Red Scare - Shia LaBuse

Episode Date: December 15, 2020

The ladies discuss the WSJ's problematic op-ed on Dr. Jill Biden's problematic honori

We're back. We're back. Sorry. I'm going to say that with a maximum lag. Unfortunately, we're back. The merch is mostly on its way out. It's fulfilled. Yeah.

We packed it lovingly ourselves. Yeah. I even wore one of the XL shirts briefly before putting it in. So one of you lucky large fans will get a very special shirt. Yeah. There's definitely DNA flex from me, you, and Maddie, and even Eli in the pile. It was a whole four person operation. It was hard.

Yeah. It was a good experience, I think. Definitely. A memory. A nice memory. I'm used to floor sitting and manual labor, so it's fine. Yeah. In the DNA from all those millennia of like squatting over like tandoori ovens or whatever

we were doing in Mesopotamia, I don't know. I thought you were going to say working on the assembly line. Oh, no. But I actually come, a lot of my relatives are engineers. Yeah. I don't know if any of them ever worked in a, no, my grandpa worked in a television factory with Lee Harvey Oswald actually. Wait what?

How? He lived in Belarus to the former Soviet Union for a brief stint and worked in it. That's an exciting little bit of trivia. Yeah. Fun fact. Yeah. What else? What did they do?

They assembled TV sets? My grandpa was an engineer, so I don't know what he did, but it was the way that lots of people in the Soviet Union were engineers because of the land economy. Yeah. Yeah. My grandma was an engineer. Everyone has an engineer in their family if you're from the Soviet Union. I don't even really know what an engineer does.

It's like the fast food worker of the Soviet Union. They needed a lot of them. Any other housekeeping? No, I don't know. The march is coming and if you have problems with it, you can email us and we'll figure it out. Yeah. What else is on the docket today?

Well, moments after we talked about times, the person of the year shortlist, they announced that it would go to Joe and Kamala, which is only slightly less embarrassing than the time that the other times. Endorse, clobuchar, and war. Yeah. At the same time, yeah. They called him Bill Biden, that's a broken, my brain, Dr. Bill Biden, and also, Pornhub just purged all the unverified content from its platform.

Yeah. All right. I'm going to be very mad if some of my favorite vids aren't there when I return to Pornhub. Careful with your response. Our influence. Yeah. I heard that they didn't totally purge them. They suspended them and we'll review them.

Oh, I see. So they're going to hire a fleet of moderators from Varanasi to go through these like snuff and bestiality films. Exactly. Cool. But a good and a symbolic victory nonetheless. Yeah. Not that there's not for the girls of Red Scare.

We did it. We made the world just a little bit more sex-negative. And also, once we clowned on Dr. Jill Biden, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Joseph Epstein. Yeah. We had the brother of Jeffrey, who lost brother, who very condescendingly chastised Jill for using the Dr. Prefix. Yeah.

You skimmed it, right? I skimmed it. And it was brief and, you know, he says that you shouldn't call yourself a doctor unless you've delivered a baby, basically. He's not wrong, but the way that he, his delivery is off because he's doing a little bit of boomer humor that is probably like cringe and annoying for most readers. Because he's a smarmy boomer. Yeah.

The op-ed was called, is there a doctor in the White House? No. The MD, Jill Biden should think about dropping the honorific, which feels fraudulent, even comic. I mean, it does feel fraudulent and comic. And so does the entire Biden presidency, but we don't have to get into that. A lot of the dignity of those titles has been eroded anyway. Yeah.

Which is the point he makes. You know, there was like, before, back in the day, the process toward getting a PhD was extremely grueling. Like the PhD that my dad got in the Soviet Union is in no way shape or form comparable to the one that I dropped out of in the United States. And the one that I was doing was not particularly easy. I think that was like the last year where you had to actually pass a lot of exams. You had to be competent in like French and German, like there was some criteria.

I don't know if they still exist because this is like 10 years ago, but... I'm sure they do in some institutions, but for the most part, even when I was getting my BA college was kind of a bit of a sham. Yeah. Yeah. My undergrad too was, well, interestingly, the humanities were less of a sham than the soft sciences, you know? Interesting.

Like the art history department was solid, but the economics department was a joke. Yeah. And it taught me a lot about lying and grifting my way to the top. Which is really the lesson I learned from college, yeah. That's also was, I mainly took away from college was how to kind of coast by on my personal charms. Yeah. With my, I've mentioned before my great thesis on menstrual dialectics, for which I was afforded

my BA degree. Well, okay, Jill's thesis is even more retarded sounding. It's literally student retention at the community college level, meeting students' needs. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's kind of a sociological, social science, PhD, but I... Sure, why not? Yeah. Yeah, but he's right.

And he's right about kind of the degrading of honorary doctorates, which are problematic to begin with, but before it was like, he talks about how they were exclusively awarded to scholars, statesmen and artists and scientists, then they were awarded to rich men, then they were awarded to television journalists who passed themselves off as intelligent, finally to entertainers who didn't even bother feigning intelligence, like this kind of thing. And she got her PhD 15 years ago, which women should get a little more leeway, I think, on the... Yeah, there's a lack.

On the PhD, because it was harder for them to achieve those things in the first place. Yeah, them in the first place. Well, I guess even then, it was by the 70s. How old is this bitch? 70? Okay, she looks pretty good for her age, I'll give her that, because she was 55, 15 years ago, right? Yeah, she's 69.

Yeah. Nice. I mean, what's more important that Jill has a irrelevant PhD or that she looks relatively good for her age and is about to be the first lady, I'm just saying you be the judge. Yeah. Amen. But yeah, it's kind of annoying when people display their PhD in their Twitter handle, like that practice is very grating.

I feel like we're past mocking that now. I'm going to start putting CEO in my credentials since we're incorporated. Board of directors. Are we CEOs? What are we? We, I think we're technically CEOs. Wow. Creative directors.

We were really doing it all, and working in our own fulfillment centers where our own masters and our own slaves. Yeah, exactly. I feel like Jeff Bezos. Yeah, when we were devising the logistics for our fulfillment strategies, like I said that it reminded me of the social network. I felt like Mark Zuckerberg starting Facebook up in his garage as Maddie talks to the Shopify customer service representatives.

Yeah, retard logistics, that was our name for it. Yeah. We had a job all done. Yeah. No, it was for once. It was really, I literally live in fear because I wake up in a cold sweat because I'm certain that there were certain errors in the assembly line. We packed some orders wrong or did something else incorrectly and we're going to have to

pay for it because there is no wall of nameless, faceless South Asian reps. Yeah. Exactly. Standing between us and them. Direct to consumer. Yeah. Well, I also had a weird lesbian dream last night, which is not something I get a lot, but it wasn't like a hot, seamy, like positive lesbian dream.

It was like a dream where I had a crazy BPD girlfriend who wanted me to be emotionally available. Interesting. Yeah. Describe her. What was she like? Some high slim build Asian with like a kind of undercut, like she had that kind of punky Antifa look to her.

Very interesting. Yeah. I'm going to take this up with my shrink tomorrow. And she was emotionally terrorizing you. Yeah. Abusing you, if you will. Yeah. And was demanding more involvement and attachment than I was capable of giving.

That sounds like one of the worst lesbian dreams of all time. It was horrible. I was like ready for some like, you know, like no strings attached, unreal, like subconscious scissoring or something. And it was just like this woman standing there with her like hands on her hips. Disappointed. Damn. That sucks.

Yeah. Tell me about it. Being of abusive partner dynamics, oh yeah, FKA twigs filed a civil suit against her former partner Shia Labuth for domestic abuse, battery, sexual assault, kind of a litany of transgressions. It's like a diner menu of complaints and grievances. That he more or less owned up to wasn't exactly a revelation or a secret for anyone who's been following Shia Labuth's trajectory over the last few years. Yeah.

I mean, Shia really blew it for himself because we could have thrown him into that men who did nothing wrong list, but he chose to make his bed with a Luke Turner or a hater and famed textile heir at Luke Turner and now I have no love for Shia and he's on my shit list. Yeah. He fucked up and he did do something wrong. Just nothing to do with abusing FKA twigs. Just kidding.

No, I think he seems like a pretty shitty and abusive person. I'm like not surprised by any of these revolutions. But I do think this is a case of BPD ho on BPD ho violence and that the allegations at least in the way that they were described in the New York Times did seem a little alienating and attention seeking. Can you run down the allegations from the New York Times for me because I am cock blocked out of the paywall? And I know people are going to be like, you stupid bitch, you have the money to pay for

the subscription, but I just refuse to give my money to the failing New York Times. We had Maddie's login, but it stopped. I think she forgot to update her payment info. I'm airing her out right now on this podcast. Maddie, get on it. Let me find it. Maddie's our manager and we're her factory slaves so she can do whatever she wants. I'm looking at the vulture article.

Oh yeah. You know, actually. You can always count on journalists to copy paste stuff from other articles. She said she's, she'd like to be able to raise awareness on the tactics that abusers use to control you and take away your agency. He grabbed her to the point of bruising, knowingly gave her a sexually transmitted disease, insisted upon a certain number of times she had to kiss and touch quote, kiss and touch him each day. She feared going to the bathroom night because he kept a loaded gun on his bedside table.

She said what I went through shy was the worst thing I've ever been through in my whole life. He said he was in a 12 step program and basically owned up to being abusive. She said it was hard for me to process during and after. I never thought it would happen to me. My second worst nightmare is being forced to share with the world that I am a survivor of domestic abuse. My first worst nightmare is telling any, not telling anyone and knowing that I could have helped even just one person by sharing my story.

Really that's your worst nightmare, not like, you know, your parent or child dying or, I mean. It's a turn of phrase. I understand, but it's like, you know, my feeling about it is like this is not an issue for public arbitration. Definitely. And I don't really buy that it is that helpful to victims of domestic abuse to hear that it could happen to someone as beautiful and talented as FK8 twigs.

There is a, the most kind of notably annoying part is when she says that she could have gotten on a business class flight back to her townhouse in London at any point and still felt that she was unable to. Uh, why? Because of the, the abusive dynamics that, that developed, the control that she felt he had over her and the fear that she sort of lived. I mean, which is legitimate by far less to me kind of egregious as it would be in the case of someone who is say financially dependent.

But no option to leave. Yeah. User. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, she also, we should say she said that she would, um, uh, with the settlement she, she is probably going to receive from this suit, she will donate large proceeds of it to, uh, foundations that help victims of domestic abuse, which I hope she does.

I hope she does. And I, I mean, I don't know how much of, uh, the charitable contributions of celebrities actually make their way to like the intended target, whatever. But like, I don't know, any time, any time somebody says they're raising awareness, run for the hills because they're lying to you, well, actually they're lying to themselves and holding you hostage. They're raising awareness for themselves. For be victims of BPD everywhere.

Um, she says that she didn't speak out sooner cause she thought no one would believe her because she is a quirky woman of color. That's such a lie. Of course, everybody's going to believe you're a beautiful, talented woman. You're a woman. Everybody believes women and you're famous and you're unassailable. Of course you knew full well that everybody would believe you. And by the way, I totally sympathize with her.

I think this guy seems, uh, crazy and unhinged and predatory, which is probably what drew her to him in the first place. Yeah. It's like also, you know, Caroline had the right take Caroline and Twitter as a woman and she got kind of, kind of savaged for it, but she said, I'm sure she is a terrible boyfriend, probably abusive, but exploiting your bad relationship with a known troubled person after it ends for clout is its own new brand of the antisocial. Also your music sucks.

I'm not going to weigh in on the music part because I've, I've already been, uh, you know, privy to Twigs's rabid fan base and I don't, I've never really heard her music, um, but the rest is essentially correct. And the only thing that I disagree with, uh, in the statement with Caroline is that I don't think she's doing it for clout actually. I think she's doing it, um, to vindicate herself and escape from her own inner voice. You know, I think she's trying to crowdsource her own guilt and participating in this. Well, to punish Shia as well, I think, I think there's probably a bit of vindictiveness

in going public with it. Yeah, I don't see really a clout grab here necessarily, believe it or not. I mean, I guess she gets residual clout by portraying herself as a victim, but I don't think she's in it for that. Yeah. Um, it gets her name in a, in a media cycle. That's, yeah, sensibly something someone could want, I guess, but I'm not, yeah. I don't think people are that cynical and orchestrating.

Yeah. Um, I believe that, yeah, she's was traumatized by her relationship with Shia and felt compelled to speak out, but is denying in some way her own kind of complicitness and I think you're right. Yeah. And I think it dogs. I mean, I mean, listen, I catch so much heat every time I say this, I get called jealous and misogynistic and it pick me and so on.

Um, and none of it has any bearing in reality. Like if you ever catch me in the street, you can come say hello and you will see that this is like apparently, um, not true, but I want young women to listen to me very carefully, you know, um, because I will never lie to them and I'll never lead them astray because I'm a little bit older and I've been through it all. Um, and I've confronted my own self deceit and manipulations and so on. Um, but barring things that you can't control like your happiness is totally, uh, within your own hands, but you have to take responsibility for yourself and accept your agency and creating

the conditions of your own misery, like a hundred percent. And it's absolutely true that men can be horrible and treat you like shit and they can and they will, but you know, um, that doesn't make you therefore unassailable. And the worst thing that you can do for yourself, um, kind of like emotionally and existentially is crowdsource your inner self doubt, your nagging inner voice that what you're doing is not good like as a young woman, cause I think we all like most people minus the tiny sliver of the fringe that are truly sociopaths have a good strong inner instinct for when they're acting, you know, right in like a morally good and correct way.

And I think both men and women spiral and do things they shouldn't. Well, I'd like to quote, um, I'm going to read a portion of a Camille Paglia, say they revisited this from Vamps and Tramps, so she must have written it in like the early nineties. Yeah. Um, she, she says, as a feminist, I detest the rhetorical diminution of woman into a passive punching bag, which is the basic premise of the battered woman syndrome. Women strike women for quite another reason because physical superiority is their only

weapon against it being far more powerful than they are. The blow does not subordinate. It equalizes aggression expresses itself in more than one way in the cycle of domestic violence. Um, this is not to excuse men for their scurrilous behavior, it is to awaken women to their equal responsibility in dispute and confrontation. Any woman who stays with her abuser beyond the first incident is complicitous with him. She goes on, here's the crux of the relationship, which has to be defined as sadomasochistic

on both sides. His pleading reactivates the maternal in her. She forgives him. Never is he more open, vulnerable and intimate than when he begs for a second chance. I'll never do it again. His tenderness and affection enamor her. She is addicted to the apology. She is overwhelmed by sensory ecstasy by the heightened passions of rage and frenzy, yielding

to the melting reunion of boy and mother who nestles her son against her bosom. The battered woman stays because she thinks she sees the truth and because secretly she knows she's victorious. And so it is recognized that women in these relationships are exerting their own form of aggression. Battering will remain an enigma. Yes. Like this is the thing.

Paulia knows women better than they don't know themselves. I've said it before and I'll say it again, like women have a tremendous amount of unofficial agency and they're actually quite powerful and quite aggressive, especially someone like twigs. Yeah. Like a ruthlessly ambitious, extremely powerful woman. Yeah. Like, and of course in her relationship, she enters into this like quasi submissive role,

but we're all forever topping from the bottom. The other thing that dawned on me is like, you can look into any relationship you've had or I've had and both sides can be amply accused of emotional abuse. I mean, come on, like. Of course. You know, like I think like the problem with twigs publicly suing Shia is not that he's being unfairly targeted. Like you can't really make excuses for him, but that she's like dishonoring herself.

She knowingly and willingly entered into this relationship and she wanted something out of it. Sure. That wasn't. And I'm sure, you know, all of the things that became kind of problematic and dark and toxic about it were what sort of drew her to him in the first place, which he was like trouble that intense and emotional and he fits exactly the sort of psychological profile that Palliah describes, which is this kind of like infantile fixated on the mother archetype.

Anything that deviates from this kind of maternal love then becomes a point of aggression and violence, which isn't yeah, which like she says, isn't to subordinates to equalize because I'm sure he knew on a deep instinctive level that twigs was more powerful than he was. Yeah. And I listen, I remember from my own childhood when my parents had very kind of like intense violent fights. My mother was an equal party to these fights because she's incredibly powerful and incredibly influential.

And of course, my father could easily overpower her, like he goes without saying most men can overpower most women. But it was a mutually complicit dysfunctional relationship. As they often are. Yeah. As they always are. And I think like the only thing that I would disagree with like Palliah about is that, yeah, you have to do a little bit of accounting for like economic conditions and I think like

she says that in that, in other portions of that, or yeah, like as feminists, we should do what we can to assist women to exit, exit situations that are legitimately untenable abusive that have economic disparities that keep them in these cycles of abuse. Yeah. That make it impossible for them to live to leave because it that's impossible for them to live otherwise, especially if there's children involved. There's also like a legitimate therapeutic element in the sense that a lot of women are not aware of their agency and their involvement in these dynamics.

And I think a lot of men are probably not aware either. Yeah. I mean, Palliah is clearly like a man child. Yeah. And a rageaholic and an alcoholic and another one of these people like Johnny Duff who's never been told no his entire life. Right. But like, you know, women have created this like perfect hell for themselves because in

in rendering themselves permanently unaccountable in order to innocent, yeah, in order to secure certain temporary perks and concessions, they have become the guarantors of their own misery. They're literally signing the document and the dotted line. Yeah. Like there's no, you know, and like, you know, I'll say this to like, I don't care if you're like a size six or a size zero or a blonde or a brunette or whatever, there's anything more beautiful and sexy than a woman who knows herself and can handle herself. Men like this too.

Right. Like, so I think that that aside, there's also kind of like the bigger issue of like the fact that all of the legitimate channels that actors and musicians and other celebrities had for attracting attention to themselves have dried up because of the pandemic. Right. So they're left sort of like spinning their wheels. I mean, you saw this in the early days, like with like celebs doing hashtag resistance and singing Imagine and doing black and white videos about anti-racism.

And I say this not to be a bitch whatsoever, I totally sympathize, I think it's really hard for people who's like. We're in an attention economy recession. Yeah, we are. Celebs have fallen on hard times. Yeah. The attention economy has like dried up and like collapsed. The stocks are plummeting.

Under the weight of all those egos. No, but I think it's probably partly that too, because she can't tour and she's notoriously slow in like making her albums and whatever, yeah. Maybe she's got one in the works. No, maybe. Maybe she should make an album about. Maybe she's healthier than we ever credit her, I'm sure she is. No, but seriously, that's a thought like making an album about your shitty emotionally abusive

relationship is a much better avenue for publicly arbitrating it than like suing the guy in the court of law. Yeah, but the times tell all, and yeah, and I agree, like making work about something like that probably would help more women than reading a times article about how you couldn't, you could have gotten on a business class flight and yet didn't because it can happen even to the fabulously wealthy, beautiful and talented. Yeah, like I'm sure, I'm sure it can and it has, but it is kind of, it feels like a slap in the face or like rubbing it in the face of people who are like in the same situation

but less fortunate. I mean, I'm serious. Yeah. Do you think this matter is actually going to go to court? I think he'll probably will be settled out of privately saying is how he's already basically admitted to wrongdoing. Yeah. He said that not all of the allegations were true, but that he is in a 12 step program

to. Oh yeah, I read, I read his statement, which like he didn't really bother to push back or deny so much. He did a kind of gaslighty thing where he said, well, you know, I can't blame the women accusing me for feeling the way that they feel. I'll say that not all of the allegations are true, but I respect how they feel I'm currently in a 12 step program, this kind of thing. And then Sia chimed in, commended FK twigs on her bravery and said that she too had been

a victim of Shia LaBeouf who quote, conned her into an adulterous relationship. I assume while he was married, maybe he's still married to Mia Gauth. Oh, was he married? Yeah. Oh. He got, he, I remember him getting, he got like married in Vegas. Right. Um, in this kind of like campy, ostentatious display, I remember because I felt very jealous

when it happened, um, not because I want to marry Shia LaBeouf, but because I don't know, the wedding was very cute and it made me ache with some kind of like displace disappointment or something. Yeah. But I remember, yeah, seeing him getting married, um, very well. I'm checking this out now. This looks, oh, I see it's, it looks like kind of like a seventies cult thing. Yeah.

Yeah. Quite cute. Well, okay, but this is perfect. Oh, and he has this like retarded chest plate that he got for a movie role that, for a movie that tank. Yeah. Well, they met on the set of Honey Boy, which I haven't seen, but which I think Shia wrote, which is about his abusive dad and his tumultuous upbringing and, you know, rise to fame or

something. And so he's been, he's been leading with being troubled for a long time. That's his like artistic angle. Yeah. Yeah. The Times article starts with like, um, FK, Twix and Shia LaBeouf were speeding down the highway in Los Angeles and he was threatening to crash the car unless she professed her and loved him.

It was like immediately very like salacious and dramatic and one could imagine, yeah, how that cycle would perpetuate itself and become very toxic. Well, it, as with all of these kinds of accusations, depending on where you're standing and what your mood is that day, it could either sound really horrific or really horny. Like you could see this opening line as part of like a Vogue or Vanity Fair article about like how great their relationship is. Yeah. Yeah.

And how like in love they are. Right. And it really depends. It's like, you know, the joke that we've made that a lot of these me too suits are, uh, you know, would never have existed if the woman thought the guy was extremely hot in a good way. Mm hmm. I mean, I just, you know, that's, I think that's all I ask for.

And sometimes I, I begin to think that I'm like barking up the wrong tree because this kind of self denial or self deceit is a feature and not a bug of being a woman. And I'm just like, no, no, we should all just be honest, at least with ourselves. Well, because women, if women are honest about how powerful they actually are, we've talked about this too. That is favor women are constantly doing and kind of protecting not basically not a masculating man at every turn and protecting their quote, fragile masculinity, um, that all of this is kind of a, yeah, a constructed feature of heterosexual dynamic.

Yeah. But if women were honest about it, then they would lose it's paradoxical, right? Like they would lose their topping from the bottom, their power as like victims in an oppressive patriarchal dynamic. And they would just have to be men and being a man sucks. Yeah. No one wants that. Yeah.

Which is why all these men are becoming women now. Um, but yeah, I don't know. I mean, uh, yeah, it's funny because, you know, you see, uh, I guess, I see is clearly doing damage control for her magic controversy. Yeah. Music loyal. It's called music. Not magic.

Well, cause she, she did that video, um, with Shia and Maddie Ziegler's, am I saying? Which was like a pre grooming type of situation. Yeah. They were like in a kind of boxing, uh, whatever you call it, boxing box. Um, cage. Um, yeah, and claims that they had an affair that she was, uh, conned into, which of course isn't. Cause he was still married.

Yeah. Um, yeah. That's also not abusive. Yeah. That's also a lie. Like, oh, you accidentally fell on his dick in the course of shooting this video. Like, oops, um, and like, yeah, I think like women need to get real and get honest. Like, uh, one of those nineties, this is your brain on drugs commercials.

And just like, you know, acknowledge that you, you are drawn to troubled men and bad boys because, you know, I think a lot of women, especially young naive women think that they're going to be the ones to save him. And they want that kind of centrality in a man's life because it's flattering and it's passionate. Right. And like, you know, as slowly as you get older, all this kind of stuff falls away and you're left only with like the mundane indignities and humiliations of like, like calling your

insurance company and like, which is why the, the cycle of abuse is so attractive. Yeah. It says it's like, it heightens really the, the stakes and the, the drama of your intimate relationships to be transgressed upon and then apologized to. Yeah. And I think like women are really turned on by that dynamic where like the kind of street car name desires dynamic where this man who's like bursting out of his t-shirt becomes like your little baby boy or whatever.

I can't tell. I can't figure out if Shia is a buff or fat or buff fat. Shia is built. Yeah. How tall? He's probably a 5'8 actor, I'd guess. Yeah. Like a 5'8, 5'9 big head.

Yeah. But he's in good shape. Would you? He just did this, um, knowing what you know, knowing what I know, know just because I wouldn't want to talk to him for too long. Yeah. He's probably like not. He's a one on the binary if he leaves right away, but we have to get into his, um, sick

and twisted childhood or. Yeah. He's going to tell you about his PTSD and alcoholism. Yeah. Any of the insights that he has that he thinks are super interesting. I'm going to, that's going to be a no for me dog. Anybody can just like have PTSD now. You can just like pick it up at the drugstore.

Like, I mean, he's, he was a child actor, so I'm sure legitimately very troubling things have happened to him and. It's that pecking order. I wish them both well. Yeah. I mean, totally. I hope that, yeah, I hope that some battered woman's shelters do receive a, a handsome donation from him or her via him that seems like the best outcome.

He's a Gemini. Oh, June 11th. So it's a day after my mom. These people are crazy. They're totally insane. Yeah. I bet the, the charts not, not looking good. Like I think that Gemini is automatically skits a typo mood disorder, like automatically

all Gemini's. Yeah. She's the twins and she's an Aquarius, very cool. So she's a Loof detach. She's a hothead. Yeah. Perfect relationship. I could.

It's not hard to imagine how things would spiral out of control. Yeah. I don't think that. In a hot dramatic way. I don't know if I should make a movie about it. Yeah. There you go. I'm saying make a record, make a movie.

Make one of those movie records that are like lemonade or something. Yeah. Yeah. About like Beyonce had the right idea, her husband cheated on her and she made it an award winning visually stunning album instead of suing him publicly. Exactly. Maybe he didn't even cheat on her and it was all just like a stunt. Yeah.

A gimmick to sell records. I mean like that's how you do it. But I'm still waiting for our apology from Shia for siding with, never officially or probably anyway, but for his allegiance to Luke Turner, casually, a man who has abused us. Yeah. That's psychically. Yeah.

That was an era of psychological abuse. His crusading against the R word. Yeah. It feels good to be on the right side of history. Shia helped me down until I was black and blue and made me disavow my usage of the R word. He tossed me, he tossed my frail and lithe body across the room. It could happen to even someone as frail and weak as me, someone so frail yet so muscular

who's versed in the ancient art of pole dancing. And Stevens. Speaking of the ancient art of pole dancing, Tulsi is attempting to pass a bill to protect women's sports. Yeah. That's a nice segue, huh? Yeah. Speaking of emotional abuse, yeah, Tulsi.

She's been looking like better and better lately. Her cascading hair with like that white, shocking stripe. Yeah. Definitely. All right. She's passing a Joe Rogan bill or attempting to that would ban trans women and girls from female sports based on the Joe Rogan female sports defense. So there's something called title nine that was passed in the 70s that prohibits discrimination

on the basis of sex and educational programs or activities that receive federal funding. It was an initiative that basically created female competitive sports as we know them on the college level today in the video that Tulsi posted on Twitter. She said that prior to title nine, one in 27 girls played competitive sports and now two of every out of every five and sort of opened up opportunities for women to receive sports scholarships and blah, blah, blah, compete and wait, it was one in how many for it? And now it's two and five, two out of five, two out of five, which a lot of women playing

sports too many if you ask me too many. Yeah. But that's a different conversation. And now Tulsi is making the argument that title nine is being sort of misinterpreted to allow transgender women to compete in competitive female sports amongst biological women, which she claims deprives them of opportunities sort of antithetically to the original intent of title nine. So she's hoping to pass a provision that would prevent, yeah, that would deprive institutions

of federal funding who sanctioned transgender athletes competing in female sports. Yeah. Gotcha. There we go. So women, so effectively women are being butt fucked by the very provision that was supposed to protect them. Wow. She's arguing.

Yeah. I think, well, I'll get into it. I think there's a lot more complexity to this situation. And I don't think a blanket ban is like what's in order. But listen, I again, I never thought the patriarchy was real until trans people started bullying me on the internet. And I was like, oh, yeah, men just find a way to, I, I'm of the opinion that there's a very negligible amount of transgender women trying to elbow their way into their way into

female sports. Yeah. That this is very much like a kind of a symbolic act that Tulsi is undertaking to pander to her right wing constituents. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I'm generally favorable on Tulsi, but I think she knows what she's doing. She's in the last few days of her congressional term and she's not.

She's running for reelection. She's not running for reelection. She's leaving. So I think she wants to leave with a bang. Oh, I see. Well, it's never going to get passed. Yeah. Yeah.

I doubt, I mean, but yeah, there's a statistic from the article that you sent me from August that was the, from the New York Times, who should compete in women's sports or two almost irreconcilable positions, that here's the statistic from a trans researcher who says today about 200,000 athletes compete in women's college sports, Joanna Harper, a researcher and medical physicist estimated that about 50 are transgender. So I think like passing a law to ban 50 people would say on the collegiate level and then maybe another 50 people on the professional level and then another 50 people on the high school level.

So we're talking like maybe like 150, maybe 300 people tops seems like a little ridiculous. Right. Negligible. Yeah. And the issue is that, right, it's a case of, it's a lot like the bathroom sort of debate. It's a case of people getting mad about stuff that doesn't happen or the sort of the specter of a man putting on a wig and going into a women's bathroom and raping everyone in there or a biological male sort of frivolously identifying as a woman to beat other chicks in a race or

whatever. To arm wrestle other chicks in a bar. And the issue is that there are, because competitive sports have to do with feats of sort of strength and muscle mass, that there are biological sexual differences between men and women that give men typically an advantage. The Olympics does allow transgender athletes to compete. But they have to take testosterone blockers for some designated amount of time. But then there's also research that says even with testosterone blockers that it still doesn't

sort of diminish the natural physical advantages that men have in the realm of sports. Yeah. So there's also the even more unlikely fringe case of the very rare people in the population who are not transgender, but are hermaphrodites. There's this woman, Caster Seminea, who's like a runner and she was born biologically a woman designated as such, identifies as a woman, is a lesbian, I think. And she is, has been kind of under fire from the Olympic committee because she's, her testosterone is like through the roof.

She levels. Yeah. They're super high. And so she, you know, possibly has a competitive advantage, an unfair competitive advantage over other women. The other thing that somebody pointed out in one of these New York Times articles is that all athletes have an insane competitive advantage over people in general. Like they're highly qualified physically elite specimens.

And that in sort of nonally nonprofessional sports, there is truly a negligible difference between trans women and biological women. Yeah. And the point is that like the research, there's research that suggests that, yes, men who transition into women do retain certain physical advantages that may be unfair. There's other research that suggests that that's not the case. So not only is this a complicated issue where nobody's going to be, we're not everybody's going to be happy, but it's like a very kind of incipient burgeoning issue that has, there's

not enough research to rule in one way or another at this point. And then there's probably so many variances also in case by cases based on like type of sport and whether or not, because I would think, right, if someone started transitioning before puberty or close to puberty, that they wouldn't develop those biologically male advantages. Yeah, exactly. To like grab with someone like a Caitlyn Jenner or whatever. Yeah. And a boy that starts transitioning at 13 is going to have different physical abilities

than a man who starts transitioning at 40. It just seems pretty, yeah. So there's that to take into advantage. That opens up the bigger issue, whether young children should be transition, which is a much bigger and much more important issue, I think, than like a few trans girls playing sports. Right. I just feel like these things rather than being subject to like a federal bill, which

is probably not going to pass and is a move point anyway, because of the kind of newness of the situation and also the kind of negligible amount of people who are affected by like how many biological women are actually being sort of deprived of scholarships or athletic prestige due to being usurped by stronger trans women. Yeah. Two. Two. Yeah.

Maybe 10. Right. And that those things should be sort of dealt with on a case by case basis. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, based on the particular circumstances and characteristics of the individual case at hand, instead of like being billed into oblivion or whatever, there's much more pressing matters on the table than like women's sports. I mean, I'm with you.

I think the whole framing of the question is wrong because women's sports should just be abolished. I mean, in general, it's, you know, competitive sports. That's not very feminine. Yeah. Real women don't play sports. It's, you know, they can do ballet or yoga or pole dancing or salsa dancing, burlesque dancing and jazz dance tango.

Any of the dancing seems to be fair game, but why do girls want to play competitive? I'm being a bitch now. Yeah. They're living positions. But yeah, I guess it builds morale and give some good leadership qualities, but it builds a sense of like sisterhood and teamwork. Not very feminine. They should be competing against each other for a guy like Shia LaBeouf.

It's just not very feminine. If you ask me to be running around or trying to win a race or playing basketball. Yeah. Yeah. And of course there's absolutely no issue with male to female athletes. Yeah. I saw that. Nobody gives a shit.

It's just not, it doesn't seem to be a problem for some reason. Oh, that's so depressing. I just like picture like a reverse Cuomo looking twink on the field. Like he used to be a girl. He just gets outrun by like diesel ass, alpha. But I think, I mean, I, you know, I sort of trust the Olympic standard. I feel like they've, they're really the authority on sportsmanship and if they've devised some calculation by which trans women are admitted to compete, then that should sort of be the,

the standard. Yeah. I just, I don't think that we care enough about sports to care enough about this issue. I mean, I trust the Olympic committee about as much as I trust the World Health Organization or the New York Times, which is like not a lot, but it's probably fine. I mean, but they do arbitrate this. Like they generally allow trans women in, as you said, but on a case-by-case basis, they measure your T levels.

Right. And I guess the question is whether they're a residual like advantages that came about through previous T levels. Which there might be, but we're already dealing with, yeah, with like extraordinary athletic abilities here. So yeah, it seems like splitting hair is, unless it's also all a moot point because there's no athletics going on. Just like there's no concerts.

Right. Isn't the Olympics canceled? Olympics is canceled. Yeah. But this isn't about the Olympics. This is, I mean, it is transphobic. It's totally creating like a, a trans straw man. Yeah.

That doesn't exist for the most part, like you could cherry pick maybe one or two cases in which a biological woman has been disenfranchised. Yeah. Yeah. It is. No, that's, that's well said. That's a good point. But also like, I think like then you have to talk about how things like transphobia are

used to corral and cudgel people into endless meaningless culture wars. Because again, we are like, please don't kill me, but Bill Maher was really right about one thing, which is that this is a boutique issue, that's a special interest issue that does not affect the vast majority of people. Well, why do you think Tulsi has taken it up? I just think as a high T woman, she's jealous of those beautiful trans women. She is. Who beat her at her own game.

She's sporty. Yeah. She is sporty. So I get why she, she's interested. Yeah. I'm, I'm jealous of trans women. Well, the hot ones. Anyway, sometimes I see a trans woman and I'm like, your jawline is like so much better

than mine. Yeah. Your cheekbone is just a little bit more. We're still saving up for facial feminization surgery. Yeah. I'm going to write that off on taxes. I'm going to get my chin shaved down. Ban women's sports.

Their calves are getting too strong. Their arms too big. We have to, we have to, as a culture, have to take a stand and keep women, make women waifs again. The only sport women should be doing is like makeup tutorials, podcasting, how to fit both balls and that one. Ball juggling, yeah. Sword swallowing.

I mean, this is also a moot point because everybody's going to be morbidly obese soon if they're not already. So there will be no sports. Yeah. Tulsi, Tulsi take the L, I think. Is there, is there female football? I don't think so. As a legal scholar, I think title nine would include female football, but I just don't

think there's enough interest. Oh, I guess there are women who play football on men's teams. I was watching some girl UFC fighters. Oh yeah, that's a thing. The other week and that was kind of more fun than watching guys beat the shit out of each other. Wait, really? You're the second person who said this to me.

I have a friend who watches female MMA and she's like really into it. Oh, that's what it was. It was MMA. Oh, I don't know the difference, but yeah, I mean, definitely because it's, it feels way more brutal to see like, women, girls, yeah, karate chop. Because that's what they really want to do when they're quote raising awareness for social issues. Yeah.

It's just pull each other's hair. Red wrestling, that's a nice competitive sport. Being a cheerleader for a sport. Wet t-shirt contests. Yeah. Waitressing, high endurance. Yeah. All your feet all day.

I think dance is a good umbrella category because dance encompasses both elite athleticism and also sex work. Yeah, it's the best of both worlds. That issue for women. Key goals. Key goals. Figure skating. Oh yeah, that's a great one.

Rhythmic gymnastics, like my mom. Oh yeah, there you go. See, those are the sports I'm interested in. So I feel, you know, synchronized swimming, the shoulders get a little broad, but that's okay because they're doing such aesthetic things in the, they should point your dad as the head of the Olympic committee transgender task force. He's like, you will need to lose 10 kilos like Sam Rothstein with the calipers. Yeah.

Honey, as long as they're skinny, who cares? As long as the waist to hip ratio is looking right, let them, let them frolic around. What do we care? I mean, that's the number one determinant of athletic ability. If you starve them, they'll get weak and frail. I don't care how high their T levels are and that naturally levels the competitive advantage. There you go. Yeah.

I think we cracked it. Yeah. Should we talk about podcasting? Yes. Um, the Guardian wrote an op-ed with a lovely picture of Joe Rogan that says sinister sounds podcasts are becoming the new medium of misinformation. While social networks are clamping down on dangerous content, podcasting is giving it a largely unmoderated platform.

The peace draws on a largely anecdotal example of a girl whose dad got into Q and odd or something via listening to Steve Bannon's war room and then extrapolates from that point to make the case that podcasts are somehow pushing dangerous, all right narratives. And then as part of the disinformation pipeline, um, podcast can serve as quote an entry point and point of legitimation for unfounded claims says Dr. Sarah Roberts and associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The net effect is not only to put fake bogus and debunked claims into the larger public conversation, but to shift the needle entirely on the public's attention and areas of concern

says irrelevant loser college professor, the doctor prominently displayed in her Twitter handle. They really brought out the experts for that one. Yeah. Like state the obvious. The haters. Yeah. It's like the like hire, like pay an expert to say like fast food is fattening or cigarette

smoke is like cancerous or something. Um, yeah, they blow up or like go in case right out of the gate, um, Joe Rogan is sort of the classic scapegoat once again, for some reason, despite being the most popular and likable guy in podcast. Yeah. And he looks so friendly and inviting in the, in the photo of these just like, Hey, what's up man? Paired with sinister sounds.

Um, well done. Yeah. But like, you know, like in like right in the first paragraph, they talk about how like in the drawn out aftermath of the US election, Amelia's dad was losing faith in Fox news. Why wasn't it covering more allegations of voter fraud? He asked the network was a joke. So he turned to alternative sources of information podcasts, like Bannon's war room hosted by alt-right figure Steve Bannon, which regularly broadcasts baseless claims about dumps and

illegal voters. So like by their own admission, the problem isn't that misinformation is being spread. It's that the wrong kind of misinformation is being spread, you know, like, um, the kind that runs counter to the official narrative and they, you know, I'm not saying that the war room does not regularly traffic and baseless claims, but if you're going to make that kind of allegation, you have to then back it up. It's hard to get there because he does a lot of commercials. Yeah, exactly.

My episodes are only like 40 minutes long. Yeah. And he like, you know, I'm sure he like threatens a lot of people's lives on it, which is an example they slightly like, uh, makes a lot of off color racist jokes. This reminds me of the time, like, um, actually, uh, and like this is vividly in my mind, um, when Andrea Longchoo dismissed Ray Blanchard, the guy who coined the term auto-gynophilia as a, as a bigot in her book while continuing to use the term. And like, I was like, okay, like the guy may in fact, well, be a bigot.

I don't know. But yeah, it's intellectually responsible and morally reckless to call somebody a bigot and then not back it up. Right. And like now more than ever, it's easy to do it. Definitely. So now more than ever, we have to like, uh, you know, challenge it. Yeah.

Well, it reminds me also of sort of the sub stack conversation that we touched on briefly when we had Tai-Bian, um, which is that kind of mainstream media feels threatened by alternate forms of information dissemination and like podcasts or sub stacks or whatever, formerly blogs. Yeah. This is literally you mad cause you ugly. It's, there's no misinformation. And so they feel, and even if there was, it's the, the compulsion to sort of censor alternative

forms of media in the interest of like gatekeeping and legitimizing people like this UCLA professor. Yeah. And it's based on her arbitrary or arbitrary authority. And it's like, we all know that the number one source of misinformation is the mainstream official institutional media. Yeah. Like what? Um, but this was, I thought they do, so they do furnish, they pretend to furnish a proof

of like bannons, allegedly, allegedly baseless claims. Um, they say take bannons war room in November episode of the show was removed from YouTube due to Bannon's violent comments about the leader of the United States pandemic response. Dr. Anthony Fauci, um, and the FBI director, Christopher Ray, I'd put their heads on pike span and said, I'd put them at two corners of the White House as a warning to the federal bureaucrats. Okay. Hypothetical.

Yeah. I mean, he's off topic. I'm reminded also of the time that Larry Kramer said that Fauci should not be honored at a dinner, but thrown into jail for his bungling of the early HIV AIDS response. Like the point is that this doesn't prove anything because it's not provable because he's not making a provable claim. He's not making a measurable claim. He's making a sick joke.

Right. Right. There's something to prove. It's like liberally, it's like literally liberal information that they are manipulating your ability to make judgments. They're billing this as a fact when it's like a joke and they're right and they're doing a disservice to kind of nuance and tone and once again, begging to be censored by Big Tag.

Yeah. And it's interesting because like, you know, you mentioned the framing of the article. It's framed around the story of a young girl lamenting how her boomer dad has fallen prey to like right wing misinformation, which is all empathy hoarding and victim mongering. Like you as an educated liberal are supposed to feel pity for her and even more pity for him, you know, and it's like an exercise in moral superiority. It's meant to prevent you from asking why someone like her dad would be drawn to these alternative formats.

Why you would feel mis-unrepresented by Fox News, which wasn't exactly a... Oh yeah, because he's a Trump voter and they're all racists and retards. She goes on to say that before Rogan joined Spotify, I guess making the case that Spotify otherwise would have de-platformed someone like Rogan, he interviewed far-right figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos who have been banned from YouTube and Facebook respectively for hate speech, Kish, a medical worker in Australia, another random, anecdotal, anonymized person, started listening to the show when it was intimate, a bit transgressive, but he became more critical of how Rogan treated health issues, especially when he thought the show

was giving guests a pedestal to sell their snake oil. The whole COVID issue really pushed it over the edge, he says. It felt... It feels like it all went out the window when Rogan started speaking out against mask wearers and against the government for the lockdown to control and mitigate the spread of the virus, which is, I think, something we'll see more of anyone who questions the dominant party line on COVID as being a line too far. Yeah, being a spreader of fake news and salacious thoughts that have been liable and whatever.

And that's why podcasts are dangerous. Yeah, even though they're just merely another medium for the circulation of ideas that hasn't been censored yet. Yeah, listeners can't be trusted to draw their own conclusions while listening to a podcast hosted by a UFC sports commentator who's very innocently asked, I don't think Rogan has any kind of anti-medical, anti-science, anti-fouchy agenda. Yeah, like him of all people. I think that he can be swayed based on evidence.

That's like sort of his blessing and his curse, like he's actually very open-minded and intellectually curious. He's susceptible, yeah. Yeah. In either direction, but he can't. I think it's very disingenuous to accuse him of having some kind of agenda. Yeah. Well, I mean, they have to because there's no other way that they can corner the market.

But yeah, this was very ominous too, while alt-right figures have been increasingly chased off of Facebook and Twitter. Podcasting is shaping up as the next arena where the fight over questionable or dangerous content again will play out. So we're going to take away our podcast for being too dumb. Yeah. Seriously, for spreading. We're going to have to issue disclaimers about we're just too dumb bitches before we say

anything. But it's like this too, like they're implicitly calling for more censorship, not less. Explicitly, basically. And again, it's like not the, it's not misinformation. That's the problem, but the type of misinformation in this case by the alt-right, but it's not really the alt-right. It's just people who have been successful outside of the institutional channels who are all grouped into like an alt-right or like now post-left subheading.

This expert actually openly calls for more censorship. Well, the idea that no one can be, that we can't even question or be critical of lockdown measures, lest you be akin to an alt-right figure then who should be censored is that sinister. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, it's always, as always with liberals, they love to do this thing where they lament and decry and like condemn in the other quote, other side, the very things

that they fantasize about doing, like throwing people into camps and censoring them up the ass. Right. Like you want this, not those other people. Not Joe Rogan. Yeah. Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan doesn't have a list of people he'd like to put in a gulag. Yeah, but the libs do, like they totally do.

And this part where she says, where she's talking about the fake bogus and debunk claims and shifting the needle on the public's attention and areas of concern. But it's like, again, this is like hilarious how it's framed as a bad thing because as everyone from Noam Chomsky to Matt Taiyubi talking about Noam Chomsky has said, like the mainstream media is the one that narrows the public's area of concern or areas of concern into these like reductive and shallow and divisive culture wars, which is like, it's funny that this article is written, I mean, of course it's being written by like the Guardian of all places.

The gatekeeper. But yeah, she literally, this doctor says, as podcasting grows in stature and revenue, this disinformation problem can't be ignored. Too many podcast platforms have not done the work around content moderation of their bread and butter material. This will undoubtedly serve as a new liability. So again, she's like, hire some underpaid third world moderators. To listen to Red Scare and run the fact checks on our baseless claims that women shouldn't

buy sports, that's a baseless claim that again, cannot be proven either way. I wonder how many other baseless claims we've made. Oh, countless. What? Yeah. And did nothing wrong. I don't even want to draw. Draw attention to them.

Must be a fall under that microscope. Like Jeffrey Epstein has a great park of collection. I guess. Yeah. Just grain of salt. Take a podcast with a grain of salt. Well, do you think that podcasts are like the next frontier of heavy censorship? Probably right?

I hope not. Hard to say. I think it'll be like Twitter and stuff first. Yeah. But then there's also the centralization and consolidation of Spotify getting into the game and putting all of the podcasts into one umbrella. Yeah. And that that'll have probably a kind of de facto censorship quality.

I wonder if Joe Rogan can be toppled. I mean, I think he made a mistake taking that Spotify deal. Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. I think not maybe for him, but for the culture. I wonder what it would take to topple him. That sounds ominous.

I'm not trying to topple Joe Rogan. I like love him and I'm happy that he exists. But I wonder like what it would take to like. I don't know. I mean, he's already being, people already love to call him like him and his listeners like Nazis and stuff. Yeah. And transphobes.

And he made the, not even the Bernie endorsement. Yeah. Yeah. People called on Bernie to renounce him. Oh yeah. I remember that too. Yeah. As a fascist.

Couldn't be less of a fascist Rogan. I know. And the thing with Joe Rogan is that like people, like most people don't even listen to most of his episodes. Like they have them kind of on in the background. People tune in for like Elon Musk or Kanye or like Alex Jones. Right. Like nobody cares about his episodes when he has like some MMA guy on like shilling protein

supplements. Well, that's what's really dangerous about podcasts and is that people listen to them so, so casually that are, yeah, that's true, are, um, stressorist ideas are able to subliminally influence people and push the needle into the realm of unacceptable discourse and like Slavic lives matter and everybody starts wearing like little Babushka scarves. Our influences are undeniable. Yeah. I guess we are influencers in the most depressing way possible.

Um, I think that's it. Yeah. That's that. How are we doing? Um, that's not bad. Uh, rumor going around that Trump may part in a saunge. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Um, uh, thus far baseless last time I checked, but that's really annoying. I, what? The rumor, not part in. I hope he does. I, yeah, I don't like these kind of like, I don't, Anderson posted a bikini pic of her holding a sign calling for him to part in a saunge. What an angel. That might sway him.

He likes blondes. He likes blondes and big, big tits. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. That's the way that you use your BPD for good. Wait, where's the bikini pic?

I actually didn't see it. I read about it when I was trying to find out if he was going to part in a saunge or not. It's like her wearing a one piece, but she looks really hot. It's a, it's a one piece. It's an old pic too. The tweet is smart move at POTUS. You could be the hashtag hero, Julian Assange, Donald Trump, can't stop this truth free press. That's how you do politics folks.

Yeah. You know what the most criminal thing about Twitter is, is how low Pam's engagement is. This thing has 957 likes and 161 retweets and it's been up for two hours. Damn. Shameful. She must be shadow banned. I'll give it an RT. I have no libido to tweet anymore, so I'm just going to RT Pam.

Well. Shall we? Yeah. Let's do it. See you in a see you in hell. Yeah, let's do it.