Buttery males?
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I agree with you about the tests. This is something we still haven’t gotten right in this country. Everyone that can should be vaccinated, and everyone who wants one should have access to a free test when they want.
What I don’t agree with is attacking/criticizing the Press Secretary for relaying current policy. Does anyone seriously think she gets to dictate policy?
Some here seem put off by general admiration of a smart woman doing an overall kickass job. They don’t seem to see the embedded misogyny in turning any thread that says, “hey, look at this cool woman,” into an opportunity to discuss the one thing they can point to that she did less than a stellar job at messaging. I don’t seem to see them turning up on the Elon Musk threads pointing out all the shitty stuff he does, so…
It seems specific to women.
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ClutchLinkey, Psaki has been doing a phenomenal job as PS. However, when asked a serious question about something killing thousands of Americans (“why not just make them [home tests] free?”) she literally responded with sarcasm (“Should we just send one to every American?”). In my opinion it was quite a gaffe.
I just checked and there have been 44 positive posts on BB about Psaki. It is safe to say she is a regular topic here. There was not a post addressing her response to the at-home test question. This (the “Jen Dances” post) was the first post after that incident. It does not seem unreasonable or off-topic to me that some should discuss the most recent “newsworthy” thing about her.
As a hypothetical, if there was an unironic post on BB celebrating Spicy Boi’s flamenco disaster, would we all really be straightjacketed into not being able to point out that he was a shitty PS? Would anybody really flag a comment like that as off-topic?
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I’m not sure where your persecution complex is coming from here. Who is preventing you from starting your own topic on this front?
You are demanding the right to engage in whataboutism - that the community should be forced to endure a discussion about all aspects of a topic in every discussion, instead of discussing the original BB post and the comments that stem from that. It’s literally the equivalent of walking into a cocktail party where people were, for example, discussing holiday traditions in the US, and piping up with “yeah, but what about all those civilians they killed in military exercises?” I think you would quickly find the group discussing the prior topic walking away from you, and you would have done a very effective job of derailing the conversation that was taking place.
You are welcome to start your own topic about this issue. If you find this unacceptable, then I strongly suggest you find a forum (or mailing list) with threaded discussions rather than linear ones. You are far less likely to find members who are annoyed by the topic jumping around and expecting a new topic in those environments.
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I’m not demanding anything, but I am questioning where this is heading - I feel like we’re going off the rails a little here.
For instance, I just looked at this topic Televangelist Kenneth Copeland, worth over $750 million, doesn't pay property tax on his $7 million home: it's a "clergy residence" Just looking through the 46 comments about a third are about Kenny and his finances.
There are also posts about he’s a POS in general. There’s a discussion about how Christianity sucks as a whole, there’s a conversation debating how much Christianity slowed the advancement of science through the Dark Ages, a subconversation pointing out that science kept chugging right along in the non-Christian world, even a few posts about Mormonism. This seems like a healthy thing to me! It’s a bunch of people reacting to the original information and having overlapping conversations that anyone can dip in and out of.
The only difference I see here is that no one got upset by any of the comments. Heck, on a topic that is (narrowly) about one person’s use of a tax loophole to avoid paying taxes, and (more broadly) about tax exemptions for religious entities, the very first comment is Papasan (god bless him) disparaging Christianity as a whole! Far from being flagged, it got 32 likes. By the standards you seem to be setting here, this would’ve been WAY off topic, as would at least half the posts in the conversation. Again though, no one (who’s vocal on BB) disagrees with that sentiment.
Also, none of this has been whataboutism at all. Whataboutism is when someone responds to an accusation or difficult question by making an unrelated counteraccusation. (“You want to engage in whataboutism!” “well what about the other day when you spelled obsequious wrong?!”)
What? No it isn’t! It’s the equivalent of walking up to a discussion about how awesome Jen Psaki is and saying “True, but I was bummed with how she handled that at-home test thing”. Reasonable people might reply “she still rocks though” or “I thought she handled it exactly right” or “yeah, me too”. Reasonable people would NOT wave down the host of the party and request that the person who disagrees with them be moved to another room.
Well, let’s see. I posted “I was really bummed when she whiffed so badly (and really, so flippantly) on the at home test kits.” You broke that off and made it the first post of a topic titled “the double standard that women in politics must be held to”. That felt a little persecutie to me 
Then there was this post -
Some here seem put off by general admiration of a smart woman doing an overall kickass job.
Suggesting that anyone who is critical of someone in the public who happens to be a woman is automatically uncomfortable with a smart woman doing a good job is just lazy.
They don’t seem to see the embedded misogyny in turning any thread that says, “hey, look at this cool woman,” into an opportunity to discuss the one thing they can point to that she did less than a stellar job at messaging.
Someone who does indeed turn any positive thread about women/a woman into an opportunity to bash them is clearly misogynistic. I don’t think that person would last very long here in the BB community, and good riddance.
I don’t seem to see them turning up on the Elon Musk threads pointing out all the shitty stuff he does.
Okay, this person is either being disingenuous or just hasn’t read the comments on Musk threads; he gets regularly, and deservedly, thrashed here at BB.
Anyway, there are maybe FOUR posts in this topic that are actually about the double standard women face in politics. Like it or not, that’s not what this thread is about. If you’re going to impartially wield the BanHammer for every comment (on every topic) that’s off a very narrow definition of what the topic is I think you would do a lot of damage to the culture here.
You lost me there, what was your actual point?
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That’s fair.
tl;dr I think Orenwolf is claiming a standard for what constitutes “on-topic” that if actually applied would have a very negative effect on the discourse here at BB.
Also, I took a bit of umbrage at being held up as a poster child for misogynists who hold women in politics to a double standard based on one post where I both complimented someone and expressed disappointment in one particular action they took.
Wait. I looked up at the subject heading for this topic- it’s literally titled to be about the double standards women face in politics. If there’s other subjects you want to have as the subject of a thread; can’t you start one on whatever that is?
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I wasn’t being disingenuous. I pointed out that the same posters who show up to poop on the Psaki-love parade never poop on the Musk-fanboy parade, so it seems potentially gender related. Other posters poop on the Musk-fanboy parade.
And, for the record, I don’t recall seeing any of the Musk-poopers complaining when their posts get flagged as off topic. It happens to all of us who spend time here. But some just deal with it while others make a big deal about it.
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I think you’re missing a key element of his criteria: the derail. When the discussion has been taken over by one person or a small group, and it stops being about the subject in the OP and becomes about them and their pet topic, even if it’s related to the OP.
Derails rightfully get shunted to their own topic, and often die off due to lack of momentum. Sometimes, there’s a lot worth discussing there, and the new topic carries on. The Defund the Police topic started that way, IIRC, and it’s still active. But often, when the derail is more “Look at meeee!” it stalls when it’s away from the main topic, because no one has to look at it.
Unless it’s about bananas.
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Here’s a fifth.
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Makes total sense. I think what got me was knowing I wasn’t really getting flagged for being off-topic but rather because someone didn’t like what I was saying (I guarantee if I had instead posted “I sure was glad Jen got over COVID so quickly!” no one would have flagged it as off topic) and then having a MOD accuse me of misogyny when there was none, just made me a little… disappointed.
If I may, I think that the last sentence of your initial post (the part about a “window into her mind”) was a bit much. It may not have been outright, intentional misogyny, but it represented putting Psaki under a microscope and examining her motives to an extent that is simply unnecessary at best. Psaki has given us ample evidence to believe that she is the real deal, and yet with a simple gaffe (and this was not a huge gaffe, either), she was reduced to, “Is she really who she says she is?”
Again, that may not be outright or intentional, but that level of scrutiny is simply not going to sit right with a lot of people. It is the kind of thing that one who is intentionally looking for fault in Psaki would say, and that kind of fault seeking is just so rarely seen when the subject is a man. Which is exactly what we are talking about here.
I am not trying to scold you here. I just think that this is the kind of situation where a bit of introspection might be helpful. You may not have meant to seem that way, but so many people interpreted it that way.
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Thanks. I see what you’re saying.
Alright, let’s talk about that. Who asked the question? Fox News. Was the question asked in good faith? No, not in the slightest. So she blew it off. Good for her.
Where the misogyny comes into play is that, if a man is PS and does that, it’s a burn. But somehow, Psaki (or any woman in her position) is supposed to somehow find a perfect spot between being too lighthearted (fluff), too serious (boring - she should smile more!), and too assertive (bitchy). It’s an impossible standard that she often comes really close to hitting.
As press secretary, what we should really expect, and hold her accountable for, is honest and transparent answers to legitimate journalistic questions. Fielding gotchas from Fox as if they are a legitimate news organization is not really a part of that.
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If a man had been doing as phenomenal a job as Psaki has been, would you have thought it was a good burn? All I thought, especially given how practically unassailable Psaki’s performance has been, was “she’s saying it like it’s self-evidently a bad idea; does she not realize that other countries do it?”
Yes. Dismissing the question is the best way to handle a bad-faith question.
(Probably advice I should take to heart.)
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