all the Jezebel posts, and all the links in Heebie's post, and all the sublinks and ... bleh. I got it. She's making the money and doesn't like the feminists since they aren't boosting her.
I liked the most recent post by Sady at Tiger Beatdown.
That was a pretty good post. Yeah, the Daily Show needs to hire more, funnier women, since neither DS segment Munn did was funny. Or maybe they should just leave the camera on John Stewart and the montages which they seem to do a lot more of these days anyways. Stewart really dominates the show now, unlike back in the olden days, so no one can get face time anymore. m, what a hubbub, bub
Including the person who wrote said post, for using words like "anti-girl" and "hateyness".
If I were the bitter, twisted shell of a man that I think I am, I would connect the crassly juvenile tone of so many blogs with the typical narcissist's self-depiction as an innocent child.
The Stuff Geeks Love website is pretty funny.
181: Oh, I say it as a geek. (Or at minimum, a nerd.) (And 187: I did say not all, you know.)
189: If you've never known any social circle that defines itself by its misfit status (and thus tolerates misfits no other community would tolerate), nor in which certain parties try to one-up each other's claims about how "weird" they are, then congratulations. You've never known any geeks.
191: We had a thread less than a month ago about whether "geek" and "computer programmer" and "libertarian" and "asshole who uses Asperger's as an excuse for being an asshole" were all subsets of each other and why nobody seemed to care that such claims were anti-male.
Definitely missed that one. Too bad, it sounds like a hoot.
(I'm almost not even kidding. The "anti-male" thing sounds amusingly like a caricature of Geek-Dude-Defensivesness, but I'll bet someone claimed it in all seriousness, didn't they?)
And yes, those categories are mostly subsets of each other.
re: 180
Fuck yes. I've been saying this here, and elsewhere, for years.*
* With usual gross-generalisation caveats ...
And, since 192 was pretty dickish, I will agree in mitigation that "geek" is way too broad, perhaps offensively broad, a brush for the problem, which is "asshole who uses lack of social skills as an excuse for being an asshole." Not seeing the anti-male thing, though.
It's a problem any sub-culture pretty easily slides into, and -- leaving aside the triumphant lack of social skills thing -- some geeks are just the flipside of 'bro'/'frat'/'chet'/'Bullingdon' types, with all the attendant self-congratulation, elitism, snobbery, and vicious-circle 'nobody likes us and we don't care' bollocks. Also with a fairly fat side-order of misogyny.
(And 187: I did say not all, you know.)
I figured that you were thinking of Robust McManlypants when you mentioned great geeks on unfogged.
More seriously, I can't get too worked up defending geeks because there are a lot of geek behaviors that I find disturbing.
At the same time, you know, Sturgeon's Law applies in this case. Yes, many geeks are annoying, but people are annoying.
I get frustrated if people try to claim that geeks are uniquely bad.
I get frustrated if people try to claim that geeks are uniquely bad.
I don't think anyone did.
Geekness are not uniquely bad, but do own a unique flavor of badness. Geek badness annoys me more because it's closer to home, and also because at least your typical jock/fratboy douchebag -- however heinous his other sins -- doesn't typically have pretensions the kind of intellectual superiority that should allow him to know better.
(Sorry, typed 203 in a rush. Typos aside I think it's still parse-able.)
And yes, those categories are mostly subsets of each other.
One set can't be mostly a subset of another!
For "mostly" read "arguably, and if not strictly-speaking subsets, they at least significantly overlap with one another."
Let me just add this, a two years ago I met somebody that just might be the geekiest person I've ever known (and, in general, my geek cred is pretty good) -- somebody who works in IT at the local university and still plays Traveler (or, at least, can converse comfortably about the entire history of the Traveler universe).
And he was also very soft-spoken and an incredibly nice person, and that didn't surprise me at all.
At the same time I also stopped by the local game room that I used to hang out in when I was younger and saw many young men that had all of the geek aggression thing going on in a way that just made me shake my head, and that disappointed me but didn't surprise me either.
I think, like anybody else, geeks who are comfortable with themselves and who they are great people to be around. Ones that aren't aren't.
any social circle that defines itself by its misfit status does not necessarily believe that lacking social skills is a virtue, proclamations of solidarity notwithstanding.
I don't even grok social skills.
I feel like there's the kind of geek who actually takes pleasure in geek life and is happy to have the kind of lifestyle that geeks have, occasional loneliness or childhood bullying notwithstanding, and then there's the kind of geek who spends more time being angry and bitter than enjoying who they are and what they can do.
210: No, but a misfit social circle wherein the belief that one is "weird" to the norms/mundanes confers extra cred, to the extent that it becomes commonly fashionable to self-diagnose with Asperger's, does manifest that belief. (They wouldn't call it valorizing a lack of social skills, of course.)
The thing that annoys me about it more than almost anything else is the vicious scorn directed outwards; which often reduces to little more than thinly veiled class-prejudice and crypto-elitism directed against their supposed intellectual 'inferiors'.
The geeky-interests and passions part is cool. I share some of them.
I forgot contempt. There's a weird combination of anger at other people for having easier social lives and contempt for them for not having the abilities they have. The sad thing is that it turns out a lot of socially gifted people are also quite intelligent and have projects and aspirations.
For me that realization was upsetting for a while because it meant my geekiness was pointless; my having been bullied didn't amount to anything or mean anything or give me any credibility. But it did make me wake up to my need to get socialized.
214: I guess I don't know many geeks if those behaviors are a prerequisite. I would be willing to bet, though, that almost anyone who has self-diagnosed as autistic would be willing to change their entire personality if it meant they could charm the pants off of a crowd of people.
it turns out a lot of socially gifted people are also quite intelligent
And have played D&D, like comics and science fiction, and even feel awkward. Sometimes.
I agree that, like any person or group that feels ostracized but maintains some sense of self-worth, there is an strong tendency towards self-defeating, preemptive aggression.
The thing is that geeks (especially the male ones) are really horrible, horrible people.
I, personally, wouldn't use politeness as a metric to judge the absolute worth of a group I'd already defined by its absence.
218.2: almost anyone who has self-diagnosed as autistic would be willing to change their entire personality
By the time you've gotten to the stage of actually wanting to project as having a serious disorder* in order to increase your geek cred, you have (I think) to be pretty heavily invested in your interpretation of geek identity, both generally and specifically.
(* I very strongly suspect a great many of those who self-diagnose with Asperger's don't understand the seriousness of what they're claiming.)
221 makes no sense.
193: After reading the very informative post linked in 179 I now hate everyone. Including the person who wrote said post, for using words like "anti-girl" and "hateyness". But yes, now that I am familiar with the O. Munn persona I think less of the Daily Show for assimilating that persona into itself.
Agreed. Again. I'm not sure I can finish the post linked in 179, however, given that the writer doesn't seem to be able to stop saying "girl" for "woman."
In any case, any passion I might be able to drum up over The Daily Show hire of Munn is over what it means for The Daily Show; Munn is more or less extraneous, I'm afraid, given that there are thousands of her out there.
IVE MET PLENTY OF NICE PEOPLE JUST BY USING MY C64!!1! WHAT MEANIE SEZ GEEKS ARE RUDE??1?1?
223: It's a tautology: people whose technical skills far exceed their social (geeks) frequently act like complete assholes (are horrible, horrible people).
221 makes no sense.
Have you no social intelligence? Fm is pointing out that it is a bit tautological to ding a group for its lack of a particular social skill when the group is defined in large part by its lack of social skills.
For instance they either pwn others or don't preview before they hit post or shit like that.
I am moderately anti-geek. Probably based on the close to home thing. It isn't what I would want my kids to grow up to be. Admittedly, I do play "yu gi oh" with them but I also hope that they will grow out of it.
I have also worked myself up into a theoretical defense of douchebags. Since I don't actually know any douchebags, disliking douchebags just means disliking people based on their appearance, which is kind of petty.
How is this tautological? Social skills (at least to the extent they help one avoid being an asshole) are a positive good. To the extent that there's a self-reinforcing group encouraging people to take pride in avoiding acquiring those skills, it's a problem.
(Extraordinarily ban-worthy analogy: It's like saying that you shouldn't criticize the Klan for being racist, since that's how it defines its identity.)
226, 227: No, I get that, it's just that the premise -- that having technical skills must necessarily mean not having social skills -- makes no sense. It's fallacious. Hence the drift of overall commentary in this thread to the effect that said group need not, in fact, be defined in large part by its lack of social skills.
227: Have you no social intelligence?
Oh, hiss-hiss, dahling.
To follow up on my own 209. I think my point was that, whatever negative traits one associates with geekiness it isn't necessarily true that the geekier a person is, the more strongly they will manifest those negative traits.
In my experience the geekier people are also often the geeks that are more comfortable in their own skin, and the people who are geeks partially for the pleasure of having a tribal identity and be in an in-group are often not all that geeky in terms of being knowledgeable in, "geeky-interests and passions."
Of course I haven't met anybody that has self-diagnoses as having Asperger's.
I would be willing to bet, though, that almost anyone who has self-diagnosed as autistic would be willing to change their entire personality if it meant they could charm the pants off of a crowd of people.
You would be wrong, and I only wish I could be funnier and more emphatic about saying so. I point to the archives.
For the record, I have never watched a second of G4, play two computer games that are twenty years old, have only read one comic book since the 60s and that was Watchmen (I didn't much like it and am very suspicious of graphic novels as an art form). I don't eat Cheetoes, or even spell it. I can build and configure a desktop in thirty minutes.
Is Asberger's something to celebrate? Snowflakes! We all have our characteristics, and most of those are both assets and liabilities simultaneously. It is a question of choosing goals or roles, and then using whatyagot to achieve or perform or function.
I know it is hard for the very social to imagine them selves not undervalued, to conceive that soeone mught want to join their clique or crowd, or that someone might not value sociality highly at all in the first place, even with other unsocials. But I don't start no fucking wars, write laws or build institutions that oppress, create oligarchies or bureaucracies, or in ant way create an ingroup to oppress an outgroup
like geeks or those who are better than geeks.
So I like Pascal stay in my room and first do no harm. Those who embrace the hem and haw and strive to leader or follower be...aww never mind.
I don't want to be the life of the party. A shallow goal for the lonely insecure folk.
It's not that geekdom is unproblematic; its just that castigating geeks for their emotional cluelessness feels a bit like piling-on. Shall we then discuss the obese and their scandalous exercise habits?
On preview:
having technical skills must necessarily mean not having social skills -- makes no sense
I wasn't attempting to claim this.
I seem to recall thinking with regard to the last thread on matters geek* that I ultimately didn't quite understand what a geek was. I may not know any; or at least, those I might call geeks don't fit the profile being constructed. These are people who spend a lot of time programming and playing video games (engaging with comics, role-playing) and rarely emerge from the basement, as it were? And they are proud of this? Don't know any who are proud of it.
* (I don't remember which thread it was, or any memorable remarks about the anti-male tenor of some comments.)
235: It's not that geekdom is unproblematic; its just that castigating geeks for their emotional cluelessness feels a bit like piling-on.
Only if you assume in advance that they're by definition incapable of learning not to be emotionally clueless. I don't see any reason to assume this; in fact it's the kind of narrative that reinforces and excuses what's worst in geekdom, and hurts geeks in so doing. Why not challenge it? Why would challenging it be "piling-on"?
213 is smart, though I'd add that happy geek and bitter geek are often seen in the same person at different points in their lives. I've seen people go from one to the other in both directions.
I knew a guy in high school who was incredibly charming and liked by everyone, but a total fuck-up and one of those debate-team types who starts arguments about things he doesn't care about just to have them. He moved to NYC for college about 10 years after dropping out of college, and somehow got job after job in journalism, working for big papers alongside Ivy grads, all while working on his BA.
He was white, but sort of lower-middle-class and extremely bitter about it. "These guys I work with," he says, "have had everything handed to them, everything! I'm going on nothing but talent and hard work!" He'd curse out his editors for what he saw as bad journalistic decision-making, and not get fired somehow. He was just a brave kid speaking his mind.
Nevermind that he wasn't much of a kid anymore, was wildly arrogant, undereducated, and not really very talented. His charm was making people think he was better than them because his "ability" was "real" and not the product of fancy book-larnin.
Our friendship ended soon after we started hanging out here and he accused me of being a fucking sell-out for teaching college. Yes, that's what sell-outs do. Sell-outs learn something and try to make something of themselves without threatening anyone.
He wasn't a geek, but his mindset reminds me of the Bad Geek. Prove you're smart and deserving by preying on other people's insecurities.
Of course I haven't met anybody that has self-diagnoses as having Asperger's.
I test highly on the Internet Asperger tests, and others, like Farber, think I am. I do make eye contact easily and am very charming on the streets with strangers.
Did it again today. When I and my two furry monsters of 150 pounds approach a family, the parents and small children start looking scared and I start yelling "Danger! Danger! Watch out dogs, there are scarey people ahead." Amazing the degree to which that brings a smile and relaxation to anyone who has language. And then the petting.
I am far crazier than Aspy, maybe. Borderline.
One set can't be mostly a subset of another!
Why do you say this?
...rarely emerge from the basement, as it were? And they are proud of this? Don't know any who are proud of it.
As it were, Thomas Merton? Although Pride is a mortal sin.
"People who need people" are the ones who define themselves by manipulating others. Yeah, you can respect yourself for seeing the game and not playing.
Why do you say this?
Contrariness? Obviously most of a set can be a subset of another and there's nothing wrong with saying that's what you mean by one set's mostly being a subset of the other. If you really want to.
223: Maybe, but it's not uncommon for someone with a painful flaw to claim to be proud of it.
I'm not very familiar with the culture that's being described and I don't strongly identify as a geek so I cant claim to know their motives, but I do identify with those socially isolated (hence my defensiveness), and from that perspective I doubt anyone would choose that lifestyle, but perhaps I'm underestimating the effects of group reinforcement on these attitudes.
245: from that perspective I doubt anyone would choose that lifestyle
I think it's more frequently a matter of being thrust into a niche by social awkwardness early in life, learning a set of arguments and assumptions that contrives to make a virtue out of that circumstance, and becoming so dedicated to those adaptations that it becomes hard to admit to the possibility or even the desirability of discarding them.
236: These are people who spend a lot of time programming and playing video games (engaging with comics, role-playing) and rarely emerge from the basement, as it were?
Geek has come to be used in a wider sense that that. It's anyone who is 'into' comics, anime, SF, fantasy, RPGs and so on. The academic version is a nerd. In practice however, it comes from IT geeks, who are frequently all about being BOFHs.
Things, as they say, have changed over the last decade. The kind of geek DS doesn't think much of has been obscured by the massive expansion of what is defined as geekdom, along with the growing (apparently) popularity of geeky stuff.
Which is kind of odd, one moment (1999 or so?) I'm avoiding being called a geek because I was working with computers all the time, and then the internet became ubiquitous and everyone in the world decided they were geeks.
240: I am far crazier than Aspy, maybe. Borderline.
Bob, if I recall, most people trying to prove they were hardcore computer geeks tended to call themselves autistic, which you obviously aren't. Second, you already said a long time ago on here that you had some psych disorder that you went to the hospital for back in the 70's (or perhaps later) and hinted that that was borderline PD. So I've just assumed you were BPD. Did I miss something?
223: (* I very strongly suspect a great many of those who self-diagnose with Asperger's don't understand the seriousness of what they're claiming.)
I doubt they know the diagnostic criteria
m, what ds said
241: Cute, but it doesn't get me to "professes pride in being socially inept and/or emotionally clueless."
I assume the geek narrative goes something like this: those people who appear to have happy or at least socially engaged lives? Superficial. They can't program their way out of a [something appropriate]. We, however, know that the constructed game is the thing, the only thing of absorbing interest, and the petty interactions of those others are beneath us.
Elitism of that sort is fairly natural, isn't it? A standard defense mechanism. I guess I'm not seeing the reason for a particular antagonism toward geeks for it. I suspect that "geek" is doing too much work as a category here -- AWB's 239.last suggests that there's a broader complaint.
It's also possible (likely, dare I say) that they have some experience with trying to change.
Please, people. This movie is nearly thirty years old. It contains multitudes of geek type behavior/ stereotyping. It may have been the start of geek chic.
248: Elitism of that sort is fairly natural, isn't it?
"People who seem happier than me are superficial jerks" is a defense mechanism that can appear anywhere. "I'm happy to be weird if all you morons/mouth-breathers/meatbags are what constitutes 'normal'" is the variant specific to geekdom, and has a far more elaborate edifice of self-justification and self-perpetuation around it, since it's a primary axis of identification for many within geekdom in a way it isn't for non-geeks.
247: The kind of geek DS doesn't think much of has been obscured by the massive expansion of what is defined as geekdom, along with the growing (apparently) popularity of geeky stuff.
Have they? The kind of geek I'm talking about is the kind that lacks the self-awareness to be insulted by the Neanderthalic sexist pandering of the gaming industry (we started on this tangent by talking about Olivia Munn and G4). There seem to still be a hell of a lot of those, they're not at all obscure.
249: I don't know anyone with lousy social skills who hasn't made an effort.
the Neanderthalic sexist pandering of the gaming industry
It really is something to behold; it makes beer commercials appear dignified and tasteful. I blame the Japanese.
253.last: Well, it's not very compassionate, that's true.
Look, I'm trying to understand Olivia Munn's reasons for having the career she does, really I am! I don't mean to be all "You seem somewhat idiotic and I don't have any interest in people like you," but that is my secret feeling! I fail in the empathy department. Bad geek,* is what I am.
* Where "geek" means harboring feelings of 'I'm happy to be weird if you morons/mouth-breathers/meatbags are what constitutes 'normal'.'
256: They've taken such a brave stand, though!
In [2009], Japan's Ethics Organization of Computer Software, a game-maker trade group, decided to stop making games in the rape genre.
254: The kind of geek I'm talking about is the kind that lacks the self-awareness to be insulted by the Neanderthalic sexist pandering of the gaming industry
That covers a lot of ground. Most men lack the self-awareness to be insulted by sexist pandering. See beer commercials.
I was thinking of the sort of loud and proud self-proclaimed geek who might want to say they were autistic or otherwise be obnoxious when making unix jokes. (By that standard, neb is a geek but not the kind of obnoxious you dislike.)
m, preview: pwned by foolishmortal
Wait, so guys who play video games now represent geeks? As opposed to the bros these days, who never touch the stuff?
[Preview-pwned by max.]
257.2: Look, I'm trying to understand Olivia Munn's reasons for having the career she does, really I am!
Very simple to understand, it would seem to me. Male geekdom, notwithstanding many constituents' often-misplaced feelings of moral and intellectual superiority, is a dead-easy and extremely profitable target for That Sort of Thing. G4 likes profit, Olivia Munn likes money and has the necessary assets... et voila. The rest is history.
that you had some psych disorder that you went to the hospital for back in the 70's (or perhaps later) and hinted that that was borderline PD. So I've just assumed you were BPD. Did I miss something?
Accurate. Early diags were schiz variants, last & best 1982 BPD. That was early for BPD, tho, and shrinks have fads and fashions. But I buy it.
260: No, Gamers represent geeks. "Guys who play the occasional videogame" do not qualify.
Don't know what the difference is? Seekest thou a gaming forum. (A relatively "high-quality" one like, say, the Escapist, for instance.) Lurk there for a few weeks. If you can come back and tell me in all honesty that you still don't understand what I'm talking about, I will send to you in the mail a free mix CD and a slice of unbuttered toast.
255: Given that, DS's causal chain is very incomplete, suggestions that geeks should just work on their social skills are fairly insulting, and complaints about their attitudes are not as compelling. How dare they take pride in their social interactions!
261: I confess that my comment was slightly tongue-in-cheek. You know we're being asked by a variety of blogs posting on the matter to find no fault whatsoever with Munn for her participation: it's the males' fault. She's just a girl who needs to make a living, and this is as good as any other. Which, yeah, quite obvious and available point to be made, but it's not working for me.
The post linked in, uh, 179 (as much of it as I've read) tells us that no amount of women refusing to participate will change misogynistic geekdom, so ... it's pointless to refuse to participate? It's ... what? But I didn't finish reading the post.
265: Nice.
266: I'm sorry, did that post by togolosh constitute a scientific study or something?
As it happens, I've known people with little or no social skills who did not make apparent attempts to improve, in large part because they could gravitate to settings that would reward their not improving. The existence of these people does not reflect on you, so you need not take my opinion of them as a judgment of you. You can relax. Agreeable?
I don't think anyone here is saying "let's shun social misfits.". The beef is with a particular brand of "geek culture" which can itself be pretty exclusionary, especially towards women.
I don't think anyone here is saying "let's shun social misfits."
I am... that's why I'm not in his thread!
HAH HOO!
I don't think anyone here is saying "let's shun social misfits."
Thanks. Can I get a hug?
268: How long did you know them? How well? You're sure they haven't tried?
I agree their existence doesn't reflect on me. It's your comments that annoy.
I feel like a misfit for being pwned.
268: My experience is certainly not representative, and I've no doubt that people who genuinely make no effort exist, but at the same time it's undoubtedly the case that many people's efforts to improve would not be apparent to someone who wasn't quite intimate with them. Also a lot of people just give up after a while, which may be the case with some of your sample set.
I hope that the review in 265 is of a slice of unbuttered toast.
272: I've had them all followed with hidden cameras for about twenty years and have conclusively proved that they're not trying, yes. Moreover, a few of them seem to have developed a paranoid delusion about Being Watched, which worsened when they discovered the tracking devices I'd embedded in their necks. And while I admit there may be a possible connection, really, how else was I supposed to track them?
276: Yahtzee's never been edgy enough for that.
FWIW, ca 1982
Shrinks:"Bob, you really need to socialize, find a girl settle down form relationships and work on your social skills. Now, of course, you may fail, and the attempt may exacerbate your hostile feelings, and we feel there is a 50-50 chance you will kill yourself or somebody else. Please come to us when you have those feelings."
Bob:"Fuck you. Not worth the risk. I will find a way, even if it means a cave for a decade. Socialization is your fucking value, not absolute, and anyway, blowing off you, what you stand for, and the human race may be enough acting out and displace the rage enough that I can find a way to function and reintegrate without hurting anyone but those who want me to be "normal"."
And it wasn't even a sacrifice. I got content and happy, was kind and made strangers smile pretty damn quick when I gave up on the two-by-two and the tribe. After a while I just fell into company without looking for it.
276: The review in 265 appears to be a video, so who knows.
We're not arguing over whose sample set is more representative now, are we? Surely we can argue over whether women might as well pursue Olivia Munn's job, or previous job.
Seriously, though, this is the best comment I've read on all of this (I haven't read many comment threads on it), from the Beyerstein link in the OP:
The Daily Show had a chance to try to pick up a segment of slightly younger men with the hire of Munn. The problem is, to keep these men, they will have to have Munn do what draws these men to her (overt sexuality). They problem is that will alienate many of their current watchers. So they are stuck having her do things that she is horrible at. Her delivery is bad. Her phrasing for any sentence beyond very basic ones is lost. It makes her sound like she just does not understand what it is she is saying.
I don't know whether the assessment of her delivery is accurate. Heebie is right! If she winds up being funny, no problem.
280: We're not arguing over whose sample set is more representative now, are we?
* dabs sweaty forehead with handkerchief * Certainly not, madam. That would be silly!
(But, mine is. Just for the record.)
Speaking of Louis CK above, I watched both episodes of the show, which is good, though not as funny as this.
Now, of course, you may fail, and the attempt may exacerbate your hostile feelings, and we feel there is a 50-50 chance you will kill yourself or somebody else.
You should probably ignore any shrink who gives specific odds about something like that. Especially if they push you to take the the over.
Your modern shrinks arrange their patients into tranches.
263: Accurate. Early diags were schiz variants, last & best 1982 BPD. That was early for BPD, tho, and shrinks have fads and fashions. But I buy it.
I'd buy it as well. It seems sensible enough but it's hardly what you'd associate with Aspergers.
269: I don't think anyone here is saying "let's shun social misfits.".
We'd have to shun the entire blog I'd think, per tweety.
The beef is with a particular brand of "geek culture" which can itself be pretty exclusionary, especially towards women.
Oh, we're talking about gamers diddling around inside of games with computer girls with giant breasts. They think those are 'women'. Right, OK, that's what we're talking about when we say 'geek'. Now I get what specific thing DS is going after.
280: I don't know whether the assessment of [Munn's] delivery is accurate.
Oh, it's accurate. Munn's delivery on the Daily Show was terrible. Her delivery on G4 wasn't that bad, but they weren't asking for complex news bits either.
m, i'm surprised she still works there
Show us on the doll where capitalism touched you, bob.
Olivia Munn is on the Daily Show this evening. Thus far, she isnt very comfortable in her delivery, but she isn't doing the G4 shit.
In case no one has linked the institute for the study of neurotypicals yet. The end of the Note is probably the most explanatory part.
Tragically, as many as 9625 out of every 10,000 individuals may be neurotypical.
Umm.
I haven't read a Jezebel post in years, and was never a regular reader, and haven't read this thread, but the thing that struck me about the original linked post is that it basically takes the form of mid-length (for the internet) reporting, not snarky outrage blogging. I have my doubts that it's normal for a Jezebel post to run that long or use that many sources. It could be wrong on the facts and everything else, but it's different in form from the kind of post I think of as explicitly looking for outrage.
Anyway, the Canadian fake news show This Hour Has 22 Minutes puts a significantly larger number of women on the air.
175, 184: All else aside, how is having 40% female employees indicative of a lack of gender bias?
Also, it's pretty unlikely that people in Hollywood, much less people associated with the Daily Show, didn't know about Jezebel until this story came out, as Munn claims. It's also pretty unlikely that it's attracting hits because of Munn, rather than because of the Daily Show, without which few people beyond G4 would have heard of Munn. She seems to have gotten herself confused with an actual celebrity.
298: I imagine it suggests that they have a goodly number of female staff. I don't want to interrogate The Daily Show with respect to the salaries paid its female employees.
The choice to hire Munn as a new correspondent is odd, there's no getting around that. Much as I generally dislike Jezebel, I don't mind their having wondered about this choice. The Jezebel post itself went for the kill, which seems par for the course for their journalistic style.
Actually, wait, I guess those covers count for something. But it's so nice to sneer at people you don't know.
299: Yep. Her confusion is a little embarrassing. I wish her luck.
It's worth looking at the actual job titles listed in the Daily Show response, and then wondering what their roles are. Not a lot of people on that list are "writer" or "correspondent" but I have no idea what the various types of producers do. The Jezebel post wasn't about aggregate employment numbers.
Oh. People read Maxim? What is that, a men's magazine?
Jesus Christ, parsimon.
No, no one reads Maxim.
No, no one reads Maxim.
Of course not. They prefer Maxim criticism.
When I lived here a mysterious Maxim subscription showed up at my apartment, a remnant of someone from a previous year. One of my roommates eagerly grabbed them all and cached them in the bathroom. I can only assume that "reading" is not what he did with them.
And while I'm commenting on this for some reason, while I try to figure out just what is to do that I'm putting off, I would have figured that Munn's politics tend towards schmibertarian libertarianism, which is generally not the Daily Show's kind of politics.
A guy I dated in college was in a fraternity that had some Maxims lying around. It basically seemed like Boy Cosmo--really shaming, judgmental stuff about how the reader clearly doesn't own enough cool clothes or have a nice enough body or know the awesome sex moves that will keep his girl at home. There were pictures of girls next to articles like "Why We Love [Munnish Girl]" with all the reasons she's not like those horrible Cosmo-reading girls.
310: That's the idea I'd had of it. It's more upscale than Playgirl or Attack of the Show on G4, but the sell-job is roughly the same.
Oh, well. Who knows.
304: Near as I can tell, Maxim is for guys who are afraid they might accidentally see female genitalia while poring over an article on loudspeakers or motorcycles.
312: Even worse!
The descriptions in 312 and 310 seem somewhat at odds. Is you or is you not supposed to engage with female genitalia?
One more vote for the the Louis C.K. interview on Frrrrrrrrrrrrrresh Air! and the Louie pilot on Hulu. Watching #2 now.
I didn't see any nekked wimmins in the issue I looked at. I could have related to it when I was fourteen or so. Titillating but safe.
298: I don't get how that defense is supposed to work either. On the other hand, it's not clear how you prove lack of bias absent a strict 50/50 gender ratio in all positions. On the other other hand, it's also unclear how adding a woman with on-screen time is indicative of bias. Sure she plays up the sexy aspect, but that's not really all that uncommon in show business.
316.1: Thank you for getting my point. Sure, you can hit ratios of not 50/50 without it necessarily being the result of bias. But pointing to a mere 40% as evidence of equality seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of math.
317. Not to disagree with you at all, but are they claiming 40% as equality or as a massive improvement on the 5% which was probably the norm 25 years ago? And if so, then are they then saying, "Well, 40% - great improvement, job done", or are they allowing that there's an ongoing process?
How long you allow people to move from "Women have a job here because of an administrative error" to "Women have half the jobs here +/- a margin of error" must depend on your attitude to proactive recruitment policies. Me, I'm all for them, but I try to regard people who are less enthusiastic as innocent until proven Neanderthal, because I can see some (inadequate IMO) grounds for worry.
I am completely in agreement, chris. 40% would actually be huge progress in my workplace (profession?), and I would celebrate such progress mightily. So long as we're all clear re: the distinction between "progress" and "mission accomplished."
I heard de la Rochefoucauld had a great big stack of Maxims.
But pointing to a mere 40% as evidence of equality seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of math.
Women are 46 percent of the labor force, and 40 percent female is prima facie evidence of discrimination? I guess then the revolution requires strictly equal gender representation in all workplaces.
The revolution won't be televised, unless 51% of the camera operators are women.
Jezebel wasn't saying there was sexism because of the 40% female employment rate. They were talking about content and who makes it. To have countered with "And there are lots of women in accounting and makeup!" was not a particularly silencing retort, and, sure, 40% women isn't terribly impressive anyway, equality-wise. No one's talking about revolution here.
The issue is not that TDS is like a public office that has to represent diversity, but that a lot of women have felt the show is "for" us too, and we keep being reminded that it's not in subtle and less-subtle ways. It's a little jarring.
Women are 46 percent of the labor force, and 40 percent female is prima facie evidence of discrimination?
You tell me. What would be a plausible margin? I wouldn't even know what data to look for to infer it.
The revolution won't be televised, unless 51% of the camera operators are women.
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim stash, and they have not.
323.1 gets it right. The writers and on-screen personalities are the raison d'etre of the show; it's completely appropriate to focus on them.
My sort-of-but-not-really informed guess is that the writers' room/creative side of TDS is well at the non-sexist end of the spectrum for a TV comedy show. That may not be saying much since in general the comedy business is legendarily male dominated.
The other claim of the letter from TDS was that women can throw out ideas from any position, so it doesn't matter that they're not writers or on-screen talent; even a makeup artist can suggest an idea for a joke.
This is fine, I guess, but another way in which lower-paying, less-glamorous jobs are often used as repositories of talent that aren't paid for or acknowledged. When I worked as a receptionist for a magazine, I was flattered that they recognized my design abilities and started having me create content for the magazine. I wrote a few articles, did some page layout, and created in-house ads for clients. It was neat to see my work published. But was my name on the masthead, or even on the articles I wrote? Did I make more than $7/hour? Of course not.
But was my name on the masthead, or even on the articles I wrote?
This is a great truth about all kinds of organisations, and I wouldn't like to undermine it. But, did you ever ask?
Munn may not be doing her G4 schtick on TDS, but I'll be interested to see if, without showing her underwear and hating bitches, there's anything to her. Early reports seem to say, no, there's not much there. I'd like to see her grow into a different kind of comedian--it would be great if she proved everyone wrong--but how long are those G4 fans going to follow her on TDS if she's not giving them what they came for?
328: I was 18, and it was a summer job, so I didn't fight it, though I often asked for raises that I didn't get. Sometimes I had to work overtime to get all my "creative" work done, so I stayed really late, charged time-and-a-half, and drank beer out of the company refrigerator. They did say that if I needed to use that work in a portfolio, they'd verify that it was mine.
without showing her underwear
Would you stop Señor Wences from putting lipstick on his hand?
I'm surprised this is even controversial. The Daily Show has had so few women correspondents for so long that when Munn showed up, I joked to my wife that Bee must have gone into labor since they have to keep the number of women correspondents at exactly one at all times.
331 was me. Anyway, I'm not really sure what G4 is except that it shows up on the cable menu up with the crappy movie channels.
charged time-and-a-half, and drank beer out of the company refrigerator.
When you're 18, that's probably not such a shitty deal. For me it would have depended on the quality of the beer at that age.
I didn't watch the background videos, but my dominant impression has been that Munn wasn't even known for comedy before TDS, which is what most stands out to me.
331: Exactly! Why hire a sexpot to be your (fake) correspondent and then make her act like a real (fake) correspondent? There might be a layer of memory there for guys who followed her on some no-name show, but the sexpot thing sort of requires you to keep being a sexpot.
334: Local microbrew. One of the perks of being a city business magazine. Another was that the company sent me out to dinner with a boyfriend at the best steakhouse in the city on gift certificates we got in "trade" for ads. There were a lot of sketchy things going on there, and one of them was the sheer amount of unreported income through trade. I don't know how illegal this is, but it was maybe half of the total ad revenue. The publisher even got architecture and contracting work on his house out of it.
it shows up on the cable menu up with the crappy movie channels.
I've never even seen a G4, but I just realized that Olivia Munn is the person from the crappy On-Demand commercials. The Daily Show, really? Does she actually show her underwear and hate bitches on her G4 show? I suppose the occasion does rather merit some geek-loathing.
Another was that the company sent me out to dinner with a boyfriend at the best steakhouse in the city on gift certificates we got in "trade" for ads.
I hope this was before you went veggie, or it would have been intensely frustrating. I can't think it was illegal, or even immoral, though possibly fattening - if the magazine was a private business it'd be largely up to them what they did with freebies. If there's public money involved of course it becomes a whole different ball game.
When she shows her underwear, it's "Sexpot." When I do it, it's "Plumber's ass." Life is confusing.
338: Following the links in the OP will take you to endless videos of Munn pretending to deep-throat hot dogs, showing off the panties she's wearing under a 5" skirt, pretending to flirt with girls before getting all no-homo about it, acting like she's being sodomized by her co-star, etc. Underneath all that, there does seem to be some potential for actually being funny, but her TDS performance so far seems to indicate that she's not ready.
339: It was after I became veg, but it was where I learned that I love watching other people eat a beautiful piece of meat. My broccoli was excellent, too.
341. In that case, I no longer feel troubled by the fact that TDS won't stream its videos outside the US, although I still don't understand why.
where I learned that I love watching other people eat a beautiful piece of meat.
So. John and I still want to keep that tape private.
Following the links in the OP will take you to endless videos of Munn . . .
My shrewd decision to remain as ignorant as possible of Munnalia is vindicated.
341: She's just starting at a place that's a very big deal for comedians, so I figure she's inevitably going to be kind of rough the first few times. Wyatt Cenac sucked very badly before he hit his stride, so I think it's fair to cut Munn some slack on that count. Hopefully she'll settle into the position and use it to shift from her previous schtick into something less driven by sexing it up for teenage boys.
I get the impression from reading things she's said that the decision to hire her was essentially a judgment call on Stewart's part. It's too early to tell if it was a good call or not, but I'm going to stay optimistic because why not?
343. The simplest explanation is advertising revenue-- advertisers will only pay for audiences that can buy their products.
337: the sheer amount of unreported income through trade
Extremely common at many levels of journalism in my experience. Probably almost impossible to crack down on, even if the IRS had the money and political capital necessary to do it though. Apparently, except for the big dailies, every other print media outlet in town has gone pay-for-play with restaurant reviews. I.e. the restaurants now have to compete by comping ever larger and more extravagant meals to the reviewers and their friends. I hope the asshole editors at my college newspaper job, who were always whining that we took free movie tickets (just to movies we were reviewing, obvs.) are happy now that they're out in the real world, skulking through the actual corruption. Jerks.
The kind of geek I'm talking about is the kind that lacks the self-awareness to be insulted by the Neanderthalic sexist pandering of the gaming industry (we started on this tangent by talking about Olivia Munn and G4)
So, all 14 year old boys, then?
Seriously, I can't get my head around who the geeks who are the particular target of your opprobrium are, unless they're some vanishingly small portion of adults who self-identify as geeks (or gamers for that matter). The parts of the gaming web that are most prone to neanderthalic sexism are precisely the most mainstream ones (eg Kotaku, GameTrailers) with the youngest audience. Conversely the geekiest ones (Three Moves Ahead, say) sidestep the issue altogether, given that there's not much mileage for T&A in a hardcore strategy game (Evony's absurd advertising aside). Now it's certainly true that the gaming industry in general panders to the neanderthalic sexism of 14 year old boys, but that doesn't say a lot about geeks as such. Adult gamers avoid G4 like the plague.
given that there's not much mileage for T&A in a hardcore strategy game
In Civ 5, the archer units are topless amazonian types.
In defense of G4, they occasionally show Ninja Warrior.
321: Nice straw person, PGD, but I said nothing about prima facie evidence of discrimination. The point, which I had not thought was that subtle, was that it is hardly prima facie evidence of *non-discrimination*. But, yeah, absent proportional representation, I do think companies should be taking a second look at why the numbers aren't balanced -- with the percentage disparity being more significant in a very large company/industry than in a 10 person shop.
349 is my reaction. Maybe I know an oddly enlightened group of geeks, but they don't seem any more Neanderthal than anyone else. The Munn clips that Lindsey linked to are pretty horrible, but not worse than anything you'd see coming out of Howard Stern.
352: The point, which I had not thought was that subtle, was that it is hardly prima facie evidence of *non-discrimination*.
Unfortunately, this leaves you with trying to claim that the who penned the Daily Show "Dear People Who Don't Work Here" missive were intimidated into doing so or are deluding themselves. Which also sort of puts you in the position of having to imply that you know more about their workplace than they do.
Sady at Tigerbeatdown took probably as good a stab at this tactic as it's going to get. I don't think she pulled it off, I guess YMMV.
355: Clearly we need to send in the USMC to pacify the Daily Show and make sure that they stop oppressing women. It worked in Afghanistan, right? Lots of airstrikes first though. Support Our Brave Troops!
Oh, BTW, pace 325 -- and with much love to AWB -- 323.1 gets it quite wrong. Here's the relevant passage from the Daily Show retort (emphasis added):
We areco-executive producers, supervising producers, senior producers, segment producers, coordinating field producers, associate producers, editors, writers, correspondents, talent coordinators, production coordinators, researchers, makeup artists, the entire accounting and audience departments, production assistants, crew members, and much more.
It's actually quite insulting and dismissive -- not to mention grossly ignorant about how the stuff that happens in front of the camera gets there -- to render that as "there are lots of women in accounting and makeup." Which is ironic, since it's supposed to be the Daily Show's boy-club that's insulting and dismissive. There comes a time when you have to be able to say "I stand corrected" and leave it alone.
The Munn clips that Lindsey linked to are pretty horrible, but not worse than anything you'd see coming out of Howard Stern.
Way to set the bar, Walt. Maybe Robin Quivers can be TDS's next on-air correspondent.
I was going on Lindsay's retort to that letter, assuming she knows more than I do. Yes, I'm aware that there are staffs for shows. I wouldn't worry about my little pre-coffee comment making anyone feel so dismissed and insulted that they jump off a bridge or anything.
I jumped off the curb, after looking both ways and giving the finder to somebody trying to make a right on red while texting.
355: No, it really does not put me in that position at all. I have expressed NO opinion on whether TDS is sexist. My sole point is that "But 40% of the employees are women!" was not good evidence to support that position.
359: Yes, I'm aware that there are staffs for shows.
Quite. But I'm sure Lindsay is, too, and that didn't stop her from offering the insult.
I doubt anybody's going to jump off a bridge, or anything, and my opprobrium isn't directed just at you. It's just generally amazing to me the extent to which people will keep digging in these situations. I mean, it's not even a matter of having to admit that what they did was wrong, just that what Irina at Jezebel wrote was wrong. But this is apparently so unfathomable that the "accountants and makeup" comment is preferable, or that Sady over at Tigerbeatdown would rather write parodies implying the women at TDS are a bunch of stupid, bitchy Heathers than admit error. It's real own-goal stuff for Teh Feminist Blogosphere.
Further to 362: There comes a point where you just have to say, "I stand corrected," and leave it alone,
358: He was addressing the "uniquely bad" question about geek culture.
354: This doesn't address the "uniquely bad" question about geek culture.
I think we can all agree that young men are horrible human beings. Sociopaths, really.
It's worth noting that the executive who actually runs the Daily Show -- effectively, John Stewart's boss, although he gets paid a lot more -- is a woman.
362: My sole point is that "But 40% of the employees are women!" was not good evidence to support that position.
It does, however, go some considerable way toward undermining the contention that the Daily Show is a boy's club. A major part of Irina's original contention was that the Daily Show did not hire much in the way of women -- and this wasn't just about on-air personalities -- along with a strong implication was that the few women it did hire were being hired largely for sexist reasons, in particular their sex appeal to the boy's club. It's not viable to pretend that those contentions have not taken serious hits, and that the 40% female staff figure is one of those hits.
365: The feminist blogosphere is Innerant, peep. Any suggestion that a position currently popular within it might be wrong or badly-conveyed is Always-Already concern-trollery.
"Innerant" s/b "Inerrant," which I'm not, obvs.
366.1: But is Howard Stern really mainstream? Isn't he sort of a creepy little wallowing-in-the-mud subculture of his own? I don't think anyone is claiming that geeks are the worst people in the world, just that they're not as swell as they think they are.
I think we can all agree that young men are horrible human beings. Sociopaths, really.
When talking about what counts as good television, I don't think you need to add the qualifier "young." I pick what to watch based on how naked the lady is or how badly I want to see her naked.
Perhaps I don't understand how these shows are put together, but it seems entirely possible for there to be a boys club composed of the writers and performers, even within a mixed organization.
I'm starting to get where 180 came from.
373: Read the list of positions in 357 carefully.
294
Wow, a better example of DS' thesis you could not find.
My brain is a jewel. I am in awe of the mind that I have.
Just fucking shoot me if I ever say something like this.
I disagree that "But 40% of the employees are women!" undermines the charge that it's a boys' club. It may or may not be a boys' club, but as AWB said, supra, 40% isn't especially impressive equality wise.
My brain is Jewel. And my esophagus is a WalMart.
369:
The A certain portion of the feminist blogosphere is Inerrant
Fixed that for you. In a mild and non-combative manner.
374: Was it something I said?
375: Out of a list of 16 current writers, I saw one Hallie and one Jo. The rest seemed male.
382.1: Sorry! I was addressing DS, who wrote 180.
382.2: But Hallie and Jo both said there was no sexism!
377: 40% isn't especially impressive equality wise.
Except that PGD was entirely right to mock this statement; his basic point, which you dodged in order to complain about straw persons, was that 40% is in fact perfectly respectable "equality-wise" in a 46% female workforce. And he is correct*. Moreover, by comparison with what was originally being claimed / implied -- which was something far, far stronger than "the Daily Show is several points off the national average for female employment" -- this simply does not hold water. "Boy's club" implies a situation where women are significantly in the minority, and purposefully kept that way. That is plainly the kind of atmosphere that Irina was trying to evoke.
(* The actual figure right now is 49 or 50% since the recession, but may be a bit skewed given the recession and rising unemployment. Whatever, the point is the same.)
There is no sexism in the Champagne Room.
383.2: And what do those silly bitches know, right? I mean God, one of them's named "Jo," could you get any more gauche.
382.2: Sorry, I should've been more specific. Look at the entire list of positions. One of them is "co-executive producer." Here's a sample of what that means in television from J. Michael Straczynski.
381: Well, yes, but I don't think B has weighed in on this yet. (Sybil's on her site, true, but it ain't the same.)
It seems fair to say that while 40% of editors and whatnot seems perfectly reasonable, the fact that TDS is a television show means that one would like to see more women actually on-screen, and the dearth of female correspondents on the show is and has been for some time noteworthy, and (further!) the choice of Munn of all people as new female correspondent is rather strange indeed.
I'd like to see Jezebel issue a follow-up/correction to the original post clarifying all of this. Perhaps they have. It needn't be a full-on mea culpa; but a clarification of the complaint seems in order. Digging in heels and seemingly insisting that the letter from female TDS staffmembers is irrelevant tends to take them out of the conversation altogether.
You could have a workforce split near 50-50 and still have it be a place that could plausibly be labeled a boy's club. That's pretty much how the workforce was until the 70s-80s, no (not that I'm claiming that women made up 50% of the workforce, but that some offices would have been distributed that way)? Only men in positions of power, women as secretaries and assistants with no way to move up the ladder. Numbers alone don't make the argument - I think this is the point Di was trying to make.
But when you go beyond the numbers with the Daily Show and looking at the list of positions closely, it does seem that the Daily Show is not being run along the exact lines claimed by the Jezebel writer. They still could use some more on-camera women, though.
And what do those silly bitches know, right? I mean God, one of them's named "Jo," could you get any more gauche
Are you reading my mind? It's amazing!
Outside of the echo chamber, this dust up reads like this
The final "them" in 388 was intended to refer to Jezebel, but it might as well refer to TDS's female staffmembers as well.
Inside the echo chamber, it's too dark to read.
388 is perfectly agreeable.
390: You'd be amazed at what I can do. My brain is a jewel.
40% is in fact perfectly respectable "equality-wise"
Oh, well if you say so! And I totally see why you don't think that there's any significant impact on this argument if women are actually 50% rather than 46% of the workforce.
Look, I understand that from a male perspective and particularly from a historical context 40% is going to seem like a lot of women. If I walked into a firm in which 40% of the attorneys were women (most especially if that percentage carried through all the way to the top tiers), I'd genuinely feel good that such a firm was really making great progress. I'd be fully convinced that this percentage was convincing evidence that this law firm had really made tremendous strides as compared to the industry as a whole, and as indicative of a sincere commitment to progress.
BUT I would absolutely not buy that statistic as evidence that the 60-40 firm was not a boys' club. Less of one than others, perhaps. Maybe demonstrably not a boys' club in light of other data tending to explain the 60-40 disparity. But on it's face, 40% is not evidence of a leveled playing field. And however much strength the percentage might have even if 40% were on its face "respectable" would be highly contingent on exactly how that 60-40 is distributed. You can, of course, get to even 50-50 representation pretty easily by loading the lower levels of an organization with women and preserving most of the top slots for men.
"But 40% of the employees are women!" doesn't tell me much one way or the other about whether or not TDS is a boys' club. And let me be clear. I *like* TDS. I would very much like to believe that it's not a den of sexist iniquity. I would be very bothered if I were convinced that it is.
I think it is very fair to say that the world of comedy writing, in general, is male dominated and sexist. From what I know of it.
I think it is unfair, bordering on ridiculous, to say that TDS is particularly sexist or worthy of opprobium. Quite the opposite. From everything I can tell, women actually run much of the production and John Stewart is a decent guy and a good boss.
As someone who has recurring dreams about Jon Stewart hitting on me, I am perfectly inclined to buy 396.2 -- with the spelling of the name corrected.
395: Look, I understand that from a male perspective
Tell me about it. In the arts, we only hire women whose names end with a heart over an "i." And strictly one per office, but she's got to have lots of stamina.
BUT I would absolutely not buy that statistic as evidence that the 60-40 firm was not a boys' club.
Which is good, as no-one was at any point offering the statistic alone as such evidence, as you who are so concerned about the avoidance of straw should probably have taken time to notice. What the statistic was evidence of is that one of the core contentions in the original was that the Daily Show did not hire many women. Whether or not 40% constitutes "a lot of women," it does not constitute the workplace that the original article was trying to portray, which (again) was implying that women are significantly in the minority and deliberately kept that way. This is why it was one of the hits against that portrayal. Not the only one; one of them.
You could have a workforce split near 50-50 and still have it be a place that could plausibly be labeled a boy's club.
Indeed, some library systems are 90% female employees, and yet the people who set the budget, run the board, hire and fire, decide on building renovation and expansion, and every other major aspect outside of collection development...are male.
400: And those bastards aren't even hiring Hot Librarians and demanding that they wear short skirts. I've been meaning to get down to the lodge hall and have a word with them.
While the list of titles does include what one would hope in terms of writers and editors, padding it out with endless varieties of producers, not to mention make-up artists and production assistants, does seem a bit snark-worthy. Not that those positions are anything to be ashamed of, but at the same time they're not really what I would think of as breaking ground for gender equality.
And like Ginger in 384 and AWB in 239, the misogynist jerks I've happened to know never self-identified as geeks. The "gamers equal geeks" thing still seems unconvincing to me, there seem to be plenty of jocks and Apatow-esque dudes in that subculture. I do get that there are geek subsets-- The Silicon Valley Objectivist, The Internet Tough-Guy-- who can be pretty loathsome. But I'd actually expect the more extreme examples of such less likely to self-identify as geek. Maybe this is changing, though, with the internet broadening the term so much.
I think part of the problem is capitalism-- a lot of misogynistic corporate marketing is exploiting a geek angle, by marketing this identity to the 14 year old male demographic. Still, Axe Body Spray & ilk are a different venn diagram circle from incessant Monty Python quotations and xkcd.
I know the conversation's moved on, but my brain is slow, like a bug struggling in a gob of sap, which over millions of years will become beautiful fossilized amber.
Which is good, as no-one was at any point offering the statistic alone as such evidence, as you who are so concerned about the avoidance of straw should probably have taken time to notice
Again, you have mischaracterized my point. I never claimed the issue was that anyone was relying on the statistic *alone* as evidence that TDS was not a boys' club. My point (for the last time, for those* who are tired of me trying to clarify) is that 40% is not evidence AT ALL that TDS is not a boys' club. There may be truckloads of *other* evidence to prove it's not a boys' club. I have no opinion on the ultimate question, as I have not seen enough evidence to make a judgment either way. Simply hiring 2 women for every 3 men does not add any value to the argument of gender-equality-clubishness, but instead weighs (even if only slightly) against it.
*Eg., me.
And like Ginger in 384 and AWB in 239, the misogynist jerks I've happened to know never self-identified as geeks.
That's fortunate for you (athough I think you're misreading 239). If you ever do know one, there's a high probability he will be a "Nice Guy." Though there are other possibilities.
The "gamers equal geeks" thing still seems unconvincing to me
"Gamers" in this discussion means hardcore gamers, not the kind of people who happen to own an X-Box and play Battlefront with their buddies once in a while. It's a core geek subculture, in fact by this time probably the core geek subculture. It's the audience that has made Penny Arcade the Emperor of Webcomix, and Penny Arcade's content routinely trades on the geekery of its audience, which immediately recognizes the source of quips like "I roll Twenties" or running jokes about fear of contact with sunlight.
(404 to 402.)
403: *Eg., me.
Oh, I'm right there with you, don't worry. "Clarification"-as-avoidance gets old.
I would absolutely not buy that statistic as evidence that the 60-40 firm was not a boys' club.
I worked in an environment that was less than 60% assholes, and it was definitely an assholes' club. But they were concentrated in management.
Apatow-esque dudes
Freaks, not geeks?
DS, you are a jackass. I have not "avoided" anything. The fundamental disagreement is that you think 40% representation is a good sign and I think it is a bad sign. You think it evidences a lack of gender bias; I think it evidences the opposite. You are wrong; I am right.
I kind of feel like the era of hardcore gamer-geek subculture ascendance ended five or ten years ago, but maybe that's just because I've either lost touch with the hardcore gamer-geek people I knew back then or they've grown up and moved on.
I bet more than 40% of the employees at Sterling Cooper are women. And they even let Peggy write ads!
That's the old Sterling Cooper. The new one is, I believe, 1/4 female. And yet it may be less sexist!
408: I have not "avoided" anything.
You have quite specifically avoided the point: which (for the last time, because I'm sick of repeating myself) is responsive to the original article's contention about a specific kind of boy's club scenario that involved women being kept in a significant minority. Responding to this that you don't accept it as evidence against some vaguer definition of the boy's club is irrelevant and uninteresting.
A minor error. And yet again: you've progressed through condescension into outright name-calling in defending it to the death. And what the hell for?
I'm not willing to argue about who is a gamer against somebody using "DS" as a name. Nor I am willing to let somebody named Wii sit on the good couch.
413: Calling myself "Genesis" didn't go down with my Christian friends.
That's the old Sterling Cooper. The new one is, I believe, 1/4 female. And yet it may be less sexist!
There is no new Sterling Cooper, only Sterling Cooper Draper Britishguy.
409: Could be. I'm not really that confident about the relative positioning of geek subcultures myself. I just don't see what could supplant the gamers in top spot. Comics geeks? Pen-and-paper roleplayers?
417: Oh it is, but I'm talking more about market share.
(* The actual figure right now is 49 or 50% since the recession, but may be a bit skewed given the recession and rising unemployment. Whatever, the point is the same.)
June 2010, labor force 46.6 percent female. . Call me an autistic geek if you want, just don't question my numbers.
It seems like this:
"Actually, we make up 40% of the staff, and we're not all shoved into the party-planning department" (The Daily Show statement)
is intended to address this:
"Women are universally scarce, whether in the writer's room or on the air." (The Jezebel article).
My ability to correct peoples' numbers makes me superior, despite my lack of social skills.
And Howard Stern is the core guy demographic, an audience that has made Howard Stern the King of All Media.
In truth, the core geek demographic is women who write Harry Potter fan fiction. If you're not prepared to pen your own version of the classic Snape-going-down-on-Harry scene, you're just not a geek.
Walt sounds suspiciously conversant with Harry Potter fanfic.
424: See, I'm totally out of it. All my Harry Potter fanfics involve the mysterious Professor Slackke coming to Hogwarts to teach African Wizardry and getting it on with Parvati and Padma.
My Harry Potter fanfics focus on whether or not you can use accio sperm as birth control or not.
426: That's like having an X-Box and playing Battlefront with your buddies every once in a while.
Apologies for the liberty I am going to take with the house style, but in response to this from DS:
You have quite specifically avoided the point: which (for the last time, because I'm sick of repeating myself) is responsive to the original article's contention about a specific kind of boy's club scenario that involved women being kept in a significant minority. Responding to this that you don't accept it as evidence against some vaguer definition of the boy's club is irrelevant and uninteresting.
All else aside, how is having 40% female employees indicative of a lack of gender bias?
[PGD]Women are 46 percent of the labor force, and 40 percent female is prima facie evidence of discrimination? I guess then the revolution requires strictly equal gender representation in all workplaces.
PGD was entirely right to mock this statement; his basic point, which you dodged in order to complain about straw persons, was that 40% is in fact perfectly respectable "equality-wise" in a 46% female workforce.
Which is good, as no-one was at any point offering the statistic alone as such evidence, as you who are so concerned about the avoidance of straw should probably have taken time to notice. What the statistic was evidence of is that one of the core contentions in the original was that the Daily Show did not hire many women. Whether or not 40% constitutes "a lot of women," it does not constitute the workplace that the original article was trying to portray, which (again) was implying that women are significantly in the minority and deliberately kept that way. This is why it was one of the hits against that portrayal. Not the only one; one of them.
Oh, I'm right there with you, don't worry. "Clarification"-as-avoidance gets old.
And yet again: you've progressed through condescension into outright name-calling in defending it to the death. And what the hell for?
Posers! True geeks write slashfic about Norbert and the Weasley's car.
430: I would like to offer the following recap
Yeah, you do that.
A belated thanks to F for 421, by the way.
431: Sorting hat/Young Tom Riddle.
421 is responsive and apt. Yes, "40%" is a good response to "universally scarce." I would personally read the Jezebel line as intending to call out the (alleged) scarcity at the top ("in the writer's room or on the air"), to which "40% *of the staff*" is not really responsive. But you are absolutely correct, F, that "universally scarce" appears to be a decisive overstatement.
You mean... it's like the 40% statistic is at odds with the workplace that the original article was trying to portray?
Actually, I find the two statements quite symmetrical. "40%" addresses "scarce" and "not all in the party planning department" addresses "in the writer's room or on the air". To be fair, it doesn't address it in a rigorously quantitative way, but more than sufficiently to establish Jezebel as, at best, hyperbolic.
432.1 Oh, I can simplify, too. You claim now that the argument all along was about this very narrow charge (which F managed to address quite clearly and concisely) of scarcity of women at TDS. But you your very own self declared that the point we were arguing "was that 40% is in fact perfectly respectable 'equality-wise' in a 46% female workforce." The moving goalpost, "you're totally avoiding this argument that we weren't even discussing" bit annoys me.
Di, DS: get a room already
438: But you your very own self declared that the point we were arguing
Was that the statistic was responsive "by comparison with what was originally being claimed / implied -- which was something far, far stronger than "the Daily Show is several points off the national average for female employment." From that same post you're quoting. You read that far, right?
It's hella funny that having had to concede the argument, you're still digging. Let. It. Go.
439: I only have eyes for you, TLL. I've just never had the courage to admit it... until now.
My initial reaction to the Jezebel post was my usual response to Jezebel posts, which is "I wouldn't worry about it." Hiring Munn is at most a symptom, not a cause, of sexism. But I thought Lindsay's response to the letter was important, in that no one accuse TDS of not having a sufficient number of female employees, so 40% is not only not that impressive; it's also irrelevant to the charge being made. Even if 90% of the actual writers and on-screen personalities were women, if it became a show predominantly pitched toward the G4 crowd, it would not be so much a show that cares about women viewers anymore.
And that would be fine, too. It just wouldn't be a show I'd watch, as an individual viewer making a decision about how to spend my time. It remains to be seen what TDS wants Munn to do. Maybe she'll become a great correspondent, and Stewart saw something in her that could be developed.
"40%" addresses "scarce" and "not all in the party planning department" addresses "in the writer's room or on the air".
It's entirely possible for women to be scarce in the writers' room and on the air, and yet not *all* be in the party planning department.
Ultimately, what I am really pushing back against is the idea that 40% should be considered "perfectly respectable."
And Lindsay weighs in again: Munn is maybe going to be a good addition to the show.
I think 40% should not be considered a warning sign of anything. Since it's within experimental error of the general employment ratio.
DS/TLL/Snape/Tonks.
Tonks the Harry Potter character, or tonks the Unfogged commenter?
447: It's not a warning sign, it's just not not a warning sign. We should have another two hundred comments about this.
447: I will confess, I don't really know how you figure out a margin of error for that kind of thing. I do, however, resist measuring the 40% against the general employment ratio, particularly where it seems at least plausible to me that the general employment ratio could likewise be impacted by gender bias.
451: That's not nearly enough. Better throw Parvati and Padma in there, too... because I'm a feminist.
You all are now mentioning Harry Potter characters that I've never even heard of.
So now that we have demonstrated that Jezebel is completely wrong about everything, I'd like to raise a curious point for your attention. The Daily Show does not, by and large, put women in front of the camera. Isn't that strange? Now they've finally added a woman correspondent, and she's someone who's previous calling was as a lust-object for guys. What a surprising development! What could it all mean?
454: Looks like Lindsay Beyerstein is cautiously pro-sex-object now. If Marcotte goes too, the entire anti-Munn salient could collapse!
452. All pedantic explanations will be male.
Here is a geographic exploration of male:female employment ratios in the US
http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-men-dont-work.html
(I kid. But it's also sort of easy to forget, in all the scrying about comedy and gender relations, that they might have hired Munn on the strength of an actually good audition.)
Better throw Parvati and Padma in there, too... because I'm a feminist.
An interesting side note: Parvati's brother and father recently tried to kill her. I, of course, blame the patriarchy.
What could it all mean?
That The Daily Show parodies real news networks?
DS is a horrible sexist. DK is an inflexible feminist. Got it. Can we go back to imaginary perversion yet?
You really want to insist there's a difference between 47% and 51%?
For small organizations, even if you drew people at random, there'd be a reasonable chance you'd get 40% instead of 47% (or 51%).
462: More that, while the difference between 40% and 47% does not strike me as statistically insignificant (from my statistically-challenged seat: girls are bad at math), the difference between 40% and 51% seems sort of obviously significant.
DK is an inflexible feminist.
Comity!
Can we go back to imaginary perversion yet?
Why the hell not? Imaginary is the best offer of perversion I've had in a long time....
463: Depends on the size of the sample and the confidence interval.
the difference between 40% and 51% seems sort of obviously significant
Not necessarily, says the guy who edits statistical reports for a living.
460: DS is a horrible sexist.
Excuse me, but I am an exceptional sexist.
On further questions about the significance of statistics: the conservative wit TLL quotes in 393 lampoons "liberalism" as believing that striving for equity should mean quotas that entail each business having a gender and ethnic pie chart that precisely reflects the proportions of the overall population, lest it come under suspicion of illiberalism. I chuckle at stuff like that because I know that most liberals, most of the time, do not actually think this way.
393: Inside the echo chamber, it's too dark to read.
Fruit flies prefer a banana but wonder if its shape suggests complicity with the patriarchy.
Not necessarily, says the guy who edits statistical reports for a living.
Can you give the Cliff's Notes explanation? Quite possibly my single greatest academic regret is never having taken statistics...
For the same reason you don't always get exactly 50% heads when you flip a coin. It depends on (I think) the square root of the number of trials.
I think we can all agree that "The House That Drips Blood on Alex" is a great title for a movie we are all going to see.
I know that most liberals, most of the time, do not actually think this way.
I do agree that insisting upon precise pie chart representation is not practical or even often advisable. But I do think awareness of the pie chart is important, and that when you find your company has drifter "too far" from the proportionate distribution, everybody benefits from taking a good hard look at why that is.
471 makes intuitive sense as to small deviations, but 11% seems... Not small.
473: If that be the case then the guy linked in 393 scores a solid hit: what TDS more urgently needs to sit down and have a chat about is ethnic diversity.
Can you give the Cliff's Notes explanation?
This might be helpful, it gives a concrete example of a distribution curve.
The chances of being off by 10% among 25 employees is 32%. Among 100 employees, it's 4.6%. Among 225 employees it's 0.27%. Assuming 50/50 probability.
470: Not at five on a Friday I can't.
I am like 200 comments late with this and it's anecdata anyway but it has long seemed to me that Borderline is a diagnosis shrinks give to anyone that pushes their particular buttons. It is also a grating early Madonna song.
Well, 465 is the Cliff's Notes version. It would probably be significant in a large company, but as you move down the scale of staff size, natural variation gets large quickly. If the expected distribution based on the overall workforce is 46%, then 40 to 51 falls within a 6% confidence interval. In a 50-person company (which would almost certainly have a CI higher than 6%), those percentages represent 20 vs. 25 female employees.
In the stuff I look at, a 40% vs 50% reduction in [blood pressure/tumor size/white blood cell count/etc] is likely not to be significant in early phase trials with small patient populations because the within-subject variation in measures like that is fairly large already.
477/480 are likewise helpful, particularly in conjunction with each other.
479: I thought the current conventional wisdom was Borderline applied to women who push the shrink's buttons while the men get labeled Narcissistic. I am not, mind you, suggesting the labels are being misapplied...
Following up on 476, this looks like it could be fun to play around with.
It doesn't run on my browser at work, but I'd be curious to see how much shifting the "bounce left" odds from 50% to, say, 45% changes the shape of the resulting curve.
http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p2.html
The pie chart post.
483 I don't know, it's tempting to dismiss diagnosis to some considerable extent as a tool of psychopharm, but personality disorders don't get treated with meds so I guess I'll have to dismiss it as just an often misguided overreach in the face of daunting complexity.
More anecdata: I have to read a lot of psych records and the same person will get quite a range of diagnoses. Makes me think of Bettleheim. You can make lists and assign numbers, but some things aren't quite science, even if it would be convinent for them to be so.
And the people who write the DSM tetralogy have not yet accepted my suggestion of "Kind of Just an Asshole Disorder" yet so the system is obviously quite flawed.
486: I think you are completely right. But until KJAD makes it into the DSM, NPD and BPD seem like pretty workable proxies.
||
Our intern just asked me what old people do on the weekend.
|>
What did you tell the young intern, Grandpa?
Well, good lord, tog, don't keep us hanging: what do they do?
On the original subject, gamers are awful people. (I will freely accept that this is because teenaged boys are awful people.)
Sex. And mountain biking.
That ought to hold the little bastards for a while
Have patience, people: he probably fell asleep.
WAKE UP, TOGOLOSH!
||
I was just at the grocery store, and the kid said "You just have one bag. You want me to put the milk and OJ in it and leave the rest of the stuff out, or put the other stuff in and leave the milk and OJ out?"
I said, "I bet you can get it all to fit."
And he did. Satisfying experience.
|>
491: And that post is spot on, especially about attitudes and behaviors towards women and minorities (and the prevalence of crypto-racism from people who adamantly refuse to believe they're racists). It's not just gamers, those things have always been true of geekdom generally. But it's very true of gamers.
491. Maybe blizzard should have the human avatars more diverse?
Our intern just asked me what old people do on the weekend.
Today I was recounting a story about Kobe Bryant and found out that my intern was SIX when he was drafted.
Granted, I don't follow basketball, so I had sort of lost track of the number of years since he was in high school, but holy wow.
what old people do on the weekend
Nap.
496: Clever answer. And then you had the intern all, "Which drug? Which drug?!"
Apropos of grocery stores and interns, at the small local store I favor, a young, clearly new college-age woman in the deli department was nattering on kind of endlessly to the seasoned deli staffwoman about the funny poem online about this very neighborhood grocery store, "Ode to Eddie's" or something, and how very funny it was, and the older staffwoman should totally go online and look it up, it's awesome, seriously -- hahahahaha -- no kidding, you should look it up, have you seen it yet? I bet you've seen it already, isn't it hilarious?? etc.
And the older woman just kept saying No. No, I don't think so. No, I spend enough time here. Sorry, no. Yeah, whatever. Yep, yep, no.
By the time I walked away the younger woman was still carrying on about the poem, how we should totally write a poem ourselves, hahahaha.
Good grief. I felt pretty badly for the older woman, and frankly wondered what was wrong with the younger woman. And then I spent five dollars.
500: The old *men*, maybe. Old women do the same things young women do: all the damn housework, the childcare, grocery shopping, balancing the checkbook...
Eh, who'm I kidding? I plan to spend the weekend stretched out in a lawn chair, occasionally feeling guilty about the laundry I most likely won't be doing.
Today I was recounting a story about Kobe Bryant and found out that my intern was SIX when he was drafted.
Your intern must be very good at basketball.
all the damn housework, the childcare, grocery shopping, balancing the checkbook...
Oh my God! I'm a woman! I had a sex change and no one told me.
[well, I don't do all the housework, I make my sons do it. I'm management now]
the laundry I most likely won't be doing.
Hey, thanks, DK. I forgot I had put laundry in, like, hours ago.
Jezebel has in fact posted an update, in response to Jon Stewart's mention. I'd wondered if he'd bring it up on screen.
506: Jezebel has in fact posted an update
Rather interesting what she picked and chose to respond to, isn't it?
(Oh, and look at that: one of Irin's readers is in the comments section imploring Jezebel respond to the open letter... to denounce TDS for having obviously coerced their female employees into signing off on patriarchal propaganda.)
507: Can I sigh? Is that too much?
Yeah. I didn't actually watch the relevant Stewart clip. The follow-up does, to be fair, seem a grudging admission that an explanation of intention is needed (and is provided), and that at this point backing off is the smart thing to do. The continuing grudge factor, and the failure to plainly acknowledge the faulty reporting involved in claiming that women are severely underrepresented among TDS staff, renders the writer an unserious person, in my view. But then, I'm kind of tired, and Jezebel isn't necessarily that kind of blog in the first place.
Meanwhile, the relative lack of women actually on the air on the Daily Show is so obvious that it was the opening conceit of the segment in which the Daily Show introduced Olivia Munn. Maybe the Daily Show will air a response to that segment.
506: The "five reasons..." link at the bottom of that page is worth a read, too.
506:Whatever Jezebel & TDS
But I did click over to the "Men Who Cry" thread, and amongst all the feminazi wimmens getting moisty at male tears, this wonder was posted:
From Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet: "The sacred tears of the heterosexual man: rare and precious liquor whose properties, we are led to believe, are rivaled only by the lacrimae Christi whose secretion is such a specialty of religious kitsch. What charm, compared to this chrism of the gratuitous, can reside in the all too predictable tears of women, of gay men, of people with something to cry about? Nietzsche asks scornfully: 'Of what account is the pity of those who suffer!' But, he explains, 'a man who can do something, carry out a decision, remain true to an idea, hold on to a woman, punish and put down insolence...in short a man who is by nature a master--when such a man has pity, well! that pity has value!' (Beyond, 198). Both the mass and the high culture of our century ratify this judgment, by no means stopping short at such a man's pity for himself" (146).
OOh, "feminazi wimmens" is so so wrong, and I sincerely apologize.
Can someone help me out with a witty term for the bourgeois women who use angry feminism as a fashion accessory, like a belly piercing or dragon tattoo? Please?
Oh well. Back to Berlin "Oh, what a feeling."
Has Munn's latest from TDS been linked yet? She seems to be at least going for the TDS schtick. I'd say jury's out on whether she'll master it.
Holy shit, is that Seal guy real? I... I'm not sure I can handle this level of cognitive dissonance.
517: The internet suggests that Mr. Seel really is for real. Why on Earth he agreed to talk to The Daily Show remains beyond my paygrade of understanding.
