Ask A Genius 873: Where do we even start with this one?

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/31

[Recording Start] 

Rick Rosner: So, this is the original tweet, Jimmy’s reaction to Aaron Rodgers saying that he will be thrilled when Jimmy’s name shows up on the Epstein list, which it won’t. So, Jimmy tweets, “Dear Asshole: for the record, I’ve not met, flown with, visited, or had any contact whatsoever with Epstein, nor will you find my name on any “list” other than the clearly-phony nonsense that soft-brained wackos like yourself can’t seem to distinguish from reality. Your reckless words put my family in danger. Keep it up, and we will debate the facts further in court.” 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Wow!

Rosner: So, then this person, Erin Elizabeth Health Nut News, retweets Jimmy and says, “Sure, Jimmy Kimmel, I think you’re worse than Jeffrey Epstein. Signed a reporter who had to cover you for nearly a decade living in West Hollywood. I wouldn’t let any kids near you.” So, then I responded to her, “I know I shouldn’t use the word retarded, but it fits. Also, lying and libellous. You’re notorious for pedalling a metric ton of dangerous BS, including antisemitic BS, pure scammer. Here are some of your greatest hits,” and I link to her Wikipedia page and also to an article on the 12 biggest COVID misinformation peddlers from McGill University. Then she accused me of libel and said she’s going on the list of people she’ll be suing, and I don’t want to be sued. So, I said all right. I’m just going to take down my original tweet. It seems like the simplest thing to do. Then people argue about the veracity and source of some of the links, the couple of links I put up, and so her latest tweet puts up a screenshot of my original tweet and says, “As evidenced here in the post and the screenshot of the link from Wikipedia nonetheless he deleted the link, and I very much appreciate him stating that he would do so,” for which I gave her a fave. So, are we friends now? I don’t know. It’s weird.

Jacobsen: That’s weird, man. That’s a very Rosner story.

Rosner: Yeah, I shouldn’t wade into this shit. And then there’s a whole discussion on Tom Hanks, and Kimmel are pedophiles based on a bit that I worked on where Kimmel starring Tom Hanks, and it was a great bit. There used to be a show called Toddlers and Tiaras, which is about very young, from the word toddlers, contestants in child beauty pageants and how creepy it is that they’re covered with makeup and that they dance to sexy songs. You’ve got a 5-year-old dancing to a sexy song. At some point, I don’t know if this was before, after we did the bit, some insane parent gave their five-year-old fake boobs to augment their outfit, but the whole thing is super creepy and bizarre. 

We thought it would be fun to have Tom Hanks make fun, creepy pageant parents by being one. So, we did a bit where he’s insanely obsessed; they’ve got a room full of pageant trophies. These are scams that get hundreds and thousands of dollars out of parents who think their kids are going to be discovered on the basis of being in these pageants. So, part of the whole deal is if you win one of these things, you get a trophy that’s three or four feet tall, and they have all sorts of sub trophies for most congenial or who the fucking knows… but anyway, Tom Hanks has a kid who’s very much not into it and has a room full of these five-foot-tall trophies, and the whole thing is ridiculous. And then, people who are fucking idiots think that this is evidence of something. So then, two people are arguing about whether it’s promoting pedophilia by doing the bit and then an idiot – it’s mostly idiots on the other side, and then a guy defending the bit and defending me who just wrote “Hey Rick, it must be infuriating for guys like you to see discussions like this. I think the message is pretty clear in the bit. People with no critical thought see it and can’t link it to the absolute fuck-scape that his child pageants are a lost cause.” 

And so, like a hundred comments; that’s just the most recent ones. I’ve called a couple of people jag-offs, which is a great term. I’ve learned that every time I put “jag off,” somebody writes asking if I’m from Pittsburgh. Apparently, that’s a regional pronunciation of jerk off. Then I posted it, it drifted into anti-vaxx shit, and I stepped in and said that I’d been vaxxed eight times. I’m way smarter than you, and then somebody tweeted back, “When did you become afraid of your own shadow?”, referring to that you got to be a pussy to be afraid of Covid. Somebody named Hong Vinh, who’s Vietnamese, replied, “Expect, expect, expect, expect, expect, expect, expect,” which I don’t know what that meant since I don’t speak Vietnamese, but I gave them a fave anyway. I think they’re on my side; I don’t know.

Jacobsen: So, what’s the big takeaway from all of this so far?

Rosner: That I shouldn’t step in to fight for this shit. I mean, I should spend my time doing other stuff. Oh, here’s another one from a guy named Haywood Jablomy, whose Twitter handle is JohnnyJoeIdaho1, asking again about the vax, “When did you become afraid of your own shadow?” I know I waste too much time on this shit, and I also end up getting an angry letter from some lawyer. You were on Twitter for a while, and you don’t do it anymore.

Jacobsen: Very briefly and mainly, it is to republish content, whether interviews or articles, maybe some memes. I used to run a semi-podcast on human rights and violence against women for about an hour once a week for the Good Men Project. I wouldn’t mind rebooting that; that’s a fascinating topic, especially after going to Ukraine. It got me thinking about it more because every time there’s war, sexual violence and violence against women in general go up.

Rosner: Sure, I mean, like, Hamas has made no bones about using rape as a weapon.

Jacobsen: Yeah, so if you go to the major women’s rights documents, even to probably most substantial, the Beijing Declaration of 1995, which involved probably most countries or Member States of the United Nations at one time agreeing on a document for rights for women, they speak repeatedly in line after line, paragraph after paragraph of rape as a weapon of war. That’s almost a formalized phrase; it gets stated so much that it’s unfortunate, pervasive, universal, and worldwide. Whenever there is war, you can expect the rights of women to decline. In general, with the increase in violence against women, the status of society declines, and the quality of life declines because, typically, the most powerful metric for the development of a society is simply to look at the level or degree of empowerment of women. So, as a generic phrase, just look at the rights of women, the education for women, quality of life, health, abortion or reproductive rights, and so on. The more women are empowered, the healthier the society will be on pretty much every metric; the floor of the country will just go up.

So, if you want to improve your society, empower women. It’s a common thing actually in nonprofit donation work in the African States. This probably expands to other cultures as well, where if you donate money when you give it to the men, the men typically spend it on themselves, not obviously, but more of as a statistical phenomenon bell curve; men will invest in themselves. If you look at investing in women with that same money, I say seed funding; the women will invest it in themselves, their children, and their community. This, again, raises the floor of the community. So, there’s a different acculturation process. There’s probably a different, arguably innate sense of communal connection with women to other people, just given the verbal and social development of girls and young women being faster, in particular the verbal skills. They not only surpass the boys much earlier globally and across time, but they maintain that advantage on average throughout the lifespan. So, that never declines, and that obviously has a cascade of derivative effects into social life, into personal skills, and emotional skills unless the girl/young woman has an issue around being on the autism spectrum or having Aspergers or something like this; that impairs that as in sort of an outgrowth of development and structure of the brain being a problem.

So, rape is a weapon of war. It’s known, it’s formally spoken about at the international stage, and that’s very impactful in terms of what is spoken about and trying to prevent it. Yet, the practical elements of building a framework of protection are an issue of implementation. That’s the most important and most difficult part. One of my first interviews that was big was a Nobel Peace Prize nominee in 2013 or 2014; she’s dead now. She was from Somalia, and her name was Hawa Abdi. 

Rosner: She didn’t get killed, did she?

Jacobsen: No, I believe she died of natural causes. Her daughter is still alive, yet I mean, it’s a culture where you just have to work, and you just have to work harder because there’s not a lot of infrastructure. So, she provided sort of a safe community for women who were victims of war violence or what have you. She was an MD, so she’s had that mindset as well. Anytime I see an MD in a war context or in a context of protection for women’s wellbeing, typically, you’re dealing with humanitarian efforts oriented around medical expertise. That was an early indication to me over a decade ago or about a decade ago about this being an important issue. So, that’s been a longstanding trend in a lot of work that I’ve done more seriously. I mean, obviously, I have some elements where I’m jokey, and I talk about other things, but certainly, there are areas when it comes to wellbeing, human life, and things of that nature; that is an area of seriousness to me.

I’m certain you can find funny elements in them, yet those are typically not the areas where I find things fun. That has been a perennial issue that’s going to be a long-term issue with this current backlash against the progress that’s been made for women’s equality. We’ve seen it in Afghanistan and Iraq with women and girls being denied the opportunity to go to school and get an education, the denial of the protection of the law from domestic violence with the repeal of the domestic violence or domestic abuse law in the Russian Federation. We’ve seen the repealing of Roe. V Wade, in the United States, we’ve seen the rise of somewhat self-help speakers for young men and somewhat misogynistic talk on certain orientations in the rise of figures like Jordan Peterson. At the same time, we in Canada have people like Margaret who’s been a long standing…

Rosner: Yeah, she’s the fucking saint of freaking women because she wrote The Handmaids Tale, which is the definitive female dystopia. 

Jacobsen: She’s interesting. 

Rosner: She’s also funny.

Jacobsen: Yeah, super funny.

Rosner: Have you interviewed her?

Jacobsen: No, I would like to. She actually won Humanist of the Year from Humanist Canada.

Rosner: She’s probably a tough get.

Jacobsen: I mean, she’s in her 80s, I think, now. 

Rosner: So, this kind of goes along with the amplifying nature of lunatic positions and the rise of fascism via social media. 

Jacobsen: This is gender-based, I think. Most of the figures you’re seeing rise of Orban or Trump in the United States, Putin in Russia, and Duterte previously in the Philippines; these figures are all men. 

Rosner: Sure, but one of the legs of the stool that they stand on is propaganda, especially propaganda via social media that allows fucking misogynists from around the world to show their support for fascist fuckers around the world. It used to be that if you belonged to the John Birch Society in the 1950s, most of your support was going to come via very small meetings and via the US mail communicating with other lunatics, which is a slow and a one-on-one means of communication. It’s hard to build up a lot of demographic momentum that way, but now the same people who tweet in favour of Trump will tweet in favour of Orban and Putin. Tucker Carlson is celebrated by RT, Russian television. 

Jacobsen: The majority of the figures are men.

Rosner: Yeah, though, it’s always nice to have some females like Anita Bryant in the ’70s or Phyllis Schlafly in the South.

Jacobsen: What about Candace Owens?

Rosner: Yeah.

Jacobsen: I mean, these are modern figures. You certainly have individuals who misrepresent other people’s positions.

Rosner: Anita Bryant is not a right and correct example because she wasn’t anti-woman; she was anti-gay.

Jacobsen: A lot of the backlash, I think, is anti-women. I mean, it comes up in religious talk or their selection. This was pointed out to me. So, I used to do a lot of writing and collaborating with some of these prominent sort of new atheist types, and they spoke about fundamentalism. Massimo Pigliucci corrected me, saying that actually fundamentalism is a tricky term because it comes out of some book called The Fundamentals and that is incorrect in terms of representing these people and he’s written a history about the extension of that. Someone else pointed this out to me; it might have been off-tape or recorded. So, I don’t know if I can find it, but for whoever it was, thank you. The interpretation that these people have is not literalism, and it’s not fundamentalism; it’s selective literalism.

Rosner: Yeah, I mean, it’s the same way with our Supreme Court, where they call themselves originalists and literalists but only when it serves their purpose.

[Recording End]

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