LA news show slut shames weather forecaster on air

[daneel]

@winkybber

In what sense are the people who read the weather on the TV “meteorologists”?

On the BBC at least, they always were when they were provided by the Met Office.

[LDoBe]

Seattle’s KOMO has Steve Pool, who’s a meteorologist.

Steve Pool

He even wrote a book: Somewhere I Was Right

It’s about how the Pacific North West’s geography makes a bunch of little microclimates that sort of move around, which makes the weather very unpredictable for a given spot on the ground.

[ficuswhisperer]

There’s a huge difference between meteorologist and weatherperson.

A meteorologist is an actual scientist and are typically credentialed. A weatherperson just has to read cues in front of a camera.

5 Things Only Meteorologists Know About Weather Reports

[winkybber]

I can’t see in the Wiki where he’s a qualified meteorologist. i.e. BSc in meteorology. He came from a science reporter role. I stand to be corrected. Actual meteorologists may be slightly annoyed by talking heads being mis-labelled.

[OtherMichael]

If we can get Mr. Bells and Mrs. Michael to give their blessings, sure - we’ll be one big menage-a-quatre!

[anon33466019]

ahem!
What about our engagement?

Edit

@manybellsdown yeah, yer gonna have to fight me for’em.

[OtherMichael]

In the mid 80’s he changed directions and became the stations lead
weather forecaster after going back to the University of Washington to
receive specialized training in atmospheric sciences from renowned
professor Clifford Mass.

- (source)

That’s not the same thing as a degree. But is a scientist a person who applies the scientific method, or a person who has a degree?

[winkybber]

The degree speaks to the extent of education that a person has received. Not a perfect measure at all. Yes many non-qualified people understand and apply the scientific method to their thinking, at least. This guy seems like he’'s genuinely interested in doing a good job of informing the public about meteorology-related matters. I suspect he’s an outlier, though. Most weather presenters seem to be talking heads, more concerned with their spray tans and witty banter with the show hosts.

[anon61221983]

[anon61221983]

[anon61221983]

@OtherMichael

WE DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHTWE RAGE RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT

(I’m hearing that in this voice)

[daneel]

[anon50609448]

I have an honest question - not a rhetorical one for @moth @cinquante_sept @Crookedplatipus @m_a_t @Kevin_Godfrey @afabb and anyone else who thinks we need to tone down our outrage because this is just a joke.

As best I can tell, concerns include from society becoming humourless; and movements to fix large problems being undermined by wasting energy on small problems or crying wolf over non-problems. I disagree that either of those are serious concerns, but I think others have expressed that.

The repeated theme is that people complaining about this sort of thing ought to check the facts before they react.

@Moth

Really! Is it just people flipping out over trivial things now?

@cinquante_sept

Jeez, every little thing in this world doesn’t have to be the sky falling.

@cinquante_sept

my answer is that your outrage is out of calibration; your indignation should have its hair-trigger adjusted.

@m_a_t

Has anybody made the effort to actualy do a little research? No, because it would spoil the fun of viral outrage, I guess.

So my question is, why is this important to you? I’m not being facetious. Do you think we are in trouble as a society because outrage about racism and sexism is running amok? Does it make you feel like you are under attack because something you say might be misinterpreted in the future? I’m just spit-balling ideas here, but I said above it was worth listening to people who are upset about something, and I so I am willing to listen.

It just seems like the “let’s cool our jets” talk is a little weird in a forum where people are just discussing an incident that happened in the past tense and no one is taking or even calling for any concrete action (I’m the only one who called for killings, and I suggested they be at random, which makes the suggestion neutral as far as the debate at hand is concerned). It seems like discussion about how people’s actions sometimes upset other people touches a nerve with some people, and while the typical explanation is that people in positions of relative power don’t like to have that power undermined, that’s a sociological/behavioural point of view that can’t be meaningfully applied to individuals. Since you are here, I wonder if you’d take the time to share why this is upsetting to you.

[anon29631895]

@winkybber

In what sense are the people who read the weather on the TV “meteorologists”? A similar mistake is made when we call newsreaders “journalists”.

Liberté is both (sort of – not sure what a certificate in meteorology entails) as well as a nationally ranked figure skater as a kid…

Liberté earned her certificate in meteorology from Mississippi State University in August, 2015. She also has a master’s degree in Public Health from USC’s Keck School of Medicine, plus a certification in broadcast journalism from UCLA and a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from University of Massachusetts Amherst.

[Medievalist]

@Mark_Sniadecki

…the bit I quoted from you above–that could be the same as a very, very religious person coming up to a lovely heathen like me and saying “By the way, you can’t see this because you’re assimilated into the ways of sin, BUT what you’re doing right now is leading you toward eternal damnation. I need to show you the light. I need to show you why you need to repent and throw off this wrong-headed culture you follow.”

You’re in the wrong thread, friend, if you don’t want to be preached at.

[anon50609448]

@Mark_Sniadecki

So, the bit I quoted from you above–that could be the same as a very, very religious person coming up to a lovely heathen like me and saying “By the way, you can’t see this because you’re assimilated into the ways of sin, BUT what you’re doing right now is leading you toward eternal damnation. I need to show you the light. I need to show you why you need to repent and throw off this wrong-headed culture you follow.”

That seems like a huge leap. We’re all in the position of not knowing whether we are the dumb ones in any given situation, but that doesn’t mean I should give the same value to, “That joke you make might have hurt someone’s feelings” as I would to, “Not sacrificing a goat to Baal might mean you’ll get scurvy.”

@Mark_Sniadecki

We are earnestly saying: don’t treat women like this–in some cases, passionately making that statement, angrily even–but at the center of it all, this one person has ceased to matter in the story. She’s just living her life.

If the title of this post was “LA man slut shames wife in their living room” then I would be saying, “We don’t know about their personal relationship so we shouldn’t jump to conclusions” while at the same time saying, “Where the hell did this footage come from?”

I have a friend who I make despicably offensive jokes with. Why do we do that? There’s a lot that goes into that, I think a significant part of it is that we share a very dark worldview and we laugh at the horror we see around us. Another part of it is a way of reminding ourselves to think about our own biases - a joke we make between ourselves about someone’s race serves as a reminder to us that we probably actually are judging that person because of their race even though we’d rather not be doing so, and we should think about how we might be doing that. It’s roundabout self-deprecation mixed with cosmic horror.

If I were a presidential candidate and I tweeted such a joke, I wouldn’t expect the world to understand my life story and our relationship, or to see such a joke as anything other than what it literally would be in that context: racism, sexism, whatever.

If the idea of people making their own interpretations of your jokes is problematic for you, or if the idea that people might talk about your jokes in a context beyond the one in which you made them is something you don’t like, avoid making jokes on TV.

[Phrenological]

It’s only racism or sexism if the person “has a problem with it” or one single dimwitted reader thinks it’s “funny”, in which case nobody is allowed to discuss or hold their opinions.

And yet, discussing amongst ourselves outside of the controlled auspices of the regressives’ approved narrative is the real thoughtcrime.

[m_a_t]

Okay. Good question. Here’s my take on an honest answer:
it is actually so important to me because the topic of equality is too important to me to be wasted on false alarms so the other side can call everyone a SJW or whatever. it is also important to me because a culture of outrage has risen on the web, that does not reflect a genuine concern about the topics. People build up social media identities with which they react on viral news which spread too fast for an actual reality check. Rumors blow up and explode in the face of those actually affected by inequality and oppression.

If we want positive change, and I do, we must spend a good deal of our energy at uncovering the false positives.

[anon50609448]

@m_a_t

it is actually so important to me because the topic of equality is too important to me to be wasted on false alarms so the other side can call everyone a SJW or whatever. it is also important to me because a culture of outrage has risen on the web, that does not reflect a genuine concern about the topics. People build up social media identities with which they react on viral news which spread too fast for an actual reality check. Rumors blow up and explode in the face of those actually affected by inequality and oppression.

I think to talk about wasting energy on false alarms, we need to figure out what we mean by a false alarm. Like I said above, if this was a private joke made in private I would be saying we shouldn’t judge interactions between individuals since we don’t know the context. It was a public joke made on TV, so the audience is expected to have a reaction. If many people felt there was something wrong with the joke - that it seemed like harassment to them or otherwise made them feel uncomfortable - then that isn’t a false alarm, that really happened. I don’t think this is a false alarm at all because even if she was fine with the joke it wasn’t a private joke.

But you say that the outrage people express on the web doesn’t reflect a genuine concern for the issues. I wonder what makes you think that. I think that people who thought the clip was terrible posting here genuinely thought the clip was terrible.

Anyway, I feel like I didn’t quite get an answer to my question (well, to the question I meant to be asking, I guess): what problems do you feel the culture of outrage is creating?

It looks like you are saying it’s a problem with crying wolf (and the resulting not-being-taken-seriously).

What I keep seeing when I look at examples of injustice is that no example is ever good enough. You take police killing unarmed young black men and it seems like every single case, when examined individually, results in an acquittal. It’s obvious there is a problem with the overall numbers, but our standards for saying there is a problem with a particular case are so high that nothing is ever done. If Rosa Parks made her famous ride today we’d be bogged down in an endless conversation about where there were vacant seats on that particular bus and whether Parks was actually too tired to walk to the back as she said she was instead of seeing it as a tiny fragment of a systemic problem.

So I’m much more concerned with the drive to justify and perfect examples than I am with generalized outrage about events. Generalized outrage tends to explode in the direction of specific incidents, but it isn’t really about them any more than couples really get divorced because someone never does the dishes. Focusing on the specifics of examples weighs everything down and makes everything seem trivial.

[Mark_Sniadecki]

Okay, please understand… I’m not defending what happened. I was trying to have a rational discussion about other possible ways of looking at the situation–conjecture, mostly. Considering it from other angles. It was a mistake to try and do that here, and I recognize that now.

I agree that a public apology needs to be made. I agree that it’s ridiculous that that meteorologist was treated as if the sight of her body was shameful. and that it can (and will) be used as an example of the larger cultural issue at hand regardless of her statement. And that’s the last I’ll say about it. On to safer threads…