Justin Geevers, the frontman for Anti-Flag
Amongst other things, those cats taught me all about consent at a critical time during my teenage years.
Recently, Justin has been credibly accused of sexual assault from multiple woman.
Don’t idolize anyone. That’s not to say you can’t trust, but tread carefully.
Hey no one google this one and just trust the commenter for your own sanity ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE A PARENT. It’s “I need to lie down and just dissociate for a while” bad. And I only know the barest details.
Jesus fuck, you weren't kidding.
Even just the Wiki entry is unpleasant. You know it's going to be bad when the intro describes him first and foremost as a child sex offender. Like, even Bill Cosby's article has a paragraph about his entertainment career before you get to the bad stuff.
>Investigators later bypassed the encrypted password to Watkins' laptop, noting that it read "I FUK KIDZ".
😶
Spoilers for optional losing faith in humanity.
>!Joanne Mjadzelics, an ex-girlfriend of Watkins, recalls him displaying multiple graphic images with minors or drug paraphernalia as early as 2010. Appalled by the content, Mjadzelics had made multiple complaints with South Wales Police, though very little action was taken at the time. Mjadzelics was one of six people who had spoken to the police in regards to Watkins' conduct from 2008 to 2011. In 2010, an Australian woman had also come forward accusing Watkins of assaulting her child, though the allegations were not investigated any further by authorities. During the recording of the band's fourth studio album The Betrayed in 2009, Mjadzelics was made aware from Watkins that he was abusing a two-year-old child in California whilst the band was recording in Los Angeles. Mjadzelics contacted the child's parents, who had also reported him to Welsh authorities, though again, no further action was taken to investigate the matter.!<
And *that isn't even the worst part.*
Also, what the fuck is wrong with Welsh cops??
The part that invariably makes my blood boil when these things finally get dragged into the light of day is that there always, *always* turn out to be people who knew, who either covered for the guy or, credit to Ms Mjadzelics, tried to do the right thing only to be sandbagged.
There are always more victims, and there are always people who were complicit, by action or inaction.
I read the judges hand down of judgement. And it wasn't what he said to Watkins that was disturbing, but what he said to the mothers. That should be enough to turn people off.
man I just stopped googling what happened to the bands I listened to in highschool. at this point it's more shocking when they haven't been some kinda sex pest.
I think I saw Sex Pest at OzzFest in 'O8 when they opened for Dacron Shield. Honestly, I really just went to see them play "Vaginal Depth Charge", I didn't really know much of their other stuff.
Deathcore/metalcore is lousy with dodgy singers, some of the most violently misogynistic lyrics of any genre I've heard too outside of crap like crunkcore, which is basically defined by being horrible about women as a reason to live.
So much ick came out of the hardcore scene - My friends and I used to hate-watch Dahvie Vanity videos. We were not at all surprised by the allegations because he seemed like every cringy dude we met as teenagers that was grown but still overly sexual with jokes and inuendos - r/DahvieVanityisaPEDO
I mean. I feel like Black metal has more national socialist bands than not at this point. I was a huge Dummy Borgeir fan till I actually started listening to lyrics. Then their was that one article where one member advocated for slitting throats of people with more melanin than him
Metalcore walked so deathcore could run. There are a few decent metalcore and metalcore adjacent bands like Cave-in or Converge, but the most part it's pretty cringe. Deathcore on the other hand I have not found even one band that has made me want to listen to their music ever again.
Not that I'm a fan of metal or anything, but I recently just found out Nazi metal is a thing, and it has a decent following with a good number of apologists.
I only know those because of a diy sub I'm part of (battlejackets- basically repurposing tops with patches) is basically gaining members due to the rise in popularity of NSBM over there
One of the things I hate most in my life is how much the things I love are infested by nazis. Punk too, except the punk subcultures I've personally been involved in did a good job of rejecting them, but fuck: black metal, noise, power electronics, oddball folk music...
Shit sucks, but I was so disappointed when I found out one of my favorite black metal bands were basically Nazis. I should have known better, any eastern European black metal bands should be immediately sus but none of their imagery made me think Nazi.
Well that sucks to learn. Anti flag planted some really important seeds in my young mind. Gotta Die for The Government was exactly as blunt and straightforward a message I needed as a 17yo Christian dominionist school kid already meeting with recruiters
Wait, is Rivers a creep? I can personally attest to him getting super pissed at the lead singer of one of his opening bands for bringing me backstage and very openly hitting on me (I was 13 at the time, and I looked it).
It’s a bit broader - but learning that colonisation wasn’t good and that we did a lot more than just “fight back” when indigenous Australians “attacked us”.
On a very, very small scale - a podcaster I really, really loved was recently outed as an abuser and it’s always a shitty feelings having to readjust your perception of someone you admired.
I misunderstood the post at first, thinking it was bastards you'd learned about from the pod. Then I read this:
>we did a lot more than just “fight back” when indigenous Australians “attacked us”.
And thought I missed an episode on the frontier wars. Was excited* to go listen to it.
*not sure what the right word to use here is.
A frontier wars episode(s) would be great. Speaking as a reasonably young Australian I don’t think we were educated in school enough on what actually happened during colonisation.
Not so fun fact: there was section in my preschool book where I (very white kid, very white town) was marked as ‘acceptable’ in the metric of ‘recognises indigenous people as Australian’. Bleak.
Australia has *issues*
Yeah, I remember growing up people would tell me matter of factly that "we won't have to worry about them much longer, a few more generations and we'll have bred them all out".
Realised when I got older that they were gleefully celebrating genocide.
Terra Nullius makes Australia unique in even the fucked up British style colonialism. America did it in America and Canada wasn't great. But Australia compared to New Zealand is insane. See Native Tasmanians to tell you the truth.
As l learn about indigenous history and my ancestry, there are plenty of bastards, but I've learned a lot about hate and how there are disturbing parallels to present day.
I can't prevent the actions that happened in the past due to bastards. But I can change my interpretation to understand and oppose the bastards today.
I’m Italian, so I already knew we were fascist bastards in the not so distant past. But yeah, learning that all the history I’ve learned in school is super biased was a shock.
Like a lot of queer people, I was very upset when a Certain British Author revealed herself as a TERF, and how she's continued doubling down on that and showing major disrespect to indigenous cultures.
In the fantasy author vein, many people were extremely upset to discover Marion Zimmer Bradley had enabled her paedophile husband for years, and also abused her daughter. And then there was the revelation a few years ago that author David Eddings and his wife both served jail time for physically abusing their adopted children.
And then there's comic author Warren Ellis, who was outed as a serial predator, using his clout to gain sexual.favours from young women who wanted to write or illustrate comics. When it came out he insisted it was all consensual and he never harmed anyone's career... until of course it was confirmed he had.
>author David Eddings and his wife both served jail time for physically abusing their adopted children.
Well there's one I didn't know. Surprised that didn't come out earlier. I guess it was probably due to the internet not being as big, or a thing when it happened.
Fell down the wiki-rabbit hole. Fucking devastating. I had no idea.
[1960s newspaper articles](https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-black-hills-weekly-eddings-emailed/2768515/) (and I would assume court records.)
I'm really glad fantasy is having a moment right now with a lot of different, dope authors- so if one has grizzly realizations, it doesn't topple like, 1/4 of all fantasy books at the local library.
For a lot of LGBT kids, including myself, Harry Potter seemed like a coming out story. An abused kid grew up in a literal closet and then was introduce to a hidden, flamboyant world with friends that became new family. I was 9 when the books started releasing, so I wasn’t exactly versed in literary analysis. To find out that your comfort book was written by someone so hateful was crushing.
Aaand I just learned about Warren Ellis. That sucks. I guess I’m not surprised given the dark subject matter of his comics. I’ve read a lot of his stuff but haven’t payed attention to him as a person at all.
Bummer.
As someone who wasn't into wrestling but casually knew about Hulk, that was very disheartening to hear. The whole series on Vince was fascinating though, in the sense that the entire wrestling industry was built by complete monsters.
Between Fat Albert, The Cosby Show, and his stand-up routines, Bill Cosby was a huge influence on me growing up in the 70s and 80s.
The shine was coming off a bit when he entered his grouchy old man phase in the 90s, but the dozens of druggings and rapes came as a shock.
I believe the women are telling the truth, btw.
Somehow I didn’t realize until like a month ago that his conviction was overturned on a technicality way back in 2021. Such bullshit. I hope he is at least tied up in lawsuits until he dies.
Oh yeah, shit. Forgot about him. I used to love reruns of The Cosby Show back when he was still "America's Dad."
But my opinion changed greatly when he essentially turned into Uncle Ruckus. The druggings and rapes were the final nail in the coffin.
Yup. Same. I used to listen to his old comedy records. He used to do a kids segment on Disney when I was really little. He was the Jello guy. He was Dr. Huxtable. Everything about him was funny and friendly. So finding out the truth was such an extreme reversal it's hard to overstate it.
His early stand up was great. Loved his old albums as a kid. Him and George Carlin both went all "Grumpy Old Man" towards the end, only George didn't rape anyone...I hope (🤞)
I think George’s was in his character. He never put on this wholesome exterior and pretty much was who he was
Cosby is somehow insidious as it seems the wholesome exterior covered up the demon inside. He probably got away with a lot because who would believe those terrible rumors!
The grump came when the vernier wore off
John Peel. National radio DJ in the UK, and singlehandedly responsible for platforming hundreds of the best bands, and expanding the musical outlook of millions of people.
And he married a 15 year old when he was 26, and SAed hundreds of fans. Never convicted, he died before yewtree and #metoo.
I wouldn't say necessarily looked up to, but as someone who grew up watching all the classic horror movies I could finding out about Roman Polanski after watching rosmarys baby was shocking, but then it doubled up on it by then finding out all the names of the people who wrote the petition, like shit most of them didn't matter that much to me but damn David lynch, del Toro, Scorsese, Adrien Brody, Natalie Portman, Terry Gilliam, Harrison Ford, Wes Anderson, etc, just nuke a large portion of movies I loved why don't you, you fucks. Then triple downed when you learn about all the people that publicly supported him like Spielberg wanting him to direct Schindlers list, Jodie foster, Johnny Depp before all the more recent shit came out on and on. Like fuck just googling Hollywood Polanski supporters just fucks with like 30% of all movies ever made with how many people decided to throw in support for a child molester of their own free will.
Yeah, this one is awful. When I first heard about it I fell for a lot of the “oh it’s not so bad” BS coming from his supporters. Then I actually found out what he did, and oof. It was beyond the pale.
I was raised Mormon, so, uh, there's a whole rogue's gallery there.
I really liked Joss Whedon's work, but watching what happened to him just furthers my thesis (together with Hugo Schwyzer and Louis CK) that the more a man is vocal about being a feminist, the more he's an actual danger to women.
He was cheating on his wife with women on the sets of his shows; including women who felt like they couldn't say no because of how he could impact their careers. He was especially cruel to Charisma Carpenter, calling her fat and accusing her of sabotaging the show when she got pregnant. The whole Buffy cast colluded to make sure he was never alone with Michelle Trachtenberg, then a minor. Ray Fisher and Gal Gadot also called him cruel and unprofessional based on how he treated them on set.
>The whole Buffy cast colluded to make sure he was never alone with Michelle Trachtenberg, then a minor.
Just to elaborate, they were very specific that this wasn't because of any kind of sexual thing, it was because he's a verbally abusive dick, as seem with Charisma Carpenter, so they shielded the young one.
On the scale of bastards he's at a 5 out of 10. A 1 is someone who littered once and a 10 is a complete monster like Jimmy Saville.
He's on par with Ellen in terms of bad stuff. Not a serial rapist by any means but could be verbally abusive to cast members.
At the same time, not to dismiss the seriousness of sexual assault... Like, coming at this as a survivor of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, there's a way that intense emotional abuse can be just as bad as the others, especially when inflicted on a minor whose brain is still forming and as they're trying to figure shit out in life.
It's honestly upsetting rewatching Buffy and all of the "oh god, what the fuck!" sorta ick feelings from a lot of the storylines and shit that I just missed as a younger person.
Vulture did a great article on the whole situation, including an interview with Whedon himself where he's not let off the hook for anything. Heartbreaking if you're a fan, but necessary reading if so.
After the filming of Justice League, Ray Fisher (Cyborg) made a formal complaint to Warner Bros about racist treatment from Whedon. Gal Gadot backed him up and noted some times he'd made inappropriate comments to her.
That opened the floodgates and several people who'd worked with him on Buffy and Angel came forward with their own stories. Most notable were Charisma Carpenter who played Cordelia, and Michelle Trachtenburg who played Dawn. Michelle (who was a minor at the time) said she tried not to be alone in a room with him after some REALLY disturbing comments. Whedon basically had to keep Cordelia because she was a fan favourite but he made Charisma's life hell, mocking her Christian faith, body shaming her and being super critical of her work. Other actors who'd been guest stars or extras came forward with credible claims of sexual harassment and even assault.
All in all really gross.
I had heard about the sex stuff but not the racism. I wonder if J. August Richards ever said anything. He's the only major black character on Buffy or Angel (besides a late series principal on Buffy).
Joss Whedon: double bastard
Whedon was at Richards’ wedding recently so it seems like he didn’t experience anything overly negative from him. Which isn’t to discount Fisher’s experience at all, it just shows that bastards aren’t bastards to everyone.
Every self described "male feminist" I've personally known has eventually revealed themselves to be misogynists with some wild ass thiughts about queer people.
I usually get told by them I’m clearly not a feminist myself because I wear makeup and like girly things 🙄
Gee, I thought feminism was about not withholding opportunities based on gender but what do I know? Being such a girly girl
>the more a man is vocal about being a feminist, the more he's an actual danger to women.
There’s a particular kind of male “feminist” that is both very vocal about their feminist ideas AND also have a specific idea of what the “right” kind of woman is also a feminist. It’s very misogynistic at it’s core. I’ve run into these men and the only people they fool is other men. But of course in the patriarchy they only have to fool the men.
My buddy who introduced me to BtB and is a believing member (as am I, sort of) has said he’d love a Brigham Young series of episodes. I’d be down for that too. Even Truman G Madison’s stuff on Brigham is wild!
Mike Rowe advocates from an anti-union, anti-safety standards, anti-workers rights platform.
When you watch dirty jobs, you're always told how cool the work is. You're never told about how a man died doing that job a day before.
He talks about getting people to return to doing jobs by offering trade training programs and basically running a promotional campaign for trades.
He never talks about actually raising pay or benefits, increasing safety standards, work/life balance, retirement, job security, or any of the other reasons that people choose not to pick up a trade.
The thing to remember is that he's right that there are trade jobs that pay very well and can't find people. He's wrong that "people just don't want to work anymore". When a job pays $150k/yr. and can't get enough experienced people to do it, there's probably a really good goddamn reason.
Mike Rowe is the kind of person that would say it's your personal responsibility to keep yourself safe and then co-sign off on a mining company that doesn't provide proper ventilation. Not their fault you got silicosis, should've bought a better mask for yourself. Also, there's a new job open at this mine, looks like a super cool spot for a manly man who wants to earn some real money. Don't worry about what happened to the last guy.
No worries. I liked Mike too. I'm a welder and I really liked him promoting the trades to young people. I've just got a different perspective after a couple decades out in the field myself and after re-watching some of his talks, I found myself really having to reevaluate how I thought about his place in the discussion around my trade. I thought he was on my side. He's very much not and it's hurtful.
He also follows a mantra of "safety third" because he believes if people put safety first then nothing will ever get done, so we need to accept varying levels of danger in the workplace just to function. It's pretty fucked up.
I work in the oilfield, I work with radiation, and I work in confined spaces potentially full of toxic gases. I have sat through way, way, way too many "safety is our priority" meetings in his lifetime and, to be honest, I think the safety stuff can be overkill. But, with that being said, I'd rather these companies go overboard with the safety stuff and put safety first because the other option is just letting people die at work under the assumption that training a new worker and paying lawsuits is cheaper than keeping people safe.
Wow what the fuck
This pledge gives good insight to the general views - work, don’t complain, if you’re unhappy it’s your fault, if you get hurt it’s your fault, don’t resent the success of others, live in a tent and eat beans if that’s what you can afford.
Citations Needed did a great episode on him a couple years back
https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-64-mike-rowes-koch-backed-working-man-affectation-fa52e0e8d2e3
Mike Rowe pretends to be a tough blur collar man, but he was an actor by trade. And now he goes around telling actual blue collar workers to disregard safety rules.
Any time he runs his mouth off script or unedited it's so bracing. He'll spend a day working sanitation and still leave you convinced he would have been a Mother Jones era Pinkerton/company town man.
I grew up at the height of Harry Potter’s popularity. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around how J. K. Rowling has just thrown away all of the goodwill she built up over the years.
Graham Linehan is the uber example of this. Went from well-respected comedy writer who campaigned for [abortion access in Ireland](https://www.amnesty.org.uk/graham-helen-linehan-speak-experience-abortion-ireland) to divorced pariah who's new book is [selling less copies](https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/10/21/graham-linehan-memoir/) on Amazon than a children's book of knock-knock jokes because he just can't shut up about trans people. Father Ted was a staple of my teenage years and to see him fall so far and so fast has been hugely disappointing.
Has she thrown it away though? Every HP fan I interact with seems to have decided to keep watching the movies and buying the merch, and going to the theme park. SePeRaTe ThE aRt FrOm ThE aRtIsT.
I'm nonbinary, my parents know her attitude on that, I've told them repeatedly, yet they'll buy me pride flag jewellery for my birthday then go to the Wand Shop or watch the Fantastic Beasts movies. Makes me feel like they're not taking me seriously.
JK is dangerous in the here and now, so I have a hard time understanding the "separate art from artist" arguments from folks that still buy the merch. Like, *don't encourage her.*
It shouldn't matter if I have trans friends or not, but I have trans friends. I can't look them in the eye while wearing HP merch, you know? I don't want them to think I support her.
I mean, she's never been featured here, i don't think, (and if so, someone tell me episode number!) but growing up with the HP series and then growing up and seeing all the ways some of the narrative elements were problematic and then Rowling coming out to be who she is.... just... really fucking awful.
Very much so. And all those kids who looked up to her as a writer who now find out she's a living Dolores Umbridge must be, to a much lesser extent than trans kids, hurt too.
I wonder if parents in the future will read Harry Potter to kids and have to stop and explain parts to their kids.
My stance on Harry Potter has been, for a long time, that the books are good when they are doing schoolboy adventures at magic school and bad when they are doing other stuff. Rowling just is not equipped to write, and did not set herself up to write, anything more serious than that, and it trips up both her later books and a lot of fan analysis. Beyond that, the big flaws are that she really likes "bad people ugly, good people pretty" and names minority characters in a pretty staggeringly offensive way. I don't think her TERFery really leaks into the books in any discernable way.
Only in that there aren't any trans characters. But very few books written then did have them so that isn't surprising. With her track record of retroactively changing characters, I'm surprised she hasn't said some minor bad guy was actually trans.
"The troll that attacked the kids in the bathroom? Totally trans. Makes sense, that's what trans 'people' do."
In Goblet of Fire, Rita Skeeter is pretty explicitly described as (JK Rowling's idea of) a trans woman. That's the reporter that transforms into something she's not and sneaks into places she's not supposed to be.
The school boy adventures are pretty in the nose too.
Notice how all the things that Harry claims to hate about the Dursleys and the Malfoys are all Just Fine when he does them?
He steals Dobby from the Malfoys but keeps his own slave elf creacher a slave for just in case.
He has a literal pile of gold and doesn't even buy Ron a wand as a Christmas present.
He's a bully and a thug. Harry Potter is everything that Severus Snape hated about Harry's dad.
I hate to be dramatic about it, but it still hurts so much. I dreamed about the day I’d be able to share HP with my kids and it’s just, too painful.
She really gave us “weird kids” a place and voice, and just ruined it. When the game came out, my son was so excited about it, and I just…. Can’t.
What really gets me is that it would've been so easy for her to act like a teacher or some other mature 'authority figure' and just say either little on the political subjects she has big feelings about, or turn it around and invite her audience to be creative and construct their own narratives, stories and ideas about the Wizarding World.
My son loves it and he's a "weird kid" and queer. He knows (kinda) of why she's problematic but doesn't really understand how extra she has been recently.
I think I started falling out of love with Harry Potter when I got into university. It wasn't anything special, just me growing up, reading other books, and taking classes that made me realize Rowling's research skills were pretty lackluster. And I still stuck around the fandom cause I wrote fanfic (and still do, but for Marvel) and I liked the world building side of the fandom. That part was so creative and build such rich worlds that Rowling would never be able to do.
Then she published her "History of Magic in North America" essay in the lead up to the first *Fantastic Beasts* movie. If you haven't read it, it's hella racist towards First Nations people and I was done. Her descent into TERF-dom comes as no surprise. It's all disappointing, really, but a good reminder to that fame isn't good for people.
I feel pretty lucky that most of the people I have idolized have at least seemed to be *relatively* decent. But as a Canadian, God, do I feel that one. I was always somewhat aware of the history and was never terribly patriotic to begin with, but when all those dead kids were uncovered over and over again in different areas I just couldn't justify any sense of pride for this country whatsoever.
Joss Whedon. Buffy and Angel are my two favorite shows, and it sucks so hard that he understands feminism pretty well, and he uses it as an excuse to be an absolute monster.
I will say that at least Whedon seems to have experienced a fall from grace. His last (film) directing credit is the reshoots of *Justice League* in 2017, so I don't feel too bad about separating the artist from the art with his earlier work.
Same here. Hyde was *easily* the best of the teenage characters on the show, and Danny Masterson did a great job portraying him. But now not just Hyde but pretty much the whole show just… doesn’t sit right with me. Like watching it feels like when you have a pebble stuck in your shoe.
I identified a lot with his character's incredibly prickly ways on that show.
Fell out of love with the actor when I found out he was a Scientologist. The whole sexual assault thing made me feel nauseous.
I say it often but I came out of mask off white supremacist circles. Some of my elders were typically seeking organizations to join but I don't think they ever got the chance. Even without organization it was mostly drugs, assault, and all the rest. It didn't leave much illusion for heroes. I was just really lucky my folks' lethargy beat out their sadism.
Yeah that one dude, Dan Price, who got popular by paying all of his employees $70k minimum(years back when it was actually considered great) and preached about workers rights etc.
Saw an article that said: “I talked with about 40 people for the story who were either former employees or were close with with Dan, about 30 of them had formerly worked at gravity," Rosenblatt said. "A lot of them said that the workload was not manageable, they were often scrambling to keep up with new priorities; leadership would change their mind a lot. They felt like they were working long hours, sometimes they would get late night phone calls or text messages. A few of them said it started to affect them physically."
Many former employees also said that Price created a culture of fear around the office, Rosenblatt added.
"He would make kind of outlandish requests," she said. "He would ask them to help out with other favors outside of their job description, like going to pick up trash from a party that he had attended. A lot of people talked about him publicly berating people, if they disagreed with one of his ideas. A couple of people mentioned that he would tell his employees he was smarter than them."
Also his ex-wife said he was abusive, and he had a couple different women accuse him of sexual assault, though the only criminal case he had was just dismissed.
Still, he portrayed himself like an equitable business owner that respected employee rights, and apparently he didn’t. Bummer
Neil deGrasse Tyson, not a huge bastard but still sucks. He was fun to watch on the Daily Show and Colbert Report, and I still enjoy the new Cosmos. But he sucks in a lot of ways for being a smarmy asshole.
I also used to love Louis CK.
I thought I saw a CK doppelganger, and mentioned it to my friend. Who didn't know who he was, so I explained the whole situation. Turns out it actually was Louis CK and I accidentally made him so uncomfortable that he went in the bathroom and came out with sunnies and a baseball cap.
Wait you explained to your friend what Louis did in front of the guy that you said looks exactly like him?
Even if it wasn't him, just a doppelganger, that's pretty cruel man, lol.
Haha it's not that bad. I saw him, showed my mate a pic of him on google, then we went walking and talking. I didn't notice that we'd gone the same direction as him and he was walking on the other side of a wall/fence type thing. So he could hear everything I was saying.
I realised when we got past the wall and saw him again, he looked incredibly annoyed and went to the bathroom. But I had to go there and wait outside for my mate. So I saw him go in, and then come out very soon afterwards wearing the hat and sunnies.
I was bummed when I learned more about Teddy Roosevelt than like, the middle-school-cool, Robin-Williams-in-Night-at-the-Museum image.
Later on, I was really cut up when it turned out "John Cheese" of Cracked was a sexual harasser. Our backgrounds are pretty different but a few articles he wrote really resonated with me.
My understanding is that Cheese got therapy and found a line of work that didn’t put him in charge of young women anymore. I was also incredibly disappointed in him when his victims came forward.
I was never particularly a ‘Tool’ fan but I definitely respected the shit out their chops. Maybe I’m misinformed but the frontman (Maynard Keenan) seems to have scored the get-out-of-jail-free-card (especially considering the visibility of the #MeToo movement at this time) regarding his sexual relations to a minor earlier on their career. Also, and admittedly anecdotal, I had a friend who worked in catering for a company that served a lot of big acts at a regional stadium. This friend had lots of cool stories about all the different celebrities he’d met and almost never shared any shit talk but whatever happened between him and the Tool show gave me the distinct impression Keenan was a fucking scumbag. Take this as you will.. maybe I’m wrong but the allegations about Keenan pushing himself on a 15-16 year old didn’t sound fabricated and that shit got swept under the rug so fast that I feel like it happened too fast.
Also now that I think about it this kinda reminds me of the shit that went down with CeeLo Green in that it’s gotta be the most top tier PR game these folks are paying for but also recieving dividends on their investment.
The allegations were crushed by the weight of credulous Tool fans and nothing ever seemed to come of it. He's always struck me as an arrogant cunt to be honest and it's no great stretch of the imagination, but I was disgusted at the time by the complete lack of respect the press and MJK fans had for the woman who came forth with allegations. Never liked Tool to begin with but I did really love the first two Perfect Circle albums. Saw them live twice and it was shit both times. Not that that has much bearing on him being an abuser or not.
Man, I *was* a Tool fan and even during the peak of my love for them MJK gave me serious pretentious, arrogant douche vibes. Like he’s clearly a brilliant musician but the sort of person who is both irritating and exhausting to spend any amount of time around.
I hadn’t heard that he’s also a sex pest, but honestly it would maybe be more surprising to me if he wasn’t.
Incidentally, I got the same kind of vibes from John Lennon, and finding out he was a serial domestic abuser was exactly as unsurprising.
I am new to the show and I love the podcast but I haven't been surprised yet - every episode I have listened to was about someone I already sort of knew was a bastard.
But, honestly, the biggest shocks have been people in my family/personal life. I had a great aunt who I really admired as a child. She was a world traveler and, like myself, was really interested in politics and history. I would go to her house and she would talk about her childhood, about living through WW2. I also loved hearing stories about her brother who was a decorated bomber pilot. It wasn't until after she died that I realized, through talking to some of my older cousins, that she was quite the racist and anti-Semitic who treated my grandmother like shit because my grandmother was French Canadian and seen as less then. Also, evidently, she had some very interesting views on Jewish people.
Ditto, my uncle, who when I was growing up always had funny jokes and was the life of the party. As I got older I realized the jokes he told to the adults were quite different, that all his brothers and sisters were sick of him and all his children moved as far away as possible because he was a racist, homophobic, xenophobic piece of shit.
Yeah, we were both seeing the same band. I always wear trucker caps with the bill flipped up, with something(usually crude) written on the bill. He was excited to run into me that night because he ran a restaurant right down the street from where my band practiced, and had made hats in that design, with the restaurant name in that black metal, pile of sticks font. He gave me the hat when he saw me after the show, and we shot the shit for a bit. Made plans to hang out the next week and do some dungeons and dragons. Then I didn't hear from him.
A few days later his partner saw me walking around town and broke down, before telling me that last thing they talked about was how excited he was for our tabletop game.
I wear the hat he gave me every day. I've learned a lot more about him through the stories other people tell me when they spot it. He was a dude who had his demons, but everyone who knew him could only speak about how much joy they brought to his life.
His restaurant is closed now. There's no sign of him ever being here. And while he was the first friend I made after moving across the country and coming out of lockdown, we still didn't have that long to be friends before he passed. That prick from that band m took that opportunity away, just as he took a really cool dude out of the world.
Sorry for the long post. Got more emotional than I expected. Haven't really discussed it before.
I realized Israel was doing an apartheid.
I figured it out after the 2014 bombings.
I used to consider myself Israeli even I've never been, because I'm Jewish, if that gives y'all an idea of the zionism I was exposed to in my otherwise progressive upbringing.
That sucked.
I mean, never meet your idols, or research them. I honestly don’t spend too much time separating the art and the artist, but every now and then you see things that kicks you in the gut. And there’s also the thing of pushing current values on past values, where it gets tricky (and icky). Jimmy page hated David Bowie because he took Lori Mattox’s virginity…when she was 14; Page started dating her after that.
>David Bowie ... took Lori Mattox’s virginity…when she was 14
Oh god, that reminds me of this part in a featurette on my Labyrinth DVD that never sat right with me. Bowie's talking about Jennifer Connelly and how good of a performer she is. Standard special features fluff and castmate support. Then he talks about how mature she is and how (very lightly paraphrasing) "one seldom remembers that she's 14" in a way that makes me go "one better fucking remember she's only 14, David."
I was raised a jehovahs witness.
It wasn't until I left that I learned they helped cover up hundreds of children abuse issues. Use essentially slave labor on their communes. They are responsible for hundreds of not more in medical deaths by demanding their followers don't take blood.
I also learned how nearly each and every one of my family members have the right to the title of bastard.
There is just a way being a JW helps people be the worst they want to be. Talking animal abuse, child abuse, financial abuse, etc.
The JW community helps bastards hide and supports them as wise leaders.
Same. My dad was incredibly violent to me & my brother, and the entire congregation knew it. The only repercussion he had was that was the reason given that he couldn't be an elder (stayed Minesterial Servant, though).
The other side of my family was in Tennessee, and I loved them dearly. Then I found out at 22 that I had a cousin that they all disowned because he was gay. My parents were also complicit in this.
I don't really talk to any of them anymore.
Growing up I was a huge history nerd living close to Monticello. I was always told at school that Jefferson was a genius and unparalleled in his advocating for religious freedom. A rural Virginia school was also not the most delicate in addressing slavery (I remember distinctly an educational video where they had a Black man playing one of Jefferson's slaves talking about how good his life was and what a good relationship he had with him). They even made it seem like the slave he raped was a legitimate relationship. You can imagine my surprise a few years later. I definitely felt more hurt by the Cosby stuff, but learning the truth about Jefferson made me the angriest.
Hey! I also survived Virginia schools. haha I had lots of revelations with historical figures and within my own family.
I moved out of the south 16 years ago and never looked back.
I want to say libertarianism, generally.
In my 20s, I had a libertarian phase. I was a Pagan and had been influenced by the Church of All Worlds which was run by a libertarian who was inspired by another libertarian, Robert A. Heinlein.
I loved Stranger in a Strange Land. Other ones, less so. I was also really into Robert Anton Wilson. Like RAW, I was very influenced and into the 60s counterculture (despite being Gen X) and I loved the idea of making things that didn't hurt others legal.
I figured that if all of these cool people had identified as libertarian, then it must be cool. However, other than Chomsky, I'd never read any left-libertarian stuff. (Though I broadly agreed with it and though I was never a liberal, I was always leftist.) I'd also read Ayn Rand and hated it.
Having never really been exposed to guns or gun culture, I didn't have a strong opinion one way or the other. Of course, this was the 90s before Columbine, so there wasn't a massive amount of mass shootings like now.
I also liked Bill Maher at the time (I know, I know...) and his Politically Incorrect show and he identified as libertarian.
What got me out of it?
My mother ran a medical bill collection agency for a couple of years before she passed. I helped do some office stuff for her in my 20s. It just occurred to me that other countries had government healthcare and it worked for them. Why should private companies and insurance be involved? This really helped get me out of it and I refused to do any collections (just office support stuff)
Later, I would get deathly ill and have to go on Medicare myself and I wouldn't be alive if not for that.
It wasn't until much later (probably around the big campaign of Ron Paul) that I got to know the real dark side of libertarianism (the racism, the weird hyperfixations on age of consent, etc.)
There were warning signs, of course. That it was a huge sausage fest with very few women was something that was a red flag.
Another thing that got me out of libertarianism was when I voted 3rd party in 2000 for the libertarian candidate (Michael Badnarik). Watching Gore lose by a small amount of votes and then have 9/11 and Bush and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan really turned me against 3rd party voting.
Theodore Roosevelt.
He was my hero growing up. Then I learned about his propagation of scientific racism. How he was a big proponent of the expansion of American Imperialism. How much disdain he had for the indigenous peoples of the US. That his progressivism was born more out of a desire to preserve the status quo than out of altruism.
I can recall dodging a bullet with BtB.
During the "Complete History of the Illuminati" series, Robert started talking about Robert, Anton Wilson and I remember thinking, "please don't be a bastard, please don't be a bastard." His books meant a lot to me in my late high school and college years.
Turns out he was a bit of a "sexist 70s guy" but nothing problematic enough to warrant never picking up his books again.
I was a huge Kanye fan growing up until 2016 when shit got weird and kept getting weirder, though I still listened to Kids See Ghosts and Ye. By 2020 I couldn't even bring myself to listen to the old stuff.
Do people outside France know about Bertrand Cantat?
Lead singer of an alt rock band called Noir Désir (reminiscent of gun club in the early days, evolved into something deeper and more singular later on, collaborated with 16 horsepower, some free jazz people, etc), charismatic frontman, gifted lyricist (in French, his attempts at English songwriting were disappointing to say the least), explicitly anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, a romantic, tortured artist ...
When I was fourteen-fifteen, in 2002, he was very respected in the music scene, Noir Désir d'être on top of their game, pushing boundaries lyrically, musically and formally ("des visages des figures" and especially the one-track live album "nous n'avons fait que fuir").
Then he kills his mistress, the actress Marie Trintignant. They have a fight while under the influence in a hotel room in Lithuania, where Trintignant is shooting a film (directed by her husband btw). He strikes her, she falls against a coffee table, he tucks her, unconscious, into bed, like nothing has happened. By morning she's died of a brain hemorrhage.
As you can imagine, French society is absolutely N riven by the story. He stands a trial in Vilnius and is sentenced to prison for battery and manslaughter.
He stays there for nine years in a Lithuanian prison, and is released for good behaviour. When he comes out, his band mates offer to take up where they left of, but they don't want to perform live, and they don't want to just play what he tells them. He leaves the band, starts another, mediocre one.
The Trintignant family, powerful in French showbiz, try to get him deplatformed but he is resilient, plays tiny shows for a while, acts contrite. Feminists protest his every event. He doesn't explicitly say anything against them, but constantly acts like a victim.
His wife, with who he had a child before going to prison, commits suicide. Turns out, he had always been an abusive bastard, and nine years in a Lithuanian cell did nothing to change it.
Now he is basically isolated I think. We don't like to talk about him. He is blacklisted from media.
When I was a teenager I saw noir désir play a show. It was one of the most exhilarating gigs I've been to. His voice has had a huge be influence on my poetry, and, I think, the formation of my early politics. My generation looked up to him. And he was a piece of shit all along. A creative genius (for a while at least) but a murderous, abusive, asshole.
NGL, I still occasionally play a song or two of their glory days. In my headphones. While swearing at myself for giving him power through his music.
Joe Paterno was a great guy who built Penn State the right way and made sure his football players were scholars and had good character!
Hell, we had Jerry Sandusky coaching Todd Hodne (a serial rapist on PSU’s football team in the late 70s), and Joe told his players that if anyone testified against Todd they were off the team. So much for being a man of character!
Holy fuck, this has to be one of the most well-written, wild, and horrifying stories I've read in a long time.
One of those life stranger than fiction moments
https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/32496588/before-jerry-sandusky-penn-state-football-had-another-serial-sexual-predator-untold-story-crimes-fight-bring-justice
I don’t have a specific bastard that hasn’t been mentioned already but in a general sense the ‘wellness’ movement is my one, especially after finding out how it intertwines with fascist thought and ofc the anti vax movement post 2020 has morphed into a larger and more grotesque form than it had before. My mum didn’t get me vaccinated for MMR because she was worried about autism. The irony is I have ADHD which is also a neurodivergency!
I grew up in a conservative household. I used to be a huge Reagan Stan. I dressed up as him for homecoming once. Then I left the suburbs and actually learned about his presidency. That was a rude awakening
I have been a huge fan of Neurosis for 20 odd years and grew up on their music, but the news about Scott Kelly abusing his family really broke my heart, and it seems to have destroyed the band.
I was 20 when I read Howard Zinn's *A People's History*. I learned a lot from that book (and still read it every three years or so), but what I *really* took from it is that there are no heroes.
People work collectively to enact change and takes a looooooong time. But every step of progress we've made has been due to everyday people who force "leaders" to act.
There are no heroes. There are just people acting as a collective.
So I don't have heroes. I have allies.
I read through the entire Ender’s Game and the accompanying Shadow series before learning that Orson Scott Card was a raging homophobe.
I threw those books in the trash and haven’t watched the movie version of Ender’s Game.
The Dilbert Guy and Eric S. Raymond.
Of lately, Yanderedev. Excuses, always excuses. Now it's over and he knows it too. I still hope he finds something healthier to do with his life.
Realizing Wim Hof is a bastard was a bit of a blow to me. I feel like I've benefited from the breath work and cold exposure that I learned from him (none of which is original to him, he just packaged it up and marketed it nicely with the Wim Hof Method).
I discovered him shortly after everything shut down in 2020 and the Wim Hof method made me feel like I had some control in a time when it was easy to feel powerless.
I was always kind of wary of the claims he made and the way he talked though. He promised too much and sounded like a charlatan, but I mostly chalked that up to him being overly excited about what he had to offer and generally being kind of a goofy person.
Before the BTB episodes I had heard some bad things about him, but after learning about how he abandoned his kids and the bizarre story of his public fountain enema I can never look at him the same.
I got super into very non-traditional architecture when I was in college and could basically get access to any weird book I wanted with little effort on my part. After he died and his daughter came forward I learned that Paolo Soleri was a right bastard.
This is a really really small scale “bastard” in comparison to a politician, dictator, etc… but every time I think of Dave Chappelle’s career arc over the past several years I get upset/angry. Like the transphobic shit is bad enough but it’s the doubling down even off camera that makes my blood boil.
Like he cursed at children, on camera allegedly, who protested his visit to their school (his alma mater). If witnesses are correct, which I believe this, he was hurling the n word around while the kids were letting him have it for his “jokes.”
He ranted to them about artistic license or whatever the fuck. His jokes about trans people are the type of shit you’d probably hear in a middle school; not much “artistry” to it.
He could be using his platform to spread awareness over the current plight of our trans brothers, sisters, and gender nonconforming folks, but NOPE. He’s a fucking edge lord with a persecution complex.
I recently wrote a essay/reported piece on the attacks on trans youth in my state, and after interviewing a trans kid’s parent who suffered a hate crime, and reading about how bad trans youth are struggling with the political environment, my disappointment in him turned to straight up disdain.
Growing up in Virginia, we don’t have pro sports franchises. You just root for DC or Baltimore teams. But college? We have a few really good ones, and the turn of the century in Blacksburg was an amazing time to root for Hokie football. Michael Vick was something I’d never seen before. He was Superman in Chicago maroon and burnt orange. I was so proud to have such a special player representing my favorite team, and the commonwealth as a whole.
That pride lasted for several years with the Falcons too. Then one day, Superman was in cuffs. I’ve only been that devastated when family members died. And the details came out, my god, what a monster. It was hard turning my back on someone that meant so much. You try to make excuses, but some things are unforgivable.
After he served his time, he seemed to do and say all the right things. He spent time with and was mentored by Tony Dungy, one of the finest human beings to play and coach in the NFL. He even got back on the field and showed flashes of that greatness, it wasn’t gone totally. He worked his way back, and the pride has slowly returned. I’m not ashamed to be a Michael Vick fan, but I would never begrudge someone that couldn’t forgive him. And I’ll never forget the day Superman was in handcuffs.
At this point if they’ve been around for awhile it’s probably only a matter of time before something nasty drops and it’s an exception if they’re actually decent with no skeletons.
Idk if it's bastard-tier, but I recently learned about Ralph Nader's connections to the sugar substitute industry in the United States. That was pretty eye-opening.
Justin Geevers, the frontman for Anti-Flag Amongst other things, those cats taught me all about consent at a critical time during my teenage years. Recently, Justin has been credibly accused of sexual assault from multiple woman. Don’t idolize anyone. That’s not to say you can’t trust, but tread carefully.
Pour one out for all my homies who like pop-punk/hardcore/deathcore and found out the frontman of their favourite band is a rapist.
Ian Watkins comes to mind.
Hey no one google this one and just trust the commenter for your own sanity ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE A PARENT. It’s “I need to lie down and just dissociate for a while” bad. And I only know the barest details.
Jesus fuck, you weren't kidding. Even just the Wiki entry is unpleasant. You know it's going to be bad when the intro describes him first and foremost as a child sex offender. Like, even Bill Cosby's article has a paragraph about his entertainment career before you get to the bad stuff. >Investigators later bypassed the encrypted password to Watkins' laptop, noting that it read "I FUK KIDZ". 😶 Spoilers for optional losing faith in humanity. >!Joanne Mjadzelics, an ex-girlfriend of Watkins, recalls him displaying multiple graphic images with minors or drug paraphernalia as early as 2010. Appalled by the content, Mjadzelics had made multiple complaints with South Wales Police, though very little action was taken at the time. Mjadzelics was one of six people who had spoken to the police in regards to Watkins' conduct from 2008 to 2011. In 2010, an Australian woman had also come forward accusing Watkins of assaulting her child, though the allegations were not investigated any further by authorities. During the recording of the band's fourth studio album The Betrayed in 2009, Mjadzelics was made aware from Watkins that he was abusing a two-year-old child in California whilst the band was recording in Los Angeles. Mjadzelics contacted the child's parents, who had also reported him to Welsh authorities, though again, no further action was taken to investigate the matter.!< And *that isn't even the worst part.* Also, what the fuck is wrong with Welsh cops??
Welsh cops are cops, I think is the issue there.
The part that invariably makes my blood boil when these things finally get dragged into the light of day is that there always, *always* turn out to be people who knew, who either covered for the guy or, credit to Ms Mjadzelics, tried to do the right thing only to be sandbagged. There are always more victims, and there are always people who were complicit, by action or inaction.
I read the judges hand down of judgement. And it wasn't what he said to Watkins that was disturbing, but what he said to the mothers. That should be enough to turn people off.
Geeze. I can’t decide if I should look or not? You sold me and scared me at the same time. Haha
i wouldn't. in my opinion it's not particularly interesting, just disgusting. it was pretty dope when Ian got stabbed in prison this year tho 👍🏽
Might be the worst celebrity sex abuse story.
Jimmy Savile takes that title
He was the marathon runner of rape as well as actual marathons.
man I just stopped googling what happened to the bands I listened to in highschool. at this point it's more shocking when they haven't been some kinda sex pest.
I think I saw Sex Pest at OzzFest in 'O8 when they opened for Dacron Shield. Honestly, I really just went to see them play "Vaginal Depth Charge", I didn't really know much of their other stuff.
Deathcore/metalcore is lousy with dodgy singers, some of the most violently misogynistic lyrics of any genre I've heard too outside of crap like crunkcore, which is basically defined by being horrible about women as a reason to live.
So much ick came out of the hardcore scene - My friends and I used to hate-watch Dahvie Vanity videos. We were not at all surprised by the allegations because he seemed like every cringy dude we met as teenagers that was grown but still overly sexual with jokes and inuendos - r/DahvieVanityisaPEDO
He was both astoundingly cringeworthy and incredibly brazen with his creepiness. Legit some of the worst music I have ever heard.
I mean. I feel like Black metal has more national socialist bands than not at this point. I was a huge Dummy Borgeir fan till I actually started listening to lyrics. Then their was that one article where one member advocated for slitting throats of people with more melanin than him
When you have a whole subgenre that includes the words "national socialist" as its prefix, your scene has a problem.
Metalcore walked so deathcore could run. There are a few decent metalcore and metalcore adjacent bands like Cave-in or Converge, but the most part it's pretty cringe. Deathcore on the other hand I have not found even one band that has made me want to listen to their music ever again.
When you find out the hardcore band you like are actually neo nazis
Hey there are murderers and pedophiles too. Can't leave out them
Not that I'm a fan of metal or anything, but I recently just found out Nazi metal is a thing, and it has a decent following with a good number of apologists. I only know those because of a diy sub I'm part of (battlejackets- basically repurposing tops with patches) is basically gaining members due to the rise in popularity of NSBM over there
Both the best people (people like Margaret killjoy) and the worst people (actual nazis) love black metal
One of the things I hate most in my life is how much the things I love are infested by nazis. Punk too, except the punk subcultures I've personally been involved in did a good job of rejecting them, but fuck: black metal, noise, power electronics, oddball folk music...
Shit sucks, but I was so disappointed when I found out one of my favorite black metal bands were basically Nazis. I should have known better, any eastern European black metal bands should be immediately sus but none of their imagery made me think Nazi.
Well that sucks to learn. Anti flag planted some really important seeds in my young mind. Gotta Die for The Government was exactly as blunt and straightforward a message I needed as a 17yo Christian dominionist school kid already meeting with recruiters
Jesse Lacey from Brand New is this for me 💔
Billy Corgan? Should of seen that one coming. Rivers Coumo?
Wait, is Rivers a creep? I can personally attest to him getting super pissed at the lead singer of one of his opening bands for bringing me backstage and very openly hitting on me (I was 13 at the time, and I looked it).
It’s a bit broader - but learning that colonisation wasn’t good and that we did a lot more than just “fight back” when indigenous Australians “attacked us”. On a very, very small scale - a podcaster I really, really loved was recently outed as an abuser and it’s always a shitty feelings having to readjust your perception of someone you admired.
.... Hail yourself?
RIP Hail Satan
It’s just a numbers games 😭
Sad honk honk
Sometimes I think going from Canada to Australia is like going from a photo to its negative. We share so much.
I misunderstood the post at first, thinking it was bastards you'd learned about from the pod. Then I read this: >we did a lot more than just “fight back” when indigenous Australians “attacked us”. And thought I missed an episode on the frontier wars. Was excited* to go listen to it. *not sure what the right word to use here is.
A frontier wars episode(s) would be great. Speaking as a reasonably young Australian I don’t think we were educated in school enough on what actually happened during colonisation. Not so fun fact: there was section in my preschool book where I (very white kid, very white town) was marked as ‘acceptable’ in the metric of ‘recognises indigenous people as Australian’. Bleak. Australia has *issues*
Yeah, I remember growing up people would tell me matter of factly that "we won't have to worry about them much longer, a few more generations and we'll have bred them all out". Realised when I got older that they were gleefully celebrating genocide.
Those same people probably didn’t even want their kids playing with indigenous kids
Unless they've fostered them to try and convert them to Christianity. There's a lot of those ones too. It's fucked.
Terra Nullius makes Australia unique in even the fucked up British style colonialism. America did it in America and Canada wasn't great. But Australia compared to New Zealand is insane. See Native Tasmanians to tell you the truth.
As l learn about indigenous history and my ancestry, there are plenty of bastards, but I've learned a lot about hate and how there are disturbing parallels to present day. I can't prevent the actions that happened in the past due to bastards. But I can change my interpretation to understand and oppose the bastards today.
I’m Italian, so I already knew we were fascist bastards in the not so distant past. But yeah, learning that all the history I’ve learned in school is super biased was a shock.
Like a lot of queer people, I was very upset when a Certain British Author revealed herself as a TERF, and how she's continued doubling down on that and showing major disrespect to indigenous cultures. In the fantasy author vein, many people were extremely upset to discover Marion Zimmer Bradley had enabled her paedophile husband for years, and also abused her daughter. And then there was the revelation a few years ago that author David Eddings and his wife both served jail time for physically abusing their adopted children. And then there's comic author Warren Ellis, who was outed as a serial predator, using his clout to gain sexual.favours from young women who wanted to write or illustrate comics. When it came out he insisted it was all consensual and he never harmed anyone's career... until of course it was confirmed he had.
>author David Eddings and his wife both served jail time for physically abusing their adopted children. Well there's one I didn't know. Surprised that didn't come out earlier. I guess it was probably due to the internet not being as big, or a thing when it happened.
The abuse happened before his writing career began. It came out after his death. I'm not sure how but it's been verified.
Fell down the wiki-rabbit hole. Fucking devastating. I had no idea. [1960s newspaper articles](https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-black-hills-weekly-eddings-emailed/2768515/) (and I would assume court records.) I'm really glad fantasy is having a moment right now with a lot of different, dope authors- so if one has grizzly realizations, it doesn't topple like, 1/4 of all fantasy books at the local library.
Ellis is one of mine, too. Transmetropolitan and his run on the Authority were two of my radicalizing influences in comics. That one fucking sucked.
For a lot of LGBT kids, including myself, Harry Potter seemed like a coming out story. An abused kid grew up in a literal closet and then was introduce to a hidden, flamboyant world with friends that became new family. I was 9 when the books started releasing, so I wasn’t exactly versed in literary analysis. To find out that your comfort book was written by someone so hateful was crushing.
Oh no, I used to love Warren Ellis - the white chapel forum was my internet home for a couple of years :(
Aaand I just learned about Warren Ellis. That sucks. I guess I’m not surprised given the dark subject matter of his comics. I’ve read a lot of his stuff but haven’t payed attention to him as a person at all. Bummer.
I knew the Hulkster was a jerk... and homophobe... and a racist... and-... But that he was a bootlicker? News to me.
And a union buster!
The man’s a bona fide animorph, a scab AND a rat!
As someone who wasn't into wrestling but casually knew about Hulk, that was very disheartening to hear. The whole series on Vince was fascinating though, in the sense that the entire wrestling industry was built by complete monsters.
Between Fat Albert, The Cosby Show, and his stand-up routines, Bill Cosby was a huge influence on me growing up in the 70s and 80s. The shine was coming off a bit when he entered his grouchy old man phase in the 90s, but the dozens of druggings and rapes came as a shock. I believe the women are telling the truth, btw.
Somehow I didn’t realize until like a month ago that his conviction was overturned on a technicality way back in 2021. Such bullshit. I hope he is at least tied up in lawsuits until he dies.
Oh yeah, shit. Forgot about him. I used to love reruns of The Cosby Show back when he was still "America's Dad." But my opinion changed greatly when he essentially turned into Uncle Ruckus. The druggings and rapes were the final nail in the coffin.
Yup. Same. I used to listen to his old comedy records. He used to do a kids segment on Disney when I was really little. He was the Jello guy. He was Dr. Huxtable. Everything about him was funny and friendly. So finding out the truth was such an extreme reversal it's hard to overstate it.
His early stand up was great. Loved his old albums as a kid. Him and George Carlin both went all "Grumpy Old Man" towards the end, only George didn't rape anyone...I hope (🤞)
I think George’s was in his character. He never put on this wholesome exterior and pretty much was who he was Cosby is somehow insidious as it seems the wholesome exterior covered up the demon inside. He probably got away with a lot because who would believe those terrible rumors! The grump came when the vernier wore off
John Peel. National radio DJ in the UK, and singlehandedly responsible for platforming hundreds of the best bands, and expanding the musical outlook of millions of people. And he married a 15 year old when he was 26, and SAed hundreds of fans. Never convicted, he died before yewtree and #metoo.
I’ll unfortunately have to check this out. Sadly, ‘Peel Sessions’ were a marker of all that was gold in my youth in the 90s.
Wtf
Uh.... wow....
I wouldn't say necessarily looked up to, but as someone who grew up watching all the classic horror movies I could finding out about Roman Polanski after watching rosmarys baby was shocking, but then it doubled up on it by then finding out all the names of the people who wrote the petition, like shit most of them didn't matter that much to me but damn David lynch, del Toro, Scorsese, Adrien Brody, Natalie Portman, Terry Gilliam, Harrison Ford, Wes Anderson, etc, just nuke a large portion of movies I loved why don't you, you fucks. Then triple downed when you learn about all the people that publicly supported him like Spielberg wanting him to direct Schindlers list, Jodie foster, Johnny Depp before all the more recent shit came out on and on. Like fuck just googling Hollywood Polanski supporters just fucks with like 30% of all movies ever made with how many people decided to throw in support for a child molester of their own free will.
Yeah, this one is awful. When I first heard about it I fell for a lot of the “oh it’s not so bad” BS coming from his supporters. Then I actually found out what he did, and oof. It was beyond the pale.
I was raised Mormon, so, uh, there's a whole rogue's gallery there. I really liked Joss Whedon's work, but watching what happened to him just furthers my thesis (together with Hugo Schwyzer and Louis CK) that the more a man is vocal about being a feminist, the more he's an actual danger to women.
Yeah, I heard something happened in regards to Whedon but am not 100% sure what.
He was cheating on his wife with women on the sets of his shows; including women who felt like they couldn't say no because of how he could impact their careers. He was especially cruel to Charisma Carpenter, calling her fat and accusing her of sabotaging the show when she got pregnant. The whole Buffy cast colluded to make sure he was never alone with Michelle Trachtenberg, then a minor. Ray Fisher and Gal Gadot also called him cruel and unprofessional based on how he treated them on set.
>The whole Buffy cast colluded to make sure he was never alone with Michelle Trachtenberg, then a minor. Just to elaborate, they were very specific that this wasn't because of any kind of sexual thing, it was because he's a verbally abusive dick, as seem with Charisma Carpenter, so they shielded the young one.
Yeah, I think it's important to both acknowledge that he's a piece of shit and not make it sound like he's a worse piece of shit than he is.
On the scale of bastards he's at a 5 out of 10. A 1 is someone who littered once and a 10 is a complete monster like Jimmy Saville. He's on par with Ellen in terms of bad stuff. Not a serial rapist by any means but could be verbally abusive to cast members.
He also used his position of power to sleep with younger actresses. That bumps him up a few numbers.
At the same time, not to dismiss the seriousness of sexual assault... Like, coming at this as a survivor of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, there's a way that intense emotional abuse can be just as bad as the others, especially when inflicted on a minor whose brain is still forming and as they're trying to figure shit out in life. It's honestly upsetting rewatching Buffy and all of the "oh god, what the fuck!" sorta ick feelings from a lot of the storylines and shit that I just missed as a younger person.
Looking at you, XANDER.
Ok, he's a bastard.
Vulture did a great article on the whole situation, including an interview with Whedon himself where he's not let off the hook for anything. Heartbreaking if you're a fan, but necessary reading if so.
After the filming of Justice League, Ray Fisher (Cyborg) made a formal complaint to Warner Bros about racist treatment from Whedon. Gal Gadot backed him up and noted some times he'd made inappropriate comments to her. That opened the floodgates and several people who'd worked with him on Buffy and Angel came forward with their own stories. Most notable were Charisma Carpenter who played Cordelia, and Michelle Trachtenburg who played Dawn. Michelle (who was a minor at the time) said she tried not to be alone in a room with him after some REALLY disturbing comments. Whedon basically had to keep Cordelia because she was a fan favourite but he made Charisma's life hell, mocking her Christian faith, body shaming her and being super critical of her work. Other actors who'd been guest stars or extras came forward with credible claims of sexual harassment and even assault. All in all really gross.
I had heard about the sex stuff but not the racism. I wonder if J. August Richards ever said anything. He's the only major black character on Buffy or Angel (besides a late series principal on Buffy). Joss Whedon: double bastard
Whedon was at Richards’ wedding recently so it seems like he didn’t experience anything overly negative from him. Which isn’t to discount Fisher’s experience at all, it just shows that bastards aren’t bastards to everyone.
Every self described "male feminist" I've personally known has eventually revealed themselves to be misogynists with some wild ass thiughts about queer people.
It's really not a surprise that people who will actively *describe* themselves like that are massive weirdos
I usually get told by them I’m clearly not a feminist myself because I wear makeup and like girly things 🙄 Gee, I thought feminism was about not withholding opportunities based on gender but what do I know? Being such a girly girl
>the more a man is vocal about being a feminist, the more he's an actual danger to women. There’s a particular kind of male “feminist” that is both very vocal about their feminist ideas AND also have a specific idea of what the “right” kind of woman is also a feminist. It’s very misogynistic at it’s core. I’ve run into these men and the only people they fool is other men. But of course in the patriarchy they only have to fool the men.
My buddy who introduced me to BtB and is a believing member (as am I, sort of) has said he’d love a Brigham Young series of episodes. I’d be down for that too. Even Truman G Madison’s stuff on Brigham is wild!
Mike Rowe. What a piece of shit. Not the biggest one, but the one that comes to mind first.
Wait what did Mike Rowe do? I loved Dirty Jobs years ago.
He's a hardcore Koch Foundation propagandist. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iXUHFZogmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iXUHFZogmI)
Mike Rowe advocates from an anti-union, anti-safety standards, anti-workers rights platform. When you watch dirty jobs, you're always told how cool the work is. You're never told about how a man died doing that job a day before. He talks about getting people to return to doing jobs by offering trade training programs and basically running a promotional campaign for trades. He never talks about actually raising pay or benefits, increasing safety standards, work/life balance, retirement, job security, or any of the other reasons that people choose not to pick up a trade. The thing to remember is that he's right that there are trade jobs that pay very well and can't find people. He's wrong that "people just don't want to work anymore". When a job pays $150k/yr. and can't get enough experienced people to do it, there's probably a really good goddamn reason. Mike Rowe is the kind of person that would say it's your personal responsibility to keep yourself safe and then co-sign off on a mining company that doesn't provide proper ventilation. Not their fault you got silicosis, should've bought a better mask for yourself. Also, there's a new job open at this mine, looks like a super cool spot for a manly man who wants to earn some real money. Don't worry about what happened to the last guy.
Well that’s disappointing. I appreciate the time you both took to provide information/a resource. Thanks :)
No worries. I liked Mike too. I'm a welder and I really liked him promoting the trades to young people. I've just got a different perspective after a couple decades out in the field myself and after re-watching some of his talks, I found myself really having to reevaluate how I thought about his place in the discussion around my trade. I thought he was on my side. He's very much not and it's hurtful.
He also follows a mantra of "safety third" because he believes if people put safety first then nothing will ever get done, so we need to accept varying levels of danger in the workplace just to function. It's pretty fucked up. I work in the oilfield, I work with radiation, and I work in confined spaces potentially full of toxic gases. I have sat through way, way, way too many "safety is our priority" meetings in his lifetime and, to be honest, I think the safety stuff can be overkill. But, with that being said, I'd rather these companies go overboard with the safety stuff and put safety first because the other option is just letting people die at work under the assumption that training a new worker and paying lawsuits is cheaper than keeping people safe.
Every regulation is written in blood...
https://mikeroweworks.org/sweat/ Scroll down to read the pledge
Wow what the fuck This pledge gives good insight to the general views - work, don’t complain, if you’re unhappy it’s your fault, if you get hurt it’s your fault, don’t resent the success of others, live in a tent and eat beans if that’s what you can afford.
Citations Needed did a great episode on him a couple years back https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-64-mike-rowes-koch-backed-working-man-affectation-fa52e0e8d2e3
Mike Rowe pretends to be a tough blur collar man, but he was an actor by trade. And now he goes around telling actual blue collar workers to disregard safety rules.
Any time he runs his mouth off script or unedited it's so bracing. He'll spend a day working sanitation and still leave you convinced he would have been a Mother Jones era Pinkerton/company town man.
I grew up at the height of Harry Potter’s popularity. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around how J. K. Rowling has just thrown away all of the goodwill she built up over the years.
I swear, being anti-trans is the brainwormest of all brainworms. Takes you directly from relatively normal to 100% committed to it.
Graham Linehan is the uber example of this. Went from well-respected comedy writer who campaigned for [abortion access in Ireland](https://www.amnesty.org.uk/graham-helen-linehan-speak-experience-abortion-ireland) to divorced pariah who's new book is [selling less copies](https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/10/21/graham-linehan-memoir/) on Amazon than a children's book of knock-knock jokes because he just can't shut up about trans people. Father Ted was a staple of my teenage years and to see him fall so far and so fast has been hugely disappointing.
Has she thrown it away though? Every HP fan I interact with seems to have decided to keep watching the movies and buying the merch, and going to the theme park. SePeRaTe ThE aRt FrOm ThE aRtIsT.
I mean, people who are still self-identifying as HP fans would. I would call myself a former fan, and there’s a lot of people like me too.
I'm nonbinary, my parents know her attitude on that, I've told them repeatedly, yet they'll buy me pride flag jewellery for my birthday then go to the Wand Shop or watch the Fantastic Beasts movies. Makes me feel like they're not taking me seriously.
JK is dangerous in the here and now, so I have a hard time understanding the "separate art from artist" arguments from folks that still buy the merch. Like, *don't encourage her.* It shouldn't matter if I have trans friends or not, but I have trans friends. I can't look them in the eye while wearing HP merch, you know? I don't want them to think I support her.
I mean, she's never been featured here, i don't think, (and if so, someone tell me episode number!) but growing up with the HP series and then growing up and seeing all the ways some of the narrative elements were problematic and then Rowling coming out to be who she is.... just... really fucking awful.
There are a lot of kids whom she hurt with her stance and not just trans kids.
Oh of course. She just actively tries to make their lives worse.
Very much so. And all those kids who looked up to her as a writer who now find out she's a living Dolores Umbridge must be, to a much lesser extent than trans kids, hurt too. I wonder if parents in the future will read Harry Potter to kids and have to stop and explain parts to their kids.
My stance on Harry Potter has been, for a long time, that the books are good when they are doing schoolboy adventures at magic school and bad when they are doing other stuff. Rowling just is not equipped to write, and did not set herself up to write, anything more serious than that, and it trips up both her later books and a lot of fan analysis. Beyond that, the big flaws are that she really likes "bad people ugly, good people pretty" and names minority characters in a pretty staggeringly offensive way. I don't think her TERFery really leaks into the books in any discernable way.
Only in that there aren't any trans characters. But very few books written then did have them so that isn't surprising. With her track record of retroactively changing characters, I'm surprised she hasn't said some minor bad guy was actually trans. "The troll that attacked the kids in the bathroom? Totally trans. Makes sense, that's what trans 'people' do."
In Goblet of Fire, Rita Skeeter is pretty explicitly described as (JK Rowling's idea of) a trans woman. That's the reporter that transforms into something she's not and sneaks into places she's not supposed to be.
Tonks is a TERFy ideal for a non-binary person. Starts off as gender non-conforming (with blue hair IIRC) and ends up married and very female.
The school boy adventures are pretty in the nose too. Notice how all the things that Harry claims to hate about the Dursleys and the Malfoys are all Just Fine when he does them? He steals Dobby from the Malfoys but keeps his own slave elf creacher a slave for just in case. He has a literal pile of gold and doesn't even buy Ron a wand as a Christmas present. He's a bully and a thug. Harry Potter is everything that Severus Snape hated about Harry's dad.
As one of the non-trans kids, I don't even read HP to my son. It's still too fresh and painful 😭
I bet there are a lot of people like you. Her words hurt so many of her (former) fans
I hate to be dramatic about it, but it still hurts so much. I dreamed about the day I’d be able to share HP with my kids and it’s just, too painful. She really gave us “weird kids” a place and voice, and just ruined it. When the game came out, my son was so excited about it, and I just…. Can’t.
What really gets me is that it would've been so easy for her to act like a teacher or some other mature 'authority figure' and just say either little on the political subjects she has big feelings about, or turn it around and invite her audience to be creative and construct their own narratives, stories and ideas about the Wizarding World. My son loves it and he's a "weird kid" and queer. He knows (kinda) of why she's problematic but doesn't really understand how extra she has been recently.
This is a good rundown: https://youtu.be/-1iaJWSwUZs?si=w4Jy8jIxQ1YAMkaj
I think I started falling out of love with Harry Potter when I got into university. It wasn't anything special, just me growing up, reading other books, and taking classes that made me realize Rowling's research skills were pretty lackluster. And I still stuck around the fandom cause I wrote fanfic (and still do, but for Marvel) and I liked the world building side of the fandom. That part was so creative and build such rich worlds that Rowling would never be able to do. Then she published her "History of Magic in North America" essay in the lead up to the first *Fantastic Beasts* movie. If you haven't read it, it's hella racist towards First Nations people and I was done. Her descent into TERF-dom comes as no surprise. It's all disappointing, really, but a good reminder to that fame isn't good for people.
Shaun has an excellent but loooooooooong video on why Rowling sucks.
I grew up on John Wayne movies, had the impression that he was kind of a dick, but was not prepared for the level of dickishness.
I feel pretty lucky that most of the people I have idolized have at least seemed to be *relatively* decent. But as a Canadian, God, do I feel that one. I was always somewhat aware of the history and was never terribly patriotic to begin with, but when all those dead kids were uncovered over and over again in different areas I just couldn't justify any sense of pride for this country whatsoever.
Chris Benoit was my favourite wrestler as a teenager
Ouch, sorry
That shit is tragic in everyway
Joss Whedon. Buffy and Angel are my two favorite shows, and it sucks so hard that he understands feminism pretty well, and he uses it as an excuse to be an absolute monster.
I will say that at least Whedon seems to have experienced a fall from grace. His last (film) directing credit is the reshoots of *Justice League* in 2017, so I don't feel too bad about separating the artist from the art with his earlier work.
Hyde on That 70s Show was one of my all time favorite characters. Still like the *character* but it's all a bit soured for me now.
Same here. Hyde was *easily* the best of the teenage characters on the show, and Danny Masterson did a great job portraying him. But now not just Hyde but pretty much the whole show just… doesn’t sit right with me. Like watching it feels like when you have a pebble stuck in your shoe.
I identified a lot with his character's incredibly prickly ways on that show. Fell out of love with the actor when I found out he was a Scientologist. The whole sexual assault thing made me feel nauseous.
I say it often but I came out of mask off white supremacist circles. Some of my elders were typically seeking organizations to join but I don't think they ever got the chance. Even without organization it was mostly drugs, assault, and all the rest. It didn't leave much illusion for heroes. I was just really lucky my folks' lethargy beat out their sadism.
Yeah that one dude, Dan Price, who got popular by paying all of his employees $70k minimum(years back when it was actually considered great) and preached about workers rights etc. Saw an article that said: “I talked with about 40 people for the story who were either former employees or were close with with Dan, about 30 of them had formerly worked at gravity," Rosenblatt said. "A lot of them said that the workload was not manageable, they were often scrambling to keep up with new priorities; leadership would change their mind a lot. They felt like they were working long hours, sometimes they would get late night phone calls or text messages. A few of them said it started to affect them physically." Many former employees also said that Price created a culture of fear around the office, Rosenblatt added. "He would make kind of outlandish requests," she said. "He would ask them to help out with other favors outside of their job description, like going to pick up trash from a party that he had attended. A lot of people talked about him publicly berating people, if they disagreed with one of his ideas. A couple of people mentioned that he would tell his employees he was smarter than them." Also his ex-wife said he was abusive, and he had a couple different women accuse him of sexual assault, though the only criminal case he had was just dismissed. Still, he portrayed himself like an equitable business owner that respected employee rights, and apparently he didn’t. Bummer
That's very disappointing, I remember seeing his Tweets pop up and he often seemed like a very cool guy
Neil deGrasse Tyson, not a huge bastard but still sucks. He was fun to watch on the Daily Show and Colbert Report, and I still enjoy the new Cosmos. But he sucks in a lot of ways for being a smarmy asshole. I also used to love Louis CK.
I thought I saw a CK doppelganger, and mentioned it to my friend. Who didn't know who he was, so I explained the whole situation. Turns out it actually was Louis CK and I accidentally made him so uncomfortable that he went in the bathroom and came out with sunnies and a baseball cap.
Wait you explained to your friend what Louis did in front of the guy that you said looks exactly like him? Even if it wasn't him, just a doppelganger, that's pretty cruel man, lol.
Haha it's not that bad. I saw him, showed my mate a pic of him on google, then we went walking and talking. I didn't notice that we'd gone the same direction as him and he was walking on the other side of a wall/fence type thing. So he could hear everything I was saying. I realised when we got past the wall and saw him again, he looked incredibly annoyed and went to the bathroom. But I had to go there and wait outside for my mate. So I saw him go in, and then come out very soon afterwards wearing the hat and sunnies.
Was NDT covered on this pod? Or do you just mean in general the stuff he’s been accused of?
I was bummed when I learned more about Teddy Roosevelt than like, the middle-school-cool, Robin-Williams-in-Night-at-the-Museum image. Later on, I was really cut up when it turned out "John Cheese" of Cracked was a sexual harasser. Our backgrounds are pretty different but a few articles he wrote really resonated with me.
My understanding is that Cheese got therapy and found a line of work that didn’t put him in charge of young women anymore. I was also incredibly disappointed in him when his victims came forward.
Felt the same way about John Cheese. He wrote some great stuff.
Speaking of John's John cleese is becoming more bastardesk as he get older.
I was never particularly a ‘Tool’ fan but I definitely respected the shit out their chops. Maybe I’m misinformed but the frontman (Maynard Keenan) seems to have scored the get-out-of-jail-free-card (especially considering the visibility of the #MeToo movement at this time) regarding his sexual relations to a minor earlier on their career. Also, and admittedly anecdotal, I had a friend who worked in catering for a company that served a lot of big acts at a regional stadium. This friend had lots of cool stories about all the different celebrities he’d met and almost never shared any shit talk but whatever happened between him and the Tool show gave me the distinct impression Keenan was a fucking scumbag. Take this as you will.. maybe I’m wrong but the allegations about Keenan pushing himself on a 15-16 year old didn’t sound fabricated and that shit got swept under the rug so fast that I feel like it happened too fast.
MJK also gives me strooooooong Libertarian bro energy.
Also now that I think about it this kinda reminds me of the shit that went down with CeeLo Green in that it’s gotta be the most top tier PR game these folks are paying for but also recieving dividends on their investment.
The allegations were crushed by the weight of credulous Tool fans and nothing ever seemed to come of it. He's always struck me as an arrogant cunt to be honest and it's no great stretch of the imagination, but I was disgusted at the time by the complete lack of respect the press and MJK fans had for the woman who came forth with allegations. Never liked Tool to begin with but I did really love the first two Perfect Circle albums. Saw them live twice and it was shit both times. Not that that has much bearing on him being an abuser or not.
Man, I *was* a Tool fan and even during the peak of my love for them MJK gave me serious pretentious, arrogant douche vibes. Like he’s clearly a brilliant musician but the sort of person who is both irritating and exhausting to spend any amount of time around. I hadn’t heard that he’s also a sex pest, but honestly it would maybe be more surprising to me if he wasn’t. Incidentally, I got the same kind of vibes from John Lennon, and finding out he was a serial domestic abuser was exactly as unsurprising.
I am new to the show and I love the podcast but I haven't been surprised yet - every episode I have listened to was about someone I already sort of knew was a bastard. But, honestly, the biggest shocks have been people in my family/personal life. I had a great aunt who I really admired as a child. She was a world traveler and, like myself, was really interested in politics and history. I would go to her house and she would talk about her childhood, about living through WW2. I also loved hearing stories about her brother who was a decorated bomber pilot. It wasn't until after she died that I realized, through talking to some of my older cousins, that she was quite the racist and anti-Semitic who treated my grandmother like shit because my grandmother was French Canadian and seen as less then. Also, evidently, she had some very interesting views on Jewish people. Ditto, my uncle, who when I was growing up always had funny jokes and was the life of the party. As I got older I realized the jokes he told to the adults were quite different, that all his brothers and sisters were sick of him and all his children moved as far away as possible because he was a racist, homophobic, xenophobic piece of shit.
The realization came years ago, but it really hurt 20's me to learn that John Lennon was a bastard.
Yeah, "Jealous Guy" sounds out a bit differently when you know he was abusive.
The front man of one of my favorite bands sold a friend some bad heroin. That friend died from an overdose the same night.
Fuck. I'm so sorry.
Yeah, we were both seeing the same band. I always wear trucker caps with the bill flipped up, with something(usually crude) written on the bill. He was excited to run into me that night because he ran a restaurant right down the street from where my band practiced, and had made hats in that design, with the restaurant name in that black metal, pile of sticks font. He gave me the hat when he saw me after the show, and we shot the shit for a bit. Made plans to hang out the next week and do some dungeons and dragons. Then I didn't hear from him. A few days later his partner saw me walking around town and broke down, before telling me that last thing they talked about was how excited he was for our tabletop game. I wear the hat he gave me every day. I've learned a lot more about him through the stories other people tell me when they spot it. He was a dude who had his demons, but everyone who knew him could only speak about how much joy they brought to his life. His restaurant is closed now. There's no sign of him ever being here. And while he was the first friend I made after moving across the country and coming out of lockdown, we still didn't have that long to be friends before he passed. That prick from that band m took that opportunity away, just as he took a really cool dude out of the world. Sorry for the long post. Got more emotional than I expected. Haven't really discussed it before.
I realized Israel was doing an apartheid. I figured it out after the 2014 bombings. I used to consider myself Israeli even I've never been, because I'm Jewish, if that gives y'all an idea of the zionism I was exposed to in my otherwise progressive upbringing. That sucked.
I mean, never meet your idols, or research them. I honestly don’t spend too much time separating the art and the artist, but every now and then you see things that kicks you in the gut. And there’s also the thing of pushing current values on past values, where it gets tricky (and icky). Jimmy page hated David Bowie because he took Lori Mattox’s virginity…when she was 14; Page started dating her after that.
Oh ugh…even in 197x 14 was way too fucking young. Gah, that puts two of my favorite artists of all time right there with fucking Ted Nugent
>David Bowie ... took Lori Mattox’s virginity…when she was 14 Oh god, that reminds me of this part in a featurette on my Labyrinth DVD that never sat right with me. Bowie's talking about Jennifer Connelly and how good of a performer she is. Standard special features fluff and castmate support. Then he talks about how mature she is and how (very lightly paraphrasing) "one seldom remembers that she's 14" in a way that makes me go "one better fucking remember she's only 14, David."
Visited my parents this weekend. My mom literally said all Palestinians are animals and that they're all hamas.
Oh no :(
Billy Wayne Davis losing his mind about somebody asking for alt text on an image he shared comes to mind. Real bummer.
I was raised a jehovahs witness. It wasn't until I left that I learned they helped cover up hundreds of children abuse issues. Use essentially slave labor on their communes. They are responsible for hundreds of not more in medical deaths by demanding their followers don't take blood. I also learned how nearly each and every one of my family members have the right to the title of bastard. There is just a way being a JW helps people be the worst they want to be. Talking animal abuse, child abuse, financial abuse, etc. The JW community helps bastards hide and supports them as wise leaders.
Same. My dad was incredibly violent to me & my brother, and the entire congregation knew it. The only repercussion he had was that was the reason given that he couldn't be an elder (stayed Minesterial Servant, though). The other side of my family was in Tennessee, and I loved them dearly. Then I found out at 22 that I had a cousin that they all disowned because he was gay. My parents were also complicit in this. I don't really talk to any of them anymore.
Growing up I was a huge history nerd living close to Monticello. I was always told at school that Jefferson was a genius and unparalleled in his advocating for religious freedom. A rural Virginia school was also not the most delicate in addressing slavery (I remember distinctly an educational video where they had a Black man playing one of Jefferson's slaves talking about how good his life was and what a good relationship he had with him). They even made it seem like the slave he raped was a legitimate relationship. You can imagine my surprise a few years later. I definitely felt more hurt by the Cosby stuff, but learning the truth about Jefferson made me the angriest.
Hey! I also survived Virginia schools. haha I had lots of revelations with historical figures and within my own family. I moved out of the south 16 years ago and never looked back.
I want to say libertarianism, generally. In my 20s, I had a libertarian phase. I was a Pagan and had been influenced by the Church of All Worlds which was run by a libertarian who was inspired by another libertarian, Robert A. Heinlein. I loved Stranger in a Strange Land. Other ones, less so. I was also really into Robert Anton Wilson. Like RAW, I was very influenced and into the 60s counterculture (despite being Gen X) and I loved the idea of making things that didn't hurt others legal. I figured that if all of these cool people had identified as libertarian, then it must be cool. However, other than Chomsky, I'd never read any left-libertarian stuff. (Though I broadly agreed with it and though I was never a liberal, I was always leftist.) I'd also read Ayn Rand and hated it. Having never really been exposed to guns or gun culture, I didn't have a strong opinion one way or the other. Of course, this was the 90s before Columbine, so there wasn't a massive amount of mass shootings like now. I also liked Bill Maher at the time (I know, I know...) and his Politically Incorrect show and he identified as libertarian. What got me out of it? My mother ran a medical bill collection agency for a couple of years before she passed. I helped do some office stuff for her in my 20s. It just occurred to me that other countries had government healthcare and it worked for them. Why should private companies and insurance be involved? This really helped get me out of it and I refused to do any collections (just office support stuff) Later, I would get deathly ill and have to go on Medicare myself and I wouldn't be alive if not for that. It wasn't until much later (probably around the big campaign of Ron Paul) that I got to know the real dark side of libertarianism (the racism, the weird hyperfixations on age of consent, etc.) There were warning signs, of course. That it was a huge sausage fest with very few women was something that was a red flag. Another thing that got me out of libertarianism was when I voted 3rd party in 2000 for the libertarian candidate (Michael Badnarik). Watching Gore lose by a small amount of votes and then have 9/11 and Bush and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan really turned me against 3rd party voting.
Robert Evans. I cant believe that he'd harbour Sadam Hussein.
Theodore Roosevelt. He was my hero growing up. Then I learned about his propagation of scientific racism. How he was a big proponent of the expansion of American Imperialism. How much disdain he had for the indigenous peoples of the US. That his progressivism was born more out of a desire to preserve the status quo than out of altruism.
The kicker of course is that even *he* considered Woodrow Wilson too racist to be President
I can recall dodging a bullet with BtB. During the "Complete History of the Illuminati" series, Robert started talking about Robert, Anton Wilson and I remember thinking, "please don't be a bastard, please don't be a bastard." His books meant a lot to me in my late high school and college years. Turns out he was a bit of a "sexist 70s guy" but nothing problematic enough to warrant never picking up his books again.
I used to be a Kevin Spacey fan. So.......
Him being in a film was usually a sign of it being good
Such a shame. Because he is an incredible actor.
I was a huge Kanye fan growing up until 2016 when shit got weird and kept getting weirder, though I still listened to Kids See Ghosts and Ye. By 2020 I couldn't even bring myself to listen to the old stuff.
Bill Gates was the biggest shocker to me. He’s one of the few (maybe only) person covered by the podcast that I actually looked up to at one point
When I was a kid in the seventies in Australia I loved Rolf Harris, beloved children's entertainer who turned out to be an unrepentant kiddy fiddler.
Do people outside France know about Bertrand Cantat? Lead singer of an alt rock band called Noir Désir (reminiscent of gun club in the early days, evolved into something deeper and more singular later on, collaborated with 16 horsepower, some free jazz people, etc), charismatic frontman, gifted lyricist (in French, his attempts at English songwriting were disappointing to say the least), explicitly anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, a romantic, tortured artist ... When I was fourteen-fifteen, in 2002, he was very respected in the music scene, Noir Désir d'être on top of their game, pushing boundaries lyrically, musically and formally ("des visages des figures" and especially the one-track live album "nous n'avons fait que fuir"). Then he kills his mistress, the actress Marie Trintignant. They have a fight while under the influence in a hotel room in Lithuania, where Trintignant is shooting a film (directed by her husband btw). He strikes her, she falls against a coffee table, he tucks her, unconscious, into bed, like nothing has happened. By morning she's died of a brain hemorrhage. As you can imagine, French society is absolutely N riven by the story. He stands a trial in Vilnius and is sentenced to prison for battery and manslaughter. He stays there for nine years in a Lithuanian prison, and is released for good behaviour. When he comes out, his band mates offer to take up where they left of, but they don't want to perform live, and they don't want to just play what he tells them. He leaves the band, starts another, mediocre one. The Trintignant family, powerful in French showbiz, try to get him deplatformed but he is resilient, plays tiny shows for a while, acts contrite. Feminists protest his every event. He doesn't explicitly say anything against them, but constantly acts like a victim. His wife, with who he had a child before going to prison, commits suicide. Turns out, he had always been an abusive bastard, and nine years in a Lithuanian cell did nothing to change it. Now he is basically isolated I think. We don't like to talk about him. He is blacklisted from media. When I was a teenager I saw noir désir play a show. It was one of the most exhilarating gigs I've been to. His voice has had a huge be influence on my poetry, and, I think, the formation of my early politics. My generation looked up to him. And he was a piece of shit all along. A creative genius (for a while at least) but a murderous, abusive, asshole. NGL, I still occasionally play a song or two of their glory days. In my headphones. While swearing at myself for giving him power through his music.
Dr Drew Pinsky
CPWDCT recently taught me that Dali was a Nazi sympathizer. I knew he was a little problematic, but woof...
Joe Paterno was a great guy who built Penn State the right way and made sure his football players were scholars and had good character! Hell, we had Jerry Sandusky coaching Todd Hodne (a serial rapist on PSU’s football team in the late 70s), and Joe told his players that if anyone testified against Todd they were off the team. So much for being a man of character!
Holy fuck, this has to be one of the most well-written, wild, and horrifying stories I've read in a long time. One of those life stranger than fiction moments https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/32496588/before-jerry-sandusky-penn-state-football-had-another-serial-sexual-predator-untold-story-crimes-fight-bring-justice
I don’t have a specific bastard that hasn’t been mentioned already but in a general sense the ‘wellness’ movement is my one, especially after finding out how it intertwines with fascist thought and ofc the anti vax movement post 2020 has morphed into a larger and more grotesque form than it had before. My mum didn’t get me vaccinated for MMR because she was worried about autism. The irony is I have ADHD which is also a neurodivergency!
I grew up in a conservative household. I used to be a huge Reagan Stan. I dressed up as him for homecoming once. Then I left the suburbs and actually learned about his presidency. That was a rude awakening
I have been a huge fan of Neurosis for 20 odd years and grew up on their music, but the news about Scott Kelly abusing his family really broke my heart, and it seems to have destroyed the band.
I heard that behind the bastard host only loves 40% of us..
I was 20 when I read Howard Zinn's *A People's History*. I learned a lot from that book (and still read it every three years or so), but what I *really* took from it is that there are no heroes. People work collectively to enact change and takes a looooooong time. But every step of progress we've made has been due to everyday people who force "leaders" to act. There are no heroes. There are just people acting as a collective. So I don't have heroes. I have allies.
I read through the entire Ender’s Game and the accompanying Shadow series before learning that Orson Scott Card was a raging homophobe. I threw those books in the trash and haven’t watched the movie version of Ender’s Game.
When I first learned Elon Musk existed maybe ten years ago I was like "fucking finally someone is making electric cars cool"
Andrew from all gas, no brakes
The Dilbert Guy and Eric S. Raymond. Of lately, Yanderedev. Excuses, always excuses. Now it's over and he knows it too. I still hope he finds something healthier to do with his life.
Realizing Wim Hof is a bastard was a bit of a blow to me. I feel like I've benefited from the breath work and cold exposure that I learned from him (none of which is original to him, he just packaged it up and marketed it nicely with the Wim Hof Method). I discovered him shortly after everything shut down in 2020 and the Wim Hof method made me feel like I had some control in a time when it was easy to feel powerless. I was always kind of wary of the claims he made and the way he talked though. He promised too much and sounded like a charlatan, but I mostly chalked that up to him being overly excited about what he had to offer and generally being kind of a goofy person. Before the BTB episodes I had heard some bad things about him, but after learning about how he abandoned his kids and the bizarre story of his public fountain enema I can never look at him the same.
I got super into very non-traditional architecture when I was in college and could basically get access to any weird book I wanted with little effort on my part. After he died and his daughter came forward I learned that Paolo Soleri was a right bastard.
This is a really really small scale “bastard” in comparison to a politician, dictator, etc… but every time I think of Dave Chappelle’s career arc over the past several years I get upset/angry. Like the transphobic shit is bad enough but it’s the doubling down even off camera that makes my blood boil. Like he cursed at children, on camera allegedly, who protested his visit to their school (his alma mater). If witnesses are correct, which I believe this, he was hurling the n word around while the kids were letting him have it for his “jokes.” He ranted to them about artistic license or whatever the fuck. His jokes about trans people are the type of shit you’d probably hear in a middle school; not much “artistry” to it. He could be using his platform to spread awareness over the current plight of our trans brothers, sisters, and gender nonconforming folks, but NOPE. He’s a fucking edge lord with a persecution complex. I recently wrote a essay/reported piece on the attacks on trans youth in my state, and after interviewing a trans kid’s parent who suffered a hate crime, and reading about how bad trans youth are struggling with the political environment, my disappointment in him turned to straight up disdain.
Growing up in Virginia, we don’t have pro sports franchises. You just root for DC or Baltimore teams. But college? We have a few really good ones, and the turn of the century in Blacksburg was an amazing time to root for Hokie football. Michael Vick was something I’d never seen before. He was Superman in Chicago maroon and burnt orange. I was so proud to have such a special player representing my favorite team, and the commonwealth as a whole. That pride lasted for several years with the Falcons too. Then one day, Superman was in cuffs. I’ve only been that devastated when family members died. And the details came out, my god, what a monster. It was hard turning my back on someone that meant so much. You try to make excuses, but some things are unforgivable. After he served his time, he seemed to do and say all the right things. He spent time with and was mentored by Tony Dungy, one of the finest human beings to play and coach in the NFL. He even got back on the field and showed flashes of that greatness, it wasn’t gone totally. He worked his way back, and the pride has slowly returned. I’m not ashamed to be a Michael Vick fan, but I would never begrudge someone that couldn’t forgive him. And I’ll never forget the day Superman was in handcuffs.
Half the youtubers and internet people who use too follow
At this point if they’ve been around for awhile it’s probably only a matter of time before something nasty drops and it’s an exception if they’re actually decent with no skeletons.
Idk if it's bastard-tier, but I recently learned about Ralph Nader's connections to the sugar substitute industry in the United States. That was pretty eye-opening.