If Books Could Kill - The Worst Takes of 2023 [TEASER]

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

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Peter. Michael. What's your first nominee for the worst take of 2023? I think it's vulture putting us as the number four podcast of the year and not number one. So a few weeks ago, we put out a call on the Patreon for the worst takes of 2023, and we received a number of excellent nominations. There was one that just said, if books could kill defending Hillary Clinton. I know. That was funny. That was funny. I liked it a lot.

You know what? There was also one person who said something along the lines of like, this is just going to be a rundown of Mike's Twitter beefs, LOL, which like, first of all, how dare you, and secondly, that's correct. My only real criticism, and it's not anyone's fault, is that the recency bias is severe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All of them were from like the last three weeks. And I, I like knew that that was an issue, but myself, I had no memory of anything that happened more than a month ago.

Yeah, it's insane. I know. I don't know how we get out of this cycle, but we're just inundated with too much news. And I feel like as a society, we need to pick maybe like one every two weeks, one new story that we talk about for two weeks, and then we all move on. So as usual, I have over-prepared for this and Peter has under-prepared for this. I have three nominees and then an extremely obvious winner.

And then I have a bunch of honorable mentions and then I have like the worst, just like discourse. I also have some sort of primaries and some honorable mentions here. Okay. Yeah, I think we're probably on the same page. I am underplaying how much I read for this a little bit. Okay, yeah, I would like to.

I've fried my brain reading the worst takes for like three days straight. My first nomination is this was a year with a lot of talk about how marriage is good. I feel like this is already the memory hold, but there were all kinds of studies and books that came out this year that were like, well, the data is in, and marriage is really good for kids.

And one of my most worst takes is an Atlantic article by Melissa Kerney who wrote this book called The Two Parent Privilege, how Americans stopped getting married and started falling behind. And I am going to send you the opening paragraphs. Earlier this year, I was at a conference on fighting poverty, and a member of the audience asked a question that made the experts visibly uncomfortable. What about family structure, he asked? Single-parent families are more likely to be poor than two-parent ones. Does family structure play a role in poverty?

The scholar to whom the question was directed looked annoyed and struggled to formulate an answer. The panelist shifted in their seats. The moderator stepped in, quickly pointing out that poverty makes it harder for people to form stable marriages. She promptly called on someone else. I side. As an economist who studies inequality in families,

I have often found myself in the same position as the questioner. I have suggested in similar settings that we need to consider how marriage and household structure affect children's life outcomes only to be met with annoyance and evasion. You can't even talk about how two parents are good for kids anymore.

I'm not like 100% sure that I believe this happened. I know. Oh, oh, visibly uncomfortable. Like the moderators like stammering like, oh, oh, the parents of kids. They've revealed that conservatism is correct. This is like a, this is a thing that I think conservatives actually believe that like that liberal secretly know that conservatism is right. And so if you like ask them a prodding question, they will just literally shake and cry. The thing is I found this discourse

extremely obnoxious all year, both because like, it just comes up like on kind of three year cycles. It just like, well, we're doing it again. Like when I was looking up takes on this, there was like a wave of takes in like 2016 as well. And like we've, as we talked about in our success sequence episode, this thing of like, oh, you need to be married. This just keeps happening. People, it's literally the same people saying literally the exact

same thing all the time. Right. I don't want to go over too much of what we said in that episode, but it's like this entire thing seems to misunderstand correlation and causation, which the data itself cannot really untangle for you. It's very obviously true that like, kids raised with two parents are more likely to graduate from high school, they earn more in life, whatever, but like, that doesn't tell you whether like marriage itself is doing. It could be that when you're married,

you're more likely to be rich. It could also be that when you're rich, you're more likely to be married. Right. And as that when you're rich, you're more likely to be married. And as Kerni actually admits in a lot of her interviews, what she's really talking about is cohabitation. When you live together, you're better at raising kids, because obviously you're sharing resources, sharing childcare. Again, nobody really disagrees with this. It's easier to raise kids with two people than with one person, duh. But how many people are living together and raising kids is much more difficult to measure. So it's like the data is kind of garbage to begin with and it doesn't really tell us anything.

She's talking about evasion. What these pieces all actually evade is what is your prescription here exactly? Some conservatives will admit that what they want is like no no fault divorce. And, yeah, yeah. And, you know, basically social pressure to marry and marry young. But not a lot of people are willing to admit that. And so it's sort of a situation where what they're actually doing is just sort of like poop pooing other causes of poverty. Right. And being like, well, maybe, maybe the real problem is something that is sort of specific

to these individuals and is not solved by, you know, welfare payments. Exactly. And that's, it actually, the thing that I kept thinking was what me and Aubrey keep saying on maintenance phase about like fatness, that there's this entire debate of like, how bad is it for you to be fat, blah, blah, blah, and like the data is more complicated. We've done a million episodes about it, but we also kind of hate doing episodes about it because the answer to that question is kind of irrelevant,

right, because even if it's straightforwardly true that being fat is bad for you, people cannot stop being fat. People can't lose weight, right? And so telling a 300 pound person, hey, you'd be healthier if you lost weight, is not useful because chances are that person has tried losing weight a million times. And if they try losing weight again, they're gonna engage in a bunch of unhealthy behaviors

and two years later they're gonna be 350 pounds. And it's the same thing with marriage, right? That it's like, okay, we've proven that it's good for kids to get married, like to have their parents be married. Fine, whatever, even if that's true, it's not like there's some reservoir of like well-earning, well-educated, great dudes out there. And single moms are like,

oh no, I don't wanna partner. It's like, what are people supposed to do with that information? Mary in cells. You'll eventually get there if you ask enough concerning this what the solution. Or like the weird sex robot thing that they sometimes come back to.

Yeah, right. We need the Jordan Peterson milking video to be public policy, I don't know. That was also a contender for one of the worst takes. Yes, someone appears to have attached a machine to Jordan Peterson that is milking him for the worst imaginable takes. But then like, she also mentioned in this op-ed that only 1% of the federal budget for welfare, whatever, goes to promoting marriage. That sounds like too much of the welfare budget, frankly. Yeah, and the thing is, this is actually already a large component of our poverty alleviation strategy,

because in 1996 they made welfare be like block grants to states, states can decide how they spend it and a lot of states, especially conservative states, spend their welfare budgets on these fucking assenine, promoting marriage, like this is why marriage is good classes, which are one of the least effective poverty alleviation strategies. Well, what's a less effective

poverty alleviation strategy? Did you know that it's good to settle down? They're basically asking, they're using irrelevant data to promote more of something we're already doing and doesn't work. Yeah. And then another one, this is Reasonsy bias, but then there was a couple of weeks ago,

this sort of, this discourse has kind of been around, bouncing around all year, and then this has now culminated in this atrocious Washington Post editorial, which I'm sure you saw. This was my first one, because this is like popular demand. Yeah, yeah, yeah, walk us through it, Peter.

All right. So, yeah, the Washington Post editorial board, the headline is, if attitudes don't shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage. Threaten marriage. And I guess even though you read it as well, I will send you some of the choice quotes. I wonder if we highlighted the same paragraphs. So I have three yellow, yellow paragraphs. I only have two. Oh, yeah, this is the one where they're calling for a vibe shift. Okay.

Americans have increasingly sorted themselves according to ideological orientation. They are working, living, and socializing with people who think the same things that they do, particularly on college campuses. A culture of seeking sameness has set up young Americans for disappointment. They expect people to share their own convictions and commitments.

A cultural shift might be necessary, one that views politics as part of people's identities, but far from the most important part. Americans' ability to live together quite literally might depend on it. I love that they threw college students in here. Like this broad sociological phenomenon. Fuck these kids. They can't resist. Like, there's no like data or anything that like they mention

that links us directly to college campuses. In reality, there is some data about younger people drawing like harder lines about what political identities they're willing to date. But in my mind, the subtext here is like, no one wants to date Republicans anymore. Yeah, totally. Yeah, which is basically women because men are one wants to date Republicans anymore. Yeah, totally. Yeah, which is basically women because men are much more likely to be conservatives.

Yeah. Right. And I feel like this is unsettling in two ways. First, in the micro, it's essentially like, look, ladies, you should be open to dating people who believe that you should not have reproductive autonomy. Yeah. It's been your life with someone who just doesn't respect you at all. That is, and that's like the sort of solution being offered here implicitly. And then second, like in the macro, we have this broad problem of political polarization,

which has all of these complex systemic causes. And this is sort of like putting the moral responsibility for that issue onto individuals as this polarization would go away if we all just pretended to like each other. And reality, what's happening is as politics polarize around you, you are forced to make choices like this, no matter what you do. Like as your median conservative

gravitates towards being a QAnon guy, even a moderate woman on a college campus is now forced to make a choice that she didn't previously have to make, do I want to date a QAnon guy or not? Or do I wanna treat him as a fixer upper, which always works? Ladies, you can fix it.

Right, ladies. That should have been the headline. I also think that on a logistical note, it's very funny to me that they bring up college campuses because of course, college campuses are relatively ideologically coherent. Most people do subscribe to more left-wing beliefs. But that's the breakdown of this entire article.

Is that we are sorting along ideological lines, but a lot of that is geographical and institutional. If you're a conservative and you live in a conservative state, you can date conservatives because they're all around you. If you're a conservative, and you live in a conservative state, you can date conservatives because they're all around you. And if you're a liberal and you live in a liberal city, you can date other liberals because that's who's around you. Yeah. They're linking this to this kind of this thing

that threatens marriage. Like, is this the end of marriage as we know it? And as we discussed in our rules episode, people have been fretting about this since the literal 1700s. We're not going to stop like coupling up and like having babies anytime soon. And the fact that people have different ideological beliefs

has nothing to do with falling marriage rates. Marriage rates are falling because people are waiting longer to get married basically. And like the divorce rates are also falling because like people might actually be in happier marriages than they used to be in previous generations. This is not the sort of underlying crisis. It's not really a crisis.

They also, I don't know if you notice this, but they're talking about the ideology gap and like, when men are more likely to be liberal and men are more likely to be conservative, and they say the ideology gap is particularly pronounced among Gen Z white people, and they talk about white conservatives, whatever. But Gen Z is only 50% white. Right like white conservatives, whatever. But Gen Z is only

50% white. Right. And so like it's it's weird to sort of I don't know how like explicitly or like consciously they're doing this. But it's like white people kind of quote, quote, resorting to like marrying minorities because they have the same ideological beliefs as them is not bad. There's also, there's just something fundamentally weird about this, like, broad implication that you don't have to vote for Republicans, of course, right? This is a democracy, but you should be willing to spend the rest of your life with one. That's a, that's a sacrifice that we all need to think hard about for some reason. In the same paragraph that you sent me, they, they also say, they're talking about these like ideological divides and they say,

unfortunately Americans have not equipped themselves to discuss, debate, and reason across these divides. And like this is something that people just kind of say now. I don't actually think that there's any evidence that this is the case. A lot of people are fine with like their more conservative family members and even having like more conservative friends.

I think most people are adults and like if anything are like too reluctant to draw lines in the sand about this. Also one of my favorite things, because you know I read these like reactionary centrist substacks, like this whole kind of substack world. I find darkly fascinating. What's your substack budget?

Just for reading, substacks psychos. I do not pay for any. For the record, I do not pay for any. I'm imagining you writing off like $400 in like Barry White sub-stack subscription. My Jesse single budget and for every month. So need to the IRS. No, fuck no. But one thing that these people are obsessed with is how leftists will sometimes be like, it's not my job to educate you, right? So like, sometimes you're kind of debating with somebody and you're like, what's your evidence for that claim?

And they're like, it's not my job to educate you. But like, they often use this as evidence for like nobody wants to debate anymore. But I think the key distinction is that people don't want to debate on social media with some fucking just asking questions as whole. I think that it's totally legitimate to have like different standards for behavior, online, and in person, like in person, I do actually have friends that are like relatively conservative

and I'm perfectly happy to like walk people through data on like, oh, actually like the trans right stuff, like it's not really the case that kids are getting surgeries without assessment, like let's talk about it. I'm actually totally happy to do that online. I'm not, though, online, the fucking slightest hint of transphobia, you are fucking blocked. That's not like, oh, ideologically, like, my can't handle debate or whatever. It's like, that's not the experience that I want to have online. Right. When you're talking politics on social media, you're sort of constantly debating. And so everyone hits their wall, right? And it's like, yeah, I don't want to fucking talk to this.

Yeah, fuck off. With some person who's probably not acting in good faith and who it wouldn't matter if I change their mind anyway, right? Dude, I was, I think I already told you that's when we weren't recording, but I was in an Uber the other day, talking with the weather. And then he's like, oh, my my daughter like runs when it's sunny, or something, he mentioned daughter or something, something. And I was like, oh, how old's your daughter? He's like, oh, she's 35 now. Her mom's a narcissistic bitch.

Yeah. I was like, oh, zero to 60. And then he's like, ranting about like queer people and stuff. And it was just like, okay, I guess we're just like doing this. But I was nice. Good for you. Not being immediately clocked as gay.

I don't even know how that's possible, but. I was so proud. That was all I could think. Oh my god, do you think I'm straight? Oh, it's like slipping my hair around. I'm like the straightest. But anyway, I didn't like have a meltdown. Right, right, sorry I'm dying right. Sorry, I'm dying at this

guy. I'm dying at this guy who's like, see, see his little twink might, my cobs in his back seat. And it's like, I'm going to, first I'm going to tell this guy how about, about how my ex is a bitch. And then I'm going to rant about gays. Only a straight person would refer to a 41 year old five-six man as a twink. Very adorable. You Peter, thank you. I thought that twink was entirely about being short and skinny.

Speaking of which, this is my next nominee, which I don't think you would have clocked this. Okay. So, we're reaching back through time. This is from June. There is a New York Times op-ed by a person in Richard Morgan who I've never heard of before. And the op-ed is called,

as a gay man, I'll never be normal. And there's been this kind of wave this year of basically straight media plucking gay men out of obscurity to be like, wow, gay rights has really gone too far. Right.

The entire piece is pushing back against like over representation. So he actually like says this at one point. And he starts out by saying, you know, there's all this discourse about like the percentage of LGBT people is like growing. And it's now 7% of the population identifies this LGBT. And he's like, well, you know, it sounds like it's so big. Like it sounds like we're kind of everywhere, but actually, if you look into the numbers,

more than half are bisexuals. And if you take the bisexuals out, it's only 3%. I'm always controlling for bisexuals. Yeah, why would you remove the bisexuals though? They're in the fucking acronym. And like the danger that he's warning against, he has this absurd fucking thing about how like the ACLU has tweeted out,

like, trans people belong everywhere, which is like a nice little phrase. And then he fact checks it. He's like, actually, trans people are only 1% of the population. They'll never be everywhere. I don't think that's what they mean. That's not what they mean when they say trans people

belong everywhere. They don't mean 100% of the population. This is physically trans people could not be everywhere. It was. And keep that voice, Peter. That's good. Save it. I can only do like a super nerd from like the sentence

basically for the Brooklyn tough guy. That's it. It's just like, shut the fuck up. I love that he's not counting. You know how sometimes a weirdly racist people will be like, did you know that Obama's actually half white? You know, these guys are half straight, keep in mind. Like that's how they view bisexuality as just being half straight.

He says, the make-believe of overrepresentation is a kind of reverse closet. Instead of pushing queer Americans to pretend to be heterosexual, we ask the broader culture to costume as more queer than it is. I feel, I haven't talked about this on the podcast, but I feel like it's us straight in the closet now.

Ha ha ha ha ha. The whole piece, I was just like, just say you hate yourself. This is taking forever. It's exhausting. And this is the same year where we had David Sederis being like, they want to call me queer. And that's bad.

I'm gay. And like, David, no one fucking cares what you call yourself. Oh, right. Just a fucking word, just. And you know, fucking Andrew Sullivan has been banging this drum forever. He's like, he's like gatekeeping queerness. He's like, oh, these aren't like real queers.

But it's like, this is actually the future that liberals want, right? I think it's fucking great that more people are identifying as bisexual and like exploring that. And like, it's so demeaning to say that like that doesn't count. When like a lot of people, like I know people who are in sort of quote-unquote heterosexual relationships, like opposite sex marriages and they're monogamous, there's this weird move to be like, oh, well, they're not really bisexual. But why would you take that away from somebody?

That's actually fine for them to identify that way. Even if for the rest of their lives, they're monogamous with an opposite sex partner. Doesn't mean they're not bisexual anymore. I'm married to my wife, but it doesn't mean that I'm no longer in, like, quote unquote, interesting women. Like I'm not, I'm still straight.

They're just because I've committed to one person, doesn't mean, doesn'm no longer in, like quote unquote interested in women. Like I'm not, I'm still straight. They're just because I've committed to one person doesn't mean, doesn't like invalidate my sexuality in some way. And like the reason this feels like dog whistle transphobia to me is because there's this panic about like what if kids are identifying as trans? And then it turns out they're not trans. And like that's not a bad outcome.

That's actually fine. If more people are open to like maybe thinking they're bisexual and then they explore that and then a couple of years later, they're like, oh, it turns out I'm heterosexual. That's fine. That's like a future ally to me. I think a world where people are able to explore

their sexuality is better than one that we've had for most of human history where people just had to tamp this shit down and never really know that part of themselves. Like it's so weird to me to see actual gay people being like, aw, some of them aren't even bisexual. Who fucking cares, man? The greatest argument for LGBT rights

has always just been who gives a shit. Yeah. This is not your problem. Just move on. Go have sex with straight presenting gay dudes or whatever you're doing. I have a blast. Do the Andrew Sullivan where you try to try your best to present straight and then have

an extremely dark online life. By which you mean his writing career? There's nothing else that you would be referring to here. Okay, but then Peter, the entire reason we're talking about this is so that we can read, this is not the worst take of the year, but this is the worst paragraph of the year. So I'm going to send this to you. Do it in a gay voice, Peter, do it. No problem.

Do it. I know you have one in your back pocket. I don't even know what you mean. I still don't fit in. And not just in the straight world. I don't watch... Exhausting. Exhausting.

I don't watch RuPaul's Drag Race. I've never been to Fire Island. My skincare routine is soap. I wear old Navy and a raggedy bucket hat. Queer folks ask me if I'm a top, a bottom, or a verse, and I give the most unpopular answer. Why wouldn't I want to love my partner every way I can? Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

So verse. Yeah, thank you. The whole internet erupted when this fucking thing came out like verse, that's verse. That's verse, buddy. I'm sorry, but this is so fucking stupid. First of all, use moisturizer. Every straight guy I know for the past decade has been rocking at the very least a basic Moisturization routine. It is very funny to be when gay people do this straight

fitting-in shit and then straight people are like, you're overdoing it. You can wear skinny jeans, man. It's fine. No, we're moisturizing. Every street guy has one bravo show. We're well-pastors. This is just like, I'm culture-less and nobody likes me. And I'm completely unwilling, like, as a matter of principle, to engage in anything that I associate with modern gay culture. Yeah, I hate myself so much. I've invented a bizarre fourth category that doesn't fall under top, bottom, or verse. Yeah. I'm tired of you asking me whether I'm left or right handed, but wouldn't I want to hold a tennis racket

anyway that I can? He's right that that is the most unpopular answer, because it's the worst way to answer the question. Yeah, exactly. Just tedious. Imagine hating yourself so much that you wear a bucket hats, and that was just like an adult gay man. Yeah.

Yeah. I also, I really do blame the Straits for this whole thing more than I blame this individual person. Because what he's expressing here is a very typical stage of coming out of the closet. I think that for gay people, if you're growing up gay, there's certain kinds of representation that you see. And when you go to gay nightclubs, you're seeing a certain kind of gay person. And like it can make you a little bit uncomfortable because you're like,

I don't look like these people. I don't really feel like I fit in with these people. But there's this stage where you're like, I don't want to put a label on it. I'm not, I'm not like those other gays. I'm into sports. Like I don't watch, I don't watch RuPaul's Drag Race. And honestly, like eventually you outgrow that.

It's like white people having a libertarian face. Right. You eventually realize that like, no one cares. There's no pressure to watch RuPaul's Drag Race. I don't watch RuPaul's Drag Race. No one fucking cares. It's not that interesting. Right.

What he thinks he's doing is challenging straight people's bigotry, right? He's doing this like, look, not all of us. Yeah. Are these like effeminate, prancing queens, right? That's what he thinks he's doing this like, look, not all of us are these like effeminate, prancing queens, right? That's what he thinks he's doing. What he's actually doing is reinforcing their bigotry.

He is giving them a license to when they see those prancing queens on the street or as a barista or whatever to go, hey, why can't you be like this other gay guy? Why can't you be like this guy in the New York Times? He's not so effeminate. I can't even really tell that he's gay. He's like wearing fucking flannel or whatever the fuck he's bragging about in this stupid op-ed. Yeah.

He is throwing other gay people under the bus in an effort to demonstrate his proximity to straightness. Maybe, I mean, you probably have stronger opinions about this than me, but there is, in my view, sort of like a, like a young gay monoculture to a degree. And now, that's not like unusual. Like there's a, yeah, there's like a young straight guy monoculture too.

It's just that we don't like wrestle with it as part of our identity because we're all quite comfortable sliding in and out of it. Oh, don't say sliding in and out after we just talked about top-autumn inverse beaters. What's the problem? What's the problem with loving whatever terminology? Yeah, I think, I mean, this is something that like, I don't think any straight person would ever describe what they're doing as like exploring my heterosexuality. But that is something people do.

Right. And you kind of figure out what kind of heterosexual you're going to be. And for gay people, this process is oftentimes delayed because you're in the fucking closet. Yeah. And then there's also this weird second coming out of the closet where you're like, I have to now be among gay people. And like that can be really traumatic because we all see these fucking movies where it's like, oh, we're just all going to be at night clubs all the time and having a great time.

And that's only like 20% of it. Yeah, exactly. And people just beat you in the street if you're like, I don't want RuPaul's Drag Race. There's the explosion of violence. Leave this brunch right now. Yeah. But that is a real, like, it's something

that oftentimes like the broader culture because that culture is filtered through straight people, culture doesn't prepare you for as a gay person. Right. And so we all figure out like what kind of gay person we're going to be. And that means like trying on different identities for a while. And for a lot of people trying on this like, oh, I'm not, I'm not like the other guys. It's like part of that identity formation. So it's like this person is arguing against exactly the thing that could make him happier, right? A future where they're, you know,

7% of the population identifies as LGBT and like, ooh, half of them are bisexual. Let's get that up. Let's get those numbers up, right? Because a world where there's more queer people is also a world where there's more types of queerness. And it's easier to explore the kind of queer person that you wanna be, right?

This was published in the fucking month that we had the target pride display meltdown and the buttlight meltdown. And it's like street editors are commissioning these fucking pieces and being like, well, it hasn't all gone a little too far. Like kids are all identifying as bisexual now. Let's get our worst-rest gay on the case.

Let's get our flakiest skinned gay to write a column about this. That was the most heterophobic thing you've said on the podcast in front of you. You're a self-hating street person. When I'm watching below deck, I have to be looking at pictures of hot chicks on my phone to balance it out. Okay, what is your next one, Peter?

My next nomination is not a single take as much as a series of takes by the same organization. I'm really the same person. And this is basically best summed up as the last month and a half of the ADL under the helm of Jonathan Greenblatt.