Just as we all finished putting up our fresh calendars, hearts filled with optimism at what the new year might bring, we were presented with “Bean Dad”—the now eternal internet moniker of musician and podcaster John Roderick—as an immediate suggestion that, at least online, 2021 will continue to be as shitty and dumb as the months preceding its start.
In short, the Bean Dad Saga unfolds like this: Roderick tweeted a long thread about trying to teach his 9-year old daughter the importance of can opener engineering by making her learn how to unseal a can of beans over a six hour period. Unfunny and vaguely unbelievable in the way that most of these kind of long, “stories from my crazy life!” Twitter threads are always unfunny and vaguely unbelievable, the story managed to attract plenty of ire from people unimpressed with the self-congratulatory tone of Roderick’s frustrating, bean-withholding pedagogical style. Rather than fade away over the next few days like so many other bad threads, Roderick’s tweets ended up opening not just a can of beans, but a radioactive barrel of wormy old tweets from his past filled with awful, “edgy,” slur-ridden pseudo-jokes.
Following this, the My Brother, My Brother, And Me podcast dropped Roderick’s Long Winters track, “(It’s A) Departure” as its theme song, his Omnibus co-host Ken Jennings tried to defend his character, and then, like that last bean that falls from the strainer to disappear into the inky depths of the sink drain, Roderick disappeared, deleting his Twitter account.
Now, days having passed, Roderick has returned to publish a long apology. He calls his original bean story “poorly told,” his style of writing a reflection of his “comedic persona,” and says that he “didn’t share how much laughing we were doing” or “how we had a bowl of pistachios between us all day as [he and his daughter] worked” out the can opener’s mechanisms. He also apologizes for “fighting back and being flippant when confronted, and for taking my Twitter feed offline yesterday instead of facing the music.”
“As for the many racist, anti-Semitic, hurtful, and slur-filled tweets from my early days on Twitter I can say only this: All of those tweets were intended to be ironic, sarcastic.” In a hell of a following sentence, he explains that he “thought then that being an ally meant taking the slurs of the oppressors and flipping them to mock racism, sexism, homophobia, and bigotry.”
“That was wrong, so I stopped,” he continues. “I deeply regret having ever used those words. I do not want to spread more hate in the world. I want the opposite.”
You can read Roderick’s entire letter here, and then make of it what you will.
[via The Wrap and Garbage Day]
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184 Comments
Apologizing after you’re facing professional consequences for being an abusive asshole really weakens the apology. Especially since he spent a bunch of time doubling down when the backlash started.
What have the McElroys said about this? I adore The Brothers, but I can’t help but apply your post to them just as to Roderick. Did they know about Roderick’s tweets but just ignored them and kept using The Long Winters song, or did they just find out about them when the tweets resurfaced? I think the McElroys are thoughtful and progressive, so I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but it’s easy to read from the series of events that they were going with the status quo until the tweets resurfaced.
There were only a handful of tweets that I saw and they were buried in replies to other people and several years old, so I don’t see any reason to think the people who worked with him would have known. I don’t know about you, but I don’t generally search people’s Twitter timeline for slurs they may have used years ago.
I definitely don’t do that kind of thorough research, but what’s more likely is that someone especially the person to whom he replied might have seen the tweets and called Roderick out for it, replied to it, retweeted it, or mention it when they run across Roderick’s name.I think in the same way that we’re evaluating Roderick’s apology, I’m curious about how The Brothers talked through the discovery of the tweets, the decision, etc.
That would be nice, but I get the impression that the people he replied to were either cool with it because they knew he was being ironic or not at all cool with it but not comfortable saying anything.Though he says he learned that it wasn’t okay at some point, so maybe people took him aside privately.
Lots of companies do that very thing. You can find pre-formatted search strings for that purpose online.
Tolerating this kind of history would be out of public character for the McElroys, but they’re (almost) all tech-savvy enough to have done this ages ago. (Clint is off the hook here, obviously.)
I don’t really know who any of those people are, but I’ll take your word for it if you say that it’s become de rigueur now. Seems plausible and a smart thing to do. Honestly, public figure or not, everyone should be checking their own history and scrubbing it of anything that could be taken out of context even if they haven’t said anything on the level of what Roderick said.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Yes, they did the right thing in dropping the song and disassociating the podcast with him when all this came to light; no, I don’t think it was incumbent upon them to go internet sleuthing for shitty tweets from eight years ago.
Neither do I.
But if you’re making a financial decision for your business to connect itself to someone else identifiable, running a single advanced search for anything from their account that includes any tweets with key words and phrases, like “mud people,” isn’t a terrible idea and can save you from embarrassing fiascos later, especially when your entire business is basically built on the goodwill of your audience.
If they’ve got a social media manager — no idea if they do, but it wouldn’t be a surprise — this would be a pretty easy task for them to do in about 90 seconds.
They immediately tweeted they won’t be working with him again and recut yesterday’s episode to replace It’s a Departure with the Rugrats theme.
WELL IF THE MCELROYS KNEW THEN THEY MUST BURN TOO!!!!!!!AND BURN EVEN IF THEY DIDNT KNOW!
Things nobody said
Go ask the people at Maximum Fun Co. how their morning is going.
What?
While I’ll definitely buy that the inciting story was exaggerated for comedic value, what I don’t buy is that all those disgusting tweets from a few years ago were anything but what they appear to be – evidence of clear racism, homophobia, antisemitism, and other flavors of bigotry.
It’s always the same terrible rationalisation. “I’m not a bigot! Would I be making bigoted jokes if I was?”“Yes, most likely…”“Oh. But I’m not a bigot, that’s what makes the jokes funny! That non-bigots make bigoted jokes!”“How do we tell you apart from the bigots then?”“…”
Yup! If the “parody” bigotry is indistinguishable from the real thing, then he’s failing both morally and professionally, given that he’s theoretically a comedian/entertainer.
Say it louder for David Cross.
Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor would like a word. Maybe they could tell you that you can tell them apart by thinking about it for half a second.
That’s hilarious, buddy, that you think you comprehend what I’m saying, or that you comprehend and speak for two other people.Two other people, I might add, that are one dead and one that’s a nonagenarian. If you think there’s any rebuff to my point because two old, fallible celebrities disagree with me in your head, you’re deluded.
Says the person absolutely sure THEY know what everybody REALLY means and invents a conversation between two people that only exist in their heads.
Mr. Crusher, you don’t deserve to wear that uniform
Don’t mind our buddy here, their head is all messed up from pon farr.
STNG S4 #21, written by Jeri Taylor:“We think we’ve come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it’s all ancient history. And then, before you can blink an eye, suddenly, it threatens to start all over again.”
“I believed her. I-I HELPED her! I did not see what she was.”
“Mr. Worf, villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well-camouflaged.”
“I think, after yesterday, people will not be so ready to trust her.”
“Maybe. But she or someone like her will always be with us, waiting for the right climate in which to flourish – spreading fear in the name of righteousness. Vigilance, Mr. Worf. That is the price we have to continually pay.”- Picard and Worf, discussing both the investigations and the misguidedness of Admiral Satie
Always fun to find Trekkies who think the show wasn’t adamantly anti-racism
Was expecting this kind of comment from you and I’m glad I witnessed it.
Exactly! Now you’re catching on.
Those are basically the two worst examples you could give to defend other people making racist and anti-semitic slurs under the guise of comedy.
Have you ever even watched any of their work before you decided to clamp onto them like your garden variety stupid-wing moron?
Roderick’s racist tweets didn’t look remotely like jokes.
Two immensely famous people who built comedic bodies of work around long-form comedy over a period of decades probably wouldn’t have much to say about some sentences a guy said on an advertising website.
Yeah, Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor and some douchebag who used to be in Harvey Danger. Totally on the same comedic level.
I will say that as a young person in my teens and early 20’s, I bought into the ironic bigotry jokes. It was until I was older and out of my very white suburban environment that I was able to understand why others would be hurt by them. At no point did I actually believe any of the stereotypes behind them, but that does not change the way they sound.
the classic ironic sexism is still sexism.
mmm, flavors of bigotry…
What, like Cherries Jewbilee?
or Dark Chocolate?
“Do I detect a hint of misoginger?”
It’s the old “I was doing it ironically!” thingAs I saw someone say in response to this: even if you say you’re fucking that goat ironically, you’re still fucking a goat.
Imagine how the goat feels. “Ironically? I thought we had something special!”
I can definitely see why someone would think that. But I do believe him that he was intending to be sarcastic. Some of the accompanying tweets are no longer available, but if you look at the larger conversation, you can recognize the sarcasm. Though that doesn’t make it okay at all. And you’re right that he likely has some subconscious prejudice that led him to make those statements even if he intended them to be ironic. You don’t make multiple tweets about “Jew lawyers” unless you have internalized some stereotypes and you don’t call friends gay slurs as a joke if you’re not at least somewhat homophobic. You can have gay friends and still be homophobic just like you can have black friends and still be racist.
I dunno. It definitely reflects his privilege and total misunderstanding of power structures, but it tracks with the tons of white liberals I’ve met who genuinely think using slurs can be a form of allyship. It’s amazing how privilege can completely override logic.
He’s doing the same thing we used to praise Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert for. Not as well as them, but ten years ago this is basically what liberal white comedy was.
Suey Park was right
The big difference being they at least provided enough context to make what they were doing obvious. It didn’t always work (sometimes they went too far for context to make a difference), but it was always clear what the angle was, which is the only way this brand of “ain’t I a stinker” comedy can possibly work.Twitter, being mostly broken into nice little context-free chunks, is a really bad platform for this. People keep saying “better comedians get away with offensive material” but better comedians understand the importance of playing to the venue you’re in.
Pretty much. He does a podcast with two other guys called “Friendly Fire” where they review war movies, and he always does this curmudgeonly thing that is funny a lot of the time, but would certainly fall flat if listened to out of context. Having heard his schtick before, I never believed he was serious.
Maybe I missed it, but I’m pretty sure Steven Colbert never used racial slurs in his playacting as a conservative pundit. The lines around what was and wasn’t an act were very clearly drawn. It’s much harder to draw such lines on Twitter, which is why attempting something like that is not a good idea, but even then, not the same thing at all. I wasn’t a regular 30 rock viewer, can’t comment there.
Colbert did introduce a stereotypical Asian, something explicitly mentioned on screen as a “character”, as some sort of bizarre meta-commentary on the Colbert persona. It didn’t work.
And even if it was exaggerated for comedic value, why does he think keeping a hungry child waiting six hours for a meal is an idea that has comedic value?
I don’t know that the story was all that exaggerated, either. Or rather, not the things people were actually criticizing him for.
Like he says it was exaggerated, but he doesn’t provide a lot of specifics – while I would’ve thought he’d be eager to correct the narrative.
The only fact that actually changes in the new version of the story is that he didn’t entirely prevent her from eating in the six hours between her announcing she was hungry and her figuring out the can opener – he now says that they had a bowl of pistachios between them while they worked on it.
If the parts people were calling shitty parenting aren’t true (the withholding of food, the refusal to stop for the day even when she burst into tears, this going on for six hours when the kid was hungry to begin with) then it’s awfully weird that even in his apology, his only clarification on that front is “Well actually, I didn’t entirely stop her from eating until she figured out the can opener – she was allowed to nibble on some pistachios.”
Plus, his initial response was just that six hours isn’t that long, and aren’t these people calling it child abuse ridiculous. Again, it’s weird that he would double down defending the facts he’d made up, instead of just giving people the real version of events.
You’re giving him too much credit. He’s not a bigot, he’s playacting one in lieu of being funny.
If this guy is a songwriter first, and a comedian second, I wonder if he isn’t only too deftly aware of the benefits of prioritizing structure—cadence, grammar, meter, whatever you want to call it—over substance, including vocabulary. I’m not saying that excuses his jokes (any more than I would say hate speech is A-OK ‘cuz it really draws a crowd)—I guess any way you look at it, it’s a sort of pandering.
So, like all reasonable people understood from the get-go, he wasn’t ACTUALLY being an abusive father, but instead exaggerating for comedic effect? Shocking.
It’s just like when my Dad used to beat me “ironically”
It’s really more the veritable deluge of slurs and hateful “jokes” that people are taking issue with.
Nah, he doubled down on that shit before nuking his entire account.Coming back now with his mea culpa only after Ken Jennings got caught in the splash damage doesn’t cut it.
Reasonable or not, there were a lot of people in the comments defending his described actions and saying that he was right to treat his child that way, that it was a good way to educate her.
I mean… It’s easy to say “reasonable people understood” he was exaggerating, but you can’t blame people for thinking he was an abusive parent when he sounded *exactly* like an abusive parent. It didn’t sound like a joke or a parody—everything he said is exactly what an abusive parent would say, and how they would say it. It’s exactly the kind of story abusive parents use to “prove” that their kind of parenting works.It’s just not a very good joke if the joke doesn’t land.
What kind of person thinks child abuse has comedic effect?
For better or for worse, there’s definitely a “brand” of tweets that fall into my “my daughter/son the idiot…”; “my son/daughter the asshole”; etc. As a parent of two young kids, I sort of get them, but 99% of the time they’re just meant as a display of the author’s (supposed) comedic chops.The flipside of this is the humblebrag about the wee-one’s achievements (or their comedic chops), which again is ultimately intended as a reflection of the author.I know this isn’t even remotely possible, but I think the best policy is to just keep the kids out of your tweets or social media.
I completely agree. I do Facebook my kids (5 and 2) because they’re super cute, but it’s always nice stuff. I know a lot of people joke about hitting their kids and how they need a smack and this and that and I’d never joke about that because, as this guy learned, abuse is a real thing that happens to kids, and furthermore, a lot of people don’t think of it as abuse. A lot of people thought his story was funny and that this was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, just like a lot of people think hitting children is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Joking about it just goes to normalize these attitudes about children not being worthy of basic respect, and it’s shitty.Except newborns. They are assholes who never let you sleep or sit down and they make your nipples sore.
Yeah, my baby’s given my nipples absolute hell. Being a dad is tough.
His posts were not funny to me, either, but most things can potentially have comedic effect. Some things are funny specifically because they’re fucked up.
How was it child abuse?
I mean, if you don’t already know why denying a child food for six hours while alternately ignoring them and mocking them until they figure out how to complete a menial task is child abuse I don’t imagine anything I say about it will convince you.
Was it really 6 hours and was there no food in the house other than the can of beans? She could have poured herself a bowl of cereal. Also, was it an electric or manual can opener? Because if it was the former, those things are super intuitive. The manuals usually have to lock and you have to get that right.
According to the story he told for comedic effect, he told her she couldn’t eat until she opened the can. According to the story, it was 6 hours.It was a manual can opener. Did you even read the story?
I read this article. and read some quoted tweets. If it was literal, it was not good parenting, but still not abuse.
Then we’re right where we started. If you don’t already know why denying a child food for six hours while alternately ignoring them and mocking them until they figure out how to complete a menial task is child abuse I don’t imagine anything I say about it will convince you, and this little back and forth was as big a waste of time as I said it would be.Reply
His original lengthy thread is full of abusive behavior and no indication that it was a joke. (The language he uses is pretty flowery, but so are his lyrics.) Squinting at a guy saying he’s abusing his kid and saying “nah, I’m pretty sure he’s joking about this” is definitely a choice.
The whole concept of wanting your 9-year old child to figure out engineering is so fucking weird to me. I didn’t really develop a mind for these things until adulthood. And even then, it would have been infinitely more efficient to actually show her how to use it, then explain why it worked.
One of my kids is an engineering genius and is planning his life around going to MIT or Caltech. He still was mystified by can openers. It’s completely disingenuous for Bean Dad or anyone else to pretend a kid should be able to figure out how to do it without real help.
I don’t think the people who took the story seriously thought he was being genuinely abusive, just weirdly dickish to his daughter and weirdly proud of his shitty parenting technique. If he had owned up to the criticism instead of doubling down (and inviting scrutiny of his earlier tweets) he probably could have nipped this in the bud.
Oh you apparently you haven’t waded very fair into the twitter cesspool. There were people genuinely accusing him of child abuse and that he should be reported to CPS.
I like how this is the problem and not a father who can’t just feed his kid
Or maybe…..abusive bullying behavior isn’t funny even when it’s made up? SHOCKING!
Characterizing his interaction with his daughter as abusive is ridiculous.
No, it isn’t. You don’t understand psychological abuse, so spare everyone your dogshit diagnosis.
Your own misunderstanding of what constitutes abuse doesn’t absolve abusers of it
I’m so glad I don’t know who or what any of this shit is.
Roderick tweeted a long thread about trying to teach his 9-year old daughter the importance of can opener engineering by making her learn how to unseal a can of beans over a six hour period.Lol, this is a pretty generous description, since it seems like he spent the better part of that six hours studiously avoiding teaching her anything except what an unnecessary ass her father could be.Anyways, the discourse over this is so much less fun than the discourse over the Peloton ad. More Peloton ad-type discourse, less discourse about fathers bragging about antagonizing their hungry children, please.
I wouldn’t have known about this if I wasn’t a MBMBAM listener. Hearing the first episode of 2021 open with a different song was shocking.
I thought Donald Trump was the Bean Father?
I had no idea that making subjectively bigoted, antisemitic jokes was a way to mock bigotry and antisemitism! And here I thought that praising Hitler, like he did, was something Nazis did. Turns out it’s “ironic”! Oh, Bean Dad.
Ken Jennings needs to lay low as well. Dude is edging his way towards losing his gig as the next Jeopardy! host.
I think it’s already lost. The show can’t risk having a host who is going to spout off on Twitter like this.
You never know, the network execs may think his tweets are hilarious.
Twitter’s ravenous maw has consumed another one.
The best, and really only truly good “apology” for old jokes that I’ve seen, is from Drew Magary before Deadspin flew off a cliff:https://deadspin.com/the-reckoning-always-comes-1819874125He rightly acknowledges that he made shitty jokes in the past, that those jokes were just what a lot of people did at the time, and that nonetheless, that doesn’t make them ok. He also frankly says that he’s not interested in making those jokes anymore because he (and the broader context) have changed.
His was really a thoughtful analysis and an example for how people can listen, grow and change.
It really was, and in particular I think he walked the fine line between (a) rationalizing it as just a product of the times (which doesn’t make something ok, and (b) acknowledging that what he did in the past was shitty, but that he’s older, more mature (hysterical to say this about Magary), and has greater lived experiences to recognize that he doesn’t want to do it anymore.
To be fair, if you read John Roderick’s actual apology and not just AVC’s spin on it, that is pretty much exactly what he’s saying too.
Weird that he never went back and deleted those posts before this, though. Advance searches in Twitter require going to a second screen to perform them, but he could easily find all of his mud people “jokes” pretty easily and nuke them if this isn’t who he is.
Or he might not have thought of doing so, because up until about three years ago, it wasn’t common practice for hordes of people to search your old tweets. And if he had deleted them, he just would have been accused of trying to “hide who he really was”.It’s okay to say, “I would never forgive him no matter what he did.” That’s a legitimate stance, just don’t pretend that there was some action he could have taken that would have changed your opinion.
Yes, except for the part where he says: “All of those tweets were intended to be ironic, sarcastic. I thought then that being an ally meant taking the slurs of the oppressors and flipping them to mock racism, sexism, homophobia, and bigotry.”What he’s really saying is that because he’s a liberal, he thought he could get away with it. That’s not really the same thing as saying those tweets were intended to be ironic or sarcastic. That being said, I think it’s just a matter of him being clumsy in his apology language – I do think overall the message is the right one he’s trying to get across.
I suppose you could take what he said and decide it means something else, and then therefore claim it was clumsily worded. But did his apology stop there? Or did he go on to also say this:
“I am humiliated by my incredibly insensitive use of the language of sexual assault in casual banter. It was a lazy and damaging ideology, that I continued to believe long past the point I should’ve known better that because I was a hipster intellectual from a diverse community it was ok for me to joke and deploy slurs in that context. It was not. I realized, sometime in the early part of the decade, helped by real-life friends and Twitter friends too, that my status as a straight white male didn’t permit me to “repurpose” those slurs as people from disenfranchised communities might do.”Seems to me, the whole context is relevant. He is absolutely saying that because he is a liberal, he thought (past tense) it was okay to jokingly use those terms, but he listened to people who told him otherwise and he changed his behavior. Again, this is exactly what should be expected of those who do bad things. If redemption isn’t possible, a) basically everyone who was born before 2010 is going to be burned by something they once did and b) there’s no impetus to even try to be a better person.
I get that there are probably some unforgiveable sins out there, but I can’t imagine some shitty tweets are among them. Perhaps I’m wrong.
My point is that thinking you have a pass to use a term jokingly is not the same thing as claiming you were using the term ironically or sarcastically in order to mock the oppressors. Given the rest of his apology seems sincere (as written) and takes the right tone, that’s why I think it’s that his language is clumsy, not ill-intentioned.I agree that old tweets are not an unforgiveable sin, and I agree the evolution in thinking he described is what we want to see from people (myself included, tbh).
I think you can hold both thoughts at the same time, though, and I’m guessing (based on what he wrote) that was the case with him. You can on one hand think, when you’re with your buddies (or in an environment in which you feel secure) that you can use terms freely. And you can also think that when you’re in a public space or confronting someone, that you are being an “ally” by “taking the word back”. Both thoughts are wrong-headed, and they also come from the same place: believing you’re so not-racist/sexist/homophobic that your intentions will not be questioned or doubted.I’ve had a situation many years ago where I was with someone I was close with and I made an ironic joke knowing full and well I didn’t mean anything hateful by it. But it was a bad joke to make and she called me out on it right in the moment. I took it to heart and I’ve never forgotten that moment. I think people can grow if we let them, and it’s concerning that so much of online rage has no place or avenue for redemption.
“As for the many racist, anti-Semitic, hurtful, and slur-filled tweets from my early days on Twitter I can say only this: All of those tweets were intended to be ironic, sarcastic.” In a hell of a following sentence, he explains that he “thought then that being an ally meant taking the slurs of the oppressors and flipping them to mock racism, sexism, homophobia, and bigotry.” So you’re lying or you fundamentally do not understand irony/sarcasm.
It is both things.
Irony and sarcasm rely on context for their effect. Social media is a commercial platform that restricts communication to inane, promotional bits, and it is extensively used as a recruitment space for unironic racism. Interpreting anything on social media as ironic is like denying a car commercial was trying to sell you a car – it’s anthemic to the form. And there’s no point arguing for authorial intent because the author is the product being advertised.
Excuse me? The style of satire where you imitate the real racists by using their own language to make them sound dumb, was the prolific style of Liberal satire for decades. STFU.
That’s a good reminder to drop Omnibus from my subs.
Unfunny and vaguely unbelievable in the way that most of these kind of
long, “stories from my crazy life!” Twitter threads are always unfunny
As are the long, unnecessary summaries of them.
did he apologize to his daughter?
!!!
He wrote an apology note and hid it inside one of those finger trap puzzles. He’s currently filming her trying to retrieve it as part of his upcoming tv show that he swears will be hilarious.
See? This is why I won’t give my kids a can opener!
Right? I say give ‘em a hammer and an ice pick and let the games begin.
I would believe his apology for all the bigotry if it hadn’t been dredged up on account of him thinking his terrible parenting was such a laugh riot at his daughter’s expense. People change and grow, but it really is tough to believe someone who can’t even give his daughter a break, to the degree that he has to share it with the world.
that’s my thing!! even if it was a lie, he’s being such a dick to his daughter and basically making fun of her calling her dumb for… the clout? I GUESS?
Yeah I can’t believe it being an exaggeration or just a joke when his MO has been punching down all along. But that could also be some bad experiences being taught how to do manual things as a kid talking
You called out Ken Jennings for defending him. Why didn’t you mention Michael Ian Black?
And John Hodgman too.
I’m not what the kids call Extremely Online and only heard about Bean Dad yesterday. Roderick sounds like the kind of LOLbertarian dork who has a tattoo of Ayn Rand on his ass.
And you would be completely wrong…as anyone who has heard his podcasts could tell you.
uhhhhhh can we talk about how EVEN IF the story was exaggerated (which was not his claim at the time but okay whatever) he was still basically making fun of his kid behind her back and calling her dumb?the whole “process visualization and order of operating are not things she …. intuits” quote… as if not understanding how to use something by simply looking at it AT NINE YEARS OLD means she’s slow? even if the entire thing was a lie, that still means he basically made up a story that he thought would make his kid look dumb so he could laugh about it with his followers and that sucks. this guy absolutely fucking sucks.
Yeah I find this story really disturbing, as I do with most parents embarrassing their kids on social media. This upcoming generation will have all their dirty laundry aired by their own parents. That’s gotta have some effect on them. I also feel for the kid as someone who wasn’t the best at figuring out tools, especially being left handed, and not having patient parental figures helping me through the process. It never made me learn to critically think better, it just made me terrified of trying new things
Thank you. This guy is a dick. Not to mention he’s lazily relying on the stereotype that women/girls are bad at mechanical things. He’s a dick who is exactly what that twitter story and his old tweets say he is.
Oh I’m sure he was mansplaining how a can opener works. But instead of showing her and guiding her on how to use one, he stands back and mocks her instead. Smh…
The worst teachers are those who somehow forget that they, too, didn’t know the things they’re teaching until they learned them. Acting like a small child is supposed to intuitively grasp the engineering of tools, or, you know, give a fuck, reeks of this.
You’re telling me that the Socratic Method isn’t ideal for teaching people how to use simple tools?
To say nothing of the fact that literally he could have put the can opener in her hand and positioned it and probably saved them both loads of aggravation AND she’d know how to use it.Pretending can openers are not sharp tools that can also cut tiny fingers when you’re just flopping around with it is also potentially dangerous.
Will 2021 be the year we all finally acknowledge that social media is a branding exercise and literally nothing else? And we can finally treat everything stated in that space as an advertisement for whatever is being stated and the person stating it? People in their 30s and 40s seem comically unaware that the irony of their formative years simply does not translate to this commercial space. They have an equally comical tendency to demand nuance in interpreting discourse on a platform that explicitly promotes brevity above all else. And that platform is hilariously, infuriatingly uninterested in the irony vacuum that they’ve created. There are places where this guy’s story about being a moderate asshat to his daughter could be funny. But a commercial for his creative enterprise (ie, his social media) isn’t one of those places.
Yeah, I was just talking elsewhere about how social media completely scrambles our sense of “public” and “private.” Twitter is ostensibly about sharing your immediate, unfiltered thoughts, and tweeting can sometimes feel like you’re just interacting with your immediate social circle—because, let’s face it, most of the time only your friends and a handful of followers give a shit about you—but people can’t seem to reconcile that sense of relative intimacy with the fact that they’re literally broadcasting everything to millions of people all the time.
In fairness, it’s an insidious way of existing – we can understand intellectually that these companies are making billions of dollars. But it’s kind of hard to believe that they make all that money by harvesting our personal information and selling it, then turning around and selling us products using the data they harvested. In particular, twitter is engineered for nuance free statements and massive pile-on responses to the same. People comparing bullshit ironic twitter posts to the work of an actual comedian or comedy writer are on the wrong side of reality.
Will 2021 be the year we all finally acknowledge that social media is a branding exercise and literally nothing else?God, I hope so.
There’s a whole bunch of people I know who are parents and write the weirdest fucking things on social media, seemingly unaware of how poorly theycome across.A woman I grew up with had her first kid about 10 years back and went absolutely fucking mad, putting up 10-20 pics a day of the kid on Facebook and absolutely spamming the hell out of the world with stories of every shit the kid took. It crossed the line hard when she posted about the kid tripping and going head-first through the bannisters on the stairwell and getting caught in there.This woman cheerfully regaled the story of how the kid was screaming in pain but she thought it was funny and walked upstairs to get her phone so she could take a picture.The comments on the facebook post were brutal, with her friends and even her own mum pointing out that wasn’t cool.
Also he’s forcing her to learn how to use a piece of technology that’s increasingly becoming redundant. More and more tinned goods have ring pull lids so you don’t need a can opener, and I’m guessing most of the ones this little girl has seen are exactly that. It’s like insisting she learn how to use a hand wringer to dry out wet clothes.
From what I have read, I have no problem with his original story. If that’s all people were upset about then I would be on his side.
This is really disappointing. John Roderick always seemed like a really good guy. I don’t know him from podcasts but I’ve seen him live a few times and not only are his songs good and interestingly structured (he does deserve to be grouped with Decemberists and Sea and Cake so maybe not for everyone, interestingly structured) but he does some of the greatest crowd banter I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen him shower praise on another musician I knew…I had hoped he was a good dude. It’s not just that he was a closet dick, it’s that he was a closet dick in the same way so many people are and he didn’t realize he was a cliche. Ugh, thanks 2021.
As usual, the AV Club has done a real disservice to the subject they’re reporting on.
The full apology note is worth reading, as it is exactly the kind of apology we always say we want: one that acknowledges fault, explains the thinking behind the action while admitting it was flawed thinking, and commits to being better going forward.
Nah. He can extensively ‘contextualize’ and ‘mea culpa’ with the hindsight of someone called out by social media, but it doesn’t change the fact that he thought for quite awhile that insulting Jews, praising Hitler, and mocking Black people was “being an ally”.
So, people who were shitty in the past can never be redeemed?
Redemption’s a funny thing. When you realize you’ve been shitty and make amends after years of people telling you you’re a Hitler-worshipping bigot, it’s meaningful. But when you only seek redemption after the discovery of your old bigoted racist tweets impacts your livelihood, it kinda comes off as fake and opportunistic. So in this case, it’s going to take more than a whiny letter for him to be redeemed.
So, you’re argument is that a person has to have been told by society for years that they are a shitty person for them to get redemption. Being told you’re a shitty person, reacting negatively for a couple hours, and then stepping back and admitting fault doesn’t count? It’s the length of time that people have hated you that counts?
I didn’t say that, no.My thought is that it shouldn’t really be difficult to realize that praising Hitler and mocking Jews and Black people isn’t “woke” or “being a liberal ally”. Coming to that ‘realization’ only after Twitter calls you out on it doesn’t strike me as truthful. It strikes me as someone who just realized that openly being a bigot is suddenly hurting their income flow.
Except, that’s not what he did. As he explained in the apology note, he stopped making those jokes a while ago. And, quite clearly, he agrees with you about it not being true allyship. He says flat out:I am humiliated by my incredibly insensitive use of the language of sexual assault in casual banter. It was a lazy and damaging ideology, that I continued to believe long past the point I should’ve known better that because I was a hipster intellectual from a diverse community it was ok for me to joke and deploy slurs in that context. It was not. I realized, sometime in the early part of the decade, helped by real-life friends and Twitter friends too, that my status as a straight white male didn’t permit me to “repurpose” those slurs as people from disenfranchised communities might do.It strikes me as incredibly disingenuous to pretend like he isn’t saying exactly what you’re demanding he say.
I also think there’s a bit of the Pharisee-casting-the-first-stone in your pretense of, “I have never said anything shitty in my life.” The difference for most of us is, we made our shitty “edgy” jokes among friends and we likely won’t ever have to face public scrutiny for what we said.
He made a “joke” about being an abusive father a few days ago. What time warp do you live in?
If only he had done that right away instead of being a dick about it when people told him he was being a dick.
I’m sure if anyone tells you you’re wrong about anything, you just instantly change.
And if I don’t, people can and should call me out on it. Unless I’m actually right.
Yes, 48 hours sure is a long time.
I didn’t say it was a long time. But yes, 48 hours is long enough to consult with a publicist and crisis manager.
Dude’s a podcaster and the lead singer of a moderately successful indie band that hasn’t released a new album in over a decade. My guess, he doesn’t have a publicist or crisis manager on retainer.
Is it your understanding that you can’t hire a publicist or crisis manager without having had one on retainer for some previous length of time?
It’s my understanding that a minor podcaster and former musician probably doesn’t have emergency cash lying around to call in a crisis team over the weekend to help him craft an apology letter when he could probably have just done it himself. Nothing about the apology letter comes across as particularly workshopped or contrived. There is literally no evidence it was the product of a crisis manager.
In that case, I would suggest that your understanding is faulty. A publicist or a crisis manager is hardly “a crisis team.” One person does not a team make. A few hours worth of work to draft an apology would cost maybe a couple thousand dollars. I’ve never hired a publicist myself, but I can’t imagine it would be more than that for a few hours of work, and he also very likely has an agent who, as you mentioned, has one on retainer. If he just hired a lawyer I know for a fact it would be less. But I’m glad that you believe it was all from the heart based on nothing at all. Frankly either one of us could be right, but it’s weird that you won’t even allow for the very reasonable possibility that a public figure hired a publicist.
I think it’s weirder that you’re so invested in this theory that he hired someone to craft this clearly personal apology letter. Even more so, it matters to you so greatly because you feel it’s very important that people stay mad at “Bean dad”, as if nothing else in the world is going on.
lol What exactly have I “invested” in this theory? I made a comment, then you responded, and we have been carrying on a conversation. I have invested about 5 minutes total. Presumably about the same that you have invested.What specifically about my commentary indicates that I care whether other people are mad at Bean dad? What about my commentary indicates that I’m mad at Bean dad? And what about my commentary indicates that “nothing else in the world is going on”?
This in your commentary:“If only he had done that right away instead of being a dick about it when people told him he was being a dick.”Also, there’s the fact that you keep coming back when all the other commentators moved on a long time ago.I genuinely think there’s something to be gained by having a discussion of how people can be redeemed after they’ve made mistakes. Considering we all live online and we all (by being human) make mistakes, I think a society that has some sort of standard for redemption is a healthy one. Which is why I’m invested in this conversation and keep commenting.You, on the other hand, claim not to be invested, and yet you keep coming back. So either you’re invested, or you’re lonely.
Oh I know what I said. What I don’t know is how what I said indicates that I “feel it’s very important that people stay mad” at him. I think he’s a bit of a dick. That doesn’t mean I give a shit how other people feel about him. Nor does it mean that I’m mad at him. There’s no one in the world that you think is a bit of a dick? Does that mean you are wasting emotional energy being mad at them? If so, that sucks.As for the fact that I “keep coming back,” what does that even mean? I’m coming back because you keep replying, so don’t you also “keep coming back”? Maybe “all the other commentators moved on a long time ago” but you sure haven’t. If it says something about me what does it say about you? Are you also invested and lonely because you haven’t moved on from this conversation?I have no problem with people being redeemed after making mistakes. That doesn’t mean that I have to immediately assume that every public figure who apologizes has made that apology sincerely, from the heart, and without assistance following backlash to preserve their reputation. All I said was it’s strange that you won’t even acknowledge the possibility that this guy had help with this apology, and it is strange. I acknowledged the possibility that he didn’t, but you won’t even say “it’s possible he did.” Instead you’re trying to convince me that he definitely didn’t, when you have no more evidence than I have.That’s weird, and it’s also weird that you have accused me of being “invested” and “lonely” because I am in a conversation with you. Does that honestly make sense to you? Instead of just saying “yes it’s possible he had help but I the apology reads as sincere to me so I’m going to believe he didn’t,” you have to try to make me look silly and sad because that’s easier for you than simply admitting the possibility that you’re wrong. So when I respond to you you tell yourself and me that I’m lonely, but if I didn’t respond to you you’d tell yourself “gosh I really got her, she can’t even respond.” That’s…well. That’s kind of sad.
Actually, I already said I’m invested and explained why. Also, I started this thread, so that’s why I keep coming back. The question is why someone “not invested” would do the same. The issue for me isn’t whether he had help writing the apology (it’s immaterial and unlikely), it’s whether it’s sincere (we’ll never know) and whether it adequately addresses what people are upset about (I’d say it does).Every one talks about shitty apologies (of which there are many examples), so I just find it interesting that when someone gives a good one, the default for some is to say, “Well, he’s still a dick and I think it was written by someone else.” The first point is an opinion about a guy you presumably didn’t have an opinion on a week ago, yet you’re now steadfast in that opinion because of a couple tweets. The second part is a fantasy you created to justify your opinion. It’s almost as if you’re invested in disliking internet strangers. Sort of a dickish personality trait.
That’s great! I’m glad you’re invested, “as if nothing else in the world is going on.” lol The reason someone who’s “not invested” would do the same is that that person is not generally in the habit of just walking out of conversations. If you’d like to end the conversation, why do you keep carrying it on? And why do you think it’s strange that I respond to people who talk to me, with or without an investment?Okay, you say the issue isn’t whether he had help, and yet among the first comments you made to me were ones telling me that he didn’t have help. If the conversation was about something else, you should have let me know that instead of telling me that your issue was with my claim that he had help. I do agree that it adequately addresses why people were upset (almost, there are one or two things I would have added). But I also think that its drafting was aided. You say it’s unlikely—I think that’s an unreasonable conclusion, but you’re allowed to reach conclusions that I think are unreasonable, and I’m not trying to convince you to agree with me.So, there were more than “a couple of tweets,” and it’s interesting how on more than one occasion you’ve chosen to downplay the behavior so that it fits the narrative you want to believe, because believing that narrative makes you feel superior to those who don’t believe that narrative. The fact is that neither of us knows whether this guy is a dick or whether this guy is sincere. The other fact is that you are “steadfast” in your conclusion without even allowing for the fact that you could be wrong. I may be “steadfast,” but I at least acknowledge that I can’t know whether I’m right or wrong, and my opinion of this man hasn’t altered my behavior or his life in any way whatsoever. You, on the other hand, think I’m a dick for forming an opinion on this person, and make the weird claim that I’m “invested in disliking” strangers, indicating that I’m a bad person for having formed an opinion of this one person (not people, not strangers, one single person) based on his behavior, and meanwhile you’ve insulted me personally more than once simply for disagreeing with you (I haven’t insulted you at all). You’ve called me “lonely” for engaging in a conversation. I could have, but didn’t, reply that it’s unfortunate that you are accustomed to people only speaking to you when you are the absolute last resort and they have no one else to talk to. I could have, but didn’t, say it was a completely asshole thing to do to use “lonely” as an insult during a pandemic when people are cut off from their normal social outlets and are unable to visit friends and family and a lot of people are, indeed, truly suffering from loneliness, but you use it as a lazy gibe when you feel defensive. I could say that that’s a “dickish personality trait.” I could have, but didn’t, say that you seem invested in disliking strangers on the internet because they have a different opinion on a celebrity than you have. So I guess we’re both dicks. I, for having a vaguely unfavorable opinion of a celebrity I’ve never heard of before and will never think about again, and you, for being outright mean to a person you’re actually talking to.But to put your mind at ease, I can assure you that I don’t dislike most people, I don’t have opinions at all on most strangers or celebrities, and between my kids and my man, I cherish and value my quiet alone time, of which I don’t get enough.
I think your claim of not being invested (for whatever reason) is undercut because you keep responding when everyone else has moved on, and because each one of your responses keeps getting longer and longer, while saying less and less.
For the record, here’s how the convo started (by me):
“The full apology note is worth reading, as it is exactly the kind of apology we always say we want: one that acknowledges fault, explains the thinking behind the action while admitting it was flawed thinking, and commits to being better going forward.”
Your response, apropos of nothing (and using such mean language):
“If only he had done that right away instead of being a dick about it when people told him he was being a dick.”
(You’ll note I was making an attempt to have a reasoned discussion and your reaction was to dismiss my point with potty language.)
Me:
“Yes, 48 hours sure is a long time.”
You:
“I didn’t say it was a long time. But yes, 48 hours is long enough to consult with a publicist and crisis manager.”
Me:
“Dude’s a podcaster and the lead singer of a moderately successful indie band that hasn’t released a new album in over a decade. My guess, he doesn’t have a publicist or crisis manager on retainer.”
So, no, I didn’t unequivocally claim he didn’t have help, I said it was my guess that he didn’t. You were the one who asserted, without evidence, that he hired outside help. A strangely unnecessary (and frequently condescending) assertion, since that had nothing to do with my original comment. And more importantly, it’s a claim that seems to serve no other purpose than to invalidate an apology – by all appearances, made in good faith – so you can hold on to your moral superiority.
I’m sorry I was “mean” to you by rightly pointing out you were displaying dickish behavior. Certainly, you would never use such language about a stranger. The lecture about “Covid-related loneliness” was a nice touch, though. Truly a masterclass in heightening a benign comment into something nefarious. It really puts into focus the phoniness of your concern with “Bean Dad.”
So, that’s a definition of “invested” that I hadn’t heard before, but if we are going by the definition of invested being someone who carries on a conversation that their interlocuter is also carrying on, then okay yes, I am invested! I’m glad we have found a point of agreement! As for my posts getting longer and longer, I trust you have noticed that your posts are also getting longer and longer, so I trust you also understand that if you say more, then you have given me more to respond to, which is why my posts must likewise become longer and longer. As for saying “less and less” there is again another one of your famous personal attacks when you feel defensive and lacking a reasoned response.So, not to be mean, but do you know what “apropos” means? Because it is not used correctly there. Also, “potty language.” lol That’s cute. If you’re offended by the word “dick,” I’m gonna suggest you stick to websites like disneynow.com.You really didn’t need to go back and quote the conversation. I was there. And yes, you have unequivocally claimed that he didn’t have help. Because when I claimed that he did, you went on several times to try to argue to me that he didn’t, when all the while I said repeatedly that I understand that he might not have, but that I think he did. Instead of you just saying “I understand that he might have, but I think he didn’t.” That would have ended the conversation.But I get it. Again, you have to make yourself feel superior and can’t admit the possibility that your “guess” might be wrong. And for the record? It is a lie to say that your guess was that he didn’t hire a publicist. Your guess was that he didn’t have one on retainer, and no one ever said he had one on retainer.And it’s also a lie that you’re sorry for making unwarranted personal attacks against someone who did not make personal attacks against you. And since we’ve reached the point of the conversation where you are not only being unnecessarily mean but just outright lying, we’ve also reached the point where I wholeheartedly understand why no one talks to you unless they’re lonely and you’re a last resort. It’s because you’re a dick, and frankly, given your weirdly strident defense of Bean Dad, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re him.So, with that, I’m going to go ahead and cash in my “investment” and end this conversation. You may have the last word, which I know is why you’ve really been so invested in this back-and forth. I won’t be reading it. You win.
My posts have gotten longer because I have been quoting previous parts of the conversation. In terms of new text, I’ve been fairly brief. You must live a very sheltered life if “saying less and less” is a personal attack. I am merely pointing out that while your responses are getting longer, the substance is not getting any more substantial.
As regards “apropos”: Phrase. apropos of nothing. Without reference to anything. Without any apparent reason or purpose. So, no, I stand by my use of it. Stay in your lane.I’m not offended by the word dick. You’re the one who was upset with me for being, quote, “mean.” Do enjoy disneynow.com.
I actually did need to quote the conversation because you clearly misremember it. I have said I find it highly unlikely that he had help. Your assertion that he is a “dick” whose apology doesn’t mean anything is predicated on your assertion that he hired someone to help him write it.
“Because when I claimed that he did, you went on several times to try to argue to me that he didn’t, when all the while I said repeatedly that I understand that he might not have, but that I think he did.
I never argued that he didn’t, I said he probably didn’t have a crisis team on hand and then said this: “Nothing about the apology letter comes across as particularly workshopped or contrived. There is literally no evidence it was the product of a crisis manager.” That is factually accurate, as you don’t have any evidence for your assertion. It’s just a feeling you have.
Instead of you just saying “I understand that he might have, but I think he didn’t.” That would have ended the conversation.”
You do realize you, too, could have just said, “I understand that he might not have, but I think he did” and that would have ended the conversation too? The difference is, as I have said multiple times, I have an investment in this topic. I’m fascinated by what makes a person, such as yourself, determine when an apology is and isn’t sincere. You, on the other hand, claim to not care.
“I wholeheartedly understand why no one talks to you unless they’re lonely and you’re a last resort. It’s because you’re a dick, and frankly, given your weirdly strident defense of Bean Dad, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re him.”Yes, you are clearly above personal attacks. But yes, I’m Bean Dad. You got me. (Actually, I’m a very easily researched person. Feel free to look me up.)
It’s the kind of apology you make when your assholery that you’ve been indulging in for years suddenly starts to affect your income.
What kind of apology could he make that would be acceptable to you?
I had only heard something vague about “Bean Dad” before this, and had no idea what it was. Now that I know, I’m not glad that I know.
Did he think the internet was going after him for his Tweets? We were all just doing a bit. It was a parody of people upset about a parody of being a bigot and bad father.
Roderick tweeted a long thread
about trying to teach his 9-year old daughter the importance of can
opener engineering by making her learn how to unseal a can of beans over
a six hour period.
He explicitly said in the original thread that she wasn’t allowed to eat anything until she figured out, on her own, how to work a can opener. The pistachios are a new element.“I’m not a horrible father who bullied my nine-year-old daughter; I was just pretending I was” is a pretty shitty defense, in an era full of them.(This fits in well with the “I can’t be a racist, because I’m making racist jokes” defense, of course.)
From the apology:What I didn’t understand when posting that story, was that a lot of the language I used reminded people very viscerally of abuse they’d experienced at the hand of a parent. This is something I simply do not truck with; I’ve seen a few people defending Roderick with this claim as well. It’s kinda bullshit to shunt any culpability off on the idea that “anyone who took issue with my words/actions is clearly reacting to mismanaged lingering trauma; my brilliant joke didn’t land because you’re broken.” You can fuck right off with that; the joke just sucked.
Yeah, this idea he’s pushing that the reason people had an issue with his story was that it reminded them of their own shitty childhoods doesn’t quite make sense with his other defense of “This is a highly exaggerated version of events that I deliberately told in a way that makes me look like an asshole of a parent.”Like, if you decide it would be a fun joke to tell a story about you being a shitty father, then obviously anyone who mistakenly thinks you’re sincere is gonna assume you’re just a shitty father. It doesn’t mean they’re all projecting their own residual childhood trauma.
If I ever have kids, I will not let them use a phone until they reinvent the entire technology behind it out of thin air. That’s just good parenting.
I mean obviously you shouldn’t be putting shitty thoughts online anyway , but the other main takeaway from all these ‘people confronted by terrible tweets they made in the past’ is simply dont have an identifiable online presence in the first place .
This is the first knee-jerk, twitter mob overreaction that’s really gotten to me since I feel like I know John Roderick’s views pretty well from listening to him speak for hundreds of hours. At the very least, better than the twitter mob that have been posting ridiculously misinformed bullshit. Anyone that’s listened to his podcasts knew exactly the context of those tweets, although they were absolutely inappropriate and horrible, and he shouldn’t have posted them. This is exactly the same situation as James Gunn’s bullshit edge lord tweets. I think his apology is heart felt and appropriate.Ken Jennings, Michael Ian Black and now John Hodgman have spoken in his defense.
I don’t know him, but every outraged reactions sound like someone who just saw a Tim Heidecker or Andy Kaufman bit and took it at face value with no further research. The racist tweets seem like responses that are mocking the part the original poster didn’t say out loud.
This exactly. For example, if you want to hear some of his actual views on Jews, you could, say, listen to him talking for over an hour about it here: https://www.omnibusproject.com/196
I don’t give a fuck what this white douchebag’s views on Jews are; I don’t want to hear them regardless.
Don’t ruin Twitter mob’s fun.
I took a social media hiatus over the holidays, so coming back to everyone talking about Bean Dad really belies just how much the internet rots peoples brains.
“[R]eally belies just how much the internet rots peoples brains.”https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/belieAre you saying Bean Dad gives a false impression of how the internet rots people’s brains?
Once again, the moral of the story is don’t use Twitter, or if you absolutely have to, make sure to take time every month or so to delete everything you’ve ever posted prior to maybe your last few days’ worth of posts, and for the love of god don’t attempt to use irony or sarcasm because it will be misinterpreted.
I had just listened to MBMBaM today at work and wondered why the song changed. Figured it was just some dumb gimmick for the new year but of course it was something much dumber.
John Roderick sucks, the Twitter mob sucks, the AV Club sucks. Don’t be a dick to your kid, don’t pretend to be a dick to your kid if you can’t be more explicitly funny and good natured about it. Don’t dig up 8 year old ironic tweets and act like a hero. Delete your terrible 8 year old ironic jokes because that shit isn’t funny and we’ve all stopped doing that. Don’t be so fucking snarky because you aren’t Sean O’Neal and it isn’t a good look on you.
i prefer coffee_dad
It led to this glorious Milkshake Duck Matrix however:
“Meet Bean Dad, an abusive dad who denies his daughter beans! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you Bean Dad is racist.”
James Gunn was cancel cultured too, then forgiven by a big chunk of folx. I’d like to know how Roderick’s situation is different.
And I have no strong opinion either way on whether or not Roderick didn’t give beans to his kid for one day one time; not until I have a clear timeline of the day as well as knowledge on whether or not he conducted this practice with his child on a regular basis to their detriment.And while the phrase “cancel culture” is certainly abused by those on the Right who think Liberals are too “woke” and/or sensitive, I’ve seen on more than one occasion someone in social media getting torn asunder by kneejerk reactors, and there are certainly folx that have been rightfully cancelled. But if you don’t want to use the phrase “cancel culture”, then let me know what we call it when someone is prematurely judged and arbitrarily dismissed from society with no context of the incident, a thorough review of what lead to the incident, or the opportunity to explain themselves.
I am very concerned that comedy, even in the form of bad, or poorly executed parody or satire, may be unfairly under fire in Roderick’s situation. Are we getting too close to censorship?
Not saying that the internet doesn’t sometimes mistake self-deprecating humour for genuine belief (e.g. Justine Sacco), but, even if I squint, I can’t see how his claim is legit here. The “the right just say Jews” almost resembles a legitimate joke*, but that’s it.* in the vein of https://www.theonion.com/stereotypes-are-a-real-time-saver-1819583925
He also thanks everyone for all the attention and money.
I’d rather read what his daughter has to say about the matter.
Bean Dad is probably the lone beneficiary of the shit that went down in DC on Wednesday.