Open a can and put it in pot

January 2, 2021 3:35 PM

Make some baked beans John Roderick shares the experience of watching his daughter figure out a can opener. (twitter thread linked above, full thread on Threadreader)
posted by jazon (591 comments total)

I would have just showed my daughter how to open a can of beans and not been such an a-hole.
posted by SPrintF at 3:57 PM on January 2, 2021 [156 favorites]

I sort of hope some of this is exaggerated because one of the most infuriating things when I was a kid when someone would tell me to "figure it out" when they could just be generous and teach me. And then I'd know! Why couldn't he just explain the mechanics of the can opener and then demonstrate it rather than make his daughter spend hours figuring this out on her own?

I think there are very few things we're just expected to figure out how to do on our own. We're meant to learn from each other! Yes, if we're in a place where we're alone and survival depends on experimentation until things go right, that's one thing. If it's just my dad not showing me how to open a can of beans to teach me a lesson, that's another.
posted by edencosmic at 3:59 PM on January 2, 2021 [63 favorites]

That was lovely.
posted by signal at 4:02 PM on January 2, 2021 [8 favorites]

This is all very good and fine, but I always wonder why the shark-fin can opener never succeeded outside Scandinavia. It's cheap (the link is to the posh, touristy site, you can get it for a dollar). It's easy to clean. It's easy to use, though you have to learn it from your parents, it's hard to guess how it works. It should be the universal can-opener, but somehow it isn't.
posted by mumimor at 4:05 PM on January 2, 2021 [9 favorites]

Urgh. I find it bordering on abusive. I'm a father, I've been known to refuse to answer questions or answer with a Socratic interrogation. But six hours and we both go hungry? Taking it way too far.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 4:05 PM on January 2, 2021 [80 favorites]

My mom, when I did the whole "I don't know how, you do it" thing would always say " I wasn't born knowing how to do things, why don't you try?". And I did, and now I'm the guy who usually can figure out how to open, close, turn on, etc., pretty much everything. It doesn't hurt that I always carry a leatherman as well.
posted by signal at 4:06 PM on January 2, 2021 [5 favorites]

Look I think the principle is great, but it's in conflict with other principles like not being a tyrant as a parent or feeding your child on a regular schedule. If she'd taken the challenge on herself, I would applaud.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 4:12 PM on January 2, 2021 [41 favorites]

"dad my appendix has burst how do I use this retractor"
"its a learning moment, sara jane the 14th"
posted by lalochezia at 4:12 PM on January 2, 2021 [35 favorites]

mumimor: It did succeed outside of Scandinavia, in the form of the P-38 can opener, though largely in a military context.
posted by SansPoint at 4:12 PM on January 2, 2021 [23 favorites]

Fuck this.

That hews very closely to the kind of lionizing story my dad would tell other people about the "lessons" he taught me. Abuse, full stop. The lesson she learned is never fucking trust anybody.
posted by Horkus at 4:13 PM on January 2, 2021 [104 favorites]

Thinking more about this, adults not helping me when I asked for help only taught me to not ask for help. Even when I really needed it. And yeah, emotional pain is different than not being able to open a can, sure, but it felt much the same -- that my problems were mine alone to solve and people were only going to reject me if I reached out. And that's not great. I still have trouble asking for help now because of things like this.
posted by edencosmic at 4:15 PM on January 2, 2021 [117 favorites]

yeah, you should be able to feed your child three meals a day, at the very least. You can't brag about not doing that, ever. But I really have opinions about can-openers.
posted by mumimor at 4:20 PM on January 2, 2021 [4 favorites]

I laughed, I cried.
posted by inexorably_forward at 4:25 PM on January 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is your periodic reminder that Socrates himself claimed not to know the answers to the questions he was asking. When people drag this out while knowing the answers - particularly in front of an audience, which this mercifully was not the case (right up until Dad decided to put it on Twitter, awesome choice great job) - it’s a lot more sadistic than it is socratic.
posted by mhoye at 4:25 PM on January 2, 2021 [32 favorites]

“Sweetheart, neither of us will eat another bite today until we get into this can of beans.”

Nope.
posted by obfuscation at 4:25 PM on January 2, 2021 [40 favorites]

I dunno. I really doubt John would have let his kid starve just to prove a point. Letting your kid learn on their own via something low stakes like opening a can of beans seems like a good way to, well, let them learn by doing.
posted by SansPoint at 4:30 PM on January 2, 2021 [11 favorites]

But in the half baked bean contempt-plating world of Metafilter, we might want to see her figure out a cannot opener, too.
posted by jamjam at 4:31 PM on January 2, 2021 [11 favorites]

He’s being a real dick to people who bring up these points to him. Jeez.

Yeah, I mean, I don't really know anything about this guy but how abrasive he was toward people who reasonably brought up that maybe this wasn't that cool tells me he knows he was maybe wrong here and also just sort of an ass.
posted by edencosmic at 4:32 PM on January 2, 2021 [20 favorites]

Perseverance is one of the most important life skills a person can learn. If everything is just handed to you when you ask, you might never learn it. You need that voice inside your head that keeps saying "I can do this, I can do this, I can figure this out." That confidence only comes with experience. And it's best to get that experience when the stakes are low.

She worked at it. Got frustrated. Stopped. Rested. Came back at it again and again. That's what real life is like. The next time she is stumped or frustrated hopefully she will remember her previous success and keep trying.
posted by JackFlash at 4:34 PM on January 2, 2021 [14 favorites]

r/IATcoA
posted by lalochezia at 4:36 PM on January 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

There are plenty of opportunities to teach perseverance that don't involve withholding food from a hungry child for 6 hours, and then bragging about it on the internet.
posted by He Is Only The Imposter at 4:37 PM on January 2, 2021 [130 favorites]

Can openers became weirdly non-intuitive as soon as they got more complicated than lever-types. The victorinox style is the pinnacle of can opener design and I will not hear otherwise.

Also apparently I'm very much in the minority in that I like this and wish my father did stuff like this
posted by ToddBurson at 4:42 PM on January 2, 2021 [7 favorites]

She worked at it. Got frustrated. Stopped. Rested. Came back at it again and again. That's what real life is like.

That's obviously nonsense. In real life if your boss insisted you figure out how to use your tools from first principles while denying you any access to training or documentation out of some fit of macho pique, you're already en-route to the emergency room and your whole workplace is some sort of OSHA superfund site.
posted by mhoye at 4:42 PM on January 2, 2021 [120 favorites]

I'm surprised the 9 year old didn't immediately look up how to do this on YouTube.
posted by airmail at 4:43 PM on January 2, 2021 [62 favorites]

My kid would have totally stabbed the top of it open with a knife 'round about minute 5.

Which probably doesn't say much for their perseverance or patience, but does demonstrate out-of-the-box problem solving.
posted by madajb at 4:43 PM on January 2, 2021 [18 favorites]

It must be nice to have such a trouble-free life that you have no qualms about putting your kid through additional and entirely unnecessary stress during a global pandemic the likes of which we haven’t seen in a century.
posted by bettafish at 4:44 PM on January 2, 2021 [66 favorites]

madajb: Ah, the Captain Kirk Kobyashi Maru solution. "It had the benefit of never being tried."
posted by SansPoint at 4:45 PM on January 2, 2021 [3 favorites]

Once upon a time Ivan worked in a mattress store. We sold two inexpensive twin mattresses. One was truly terrible: the kind of thing you'd expect to find in the Bates Motel. It was only marginally superior to the mattress one gets in a holding cell in your local jail. The other one was worlds better: it's on the daybed in my office, and gets used regularly. It cost $12.95 more than the terrible one. When people would choose the terrible one for their child and it was readily apparent that they had the cash to pay for the better model, I would often joke "remember: this person is going to be responsible for putting you in a home or inviting you to live out your golden years in their spare bedroom!" Many people just didn't get how this works, and bought the terrible mattress for their child.

Those people are going to live out their last years in the cheapest care home on the planet. And I'm willing to bet that this guy—if his daughter has anything to do with it—will be down the hall from the cheap mattress buyers. Seriously: fuck this asshole. He's just given a seminar on how not to handle the "teachable moment," IMO.
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 4:53 PM on January 2, 2021 [51 favorites]

As a person who was a girl child, this was upsetting and gave me those paternalistic, condescending, sexist vibes that absolutely infuriated me as a kid!! This is coming from a person whose parents absolutely overcorrected on instilling "grit" in me. Ah, parenting, a life-and-death task whereby we try to correct the sins of our parents and thereby mess our kids up in totally new and unexpected ways! :P
posted by Uncle Glendinning at 4:57 PM on January 2, 2021 [73 favorites]

My father never taught me how to tie my own shoelaces. "You stupid fuck, just figure it out," he said, as he popped open another beer. My sister was kind enough to show me the basics and so I was able to finally tie my own shoes. Hooray!

Yes, I understand that it's kind of stupid that we aren't born knowing how to tie shoe laces or wash ourselves or even open a goddamed can of beans to feed ourselves, but if parents don't do that, what good are they?
posted by SPrintF at 4:58 PM on January 2, 2021 [61 favorites]

"that defibrilator ain't gonna start itself!"
posted by lalochezia at 5:02 PM on January 2, 2021 [12 favorites]

Once upon a time Ivan worked in a mattress store. We sold two inexpensive twin mattresses. One was truly terrible: the kind of thing you'd expect to find in the Bates Motel.

I don't think that the problem most people had with the Bates Motel was the quality of the mattresses.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 5:03 PM on January 2, 2021 [37 favorites]

Folks are so eager to assume the worst! This guy seems like he loves his kid and spent 6 hours with her while she learned to use a can opener. Definitely a little crazy but also a far cry from some of the examples people are using as analogues up thread. I bet his daughter looks back on this fondly as time spent learning with her dad.

Although really, no one here can assume to know how the daughter feels about all this.
posted by TurnKey at 5:05 PM on January 2, 2021 [16 favorites]

I mean it’s not like he locked her in the basement with a can of beans and a Swing-a way. It’s not the way I’d do it and he’s definitely a bit smug about it but he’s there putting in the time, more than I can say for a lot of parents.
posted by Admiral Viceroy at 5:06 PM on January 2, 2021 [4 favorites]

My boss in the job I had in 2019 would often do exactly this to me. It was one of the things that lead others to tell me I was in a toxic workplace and I should get the fuck out.

Just thought I'd mention that.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:07 PM on January 2, 2021 [75 favorites]

If he really stopped her from until she figured it out, and she went hungry for six hours while he did his jigsaw puzzle, yeah, that's lousy parenting.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:12 PM on January 2, 2021 [27 favorites]

I would be willing to bet that "six hours" was actually "thirty minutes". This just seems fake in the Twitter "and then everyone applauded" kind of way.
posted by betweenthebars at 5:16 PM on January 2, 2021 [20 favorites]

> . Letting your kid learn on their own via something low stakes like opening a can of beans seems like a good way to, well, let them learn by doing.

I've done exactly this with my Girl Scouts: given them food that was canned, and a manual can opener, and then refused to show them how to use it until they'd made a good effort. But I didn't carry on for six hours. In the end my troop knows how to use a can opener, and so does his daughter, and I don't know that she knows it any better or really picked up more key concepts of engineering or sisu or whatever he's attempting, here.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:16 PM on January 2, 2021 [14 favorites]

Hyperbole?
posted by monotreme at 5:27 PM on January 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

this is like a rorschach test of which mefites had abusive parents
posted by wpgr at 5:34 PM on January 2, 2021 [157 favorites]

It's one thing to encourage your kids to figure things out, but there comes a point when the correct answer is to either show them, or take a break and pick the topic back up next day, and for most kids, that point is long before 6 hours. Adding a punishment for failure (you can't eat till you figure it out) seems like it would do the opposite of encourage curiosity.

He also indicates that it was specifically the clamping that she had difficulty with. Which makes me wonder if the issue here was as much lack of engineering knowledge as lack of adult hand size and hand strength. A lot of can openers need a good amount of physical strength, and trying one as a child, I'm not at all sure there would be an obvious difference between doing the wrong thing, and doing the right thing with insufficient strength.

And at some level, I'm just kind of WTF that no one had ever shown a 9 year old how to work a can-opener. Not that many cans are pull tops. But I realize I'm an old fart and that many kids these days don't just grow up watching anyone prepare even really basic meals often enough to learn such things by osmosis. (I honestly can't remember when I learned to use a can opener, but I know I understood the mechanism long before my hands were strong enough to not need to ask for help with turning the handle).
posted by Dorothea Ladislaw at 5:34 PM on January 2, 2021 [39 favorites]

This guy spent several hours engaging with his daughter in a problem-solving activity when he could have just opened the can himself and ignored her for the rest of the day. What a monster.
posted by slkinsey at 5:34 PM on January 2, 2021 [29 favorites]

I truly doubt it was 6 hours.

Hyperbole for the sake of the Twitter likes.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 5:43 PM on January 2, 2021 [7 favorites]

Like a 9 year old is so set on a can of beans to not eat for six hours instead of raiding the cereal or some can of something that has a pull top or literally any thing else in the kitchen.
posted by zengargoyle at 5:44 PM on January 2, 2021 [9 favorites]

> Hyperbole for the sake of the Twitter likes.

So say "So we made PB&Js while we took a break, then set back to work," or whatever.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:57 PM on January 2, 2021 [12 favorites]

What kind of monster buys beans that don’t have a ring pull lid like god and Mr. Heinz intended?
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 6:03 PM on January 2, 2021 [8 favorites]

I keep coming back to the glossed-over detail that there’s no other food in the house besides the beans, which he ironically mentions a tweet after referring to himself as an “apocalypse dad.” Not that there aren’t understandable reasons for that to happen, but I can’t help but think of all the flak and scrutiny faced by parents who aren’t white, middle class Maker Dads^TM — meanwhile this guy posts a story (exaggerated or otherwise) in which there’s nothing else in the house for his child to eat in total confidence that he’ll get more praise than condemnation.

BTW as someone whose parents were forced to leave their home countries because of political unrest and the threat of imprisonment/death/etc, the apocalypse lessons they taught me were more on the lines of “have a stockpile of food and other necessities in the case of infrastructure collapse, and cash/precious jewelry to hand in case you can’t get to a bank or have to run for your life with what you can carry.” The first part especially much more helpful in the past year than how to use a can opener! The survivalist/prepper mindset is so weird to me.
posted by bettafish at 6:10 PM on January 2, 2021 [76 favorites]

“My brain is fuzzy! I can’t think of anything else to try!!!” and I’d say, “When your brain doesn’t work, trust your hands.”

Sounds like Yoda.
posted by JackFlash at 6:12 PM on January 2, 2021

Wait, there's a way to open tin cans other than rubbing them on concrete?
posted by gwint at 6:22 PM on January 2, 2021 [17 favorites]

He could have taken the opportunity to teach his daughter how to operate a can opener. Instead, he took the opportunity to teach his daughter what an asshole is.

Can’t wait to see how teaching her to drive goes.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:37 PM on January 2, 2021 [80 favorites]

Has anyone here ever read fictionalized humor before? Wow
posted by GuyZero at 6:42 PM on January 2, 2021 [11 favorites]

Has anyone here ever read fictionalized humor before?

Yes. That's not what this was, though. You can tell because it's not funny.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:47 PM on January 2, 2021 [173 favorites]

And at some level, I'm just kind of WTF that no one had ever shown a 9 year old how to work a can-opener. Not that many cans are pull tops. But I realize I'm an old fart and that many kids these days don't just grow up watching anyone prepare even really basic meals often enough to learn such things by osmosis.

I surveyed the girls, all about the same age, and 2/3rds could describe how you use a can opener.
(I didn't make them prove it to eat, though!)

I'm middle-aged, make dinner almost every night, and I can't recall the last time I opened a can, pop-top or otherwise.
We must have a can opener because it's the kind of thing that you generally acquire going through life, but I'd have to hunt in the kitchen to find it.

It's entirely plausible to me that a 9 year old would be flummoxed.
posted by madajb at 7:03 PM on January 2, 2021 [11 favorites]

Long, but essential, quote from Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome:

We are very fond of pine-apple, all three of us. We looked at the picture on the tin; we thought of the juice. We smiled at one another, and Harris got a spoon ready.

Then we looked for the knife to open the tin with. We turned out everything in the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the boards at the bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank and shook it. There was no tin-opener to be found.

Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.

Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down.

It was George’s straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter’s evening, when the pipes are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.

Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.

After that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.

We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry—but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it.

There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:07 PM on January 2, 2021 [76 favorites]

This guy spent several hours engaging with his daughter in a problem-solving activity when he could have just opened the can himself and ignored her for the rest of the day. What a monster.

This is the point!

When my father was in John's position here, he would tell me exactly what to do, get very upset with me when I couldn't "get it", and was just impatient in every way, caring only about getting the task done.

We didn't spend much quality time together.

I'm sure John's an infuriating person to deal with, but there is a lot of love and non-judgement in the picture here. I would have killed to have a dad who would let me make so many mistakes and still not impatiently wrench the job away from me. But I'm guessing John's daughter won't have the same hangups as me...
posted by billjings at 7:25 PM on January 2, 2021 [9 favorites]

I'm glad other people also found it enraging, and it's not actually better if it it's exaggerated; it means he made up a story about how stupid and incompetent his daughter is for the internet to laugh at, including quite possibly her peers.
posted by tavella at 7:31 PM on January 2, 2021 [76 favorites]

I'm starting to realize that the way people respond to this story can be a window into their childhood, and it's troubling and I'm sorry to learn how many people had hard ones. (This is meant as an overall impression. Not talking about anyone specifically at all. I hardly ever even look at the names of commenters.)

Personally, that story reads to me as firmly within the "teach them how to fish" category, like any of thousands of teachable moments between a parent and child found from everyday life. It's not about a can opener or a can. The father expects his daughter to acquire a mechanical aptitude, for her own good, because life is better when you're less dependent on others. Heart warmed.
posted by hypnogogue at 7:32 PM on January 2, 2021 [16 favorites]

I feel like this is a “Why are men?” situation.

Although hey, maybe this parenting style jibes with his daughter’s personality. That’s maybe the thing to hope for here.
posted by uncleozzy at 7:36 PM on January 2, 2021 [14 favorites]

I'm a grown ass adult and sometimes I don't get the can opener to latch on right. This is obnoxious, even if it wasn't six hours. My grandfather was this type of person. The stories were great decades later, but his children were not served well by the experience.
posted by Mavri at 7:37 PM on January 2, 2021 [33 favorites]

My father taught me how to fish; he did this by demonstrating how to do things, not by handing me a tacklebox and an empty rod and telling me to figure it out or I wouldn't eat. Our ability to teach by deliberately demonstrating is in fact one of the most important skills in the primate lineage.
posted by tavella at 7:38 PM on January 2, 2021 [134 favorites]

"I realized I’d never taught her to use [ a can opener]."

Guess what, asshole? You still haven't.
posted by Frayed Knot at 7:39 PM on January 2, 2021 [81 favorites]

The best part of the story was when the daughter came back to the problem on her own, because she wanted to solve it. She wanted to. She didn't give up. Let's not take away her agency.
posted by hypnogogue at 7:39 PM on January 2, 2021 [9 favorites]

Our ability to teach by deliberately demonstrating is in fact one of the most important skills in the primate lineage.

This is so well-put, tavella. Thank you.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 7:43 PM on January 2, 2021 [8 favorites]

I had loving parents, but, through no fault of theirs, some crappy teachers and counselors. From them, I learned that if I had a question, it was either a dumb question or something I should try harder to figure out. And from that, I deduced that I wasn't good at whatever it was they were teaching -- usually math or sports. I was in college (and not my first year) before I felt comfortable asking questions.*

So, yeah, I don't think this is as great a story as he thinks it is. But it's not the end of her childhood. It just pushes some buttons.

* Then, in law school, I had to learn not to ask them again. Unless you know the prof's cool. Otherwise, you could get the dunce cap for the day.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:54 PM on January 2, 2021 [15 favorites]

The best part of the story was when the daughter came back to the problem on her own

The best part of the story for me was when she wanted to open all the other canned goods in the house afterwards.
posted by aubilenon at 7:54 PM on January 2, 2021 [19 favorites]

Perhaps I’m a monster. But I have a nine-year-old and the pandemic has been long. I’m considering seeing if she knows how to open a can.... An activity that could take all day and we could amuse ourselves and look deeply at an object? Talk about something new? Could be fun.

His tone is...not 1000% great maybe but, you know, it’s an anecdote not a lifestyle (necessarily). I feel like there’s room for both side-by-side teaching and coaching and sink-or-swim style learning moments. And, as the parent of a 9 1/2 year old (now 10) during a pandemic, there have been times (the half ages always seem to be “a phase”) where gentle coaching, “here, I’ll show you and you can try” was met with screeching and hysterics. Because that sometimes happens when you’re 9 1/2. Or 8 1/2, or so on.
posted by amanda at 8:01 PM on January 2, 2021 [10 favorites]

This story made me feel good in that it made me realize my father wasn’t the single most condescending prick on Earth after all.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:02 PM on January 2, 2021 [73 favorites]

I agree that this is a story we view through the various lenses ground by our childhoods. In my case my parents let me spend like 50 hours a week on the internet starting in third grade so I’ve been around long enough to realize that this is very obviously a case of some dork spinning the most interesting thing that happened to them all week into an exaggerated yarn for favs
posted by katiec at 8:03 PM on January 2, 2021 [31 favorites]

Sorry I stopped reading at "superfluous" does he finish the jigsaw puzzle or was he too busy patting himself on the back and ordering a dad of the year trophy that in two weeks he'll claim was a spontaneous gift from his daughter?
posted by muddgirl at 8:15 PM on January 2, 2021 [14 favorites]

Considering after all that she is trying to open every can in the house, it means this is their father-daughter dynamic; and it isn't abusive to the point of calling child care services, nor does it appear that the daughter is in any way psychologically abused.

And as with my friends and family with children and how they raised them, it isn't for me to pass judgement just because I wouldn't do it that way; the kid is fine, and it's their thing.

All I would pass judgement on is why bother tweeting about it, but that's the whole social media thing and a totally different topic.
posted by linux at 8:15 PM on January 2, 2021 [10 favorites]

mumimor/SansPoint: I believe the Shark Fin (P-38) can opener is also popular in Japan. I bought some P-38 US military style ones but when I tried them they were terrible. Could only open about one can before they'd bend themselves into unusability. I went searching for a heftier version and found this Japanese model:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001TV6A7G/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

They are huge but tear through cans, the size lets me get tons more leverage too.
posted by kvanh at 8:26 PM on January 2, 2021 [3 favorites]

I saw the description and wondered if it was, yes, that John Roderick. I know some people who know him well (I don't know him at all) but the only impression i've ever gotten is that he's a giant prick. I like his music, but i have heard so many stories over the years that i don't listen to it any more, the way i don't watch woody allen, or read golden age sci-fi dudes. I came to read the thread here before clicking the link, and I'm so unsurprised by the comments that I don't even have to go there, so thanks fellow mefites for saving me the trouble.
posted by OHenryPacey at 8:28 PM on January 2, 2021 [48 favorites]

It would not have worked well with child me, and I would possibly take it as a signal that I needed to start hoarding food in my room in case good 'ol Dad decided to deny me a meal again to prove a point.

I of course hope his daughter is happy and good and this is exactly the type of parenting she needs. My parents were never abusive in this way, so it wasn't directly triggering. But it wasn't hard for me to imagine this going very badly.

I tried to remember learning to use a can opener, and I'm pretty sure the first one I ever used was electric, and since there was only one way to put the can to it, helped me understand the whole blade cuts/turning gears mechanism in action. So when I used a manual one, it wasn't hard to figure out. My sister most likely was the person to show me how to use it; she also taught me to tie my shoes and ride a bike. Neither were easy and I was often in tears but she didn't just leave me and tell me tough shit, she sat with me and walked me through it.
posted by emjaybee at 8:29 PM on January 2, 2021 [15 favorites]

She set up again, carefully, and brought the Swing-a-Way to bear on the can of S&W baked beans with the meticulousness of Roger Moore extracting a detonator from an ICBM in The Spy Who Loved Me.

oooooookay, Ready Player Dad
posted by phooky at 8:41 PM on January 2, 2021 [69 favorites]

I only know John Roderick through his podcasts, of which I listen to three. It’s obviously one of those one-way parasocial relationships where I don’t really know him in any real way but I’ve never doubted how much he loves his kid. I’m also sure he can be a jerk. But I didn’t see that in evidence here. I would have grumbled and been frustrated and mad and the moment I figured it out I would have felt so damn proud of myself.

I’m somebody who wishes desperately that I had been taught to learn how to do things, and how to stick to things even when they were difficult, and how to trust myself that I’d find a way through a problem. Sometimes I make it there anyway and that feeling of holding the keys to the kingdom is so incredible.
posted by PussKillian at 8:43 PM on January 2, 2021 [17 favorites]

anybody: "here's a short quirky story about parenting"

Some of y'all: "We *must* decide this parent's entire worth of character based on this anecdote and its clearly awesome/reprehensible!"
posted by midmarch snowman at 8:43 PM on January 2, 2021 [21 favorites]

Guess rooms on the next JoCoCruise are going to be easier to get.
posted by sideshow at 8:48 PM on January 2, 2021 [8 favorites]

Six hours and he never mentions how sharp the cut lid is.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 8:48 PM on January 2, 2021 [17 favorites]

I mean, if "nobody eats for 6 hours" is to be taken as hyperbole and not something-that-happened, I'm not sure why "and she wants to open every can in the house!", a very clear punchline, gets off so light.

I'm inclined to take the whole thing as largely fictional, but as above, even there it's not "haha, what a charming anecdote" and more "what does this Woody Allen-esque figure see in himself that this sounds like an amusing thing and not something grating at best?"

On the other hand, by the "would I be entertained by this at a party?" scale of anecdotes, this *is* one I'd enjoy asking follow-ups about.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:12 PM on January 2, 2021 [8 favorites]

This is a story that he's offered to represent him as a parent. Maybe it's not how he is a parent in total, but he thought it was representative enough for him to share it with everyone.

Yes, I have my own personal issues with this. I'm also sure my dad thought he was a good father (and I think he was as good as he could be). But I do think those of us where this is way too close to our experience should be discounted, either. For everyone who learned to do something on their own, there are some of us who just felt abandoned. Our childhood didn't feel like something summarized in a self-congratulatory Twitter thread.

As I said, I hope this is mostly exaggerated/fake. But it's fair that some of us don't find this to be a cute Twitter thread.
posted by edencosmic at 9:18 PM on January 2, 2021 [15 favorites]

What's interesting to me is how so many people on social media are simply determined to judge this innocuous and somewhat silly and/or exaggerated tale in the absolute harshest light. I don't know John. I don't know his kid. Reading much into their relationship or his parenting skills based on this story seems absurd.

Anyway, is there some weirdly misplaced "speak truth to power" thing going on — or is it some side-effect of the politicization of social media interactions where everyone has to be assessed as either "good" or "evil," "our team" or "their team?" There's a kind of harshness on social media in the past years that I don't think really existed so strongly before, at least as such a central part of the experience.
posted by chasing at 9:19 PM on January 2, 2021 [15 favorites]

I don't think my parents ever did anything like this to me. On the other hand, they did drag me and my brother out to backwoods Arkansas in the early '80's and build a log cabin that we lived in with no electricity, no running water, and no phone service for a few years. Learned a lot from that, and wouldn't exchange the experience for anything, and it lasted quite a bit longer than 6 hours.
Edit: a pic of the cabin in question. Not a kit, my mom and dad chopped the trees down with axes and chainsaws.
posted by smcameron at 9:20 PM on January 2, 2021 [12 favorites]

this innocuous and somewhat silly and/or exaggerated tale

Again, either it is a true tale and he decided his kid wouldn't eat for six hours so he could be a smug jerk and not demonstrate how to use a tool, or he decided to make up a story about how his child was so slow and mechanically inept they couldn't figure out how to use a can opener for six hours, with plenty of snide little digs about it, and tell it to the entire world.

Either way he's an absolute asshole.
posted by tavella at 9:22 PM on January 2, 2021 [81 favorites]

> Either way he's an absolute asshole.

Yeah, this is exactly the kind of reaction I'm talking about. Just kind of shockingly harsh and judgmental.

What's going on, here?
posted by chasing at 9:27 PM on January 2, 2021 [13 favorites]

If someone doesn't want me to be judgmental, then they shouldn't put out stories about making their children go hungry to "teach them a lesson."
posted by tavella at 9:30 PM on January 2, 2021 [65 favorites]

> If someone doesn't want me to be judgmental, then they shouldn't put out stories about making their children go hungry to "teach them a lesson."

Nobody went hungry and the "lesson" was one about problem-solving. For heaven's sake.
posted by chasing at 9:37 PM on January 2, 2021 [11 favorites]

Update. The child has apparently survived this horror.
posted by chasing at 9:37 PM on January 2, 2021 [4 favorites]

What's going on, here?
Metafilter: the emotional labor of opening a can of beans
posted by bartleby at 9:37 PM on January 2, 2021 [22 favorites]

This reminds me of how peeved I get at educators who fetishize the Socratic method, and brag "oh I don't tell them X, I want them to find it for themselves." My expectation is that a certain percentage of the class doesn't ever really learn the principle at all, and they spend a lot of time floundering around when there is a perfectly qualified professional at the front of the room whose job is to teach. Just telling people things that they want to know can be an act of kindness and generosity.

That was the adult's job here - sure, getting her to engage with the tool and try different things was nice, but there is a very obvious point where he should have cut the gordian knot and shown her how it's tricky but you can get the blade to cut into the lid. That's his role as parent and caregiver, to actually show her some stuff.

Also, thinking back on my own experience it strikes me that it really did take me quite a while to be able to reliably open cans, until adulthood really, because of the exact challenge he describes. That's because I was always alone when I tried to open things, for some reason. And yet, I'll take being a feral child over this "daddy is a dickhead while he does his puzzle and then brags about it on twitter" thing, that doesn't really sound better.
posted by anhedonic at 9:51 PM on January 2, 2021 [33 favorites]

"oh I don't tell them X, I want them to find it for themselves."

That's unnecessarily bipolar. As you say, there's a middle ground. I do a lot of training (of adults, which is somewhat different) and my approach would be more of a "what do you think this part does? What part of the can do you think it's supposed to cut?" gently-guiding style. Not a complete "here let me show you" (right away), but also not "you're on your own".

But I'm also not a parent of kids, much less a parent of his kids. I don't know her learning style or how much she would love the discovery, or how able she is to play along in good fun, none of that. So I'm not about to judge.

As a humor bit, which is what I was expecting, it wasn't that funny though.
posted by ctmf at 10:06 PM on January 2, 2021 [3 favorites]

This guy managed to be a bad teacher, a bad parent and a bad internet poster all in the span of a few hours. Cool.
posted by Soi-hah at 10:07 PM on January 2, 2021 [22 favorites]

Isn't this just a "if you figure it out for yourself it'll mean more to you" kind of story? The whole thing struck me as an anecdote about developing the sense of independence that comes with the confidence of being able to work through a problem alone. He clearly tries to walk her through reverse engineering the problem by examining the different parts of the can opener and considering the purpose of each component. No one is in any danger and his daughter can develop this skill in a supportive environment where he'll walk her through all the steps to lead her to success but let the success be hers and not his.

Sure, there is a difference between instruction and open-ended exploration. This story is about the latter. I don't think it's a comparison of the two or a message about the superiority of one over the other.

I feel like this kind of anecdote would have worked better as a Reader's Digest piece from decades ago. Unfortunately, John chose to present it as a modern Twitter thread about parenting.
posted by Avelwood at 10:08 PM on January 2, 2021 [10 favorites]

"My kid is fine"

Is not actually something I would take at face value at this point. What, he would say anything else?

TIL I have massively different values about child-rearing from a substantial number of people.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:16 PM on January 2, 2021 [29 favorites]

That's unnecessarily bipolar. As you say, there's a middle ground. I do a lot of training (of adults, which is somewhat different) and my approach would be more of a "what do you think this part does? What part of the can do you think it's supposed to cut?" gently-guiding style. Not a complete "here let me show you" (right away), but also not "you're on your own".

Also, because you (presumably) train the same things over and over, you have a good sense of what's easy enough for anybody to figure out and you also know the things that aren't obvious, that they quite possibly won't get. That's what annoyed me, is that in torturing his daughter he isolated the exact thing that is actually tricky to master and seems quite pleased with himself for that, but he refused to just finish the lesson. He could have validated the progress she had made, shown her the tricky part, and let her eat some beans.
posted by anhedonic at 10:17 PM on January 2, 2021 [22 favorites]

That is a hell of a cabin, smcameron!

And I can hardly imagine how much stuff that I don't know but would like to that you must have learned participating in that construction and living there for a few years.

If you'll pardon my curiosity, I wouldn't mind knowing whether that foundation is made from the same kind of flat stone as the porch piers, or a more rounded river rock or fieldstone. I couldn't quite tell from the pictures.
posted by jamjam at 10:24 PM on January 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

Yeah, the "Ok, I'll do ONE thing... [clamp] Now you do the rest" strategy probably would have worked really well after the first 5-10 minutes of experimentation.
posted by ctmf at 10:25 PM on January 2, 2021 [12 favorites]

The dude’s a fuckwit. Straight up. I listen to his war movies podcast and it’s fine but I would never want to be in a room with him. This story was just bullshit and at the end of this hoorah he’ll say it was all a way to find out who overreacts to whatever he thinks he was doing. There’s no way it actually happened.
posted by awfurby at 10:57 PM on January 2, 2021 [19 favorites]

There was no tin-opener to be found

I lived this story in 1982. Outward Bound, out of Hurricane Island on longboats, 10 teenagers and two adult watch leaders in each 30-foot boat. "Group solo" in the third week, we pull up by a rocky little island and our watch leaders tell us we can take 5 items from the boat ashore for the night and they'll be back in the morning. We pick a tarp, bug spray, two flashlights, and a 100-ounce can of fruit cocktail – but no opener. Once we'd checked out the island and set up "camp" and gotten hungry, we realized we had no way to open the can.

(I had a folding marlinspike in my pocket in so we bashed holes in the top of the can until we could pour the fruit out.)
posted by nicwolff at 10:58 PM on January 2, 2021 [8 favorites]

jamjam, to answer your question... the piers for the porch and the foundation are made from a variety of rocks that we found around the place. Many are stones from the Middle Fork of the Red River which is very near (maybe 200 yards away horizontally, 100 yards vertically), and many are random field stones we found around the place. There are lots of rocks around, we just picked up the ones that looked useful. Many a day spent loading rocks into the pickup truck from wherever we found them, then unloading the rocks. /derail.
posted by smcameron at 11:16 PM on January 2, 2021 [4 favorites]

The guy is getting ratioed to hell on Twitter and acting indignant about it. I can't decide if he really didn't know it would happen or if this is a way to get clicks.
posted by emjaybee at 11:34 PM on January 2, 2021 [4 favorites]

The crucial points here are "nobody is eating until you open the can" and the claim it took six hours. Oh, and the tears.

Teaching kids independence and how to learn and not giving them everything on a literal plate and all that good shit is awesome! Making them cry and withholding food until they solve a puzzle is not.

Am I wrong for taking him at his word about how this played out?
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:48 PM on January 2, 2021 [45 favorites]

This is a really great reply thread from an early childhood educator.
posted by airmail at 11:49 PM on January 2, 2021 [76 favorites]

Late in the tweet thread:

I know I’m infuriating. I know this is parenting theater in some ways.

It is parenting theater in all ways.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:59 PM on January 2, 2021 [17 favorites]

@airmail that is a wonderfully generous take! Much more thoughtful than my initial response.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:00 AM on January 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

And I've been thinking about people upthread who think this is some kind of litmus test for whether you had abusive parents or not.

I don't believe I had abusive parents. Indeed, I would say being heedless of the issues here is in fact a warning sign for abuse. I would paraphrase the litmus test lines as "My parents hit me but it didn't do me any harm". This is completely at odds with my notions of how human beings should relate to each other. The fact one of the human beings is a child makes it so much worse. The lessons being taught here are awful.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:07 AM on January 3, 2021 [14 favorites]

Actually I realise I may have misinterpreted some of those comments, which may have come from the perspective of recognising abusive patterns all too well. If that was where you were coming from I apologise.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:16 AM on January 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

In the parlance of all-purpose New Yorker comic captions and a MetaFilter from years gone by that was a little rougher around the edges but not as forgiving of bullshit like this:

Christ, what an asshole!
posted by MCMikeNamara at 12:19 AM on January 3, 2021 [35 favorites]

I found it enraging because I had parents who in fact taught me things, not because they were abusive. If I had asked this question, they'd demonstrate! And they'd also tell me about the mechanics of it, how the handles gave you leverage to put more pressure on the piercing blade. I knew about things like the simple machines from a very young age from talks like that. And I never had to cry and go hungry because some fucker wouldn't demonstrate a can opener, and so I feel very sorry for any child stuck in that situation. Because I know what good parents are like.

Frankly, if the story isn't bullshit, it's somewhat disturbing that she had to come ask for food at all. Nine-year-olds are growing, they should have access to healthy snacks at all times unless there's some medical issue that counter-indicates, or financial difficulties (which I doubt apply here). Fruit, veggies, yogurt, cheese sticks, things like that. A house where a kid doesn't shrug at being blown off about a hot lunch and go make themselves a lunch of cheese, crackers and fruit or the like is not a great place.
posted by tavella at 12:23 AM on January 3, 2021 [36 favorites]

I don't think this is such a big deal, and Roderick's been a cock to me personally before.

-"Nine-year-olds are growing, they should have access to healthy snacks at all times"
Damn. I might have some thinking to do about my childhood.
posted by Sterros at 12:45 AM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

What's interesting to me is how so many people on social media are simply determined to judge this innocuous and somewhat silly and/or exaggerated tale in the absolute harshest light.

It’s interesting to me that anyone is simply determined to frame this story as silly and innocuous.

Isn't this just a "if you figure it out for yourself it'll mean more to you" kind of story? The whole thing struck me as an anecdote about developing the sense of independence that comes with the confidence of being able to work through a problem alone.


It starts off that way, but then he pushes it beyond reason to a ridiculous extreme.

He could have validated the progress she had made, shown her the tricky part, and let her eat some beans.

Exactly.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:51 AM on January 3, 2021 [28 favorites]

I wouldn't let this jerk own a dog.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 1:02 AM on January 3, 2021 [16 favorites]

“Open it how?”
“With a can opener!” I said, incredulous. She brought me the can opener ..."

How did she guess that thing was a can opener? This story seems a bit embellished.
posted by ctmf at 1:09 AM on January 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

A parent made a choice, probably not a great one. I don't think it needed to be blogged, or at least, not in such a self-congratulatory manner.
posted by signsofrain at 1:18 AM on January 3, 2021 [8 favorites]

I saw a thing just the other day about how growing kids need an adult amount of calories every day but have kid-sized stomachs and that’s why they’re constantly hungry - they can’t eat enough of their caloric needs during “regular” meals so snacking all the time is perfectly healthy.

Then I read this and think wow if he really dragged this on for six hours, that’s a lot of hunger and frustration for her, and the whole “that’s the time from lunch to dinner” rationalisation totally misses the point.

Even putting that aside, the notion that he was somehow teaching her to “not give up” and “self reliance”, and how strongly people are supporting that general idea here, shows to me how little progress we have made as a culture to actually look at the science of motivation and learning. As someone who had to spend years of therapy de-programming herself from this kind of thinking to save myself from feelings of shame and self-hatred, this is such a disappointing and upsetting thread to read.
posted by ukdanae at 1:22 AM on January 3, 2021 [45 favorites]

That's unnecessarily bipolar.

I don’t think ‘bipolar’ is the right word here - it makes light of a difficult mental illness. Probably something like “all or nothing” is a bit more like what you meant, I think.

I’m on the side of him ruining the teaching moment. Skills transfer is a well-researched topic, but people ignore it because of gut feelings or ideology about the value of struggling.
posted by harriet vane at 1:58 AM on January 3, 2021 [25 favorites]

Is this where I admit I didn't know how to use a can opener at age 21?

I had just moved to the US and my grad school roommate had to show me how. She was incredulous and laughed at me but also didn't drag it in for 6 hours.

I was definitely privileged and sheltered in some ways, but looking back I think my roommate was sheltered too. I grew up in India and basically did not eat canned food - all of our food was fresh. I was a pretty decent cook but had simply no occasion to open a can before this. I think I grokked the mechanics and why of the can opener pretty quickly when shown.
posted by peacheater at 2:02 AM on January 3, 2021 [19 favorites]

The thing about Socrates is that he was applying his method to philosophical/moral/ethical issues. Profound questions for which there is no objective answer. It wasn't fucking vocational training!

If someone asked "hey Socrates, can you teach me how to darn my socks" I guarantee he didn't say "I don't know, how do you think you should darn your socks?"
posted by equalpants at 2:05 AM on January 3, 2021 [59 favorites]

I wonder the odds the resolution to this will be a screenshot of the notes app apology tweet or a heel turn into reactionary contrarianism.
posted by ndfine at 2:16 AM on January 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

Open a can of beans for a child and she eats for a day.

Teach a child how to open a can of beans and she eats for a lifetime.

Force a child to figure out how to open a can of beans herself and then post about it for Twitter clout and she puts you in a shoddy, cut-rate nursing home when you grow old.
posted by Atom Eyes at 2:30 AM on January 3, 2021 [49 favorites]

I was just expected to just know how to do things-- not survival level stuff, but it still made me crazy in its own way.

This story seemed better than what I grew up with because he did a lot of teaching about problem-solving methods.

Is it actually patronizing to say that some people are better at spatial/mechanical things than others, and that it wasn't his daughter's strong point?

I agree that it's a betrayal of trust if he didn't get his daughter's consent for posting the story, and him saying that his daughter is fine is no evidence of anything.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 2:47 AM on January 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

I also agree that 6 hours from one meal to another is not at all the same thing as 6 hours from when one is already hungry, and the people who don't see the difference are, at best, very sloppy readers/thinkers.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 2:50 AM on January 3, 2021 [53 favorites]

I have no opinion on whether parents should or should not help their kids use a can opener in general or whether this guy should or should not have helped this kid in particular, but I am curious to know what sort of upbringing results in the smug sort of fool who is proud to advertise the fact that it took them and their kid six hours to open a can of beans.
posted by dmh at 3:02 AM on January 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

I don't think that this is endearing, and splitting hairs over how long it's technically OK to let a child go without food before it's abuse, or whether it was actually six hours or if she was really crying and what else is made up really isn't making it any better. It's not endearing as a fictional scenario any more than it is as an accurate description of real events.

There are circumstances in which it's really valuable for someone to figure something out for themselves instead of being given the answer. When I help someone with a basic programming question, I try to lead them to the solution without just giving it to them, but this involves stuff like dropping hints, asking increasingly leading questions, and giving them feedback on the things they're trying. If I just told them "here's the complete Python documentation, figure it out from first principles, lol", and didn't tell them that they were misunderstanding something basic that was throwing everything off, I'd be an unhelpful asshole.

My parents weren't abusive, but I can tell when someone is being an asshole.

As a complete aside, I'm amazed that there are people who don't open cans.
posted by confluency at 3:22 AM on January 3, 2021 [33 favorites]

My dad was like this. But when he tried his ideas out on us, we would almost always be saved by my stepmother who swooped in and stopped it. He didn't change his ways till he became a granddad, though. His lessons weren't about cooking. Until he was in his fifties, he literally couldn't boil an egg, let alone open a can and heat up its contents. So we would never ask him for food.
Someone I would ask for food was my grandmother, and when we were small, she would ask us to open a can of baked beans or spaghetti hoops. That was a treat, because she had a really fancy can-opener hanging on a window post, and we all enjoyed being the designated can-opening person. When I grew older, maybe 11 or 12, I realized that the can-opener was a disgusting, greasy and yet rusty device that shouldn't be used for food ever. I tried to clean it, but it was impossible, because it was fastened to the post and couldn't be taken apart. This was when I developed an affection for the shark-fin opener which is a bit harder to use, but very easy to clean. It's also great for camping, because it is so small and light. Much later I realized it was designed by Jens Quistgaard for Raadvad, which has now been bought by Fiskars.

As for teaching people stuff, I just came off a zoom meeting with my colleagues, and because of this thread I was reminded that every frigging week I have to tell these guys that if students don't know something, it's because we haven't taught it. How difficult can that be to understand? The same applies to this guy: if his daughter can't open a can at nine, it's either because she hasn't spent time in the kitchen with her parents, or because, like peacheater, she has never eaten food from a can. The latter is admirable, the former not so much. If you really, honestly want your child to have life-skills, like cooking your own food, you need to include them in your daily practice, not suddenly devise some prank when they are nine!

On the other hand... My dad was a soldier, and when he missed me, he'd send me ordnance survey maps of where I was, and suggest I tried to figure out how they worked. My grandparents pointed out some markers I could look for if I was lost, and then I'd go out and get lost, often for hours. I was never worried and eventually, I learnt how the maps worked and also every inch of the landscape, so when I was 12, and a Boy Scout got lost in the fog, I was allowed to go out to search on my own. I was quite proud of that even though I didn't find the scout.
posted by mumimor at 4:03 AM on January 3, 2021 [34 favorites]

From the dad: I should say that spatial orientation, process visualization and order of operation are not things she... intuits. I knew this would be a challenge. But it was a rainy weekend.

It was a rainy weekend. Dad was engrossed with a jigsaw puzzle. Daughter, 9, was already hungry and she was ordered to solve a problem that her dad understood would be hard for her even when she was well-fed and rested.

From the great reply linked by airmail, above, from @jannejanne:
... by turning something as simple as learning to use a can opener into a huge deal - an ordeal ending in frustration and tears - you might actually be discouraging her from being curious in the future, and from asking for help when she needs it. ... In that thread, I see an adult's good intentions conflicting with badly applied judgements. I see a child who was confident and brave enough to communicate (both verbally and non-verbally) and attempting to be heard. I see a learner who did persevere, despite being hungry and frustrated and disrespected.

She got there in the end but it really didn't have to be like that. That learning experience could have been much less stressful (and just much more fun!) for everyone involved, had OP actually tuned into what his daughter was telling him ... as grown-ups, it's our responsibility to assess interactions and situations with more common sense, tact, reasoning; know when to push, and when to let up and be caring.

Will this guy apologize to his daughter ever? Will he at some point realize that he made several mistakes and acknowledge them to himself and, more importantly, to his kid? I doubt it. What I find problematic is how readily adults give other adults a pass for treating the people in their power (children most often; workers they manage; the elderly) with so little respect. Parents (including me) make lots of mistakes and one of the worst is simply not taking what our kids say seriously. Or not caring about what they communicate (the discomfort, the distress) because teaching them some kind of lesson, we have decided, is more important.

Like, can you imagine him treating another adult that way? If you can't, then why was it okay to do that to a kid? It was not okay for all the reasons given above.

Everyone one of us comes to this story with our own experiences; it's almost impossible to view it in a neutral way, which is why I appreciated the perspective of the early childhood educator, @jannejanne. I remember my dad making me drive a big truck late at night when I was too tired and could barely see. He just ignored my protests. I was in high school and my little sisters were in the truck with us and it was only after I nearly ran off the road that he switched places with me. He spent most of my life telling me to toughen up or that I wasn't really X when I said I was X. "You're okay," he always insisted. "You're fine."

My little sisters stopped talking to him a few years before he died and who can blame them? Our dad thought he knew best about everything, including our own thoughts and feelings. That was bullshit, of course. The Twitter guy reminds me of my dad. Of course, the can-opener experience is not going to make-or-break the Twitter guy's relationship with his daughter. But if it is representative of how he operates, he is teaching her different lessons than intended. The question is if he will learn anything from the resulting Twitter storm.
posted by Bella Donna at 4:14 AM on January 3, 2021 [87 favorites]

Oh, another thing about teaching, which I think someone above also addressed partially, but there are 128 comments at this point! Teaching skills is rarely about on-off events. Teaching motor skills is very much about endless repetition, which luckily is something small children really enjoy. Older children and many adults, not so much. My cousin and I would get a kick out of using that can-opener for months on end when we were five and six, although nothing really happened, while 9 year old me would hate to peal the potatoes. So you need to get in all the basic skills as early as possible. Don't be afraid to give a three year old a knife or a saw. Do stand next to them when they use sharp tools.
posted by mumimor at 4:14 AM on January 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

When my brother and I were little, our parents hit on the idea of assigning us to feed our pets as part of our chores. We loved our cats and dogs, so it was an obvious choice. However, on the first day we were supposed to do it, it was discovered that we could not do it because we were children with small hands and could not get the can opener to do the punch thing. Not because we were not mechanically inclined or had not yet learned enough perseverance and grit, but because we were children with small hands, and can openers are designed for adult hands. Ultimately, my older brother figured out a way to do it, because his hands were bigger than mine, but I just couldn't do it. My parents got an electric can opener so that I could open cat food cans until my hands were big enough to use a regular can opener. That is actual parenting.

Also, I am 44 years old, and if I am already hungry, it is generally too late for me to actually cook myself a full mea,l let alone spend 6 hours wrestling with an unfamiliar task. As the early childhood educator above notes, if you want a child to learn something, then you should start with a happy, fed kid, not a hungry, grumpy kid.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:42 AM on January 3, 2021 [49 favorites]

mumimor: the shark-fin opener which is a bit harder to use, but very easy to clean. It's also great for camping, because it is so small and light.

That's exactly why I have one. It lives in my cutlery pouch that I take when camping; it's small enough to forget that it's there, and it always does the job.
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:48 AM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Well I hope it was a really fucking good jigsaw puzzle.
posted by Spatch at 4:58 AM on January 3, 2021 [18 favorites]

I told a buddy about this thread. His response: "How does he plan to teach his kid to swim?" It was a cheap shot but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
posted by Bella Donna at 5:03 AM on January 3, 2021 [38 favorites]

I'm surprised the 9 year old didn't immediately look up how to do this on YouTube.

I suspect that this is a father who doesn't let their child figure out for themselves what's worth watching on YouTube.
posted by ambrosen at 5:29 AM on January 3, 2021 [8 favorites]

if a child for whom you are responsible comes to you & says "I am communicating a need, I need calories to keep functioning & be comfortable, I know this is true because I can physically feel hunger which is unpleasant," and your response is "I have decided on a whim as your parent it is more important for you to teach yourself from first principles how to use a can opener than to eat food, for six hours, " you're teaching them they might as well not bother communicating their needs. He ignores her communicating her needs again when she's frustration-hunger-crying.

Like, I definitely wish I'd gotten some encouragement as a kid to push through when things were hard, but I think there's a way to do that where you validate that the thing actually is hard for the kid, and teach them they can use helper strategies to make it easier.

And not when they're fucking hungry, when your kid is fucking hungry you fucking feed them. (Disclaimer: I'm posting this hungry)
posted by taquito sunrise at 5:35 AM on January 3, 2021 [48 favorites]

"What kind of monster buys beans that don’t have a ring pull lid like god and Mr. Heinz intended?"

May all your pull-top rings detach from their lids and your can-openers nowhere to be found for all eternity.
posted by Stoneshop at 5:42 AM on January 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

We explicitly teach persistence at my workplace and this is pretty much exactly how we don’t do it.

For one thing, most people don’t give up at the point they are really hungry and have a can of beans they can’t open, not because their higher insight and learning ability is engaged, but because their survival instincts engage. And survival instincts come with adrenaline - fear, anger, freeze, flight, many of which are described by the dad.

This kid may or may not remember this experience as handling herself well and solving her own problems. That’s up to her. From the description though, she definitely had a day where her needs weren’t met for a pretty random reason, and she persisted because she was hungry and powerless.

Most educators would agree this wasn’t a teachable moment. Teachable moments come step by step when a person is ready to learn the next skill. And that’s what persistence and mastery are about - repeating your steps, taking the next step. Being humble enough to ask others. Not because your survival depends on it.

I’ve done survival-style outward bound type training and - I chose it, it was explicit, it wasn’t random, and there was a skill building component built in at the start. This child may have all that in her life but the description - my daughter was hungry so I randomly chose this day as a day to abandon her to the vagarities of the can opener - is pretty whack.

The idea that grit is sitting alone with a problem until you figure it out on your own —thanks to tools provided by others in this case —is pretty much toxic masculinity and inequality in a nutshell.

In fact, this dad says in the thread he’s struggled with persistence. I would say this is a classic example. Teaching kids all the chores and cooking skills is boring, messy, and takes years. Rather than creating a path for her to learn where on the first day he shows her, the second he gets her to open the can after starting it, the next ten times she does, then he sees she’s ready to manage it and then has her manage the beans, he has to do this “teaching” all in one big dramatic shot. Randomly.

As for problem-solving ability, again, she may take that narrative from this, that’s on her. I did from a lot of abusive situations, while other people learned helplessness. Real teaching is more complex than abandonment one day. Like the example above of building a real cabin together, or going camping, or enrolling in a Lego robotics class. But The One Cool Trick To Play On Your Kid is just a shortcut and click bait.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:06 AM on January 3, 2021 [115 favorites]

I was reminded that every frigging week I have to tell these guys that if students don't know something, it's because we haven't taught it.

Maybe this is why this is bothering me so much, because my university experience was pretty much wall-to-wall instructors like this, who equated the most basic guidance with “spoon-feeding.” With some of them, they’d refuse to tell you what the damn criteria for success even were until after you failed to meet them. If even one student managed to correctly guess something they had refused to teach, then as far as they were concerned nobody else had any excuse for not getting it. And this was a teacher training program!
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:15 AM on January 3, 2021 [32 favorites]

Two reactions to the Twitter thread.

(1) I have a 7-year-old daughter, and I have occasionally employed the Socratic method to explain things like, say, celestial bodies orbiting stars and how that can create seasons. Mostly, though, my struggle is to NOT immediately blurt out the answer or offer to do it myself. The idea of intentionally withholding knowledge, especially if that meant her going hungry in the interim, is so viscerally appalling that I'm having trouble putting it into words.

(2) Once I was at my mother-in-law's house and she only had one of those bizarre sideways smooth-edge can-openers, and maybe it's a class thing or it was just an experiential blind spot, but I'd never seen one of them before. I wanted to open a can of something, and I just could not figure the damned thing out. I'm a grownass man and a goddamn engineer, and the mechanics of the thing just wouldn't click in my head. I spent five or ten minutes of increasing frustration, before I grabbed the biggest goddamn knife I could find and stabbed the can with it a bunch of times until I made something approximating a hole in the top. I probably didn't do the knife any favors, but I do not regret this decision, because who the hell has time to spend ten minutes (let alone SIX HOURS) figuring out some absurd custom piece of machinery from first principles?
posted by Mayor West at 6:17 AM on January 3, 2021 [32 favorites]

This is how you effectively teach your kid that being taught stuff is horrible.
Way to go.
posted by Too-Ticky at 6:18 AM on January 3, 2021 [17 favorites]

ok I've eaten & I'm actually more ticked off now because idk if y'all have been in a relationship with someone who learned not to communicate their needs as a kid but it's this WHOLE THING where they do all this weird passive-aggressive shit whenever they want tacos for dinner instead of just saying "HEY I WANT TACOS FOR DINNER" & if you're lucky you figure out wtf is going on before you break up out of sheer bewilderment & your prize is helping a grown-ass adult learn for the first time that they can just ask for tacos and it's FINE

fuck now I want some tacos

anyway the daughter sounds like she's a champ at communicating her needs & it's really aggravating that she's getting negative reinforcement for it!
posted by taquito sunrise at 6:28 AM on January 3, 2021 [43 favorites]

I cannot be the only infertile person who reads stuff like this, turns to the imaginary camera and says, “and *I’m* the one who couldn’t have kids!”

My parents were huge fans of letting me figure things out for myself but then ten minutes later showing me if I couldn’t. Christ, what an asshole.
posted by kimberussell at 6:31 AM on January 3, 2021 [37 favorites]

warriorqueen, your comment flagged as fantastic.
posted by Bella Donna at 6:32 AM on January 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

I came. I did a ctrl-f for Christ what an asshole. I saw that someone already got to it. I was pleased. For real, though: Christ, what an asshole.
posted by bootlegpop at 6:34 AM on January 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

The question is if he will learn anything from the resulting Twitter storm.

Less than nothing, by the look.

Big red flag is his use of the asshole-speak word 'ratio' as a passive verb, i.e. the pretense that if more people think you're wrong than right, it just means you're being picked on (rather than that you actually are wrong).
posted by Cardinal Fang at 6:36 AM on January 3, 2021 [10 favorites]

I'm trying very hard not to shit on a nine year old who's been dragged into a public spotlight against their will. But, nine year old me would not have been kind to anybody in this story.

When working with students, it's very often true that waiting until they're seconds away from giving up before providing help is how real learning happens. Figuring out when that time comes is the hard part. That it comes so early in a research setting is often frustrating. I understand the impulse to draw it out. But, using curiosity rather than hunger seems like a better motivator.

(Roderick always sounds like an arrogant jerk. I guess I'm not surprised to discover that he is one. I am a bit surprised he isn't self-aware enough to avoid bragging about it in public.)
posted by eotvos at 6:38 AM on January 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Cardinal Fang, I followed the guy so I could read more replies on Twitter and one of the first things I read was his tweet claiming that only people who agreed with him became new followers. And I thought, "wow, I wonder how many other things you are wrong about. Never mind, I don't need to know."

In fairness, it is really hard to parent well if you were parented badly. I am guessing Mr. Beans never learned how to learn well and thus, is bad at teaching others. I never got any training in best practices as a new manager (as my former reports could tell you), and I absolutely never got any sound training in parenting from my parents, with one exception: My mother was exceedingly kind. She was unable to teach me how to be a good mother because she herself was raised by cruel and uncaring people. She did, however, model empathy and kindness toward me and others.

Thing is, I spent literally years trying to learn how to become a better mom by becoming a better adult. This guy doesn't seem to have any self-awareness at all or understand the difference between being an effective parent and a control freak. TL;DR: Yup. Asshole.
posted by Bella Donna at 6:44 AM on January 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

(2) Once I was at my mother-in-law's house and she only had one of those bizarre sideways smooth-edge can-openers, and maybe it's a class thing or it was just an experiential blind spot, but I'd never seen one of them before. I wanted to open a can of something, and I just could not figure the damned thing out. I'm a grownass man and a goddamn engineer, and the mechanics of the thing just wouldn't click in my head. I spent five or ten minutes of increasing frustration, before I grabbed the biggest goddamn knife I could find and stabbed the can with it a bunch of times until I made something approximating a hole in the top.

That was my first thought. I'm in my 40s and have never used one of those types of openers. I'm sure I could figure it out eventually, but if I was standing there all frustrated and confused I'd sure be grateful to someone who said "hey, try clamping it such and such way" rather than just laughing at me.

I get that this is internet humor writing so everything is probably exaggerated for effect, but even accounting for that he still comes off sounding like a jerk who lacks self-awareness.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:47 AM on January 3, 2021 [8 favorites]

She was hungry. He was not.

Guess which one decided it would be fun and educational to be kept from eating for six hours?

Whether it's parents emulating Tiger Mom, or a coach using public humiliation during the President's Physical Fitness Test, a teacher telling a student that they can't go to the bathroom, or voters deciding if we should cut food stamps and free school lunch programs, the two ways we respond to cruelty inflicted on children is either horror or proud glorification.

Guess which one is the response we should have?
posted by AlSweigart at 6:53 AM on January 3, 2021 [42 favorites]

This is the kind of asshole who thinks everything he knows is obvious. Who thinks because he understand how a can opener works (because someone showed him, once) and the parts are exposed, it should be easy to figure out.

Some people like puzzles to figure out what this obscure object they've never seen before does! Those people generally aren't nine-year-olds whose parents are withholding food until they play the parents' game.
posted by JawnBigboote at 6:54 AM on January 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

It seems like it was an amazingly educational experience although probably a redundant one because his daughter almost certainly already knows her dad is an enormous asshole.

I only hope she's getting some exposure to the shitstorm that the internet is raining down upon him, because she needs to know more than anything else that other people see what she sees and are on her side.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:02 AM on January 3, 2021 [14 favorites]

On the plus side, I think this story is probably made up, or at least exaggerated. On the minus side, he told it because he thought it made him look good, and that suggests that he has some really wacked-out ideas about teaching and parenting.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:03 AM on January 3, 2021 [18 favorites]

I'm reading this thread with new-found gratitude for my parents, who would have never pulled this kind of stunt. I recently had a conversation with my mom about this very topic and she actually feels somewhat guilty about her approach: "I shouldn't always have been so quick to jump in with help, I never gave you enough opportunities to figure things out on your own; maybe that was just my own anxiety, but I just couldn't watch you struggle".

Now, I like to think my brother and I turned into reasonably well-adjusted grown-ups based on our current circumstances, but it's clear that neither of us would impress anyone as a rugged individualist who'd do well in a zombie-apocalpyse/if we had to flee the country and start somewhere else from scratch without any support network, and apparently my mum sees that as somewhat of a parental failure.

So that's the first notion I object too, that this is supposed to be a pedagogical priority, to make kids tough enough to survive the worst sort of disaster, etc. I mean I can see where that desire comes from, but I'm not sure it's worth the opportunity costs. Clearly that sort of toughness comes at a price, and that price might be entirely too high to pay, especially if these specific types of disasters don't actually materialize. And there are, after all, a fair number of disasters where that particular sort of toughness doesn't actually help! Just consider what an embarrassement/nuisance/danger to us all some of these prepper types are making of themselves during the current pandemic!

So that brings me to the second notion I object to, this idea that you could, one way or the other, ever possibly prepare your kid for all potential challenges they might face. Complete hybris! Because here's the thing, my mum might have had the best intentions to always remove all obstacles from my path, but she actually didn't, because she couldn't. It's true that she could never watch me struggle, and that has, indeed, affected me growing up - in the sense that I would eventually learn to only approach her with problems I thought she might be reasonably able to help me with. Granted, those sort of problemes were clearly plentiful enough (I mean I totally get why my mom doesn't have an image of me as particularly self-reliant person), and I'm becoming increasingly aware how much of privilege it is to actually have parents one can turn to in such situations. But every kid will eventually have problems their parents can't solve, or where their parents solutions just won't work for them. So I strongly feel I had plenty of opportunities to figure things out on my own after all.
posted by sohalt at 7:17 AM on January 3, 2021 [12 favorites]

For me, the worst part about this (aside from the fact that he comes off as a self-congratulatory twat) is that I looked up who this guy is, and now I have "Flagpole Sitta" stuck in my head.
posted by jonathanhughes at 7:20 AM on January 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

Yeah, I mean, I don't really know anything about this guy but how abrasive he was toward people who reasonably brought up that maybe this wasn't that cool tells me he knows he was maybe wrong here and also just sort of an ass

Reminds me of Dave Anthony's decision to take all comer rather than own up when The Dollop was caught stealing text from Damn Interesting. Even before this they both had similar "I'm an asshole so what" energy that tended to make me slide off their projects.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 7:32 AM on January 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

Now, I like to think my brother and I turned into reasonably well-adjusted grown-ups based on our current circumstances, but it's clear that neither of us would impress anyone as a rugged individualist who'd do well in a zombie-apocalpyse/if we had to flee the country and start somewhere else from scratch without any support network, and apparently my mum sees that as somewhat of a parental failure.

So I was thinking about this. As a kid, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, who was trained as a Montessori teacher in the 1930s, when Montessori education was considered pretty radical. And she also was a person who had to flee a country and start somewhere else from scratch with no support network. And I think my grandmother would have been pretty enthused about the start of this exercise: she would have wanted me to try to figure out how to use the can opener on my own. But I think that, after I gave it a go and got really frustrated, she would have shown me how to use the frigging can opener. And there is not a snowball's chance in Hell that she would have let me go hungry as some sort of teaching tool. You can believe in fostering kids' independence while also believing that kids shouldn't have to perform arbitrary tasks in order to get their basic needs met.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:47 AM on January 3, 2021 [30 favorites]

As a young kid, my cute childhood stories from toddler age onward were shared in the social media of the time. My dad was a columnist for the local paper. As soon as I was able to read, it was obvious I was being disastrously misrepresented. I hated the family circus version of myself my dad wrote about.

Above and beyond this incident, being the real person whose dumb little interaction with a dad fishing for content gets misrepresented and publicized this way sucks. At least I got to move away from that town.
posted by Rinku at 7:52 AM on January 3, 2021 [40 favorites]

So there are three people stranded on a desert isle. One is a chemist, one is a physicist and one is an economist. They have one can of beans but no opener. The chemist looks at the can, assesses the situation and says, "We can put the can in the salt water and it will rust and weaken and we can open it that way." The physicist says, "Nah, take too long. We can smash it at the correct angle on this rock and it will open." The economist looks at it and says, "Let's just assume the can opener."
posted by AugustWest at 8:00 AM on January 3, 2021 [20 favorites]

My hopefully more humane version of this was an early introduction to the dictionary. Eventually I didn't even have to say, "Go look it up." A mere widening of the eyes and arching of brow and he was off down the rabbit hole with "the book"...
posted by jim in austin at 8:04 AM on January 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

as a rugged individualist who'd do well in a zombie-apocalpyse/if we had to flee the country and start somewhere else from scratch without any support network

It never occurred to me that this silly stunt had anything to do with preparing the child for a possibly challenging future. In what world is how to use a Swing-Away can opener an important life skill? I guess something all of us that are parents should be considering what challenges our kids will meet in their future. I recently read an article in a food magazine, of all places, which suggested that people in large parts of California would soon be climate refugees. It wasn't doom-saying, just stating the facts.

Anyway, my mother was a refugee as a child, and all of my three surviving grandparents suffered from PTSD after the war, which made them terrible parents. They all tried to compensate by being wonderful grandparents. It's complicated. But: my even though my grandparents were into resilience and all that, their version of prepping was mostly like that of bettafish' parents: “have a stockpile of food and other necessities in the case of infrastructure collapse, and cash/precious jewelry to hand in case you can’t get to a bank or have to run for your life with what you can carry.”
Also: be polite, learn languages and get yourself an education that is useful all over the world.
posted by mumimor at 8:08 AM on January 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

This is written by the kind of person who thinks they're smart because they know how to use a can opener.

"You know," said Simon L'vovich, "everyone thinks that the essence of pedagogy is in psychology, but it's not. The essence of pedagogy is in ethics."
posted by grog at 8:14 AM on January 3, 2021 [25 favorites]

In what world is how to use a Swing-Away can opener an important life skill?

My guess is bean dad would frame it more as the meta skill of problem solving, figuring out stuff with minimal guidance, sticking to the task in spite of failure, developing frustration tolerance, etc.

Which are all useful learning objectives, but as I said, I think it's really unnecessary to create artificial challenges to practise these skills - life is organically full of situations that call for them, yes, even for well-sheltered middle-class kids rich countries, and I assume bean dad must severely lack imagination and empathy if he can't think of situations where his daughter had to practice frustration tolerance even without this sort of intervention.
posted by sohalt at 8:19 AM on January 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

At the risk of derailing from the parenting/pedagogy discussion, I was well into adulthood when I first encountered a smooth-edge side-cut can opener. It's now my favorite method for opening cans, but it was very confusing when I first encountered it. It has three visible components that interact with the can and no obvious way to clamp it on. The opener behaves significantly differently depending on which direction you turn the crank. I'm still not entirely certain I understand how the damn thing works, but I know how to open cans with it now.
posted by jackbishop at 8:22 AM on January 3, 2021 [10 favorites]

Gonna go out on a limb and say perhaps, like most parents, Mr. Roderick knows his daughter better than we do, knows where the lines are, knows her learning style, knows how to judge the tone in her voice, and knows when he's gone too far. We can't know that from a few most likely embellished tweets.

I spend hours whipping ping pong balls at my kid, calling her shit like "fart brain", and making her do stuff like stock and split firewood. Clearly I am a terrible parent.

Or maybe that's just the sort of relationship we've built together that couldn't possible be obvious when I tweet something like "kids suck. Never have one."
posted by bondcliff at 8:24 AM on January 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

I’m grinding my teeth at the way he condescendingly describes his daughter as “not mechanical” and says “spatial orientation, process visualization and order of operation are not things she... intuits.” Those things are learned skills! You don’t just “intuit” them from the ether! Girls, especially, get pigeonholed as “not good at mechanical things” because no one ever taught them mechanical things. Like… never showing your kid how to use a can opener.

Also, I learned to use a can opener by having it demonstrated to me. I remember being little and not understanding that it had to latch on, and having my parents show me how that felt when it happened — then I totally got it. That’s how you teach things like this.
posted by snowmentality at 8:24 AM on January 3, 2021 [75 favorites]

I always wonder why the shark-fin can opener never succeeded outside Scandinavia. It's cheap (the link is to the posh, touristy site, you can get it for a dollar). It's easy to clean.

Have you used a proper swingaway style? Like, not the $2 version of the clamp-and-crank style with skinny-ass handles, but a proper swingaway or other brand that's nice and chonky and has plastidipped handles and such? I've used the shark / p38 style once or twice and... bleah. Swingaway's much easier to use; just clamp and crank. I have a dishwasher so how easy it would be to clean manually isn't relevant to my life.

It does mean that I have to spend about $10 every ten or twenty years now that the MBAs have gotten into that industry and cheapened everything out, instead of spending $20 when you're 18 or 20 and being set for life. I can live with that.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:31 AM on January 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

Gonna go out on a limb and say perhaps, like most parents, Mr. Roderick knows his daughter better than we do, knows where the lines are, knows her learning style, knows how to judge the tone in her voice, and knows when he's gone too far. We can't know that from a few mostly likely embellished tweets.

I want to believe this, but his subsequent defensiveness and generally awful behavior since the story makes me think this isn't an isolated incident being decontextualized and misread. The way he talks about his young daughter to an audience of tens of thousands of people only makes it worse.

That said, based on my own experiences and trauma, there is a pretty gigantic gap between "bordering on abuse" and "shitty parenting practices".
posted by Ouverture at 8:31 AM on January 3, 2021 [14 favorites]

Gonna go out on a limb and say perhaps, like most parents, Mr. Roderick knows his daughter better than we do, knows where the lines are, knows her learning style, knows how to judge the tone in her voice, and knows when he's gone too far. We can't know that from a few most likely embellished tweets.

First of all, there are a lot of not-great parents out there. And second of all, I can't pass judgment on this guy or his parenting, because I don't know anything about him, including whether the can opener thing actually happened at all. All I know is this story that he told. So I'm not judging him: I'm judging the story that he told. And I think the story contains some messed-up ideas about parenting and child development.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:34 AM on January 3, 2021 [81 favorites]

Gonna go out on a limb and say perhaps, like most parents, Mr. Roderick knows his daughter better than we do, knows where the lines are, knows her learning style, knows how to judge the tone in her voice, and knows when he's gone too far. We can't know that from a few most likely embellished tweets.

I grew up under a narcissistic parent (diagnosed) and one of the things I ended up examining in therapy was how many times the looks on other people’s faces, the comments from my friends’ parents and ultimately my friends, told the story as well. But no one ever intervened that I know of because they assumed my mum knew best.

She did not.

I am a parent now and none of us wants to be judged on our worst day, but part of what this parent supposedly wants to teach is how to learn. And one thing that is a part of persisting to learn as a parent is feedback.

Also, I was a child who laughed a lot, did really well in school, and defended my parents. My mother thinks she did a great job, even though she also knows that she failed to protect me from other abuse and that I have struggled intensely at times. I was often held up as the example child while my sibling was the screw up. Kids, like people, are complex and also hard-wired to love the parents on whom they depend for everything. You can listen to a grown adult about their parents (although even there you get the “hit me for my own good” narrative) but you can’t depend on a nine year old to justify the parenting.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:41 AM on January 3, 2021 [44 favorites]

I don't remember how or when I learned to use a can opener or who taught me, but I never knew it was called a Swingaway until today.
posted by maggiemaggie at 8:43 AM on January 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

My old man would have stopped me after thirty seconds, and swear at me for ruining a perfectly good can which he could use later.
posted by Capt. Renault at 8:45 AM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

over complicated anecdotal deep dives aside

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day teach a man (kid) to fish and they eat for a lifetime.

anyone?
posted by djseafood at 8:45 AM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

It's upsetting reading all the comments in this thread saying this constitutes abuse.

wpgr says upthread:

this is like a rorschach test of which mefites had abusive parents

Which I agree with, though I can't tell which way they mean. I'm not going to presume to know anyone else's experience, but I grew up with intense physical and emotional abuse, and I can tell you, this isn't it. I would have killed to grow up in this household with this dad.

This guy cares deeply about his kid, spends a ton of time with her talking about the world, and gives her room and encouragement to distrust authority, including his own. I have no doubt she'll roll her eyes and be frustrated with him many many times throughout her life, but this is not abuse. I really don't feel like airing out all the bullshit I went through growing up in this forum but holy shit does this super not come anywhere close to abuse.

Was this the best approach to teaching his kid resilience and problem solving? I don't know! Maybe not! But maybe! Did he perform as well as a parent as people responding on Twitter who have advanced degrees in early childhood education? Probably not!

I find the comments in thread to be disheartening in a way I'm having trouble articulating.
posted by The Loch Ness Monster at 8:45 AM on January 3, 2021 [29 favorites]

I want to add this video to the conversation. We watched this at work as a way to better understand what we think to be excellent straight forward instructions.

XACT INSTRUCTIONS CHALLENGE

I think this is very relevant to the method a'la Twitter Dad
posted by djseafood at 8:53 AM on January 3, 2021 [8 favorites]

I would have killed to grow up in this household with this dad.

For a long time I contrasted my abuser’s behaviour (rape, extreme shit I don’t want to get into either) with my mother’s (narcissistic rages, weird behaviours) and my dad’s (somewhat absent but consistently kind, also directly aware of the first two situations although not all the specifics of the first but unwilling to address them) behaviours. Ultimately though, they all gave me the same message which was that my bodily needs and my emotional state was not important to them.

I agree with you that this isn’t the same as beating and raping a child, but it doesn’t mean it’s caring. It’s presented that way for sure.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:56 AM on January 3, 2021 [48 favorites]

While this parent is excessive in his teaching moment skills I wouldn’t call it abusive. If it is considered abusive by most then I would say that it is abusive, also, for parents not to encouraging their kids to figure things out and fail rather than taking over and just doing tasks like this themselves, or even showing them how to do everything without letting their kids even getting a little frustrated every hour of every day of every year until the kid finally moves out.
posted by waving at 9:01 AM on January 3, 2021

It seems weird to me that(according to his description) she lined everything up correctly, but wasn't applying enough force to break through, and he just let her stay hungry?

My parents would have us figure stuff out on our own sometimes*, but would have provided enough guidance to nudge is back if we'd gotten off the right path. Especially if it was something like, not applying enough force. I feel like as a kid it was really hard to figure out how much force was ok to apply to things.

Then again, my parent didn't leave learning to use a can opener until that late. They had us around them when they were doing things around the house from a young age. So they'd have been modeling how to do something for years before throwing us in to the deep end.

*Sometimes wouldn't involve letting us be hungry for six hours. My sisters have a metabolism where they'd wake up starving in the middle of the night, especially around growth spurts. So to me, at best this sounds like a six hour nightmare of hanger and misery for all involved and nearby.
posted by ghost phoneme at 9:02 AM on January 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.
posted by soundguy99 at 9:04 AM on January 3, 2021 [23 favorites]

@waving: The "trying to learn this new skill for six hours while already hungry" thing is an important part of this story.
posted by XtinaS at 9:06 AM on January 3, 2021 [18 favorites]

Watch one, do one, teach one.

Sounds like this douche skipped the first, and taught his kid not to do the third for anyone else in the future.
posted by NorthernLite at 9:09 AM on January 3, 2021 [21 favorites]

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day teach a man (kid) to fish and they eat for a lifetime.

I mean, sure. But that can be done without being an asshole.
No one here says he should't have tried to teach her to use a can opener, it's the way he did it (if we can even consider this teaching at all) that irks many of us.

Personally, I feel that he made her jump through a shitty hoop like a trained seal, and made her cry for no good reason at all. And then he made fun of her on the internet.
One of the takeaways for her may well have been 'Boy, learning stuff really sucks'.
posted by Too-Ticky at 9:13 AM on January 3, 2021 [27 favorites]

I’m grinding my teeth at the way he condescendingly describes his daughter as “not mechanical” and says “spatial orientation, process visualization and order of operation are not things she... intuits.” Those things are learned skills! You don’t just “intuit” them from the ether! Girls, especially, get pigeonholed as “not good at mechanical things” because no one ever taught them mechanical things. Like… never showing your kid how to use a can opener.

Thank you for bringing this up!

I've been nodding along to a lot of the responses in this thread, waiting for someone to bring this up too. First of all, I don't trust at all that this is an accurate description of his daughter. He's basically just repeating a stereotype - the one that is supposed to justify why girls are bad at boy things like math and engineering. One that is very widely believed by condescending, sexist asshole men.

Since he doesn't seem to be too emotionally aware I think it's pretty likely she's just an average child. I can't take his description of her at face value.

And even if it's true about this particular child, you don't say that about them online! You don't just decide that this is a thing that they're bad at, that this is who they are, and then tell everyone about it.

I mean, children are people. They're not grist for the social media mill. If the story is true, he withheld food from his hungry daughter for hours while she tried to figure out a puzzle he knew would be difficult for her. Then he posted about how awful she is at mechanical things on Twitter. If the story is exaggerated, then the actual "teaching incident" isn't as bad as it sounded ... but now he's lying about how bad she was at figuring out the can opener. So he's still pigeonholing her, but now it's based on misrepresentation! It... still isn't good?

I don't think that you can disconnect all of the gendered baggage from this story. It'd be awful to do this to a boy, but doing it to a girl means there is another awful, gendered angle to it.

I hate it.

(Signed, a mathematically inclined person who was often assumed to be bad at math because of her gender, when what was really the problem was not being taught properly or taken seriously as a person who could be taught properly. Suck it, I have a math degree now.)
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:23 AM on January 3, 2021 [132 favorites]

Had to look up who this dude is. I never liked that famous band he was in. Wikipedia has an opinion on his parenting style, under "Personal Life".
posted by sir_patrick_o'veal at 9:27 AM on January 3, 2021 [7 favorites]

XACT INSTRUCTIONS CHALLENGE

I think this is very relevant to the method a'la Twitter Dad

When I was teaching writing to college students, I used to do this activity with them. It was always fun.

I just the other day got a medication and the dosing instructions on the bottle read:

Take 1 tablet by mouth 3 times a day for 10 days or 97.2 at bedtime for 10 nights.

Fortunately I recognized that the doctor had shifted units from "pills" to "milligrams" halfway through there or there might have been real trouble.
posted by Orlop at 9:30 AM on January 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

So I'm not judging him: I'm judging the story that he told.

That, and the fact that he chose to tell it on a public forum in the first place, and present it as him taking advantage of a "Teaching Moment" (caps his) and do for her what his parents never did for him. The presentation implies that it's meant as a Teaching Moment for other parents. (Surely it's not just him bragging about himself, right? And surely it would have been worded differently if the motive had been to brag about his kid.)

So it's not only not strange that so many people are disagreeing with it; it also makes sense that people who disagree with it will want to push back, just as publicly, against the idea that this is something that other parents should do. And I think it's legitimate for people to speak from their own experience of being on the other side of such interactions.

Maybe he's a great guy with a super healthy relationship with his kid, but he put up a story saying "This is a Good Way", and it should be okay to say "It's not", and why.

Anyway, I'll criticize something totally different: the purple prose! The can had been through hell, label ripped off, dented, sharpened and burred, a veteran of a thousand psychic wars... Pretty sure the can experienced not a single psychic battle of its own.
posted by trig at 9:36 AM on January 3, 2021 [34 favorites]

trying to use a new piece of kitchen equipment while hungry and with nobody to demonstrate how to use it is a recipe for disaster, and I'm an adult

the solution is not to put yourself in that position, not force other people into that position for their own good
posted by BungaDunga at 9:37 AM on January 3, 2021 [7 favorites]

I mean, why not save the "you figure it out" challenge for something low-stakes? It seems pretty obvious that you could have your kid figure out how to do any number of things from scratch instead of making it about food when she was already hungry.

On another note, I tend toward the "I'll flail away from first principles rather than asking for help or seeking out instructions" side of things and this has not in fact been a great strategy for me in managing my health, doing actual paid work or doing things around the house.

If the Whelk were still with us, he would undoubtedly say that this guy's whole twitter thread reflects a particular Gen X form of smuggish online behavior and he would be right. Speaking as a youngish Gen Xer myself, I find it difficult to imagine anyone under forty thinking that this was, like, a cool and awesome story to tell about your parenting.
posted by Frowner at 9:37 AM on January 3, 2021 [33 favorites]

The saddest irony here is that John Roderick is unlikely to use this entire ordeal as a "teachable moment" for improving his parenting skills.
posted by schmod at 9:38 AM on January 3, 2021 [15 favorites]

Personally, I don't think this guy is a child abuser. Or I don't know if he is and can't say from what is presented. I can see from what he posted that he thinks it is very funny to pull a silly stunt on his child and write about it on twitter. It also seems that he thinks he is very smart and taught his daughter some sort of life-lesson. Well, he doesn't look smart to me, and I don't think there was much of a lesson to be learnt from opening a can of beans. I wouldn't do something like that to my kids. But I've certainly made other mistakes in my life.
posted by mumimor at 9:39 AM on January 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

a much more important life skill is keeping food around that you know how to make so that you don't find yourself in tears while trying to prepare food while over-hungry

another really good skill is giving up when you're behind, life's too short to spend six hours not eating beans
posted by BungaDunga at 9:43 AM on January 3, 2021 [11 favorites]

I don't think there was much of a lesson to be learnt from opening a can of beans.

And now I'm in a psychic battle with myself over whether to make an overthinking beans joke.
posted by trig at 9:45 AM on January 3, 2021 [8 favorites]

While this incident in isolation may not directly constitute abuse (personally I’m on the fence), I’d ask others in this thread to be mindful of the fact that there are many folks here who have experienced childhood trauma, and are being viscerally triggered by the details of this story.

Roderick seems like he’s a little too proud of his collection of Red Flags.
posted by schmod at 9:47 AM on January 3, 2021 [32 favorites]

> This is all very good and fine, but I always wonder why the shark-fin can opener never succeeded outside Scandinavia

It's the default can opener here in Brazil, usually combined with a bottle opener.
posted by Tom-B at 9:54 AM on January 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

QFT - If the Whelk were still with us, he would undoubtedly say that this guy's whole twitter thread reflects a particular Gen X form of smuggish online behavior and he would be right. Speaking as a youngish Gen Xer myself, I find it difficult to imagine anyone under forty thinking that this was, like, a cool and awesome story to tell about your parenting.

Frowner has it spot on I think. I'd add that there is a subsection of older Gen Xers dudes (speaking as a Gen Xer) that have a tendency to mythologise & valorise the events of their lives & their choices so to me this tweet thread reads a lot like that. So is it abuse? I don't think the event even happened, at least not how it is portrayed, so no. Is this guy a wanker? Most likely and I'm sure his child is, at the age of 9, more than aware of this and compensates accordingly.
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:00 AM on January 3, 2021 [23 favorites]

This seems like a dumb way to teach.

My parents, of course, wanted me to read The Iliad and Tolstoy and the rest of it, but they didn't just say, "have at 'er." They taught me to read, starting with the Bunyip of Berkley Creek and I took it from there.

When I learn a new programming language, I sometimes struggle with the syntactic or idiomatic elements of the language, but I understand computer science, logic and hardware and have numerous other languages to reference for clues. I did "teach myself" to program, but using resources oriented to learners. Someone taught me the basics and I launched from there.

A can opener is the simplest of complex machines, yes, but it took humanity a couple of hundred thousand years to come up with it. We would not have done so had we not first invented the wheel, the inclined plane and the lever but it still took thousands of years after that. Look at how far we've come since then though, and how fast!

When you teach people, you put them on the first rung, you don't force them to invent the ladder.
posted by klanawa at 10:03 AM on January 3, 2021 [12 favorites]

While this incident in isolation may not directly constitute abuse

It doesn’t

I’d ask others in this thread to be mindful of the fact that there are many folks here who have experienced childhood trauma, and are being viscerally triggered by the details of this story.

Speaking for myself, not by the details of this story but by the flippant and hyperbolic mislabeling of this incident as abuse in this thread.

It’s like the people who say they were literally assaulted and it turns out what they mean is that Starbucks spelled their name incorrectly on the cup, and they’re explaining it to someone who can’t sit down because they’re black and blue from shoulderblades to the backs of their thighs.

I have to tap out for a bit.
posted by The Loch Ness Monster at 10:03 AM on January 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

I wasn't a fan of this story, but I'm also aware there is literally no parenting story anyone can tell that won't get half the internet (or the people you meet in real life) telling why you did it wrong.
posted by straight at 10:05 AM on January 3, 2021 [12 favorites]

For me, the worst part about this (aside from the fact that he comes off as a self-congratulatory twat) is that I looked up who this guy is, and now I have "Flagpole Sitta" stuck in my head.

posted by jonathanhughes at 10:20 AM on January 3

Due to circumstances + Reasons, there's a huge swath of 90's Rock Hits that I have heard approximately 1 bajillion times, either played by a cover band or as background music in a bar, but I have not the slightest idea what the name of the song is or who the band is.

Upon Googling, this is one of those tunes.
posted by soundguy99 at 10:05 AM on January 3, 2021 [7 favorites]

A can opener is the simplest of complex machines, yes, but it took humanity a couple of hundred thousand years to come up with it. We would not have done so had we not first invented the wheel, the inclined plane and the lever

And, y'know, the can.
posted by Grangousier at 10:12 AM on January 3, 2021 [16 favorites]

For me it's now the Peep Show song, and I'm relieved that this twat didn't actually have anything to do with it.
posted by Flashman at 10:14 AM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

I have 3 poems mostly memorized that I recite in my head when I'm feeling anxious. One of them is This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

I want to make a little cross-stitch of this one and send it to this guy's daughter.
posted by elvissa at 10:17 AM on January 3, 2021 [22 favorites]

To save other people the effort of wading through the Twitter thread, he is either very committed to the bit, or did in fact refuse to feed his hungry daughter for 6 hours. Not knowing anything about this person, I assumed this story was a joke, it's pretty appalling to me that it seems to be entirely serious.
posted by wesleyac at 10:19 AM on January 3, 2021 [12 favorites]

you know what though there's kind of a false dichotomy at play here. it's not true that we have to affirm either that john roderick is an abuser or that what he did here was okay. we can instead hold that roderick's actions in this particular incident don't — by themselves — indicate that he's abusive, but are nonetheless not in any way acceptable or worthy of emulation.

i guess what i'm saying is that perhaps his pedagogical techniques in this case aren't sick, exactly, but not well either.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 10:25 AM on January 3, 2021 [32 favorites]

Wow. I knew about this guy's band (never really had a strong opinion about them one way or the other) and saw his tweet yesterday, although I don't follow him. I didn't know it had blown up until just this moment.

I am not a parenting expert although I am a parent. I am not an emotional abuse expert although I have experienced emotional abuse. I am not an expert on assholes, but boy, in my not even vaguely humble opinion, this dude comes off like a massive asshole in this story.

My husband bought me a fancy can opener as a gift and it is different from the kind I've used my whole life. I couldn't figure it out right away the first time I tried to use it, and well....I put it back in the drawer. I found the tiny booklet with instructions and I fully intended to find a video or something so I could practice along with it and master the damn thing. But I haven't yet. And I haven't had to, because we had other food, and cans with pull-tops, and food that doesn't come in cans.

And no, I have taught no children how to use that, or any other can opener. Because I haven't. We have lots of snacks in the house of varying levels of healthiness that no one needs to use a can opener to eat. And no one needs to try for SIX HOURS while hungry to open them, for the love of Pete.
posted by 41swans at 10:26 AM on January 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

What a condescending fuckwit. Reading this story makes me so sad for his daughter - even if she actually learned how to use a can opener thanks to this dipshit's approach (and I completely disagree that he was teaching her in an appropriate manner), the fact that he wrote it up for all - including potentially his daughter - to read robs it of any value it might possibly have had.

I might've shared this story here before, but when I was a little younger than this guy's daughter, I suddenly developed this inexplicable fear that lobsters might come out of the showerhead while I was taking a shower - to this day I can still envision what kid-me was afraid of, horrid red antennae somehow wiggling their way out of the showerhead - and I went through a period where I refused to take anything but baths. My dad eventually sat me down and drew me a schematic of what the plumbing looked like inside of the walls, walking me through the various parts and helping me understand why a lobster couldn't make it through. I came away with basic understanding of how plumbing works and the confidence to take showers again thanks to what I now knew. It also made me feel more bonded with my dad, that he would treat me as if my fears were serious and worth responding to (absurd as they were), and that he thought I was intelligent enough to understand what he wanted me to know about plumbing.

If I had later on found out that he'd written some self-congratulatory essay about the whole thing - AND had written something along the lines of "A more mechanically inclined kid might have figured it out in minutes" about me - I would have been gutted. Any positive memories I had about my learning experience would have been wiped right the hell out.

Whether or not this jackass had good intentions in this episode, he totally spoils them in the way he writes about his daughter. I hope she never comes across this crap.
posted by DingoMutt at 10:26 AM on January 3, 2021 [130 favorites]

Wherein the author of the story says slurs against LGTBQIA+ people and those with developmental disabilities are "elastic words." (TW: slurs).
posted by cooker girl at 10:29 AM on January 3, 2021 [26 favorites]

DingoMutt, I love that story about your dad. It's good he clarified things, because you never know what those lobsters might be getting up to.
posted by Orlop at 10:30 AM on January 3, 2021 [17 favorites]

DingoMutt, that is a sweet story. And also you are right, maybe this is much more about how to write about your children on the internet (or post video or photos). A lot of people I know are not really good at that.
posted by mumimor at 10:31 AM on January 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

This is a particular genre of writing that I have never been able to understand. Is this story meant to be read literally or figuratively? If parts of it are exaggerated or ironic, which parts? What elements in the text signal those bits, the use of CAPS LOCK? ("SIX HOURS") The humble-brag parts? ("I suffer from a lack of perseverance myself, and like all parents throughout history I’m trying to correct my own mistakes in the way I educate my child.") The part where he says there's no other food in the house besides a can of beans?

I get that the author intended me to find the story humorous but I couldn't find the humor anywhere. And not just because of my own personal history with this kind of behavior from authority figures. It felt like a case of punching down. The hungry kid didn't know how to use a can opener and rather than set aside his precious puzzle for a moment to teach her how, he withheld knowledge, doled out tidbits of advice until she was in tears, and is now making fun of her on Twitter. And he co-opts her story as his own by claiming "We were hungry" and "we were working on anger-management and perseverance too". No, pal, that was your kid who was hungry and frustrated. You're just an asshole.

She said, “I hate you.” I’m sure she believes that she does.

Spoiler: Dude, in that moment, I feel confident that she really hated you.
posted by skye.dancer at 10:33 AM on January 3, 2021 [47 favorites]

Also this jackass is so astonishingly un-self-aware, I got little shivers of glee/revulsion just reading his putrid little words, and I kind of wish I could attend a party he was at so I could eavesdrop on all the mouth-turds he no doubt drops, thinking he's perfuming the air with his arch wit and esoteric philosophies all the while.

Oh my god, that he actually shares with the world that he said to anybody (or wants us to think he said), "The tool is made to be pleasing but it doesn’t have any superfluous qualities."

This is a story about a tool all right, but a can opener isn't it.
posted by DingoMutt at 10:35 AM on January 3, 2021 [22 favorites]

CW for homophobia, antisemitism, misogny
Anyone who comments at me about how the bean dad is actually a really nice guy should read these tweets, written around the same time his article came out about how punk failed to solve institutional woes like racism and sexism.
posted by ShawnStruck at 10:38 AM on January 3, 2021 [24 favorites]

Somebody should have spent 6 hours deleting their shitty tweets instead of doing a puzzle.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:41 AM on January 3, 2021 [28 favorites]

dude tried to run for seattle city council a few years back. he got super super stomped, which made me happy inside. seeing this thread made me once again feel happy inside about roderick's political career ending before it started.

iirc his opponents were a chamber of commerce-backed incumbent on the one hand and a socialist tenants' rights organizer on the other. roderick tried to position himself as the sensible reasonable moderate who agreed with the socialist's desire to lower rents and protect tenants from predatory landlords, and also agreed with the incumbent's desire for the city government to diligently avoid actually doing anything to lower rents or protect tenants from predatory landlords. he ended up with about 10% of the vote, with (this is my assumption here) most of his voters voting for him because they really liked that one song.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 10:42 AM on January 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

For me, the worst part about this (aside from the fact that he comes off as a self-congratulatory twat) is that I looked up who this guy is, and now I have "Flagpole Sitta" stuck in my head.

Before that part goes too far, let's just be clear, this guy was a touring member of Harvey Danger for just about a year, it looks like. Diss on the band that's actually his band, The Long Winters, all you want, but I wouldn't say he was some kind of major contributor to Harvey Danger.

I'm sure it's gonna be a long winter for anyone stuck at home with him.
posted by limeonaire at 10:45 AM on January 3, 2021 [12 favorites]

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day teach a man (kid) to fish and they eat for a lifetime.

anyone?

Yes.

Jesus didn't walk on the water to show the apostles how clever he was.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 10:45 AM on January 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

We are finally ready to see our parents as the flawed human beings they are on the day the lobsters crawl out of the shower head.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:47 AM on January 3, 2021 [19 favorites]

Honestly one of the things that is pissing me off most about this is Bean Dad and others' defense that "six hours isn't a long time to go without food, it's just the gap between lunch and dinner".

Leaving aside the obvious fact that she was already hungry when the six hours started, and it might have been more like 8 or 9 hours... even six hours is actually a long time for a child to go without food. They have small stomachs and they are literally bodybuilders. They are growing. All the time. They need calories to support that. That's why they are supposed to eat snacks and stuff.

Also, it's actually pretty tough for kids to notice things like "I'm hungry," so by the time they tell you they're hungry, i'm gonna bet they're actually really hungry.

I can't even function well when I'm hungry and I'm a grown ass adult.

The absolute lack of empathy this guy has for his child's experience as a child with a growing body is just disgusting.
posted by the turtle's teeth at 10:47 AM on January 3, 2021 [49 favorites]

Wow, this thread sure is a litmus test for MeFites of some sort. A couple of things to point out:

1) Even if this story is partially or completely fictitious, this is a story that John Roderick chose to tell about himself, so it is completely fair and justifiable to assume that this is a real story about things that actually happened. There is a saying that goes around that especially applies to potential significant others, but can be applied to people in general: when someone tells you what they are like, believe them. (As wesleyac says above, if it's a bit, he sure is committed to it.)

2) Abuse is not all at one level, and there is no clear or obvious threshold between abuse and not-abuse. Many of those who have been abused as children, like me, know that one tool that abusers like to use is "you think that you've got it bad?" You don't need to be a world-class torturer of children to be engaged in problematic behavior with your kids. And, no, that does not mean that if you get your kid the purple Barbie's Dream SUV for Xmas instead of the pink one, or even if you think that something's a teachable moment and it turns out your kid is just hungry, you're an abuser. If your response to your kid wanting the pink one is to throw Barbie's Dream SUV in the fire, or if you make (or claim to make) your kid wait another six hours to eat when they were hungry to begin with, maybe you need to work on something.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:48 AM on January 3, 2021 [62 favorites]

This guy is an idiot
posted by 0bvious at 10:53 AM on January 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

I lived through this kind of bullshit as a child of this age. I wholly expect the truth to be worse than he let on. If he was anything like my dad, he probably insulted her repeatedly while she didn't eat.

I was a "gifted" child, so both my parents would expect me to figure things out without being taught, and often would teach me after letting me struggle. After that struggle though, there was a decidedly different approach by my parents. My mother would help me and explain things, and I would learn. My dad would use this asshole's approach: let me suffer, mock me, and then proceed to tell his adult friends about how this "smart kid" couldn't figure out something simple, usually in front of me.

The lesson I learned after a couple of rounds of this was that my father was someone that I could not go to for help, but further that ultimately he wasn't someone I could trust. My growing up was just something else for him to laugh at. We've never been close as a result of his treatment of me. I get all of the same feelings from this asshole, and doubly so when he continues his attempts to defend his actions.
posted by Mister Fabulous at 10:56 AM on January 3, 2021 [50 favorites]

Hope he enjoys all her therapy bills along with a side of beans!
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:41 AM on January 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

I hate those clamp-on and turn can openers - so finickity, so difficult to use, and they wear out within a year or two.

For simplicity (in design and use) and long lasting durability (like DECADES), the Scandinavian style shark-fin or P-38 can opener cannot be beaten. But you do need good hand control and strength to use it.

The best can opener that I've found to be used by anyone (including people with little hand control or strength) is this electric Hamilton Beach can-opener. Easy to attach the can, you just push the lever from above - and, most amazing of all, it doesn't cut the can but just uncrimps the top so there are no sharp edges anywhere.
posted by jb at 11:44 AM on January 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

And, y'know, the can.

Wait... I thought those just grew on trees?
posted by klanawa at 11:47 AM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

My dad did this kind of stuff to me. Not encouraging my natural curiosity, but making sure any request for help was basically a grueling miniature college engineering course that took four times as long as my childhood attention span. I wasn't allowed to interrupt, nor would he help me in a normal way. It would drag on, and on, and on, and in the meantime all I needed was someone to show me how to use needle-nosed pliers or reboot the computer or whatever. It was miserable. I read this thread and spent the next hour in a haze of stomach-churning anxiety it's so familiar.

I still deal with the fallout today - learning new skills, especially mechanical or physical ones, spikes my heart rate through the roof. I've learned to get through it with deep breathing and self soothing and Prozac but it took forever and it turned me off to learning about anything in which my dad had any expertise, because I hated his "help" so much. Even after I moved out I avoided everything that even had a tiny bit of association with him.

This isn't kind, or a teachable moment. This is parenting that imposes the (already bullshit) structured "rules" of adult learning on a child. It's shitty and awful and goes against fostering any sense of natural curiosity or play or learning how to learn or any of the things that actually encourages kids.

Also John Roderick is a tremendous piece of shit in general, as evidenced by his Tweet history.
posted by WidgetAlley at 11:50 AM on January 3, 2021 [79 favorites]

Leaving aside the obvious fact that she was already hungry when the six hours started, and it might have been more like 8 or 9 hours... even six hours is actually a long time for a child to go without food. They have small stomachs and they are literally bodybuilders. They are growing. All the time. They need calories to support that. That's why they are supposed to eat snacks and stuff.

I should probably put a trigger warning on this comment re: abuse and food. But this made me think.

It's sort of cathartic in a weird way to hear you say kids are supposed to eat snacks for a reason and they're not just an indulgence. Like yeah, I guess that totally is a normal, healthy part of many people's childhoods. Unfortunately, snacks specifically were a huge point of contention between my parents when I was a kid. I wish this had even been an inkling of an idea in my house.

My mother liked to get snacks, possibly in part because my father was controlling and abusive to the point of denying her food at times to try to starve her thinner, so snacks were always a secret. The dinner table was a frequent site of abuse, as he'd endlessly rail on her weight, pick fights, give her less food than everyone else or sometimes no food, insist on cooking everything and suggest she couldn't cook, call her anti-Semitic slurs about her weight, hit her, etc. I'm sure he learned some of this from his mother, who's always made comments about my body and my weight—and who I no longer talk to, of course.

Being involved isn't necessarily an unalloyed good either. He refused to let us learn to cook on our own, always insisting on supervising and criticizing what we did, so while my sibling and I were intuitive cooks, it took time for us to later reclaim the kitchen as a joyful space of our own. This was also why homeschool was a nightmare—I learned algebra and geometry early, but it was at the hands of a man who thought hitting was a valid form of communication and motivation. I forgot it all and had to relearn it later.

But giving us snacks, man, that was definitely not allowed. And so it came to pass that one of my childhood memories is of the time when, angry because he found out she'd taken us for ice cream or something like that, he kicked in the cup holder in the van in the library parking lot and someone called the police. Being allegedly self-sufficient, he later made his own wooden replacement cup holder, if I recall correctly.

Anyway, as others have said, I'm not saying this can-opener thing was that level of abuse or dysfunction. But I am saying that a father withholding food while suggesting it's for their kid's own good in some way certainly evokes some memories and feelings. While I still have complex feelings about the year before his death, when I quit visiting him in the nursing home, well, maybe you can start to see how I got there. Starve a family member, literally or figuratively, and see how it goes for you in your senescence.

Lots of speculation is going around re: the paltry contents of this guy's pantry, etc., and who really knows? But it's entirely possible to be food-insecure in a house full of food, and this is how you do it. My mother's house now? It's entirely full of food and snacks and whatever she wants to eat. Mine is full of bins of food I stockpiled at the beginning of the pandemic that at this point I need to start donating. There's probably some epigenetics-related stuff there in my response to crisis, since my grandparents and great-grandparents on both sides lived through lean times. But yeah, no doubt some of it also goes back to my father's abusive control of food when I was a kid.
posted by limeonaire at 11:53 AM on January 3, 2021 [56 favorites]

My one take here is that it seems wrong to assume that a can opener is a perfect, single purpose tool. Notably, OXO makes a better can opener (no sharp edges), and it too can confuse the uninitiated.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:54 AM on January 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

He should have taught her how to use the three seashells to open it. Humans are weird.
posted by dbiedny at 11:56 AM on January 3, 2021 [8 favorites]

...if you think that something's a teachable moment and it turns out your kid is just hungry,

I think this is part of what bothers me about the story/people brushing it off as not a big deal/saying he obviously knows his kid.

My parents were pretty in tune with us. If we said we were hungry, they wouldn't have decided we were obviously not actually hungry and could skip a meal*. I suspect even if they thought we were "bored" and not really hungry, healthy snack would have been available. Especially with kids and growth spurts etc, you never know when someone is going to become a bottomless pit.

My parents also didn't presume they were infallible. They occasionally checked in to make sure they were reading a situation right. They apologized if they thought they made a wrong call (honestly, sometimes there really wasn't a right call to make. They still apologized). Best of intentions don't always spare us from bad calls. Being able to acknowledge mistakes is a big part of mitigating the bad calls. Denying the possibility of making a bad call puts me on alert. Maybe it's a false alarm (hope so).

*Do some people hear "I'm hungry," as "I could eat now, or skip this meal entirely and eat the next one?" I'm sure that in some cases that's what some people mean by I'm hungry (some days I really only want one meal). But I'd probably want to clarify before unilaterally deciding that's what someone meant.
posted by ghost phoneme at 11:58 AM on January 3, 2021 [25 favorites]

Diss on the band that's actually his band, The Long Winters, all you want, but I wouldn't say he was some kind of major contributor to Harvey Danger.

John Rodrick is a moderate-ly sized figure in the Podcast-iverse (The theme tune for Mu Brother, My Brother, and Me, Roderick On The Line, assorted other things) so it B will be interesting to see goes this drifts out into this week’s episodes.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:05 PM on January 3, 2021

kimberussell: I cannot be the only infertile person who reads stuff like this, turns to the imaginary camera and says, “and *I’m* the one who couldn’t have kids!”

Nope, you’re not. I’m right here with you...

I teach adults. I have taught students from literacy level to second year of university. Even though I only taught ESL for a fraction of my 20+ year career, the best preparation I had for teaching anything at any level was ESL teacher training, where we were taught these four basic stages of any lesson:

1) activate prior knowledge—get students to do something (a task or discussion) that determines what they already know about the topic; it should get them ready to think about the concept they’ll be learning
2) discovery—set a carefully designed task that will help the students figure out what they need to know to [solve the problem, learn the grammar rule, understand the concept]
3) explicit instruction—teach the solution, rule, or concept to them explicitly and link it to the discovery task
4) practice—give them a supported opportunity to practice the skill, now that they know how to do it

If you skip steps, it doesn’t go very well for the average student and just makes them frustrated. This guy seemed to think he could go straight to step two, but he didn’t set up the discovery task well, just gave his daughter the task, with no preparation or real support. Also, the discovery task isn’t meant to go on for six hours, more like a few minutes!

I wish I could say I don’t have any colleagues who teach like this. The thing is, most college and university instructors in my country don’t have to have any training in pedagogy, just advanced degrees. I’m an anomaly because I did the ESL teacher training after I got my subject area degrees, and I’m so grateful for it. It’s definitely made me a better instructor.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:05 PM on January 3, 2021 [36 favorites]

Forget about this and cleanse your palate with Your Korean Dad, the purest thing on Tik Tok and the exact antidote to bean dad.

The fact that we haven't done an FPPon Your Korean yet is a grievous oversight.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:08 PM on January 3, 2021 [29 favorites]

I feel like I should say more explicitly that from my professional viewpoint, one 6-hr session in not having help with a can opener will not teach persistence or problem-solving. It may teach self-reliance in the "no one will help me" way.

But let's be clear, this dad did not model true persistence, which is probably one reason he's struggled with it. Persistence might have been her hassling him into telling her how to use it, or walking an hour to get takeout. Problem-solving might have been calling someone for help, asking him for help, or looking it up on YouTube or Google (his sole litmus test of "no screens" for good parenting is one indication that this guy does not do nuance well.)

Persistence and problem-solving also would have been taught over time, because both require time, but both would involve him doing more than withholding and would have required him to think things through.

On the parenting note-

Both my kids are able to cook because they cook with me often. They both take old things in the house apart to examine them and my oldest fixed the vacuum cleaner for me this year by taking it apart and cleaning it out and putting it back together.

I have not had to create situations for them in life that challenged them; those have come along just fine, and we're pretty privileged.

However, I have sometimes gotten a parenting principle in mind that got in the way. Here's my parenting story along those lines: When my oldest was a toddler I read that you should definitely only praise a child for effort, and probably not really do that, just reflect on details like "the sun is a nice bright yellow" rather than "wow, you drew a great picture" or even worse "wow, you're quite an artist."

At 4.5, my son was at a Montessori event and after it he turned to me with tears in his eyes and he said "Aren't you ever proud of me mommy?" And god, there was pain there. This is my biggest parenting aha moment I think which is...he had been signalling to me for quite some time that he just wanted me to be proud of him. Which I was. But I had read that we live in a time of over-praise and I had gone overboard in not praising him.

And that's the day I learned that to be a good parent is to see what's in your child's eyes and respond, not to pick a lesson and stick to it. Kids are learning machines. It's being aware of what we're teaching them.

If you think six hours is too long to go without food, you’re going to be really upset when you find out about Ramadan.

Pre-pubescent children are not required to fast for Ramadan. Some choose to - I know some who do - but there's a recognition that it's not required for kids.
posted by warriorqueen at 12:10 PM on January 3, 2021 [68 favorites]

You can give someone a fish and then teach them to fish.
posted by Joey Michaels at 12:13 PM on January 3, 2021 [37 favorites]

I taught my mom how to ride a bike when she was 45 and I was fifteen. It didn't take six hours and I didn't make fun of her at all.

When my blackberry finally bit the dust I took boy in the store for moral support. He said if I got that one he could show me how to use it cause it was what his mom had. Cool. He got me set up pretty quick with zero snark.

I really enjoyed both of those experiences. This guy isn't aware enough to see what he is missing out on by doing things his way. He is stuck and wasting time.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 12:13 PM on January 3, 2021 [16 favorites]

This reminds me of how peeved I get at educators who fetishize the Socratic method, and brag "oh I don't tell them X, I want them to find it for themselves." My expectation is that a certain percentage of the class doesn't ever really learn the principle at all, and they spend a lot of time floundering around when there is a perfectly qualified professional at the front of the room whose job is to teach. Just telling people things that they want to know can be an act of kindness and generosity.

Amen. Two things I had to learn for myself: 1) that there actually is a simple underlying concept for most things (well, that's obvious, what isn't obvious is that teachers often didn't emphasize that basic thing; 2) I really hated Socratic pedagogy. Just tell me what that thing is. (in loosely related: YT how-to videos that take a long time to get to the point.)

If this is a vote, I'm in favour of clamping side-open can-openers, I find the leverage better. (Also I had plenty of conflicts with my parents about differences of opinions, but in retrospect they were pretty good with important things so I was lucky there).
posted by ovvl at 12:15 PM on January 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

Also, skimming this thread just makes me wish we could consider it safe to label things as “something I think is bad/not what I would do” and “something I think is good/what I would emulate” without getting any more specific.

This is something I think was bad/not what I would do.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:19 PM on January 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

OMG DirtyOldTown, YourKoreanDad is amazing! Please someone do an FPP on him. (For those like me who don’t have TikTok: I was able to watch him on YouTube.)
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:21 PM on January 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

Anyone who comments at me about how the bean dad is actually a really nice guy should read these tweets, written around the same time his article came out about how punk failed to solve institutional woes like racism and sexism.

I'm no fan of Roderick. But, he's definitely not a Nazi or a homophobe. (I reserve judgement on how he treats women.) He's an aging liberal who dabbled with leftist politics in his youth and likes expressing strong opinions about boring things while listening to the echoes of his dick slapping against conference table. But, these quotes are taken out of context in a way that screams either bad faith or shitty research. His jokes may be dumb and not funny, but pretending that they aren't jokes doesn't help the conversation. There are far less dumb ways to critique him.
posted by eotvos at 12:25 PM on January 3, 2021 [10 favorites]

I don’t think ‘bipolar’ is the right word here - it makes light of a difficult mental illness.

I think they meant, literally, “having/dividing things between two poles.”
posted by atoxyl at 12:35 PM on January 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

As far as I'm concerned, ironic bigotry is still bigotry. The thin veneer of so called humor does nothing to mitigate the harm of the ideas.
posted by peppermind at 12:35 PM on January 3, 2021 [35 favorites]

There are merits to the socratic method. But one has to remember that Socrates probably left the education of 9-year-olds to his wife or slaves, if he even had any 9-year-olds in his household. Socratic method can be great with teens who are already always questioning everything. And at graduate school, when you are moving ahead from being a straight-A student to being an independent researcher. And sometimes in-between those two phases, in measured doses.

Also, a lot of Socrates' teachings were at symposiums, where there was plenty to eat and drink...

I am supposed to be commenting papers right now, and it is a PITA, because instead of discussing the merits of different educated choices within the projects, I'm spending time correcting basic vocabulary. No space for Socrates here.
posted by mumimor at 12:38 PM on January 3, 2021 [7 favorites]

I switched from a swingarm can opener to an Oxo sideways safety can opener in my 30s and even though I bought it on purpose and knew it went on sideways I had to watch a video twice to figure out how the heck to use the thing. (My kids are older, I'm back to a swingarm now; the Oxo was great once I had it on, but I always struggled to latch it properly.)

The thing about the Socratic Method is -- dramatic law school movies (and dickhead professors) aside, it's not just barking and people, "FIGURE IT OUT!" or "WHY? WHY? WHY?" like a toddler. I grew up in a family of lawyers and my dad was Socratic dialoguing me at the dinner table when I was eight years old. I went to law school, I used it to teach philosophy for five years, I use it on my own children on the regular.

It's a Socratic Dialogue and the skill to it is to ask the right questions for them to find the flaws in their own argument, and attempt to ameliorate them. To be the voice of more mature reason who helps a student think it through and specifically is scaffolding their reasoning process. And when you're using it as an actual teaching tool (and not just the bits Plato wrote down with all the side bits removed and Socrates getting some sick burns in), it sometimes goes wildly off track (people come up with some wacky stuff!) and you as the teacher have to say "Okay, hold up, I'm going to explain why that wouldn't work" or "We need to back up two steps, I've lost track of your argument and I'm confused."

And for the Socratic Method to work at all, you have to create an atmosphere where learners understand the process and feel safe enough to be publicly wrong in front of a teacher/parent/authority figure. My students were always hesitant at the beginning of the semester, and I was explicit that when we did the Socratic Method, the goal was for them to be wrong in interesting ways so we could all get closer to being right together. And when someone would hesitantly offer something up, I'd be like, "Good! Yes! You have found an extremely interesting way to be wrong! We're running with it!" And you've really got to coax it out of people at first! Students are used to the idea that being wrong in a classroom is bad. You have to teach them how it works, and be enthusiastically supportive of their wrongness, and clear about how that's part of the process. By the end of the semester we'd always be having these wildly free-wheeling Socratic dialogues where we'd all end up cracking up and everyone was super-engaged. But you have to BUILD to that.

(Sometimes my kids think it's really fun and interesting and sometimes they roll their eyes and say, "MOM. You're obviously only asking because I'm wrong and I just want to eat my snack.")
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:44 PM on January 3, 2021 [48 favorites]

I was wondering why "bean dad" was trending on Twitter this morning but Metafilter was ahead of the game.

I interviewed John Roderick many years ago, and he seemed like a jackass, but I've got a rule that I try not to decide whether someone is a jackass until I've got at least two data points. Now I've got the second, which clears up that mystery, so thanks John.
posted by ZaphodB at 12:51 PM on January 3, 2021 [32 favorites]

Not familiar with his Twitter history, but Roderick rubbed me the wrong way the handful of times I encountered him on podcasts a decade ago. Also I listened to a Long Winters album once and never had the desire to do so again. This dude never passed the sniff test for me, and as a parent, this stinks too.
posted by badbobbycase at 12:55 PM on January 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

He's an aging liberal who dabbled with leftist politics in his youth and likes expressing strong opinions about boring things while listening to the echoes of his dick slapping against conference table.

hey yo the Jimmy Dore thread is next week
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 1:04 PM on January 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

I think they meant, literally, “having/dividing things between two poles.”

Yeah, maybe "polarized" is the word I was going for there. No mental illness connection intended.
posted by ctmf at 1:05 PM on January 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Which would probably be a bit in poor taste, given how open John Roderick talks about his bipolar disorder in his roughly hundreds of podcasts.
posted by dominik at 1:07 PM on January 3, 2021

Yeah, for everyone dunking on his failed city council run, he’s subsequently discussed that he was in a manic phase when he did that.

Think what you will of the Twitter thread/his parenting, but the whole “point and laugh” at his public failures/“his music sucks” thing is pretty gross.
posted by bluloo at 1:10 PM on January 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

One of the most pernicious misconceptions about abuse is that abuse is the result of malice. The idea that this guy loves his child and therefore this isn't abuse? Like WOW. It's total bullshit.

Abusers *can* be people who lack love for their victim but that's not the definition of abuse. Abuse is defined by MISUSING POWER OVER OTHERS, enacting one's own interpersonal agenda with disregard for other people's own stated needs or desires, no matter the motivation.

Very often that motivation IS love. Egotists may genuinely believe they know what's best for you and if they have enough power, they may impose their will on you out of a sincere desire for (*their conception of*) your wellbeing. "Ah! A teachable moment! Your hunger and your distress and your very loud non-consent will be ignored because they conflict with my desire to teach you something. I forbid you to eat until you have learned what I want you to learn." The abuse here lies in misusing one's own power to override the other's autonomy and stated preferences, not in lacking love or lacking concern for the other's wellbeing.

Anyone who has power is capable of abusing that power, regardless of whether they feel love or hatred or indifference, regardless of whether they intend malice or not. Abuse is shockingly commonplace for this exact reason. GENUINELY 'GOOD' PEOPLE ARE FULLY CAPABLE OF ABUSING OTHERS. Officers bully military recruits not just because they enjoy the power trip but also to habituate them into developing skills necessary for survival in military culture. People force their spouses to have sex with them not just because they condone rape but also sometimes in order to save the marriage and show their love for their spouse. Parents stalk their estranged children not just because they're narcissistic control freaks but also because they're grieving parents who are trying to communicate their love. Abuse is abuse no matter the motivation.

And in corollary, no abuser can abuse anyone they don't have power over, regardless of the sincerity of their mission/beliefs. This dad wouldn't force his buddies or colleagues or (I hope) his spouse or his adult child to stay hungry until they figure out a can opener, even though he sincerely totally 100% believes in the gospel of people needing to figure out can openers on their own. Like, if he was dictator of the whole world, you bet your ass he's going to decree that everyone should go through what his daughter went through! But without the power to enact their agenda on others, abusers do not abuse anyone.

Power tells the whole story. Power is the necessary and sufficient condition for this equation to work. Whether the abuser's act is malicious or loving, whether the abuser is neglectful or incompetent, doesn't matter at all. Abuse is 100% about power, not intentions or motivations.

Loving people perpetrate abuse alllllll the fucking time. This guy's a pretty clear example. He disregarded her stated desires and wishes. He disregarded her needs. He prioritized his agenda and enacted it on her because he had power over her. This is textbook abuse.
posted by MiraK at 1:15 PM on January 3, 2021 [67 favorites]

Ah, the Socratic method.... I think this might be why I keep turning back to this train-wreck, because I'm a teacher, and the Socratic method to me often seems like a holy grail of teaching .... like, I get it, it can be quite thrilling when it works! It's the method where you're mostly likely to actually get to see the metaphorical lightbulb switch on over your student's head. Of course that's the sort of high you're tempted to chase as a teacher if you got to experience it once. I've always admired teachers who could pull it off and it's a long-held ambition of mine to be able to emulate them.

But right now, I'm attempting it rarely, because as Eyebrows McGee pointed out, you have to work up to it. You have to create the right conditons, build the right sort of relationship with your students. It's tricky! And risky, because the failure mode of the Socratic Methode is wasting everyone's time and making learning harder than it has to be, and I can't afford that with lots of my students, who already have a hard enough time as it is, due to circumstances beyond their and my control.

In fact I was taught at uni that failure to pull of the Socratic method is one of the chief reasons for lessons going poorely - teachers think that's what they're doing, but they're not doing it right; they underestimate the skills required and overestimate the skills they have; their questions are not sufficiently thought-provoking, they're not really building on students' answers; they've already lost half of the class and are only talking to two or three students taking mercy on them, trying to guess at what the teacher wants them to say, and ultimately suceeding, because teachers will eventually cheat by phrasing the questions sufficiently suggestively/giving nonverbal cues and putting the answer in students' mouths (think Clever Hans phenomenon), so it's easy to delude yourself as a teacher that the lesson was much more interactive and cognitively stimulating than it actually was, when students have in fact just blindly groped for an answer and eventually stumbled on the right one, without understanding all that much.

So the Socratic method was presented to us as high risk/high reward strategy, and while we were taught, it would ultimately be worth it, we were also taught to be discerning about the application, especially as beginners, because time being usually a constraint in institutional education, it might often be a good idea to save a bit of time in the discovery phase by providing rather more scaffolding than less, and thus win more time for practice and repetition, especially when it comes to foundational skills.

My experience (as a student at least) is that lightbulb moments can also happen with teaching styles that rely more heavily on instruction and demonstration - it just might not feel that way at first to the teacher, when students learn mostly by imitating, it's at first harder to see if they're just copying you without actually understanding, or whether it has actually already clicked for them. But that's why you gradually increase the difficulty level by subtly varying the initial challenge to match your students learning curve and that's also quite hard to pull of actually, because it requires paying close attention to your students and being well attuned to their learning process. (Then again, so does the Socratic method, if you do it right, and if feel that's what went wrong for Bean Dad - challenges can be important learning opportunities, but students first need to be in a comfort zone to actually benefit from leaving it. Maybe that's just me, but being hungry and having to skip lunch for a lesson is definitely not my comfort zone. I like to think of myself as a person who likes a bit of a challenge on occasion, but that only every applies for challenges I can pick for myself - even I really have a hard time appreciating the learning opportunity in challenges I'm forced into).
posted by sohalt at 1:49 PM on January 3, 2021 [22 favorites]

Mod note: One Nazi accusation linking to a deleted tweet removed, maybe try to keep this a little more on-topic?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 1:55 PM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Dude's a Nazi.

That seems to have been deleted and walked back due to being a fake. Which... who would do that? Baffling.
posted by ominous_paws at 1:55 PM on January 3, 2021

I listen to and generally enjoy Omnibus as a podcast-to-fall-asleep to, but this... i dunno. Might need to find another podcast now. There's a huge, huge leap between being cautious of teaching learned helplessness (the kid who just knows Dad will just do it for me) vs this. Give the kid sufficient time to fight with it (ie less than 6 HOURS!), then show them how it's done. Then have them grab a second can and do it for themselves, and then explain it back how they did it. This was just cruel. You learn by watching, doing, then teaching.
posted by cgg at 1:56 PM on January 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

with the rhetorical authority conferred upon me by virtue of being a Child of Abuse, I hereby declare that the primary takeaway is an appreciation for this man’s unfathomable power: like some sort of infinity stone of Stupidity, he has everyone on the internet grabbing hands and being bequeathed with the same ability to hurl blinding flames of bullshit with no apparent diminution of effect
posted by invitapriore at 1:57 PM on January 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

This post currently has more comments than any of the US or UK politics posts. Is this a sign that things are getting better? I hope so. Also: love is all you need.
posted by mumimor at 1:59 PM on January 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

Sorry, why it is not on-topic that the guy turns out to be an actual Nazi?
posted by holborne at 2:01 PM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

“The 4th has been perverted by activist (Jew) judges and mud-people apologists.”

Dude's a Nazi.

So I clicked through, and the context for this tweet (which is very confusing to interpret, because half the conversation appears to have disappeared) is him responding angrily to an old Jezebel story about a black girl being excessively disciplined for a science experiment gone wrong. Roderick is weighing in in favor of the girl and is mad at the school admins. This appears to be the kind of really bad, po’-faced satirical tweet that Twitter is perfect for decontextualizing and repackaging as proof that someone is beyond the pale.

This is really gross and shockingly excessive.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:01 PM on January 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

But I thought satirical racism was still racism.
posted by holborne at 2:06 PM on January 3, 2021 [8 favorites]

Like, 2020 (through 2016) has really rotted our brains off we find it easy to assume that a feature character in a viral moment isn’t just actually kind of bad but is also a follower of the tenets of national socialism.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:06 PM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Also: love is all you need.

If only!
posted by Bella Donna at 2:09 PM on January 3, 2021 [8 favorites]

But I thought satirical racism was still racism.

thats_bait.gif
posted by Going To Maine at 2:10 PM on January 3, 2021

Heh. Imagine co-hosting podcasts with Merlin Mann and Ken Jennings and yet still coming across as the biggest know-it-all asshole of the bunch!
posted by Atom Eyes at 2:10 PM on January 3, 2021 [16 favorites]

Btw, for some reason, the guy's timeline contains a whole lot of "satirical" anti-Semitism. Weird, huh?
posted by holborne at 2:12 PM on January 3, 2021 [19 favorites]

" it's easy to delude yourself as a teacher that the lesson was much more interactive and cognitively stimulating than it actually was, when students have in fact just blindly groped for an answer and eventually stumbled on the right one"

YES. I also think, if you're teaching by the Socratic Method, and you've never been standing in front of a class 3/4 of the way in, asked a Socratic question, had a student respond, and been stumped into silence for a solid minute before admitting, "That's a better point than the one I was building towards, and I'm not sure how to answer it," I feel like you're probably not doing it right.

And, yeah, there's a bunch of stuff you just can't teach that way. I vividly recall a time when I was teaching philosophy four days a week and had a newborn, and being so crushingly exhausted I reflexively started trying to teach the toddler how to put on his shoes via a Socratic Dialogue.

Reader, it did not work.

Also, the next 4700 times we tried to put his shoes on, he'd parrot some of the Socratic questions back at me and fuck around with putting his shoes on, because he'd found the entire thing hilarious. "Which shoe like which foot? ME NOT KNOW! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" I was hoist on my own petard and it sucked. Learn from my errors, draw smiley faces with Sharpie on the inside side of each shoe and tell them make the smiley faces kiss before putting the shoes on the feet. Don't attempt to teach them how shoes work from first principles.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:15 PM on January 3, 2021 [57 favorites]

Well that didn't take long. The Mary Sue weighs in on how Mitch McConnell is basically Bean Dad, and it all boils down to toxic masculinity, etc., etc.
posted by emjaybee at 2:20 PM on January 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

Beans, beans
The musical fruit
The more you tweet, the more we mute
The more we mute, the better we feel
So tweet more shit, you bean-brained heel!
posted by Atom Eyes at 2:27 PM on January 3, 2021 [22 favorites]

VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we teach?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let's teach.

They do not teach.
posted by ckape at 2:36 PM on January 3, 2021 [10 favorites]

John Rodrick is a moderate-ly sized figure in the Podcast-iverse (The theme tune for My Brother, My Brother, and Me, Roderick On The Line, assorted other things) so it B will be interesting to see goes this drifts out into this week’s episodes.

My Brother, My Brother and Me are already backing away:

For reasons we’re sure you’re all aware of, we’re getting started finding new music for MBMBaM. You’ll probably hear a filler theme song on this week’s episode. We’re not sure what’ll come after that, honestly, but we hope you’ll stick around to find out.

We appreciate John letting us use one of his songs as the theme for MBMBaM for nearly a decade, but his response to today’s situation is emblematic of a pattern of behavior that is antithetical to the energy we try to bring to the things we do, and so it’s time for us to move on.

This is an entirely expected response from the McElroys, who have really made kindness their brand. And it sounds like it's less about the initial tweets and more about the digging-in that followed.
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:43 PM on January 3, 2021 [35 favorites]

Can anyone summarize the follow up? Saw the McElroy’s response, went to try and figure out what “the response to today’s situation” was and found the original link now points to a tweet to an account that no longer exists? Was John deleting his account the response, or was there more?

On edit: or is that the Nazi stuff? havent read the whole thread. ignore me if it is.
posted by cgg at 2:51 PM on January 3, 2021

He deleted his account just now, but before that he was apparently arguing with all comers about the initial series of tweets. I've really only been following this here but that's the impression I got.
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:53 PM on January 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

Huh, I was getting ready to say that I was pretty much done with the Max Fun universe and am actually surprised at the McElroy's fast turn around on this.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 3:01 PM on January 3, 2021

I continue to be very bothered how every time someone even moderately famous makes a stupid mistake on Twitter, the world dives into their history and starts sharing tweets without context—and sometimes faking them—to fully take that person down.
posted by SansPoint at 3:02 PM on January 3, 2021 [14 favorites]

This tweet has some examples of things dug up from the past. None of it really relates to the topic of teaching and parenthood and beans, and now that the Twitter account has been deactivated, it’s not possible to go and verify if they were real.
posted by lazugod at 3:03 PM on January 3, 2021

I don’t give a shit if his tweets about Jews were ironic or not. I read some and they were not OK. So I am glad his account is gone even apart from the bean issue. I love it when assholes get push back for being assholes. That doesn’t happen as often as it should. It makes a nice change from people getting push back for being, say, nine, hungry, and new to can openers. I get pushback all the time for just being me, which is to say a non-asshole but neurodiverse type. Farewell for now, Mr. Beans. You wanted a teaching moment: Try to make use of this one.
posted by Bella Donna at 3:08 PM on January 3, 2021 [37 favorites]

I heard John Roderick once farted and denied it.
posted by chasing at 3:08 PM on January 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

really i think a lesson we can all learn is that it's a bad idea to casually post things on the Internet under your real name.

i know i'm kind of violating this rule right now. i tell myself that metafilter's small and obscure enough for me to get away with it, but probably i should be more careful...
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 3:10 PM on January 3, 2021 [10 favorites]

Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon: Wait... you really are Thomas Pynchon?! I love your work!
posted by SansPoint at 3:11 PM on January 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

Full Disclosure: I too engaged in Bad Kitchen Dadness yesterday when I interrupted my son's Pokemon game with handfuls of blank Shrinky-Dink sheets yelling SHRINKY DINK. He did not know what they were and I messed up by not throwing them at him and telling him to figure it out but helping him churn out the full Ghastly evolutionary line.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 3:13 PM on January 3, 2021 [13 favorites]

I continue to be very bothered how every time someone even moderately famous makes a stupid mistake on Twitter, the world dives into their history and starts sharing tweets without context—and sometimes faking them—to fully take that person down.

Sigh. Can we please object to people mocking up fake tweets while neither minimizing/excusing a self-confessed anecdote of abusive parenting as "a stupid mistake" nor (seemingly correspondingly) hyperbolizing a round of twitter-based mockery as "fully taking that person down"? Jeez.

As far as we can tell, he was not the recipient of any bigotry or identity-based hate, he was not threatened or harassed, he was not in any danger, he was not subjected to anything worse than a lot of people telling him all at once that he's a shithead for doing a thing he confessed to doing. He could have muted responses. He could have refrained from checking his mentions. He could have logged off the internet for a few days. He could have taken his twitter account private. Nobody forced him to delete his account, nobody silenced him, nobody "fully took this person down". FFS. Talk about reversing victim and offender. His daughter endured him denying her access to food longer than this.
posted by MiraK at 3:17 PM on January 3, 2021 [61 favorites]

As a teacher and a human being who works with children, I’m on the line of “fuck this guy.” I’m grateful for this thread and the responses on Twitter that have pointed out some things about being better about being a teacher and a human being who works with children, and I’m going to do my best to incorporate those things into how I do both of those things.

More than anything, this is making me think of all the funny stories my family had. We had a thing where someone would say or do something, and it would set someone off, and there would be screaming and yelling and people telling other people to get out of the house and never come back. They would never last very long, and when they had blown over, and the tears were drying, the adults would start telling stories about similar fights they had had with their parents back in the day. There were more than enough fights and telling a of stories that these stories are ingrained in the members of the generation I’m a part of.

It took me years to figure this all out. It took distance, and the desire to connect by sharing experiences, finding points in common, and all of that, by telling these stories to friends.

I mean, here I am, thinking I’m just relaying a funny anecdote about the environment I was raised in, and my friends and acquaintances, more often than not, were stunned by the stories I tell. To me, they make up what I had assumed to have been a remarkably normal upbringing lacking any sort of abuse because I was never physically hit.

I’m still not willing to call any of the members of my family abusive or abuser, but we all grew up in a cycle of toxicity, raised by people who never really learned how to become better parents than the ones who had no idea how to raise them. My life is filled with stories that went from funny-to-me because I thought it was a normal thing to maybe-I-shouldn’t-tell-these anymore because they are pretty solid examples of a deeply unhealthy family.

That’s the takeaway for me from bean dad. He’s so deeply into believing that his story is funny that he’ll never notice the shocked look on a listener’s face. He’s so into thinking his experiences (that led him to thinking this was not only acceptable to do, but also acceptable to brag about) are normal that he’s stunned by the large number of people who are trying to show him that there are better ways, ways that won’t become an anecdote his daughter learns its best not to share.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:22 PM on January 3, 2021 [53 favorites]

Can I just clarify: is there any evidence there were faked “joke” racist tweets?

All the people I saw posting objectionable things were people I believe to be reliable and likely to check things like this before retweeting.
posted by ambrosen at 3:25 PM on January 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

MiraK, I saw multiple threads of people discussing calling CPS on him. So, not just internet mockery after all.
posted by bluloo at 3:29 PM on January 3, 2021

For whatever it's worth, I clicked on the links people were posting to his anti-semitic tweets and they did exist. I clicked on at least 5 or 6 links and found actual tweets by him "ironically" talking about jewish lawyers etc.

(upon preview: and people on twitter discussing calling cps on him is... what? "taking him fully down"? I don't get it?)
posted by MiraK at 3:30 PM on January 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

Dionne Warwick is a treasure.
posted by ZaphodB at 3:30 PM on January 3, 2021 [7 favorites]

Catching up on this thread keeps getting away from me, but I wanted to chip in my two cents all the same.

I remembered the overreactions to kids-bust-in-the-room-while-live-on-the-BBC Dad. Including unfounded fears of him taking out his rage on his family and whatnot. So I worried that perhaps the same thing was happening this time, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

I had as fine and idyllic a childhood as one can imagine, never knowing real hardship and being catered to at every turn. My parents bent over backwards to provide me with every opportunity and enrichment possible. Sure, there were crummy neighborhood parents and sadistic coaches in my life, but I didn't grow up in an abusive environment.

Nevertheless, I could tell that this guy's assholery was way over the line. He wasn't doing any of what he though he was about teaching "grit" or whatever Cobra-Kai bullshit he had going on in his head. I thought it was obvious, like the way a can opener works, but one shouldn't try to "toughen up" kids who still sleep with stuffed animals.
posted by ob1quixote at 3:31 PM on January 3, 2021 [10 favorites]

Chiming in as another child with a strained parent relationship: I'm sure my parent continues to maintain that their parenting wasn't abusive, and indeed, another child might have forgiven and moved on better than I have. A lot of behavior isn't black-and-white abusive so much as somewhere on a continuum of dysfunction. The more appropriate question might be: what is the likelihood my kid will find this a sad, scary, or angry story in adulthood? If I keep stacking up those stories, are my 'teachable moments' worth the risk that I'm really teaching my kid that they should pull way back on asking me for comfort or help?

With only the info presented, sure, maybe it's 50/50 whether this will be a fond childhood memory or another example in "eventually, I just stopped asking Dad for anything." Parents might choose their own level of risk, but they should be aware that... they'll live with their child's perception of events and it might not be what they thought.
posted by nakedmolerats at 3:36 PM on January 3, 2021 [18 favorites]

I'd like to clarify that I was being loose with my terminology in my comments when used the phrase "Socratic Pedagogy" when I intended to say "That-style-of-teaching-where-the-teacher-always-says-just-figure-it-out-for-yourself" (which I often conflate with some High School Mathematics teachers whose style was "If-you-don't-get-it-you're-stupid-don't-bother-me").

The Socratic Method is a valid system of discussion, and not applicable in every situation.
posted by ovvl at 3:39 PM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

I know a few people who are not neurotypical, and who have children who aren't either. Some of them are on social media. For some, this works out just fine, a couple of my friends are role models for how they handle the challenges they have been given. For others, you might think that they need some help. Unfortunately, even here in socialist paradise, the authorities aren't really good at handling this.
I guess what I want to say is that there is no easy answer here. Dad and kid need a stocked fridge and ideally someone to help them organize their day. Most municipalities won't provide that to a middle-class dad who seems to be handling things just fine.
posted by mumimor at 3:41 PM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Turned out this guy's a white supremacist too, so it's been a fun couple days.
posted by signsofrain at 3:50 PM on January 3, 2021

Can I just clarify: is there any evidence there were faked “joke” racist tweets?

You know how occasionally you’re scrolling through a MeFi thread and you come across a mod note that reads something like: “Some comments deleted. Just a reminder folks: the use of ironic racism to make a political point is never helpful.” This guy’s tweets were basically a whole lot of that.
posted by Atom Eyes at 3:54 PM on January 3, 2021 [26 favorites]

Can I just clarify: is there any evidence there were faked “joke” racist tweets?

The tweets are (were) real. The context for the intent being ironic is pretty straightforward for some of them though. I mean by all means say they guy’s sense of humor sucks (or did whenever he wrote those) but claiming he’s a white supremacist based on that one exchange about the fourth amendment is just lazy/bad faith reading.
posted by atoxyl at 3:58 PM on January 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

Some of them I can’t make head or tail about what he’s on about, though. Like one of them dates from right when Daniel Tosh was in trouble for a rape joke back in 2012 and he calls Daniel Tosh an asshole and then threatens to rape Dave Anthony so??
posted by atoxyl at 4:02 PM on January 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

Yes, I was confused* as to why people upthread were claiming the racist tweets were fake. I am confident in my understanding that joke racism is just a different expression of racism.

*this is a polite way of saying that I was angry.
posted by ambrosen at 4:04 PM on January 3, 2021 [14 favorites]

As a long-time Omnibus devotee, I’d found myself more and more fed up with John’s brand of digression and his tendency to bloviate (and for Ken to refuse to rein it in, mostly) once I was listening in bed and not zoned out behind the wheel anymore. I’ve been pretty regularly skipping “John” episodes lately, for that reason.

He also has been talking, lately, about how he likes to wind up the members of their Facebook group. A 50-year-old man trolling for fun. Which is probably what he thought he was doing here when he dug in. He doesn’t seem to have counted on a much larger, more diverse, less friendly audience.

Like, we can’t actually know what’s happening over at Casa Roderick, parenting-wise. But the genre of “men who don’t know when to just take the L and shut up” is pretty played out.
posted by uncleozzy at 4:04 PM on January 3, 2021 [12 favorites]

confused* as to why people upthread were claiming the racist tweets were fake

If this is me, and, you know, it's fine to name me! And fine to just say you're angry! I was looking at another thread on the hell site where someone had backed off the same screen cap and said that it was fake as in possibly actually faked. Anyway turns out it was not this and was actually bad ironic racism, so that's less bizarre although, yes, worse.
posted by ominous_paws at 4:11 PM on January 3, 2021

Let's recap: that 9 yr old endured six hours of her father (inescapable adult with total power over her) browbeating her and denying her access to food, and she's still sticking around to be his daughter, she didn't disengage from him. This 52 year old man deleted his account and ran away with his tail between his legs because he was too fragile to endure a bunch of strangers with zero power over him mocking him on Twitter... mockery that nobody was forcing him to read, which he could have escaped entirely simply by logging out of his account. And like, he set out to teach her the value of "grit"?! LOL.

Also the idea that somehow what he did to the child is nbd, not abusive, totally normal parenting... but what twitter did is mob violence or "taking him down" or toxic cancel culture etc. White guy privilege, whew! Takes my breath away.
posted by MiraK at 4:16 PM on January 3, 2021 [78 favorites]

And what exactly does he intend to do when she's learning to drive?
posted by basalganglia at 4:50 PM on January 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

Jigsaw Puzzles.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 4:56 PM on January 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

Maybe he didn't know how to use the can opener but couldn't admit it? He spent the six hours frantically looking up can opener videos on YouTube.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 4:57 PM on January 3, 2021 [8 favorites]

Dear God. Please let him not own a stick shift.
posted by ghost phoneme at 5:00 PM on January 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

Edit: I posted a link to a McElroy tweet already posted two hours ago.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 5:01 PM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

So I am a clinical coach, which means that I am an expert nurse who helps other nurses with clinical issues in my specialty. Coaching is distinct from teaching or mentoring or other kinds of adult learning.

When you’re doing your job as a coach, ideally you’re helping an adult learner to identify their own problems and their own solutions. You’re there to help guide them in this but not to jump in and do it for them.

However, not every moment is a coachable moment. Sometimes people need other forms of teaching or help. Trying to force people into being coached when it’s not appropriate is stupid and makes basically everything worse (the situation, the person’s confidence, their future help seeking behaviors, etc) and can fracture your relationship with that person. I can’t imagine doing that to a kid.

This dude seemed to think this was a coachable moment for his daughter. He arrived at this decision for god only knows what reason. Ok, we all make mistakes. And then he stuck to it. For six hours. Because he’s a giant asshole. Because he was more committed to giving his kid this abstract philosophical moment than he was to his kids wellbeing. What a dick.

If you keep trying to “coach” someone who is not in the right place, it will not work. If you do it for six hours you are a giant asshole and also a fucking weirdo bluntly.

If you are such an asshole that you let your kid hit their head against a wall for six fucking hours and then brag about it on the internet, you’re a bad parent and should feel bad.
posted by supercrayon at 5:07 PM on January 3, 2021 [37 favorites]

$10 says this Roderick guy has a big ol' "cancel culture" screed going on his podcast(s?) or on some right-ish website in the next 60 days.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:14 PM on January 3, 2021 [19 favorites]

over complicated anecdotal deep dives aside

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day teach a man (kid) to fish and they eat for a lifetime.

anyone?

Ok, I'll bite...
I've always hated this saying. The man presumably needs a fish because he is hungry, right now. He's going to learn to fish (which even in the best case will likely take hours, to accumulate the tools, travel to the fishing site, learn the techniques, wait for an opportunity to catch a fish, blow that first opportunity, ...) while he's hungry?

And what happens if there just aren't any fish caught that day? What happens later on if the river is diverted for a dam or the water becomes polluted, and there aren't any more fish?

But I suppose that 'have a good social program in place to ensure that basic needs are met and then put in place opportunities for training programs so that we can all support ourselves and contribute to society in meaningful ways, despite a changing world' just isn't catchy enough.
posted by tumbling at 5:27 PM on January 3, 2021 [34 favorites]

Damn, supercrayon, reading your comment dredged up something I hadn't thought about in years. Not suppressed or anything, just something I haven't had to think about.

Picture young Ghidorah, in probably second or third grade of elementary school, pulled into one of those academically talented programs that were all the rage in the early 80s (ffs, it was actually called the Academically Talented program until they noticed other students having confidence issues about not being in it). I was good at math. I loved it. I am not anymore, and haven't been for a long time, and it's due to a lot of factors, but maybe this more than a lot of others.

I was able to do multiplication in my head. Like, 3 and 4 digit numbers times other 3 or 4 digit numbers. My teacher decided that wasn't good enough, and kept me after school, making me write out the problems, each time telling me that I was wrong. I worked at it again and again, knowing I had the answers right, trying to figure out what was wrong, finally breaking into tears (I cried pretty easily as a kid, but still...), and they still wouldn't help. I kept after the same set of problems for maybe half an hour?

Finally, they told me that my work was all wrong because I wasn't writing in the "magic zeroes" in the problem. Once I'd moved past the single column, onto the tens and hundreds, I hadn't been writing the zeroes because even as an elementary student, I already knew they were there, and therefore fucking pointless to write out.

This teacher could have just said, "hey, lil' Ghidorah, do me a favor and add in those zeroes in the tens and hundreds column, just for (insert actually sound reason here), I'd appreciate it, thanks." Instead, they decided to take a student with an actual love for the subject and humiliate them in front of their peers.

So, yeah, that might have had something to do with why I ended up re-taking geometry in summer school and barely finishing up at algebra 2.

I feel for this kid. I hope this isn't representative of her daily life, but given how defensive the guy got, I can't imagine it isn't. I hope, someday, she's able to find people that understand the difference between self-reliance and nurturing, between picking hills to die on and compassion. One of the best things I've ever come to realize on reaching adulthood is that you damn well can pick your family, because family is the close circle of friends you build up around yourself, not the self-centered assholes you had the shit luck of being born to.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:28 PM on January 3, 2021 [64 favorites]

Wow, that's rough, Ghidorah. I'm sorry to hear that.
posted by CarrotAdventure at 5:41 PM on January 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

That’s awful Ghidorah. Why do some adults think being a stubborn prick will help children? Or making them feel stupid? Or embarrassing them? Like adults don’t respond well to that shit so why would a kid?

I truly feel like a large segment of adults have absorbed the message that kindness and caring are a form of weakness, and that kids need to be resilient above anything else. And that the way for them to be resilient is to be mild to moderately horrid to them. Why is this a thing?

I honestly believe that kindness and respect, and the strong bonds it helps develop between people (kids or grownups or anyone), makes people more brave and more able to take appropriate risks. If you know you’re safe you’re more likely to try stuff. If you feel vulnerable you’re more likely to shrink back. If you want brave kids, be kind and brave yourself.

Don’t be a bullshit bean dad.
posted by supercrayon at 5:45 PM on January 3, 2021 [31 favorites]

And what exactly does he intend to do when she's learning to drive?

Given his current behavior, I'd give good odds that he'll have limited visitation rights by that time.
posted by octothorpe at 6:03 PM on January 3, 2021 [10 favorites]

I probably missed this, but we do know this guy was milkshake duck even before the beans dad thing right? I mean, he's been calling ethnic minorities "mud people", he's thrown Jewish tropes around like Mardi Gras beads, he's a straight up abelist and woman denigrator.

The bean dad thing triggered me much harder than I thought. I've been thinking about it all day, and I'm just furious for his daughter. How dare he ridicule her for something he's never taught her? How dare he have no other food but prepper food, insist that she eat beans, then force her go hungry for six hours rather than saying "Here's how you get a can opener started." How dare he brag that he made her cry and complain about being fuzzy headed because she was hungry? This is an elementary aged kid. She is old enough to understand the lesson that was truly taught; His needs to be patriarchal and therefore correct, outweighs any of her needs, including life sustaining needs.

Now that he's been "cancelled", and privatized his twitter feed, I am in physical fear for that girl. He's going to take this out on someone. I know this personality. I've hidden in closets, and under clothes and in shrubbery in neighbor's yards because of this personality. I've gone hungry, and started running away from home at 12 because of this personality.

He's a monster, and he tortured this child for his own amusement, rather than just showing her how to get the opener started, and I'm astonished that people don't see how he just admitted it, while looking for praise and pats on the back.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 6:22 PM on January 3, 2021 [21 favorites]

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day teach a man (kid) to fish and they eat for a lifetime.

anyone?

The keyword is teach. If all you do is hand the man a pole, a spool of line, and a box of hooks and wish him 'good luck' he's probably gonna starve to death.
posted by Frayed Knot at 6:31 PM on January 3, 2021 [39 favorites]

There are a lot of issues to write about here, and I had a whole lot written, but I deleted it and I will just say Thank You to the MeFites pointing out that adult tools aren't designed for a child's grip. Take it from someone who has been to the ER because the authority figure in my life assumed I simply wasn't trying hard enough.
posted by Monochrome at 6:39 PM on January 3, 2021 [30 favorites]

The fact that Ken Jennings is defending this jackass undermines whatever worth his apologies for his own shitty tweets might previously have had.
posted by DingoMutt at 6:39 PM on January 3, 2021 [15 favorites]

When first I heard that this whole Bean Dad thing had unearthed racist tweets by the guy I was expecting some oblivious white man nonsense. Not the horrifying shit that he actually posted. "Mud people?" Jesus. How did he get by this long?
posted by brundlefly at 6:45 PM on January 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

Yeah I can't stop thinking about this jackass either. Over dinner just now, I told my kids (aged 9 and 12) about how some guy is getting roasted on Twitter today because of a story he told about his 9 yr old daughter. They asked about it, and I read his tweet thread out to them.

Halfway through my reading, I noticed my 12 yr old getting unusually stiff and my 9 yr old had tears in her eyes and her face was all tight and fierce. "What's up?" I asked them. My 9 yr old burst out, "But why does he have to be so mean?!" My 12 yr old was silent and stone-faced, staring at me, almost glaring at me. That's when I realized... my kids and I have had a few conversations recently about online bullying and people piling on each other online, so they were probably assuming I was feeling critical of the Twitter mob and supportive of the dad!

If I were anything like Apocalypse Dad I would have called this a Teaching Moment and tried to Socrates my 12 yr old into figuring out how I really felt, like presented him with logical challenges or asked him to consider the evidence of my past behavior or professed principles maybe? to check his premises before assuming I was on the dad's side. To put it another way I would have let him stew further and further in frustration and resentment of me, only to surprise him in the end with "Gotcha! I was actually hating on the dad all along!" and cackled in glee at his stupidity. Then I would have gone on twitter to tell my tale of fantastic parenting.

As it was, my 12 yr old's stony face broke my heart a little, as did my 9 yr old's obvious distress at the story. I immediately broke the tension at the dinner table by saying, "What a jerk, right?!" My 12 yr old took a couple of visible breaths and muttered something like, "Bully," and my 9 yr old let her tears fall from her eyes as her face got less tightly scrunched up. Both of their faces relaxed immediately. My daughter said if she were in the kid's shoes, she would throw the can of beans at that dad's head; my son said if he was in that kid's shoes he would force the dad to forever open all cans with just a knife. But they were laughing as they said it, now that they felt safe with me, knowing that I wasn't on the mean dad's side.
posted by MiraK at 7:06 PM on January 3, 2021 [61 favorites]

(2) Once I was at my mother-in-law's house and she only had one of those bizarre sideways smooth-edge can-openers [...] I grabbed the biggest goddamn knife I could find and stabbed the can with it a bunch of times until I made something approximating a hole in the top.

We own one of these smooth-edge openers and more than once a catsitter has resorted to stabbing open the cat food cans. All of these catsitters are responsible adults (I mean, we're paying them a good deal of money to care for our cats) and at least one has a master's degree. Now we buy the cat food with the pop top when we know we're going on vacation.
posted by pullayup at 7:14 PM on January 3, 2021 [14 favorites]

Can opener dad: sweetie how do you delete a tweet.

9 year old: study the app, dad. look at it closely. consider the UI.
posted by Rhaomi at 7:35 PM on January 3, 2021 [49 favorites]

The Bean Dad twitter discourse samples a venn that I'm unused to. Everyone from mathowie and Anil to Soledad O'Brien and Dionne Warwick weighing in, and the mbmbam tie-in to boot. What a weird day on twitter.

Also fuck this guy.
posted by lazaruslong at 7:54 PM on January 3, 2021 [11 favorites]

My experience (as a student at least) is that lightbulb moments can also happen with teaching styles that rely more heavily on instruction and demonstration

One really direct way of encouraging more of these sort of moments is to introduce the idea of metacognition and ask students explicitly to reflect on their learning. Obviously not everyone is going to have an epiphany every semester in every class; and no matter how clearly we think we've articulated something, sometimes we fail to communicate as well as we intended. But I have learned over my years of teaching that at least trying to ask people clearly and directly to do the thing you want them to do does wonders for increasing the frequency of people doing the thing.
posted by eviemath at 7:54 PM on January 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

Re: the official Max Fun position on all of this - Watch This Space!
posted by Navelgazer at 7:58 PM on January 3, 2021

My favorite Twitter response. (With floofs!)
posted by darkstar at 8:00 PM on January 3, 2021 [20 favorites]

The Bean Dad twitter discourse samples a venn that I'm unused to. Everyone from mathowie and Anil to Soledad O'Brien and Dionne Warwick weighing in, and the mbmbam tie-in to boot. What a weird day on twitter.

We’re all the kid while our Bean Dad governments (Ontario even has Premier Dad) insist a pandemic can be managed through grit and personal responsibility.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:00 PM on January 3, 2021 [21 favorites]

Perseverance seems like showing a kid how to open a can and then showing them a whole other day again how to open a can and then maybe if they need it later, showing them how to open a can.

My parents had their faults, but my little sib and I were building stuff from elevations and programming computers by nine, and that was mostly because they let us take over things and mess stuff up and figure out how to do a better job. The tips we got on tool handling and figuring things out were frequent and low-key. Even at my most teenage time, I knew I could go inside and tell my dad I had accidentally spilled some gas on the lawn mower and ask him with chagrin if starting the mower would blow me up (knowing the answer was almost surely "no, of course not," but not wanting to blow off a finger or something) and know he would answer me honestly without much more than smiling for one second. "No, of course not," he said, "but it was smart to ask anyway." He did not then report to a buncha strangers what a lovely learning moment that was. He also did not call me bad at certain fields of knowledge entirely.

We did not learn how to do emotions very well. There were a lot of times I needed to talk something out or just have it be okay to cry or be angry, and those were opportunities missed, like it seems like they were really missed here. This seemed, then, like a double whammy of not teaching something fairly simple in a genuine mechanical Teachable Moment and then also ignoring with purpose a kid who just needed some help and had asked for it very straighforwardly. And then bragging about Good Parenting.

You can show someone in the air how to use a can opener and then let them try it on the can, if you only have one can. They can still open that only can. Just show 'em how. "This part cuts the surface of the top. You have to squeeze the parts together and twist a little bit to drive it into the can. This part keeps it steady on the edge. This part catches the bottom of this lip here so that the crank you do with your other hand turns it around the edge." Ten minutes, tops, and everyone can have some beans. If you have to do it again Tuesday, sounds fine. More beans for everybody.
posted by lauranesson at 8:32 PM on January 3, 2021 [29 favorites]

The Bean Dad twitter discourse samples a venn that I'm unused to. Everyone from mathowie and Anil to Soledad O'Brien and Dionne Warwick weighing in, and the mbmbam tie-in to boot. What a weird day on twitter.

Even Justin McElroy has commented on it!

(...I mean, the other one.)
posted by meese at 8:52 PM on January 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

Let's recap: that 9 yr old endured six hours of her father (inescapable adult with total power over her) browbeating her and denying her access to food

Well, when we put it that wa, and all the out of context tweets, clearly we have found The Bad Guy. He has been railroaded off of Twitter and his song isn't on MibBimBam any longer. All that's left is to get his kid taken away because he Clearly Is an Abuser and a Nazi.

Please.

That is such a gross mis-characterization of what was written. We're not even sure what actually happened. Roderick is known for his stories.

I mean we can talk about whether or not that one instance is abuse, or indicative of a pattern. But what I find shocking is how quickly the knives came out, and how thick the bloodlust is.
posted by jonnay at 9:24 PM on January 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

Exactly what I was on about earlier, jonnay. One set of questionable tweets blows up and someone’s career is basically ended because everyone digs into his past, shares stuff out of context, makes up their minds based on the cherry-picked evidence, and Bob’s your uncle.

I mean, shit, there’s tweets going around accusing him of being a Trump supporter because of a satirical song that was released on a fundraising album for Democratic candidates in 2016. (Whether the song is good satire is up for debate, but it’s clear he’s no Trumpist.) Social media is incredibly good at giving people exactly what they want to see, and stoking up flames over stuff taken out of context with real world results. Sometimes the cannon of it gets aimed at people who really need to be cancelled (such as Adam Rappaport from Bon Appetit), and sometimes it’s aimed at people who just fucked up a little.

A lot of those “Roderick is a Nazi” tweets are also from 2012. Are you the same person you were in 2012? Do you make the same dumb jokes, or have you learned something over the intervening years? Fuck knows I’m not who I was then.
posted by SansPoint at 9:44 PM on January 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

Well, I wasn't using the n-word and blaming things on the Jews on Twitter (or anywhere else) in 2012. Or 2020. Or 2000. Or pretty much anytime.
posted by gingerbeer at 9:51 PM on January 3, 2021 [77 favorites]

Jenny Nicholson: If we didn't want bean dad to delete his twitter we should have made it clear that none of us would be eating anything until he learned to take constructive criticism

Asking how to use a basic gadget, being taught in 10 seconds, and seeing that it's pretty simple empowers you to ask how to use things & be unintimidated. A grueling 6 hour process reinforces that there's a high barrier to entry & it's not worth the reward of crummy beans

Teeheeho you must answer these riddles three to earn your can of precious beans
posted by ActingTheGoat at 9:55 PM on January 3, 2021 [20 favorites]

yeah i mean Roderick was 44 years old in 2012. Just a dewy eyed young man with his whole life ahead of him being brought down by innocent racial slur mistakes? i don't think so. it's actually a little astonishing he made it this far.
posted by lazaruslong at 9:56 PM on January 3, 2021 [41 favorites]

gingerbeer: Neither was I, but there was a time in my life where I would make dumb jokes like that without any sincerity. That period ended long ago. That said, I know there’s stuff on my Twitter that could absolutely be used against me if I ever became the Main Character. Stuff that may reflect who I was then but not now.

Yes, he was 44. Fine. People learn things at different rates, in different ways, and at different times, and oh hey, isn’t that what the thread was originally about before it became “let’s find everything questionable this person has ever done and let it validate our negative feelings about someone” time
posted by SansPoint at 9:58 PM on January 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

Yeah, you know, oddly, waaay back in the antediluvian days of 2012, I didn’t think racist and anti-Semitic jokes were funny and wouldn’t have said them aloud, much less posted them on Twitter, even when they were all ironic ‘n’ stuff.

I mean, really? “Lots of people didn’t understand eight years ago that racial slurs about mud people weren’t cool”? That’s what you’re going with?
posted by holborne at 9:59 PM on January 3, 2021 [39 favorites]

One might also admire the irony in attempting to teach perseverance via learning to use a tool designed to employ various forms of mechanical advantage in order to significantly lessen the work required to do one very specific task.
posted by eviemath at 10:02 PM on January 3, 2021 [7 favorites]

Well, maybe now's the time to start actually deleting your racist and anti-semitic crap off of Twitter and elsewhere and thinking about ways to repair those harms. Not all of us were out there making "stupid jokes" so maybe reflect on why you were?

Not to single anyone out -- that's clearly good advice for a lot of people.
posted by gingerbeer at 10:04 PM on January 3, 2021 [35 favorites]

holborne: I’m going with context. Ham fisted, bad satire in @-replies to original tweets we never get to see. There was a tweet that circulated ages ago from Parton Oswalt that reads like support for NAMBLA out of context. But the tweet it followed made it clear that Oswalt was in no way endorsing pedophilia. That’s my point, people. You’re seeing snippets of larger conversations, and extrapolating meaning without context. Twitter is great for that, to its utter detriment.
posted by SansPoint at 10:04 PM on January 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

gingerbeer: You ever try going through and deleting your old, bad tweets? Especially if you’re a prolific tweeter? They don’t make it easy.
posted by SansPoint at 10:05 PM on January 3, 2021

I mean, maybe you didn't. But when did Cards Against Humanity come out? How long has Cartman been funny?

Is say that it's only been in the last 5 years that people have really started to grapple with the concept of irony poisoning.

But I guess, he said the bad stuff that we have out of context, screenshotted, and clearly word searched tweets for.

Knives out.
posted by jonnay at 10:05 PM on January 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

"I thought I was being edgy back then, but I've since realized that even ironic use of slurs, if not carefully considered, can be harmful. I'm sorry for the hurtful jokes I made in the past."

"I was caught off guard by the overwhelming response to the story about my daughter. I'm going to take some time to reflect on the things you've all said."

If Roderick came out with these statements tomorrow, I think most people would forgive him. I know I would.
posted by airmail at 10:14 PM on January 3, 2021 [37 favorites]

It's kind of interesting to me how much of the defense of this dude - both for his shitty behavior towards his daughter and his shitty words about multiple marginalized groups - boils down to some variant on "he was only joking." I thought by this point we all kind of realized "calm down, it's just a joke" tends to provide a lot of cover for some really shitty behavior?

I could've sworn I'd seen this here earlier, but I'm not finding it now so maybe I came across it elsewhere - either way, I think this Twitter thread does a good job of talking about why "it's only a joke" is problematic, and why people are upset about this dude's original thread even if you don't personally understand the problem. While she's specifically speaking to the original bean-dad thread, her points seem relevant in response to his antisemitic and otherwise bigoted "satire", too: "Why get so angry about a joke? Because jokes should be funny, and 'joking' about shitty behavior normalizes the behavior."

To act like this was something that was somehow untrue or not understood eight years ago seems disingenuous at best to me.
posted by DingoMutt at 10:18 PM on January 3, 2021 [47 favorites]

So Patton Oswalt once tweeted something which, taken out of context, sounded awful. This guy repeatedly tweeted slurs that would have been at home on 8chan. That’s not just being edgy, or however you want to try to characterize it. That’s character revealing itself under the veneer of irony.
posted by holborne at 10:19 PM on January 3, 2021 [22 favorites]

I feel like this whole thing is partly about a change in the internet.

Not so much a change in popular ideology - I mean, I remember 2012 fairly well, and Black people, Jewish people, queers, etc did not particularly enjoy the "ha ha slurs jk" school of discourse. There was never a point where, eg, gay people were like "sure, you can use slurs to be funny amongst each other, straight people, we're cool". There was a point where the vast majority of relatively well-meaning straight people didn't understand that this was ugly and hurtful and that there were, like, actual gay people out there listening.

My feeling is that since 2010-ish, the internet has grown less insular and way less dominated by Gen X early-adopters, and as a result, obnoxious and hurtful behavior that seemed normal to straight/white/male/neurotypical/post-Christian people no longer seems normal. It's not that we as a society have changed our minds about the acceptability of irony poisoning and slurs; it's that the people who have fun with slurs are no longer dominant.

~~
Like, doesn't this guy just substantially seem dated? The whole Bean Dad thing seems like it should be happening on a blog in 2006 or something. Again, I don't think anyone under forty would believe that this was a great story to tell about one's parenting.

There was a huge, huge premium on obnoxiousness when Gen X people were young - so much of the hipper end of pop culture was basically about how cool you were if you were an asshole to people, and how being an asshole to people showed that you were more perceptive than others, cut through all the bullshit, etc. It made a little sense at the time, both as a response to the worst parts of the eighties (since I mean there were certain things to which it made sense to respond with assholeism) and coming off of an extremely anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-Black decade (since it was far easier to be ignorant after the silencing of so many people).

And I feel like when Gen X people dominated internet discourse, there was still a lot of assholism. You have only to look at various sites that are really nineties-ish in their outlook and run by people more or less my age to see how this works.

I think for many mid-forties/50s people, we've let go of that stuff or never were really into it in the first place, but there are still sectors of the internet where "tell a smug story about how I, a straight white man, was a huge jerk and it was awesome and I was right to be that way because I'm smarter than others" is still really validated.
posted by Frowner at 10:36 PM on January 3, 2021 [122 favorites]

Ah yes, the time-honored "Who among us has not used language that would immediately get one banned here for directing at another user? Let he throw the first stone".

Combine that with "He's known for being a fabulist, so unless you have the right context you might totally believe that he's saying the things he's been doubling down on" and "Why yes, of course we can assume the parts people are objecting to are fabricated and him doubling down on those parts is just him committing to the bit; but the parts which soften/exonerate him? *Those* are the parts you can axiomatically trust are honest and perhaps even over-modestly relayed", and you've really got to wonder... why so strong/reflexive of a defense on such shaky ground?

It reminds me of so many past threads. So many people then that were really committed to "None of what he did was that bad, and they're probably lying anyhow, and he's a really funny guy, so why would he joke about doing the things he was doing in secret?"

Parasocial relationships are a scary thing. Put up an image of a relatable Gen-X dad who was cool back in the day, get him up on some podcasts being familiar in people's ear, and you too can get described by people who know you and like you as "never been great at apologies or taking criticism and he can be a real asshole sometimes, even to friends". And people will shrug that right off.

"Ah yes, even the people that like him call him an asshole, but there's no way he'd do this particular assholish thing, and neither would he have voiced those particular slurs without contexts that would make it legitimate"
posted by CrystalDave at 10:42 PM on January 3, 2021 [32 favorites]

So I’m a lefty, and own the appropriate can opener for this. I have no right handed can openers in my house. When someone comes over and we randomly need to open a can, sometimes I forget to mention it’s left handed and I am the dick that will let them fuck around until they’re frustrated before I tell them. Granted, these are adult friends and it doesn’t take more than 5-10 minutes and we’ve got the can open. If a kid came over I would actually be super excited to show off the left handed opener and would immediately let them know (they probably didn’t even know a left handed one existed!)

Although if it’s one of those “mainsplainer” dudes, I don’t tell them at all. They sit there and wonder to me why all the mechanics are backwards but it never clicks to them that it’s left handed. Eventually I take it from them and do it myself. (It’s amazing how some people who are so “spatially and mechanically inclined” have a huge blind spot when it comes to handed things)

Those shark fin openers look interesting. Are left handed ones available?
posted by LizBoBiz at 10:46 PM on January 3, 2021 [17 favorites]

To elaborate on my previous comment: I have really grown to despise the fake personal anecdote writing genre, whether it's on Twitter or Reddit AITA and relationship advice posts.

As long as everyone likes the story, the writer can wink-wink-nudge-nudge and suggest that maybe it's a bit exaggerated for comic effect, but it's mostly real. Or is it? Isn't it fun to pretend it's real? But if it turns out that lots of people don't like the story, they can say that obviously it's not real, and for entertainment purposes only; OMG, these killjoys have no sense of humour! It's like retroactively slapping a "satire" label on an edgy statement you made that didn't land like you expected.

It's completely disingenuous to suggest that "everyone knows" these stories aren't real and only some kind of idiot would take them at face value. Nobody would care about this kind of writing, or retweet it or upvote it or share it on WhatsApp or whatever, if it were presented up-front as fiction. These stories go viral because the bulk of people sharing them believe that they are mostly or entirely real.

I hate them because they spread misinformation and make me instinctively assume that any funny anecdote anyone ever shares is bullshit. And while some of them have no point other than making the writer look like a fun quirky person that wacky things keep happening to, some very clearly exist to dunk on a person or a category of people, and have a really unpleasant and self-congratulatory "and then everyone clapped" vibe. The writer controls the narrative, so they can make their target look stupid and make themselves look smart.

In this story, the target is the child, who is presented as lacking in problem-solving skills, and the "hero" is the dad who is smarter than the child and exerts his power over her to teach her a lesson. It's gross, and I'm not surprised that it left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.
posted by confluency at 10:48 PM on January 3, 2021 [37 favorites]

Using slurs, even in a satirical way, is often a bad idea. I won't argue against that. I do find it fascinating, however, that so many of the receipts going around on Twitter about Roderick being a Nazi are screenshots of @-replies, where you don't see what he was replying to.

One should still evaluate the use slurs in context, which in Roderick's case is context we don't have, often by deliberate omission in the case of screenshots. Is he replying to people spouting racist/Nazi dogwhistles by mocking their language? Is he trolling sincere, anti-racist/anti-Nazi people with sincere racist/Nazi rhetoric? We don't know because we don't have the context. As an example, saying "I'll fucking kill you" to someone may be a threat, or it may be a joke. It depends on context, and tone. Saying that in a laughing way to my friend who is jokingly threatening me with showing off an embarrassing video is not a threat. Saying it another way to a stranger is a threat. The textual phrase "I'll fucking kill you" in an @-reply could be either. Twitter, like all text based media, loses the context gained from tone and body language.

Again, this is not a defense of John using slurs. It's saying we don't know why he said those things, and, to repeat myself, we don't have the context to intuit those reasons. That's why I linked the piece about Patton Oswalt, because that's a small-scale example of something that is absolutely terrible out of context, but in context is still kind of "woah," but makes it abundantly clear that Patton Oswalt is not defending pedophilia.

I, personally, am willing to give John the benefit of the doubt on those tweets based on his actions and behaviors in other contexts where it's clear he makes dumb jokes in bad taste, but without sincerity. Him doing this is a bad idea, and a mark of poor judgment, but it is not a mark of someone who is truly vile. Bereft of context, we choose to read whatever preconceptions of the person into these tweets. Which are, yes, Bad Tweets.

On top of that, there's a very natural human reaction when it seems like the entire world is ganging up on you for something stupid you did. That reaction is to get defensive and become argumentative. The smart thing to do in a case like this is put the phone down, maybe deactivate your account for a bit, and go do something else until the world has moved on to the next Twitter Main Character, but most people don't do this. The result of that natural defensiveness is for the people seeing it to double down on attacking and digging for more receipts to show how terrible the person is, making that person more defensive. We see this pattern again and again and again and again, whether it's James Gunn, Trevor Noah, ContraPoints, or many other media personalities who've gone through this process.
posted by SansPoint at 10:51 PM on January 3, 2021 [6 favorites]

Six hours? No. There's something wrong there. it's not healthy to focus on any single task for six hours. I can't read the entire thread, just a screenshot of the first couple of tweets, so maybe she didn't actually spend that much time frustrated with no help or direction, but if so... it seems pointless and mean. Six hours? Really?
posted by chaz at 11:10 PM on January 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Making a child wait 6+ hours (because he never mentions if she had lunch so it was possible it was just breakfast and then beans), telling her no one will eat, and not having other food in the house is not a good look. And his snide little asides about how she just doesn't intuit can openers the way he does don't help.

My parents taught me how to use a can opener when I was 6. Yes, this meant they had to guide me through it and sometimes finish it for me. But it also mean I could feed the pets myself and help more in the kitchen. And my parents weren't even very good at parenting.

This story is a mess.
posted by asteria at 11:15 PM on January 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

I was trying to figure out when I would have learned about can openers, since I didn't do a lot of cooking until my teens, and that's it, feeding the cats was one of my tasks and the canned food didn't have a pull tab, and it was probably somewhere age 6-8 since we still had the three cats of my young childhood. Thanks asteria!
posted by tavella at 11:27 PM on January 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

Oof, the doubling-down in support of this guy's "parenting style." Completely unsurprising based on my experience as...uh...a human on this planet, but man, this shit is exhausting.
posted by desuetude at 11:31 PM on January 3, 2021 [20 favorites]

mean, really? “Lots of people didn’t understand eight years ago that racial slurs about mud people weren’t cool”? That’s what you’re going with?

How far back do you think we’d have to go to find people on MeFi saying “[racistthing racistthing amirite?]” to mean “boy these right-wing racists are dumb?” I’m gonna say people here managed to get that off the menu quicker than this guy did - or at least by 2012 they realized that you can’t lay it on nearly that thick - but I’d bet plenty of money that there are examples to be found.

This is one of those situations where I feel like a rube standing up for the guy because in the end he does seem like an asshole so I’m basically just trying to get him a plea bargain on a lesser charge of being an asshole? I’m just over the impulse to take whacks at a person most of us were unaware of before today, over shit that a lot of people aren’t even bothering to read.
posted by atoxyl at 11:43 PM on January 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

Mod note: Probably at this point better not to get into a superheated extended back and forth about the ironic racism (or "ironic" racism) from deleted, out of context tweets from years ago. I think we pretty much all agree it's a terrible form of communication in even the best case, and straight-up hate speech with a gloss of deniability in the worst. (And for the record, we do still have to delete ironic racism, and other -isms and -phobias, with a reminder that we don't do that here. For many it's a form of sarcasm that has been hard to extinguish, and Frowner pretty much nailed it, I think.)
posted by taz (staff) at 12:03 AM on January 4, 2021 [11 favorites]

I, personally, am willing to give John the benefit of the doubt on those tweets based on his actions and behaviors in other contexts where it's clear he makes dumb jokes in bad taste, but without sincerity. Him doing this is a bad idea, and a mark of poor judgment, but it is not a mark of someone who is truly vile. Bereft of context, we choose to read whatever preconceptions of the person into these tweets. Which are, yes, Bad Tweets.

Mobbings are generally ugly and I think it's to your credit to question the purpose and proportionality of the stampede around John Roderick. What I don't understand is why it matters whether John is "truly vile".

John made a fool of himself by trying to look clever at the expense of his kid. He expected praise but got ridicule and anger instead. That points to a mismatch between his expectations and reality. We can argue about his personality, his background, about context, but there isn't a reality or an interpretation in which there wasn't a mismatch between his expectations and reality. He'll need to sit with that discomfort regardless of whether he is "truly vile" or not.
posted by dmh at 1:07 AM on January 4, 2021 [19 favorites]

Those shark fin openers look interesting. Are left handed ones available?
They were available in a left hand version, but I'm not finding them online. Maybe they were discontinued when Fiskars bought Raadvad. Fiskars claim they are tested to work well for left-handed people, but that seems to me to be a lame excuse, though I can see how you could use it with your left hand by turning the can counter-clockwise.
posted by mumimor at 1:16 AM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

LizBoBiz: Those shark fin openers look interesting. Are left handed ones available?

This seems to be a close relative.
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:31 AM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Thanks! I ordered one and am excited to try it!
posted by LizBoBiz at 1:39 AM on January 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

Him doing this is a bad idea, and a mark of poor judgment, but it is not a mark of someone who is truly vile.

I don't think there's any context which excuses his use of slurs. But if I'm wrong and there is, then what? Are you worried he's being punished too harshly? Because he's already been paid for the theme tunes, etc. He hasn't been banned from social media so he can start a new account anytime he likes. The people he works with are all sticking up for him.

He's been yelled at a lot, by a lot of strangers. And that's awful, but they're not in his home or workplace. He hasn't had any death or rape threats paired with his home address or phone number, or swatting or any of the usual right-wing extremist tactics.

James Gunn and Trevor Noah are still working (I'm not familiar with Contra-Points). What are you afraid will happen here?
posted by harriet vane at 2:12 AM on January 4, 2021 [13 favorites]

I'm still kind of baffled that six hours is a long time to not eat? Or that six hours is a long time to do something, especially when it seemed like it was punctuated by giving up, going away and coming back?

Like, the Internet has spoken here but I eat lunch at midday and dinner at 8 every day? And regularly claimed to be 'hungry' instead of 'bored' and to be honest still thinks this as an adult who feeds themselves? The only actual thing that jumps out at me as a Mistake is taking that long to teach something - like after about 5 minutes I would have straight up asked 'well it doesn't seem to grip very well if the cutting bit is vertical. Why can't the can opener go horizontal?' and five minutes later there'd be baked beans on the table.

The thing that is bothering me is that there was no way for this to be handled in a constructive fashion that would have made him a better parent in the future. When someone is accusing you of child abuse, it's ride or die, because the only way it's ending is in a fight and/or losing your kid. Backing off "to reflect" is tacit admission that you agree you should have your kid taken away. For a lot of these cancel culture things it's usually clear that what got them was doubling down instead of taking the L early but I do not see how that was an option here.
posted by Merus at 2:18 AM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

The textual phrase "I'll fucking kill you" in an @-reply could be either. Twitter, like all text based media, loses the context gained from tone and body language.

Funny that, I got a 12 hour ban from Twitter last week for the simple @-reply “Fuck off and die”, which seemed fine in the context of replying to someone who was doing some low effort but very damaging covid denial, but yet Twitter still thought that was unacceptable. So I kicked my heels for a while and managed without that parasocial interaction for the day.

In the end, it's fine, because I understand that it's exhausting for people to have to cope with hostile online environments.

But right here in this thread we've got another kind of hostile online environment, one where every criticism of an oafish cishet middle-aged middle-class white man is deflected with contortionist mental gymnastics. It very clearly communicates to people who don't fit this mould that they don't belong.

I feel it as a cishet middle-aged middle-class white man who tries not to be oafish. God knows how it feels for people who are even further from the protection of this White Knighting.
posted by ambrosen at 2:19 AM on January 4, 2021 [30 favorites]

I'm still kind of baffled that six hours is a long time to not eat? Or that six hours is a long time to do something, especially when it seemed like it was punctuated by giving up, going away and coming back?

You don't seem to be a nine-year-old. For a nine-year-old, six hours, after they said they were hungry, is a very long time. In parts of the world where people strongly hold that kids should live on a regular schedule, they will have breakfast at 7 or 8, lunch at 11 or 12, tea/merenda after school, and dinner at 6-7 (though later in some countries, but then the tea/merenda thing is more substantial). I have regularly given my kids a glass of milk and some fruit before bedtime, if they were hungry. I'm all for not snacking between meals, but small people have small stomachs and need a lot of food, so this is traditionally how to handle that. Which has all been explained above albeit in less detail, so I don't really get why you are still baffled?

I'm not among those who believe this guy is an abuser, but I do think it's fair to say his tweets were stupid and he needs to figure out how not to tweet about his child.
posted by mumimor at 2:35 AM on January 4, 2021 [34 favorites]

I'm still kind of baffled that six hours is a long time to not eat?

As people keep pointing out (in the original thread, in this thread, in any place where bean dad is discussed), whenever someone comes up with that point: According to dad's account it's six hours _after_ she's already told Dad that she's hungry. She has obviously not eaten for quite a bit longer than that at this point. Bean Dad mentions breakfast and then skipping lunch in favour of the lesson. The beans are dinner. The time between breakfast and dinner was therefore clearly longer than six hours.

Actually paying attention to what people are saying can prevent a lot of bafflement, at least it tends to for me.
posted by sohalt at 2:40 AM on January 4, 2021 [20 favorites]

Funny that, I got a 12 hour ban from Twitter last week for the simple @-reply “Fuck off and die”, which seemed fine in the context of replying to someone who was doing some low effort but very damaging covid denial, but yet Twitter still thought that was unacceptable.

Twitter doing this is a relatively recent thing, only a couple of years old.

Which has all been explained above albeit in less detail, so I don't really get why you are still baffled?

Because even when I was a kid I still had lunch at midday and did not eat until dinner at around 7? Having a snack when I got home from school wasn't a thing, and at that age I was riding... 2.7 km home from school, according to Google. So my own experience as a kid is that 6 hours is a tolerable amount of time, and I don't really appreciate the condescension.
posted by Merus at 2:41 AM on January 4, 2021

So my own experience as a kid is that 6 hours is a tolerable amount of time

This may or may not be generalizeable to all kids everywhere (personally I doubt it - just because something is okay for some kids doesn't mean it should be a general principle in child education), but even if I agreed it was, that would be beside the point.

Again: A lot of people are upset about the duration of time without food, because they assume it has actually been significantly _longer_ than six hours, based on the information given to us by bean dad.
posted by sohalt at 2:47 AM on January 4, 2021 [12 favorites]

So my own experience as a kid is that 6 hours is a tolerable amount of time, and I don't really appreciate the condescension.

Sorry, I didn't want to hurt your feelings. But both I and sohalt reminded you right above here that this is a lot more than 6 hours, indeed, if he isn't BS-ing, it may be skipping lunch altogether.

Also, others above have mentioned that just because you had a shitty childhood, others don't deserve the same. As a child I often went hungry from breakfast to dinner, for many reasons, none of them good. My friends' mothers would feed me whenever possible because they were worried. I have fed my children every day, all year round, because I don't want them to go through what I went through.
posted by mumimor at 2:47 AM on January 4, 2021 [25 favorites]

Actually paying attention to what what people are saying can prevent a lot of bafflement, at least it tends to for me.

What people were saying was 'six hours', and if people had been saying 'all day' then that would have made sense to me. I do not know why people did not say all day, and it is clear at this point that a better use of my time would be to prepare a survey to ask these people instead of continuing this here.

Or have dinner, because at this point it's been nearly 10 hours since I last ate and I for sure am not going to be learning anything
posted by Merus at 2:48 AM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

What people were saying was 'six hours' -

People would sometimes skip the "while already hungry"-part, true, because they were assuming anyone participating in the discussion was familiar with Bean Dad's account and had registered that fact. And then someone else would make your objection, and then people would clarify that the six hours referred to time without food_while already hungry_ not total time without food since the last meal.

So yeah, it's an easy mistake to make, and lots of people made it before you did, and lots of people took the time to clarify that point, and personally, I have no problem clarifying it again, because I'm a teacher and I don't mind repeating things forever and ever, so no harm no foul. I should have skipped the "actually paying attention remark", and I apologize for that.
posted by sohalt at 2:59 AM on January 4, 2021 [12 favorites]

though I can see how you could use it with your left hand by turning the can counter-clockwise.

From the Wikipedia entry on the P-38 opener: "Left-handed users simply hold the P-38 in their left hand, with the cutting point aimed towards themselves, while holding the can to be opened in their right hand, while also reversing the sense of the cutting hand movements just described."
posted by Stoneshop at 2:59 AM on January 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

If you're not going to read TFA*, and also not going to read the thread, then your comments may not be totally on point, is all.

*which is impossible or difficult by now in this case, that's true
posted by Too-Ticky at 3:07 AM on January 4, 2021 [7 favorites]

I'm still kind of baffled that six hours is a long time to not eat? Or that six hours is a long time to do something, especially when it seemed like it was punctuated by giving up, going away and coming back?

As someone who does IF/OMAD yes it is a long time for a child. Especially one that is already hungry.
posted by asteria at 3:10 AM on January 4, 2021 [11 favorites]

Given that the topic of the thread is parental advise, I want to share what my mother taught me. She told me that when someone says something that you object to morally or ethically, especially racist or sexist things, and you sit there silently and don't object, it means that you have implicitly agreed with them. You have an obligation to raise your voice and make your opinion heard and laughing things off is not acceptable.

I can't claim that I'm very good at following this, I'm conflict adverse by nature but it's one of my guiding lights in my life. This guy, who I never heard of until yesterday, said a lot of real shitty things and if we don't object to them, then we're essentially agreeing with them.
posted by octothorpe at 4:01 AM on January 4, 2021 [23 favorites]

Leaving aside the "is six hours universally a long time" question and the whole "it was probably more than six hours" thing, well, it's a long time if you don't usually wait six hours. If you're a kid who usually gets lunch from mom and it's Saturday and you're with dad and all of the sudden it's sort of close to lunch time and you don't get any lunch for six hours, you're going to be really hungry.

If you frequently go for seven or eight hours between meals and it's normal and not framed as a punishment/learning opportunity, then sure, it might not be absolutely scientifically ideal but it's fine. But that's not what happened here.

I just feel like - do you remember being nine? It's not very old. Dad here is obviously rather unpredictable, too, so it's not like you're really completely confident in him anyway. If you're nine and dad tells you that no one eats until you open the beans, that's a lot of pressure and it only gets more pressure-y as the hours tick by because it becomes obvious that Dad is serious. What happens, you might wonder, if you literally can't open the beans? That's what I would have wondered as a kid. Would there be literally no dinner and then no breakfast?

And when you're nine, you're still at an age where even good parents can be a little scary. I mean, my parents were great, they loved me unconditionally, they would never ever have hit me or withheld food or whatever. But when you're small, they're large and all-powerful and their anger and decisions can sometimes be a little scary totally without meaning to. When my parents got mad, that was scary. When they did something I really didn't understand, that could be a little scary. If one of them had suddenly started withholding food, I would have been totally panicked - what was the endgame? What had changed? Why had we gone from "food happens on a schedule" to "food happens when you figure out this seemingly impossible task"?

~
It would have been so easy to say, "Okay, try to figure out the can-opener for ten minutes, then if you've given it a good try and can't do it, I'll show you". I would still think that a bit silly but it would be well within the range of normal parenting.
posted by Frowner at 4:02 AM on January 4, 2021 [55 favorites]

When someone is accusing you of child abuse, it's ride or die, because the only way it's ending is in a fight and/or losing your kid. Backing off "to reflect" is tacit admission that you agree you should have your kid taken away.

What???

I mean, if he’d said “wow, guys, your response is overwhelming. I will definitely be thinking about this because I want to be sure my kid knows I love her and am on her side, and feels secure that her needs will be met,” other people on the Internet might comment that means he admitted whatever, but that is nowhere near him saying “take my kid, please.” Especially if he’d done it early.

(And given that he’s not a Black or indigenous single parent, but the fact that he a) posted as he did and b) doubled down on his approach shows he’s not afraid of that!)

He could also have deleted the thread. I take it you missed his response. It was - not gracious. He basically said everyone accusing him lets their kids on screens and he doesn’t, so he’s right and they are wrong.

My understanding is that he lost the podcast gig because he doubled down, and then there was a bunch of racist garbage on his feed which...frankly, was there to be found.

I think the Twitter response to Roderick’s post was indeed pretty astonishing- it actually makes me take heart for parenting practices, but I can see how muting replies or suspending his account could be a result because it was a lot. But...how to put this...people who are self-aware as parents handle criticism daily, from their kids, and also in subtle and not subtle ways from teachers, neighbours, etc. I’ve dealt with it when I had a pre-verbal child that would run into traffic and I was worried about grabbing him so I used a harness and had someone ask security to talk to me at an arts festival in a park. (I’m white, seems relevant.)

These are people CPS organizations take seriously. And there are a lot of issues with that especially related to racism. But if you feel confident telling a 20-tweet story about how your daughter is upset, fuzzy-brained, and hungry while it takes her 6 hours to figure out a can opener to your 40,000 Twitter followers, you are in a privileged group. Your lack of apology or contrition is unlikely to be coming from fear of CPS.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:09 AM on January 4, 2021 [38 favorites]

>>Let's recap: that 9 yr old endured six hours of her father (inescapable adult with total power over her) browbeating her and denying her access to food

>Well, when we put it that wa, and all the out of context tweets, clearly we have found The Bad Guy.

Well what way should I have put it? Your statement here is so confusing if taken at face value but thankfully, I do know the context for your statement and others' statements just like yours: You all want to keep white guys comfortable at all costs. You all empathize with white guys' slightest discomfort most keenly, to the exclusion of everyone else's pain. Nobody else's real reality is real if that casts a white guy in a hint of shadow...

One set of questionable tweets blows up and someone’s career is basically ended

See what I mean?!

Alas "his career is basically ended"! Alas he has been "fully taken down"! You all have no qualms whatsoever making up these wild conjectures to justify your condemnation of folks who question white guys. You don't mind making up these imaginary stories about HIS supposed suffering. It's been less than one day, folks. His career may not be ended at all. Nobody else's has been!

But just let someone try to verbatim quote the guy's own confession to condemn him? That's too much for you folks.
posted by MiraK at 4:11 AM on January 4, 2021 [52 favorites]

If the dad had been out of his mind on drugs while his starving daughter banged an opener on a frigging can of beans for six hours, y'all would be singing a different tune. But it's okay for this guy because he was tormenting her intentionally. Also, because he's rich and white.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:48 AM on January 4, 2021 [18 favorites]

John 'Bean dad' Roderick has now deleted his Twitter account. [Archive.org still has the thread for posterity.]
posted by Lanark at 4:53 AM on January 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

Also, as a woman on the Internet since 1990 and first harassed in 1992, the “I was a 17 year old ironic poster” as a way to justify other people’s racism doesn’t sit that well with me. If you never had to think about what you put on Twitter, I salute you but you have been operating in a different world. That doesn’t mean I support mobs, but just as we all consider the impact of our words at work, on the bus, in city meetings, etc., maybe it’s best to clean up your feed if that’s seriously why you think someone referring to “mud people” is okay.

But if you are concerned you can spend a weekend cleaning up your feed, or use Tweet Delete.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:54 AM on January 4, 2021 [27 favorites]

The BBC's reporting on this is really amusing in its dryness.
posted by uncleozzy at 5:30 AM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

When I first read the feed, I didn't know who Roderick is or any of his history. I guess I didn't pick up on the 6 hours thing as being so stressful to the child but rather I thought that it was engaging the kid one on one. I was incorrect. I'm so glad to see all the comments about the dark side of this, as I believe that sometimes my empathy is blunted. I grew up with a controlling yet loving dad and the expectation was that we are independent and figure a lot of stuff, mechanical, biological, and emotional, ourselves. My other parent was not really emotionally available, although a very loving person. The combination of love and absence, and often fear for the controlling parent, probably resulted in my sibs and me who couldn't trust others too much to help. But I thought this was normal. I do have a fear of authority, still, and that I'll mess up and they will think I'm a dumb redneck. I'm still learning what good parenting looks like. As a parent myself, I removed the rages from the equation (which I thought were normal) because I remembered how much they frightened me. I knew that it was not what I wanted so I knew that my child would not want that. But the role of teaching independence is still strong with me. I have never done something like the bean dad, I am happy to show how to do something, but I do have somewhat high (I think) expectations that my child then commit themselves and learn how to do things without me asking, like cleaning the room, brushing teeth, minding to the pets, etc. Anyway, I appreciate the comments reflecting outrage at this and putting forth their own stories of abuse. That is brave.
posted by waving at 5:34 AM on January 4, 2021 [24 favorites]

learly we have found The Bad Guy.


Forty thousand goddamn "ironically racist" jokes, jew jokes, homophobic jokes, hard-r n-word jokes, you're goddamn right we found the bad guy.
posted by maxsparber at 5:36 AM on January 4, 2021 [33 favorites]

One of the things that makes this story so divisive is that it's a Rorschach Test that lets you see whatever the heck you want to see in it from your personal experience and familiarity with the man. Is John an idiosyncratic parent who tried to teach his daughter a skill and went a bit too far, or is he an abuser who denies his child food for extended periods to prove a point? Was there other food in the house, or were the beans the only option for the both of them? Is he a ham-fisted Gen-Xer who spouts dumb jokes that use slurs or is he an unrepentant racist and Nazi on top of the abuse?

With the information provided, there's evidence for both readings. As someone who had an abusive childhood, but did not have abusive parents (all my abuse came from peers and non-parental authority figures), and as someone familiar with Roderick's work and public life, I lean heavily towards the more charitable interpretation of the story. For example, I know Roderick and his daughter's living situation. John's daughter splits time between living with her mother and John in a shared house, and spending time with John alone in a house John recently purchased and is renovating. Which of these living situations did the incident occur in? I do not know. One makes the lack of other food more plausible, one makes it highly implausible, but without knowing if this occurred in a house being renovated, or in a house shared with both parents, I can't say.

Even, still, a charitable interpretation of John's actions is worth a fair amount of eye-rolling, and certainly John's response to criticism was dumb. However, there's nothing about either the interpretation of the story or John's response, I see as justifying picking through the guy's history with a fine tooth comb intentionally looking for examples of how shitty he is. Whenever people start picking through the history of today's Twitter Main Character to find examples of past shitty behavior, I wonder about both the motivation and whether the people doing that have anything better to do with their time. Do the people doing the searching and sharing of receipts have their own hungry kids to feed?

But, of course, the Rorschach Test aspects of this story are perfect in that it gives the people who interpret it as abuse a justification to find whatever they can to establish a pattern of shitty behavior, regardless of whether that behavior is relevant to the original discourse. It fires up more and more emotional arguing back and forth over conjecture drawn from lived experience that cannot be (and should not be) debated. Ultimately, though, this still comes down to interpretation and filling in unknowns in a story that we may never get the facts on.
posted by SansPoint at 5:41 AM on January 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

Weird how many people seem to think it is impossible not to be racist on Twitter and how unpleasant it is that this might be discovered.
posted by maxsparber at 5:42 AM on January 4, 2021 [43 favorites]

The other thing I was thinking here: that boasting about not giving your kid screen time isn't particularly fantastic.

I admit that I tend to think that pre-pandemic kids tended to have too much screen time and that the screens we have now are particularly addictive and toxic. But it's really, really important for kids to have relatively similar experiences to their peers, even if some of those experiences are sub-optimal.

I grew up in a house where all forms of pop culture were heavily restricted and it meant that I had even less in common with my peers and my peers thought I was even weirder. My childhood would have been a lot easier if I'd been able to do more of the things that my (entirely average suburban so we're not talking about, eg, rich kids doing cocaine) peers were allowed to do. In fact, my parents rethought this with my younger brother, he had a much more normal experience and he had plenty of friends, comparatively normal school times, etc, even though frankly we're equally weird.

My hope is that this guy's daughter mostly lives with her mother - he does have a strong "my wife divorced me because I am irresponsible and annoying" vibe - and so not only gets regular meals most of the time but also gets a reasonable amount of screen time.

Also, I hope her peers don't make fun of her over this whole thing. It's not that great for a kid to have their peers think their dad is a giant weirdo, nevermind the actual descriptions of her struggles.
posted by Frowner at 5:46 AM on January 4, 2021 [14 favorites]

Frowner: FWIW, John and his daughter's mother never married. They had the child, consensually, out of wedlock or any other committed relationship beyond coparenting.
posted by SansPoint at 5:48 AM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

One set of questionable tweets blows up and someone’s career is basically ended

I don’t think this has ever happened in the history of white people tweeting dumb things. Justine Sacco got a new job in PR, for heaven’s sake.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:50 AM on January 4, 2021 [29 favorites]

I'm going to avoid the whole is bean dad an asshole y/no thing because obviously he is an asshole and some of his defenders in the thread have some wacky ideas about how to deal with kids and I'm not fucking with that bullshit

I want to address the ironic joke bullshit by sharing a little experience I had with this yesterday.

Ken Jennings, Bean Dad's podcasting partner, had a tweet that said he always felt sad anytime he saw somebody hot in a wheelchair.

I'm in a wheelchair, and while not "hot" I do have a certain je ne sais quoi and I'm careful about my appearance when I go out. I wear cute little outfits.

While I have of course noted that the catcalls stopped after I broke my back at age 32, I was like HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME about that, because sheesh who wants that.

I have also known that people are less likely to want to fuck me because I use a wheelchair. I'm fine with that. I'm happily coupled, and quite satisfied and I'm not looking for randos who want to do the deed.

But I have never, not once, after putting my makeup on and admiring my recent haircut or how cute I look in my outfit, never once thought, "I wonder if somebody is going to look at me and feel sad because I'm attractive and paralyzed."

But thanks to this fucker, I am now completely aware. If I were dating, damn straight I would be wondering how many of the men I flirt with are pitying me.

Fuck these fuckers and their ironic bullshit.
posted by angrycat at 5:51 AM on January 4, 2021 [74 favorites]

Is John an idiosyncratic parent who tried to teach his daughter a skill and went a bit too far, or is he an abuser who denies his child food for extended periods to prove a point?

With the information provided, there's evidence for both readings

I'm genuinely confused. If the first reading is supposed to be mutually exclusive with the second reading, where exactly is the evidence for the first reading?

filling in unknowns in a story that we may never get the facts on.

Bahahahaha. He confessed to denying his child food for extended periods of time to prove a point. That was the entire story. But we may never know, right? Lol.
posted by MiraK at 5:52 AM on January 4, 2021 [13 favorites]

MBMBaM are now looking for a new theme song.
posted by Lanark at 5:57 AM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

MiraK: The “is six hours an extended period of time” discourse already happened. I’m on the side of six hours not being extended or excessive. I can see the argument about how John’s behavior is bad, and detrimental, but I don’t think this incident is a mark of abuse. I don’t see it as systematic, or any part of a larger pattern in how he raises his child. I’ve not see anything beyond conjecture and other people’s experience that supports that view, but again, I did not grow up in an abusive household. Even factoring the experiences you’ve shared, I just don’t see it, and I’m sorry.
posted by SansPoint at 6:05 AM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

Late on all this drama, but if anyone is still trying to figure out who the real Roderick is, I think this AMA on reddit from when he ran for Seattle city council mostly reflect the values he has been openly sharing on his podcasts over the years. Looks like MeFi has a better handle on all of this than Twitter or Reddit at least. Hot mess over on Twitter; Roderick didn't help the situation at all though from the looks of it.
posted by p3t3 at 6:08 AM on January 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

That's an interesting take, SansPoint.

Leaving aside the fact that it's not really a matter of opinion - like, 10+ hours between feedings (6 hours since she said she was hungry) is objectively an extended period of time for a 9 yr old child...

You're totally fine with an adult denying a child access to food when the child is hungry, just to prove a point? You don't consider this an abuse of the adult's power over the child?

Would you see it differently if it was an adult denying another hungry adult access to food? A boss who insists on keeping a non-consenting, crying, screaming employee late at work to finish up, denying the employee access to food for six hours - is that ok with you? Because that's literally illegal, fyi. Im finding it hard to understand why you think it's ok for a child to be treated like this when it's illegal for adults to be!

FYI abuse doesn't have to be a pattern to be abuse. If this guy had punched the child in her face, that would be abuse if he only did it once. Same goes for denying her access to food when she is hungry.
posted by MiraK at 6:11 AM on January 4, 2021 [19 favorites]

So let me see if I have this right. Dude tells a story in public that, while it may not rise to the level of legally actionable abuse, certainly does make him look like a pretentious insufferable tool. When questioned about the details of the story that made some people uncomfortable, he spends an entire day doubling down. Confused people who knew of him only as a musician and not a personality look into his background and discover years of "ironic" anti-semitism and non-ironic sexism and ablism.

And somehow, WE'RE the problem? WE'RE the ones with questionable motivations? We're the ones making suspect use of our time? We're the ones with hungry kids that need worrying about? I gotta say, even if one were a big John Roderick fan, this seems like an idiosyncratic response.
posted by Ipsifendus at 6:17 AM on January 4, 2021 [62 favorites]

However, there's nothing about either the interpretation of the story or John's response, I see as justifying picking through the guy's history with a fine tooth comb intentionally looking for examples of how shitty he is. Whenever people start picking through the history of today's Twitter Main Character to find examples of past shitty behavior, I wonder about both the motivation and whether the people doing that have anything better to do with their time. Do the people doing the searching and sharing of receipts have their own hungry kids to feed?

Look, I worked in online media from 1999-2015, and Roderick makes at least part of his living from podcasting and, apparently, giving parenting advice on Twitter.

There is no reason to believe that he had no idea, in 2020, that someone might some day go back through his Twitter feed and find his entirely inappropriate remarks. Absolutely none. I was delivering advice to print editors in 2012 about managing their social media. He isn't an innocent bystander who accidentally got dragged into the Discourse Du Jour; he is a self-promoter who put this parenting story up to say how great he is for preparing his daughter for an apocalypse without, apparently, having taught her anything about kitchen tools from the ages of 5-9, and he expected praise for it. He's even run for public office.

He knew he might be judged on his words. He just thought he was immune. And the fact that he didn't start saying "hey, thanks for the feedback, I'll take your words to heart" just shows his attitude. I don't think he has to be drawn and quartered, but it's amazing to me that he expected praise for being a dick to his kid.

As far as we know, his theme song has been booted from a brand that's based on being nice...welcome to planet Earth. Try being a teacher who puts a picture on Facebook with a beer on the kitchen table behind her.

As I said above, women on the Internet have known forever that whatever they say could result in rape and death threats, because that happens. Black women feeding their kids curry on Tik Tok have had CPS called on them for feeding "bad food." These are great injustices that should be addressed by us all. Unfortunately, because they don't impact on white men, it's been slow to get people to take them seriously (although the mom referenced above at least only had to show the video and CPS was like, yum, curry)

Now that the tables are turned though, we have to be all compassionate that someone who makes a living online couldn't be bothered to delete his racist bullshit from his feed before he spent 20 Tweets talking about how putting his daughter through this experience makes him a great teacher of Persistence and Problem Solving? I dunno man. I admit to having limitations.

That you are defending him speaks a little bit to your compassion but a lot more that something about his story hits a chord with you and I would examine that pretty closely.

My kids and I cooked together yesterday and talked over this story, both about the parenting and the social media aspects. We had a great meal. We often do talk about what's going on online so hopefully we all make good choices.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:20 AM on January 4, 2021 [77 favorites]

(although the mom referenced above at least only had to show the video and CPS was like, yum, curry)

oh that's a relief

I feel like the world is nuanced enough that you can believe John Roderick isn't such a shitty dad that his child should be taken away while also believing he could've been a better dad to his child in this one instance

instead of super going to bat for "six hours is a perfectly fine & normal length of time to deny your child food on a whim after they tell you they're hungry"
posted by taquito sunrise at 6:40 AM on January 4, 2021 [18 favorites]

Ooops, sorry, here's the link to the curry story.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:42 AM on January 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

MiraK: It is a matter of opinion because we don't know a) when John's daughter had last ate, b) if it was really six hours of it that was hyperbole, and c) if there was other food available that she could have eaten during that period. From what we know, I would absolutely say John's behavior was excessive, but that it does not extend to abuse—based purely on what I know, have experienced, and the facts in evidence. You are more than welcome to disagree, based on those same criteria.

Should John have relented earlier? Should he have demonstrated how to use the opener? Yeah, he should have. That's not the argument I'm making. The argument I'm making is that from what I know, what John did was dumb, but does not justify the level of scrutiny and debate that it received.

And I would see those other situations differently, because those situations are, well, different. Similar, but different. I do judge adults who deny other adults food—I used to be a welfare clerk, so I've seen that sort of thing managed on a systemic level. I would see the boss as abusive. I'm not 100% certain where the line is, but there is a line, and John got close to it, but I don't think he crossed it, certainly not to the degree of line-crossing to which the response seems to be.

The following things can all be true. Whether they are all true, I don't know, but I lean in favor of them being true.

1. The way John attempted to teach his daughter how to open a can of beans was bad.
2. John's actions in defending this were also bad.
3. The reaction to both 1 and 2 is excessive.
4. John made other bad, stupid tweets.
5. Those tweets are taken out of context making already bad content look worse than they really are.
6. The reaction to 5 is excessive

warriorqueen: These are all good points, but I do want to push back a bit on your interpretation of my defense. It's not that I think what he did wasn't worthy of being called out. It was, and his reaction to that called out was wrong. And yet, there's psychology involved behind that reaction that fits a pattern I've seen before where a dumb, contextless thing gets blown out of proportion and people start looking for more reasons to justify their anger, which causes the person receiving it to become increasingly more defensive. The way to break that cycle is, of course, to step away, which John did—but far too late. This is just the latest example of a regular social media phenomenon that I am not fond of, where someone does something stupid and then gets all their skeletons thrown out of the closet. Regardless of whether those skeletons should have been there in the first place, it still feels excessive to react this way because of the original story and John's bad, but understandable, reaction to the pushback.

And, to be clear, saying I understand why someone reacts the way they do is not a defense of that reaction.
posted by SansPoint at 6:43 AM on January 4, 2021 [7 favorites]

SansPoint: Was there other food in the house, or were the beans the only option for the both of them?

There were, apparently, at the very least other cans available to be opened. But he had decided she could not have any food until she opened the can. It's definitely not the case that the beans were the only option. The story tells us as much.
posted by Too-Ticky at 6:46 AM on January 4, 2021 [13 favorites]

If Mr. Beans has been misunderstood and has a good soul, he will have ample opportunity to demonstrate that after this particular storm passes. If we have made bad choices in the past, every morning we can choose to make different and better choices. It may even be possible to recognise that building arrogance, crankiness, and assholery into one's personal brand (as several of his friends and defenders have suggested) is not a sustainable plan for adult life.

I have fucked up with my kid; some of my mistakes were major. I paid a price for that but over time I regained their trust and have a strong relationship with them now. None of us can know what the daughter of Mr. Beans thinks about the can-opener adventure; only time (and future parenting choices) will show how this plays out for the two of them. Virtually no one on the blue is demanding that the daughter be taken away from her dad. But sure, I have strong opinions on this topic. One of them is that this Twitter uproar has educated maybe thousands of adults (who did not know because of their upbringing) about better, more healthy ways to teach their children how to do things.

women on the Internet have known forever that whatever they say could result in rape and death threats, because that happens. Black women feeding their kids curry on Tik Tok have had CPS called on them for feeding "bad food." These are great injustices that should be addressed by us all. Unfortunately, because they don't impact on white men, it's been slow to get people to take them seriously

This, one thousand times this. There is literally no excuse for thinking of Mr. Beans as a victim when he was clearly a volunteer. I do not grok the dismay over people digging up his shitty old tweets when they were just lying around as a fetid pool of awfulness. I am an old person, not a so-called digital native. I have had the opportunity to email, post, or comment in anti-semitic, racist, sexist, white-supremacist, or otherwise bigoted ways on Instagram, Pinterest, AOL, Facebook, MetaFilter, and elsewhere for decades. To the best of my knowledge, I have posted exactly one comment that was bigoted. (If I have made more than one bigoted comment, I apologize because that is fucked up.)

My bigoted comment was on MetaFilter and I quickly got educated by the hive mind on why my comment was wrong, wrong, wrong. I apologised, I learned from the experience, and I did not fucking double-down, get defensive, or squeal that the pile-on was unfair and mean.

TL;DR: It is not hard to avoid bigoted comments. If you make more than a few over the course of your life, that's on you and there should be a reckoning. (Also, Twitter is a sewer and I mostly avoid it.)
posted by Bella Donna at 6:46 AM on January 4, 2021 [41 favorites]

And yet, there's psychology involved behind that reaction that fits a pattern I've seen before where a dumb, contextless thing gets blown out of proportion and people start looking for more reasons to justify their anger, which causes the person receiving it to become increasingly more defensive.

This is a very interesting point you're making.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:46 AM on January 4, 2021 [32 favorites]

On the old tweets question- just do a mass delete. There are so many services that will make that easy for you. I think I have mine set to wipe everything older than 3 months. This is the service I use link. I understand Nicole Cliffe does something similar.
posted by Braeburn at 6:50 AM on January 4, 2021 [7 favorites]

SansPoint: It is a matter of opinion because we don't know a) when John's daughter had last ate, b) if it was really six hours of it that was hyperbole

He's told us that she had had breakfast and that breakfast happens at six. He's not mentioned lunch even though he's been asked about it. He's said that lunch is at noon. And he has said that the six hours were really six hours.

That's what we know, straight from the horse's mouth, as it were.
posted by Too-Ticky at 6:50 AM on January 4, 2021 [11 favorites]

I still don’t know what it is about the reaction that you think is excessive. His abrasive brand doesn’t match the podcast, so after 10 years they’re getting a new song. For all you know they were going to do that anyway. A lot of people yelled at him, because people generally don’t check to see if someone else has already made the same point first. People with a history of abuse tried to explain the potential consequences to him. Teachers tried to explain why his method wasn’t going to work. Other people gossiped and joked about him. But you’re acting like he’s being crucified. He’ll be fine.
posted by harriet vane at 6:52 AM on January 4, 2021 [25 favorites]

What did "apocalypse dad" Roderick intend to convey? "I may die, kiddo, so you'd better learn to fend for yourself, and Empire of the Sun chocolates may not be available"? If he actually conveyed that to her, it's useless and cruel. Being deliberately grim for grim's sake is really for adults (teens take it up to impress each other). Since the guy is separated from the girl's mother, it seems like barely veiled hostility to the other parent.

Is anyone reminded of the legend of the Spartan boy and the fox?

The Spartan boy and the fox

Google this and you get a lot of bullshit. I'm back at work, so I can't trace the way this diffused into the manosphere (from "300"?) and possibly influenced JR, at least indirectly, but it shows how old the attitude is.
posted by bad grammar at 6:56 AM on January 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

This is just the latest example of a regular social media phenomenon that I am not fond of, where someone does something stupid and then gets all their skeletons thrown out of the closet. Regardless of whether those skeletons should have been there in the first place, it still feels excessive to react this way because of the original story and John's bad, but understandable, reaction to the pushback.

I am not fond of mobs either. And yet, I have to admit that when I look back at my own generally quiet social media, curated to not damage my career, my family, or myself, I see that while I would be careful and thoughtful, thousands of right-wing and abusive people, vaccine deniers and racists, were screaming into the void and taking up a lot of air time.

Why is that? Because the consequences were different for them and for me. And I'm a pretty privileged white woman who had a platform for a long time. I and my team spent long hours discussing the impact of our choice of stories, our language, and our images.

So now the tables have turned and it's controlling "apocalypse dads" who are getting slammed, not instead of the rest of us, but alongside us. And I have to ask: Whose idea is it that what you put on Twitter should not "count"? Who does it serve to use phrases like "a few skeletons in the closet" when I saw at least 6 Tweets that were at the very least extremely distasteful?

And why do we accept that the "normal" response of white men is anger and doubling down on their mistakes?

It's actually all a part of the same story, because that was the very lesson he was trying to teach his daughter. Men will randomly put you to the test, and you had better be ready if you want your beans.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:59 AM on January 4, 2021 [64 favorites]

EmpressCallipygos: I am aware of the irony. I'm trying to make a larger point about these sorts of discourses, which I am clearly failing at. I'll try one last time: I find it terribly worrisome that someone can make a public mistake on Twitter, and then have half the internet jump down their throat and start searching through their past looking for evidence of how terrible a person they are—regardless of who it is. It happens to celebrities, and it happens to nobodies. It happens for valid reasons, to people who deserve cancellation. It happens for silly reasons to people who had no idea what they were doing and don't deserve the level of scrutiny they receive.

Essentially, I wonder what people want when something like this happens. Others upthread have said "John should just apologize and we'll all move on," but we've seen multiple examples of people apologizing and a significant portion of people not moving on. It also scares me that pointing out how often this happens, and citing the pattern, is ignored because So-And-So Did A Terrible Thing Today and We Must Shame Them Repeatedly.
posted by SansPoint at 7:00 AM on January 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

The argument I'm making is that from what I know, what John did was dumb, but does not justify the level of scrutiny and debate that it received.

So to recap:

- The hungry 9 yr old child fully deserved to be denied access to all food by the powerful adult charged with caring for her. You don't quite *support* this, but she definitely deserved it, which is why you're not here to object to the treatment she got.) The way she was treated is unremarkable, normal, no big deal, does not cross your line. Her suffering is inconsequential to you. You strongly prefer to completely ignore what her dad confessed to - e.g. when he said he would not allow her to eat a bite of anything until she had figured this out - because you prefer to imagine that her suffering is made-up/exaggerated/make-believe. One thing is clear: she deserves no compassion.

- The 52 yr old man who bragged about denying his child food for 6 hours did NOT deserve to be questioned, mocked, or challenged on Twitter, which has no power over his life and has done him no harm that we have any evidence of. Heck he doesn't even deserve the injury of any of us believing hhe actually did the monstrous thing he bragged about doing. To take him at his word is too cruel to him. We have crossed your line if we believe his own account of his monstrousness towards his daughter. You strongly prefer to imagine that he is suffering immensely right now. You love to make up imaginary scenarios where you elaborate on this fantasy and exaggerate how much pain he must be in. His imaginary pain is of utmost consequence to you. All the compassion you have must be channeled towards him.
posted by MiraK at 7:00 AM on January 4, 2021 [35 favorites]

Among the lesser layers of the general dimwittedness of this particular dimwit that stuck with me was the bit of the Surely They Will All Applaud Me story where his folksy wisdom was along the lines of, when you can't trust your mind, trust your hands. As if mechanical and spatial reasoning is something essential that in-dwells within thumbs and fingers which is...well, again, just one of the layers that is so, so dumb.
posted by Drastic at 7:13 AM on January 4, 2021 [19 favorites]

MiraK: I never said that a 9 year old child deserved to be denied access to food, and I certainly did not say her father shouldn't have been called out for it. I'm saying, again, that I don't think the situation is as extreme as people are painting it. I feel compassion for both people here. I don't think the behavior is monstrous, I think it's a mistake.

Everyone in this thread is trying to be compassionate to the child, myself included. To express compassion to her father does not means one cannot feel compassion for the child. This sort of binary view of the situation is part of the larger problem I'm trying to address.

I think I get where you're coming from here, much as how I tend to get very defensive in threads about how to deal with bullying, as a long-time victim of it. Child abuse is something that is very real. A lot of people in this thread have shared their experiences of it, and those experience and how they filter one's view of the situation are valid. I'm sorry that I seem to be hurting you by seeing this situation from a different perspective, and defending that perspective. I don't want to hurt you, or anyone else.
posted by SansPoint at 7:17 AM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Essentially, I wonder what people want when something like this happens

Sadly, "people" are not working in tandem by design and cannot satisfy your desire for justification. Not that they owe you any in the first place, singly or collectively. People are mostly just looking at an asshole and going, "Jeez...what an asshole". Now, having that happen a million times, can't feel good; I'm not surprised that he deleted his Twitter account. But no matter how many people react to public assholery by naming it correctly, that doesn't add up to a threat, or a slippery slope, or anything of the kind.

You know what constitutes a threat? Threatening people. Doxing people. SWATting people. And those things are genuine dangers on the internet, that disproportionately happen to women and people of color. Maybe next time you can write a dozen comments on how often that is, rather than how worrisome it is that a chucklefuck who wanted to pat himself on the back about how unusual he is got mocked instead.
posted by Ipsifendus at 7:18 AM on January 4, 2021 [36 favorites]

5. Those tweets are taken out of context making already bad content look worse than they really are.
6. The reaction to 5 is excessive


Why is this the assumption? Why go to bat for him? Let him defend himself. Why are racist comments always defended as "not really ___?" I think I know why. White supremacy always is defended. It's important to me that people who leap to the defense of racist speech examine their urge to do so.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:19 AM on January 4, 2021 [36 favorites]

Yeah, it’s really icky to see anyone defending his racist and rapist tweets as “not that bad.” You people don’t deserve beans.
posted by rikschell at 7:30 AM on January 4, 2021 [18 favorites]

My feeling is that since 2010-ish, the internet has grown less insular and way less dominated by Gen X early-adopters, and as a result, obnoxious and hurtful behavior that seemed normal to straight/white/male/neurotypical/post-Christian people no longer seems normal. It's not that we as a society have changed our minds about the acceptability of irony poisoning and slurs; it's that the people who have fun with slurs are no longer dominant.

This great long post by Frowner is especially interesting in the context of the move by My Brother, My Brother and Me to stop using his music. For people who don’t follow them - their podcast first launched in 2010, when they were all in their early to mid 20s, and it initially had some of the very problems described here. Just some thoughtless meanness. Then, maybe 40 or 60 episodes in, they got into the topic of furries, and in classic that-era-of-internet style they talked a lot of very mean shit about them, maybe even said they should be shot or something like that.

The next week they opened the episode with an apology, saying they’d been contacted by multiple furry fans who were heartbroken that they’d been so cruel, and that they were changing their tune. Furries were now explicitly welcome, and they never talked shit about them again. But beyond that, they started applying the same ethos to everything else. They stopped being mean in their comedy. And now they are a hugely beloved podcast empire because they have built their brand on compassion rather than “ironic” cruelty.

Getting called out for shitty behavior is only career-ending if you refuse to learn from it.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:42 AM on January 4, 2021 [100 favorites]

I'm sorry that I seem to be hurting you by seeing this situation from a different perspective, and defending that perspective.

How to apologize
How to fauxpologize
posted by eviemath at 7:56 AM on January 4, 2021 [19 favorites]

Why is this the assumption? Why go to bat for him? Let him defend himself. Why are racist comments always defended as "not really ___?"

W. Kamau Bell's "How do you know it was pizza?" routine jumps to mind.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 8:01 AM on January 4, 2021 [16 favorites]

Yeah, it’s really icky to see anyone defending his racist and rapist tweets as “not that bad.” You people don’t deserve beans.

AFAIK I was the first one here to post about his anti-Semitic tweets and the response from the admins was that this was not on topic.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:19 AM on January 4, 2021 [16 favorites]

I remember, back in the first semester of law school, a class where we were going over defamation, and a case came up about some construction site foreman in Texas with a mostly Latinx crew, and hime berating one of his employees with tons of racial slurs loudly enough for other crewmembers to hear it outside of the foreman's office. The main point seemed to be whether something said in an arguably private conversation can be defamation if it's done loudly and carelessly enough for others to hear regardless.

One classmate, who I'll call Silas here, asked "Is it defamation if it's true, though?" and here's where the party started.

Now, there are a couple of things to know here, the first of which is that truth is an absolute defense against a defamation claim (outside of per se cases), and the second of which is that Silas was a straight white guy from a well-off family, avowedly liberal but coming from the libertarian-leaning University of Chigaco Economics program, socially awkward, and an absolute "Gunner" (i.e. the type of kid in law school who treats every class like it's a competition to prove that they're the smartest person in the room.) I remember him having a habit of him trying to steer every class conversation to the point where he could use the word "fungible," which is a pretty specific thing to remember about someone you only spent one semester with in classes of ~120 students.

He was an annoying dude, for sure, with much to learn, and I knew him enough to know that he was trying to ask "As offensive as the term in question is, logically, if we boil it down to factual meaning, it's calling the guy Latinx, which he is, so by what legal measure are we calling it defamation?" And I think in his head, this was clear and obvious enough that he never really got around to rephrasing it as such, because the next forty-five minutes of class became a massive pile-on, and understandably so - this was a horrific question on it's face, deeply and personally offensive to the many, many POC students in the class.

Dude dug in that night, in an email meant to go out to our entire section (all of whom were in the class in question) but which went out to the entire student body, taking the conversation online and to a ton of folks who weren't even there for the original context, and it got way uglier. Wisely or not, the professor started up the conversation again in the next class, in the hopes of clearing the air and settling it down, which... it did not. Silas transferred out at the end of the semester.

This type of digging in seems to come from a particular place of straight white male privilege, in my opinion. I'm sure i've done it, and it's ugly and awful to see. I knew Silas from having had a few drinks and conversations with him before (and I think I invited him out after the first class with a few of my friends to try to more calmly explain how he'd fucked up, in a more sympathetic environment, not that that did any good ultimately) and in the end I couldn't stand behind his inability to self-reflect and stop fucking digging.

But I do have sympathy for the person at the center of a pile-on, flailing around futilely trying to defend themselves while the folks piling on have very little to worry about in the situation. Not a ton of sympathy, mind you - like I say, it's a particularly privileged straight white male thing to do, because folks who aren't privileged straight white men have almost certainly learned the way of the world well enough by adulthood that they don't get themselves in that situation to begin with. You have to really have the viewpoint that the world will come to its senses and recognize your rightness in order to keep getting yourself entangled there.

I only "know" Roderick from his podcasts, and even there mostly from Roderick-adjacent podcasts like MBMBAM and Greatest Generation, but that those hosts associate with him, or did until very recently, had me giving him the benefit of the doubt, at least coming into this. I don't think there's much of a question that this will ruin Roderick's career - he was marginally famous in exactly the right degree for this to blow up and make him much more famous as "Bean Dad." That's who he is now, because he dug into this and made himself radioactive and toxic. A lot of the old tweets that folks have unearthed, but which he wrote, on a public forum and as a person whose career is inextricably tied with seeking fame, might look a lot better in context. A lot of them, I don't really think context can do much for. The best that I can say for them is that the context, you know, what he really meant and they way in which they were supposed to be understood, was so obvious from his privileged worldview that he never even thought to explain it. Dammit, Silas. That's what privilege is and the fall from it is, to quote Dar Williams, "a fall from a great and gruesome height."

TL;DR, he did this to himself, nobody has a right to an entertainment career, and his actions in responding to this maelstrom are deservedly forcing his associates to back away from him, but I can't help but feel sympathy for the person in the middle of the vortex, especially with how giddy folks can get in piling on. But then, I'll probably be involved in piling on the next person who I don't have any preconceived notions about, so I for sure can't judge anyone here for doing it - dude has provided far too much material to claim victimhood here.
posted by Navelgazer at 8:27 AM on January 4, 2021 [34 favorites]

There's a great career ahead for him in being an affronted shithead on YouTube. Millions of people will subscribe to that shit if he can talk about it in 30-45 minute chunks without a hint of whine in his voice. It's not like there aren't hundreds of people doing that already, some of them with five figure monthly incomes.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:31 AM on January 4, 2021 [12 favorites]

> I don't think there's much of a question that this will ruin Roderick's career

I question this. What man who has done a similar thing has had his career actually ruined? Maybe they had to cancel a tour or co-hosting a different podcast, but ruined ruined? As in, had to go back to school and get a new degree and start over? Changed their name? Gone down a completely different career path, unwillingly? Has that ever happened to a straight white man because of their misbehavior on social media?
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:32 AM on January 4, 2021 [38 favorites]

Essentially, I wonder what people want when something like this happens.

I think that it's worth flipping this question around and asking what the author wanted when he posted that story. My guess: at minimum he wanted a lot of likes and retweets from his followers. At best, he wanted it to go viral, to reach a wider audience, and to draw some attention to his podcast and other business endeavors. In other words, he wanted to profit from it. That didn't work out, so he flounced.

He could have easily scrubbed his history of problematic Tweets but (presumably) he didn't see a problem with them, so he didn't. After all, the Tweets provided more content for potential fans to engage with.
posted by skye.dancer at 8:34 AM on January 4, 2021 [31 favorites]

I don't think there's much of a question that this will ruin Roderick's career

You might want to do a brief Google on how Louis C.K. is doing lately.
posted by holborne at 8:40 AM on January 4, 2021 [24 favorites]

Some comments have made it sounds like he's already been hit, professionally, for this, because his music won't be on mbmbam anymore...

Would that have actually been an income source for him at all? I always assumed they got to use the music for free, given that he was part of the same podcast network and they had the VERY thorough "thank you" for it at the end of each episode.
posted by meese at 9:03 AM on January 4, 2021

Maybe they had to cancel a tour or co-hosting a different podcast, but ruined ruined? As in, had to go back to school and get a new degree and start over? Changed their name? Gone down a completely different career path, unwillingly? Has that ever happened to a straight white man because of their misbehavior on social media?

I definitely don't wish to open an argument about whether what he said on Twitter was wrong or not, but Steven Salaita really did have his career ruined by controversy over what he said on Twitter. He went from having an offer for a tenured position to working as a bus driver because no place would hire him full time.

It's so hard to know what are good consequences for behaviour which is, ultimately, a social crime rather than a literal one. It's easier with literal crime - you charge the person with the relevant offence. Saying bad things suck and shouldn't be consequence-free, but what should the consequences be? Should someone lose their career? Does it depend on what was said and how it relates to their career? (e.g. I'd be less worried about a racist butcher than a racist teacher, because one works with and has influence over children.)

I don't know what the right response is - and I know that other people (like Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkeesian) have had far worse than just a threat to their careers. But maybe I don't want people to be utterly dredged for what they say on twitter because I'm convinced that someday, someone will take one of my tweets (or Metafilter comments) and use it to destroy me, because I'm a human, so I'm sure I've said something awful. I try not to - and I'm trying to train myself not to use ablest language like "crazy" when I mean "ridiculous" (and use it just for discussing my own mental illness).
posted by jb at 9:06 AM on January 4, 2021 [5 favorites]

The argument I'm making is that from what I know, what John did was dumb, but does not justify the level of scrutiny and debate that it received

I think that's precisely wrong. John has (had?) an audience of tens of thousands on Twitter alone. Nobody forced that audience on him — he went looking for it, in part by styling himself as someone who gives parenting advice. Then he tried to get some more attention by digging a hole for his kid. Then he fell into the hole himself.
posted by dmh at 9:07 AM on January 4, 2021 [19 favorites]

I read this thread a little further in the middle of the night, and woke up this morning still dwelling on the exchange where it was suggested that even if Bean Dad and others just couldn't help themselves back in 2012, they had to post racist, antisemitic and otherwise bigoted things because that was "funny" to them (and other cis het white guys, I guess?) back then, that maybe now in retrospect it would be swell for them to go back and delete said comments, and SansPoint, you responded with "You ever try going through and deleting your old, bad tweets? Especially if you’re a prolific tweeter? They don’t make it easy."

I don't mean to single you out because I don't think that reaction is unique to you, but I'm stuck on that comment because it seems like the argument is that Bean Dad (and by extension, others who have written shitty bigoted crap) might be harmed by people who are able to go through and find those old, bad tweets; yet even while we have actual people in this actual thread sharing how such shitty comments harm them, somehow it's too hard for the original author to take the time to go back and find those comments themselves? Oh and also "they" don't make it easy, by which I'm assuming that now even Twitter itself is more to blame than the author?

In all honesty, I'm not even sure that deleting these shitty comments is the right way to go, or if acknowledgement and a genuine apology is more appropriate, or something else entirely. Regardless, I keep coming back to this sense that much of what I'm reading in defense of Bean Dad both here and elsewhere depends on the idea that people (or really, white cis guys) who write shitty things in public spaces shouldn't be held accountable for those words, and if anybody ever brings them back up then any wrong-doing lies with that person and not the original author. The lack of accountability is just ... stunning. It almost feels like there's this wish that shitty "ironic" racism could still get by without any consequences.

I'll be curious to see if long-term, people who have written shitty bigoted "satire" in the past might actually learn from Bean Dad and take steps to reduce the harm that their words have caused - if not for the targets of their "humor" but to protect themselves from the consequences of someone else bringing their words back up later - but I'm truly not holding out any hope.
posted by DingoMutt at 9:09 AM on January 4, 2021 [32 favorites]

I definitely don't wish to open an argument about whether what he said on Twitter was wrong or not, but Steven Salaita really did have his career ruined by controversy over what he said on Twitter. He went from having an offer for a tenured position to working as a bus driver because no place would hire him full time.


Ugh, his career wasn't "ruined by controversy", he was the victim of a sustained and targeted campaign. There was mass outrage, for sure, but the regents of his university didn't exploit a legal loophole to fire him because of a twitter mob.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:10 AM on January 4, 2021 [15 favorites]

What man who has done a similar thing has had his career actually ruined?

Shane Gillis was kicked off of SNL before he ever even started because of racist shit on his podcast. Nick Robinson is another case of the McElroy's (specifically Griffin) immediately cutting ties when awful stuff came to light (in Robinson's case, predatory use of social media.) It doesn't happen a lot, but it does happen, and I think, at least with MaxFun, we're going to see that Roderick is done now. He'll probably still have Omnibus, though, so I have to concede that you're essentially right, and I'll stop picking nits.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:13 AM on January 4, 2021

In all honesty, I'm not even sure that deleting these shitty comments is the right way to go, or if acknowledgement and a genuine apology is more appropriate, or something else entirely.

I've had some professional discussion around this, in a limited group. This is mostly from a reputation management perspective, but not an uncaring one, like not cynical, more like "I really do regret this, how do I handle it?"

That group agreed however, that the right thing to do is a) delete your old Tweets, etc. There are utilities that make this easy, especially if you are willing to let go of your deathless prose of the past, b) a few days later (this delays is for your benefit, not society's) issue a real apology saying that you've deleted some Tweets because you regret your past statements and any harm you may have caused and then c) do better.

Of course at the point at which you apologize, your old Tweets may surface from other sources - screen captures etc. - and then you have to keep apologizing more specifically. So since you can pick your time and place, pick your time and place according to your ability to stay focused, calm, and sincere.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:17 AM on January 4, 2021 [31 favorites]

It's so hard to know what are good consequences for behaviour which is, ultimately, a social crime rather than a literal one.

The thing which keeps coming to mind for me with this is, broadly, "A mob is the language of the unheard". (I had a more overstuffed definition about personal consequences delegated into justice & the breakdown and all that, but it was getting in the way)

In other words, this guy, Louis CK, Warren Ellis, Woody Allen... they're untouchable. We have no system in place that people can trust "Yeah, they'll get what they're due". What mockery of a system we have & claim to have be that doesn't touch these sorts of issues, and doesn't touch men, white, rich, famous, etc. like him.

So, in the absence of that, people reach for what they've got. Their voice. And right now a confluence of technology and social pressure and many other things that voice gets heard, when previously it was ignorable. So there's consequences. It's a blunt object. It can be capricious in who gets the focus and who doesn't. People can still bounce back & find their way back into the spotlight minimally-repentant. It can be redirected into harassment campaigns. (Turns out terrible people are also learning how to direct their own energies this way) I'm not sure anybody's looking at the current state of affairs as ideal.

But at the end of it, the response can't be "Let's work to take away that option", if for no other reason then because I don't think it'd be effective. It's a symptom, not the root.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:24 AM on January 4, 2021 [27 favorites]

Some comments have made it sounds like he's already been hit, professionally, for this, because his music won't be on mbmbam anymore...

Would that have actually been an income source for him at all? I always assumed they got to use the music for free, given that he was part of the same podcast network and they had the VERY thorough "thank you" for it at the end of each episode.

It’s not about income, more about what the move symbolizes and what it might imply for his actual show on the network, Friendly Fire. But I’m fairly sure he was not part of the network when they started using his song as their theme song.
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:30 AM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

Part of being a successful "media personality" is that you are hired based on both words--your skill with media (whether it's film, print, music or "radio"), and your "persona" (which may or may not match who you are in private with your friends, but is considered "you" by the public).

If you mess either one up, you are no longer filling the role you're being paid for, and it's likely you'll lose the gig(s) you have that depend on those things. (That's certainly been true for non-straight-white-men forever.)
posted by maxwelton at 9:31 AM on January 4, 2021 [18 favorites]

This sort of binary view of the situation is part of the larger problem I'm trying to address.

But your comments here have been espousing this exact binary view from the beginning of your engagement here, SansPoint. e.g. you explicitly reject the notion that bean dad forcibly kept the child hungry for six hours (even though he confessed to it, it must not be true??) and, at the same time, you make up elaborate fantasies of how bean dad has been fully taken down or had his career snatched away from him. From your comments is where I'm hearing this binary of "in order for his pain must be recognized, hers must be erased, denied, and minimized." If you didn't buy into this binary, you would not feel the need to rebalance the scales of the facts with the thumb of your imagination.

TBH I'm not sure about the way I've been responding to this blow-up. I have a tendency to become overly engaged in internet arguments when feeling overwhelmed by other areas of life - like, I turn to my innate strength in making good, articulate arguments online in order to feel competent at something. I've taken hours off this thread, done me work, done my chores, engaged with friends and kids, and asked myself why I keep getting drawn back in here and whether it's particularly healthy. Just saying, I am questioning myself and reflecting on my participation here.

But one of the things I've changed my mind about in recent years is the notion that engaging online is useless, that online arguments have no impact on "real life" culture, etc. We used to deride "slacktivism" back in the aughts and the early 20-teens, right? But one of the lessons of the past few years has been that this shit is real and it can be a force for good. That we don't have to cede the power of the online echo chamber to trolls and assholes. It matters when we take over and echo each other in defense of victims who have very little social power, like, for instance, children. We change the culture both online and IRL in meaningful ways when we speak up and echo each other. Folks upthread have noted how this feels like a generational shift, that the internet would have responded very differently to bean dad in 2010/2011 than we just did in 2021. They're right! The internet WAS ruled by bean dads back in the day.

The fact that bean dads don't rule anymore? That they're forced to delete their accounts? That the whole internet resoundingly calls out their abuse of a child, creating a deafening echoing pile-on standing up for the child's right to access food when she is hungry? I think that's a fucking fantastic thing, goddamn. What a great change in our culture!

Sure, we can keep working towards a utopia where no echo chambers and no pile-ons exist on the internet. That's kind of a separate goal, though. It feels really silly that anyone would prioritize this goal over - or set this goal against - the goal of changing the culture to stop condoning child abuse.
posted by MiraK at 9:33 AM on January 4, 2021 [60 favorites]

It’s not about income, more about what the move symbolizes and what it might imply for his actual show on the network, Friendly Fire. But I’m fairly sure he was not part of the network when they started using his song as their theme song.

Right. I posted this above but (mefi's own) Jesse Thorn is currently deciding what to do here.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:36 AM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Mod note: A nudge that it's time to pause on further arguing the same points with each other, seems like folks have made their points sufficiently. The participation is great and widely valuable, but I think we're getting a bit stuck here.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 9:45 AM on January 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

Yesterday of all days my wife came back from helping her mom setup her christmas ipad and walked into my office holding a can opener. Her mom gave it to her saying "it's a $30 can opener and we can't figure out how to use it." My wife tried to explain the reason that this was funny to her and her mom decided it was "all ridiculous."
posted by Uncle at 9:55 AM on January 4, 2021 [20 favorites]

So I cook with my kids, and I let them pick what recipes they want to learn, and my 11-year-old definitely knows how to use a can opener (he likes to do a lot of stews and things and I'm a big fan of canned diced tomatoes), but I wasn't sure if my 9-year-old did, since he's more into learning stir fries and things like that. (And tonight I am making a chili that requires three opened cans.)

So during a break in distance learning this morning I asked him, "Hey, do you know how to use a can opener?"
"No, why?"
So I gave him a very abridged version of Bean Dad: "This jerk on the internet told his 9-year-old to figure out a can opener without help and wouldn't feed her until she did and everyone's mad."
"That's stupid."
"Right? Anyway, I wasn't sure if you knew how, so I figured tonight you could learn."
He asked, "Can I try to figure it out like the bean guy's kid before you show me?"
I said, "Okay, but only for like five minutes, because I do actually have to make dinner."

I will report back.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:57 AM on January 4, 2021 [62 favorites]

How about we post baked bean recipes instead of dwelling on this asshole, those like him and their behaviour on social media and IRL? Here's the one (French version here) I've been using lately.
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:06 AM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Canned Baked Beans
Ingredients: One (1) can of baked beans
Prep time: 6 hours
Cook time: 15 minutes
Total time: 6 hours 15 minutes
posted by Roommate at 10:14 AM on January 4, 2021 [31 favorites]

I've been experimenting with a lodge cast-iron pot (with lid), baked beans, and my offset smoker. They are really tasty, and - since it's a very slow way to cook stuff- often will take 6 hours or so.
posted by jenkinsEar at 10:17 AM on January 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

I will report back.

I'm calling it The Bean Child Challenge! For kids who don't know how to use a can opener, and want to try to figure it out on their own, just for the fun of it. (Note: The Bean Child Challenge involves lots of snacks being provided, and it ends as soon as the kid no longer finds it fun.)
posted by meese at 10:34 AM on January 4, 2021 [12 favorites]

A thought on the "behavior impacting career" issue:

Amy Cooper, the woman who called the police on an African-American bird watcher in Central Park, had her own career affected because of something she did outside of work. I would wager that many of the people here arguing that "maybe John Roderick shouldn't have his career ruined because of this" would say that however, Amy Cooper did deserve to have her career affected by what she did.

I would invite those people simply to examine what criteria they are using to ascertain why one case deserves punishment, and the other doesn't.

(Mind you, I am not saying that her actions are equitable to his on a moral scale; on the contrary, I'm asking people to consider whether a lesser offense still shouldn't carry some weight.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:46 AM on January 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

To pile one additional sin on Bean Dad: pretending to be a prepper and not giving your daughter a Leatherman for her sixth birthday, seventh at the latest.
posted by Stoneshop at 10:57 AM on January 4, 2021 [26 favorites]

So you're not really saying anything. You're just asking questions.

No, I am pointing out that the people who defend him but excoriate her may want to examine precisely why they differentiate between the two cases. A self-reflection opportunity has fallen into their laps, I believe.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:04 AM on January 4, 2021 [8 favorites]

Late to the conversation but I think it's interesting to put the Bean Dad incident in the context of a story Roderick told on his podcast about his mother destroying a bunch of his toys when he was a child because he had not put them away properly. Abuse is inherited.
posted by JDHarper at 11:12 AM on January 4, 2021 [16 favorites]

I imagine his daughter loves him, and when the internet hurts him it hurts her too. Please keep that in mind.
posted by hypnogogue at 11:21 AM on January 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

Abuse can be inherited, but many now parents who had abusive parents work at not replicating it, just look at this thread for details.
posted by jeather at 11:21 AM on January 4, 2021 [15 favorites]

You said then that you think everyone here is performatively woke in order to earn favourites.

I read your reply to EmpressCallipygos's comment and it looked a lot like you think she said it to score points. To me, there seem to be a lot of people in this thread who are treating other people's communication of their reactions as point-scoring, and as someone whose parents did withhold food to teach lessons, I find that pretty gross.
posted by ambrosen at 11:39 AM on January 4, 2021 [10 favorites]

I admit that my experience as an Overly Literal Child colors my impression of this story. Maybe other 9 year olds were not as literal as I was. Maybe other 9 year olds were able to understand that "we don't eat unless you open that can" is just play pretend. I never understood that. My mom once bought some Nancy Drew books at Costco. I asked her "are those for me?" And in a moment of bad parenting she sarcastically said "no, they're for me." So I sadly put them in her room and did not read them.

Does that make her abusive? No, absolutely not. But if she bragged about that story on the internet I would hope that other adults would question why she's sharing this as an example of her good parenting style.
posted by muddgirl at 11:44 AM on January 4, 2021 [22 favorites]

Maybe other 9 year olds were able to understand that "we don't eat unless you open that can" is just play pretend.

It wasn't play pretend, though. Why are we allowing ourselves to be gaslit about this? As told, the story is about a dad who refused to feed his child for real.
posted by MiraK at 11:59 AM on January 4, 2021 [30 favorites]

One thing that may be getting lost in all of this is that there were probably 100 other ways to accomplish the "teaching moment" without depriving a hungry 9-year-old of food. (Others have said this, but children tend to have smaller stomachs and higher metabolisms, especially during growth spurts, and need to eat more often. My daughter is now 12, and is still basically useless if she doesn't eat something everything 3 hours or so.)

I would've gone with, "Hey, let's get you a snack first, and then let's you and me see if we can figure out how this can opener thing works."

Of course no parent is perfect, but most of us don't post our mistakes on social media and expect to be congratulated for them.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 12:01 PM on January 4, 2021 [15 favorites]

It wasn't play pretend, though. Why are we allowing ourselves to be gaslit about this? As told, the story was about a dad who refused to feed his child for real.

I'm attempting to be generous with the idea that the story is exaggerated, as Ken Jennings and others have attempted to use as a defense. Even if the story is exaggerated (maybe she struggled for just 30 minutes, maybe he wasn't actually intending to withhold food) it's not an example of a good parenting moment and should not be shared as such.
posted by muddgirl at 12:03 PM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

Mod note: A few comments removed before this turns into a long back and forth derailing the conversation
posted by loup (staff) at 12:04 PM on January 4, 2021 [5 favorites]

I'm attempting to be generous with the idea that the story is exaggerated

Boy do I understand this impulse! As someone who grew up with psychological, physical, and emotional abuse, and as someone who jumped into a marriage with an emotionally, psychologically, and sexually abusive person as a way to escape my parents, I am so. very. familiar. with this temptation to bend over backwards to take abusers at their word... and further, when abusers damn themselves by their words in inescapable ways, to literally twist ourselves into pretzels making excuses for them anyways, maybe they didn't mean what they said, maybe they were just joking, maybe they made it up, maybe their monstrousness is only play-pretend.

Part of growing up and healing from the effects of long-term abuse is to stop doing that, though.

In this case, bean dad himself didn't even say it was all a joke. He didn't even say he was exaggerating. This gaslighting is being done by his apologists. It's kind of like when women go to their families complaining that their husband is abusive and their family tells them, "Are you sure he wasn't just joking? He loves you, really. Come on." They're abuse enablers and apologists for abusers, alright? We do not have to take their word and pretend the abuser didn't say what they said, didn't do what they did.

It's okay to tell them to shut up and fuck off with that gaslighting. We don't have to roll with it.
posted by MiraK at 12:10 PM on January 4, 2021 [41 favorites]

If you think it's unfair that Roderick's career might take a hit because of this, consider that it's also unfair that his his song was was chosen as the theme for a podcast that became very popular and long-lived. MBMBAM didn't become popular because his song was particularly good.

There are literally thousands of musicians whose music could have been chosen for that theme and gotten the career bump he received. It's completely unfair that he got it and they didn't. Nobody is entitled to an audience, and lots of people who deserve one don't get it. It's no unusual injustice if the whims of popularity turn the spotlight from you to somebody else.
posted by straight at 12:11 PM on January 4, 2021 [22 favorites]

Mod note: Don't. Troll. Bartleby, take a day off.
posted by taz (staff) at 12:40 PM on January 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

Coming in again as a semi-official Child of a Dysfunctional Household: what often twigs kid brains more than anything else is the feeling of insecurity or uncertainty, whether their needs will be met or scorned, whether they're going to get nice parent or screaming parent today. The uncertainty of feeling like love and basic needs are supposed to be unconditional, but sometimes your parents will decide you need to earn them in ways that don't make sense to you. It doesn't take a lot of random, unpredictable "weirdness" to disrupt what adults see as otherwise stable.

When I was probably 7, my parents got in a huge fight at dinnertime, my mom dumped dinner in the trash and stormed off to the bedroom. I think my dad was leaving for work. I remember waiting for probably about an hour (maybe it was less, in kid time) before I tiptoed in to ask if she could make me something to eat. And what I remember still, in my thirties, is that I felt guilt and shame at "bothering" her when technically, yes, I could make a bowl of cereal. But the general disruption of norms was so unsettling that I honestly didn't know that day. Was it okay to ask for food? Should I just solve this problem myself? Was she still mad, would she be mad at me for asking? Should I comfort her first?

That's the only time I was "deprived food" and yeah, I wasn't going to starve. But the general feeling of "shit this is really weird, can I fix it, should I fix it, is it OK to ask for things I need, what if I still don't get them" is a pattern that stays for a long time even with only a few events.
posted by nakedmolerats at 12:48 PM on January 4, 2021 [50 favorites]

I don’t think this is an example of an internet mob, to be honest.

I think a random dude on Twitter struck an extremely raw nerve, and accidentally coined the canonical example of oblivious, low-key shitty parenting. It resonated very strongly with people who had encountered similar experiences during their childhood.

It also felt like the culmination of several other tropes – a comedian who seems all too proud of being an asshole – a person who gets caught caught in a scandal, digs their heels in, and reacts in the worst possible way – a red-flag incident unearths a well-documented but underreported history of shitty behavior. I could go on...

Roderick seems to have extremely precisely tapped the zeitgeist of online scandals that were overdue for a reckoning, which led to this blowing up in the way that it did.

Much like the Emotional Labor thread, a lot of things suddenly clicked into focus, and we’ve been given a new vocabulary to talk about a longstanding issue. In this case, however, it was an abuser rather than a victim who outlined the crystal-clear pattern of oblivious abuse.
posted by schmod at 1:00 PM on January 4, 2021 [69 favorites]

One bright note: the (temporary? rushed?) opening song for today's MBMBAM cracked me up.
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:27 PM on January 4, 2021 [9 favorites]

Six hours is far, far too long. Not because of hunger, because 9 year olds should not be focusing on one frustrating activity for that long! The parent's commitment to making sure the daughter did it herself without help (would love to know how he figured out how to open a can himself!) is fine but with a 9 year old kid, 6 hours is completely unreasonable and mean.

Maybe after an hour if she doesn't get it, you give her a hint and then she figures it out! Making a 9 year old do any single task for 6 hours is wrong! I am so surprised by the replies that anyone thinks it's a good idea in any way!
posted by chaz at 1:57 PM on January 4, 2021 [20 favorites]

6 hours is an entire school day.
posted by schmod at 2:08 PM on January 4, 2021 [15 favorites]

Kids that age just don't have that kind of attention span. Hell, lots of adults these days don't either!
posted by peppermind at 2:13 PM on January 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

But the general feeling of "shit this is really weird, can I fix it, should I fix it, is it OK to ask for things I need, what if I still don't get them" is a pattern that stays for a long time even with only a few events.

Yeah I've been reading along, and modding along, with this thread. I had parents that I think some would call abusive but I mostly saw as mildly neglectful. But they would do this sort of drama shit where you had no idea if you were allowed to ask for the very normal thing that you think should be an okay thing to want/ask for, but then you also have to have a plan B if you don't get it because shit is super unreliable and predictable sometimes.

And even as a grown ass woman (one with no kids, for various reasons but having had ungreat parents was definitely one) I have a hard time sometimes when people are what I perceive to be unreasonable to me, at either creating a boundary ("Yeah no one gets to talk to me that way now that I am an adult") or end running that unreasonable person ("This doctor says they won't give me the meds I need for unreasonable reasons, time to try another doctor. I guess?") but it's a struggle each time. We were taught, my sister and I, that our discomfort didn't really matter. That's a hard lesson to unlearn.

As I got older I realized that both of my parents were pretty damaged people who were in way over their heads raising two kids who had their own issues. My dad--who had his own mental health challenges--did some Roderick-style shit when I was a kid, though not to that level. My mom was just a narcissist, making every story about me (even ones about my pain) all about HER. So this resonated. I've always really been squicked out by Roderick, and a lot of those guys if I am being honest, who make other people's discomfort into part of their thing. I know this is sort of me, I know some people really enjoy this kind of humor, but it's always landed kind of wrong for me and this whole journey has been, i think, part of why.
posted by jessamyn at 2:47 PM on January 4, 2021 [62 favorites]

I would invite those people simply to examine what criteria they are using to ascertain why one case deserves punishment, and the other doesn't.

(Mind you, I am not saying that her actions are equitable to his on a moral scale; on the contrary, I'm asking people to consider whether a lesser offense still shouldn't carry some weight.)

No, I am pointing out that the people who defend him but excoriate her may want to examine precisely why they differentiate between the two cases.

I think you are implying a gendered difference but it took me until your followup comment to get that because in your first comment you immediately assert yourself that his is a lesser offense.

But I think I’ve come to the realization that this whole thing is more about the beans than the (old) tweets. I was hung up on the way the instantaneous rebroadcasting of superficial readings of his history shows... dynamics of internet interaction that are basically negative, even if this guy happens to be Actually Kinda Shitty underneath. But in focusing on that I was, well, underthinking the beans, and how much that weird parenting story (and his digging in on six hours not being an exaggeration) struck a genuinely upsetting note for people so that the tweet digging basically just confirmed the impression.
posted by atoxyl at 3:08 PM on January 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

Also I think you can almost connect them in that what you can see from his old tweets is a lot of examples of him thinking the best way to make a point about racism is to be excruciatingly awkward and exhausting about rubbing it in your face.
posted by atoxyl at 3:13 PM on January 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

Yeah - as shitty as his ironic racism/antisemitism/etc. schtick is, that's not why he went viral, that's not why we're having this thread. The pain point was not his dated, bigoted old tweeting style. It was the beans.
posted by MiraK at 3:48 PM on January 4, 2021 [5 favorites]

Why are people trying to give the benefit of the doubt to a long article voluntarily written and published by a communication professional? Dude could have written away any ambiguity about how long it really was and what his daughter was thinking during all of this but decided not to. So just take him at his (many) word(s) and accept that things happened the way he wrote they did and go from there.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 4:03 PM on January 4, 2021 [14 favorites]

For anyone else who came to Bean Dad a bit late only to find Roderick's Twitter account deactivated and thus were unable to look at his tweets directly (either his original thread or his follow-up replies), he seems to have reactivated his Twitter account sometime earlier today. Though, it doesn't look like he's tweeted anything new since around noon Pacific time, Jan. 3 (i.e.: nothing in reference to any events since he de-activated).

Also, Metafilter: It was the beans.
posted by mhum at 4:19 PM on January 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

All right! So, come dinner prep time, I called for the 9-year-old and asked him if he still wanted to try.

"The bean thing? YES!"

So he set to it, first opening the can opener all the way open and trying to use it like a jar lid opener we have. Pretty rapidly figured out that wouldn't work, but was trying to close the two wheels on the edge of the can while the can opener was on TOP of the can -- which may have been by analogy to the jar opener, may have been because until literally four weeks ago I had an Oxo safe-cut type opener so if he ever saw me using it it was on top, and may have just been what seemed logical to him.

He'd been at it for about two minutes, and I pointed out the cutting blade and told him to turn the handles 90 degrees. So then he figured out how to position it, and experimented with turning the wheel, but didn't figure out how/that he needed to make it "bite" into the can.

So I said, "You've got the blade in the right place, now lay the other wheel against the side, and squeeze the handles together, a lot harder than you think you need to. REALLY hard."

He squeezed, hard, and I said, "Even harder!" and he grunted with effort and clomped down with both hands and the blade popped through and he said, "Oh!" and then immediately started cranking the wheel and went 80% of way around and said, "I think my lid is going to fall in when I get back to the start?" So I showed him how to prevent that. After doing it once, he knew how hard he had to squeeze, and had to squeeze two-handed each time, but opened my other two cans and we made chili. (And keep in mind, this is an almost-brand-new opener -- I had opened two cans with it before tonight -- and I spent extra for a good blade because I've had my share of shitty can openers.) The pressure required was really a LOT for a 9-year-old.

Maybe four minutes experimenting with the can opener, and then 90 seconds to open all three cans once he realized how much pressure he needed. Also do note this child is a tinkerer and experimenter -- his advent calendar this year was a science-experiment-every-day calendar -- so he looooooooves messing with our various tools and trying to figure them out, and he's always building things (like elaborate bunk-bed pulley systems) out of lego, wood scraps, or whatever he can get his hands on.

So now, two hours later, after we ate the chili (it was good), I told him I was going to tell the internet how his bean experiment went and asked for his thoughts if he wanted to share them with the internet. I quote, verbatim:
Him: "That was fun!"
Me: "Would you have figured it out if I hadn't showed you?"
Him: "No. Probably not."
Me: "What was the hardest part?"
Him: "Definitely the squeezing, I would NOT have known to squeeze that hard if you hadn't told me to keep squeezing harder."

It was kinda interesting watching what was and wasn't intuitive about a can opener for someone who'd never tried one before. And, yeah, it was definitely not an intuitive tool. But I also think most people are reluctant to apply a LOT of pressure on things, especially if there are sharp edges/blades involved, and learning how hard to hit things or cut things or similar is one of the things that requires some expert guidance and then some practice, even as an adult. Like, I remember being 30ish and learning to give my cat sub-Q fluids, and learning how hard to push the pop the needle in was the hardest part -- I was very anxious about pushing too hard and hurting the cat! And when it comes to human tasks with variable pressure/force, the only way to learn it is to DO it and get a feel for it.

As a kid who has no idea how sturdy steel food cans are, and limited experience of how hard to push knives through food, and knows that if you squeeze a plastic bottle too hard it'll spurt ketchup everywhere, and glass jars can break -- understanding that it's SAFE to put really a LOT of pressure on a food can, and putting quite that MUCH on it, is a big leap to expect from a 9-year-old.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 4:29 PM on January 4, 2021 [105 favorites]

Eyebrows McGee, I've been waiting for your update, and it was worth it! Nice to see that your son had fun.
posted by mumimor at 4:36 PM on January 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

Looks like the tweets and replies are back up and uh, still bad:
-insists kid wasn't really hungry/it wasn't that bad even though she said she was
-insists kid was just being dramatic and weepy mostly as jest (I can discount negative emotions!)
-insists kid was happy and laughing about it the next day (but positive emotions are evidence!)
-insists everyone criticizing him just "doesn't understand" their family/relationship
-kids' own experience of feeling hungry or upset is too mercurial to take seriously, but kids' behavior with spatial tasks is already a fixed trait??
-REPEATED refusal to answer when the kid last actually ate before the 6 hours started
posted by nakedmolerats at 4:45 PM on January 4, 2021 [24 favorites]

I think you are implying a gendered difference but it took me until your followup comment to get that because in your first comment you immediately assert yourself that his is a lesser offense.

For some it might be! I don't know, only they can tell. For others, it may be because he's a cool musician and she's not. For still others, it may be because with this evidence, we have only Roderick's own words - and for Amy Cooper, we have video evidence.

For the record, my followup that "his is a lesser offense" was a pre-emptive self-defense, as I was afraid that I would myself be misinterpreted, and that people would assume that I was implying "black man being threatened with potential police violence" was "exactly the same" as "child getting hungry because a douchenozzle thinks he's being a teacher", and I was afraid I would get blowback from that and was trying to clarify my point. However, there very well may be people who DO think they are equitable.

I have actually undergone the same self-examination, and while I don't think the two scenarios are equitable - one is more severe than the other - I do still find I'm perfectly comfortable with Roderick's potential livelihood being impacted by this event, because - for pity's sake, we have to get back to the point where actions have consequences.

....I also, however, think that apologies should also have consequences. If people had dug up Roderick's past statements and he'd responded by saying something like, "....oh, crap. Okay, you know what, y'all are right, I did say some really shitty stuff in the past, and even though I only said it because I was dumb, that still isn't an excuse - and y'know, maybe you're right and maybe I should think about how I handled this situation too, lemme go talk to my kid," I'd feel something VERY different about him than I do with his having handled it with a chest-pounding "Jeez, they were jokes, they're out of context, it's an act, what's wrong with y'all?")

So that's my boundary, and how I've thought about it. And I admit I'm taken aback by those who are drawing the boundary to excuse the "they were jokes" statements.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:51 PM on January 4, 2021 [9 favorites]

"I think my lid is going to fall in when I get back to the start?" So I showed him how to prevent that.

You can prevent that?!?!? Eyebrows! Please! Teach me!
posted by MiraK at 4:55 PM on January 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

I prevent it by leaving a small bit of lid uncut to form a hinge... is there a better way?
posted by Behemoth, in no. 302-bis, with the Browning at 4:57 PM on January 4, 2021 [17 favorites]

You can prevent that?!?!?

I prevented it by getting a different can opener, otherwise: every time.

But she probably just glares it into submitting meekly.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:59 PM on January 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

The can opener we had as a kid had a magnet on it to stick to the lid...didn't it? Or, more likely, I'm thinking of the electric opener?

As an adult, I eat only sandwiches, unless I'm in a restaurant. Solved and solved.
posted by maxwelton at 5:08 PM on January 4, 2021 [8 favorites]

LOL, yeah, bit of lid to be a hinge, and using a blunt butter knife to carefully lift the lid if it doesn't stand up on its own so you don't cut yourself on the edge. (Or rather, so HE doesn't cut himself on the edge -- I'm rather more careless with my own fingertips and usually just use a finger and hope for the best, but I'm an adult.) They DO make hand-crank can openers with a magnet on the "back" of them so you can let the lid plop in and just magnet it up, and store them on the fridge when not in use, but lid-hinge has always been fine for me. I feel like when I'm ready for a fancier can opener, I'll go whole-hog into the electric ones.

I did think that was very observant of him, though. I didn't really realize that was going to be a problem until I did it to myself several times.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:10 PM on January 4, 2021 [12 favorites]

hypnogogue: I imagine his daughter loves him, and when the internet hurts him it hurts her too. Please keep that in mind.

To be crystal clear: Roderick was -- quite literally -- the adult in the room making the decisions to put this online. She had no choice here.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:18 PM on January 4, 2021 [21 favorites]

> I did think that was very observant of him, though.

MeFite children are superior children, though, to be fair.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:18 PM on January 4, 2021 [11 favorites]

Essentially, I wonder what people want when something like this happens.

I can't speak for people, but what I really want is for the kid to have a really nice, fun time next weekend, and some fresh food. When I read the guy's own Twitter thread it gave me a chill, imagining being stuck all day in the darkest part of the winter listening to this kind of interminable bullshit he spouts, all while ravenously hungry and trying to open a can of beans. I would like to hear that kid's other parents and/or other family members are concerned and checking on her and maybe laying down rules about her getting decent food at decent intervals. Not sure what the kid's school situation is with COVID but I am guessing she is stuck with her father a lot more these days, doing what? Watching him do jigsaw puzzles?

And yes, I would like something to happen to this guy to make him see the error of his ways, but nothing's going to get through that ego shield. At best, the consequences for this could include a little more scrutiny of how he's treating his kid and a few discussions of what types of learning experiences are appropriate at what ages.
posted by BibiRose at 5:22 PM on January 4, 2021 [16 favorites]

I open cans with a CNC Machine. There's another way?
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 5:22 PM on January 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

*The only tool I have is an old M2, so I put a bunch of cans in a pyramid and put the pyramid in a box and put the box... downrange. After I've "opened" the cans I can usually scrape enough of whatever off the box.

*I just glare hatefully at the can. I've yet to meet one that refused to comply.

*Katana.

*Hoodrowlic press fitted with the Opener Nine Sextillion

*I just let the puppies play with it for a bit (eight weeks old! going homes the end of next week! starting to get real names!)
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:27 PM on January 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

*The only tool I have is an old M2,

You have an old M2 and don't have a shoebox full of P51s? I'm not buying it.
posted by mikelieman at 5:34 PM on January 4, 2021 [6 favorites]

I just checked and the opener I have is the OXO Good Grips and it doesn't let the lid fall in. I've been very happy with it.

Also, I asked two kids if they could open a can while I watched. One had seen me do it "a few years ago" and remembered how to do it; the younger one sort of knew but didn't have it properly positioned. I decided not to make it a learning experience because I didn't have anything to do with the can's contents, and also I am not a pathological Twitterer with six hours on his hands.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:46 PM on January 4, 2021 [7 favorites]

See, Eyebrows McGee's version was how to do a teaching moment. No one was hungry, the kid got to voluntarily experiment but got clear guidance at the points where they were really stuck, and everyone had fun.
posted by tavella at 5:48 PM on January 4, 2021 [13 favorites]

I just checked and the opener I have is the OXO Good Grips and it doesn't let the lid fall in. I've been very happy with it.

Part of that is good adaptive/accessible design. Because the manufacturers understand that not everything needs to be shitty and uncomfortable. OXO's not a perfect company, but they make a lot of stuff lots of people can use.

So another question for Roderick really is: "You claim to be a smart knowledge gatekeeper. How come you don't know about this kind of can opener? Maybe this is a way of approaching shitty design in your estimable quest for knowledge?"

And as someone who gave the Omnibus podcast a shot for a while...I listen to a ton of podcasts, and have a pretty high tolerance for varying production values or idiosyncratic hosts...

...but Omnibus uses this static-noise thing that pans through the stereo field as an interstitial sound. It's actually painful to deal with. It's like nails on a chalkboard meeting a bout of transient syncope. And I say that as someone with no known processing or auditory problems. And it's not hard to imagine they did that to fuck with people.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:10 PM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Here's a question for those of you who often find yourselves around family or friends with kids.

Let's say you are witness to an episode of what seems to be, in schmod's immortal words, "oblivious, low-key shitty parenting", or maybe a pattern that clashes horribly with the child's sensibilities (like muddgirl's Overly Literal Child). If you become aware of this, at what point do you say something?

At what point do you pull the adult aside and say, hey, there's another way? Or maybe spoken to the child and said, are you ok? Have people struggled with this and with what results? Does it take a village, or must one stay in one's lane?
posted by dum spiro spero at 6:26 PM on January 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

I said something pretty forcefully when one of my sisters said she would not be vaccinating her newborn - not religious, more the whole “unnatural chemicals are bad, everything can be solved with St. John’s wort also autism might be caused by vaccination.”

It didn’t work, but I’m glad I said it. Lots of things I love about my sister and my time in Asheville, NC....but both share a particular flavor of white middle class quasi-counter cultural art commune vibe with a huge anti-science streak. I’m glad I moved away from all that.

To the larger question, I don’t know what the line is. I suspect it’s different for everyone. But I do know that I wish more people intervened for the better with my parents. Alas, alack.
posted by lazaruslong at 6:38 PM on January 4, 2021 [9 favorites]

At what point do you pull the adult aside and say, hey, there's another way? Or maybe spoken to the child and said, are you ok? Have people struggled with this and with what results? Does it take a village, or must one stay in one's lane?

Owing to the parenting I received, I know how to take a literal punch, and there was no outside intervention ever, so verbally mentioning to someone that they're being mean to their kid doesn't seem like crossing a line.

Kids don't have the agency or legal rights their parents do. This is why stepping in and staying the parental hand, so to speak, is something the village sometimes needs to do.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:44 PM on January 4, 2021 [7 favorites]

this is just to say
that the can
opener
was invented
fifty years

after the can.
Before that they
hammered
with chisels

Forgive them
steel was so thick
and sharp
and dangerous
posted by Huffy Puffy at 6:48 PM on January 4, 2021 [15 favorites]

At what point do you pull the adult aside and say, hey, there's another way? Or maybe spoken to the child and said, are you ok? Have people struggled with this and with what results? Does it take a village, or must one stay in one's lane?

So, more common situations I've seen are (i) the whole grandparents not respecting kids' personal space boundaries thing, and (ii) people telling their kids not to do things because they are afraid the kids will get hurt, rather than encouraging their kids to do things safely, pointing out specific dangers to avoid where appropriate but also giving encouragement for how to avoid said dangers. In all cases, I'm just a third party observer to the situation.

Often in type (ii) situations I've found that it makes sense to talk to the kid directly, giving them alternate and more encouraging phrasing and just modeling that behavior in front of the other adults. Usually the kid is pouting after the less helpful adult intervention, and maybe tensions are getting high; or kid is starting to get wound up because they're being prevented from expending their energy in a healthy way. And other adults might be getting frustrated or overwhelmed too. So there's a natural opening for me to say the more positive thing calmly, in a way that comes across as kind of re-interpreting the previous adult's instructions rather than contradicting. Eg. I may help a kid do a cartwheel indoors so that they still get to do the cartwheel but don't break the fragile thing nearby, or spot the child around the corner that they might bump against. I do often find myself simply moving dishes away from edges of things a lot when I'm around kids. Sometimes I approach it as brainstorming/problem-solving with the kid, like "how can we do something like what you want to try, but in a manner that still satisfies the house rules?" There isn't very often a natural opening to talk to the relevant adults in the kid's life about the need for kids to test their physical limits (in safe, structured ways, of course) in order to develop body awareness, balance, better muscle control, etc. But I've definitely supported or suggested kids gymnastics programs or tried to slide some of the relevant ideas into conversations. The other thing that seems to work in terms of at least getting other adults thinking about things is to tell a story about my own experiences that helped me develop that sort of body awareness, weaving in examples of the more positive behavior that I want to subtly encourage the adults to use as part of the background for how I developed my body awareness skills.

In type (i) situations, in some cases I might contradict the adult directly if the distance of my relationship to the kid is equivalent to that of the other adult who is pushing the kid's boundaries. Eg. other adult: "come here and let your relative give you a kiss" kid: [fusses and looks unhappy or uncomfortable] me: "your body is yours, kid; unless it's safety related, it's okay to say no/you don't have to give hugs or get kisses if you don't want to". Usually using language that it would be hard for the other adult to object to without coming across as creepy/abusive, but not in any way directly saying that what the other adult was doing was "Bad" (that's a delicate balance, of course). If I know that the kid's parent is like-minded, though, I'll talk to the parent first and ask them how I can support them in helping enforce their kid's boundaries with other relatives (eg. if it's the parent's parent, sometimes they just need to know that someone else in the room supports them, otherwise it's hard for them to push back against their parent).

I'm generally more direct or forceful in type (i) situations than in type (ii) situations, because the harm to the kid is greater. There are certainly some situations that I've seen that are definitely not how I would do it, but it doesn't seem to be hurting the kid to speak of, in which case I definitely keep my opinions to myself. But, overall, I find that the telling a story from your own experience approach is particularly helpful in those cases where you're not sure if you should speak up or not. (Probably tone of voice helps - aim for "Huh. That is certainly different from what I'm used to." tone of voice, and not "My experience was the pinnacle of how these things should be done." tone of voice.)
posted by eviemath at 7:08 PM on January 4, 2021 [8 favorites]

Didn’t I once see someone on here post one of those “You’ve been doing it all wrong!” lifehacks that claimed if you turn the can opener 90 degrees (so that the handle is parallel with the top of the can) it will easily pop open the lid, leaving a perfectly smooth edge instead of the typical jagged knife shards?
posted by Atom Eyes at 7:08 PM on January 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

Pulling a parent aside and starting the conversation with, "I notice you are doing this parenting detail quite differently from how I'm used to. Can you tell me about that?" could be a helpful approach to opening a productive discussion if it's something that you think really does need to be addressed directly. I.e. the usual tips for having difficult conversations still apply.
posted by eviemath at 7:11 PM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

if you turn the can opener 90 degrees (so that the handle is parallel with the top of the can) it will easily pop open the lid, leaving a perfectly smooth edge instead of the typical jagged knife shards?

This totally works - you also need to start on the opposite side (switch from right to left for a right-handed opener.) The cut edge is still sharp but it's smooth, the lid is also easier to handle as it's too big to fall into the can and you can lift it without touching the part you cut.
posted by ethand at 7:42 PM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

The Doubleclicks' Laser Malena Webber refers to him in a tweet as a guy who would "recline backstage and talk about [her] tits with [her] comedy heroes in a work setting". Sounds like her actual experience with Roderick.

But I'm sure it's just an innocuous and somewhat silly and/or exaggerated tale, meant to paint him in the absolute harshest light. /s
posted by micketymoc at 7:45 PM on January 4, 2021 [12 favorites]

in some cases I might contradict the adult directly if the distance of my relationship to the kid is equivalent to that of the other adult who is pushing the kid's boundaries.

I personally dislike having to hug / kiss a kid that I don't know well, even if the kid is willing (and it is totally creepy and unacceptable if the kid is not). So when parents direct their child to 'go give Tumbling a kiss and a cuddle', I cheerfully say, 'Oh, I think that [kid's name] is old enough to shake hands with their adult friends'.

The kids love it and I can explain my reasoning to the parents later, after the kid struts out of the room all adult-like.
posted by tumbling at 7:53 PM on January 4, 2021 [14 favorites]

Honestly I don't care at all about cancelling Bean Dad so is it time to cancel Ken Jennings?
posted by muddgirl at 8:05 PM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

Essentially, I wonder what people want when something like this happens.

I'd also love to know what people want to see happen and how mass social media outrage actually helps the daughter in this case.

All I can see is that mass public social media is a god damn mistake. Maybe a few people learned that this is not a good way to be a parent, but it seems far more likely that thousands of people learned that this is not a good thing to share online.

In that light, it's funny seeing the triumphalism here. But then again, it's understandable that people who spend lots of time with a certain kind of online engagement desperately want to believe that what they are doing is actually making a difference.
posted by Ouverture at 8:19 PM on January 4, 2021 [8 favorites]

Maybe a few people learned that this is not a good way to be a parent, but it seems far more likely that thousands of people learned that this is not a good thing to share online.

Oh yeah, I agree. But to any portmanteau in a storm's point above, this is not someone who didn't know what they were doing with this.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:27 PM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

Honestly I don't care at all about cancelling Bean Dad so is it time to cancel Ken Jennings?

So long as it gives LeVar Burton a leg up in the race to become the next Jeopardy host, I’m all for it!
posted by Atom Eyes at 8:33 PM on January 4, 2021 [15 favorites]

Mod note: A couple deleted. I think the discussion's getting a little far afield from Bean Dad.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 9:02 PM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

> mhum: "he seems to have reactivated his Twitter account sometime earlier today"

Well, sometime in the ~5 hours since I noticed this, he's back to a deactivated Twitter account. I wasn't watching too closely so I dunno if any particular event preciptated this kind of short activation/re-deactivation cycle or if he just needed to reactivate his account in order to run some kind of tweet-deleting program or whatever.
posted by mhum at 9:36 PM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

The only good thing to come from this is now "beandad" is a thing. Ugh, that guy's a total beandad. Anyone who has spent time in a co-op preschool, a PTA meeting, soccer game, a college counseling meeting, etc, knows the type. Total f'n beandad.
posted by chaz at 9:46 PM on January 4, 2021 [16 favorites]

Roderick has posted an apology.
posted by lazugod at 10:04 PM on January 4, 2021 [15 favorites]

The Doubleclicks' Laser Malena Webber refers to him in a tweet as a guy who would "recline backstage and talk about [her] tits with [her] comedy heroes in a work setting". Sounds like her actual experience with Roderick.

For all the none of you wondering, this is what pushed me fully into "fuck this guy" territory.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:21 PM on January 4, 2021 [7 favorites]

Haha, yeah, an apology. What an apology. There are a lot of real whoppers in there. I've read it a few times now and I hate it, it's so self-serving and smug. It feels like he looked up how to write an apology but really couldn't help himself. And obviously posted up to his website where it'll gain no traction.

I thought about including a bunch of quotes but the whole thing is just under 1000 words and it's chock full of complete garbage.
posted by Neronomius at 10:32 PM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

No one cares what I think, really, but Bean Dad really hit me. As part of everything going on I’ve had to look at my relationship with my family. I am the oldest child but my younger brother is the one who “did things right”. My father would half-ass show me how to do something then get upset when I didn’t understand the next steps. He was the one who thought my drawings were “crap” and “dumb” because they weren’t mechanical drawings that his engineer self appreciated, and he drove me away from drawing. My mother sometimes tried, but she lacked imagination and a lot of the things I did and thought escaped her.

When I finally come out to them, it’s just one more thing.

I’m the black sheep of the family. I’m the failure. I’m the one who didn’t live up to expectations. I’m the one who had the mental illness and the problems they refused to accept I needed to confront except on their terms.

And finally, with recent mental events, I’m learning to be okay with that.
posted by mephron at 10:37 PM on January 4, 2021 [27 favorites]

Once again, it seems, I wish I didn't love a couple or three of his songs...

Sigh
posted by Windopaene at 10:46 PM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

I am even more confused now that the other parent was there the whole time? Two parents let a child eat pistachios for lunch for fun?? Why?
posted by nakedmolerats at 11:28 PM on January 4, 2021 [7 favorites]

I suppose the apology about the slurs is okay. His description of the can-opener task still makes him sound like a dickhead even with the extra detail - but he seems to be convinced it was a good teaching strategy in spite of the experts telling him it wasn't.

It's good that he sees that his story sounds identical to real incidents of abusive parenting, and that his privilege blinds him to the real impact of his actions. Though it's still an open question (to me) about how much of the persona, the commitment to doing a bit, is actually a thin veneer over actually being a bully. Even his friends have said he's an arsehole to them sometimes, and there's lots of stories about him belittling women and service staff, etc linked in the comments here.
posted by harriet vane at 11:31 PM on January 4, 2021 [10 favorites]

The part that really bothers me about the original thread is that children can't give meaningful consent to being discussed on the internet, or having their picture posted. Parents really don't understand this, from what I have seen in the last couple decades of internet usage, and the last decade and a half of social media existence. If we manage to improve the internet at all in the next years, hopefully we will look back on that fact and realize it was wrong. Or, we could start a conversation right now about how wrong it is in general. If this was the internet event that caused us to realize that posting about our kids is not at all okay, then it wouldn't be a second too soon.

One of the saving graces of my biography (of which there are a few) is that I came through high school and university before social media existed. I can't imagine how much worse things could have been for me if my family or schoolmates had been able to snap photos and post them to the internet, barrier-free.

Can his daughter gather together an audience of 40000 people to discuss the details of his failed parenting style? eg: "His emotional intelligence is quite low so he was unable to understand how my frustration and hunger compounded each other cyclically. It was only when his cohort began to criticize him that he made key breakthroughs. He will discover in time that I only learned not to trust him. This will come up many times in our lives, I am sure." Probably not.

The blood boils. What is he thinking? "I'm glad you had a half a can of beans. Maybe these memories of dusty shelves and that weird headache you have now will serve to toughen you up. Certainly I have made it clear to you that your spatial reasoning [or whatever the fuck he was on about] is not at all what I expect of.... someone. Now, if you'll excuse me, there is a company in California who has invented a platform where I can spend the next few hours slagging you. I get points for it. Nothing can go wrong."

Can you imagine going to school when your classmates know that you were crying cuz you couldn't open a can of beans?
posted by chiorlemas at 11:36 PM on January 4, 2021 [26 favorites]

"children can't give meaningful consent to being discussed on the internet, or having their picture posted"


This is a point that I have made many times to various friends and relatives (and schools and nurseries) as to why there is very little information about my child on the internet.
I rarely (maybe never?) mention their name. I usually use a they pronoun. There are certainly no pictures.

People sometimes assume that I have some kind of fears about strange internet perverts or something, but it's 100% that they cannot meaningfully consent to the information being out there.
So I try (probably less successfully than I think) to make sure it isn't.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 3:12 AM on January 5, 2021 [20 favorites]

I was horrified by the original tweet series, and was relieved to come here and find other people thought the same.

I was expecting that to be a non-apology. But he does actually accept responsibility and acknowledge that he did some things wrong. The incident doesn't seem to be as bad as was originally presented: the kid got some food, and the mother was there to keep an eye on things.

The book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson is a pretty good, detailed discussion of these kinds of social media pileons. Some people aren't bothered by them or profit by them. But others do suffer from them. With Justine Sacco for instance he points out that she was out of work for a while. People rationalised it by making up stories about how she was rich and didn't even need a job, but they weren't true.

Also the right-wing horrorshow are always willing to pick up recruits and converts. There should be paths back from a public shaming that don't go that direction.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 3:28 AM on January 5, 2021 [21 favorites]

That was a good apology, imo.

He no longer doubles down on his truly horrific story but rather offers his "comedy bit persona" and his personality traits when confronted by an internet pile-on as explanations for why his original thread and his original response made him sound like a textbook abuser when he may not have been *quite* as bad as all that.

It makes a significant difference that HE is the one saying it, rather than any random internet apologists concocting these explanations for him as "maybe he was actually just ...." It makes a significant difference also that he articulated exactly what was bad about the original story, and explained that he didn't see that aspect before. This means he does have legitimate plausible deniability. There is at last a credible competing theory to counterweigh what was a confession of abusive parenting until now.

There are still major issues I have with this man, viz.,

- If his daughter laughing is evidence of how everything was just fine, then how come her crying is dismissed as "just kid stuff"?

- he did still deny his kid access to a meal for ridiculously long, and though the pistachio detail does make it slightly better, that's still just ugh

- what a jerkwad immature piece of shit he is that he responded in such a dickish way when he was challenged on twitter

- I will never agree with these parents' parenting style but as a parent myself I know better than to criticize any particular parent based on this disagreement & suspicion of harm vs. a total conviction that someone is being harmed.

ouverture & others asked upthread who is helped by this type of internet pile-on. I wrote a comment earlier sharing what I think the benefits of this type of outcry are. It's about changing our culture to stop accepting, condoning, and normalizing child abuse -- bigger than one person. People in this thread have shared how healing it is for them to see so many strangers standing up against child abuse. There are other child abuse survivors who have shared how this discussion has helped them see what they still need to do better as parents themselves.

Parenting is not "obvious" or "intuited", it is not hardcoded into our DNA. It's real work and like all real work it requires learned skills. But because we live in patriarchal capitalism, it remains unpaid and not really recognized as work. We have no formal skill-sharing mechanisms available in any culture. We all rely on mainly just one body of knowledge on how to raise our children: remembering how we were raised, and reproducing the same unconscious patterns for most part. So mass discussions like this one are learning experiences for many of us who were raised by abusive parents. Many parents and future parents are learning for the first time that making kids skip meals is not normal or acceptable. Internet pile-ons have enormous power.

And even the one person at the center of it all is likely to have been helped. The next time bean daughter is hungry, I bet anything the effects of having lived through this clap back will be at the top of bean dad's mind. I'm sure he's going to think twice before deciding to keep her hungry ever again. He still might, he might even do it out of sheet spite, but that little moment of reflection is now going to be part of his decision process. That moment is EVERYTHING. Any psychologist and any mindfulness coach will tell you how sacred that moment of pause and reflection is. That is the moment in which change begins.
posted by MiraK at 4:38 AM on January 5, 2021 [30 favorites]

You have an old M2 and don't have a shoebox full of P51s? I'm not buying it.

I can't use P51s anymore after a tragic gardening accident in which I ripped my nomenclature.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:41 AM on January 5, 2021 [4 favorites]

That apology would be fine if he were a 30-year-old naif, maybe someone who typically tweets for his 3 college buddies, posted a "funny" story (wherein his inner circle would know that it's all a shtick) and then wakes up one morning to find that funny story went viral overnight and he's just overwhelmed by the attention.

But that's not what happened.

What happened is that a man who is closer to the grave than the cradle, a man who is a professional performer, intentionally punched down at his 9-year-old daughter, to his 40k followers, and then when several of them said "Hey, this is not a good way to teach kids," went on a depressingly banal White Guy rant about how great a dad he is. Even this apology is proclaiming how great a dad he is because his kid was laughing about it (also, I mean, was she actually laughing? or was this the royal we, because 90% of the story-as-told is him laughing at his kid's failure, and the purpose of telling the story was to invite us to laugh right along). The pistachio detail does not make it better -- it's utterly tone-deaf to state, after several people have yelled at you for not feeding your child all day, that a half a bowl of pistachios is sufficient between "breakfast a few hours before" and whenever the kid finally opened the can of beans. (So, like, 9-10 hr total?)

And the fauxpology about his racism is just blergh.

It's pretty telling that he only managed to post this when it became clear that his career is going to suffer. Notably, he apologizes to his partners and friends, but not, apparently, to his child.
posted by basalganglia at 5:02 AM on January 5, 2021 [13 favorites]

>The Doubleclicks' Laser Malena Webber refers to him in a tweet as a guy who would "recline backstage and talk about [her] tits with [her] comedy heroes in a work setting". Sounds like her actual experience with Roderick.

I don't know if that Tweet has changed between when you read it and now, but the full tweet is:

"I don’t know who Bean Dad is but he sounds like the kind of guy who would recline backstage and talk about your tits with your comedy heroes in a work setting, that’s just what he sounds like"

That does not sound like Webber has any personal experience with Roderick.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:05 AM on January 5, 2021 [5 favorites]

basalganglia: also, I mean, was she actually laughing?

Even if she were, I would not see that as final proof that she was OK with all that happened. Many children have learned to smile or laugh to appease their parent(s).

She can't have been laughing all the time. She was probably not laughing at the times when she was crying.
posted by Too-Ticky at 5:15 AM on January 5, 2021 [5 favorites]

As for apologising to his daughter: I don't care so much whether he does that on the internet. I do hope that he did it to her in person.
posted by Too-Ticky at 5:16 AM on January 5, 2021 [7 favorites]

That does not sound like Webber has any personal experience with Roderick.

Read the replies, backs it up.
posted by micketymoc at 5:32 AM on January 5, 2021 [4 favorites]

Read the replies, backs it up.

Sorry, I don't see that. Lots of sympathy with the idea, nobody claiming that they or anyone they know have had these sort of in person interactions with Roderick.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:41 AM on January 5, 2021

It's pretty telling that he only managed to post this when it became clear that his career is going to suffer.

Heck yeah, that's extremely telling. I hope he continues to feel the ramifications of this for as long as possible. I hope this remains in our collective memory long enough for his kid to eventually find out what her dad wrote about her on the internet and what the response was (and perhaps that will give her a third perspective on her childhood). Without these actual, real-world consequences he would never be held accountable and would never have made this apology. Another reason why I think this pile-on (with no threats, no harassment, no bigotry, nothing but people challenging someone for their actual words and actions) is a great thing.
posted by MiraK at 5:46 AM on January 5, 2021 [6 favorites]

Honestly, I don't believe a fucking word of "what was really going on" in that apology, but maybe that's my own trust issues.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 6:02 AM on January 5, 2021 [5 favorites]

There's no "there" in his parenting-related apology, because it boils down to I didn't express myself well or I left out details, and it doesn't engage at all with either his parenting style or his defensiveness.

It's "sorry I triggered people who had abusive dads." Not "I'm thinking about whether I did anything wrong with my daughter" or even "as dads, sometimes we have to weigh our desire to give our kids independence with an awareness of meeting their needs" or something generic like that. It's essentially "sorry you couldn't see that I Was Right."

I don't know that he owes the audience any more though, if he's speaking as podcaster/Tweeter John, because he's only addressing that relationship.

Parenting epiphanies don't always arrive on demand or with an audience in the wings. Plus, if you've chosen your lane as the dad who withholds help and information in order to make your child persistent and strong* you really have already indicated where your values are, and it's a long road from there to "wow, I was swimming in dangerous waters even if I had the best intentions." So as much as I would like that for my version of this story I don't think this guy is capable. Korean Dad is the best. :)

But that's why it probably won't rest well with anyone, it's more like "I'm sorry you took it that way" than anything substantial.

The rest of his apology is boilerplate and if it prevents him from that kind of "humour" well then, that's a start too.

*Again, pro tip: That's not really how it works for most people.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:15 AM on January 5, 2021 [8 favorites]

Lentrohamsanin, I think you have a point and also I automatically doubt this kind of later addition to a story. It reminds me of the old days of the internet when shameless trolling was common and people would add details no one could have possibly known to keep an argument going.

I'm really glad this guy experienced negative feedback with enough of a consensus that he had to take notice. It makes me think standards for raising children are evolving. Maybe this particular child will even feel seen on some level, if her father revisits this experience from a point of view that maybe it wasn't ok and that he is willing to listen a little more.
posted by BibiRose at 6:20 AM on January 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

Something I haven't seen mentioned is how understanding often follows use: trying to 100% understand something before you use it is not the most effective way to learn. One of the things I've struggled with is the mistaken idea that before I do or use something, I must fully understand it from the ground up. In reality the best way to learn about something is often to just use it (usually following instructions) and observe how it works. I used to think I wasn't handy around the house — turns out I can do plenty of "handy" things, I was just afraid to tackle projects where I didn't already know how to execute every step. Trying to become handy from first principles is a fool's errand. Instead you follow instructions and by the end you've usually learned a lot. I found the same to be true of programming: it's better to dive in and figure it out *by following instructions* rather than wait until you understand absolutely everything. As you follow the instructions the way it works becomes clear.

I've often wondered how much easier math would have been if my teachers had focused on use instead of starting by deriving everything first. Deriving a formula is a good skill to learn but it's often orthogonal to using the formula, and these 2 things are often confused.

And this sort of knowledge builds on itself. You might not have figured out how a can opener works all by yourself, but once you understand how a can opener works because you've used it and observed how it works it will be easier to understand other tools. So if he really wants his daughter to learn to tackle new problems, a better approach is probably to help her tackle this one so she sees how to approach a problem and so she has baseline knowledge to apply to other things.

Finally, learning to do something without instructions is madness and usually should only be a last resort. A more valuable lesson would have been how to follow helpful instructions and in the process see how deeper understanding often comes later.
posted by Tehhund at 6:21 AM on January 5, 2021 [30 favorites]

All I can see is that mass public social media is a god damn mistake. Maybe a few people learned that this is not a good way to be a parent, but it seems far more likely that thousands of people learned that this is not a good thing to share online.

Sure, stopping people from at least bragging about it, is just a first step, but I think first steps are nothing to sneeze at. Can't have a second step without a first step. Right now, a fair number of parents are doing stuff like that and not even thinking about it twice. If the faint memory of Bean-Dad disaster makes them pause in their tracks just for a second and ask themselves "Do I really want to be _that_ guy?", that's already a win in my book. Might some of them still decide "Sure! He was an innocent victim of internet mobs, fuck those people"? Probably. But lots of people are guided quite heavily by the approval and disapproval of others, norms are powerful stuff, and this is how you shift them.

Finally, even if no bean-dad-type anywhere will change their behavior at all because of this episode, (which is quite possible too, if the root cause of the behaviour is not just misguided pedagogy but plain narcisissm), it would still absolutely be worth it to have had this discussion. Because it's not just about the parents, it's also about the kids - not just the daugher in the story, (who yes, might right now feel a strong duty to side with her dad and might wish it all to just blow over, but who might also, deeply need to hear this anyway, that this was not okay), but for all the kids and former kids who had to deal with that particular type of bullshit. And I think it's profoundly important for those kids and former kids to finally see it met with widespread condemnation. So that they can appreciate what they had to put up with, and that it was not okay, and so that they can cut themselves some slack for whatever method they developed to cope.

I think, what some might apparently see as "triumphalism" is actually the deep relief, of finally being vindicated about past injustice.
posted by sohalt at 6:23 AM on January 5, 2021 [13 favorites]

Hopefully John will learn his lesson from the fallout of this and to try getting clout by filming his partner berating some store employee and gleefully posting it, a cool and good thing to do according to the podcast brothers who are getting good PR out of this.
posted by Space Coyote at 6:45 AM on January 5, 2021

ouverture & others asked upthread who is helped by this type of internet pile-on. I wrote a comment earlier sharing what I think the benefits of this type of outcry are. It's about changing our culture to stop accepting, condoning, and normalizing child abuse -- bigger than one person. People in this thread have shared how healing it is for them to see so many strangers standing up against child abuse. There are other child abuse survivors who have shared how this discussion has helped them see what they still need to do better as parents themselves.

As a survivor of severe physical child abuse and someone who has worked for years with thousands of survivors of child abuse, I am not seeing how this is actually changing our culture instead of moving the parameters of acceptable social discussion for semi-famous online people. I am genuinely glad other people feel healing, but I don't feel that at all. I just feel incredibly concerned and sad for the daughter.

I want to believe these incidents actually change things for the better. But the last decade of online activism in many fields has not been very convincing for me (although unfortunately, it seems to have worked wonders for conservatives).

As far as I can tell, the greatest trick Twitter ever pulled was convincing people that yelling at each other is a form of activism and not being Jack Dorsey's unpaid intern that makes him the vast majority of his money.

And even the one person at the center of it all is likely to have been helped. The next time bean daughter is hungry, I bet anything the effects of having lived through this clap back will be at the top of bean dad's mind. I'm sure he's going to think twice before deciding to keep her hungry ever again. He still might, he might even do it out of sheet spite, but that little moment of reflection is now going to be part of his decision process. That moment is EVERYTHING. Any psychologist and any mindfulness coach will tell you how sacred that moment of pause and reflection is. That is the moment in which change begins.

This does not match my professional experience; when a household experiences intense stress and isolation, this does not lead to better outcomes for the children in that household in the short-term. It is the same reason why so many activists are fighting to reform CPS services and protocols so the priority is materially helping the family holistically so the child can live a better life.

Ultimately, my primary issue isn't anyone in the pile-on or even people who enjoy pile-ons. The primary responsibility is on Roderick for opening this can of worms (pun intended) and for network-effect-obsessed tech companies like Twitter for enabling and profiting off of this misery.
posted by Ouverture at 6:46 AM on January 5, 2021 [13 favorites]

beans beans they’re not made of meat
the more you eat the less you tweet
the more you tweet the worse you feel
so let’s have beans with every meal
posted by Huffy Puffy at 6:52 AM on January 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

But the last decade of online activism in many fields has not been very convincing for me (although unfortunately, it seems to have worked wonders for conservatives).

It has contributed to the polarization in society, yes, and in that way, one might view it as helping conservatives - it has given them something to rally around.

Then again, all that rallying to me is also a bit of a sign that they feel increasingly threatened. And much of that, is obviously, just paranoia and a desire for martyr-cred. But part of it might also be that they rightfully realize they're on the verge of losing some of these fights.
posted by sohalt at 6:56 AM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

Point is, lack of obvious conflict is not always a good sign, and increasing polarization not always something bad.
posted by sohalt at 6:58 AM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

If internet pile-ons kill the "bit" where being a rapey racist is "funny" to anyone but unrepentant Nazis, then they are worth it.
posted by rikschell at 7:00 AM on January 5, 2021 [25 favorites]

With this, can we be done with the whole "my comedy persona is an asshole" thing? Assholes are not funny. No one cares how edgy or transgressive you are by being a purportedly kind person who pretends to be an asshole professionally.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 7:08 AM on January 5, 2021 [19 favorites]

> That does not sound like Webber has any personal experience with Roderick.

The subtext is extremely clear if you're familiar with the scene. They both work the insular geek-music circuit and would have unavoidably shared a backstage. For instance, they both perform on the JoCo Cruise frequently. Laser knows exactly who Bean Dad is, and I believe they had the experience they alude to.

Exactly, my read on that tweet was that this specific thing had happened to Laser, not necessarily but likely on the JoCo Cruise, and that they were being darkly comic about the notion that they wouldn't know Roderick. They very much inhabit the same scene.
posted by Navelgazer at 7:23 AM on January 5, 2021 [9 favorites]

Another of the layers that all came together to make the entire ball of terrible go viral is the "it's a comedy persona!" factor is one of those perfect demonstrations of (hat tip to John Scalzi for the phrase) The Failure Mode of "Clever" is "Asshole." At the very maximum-straining-for-charitable read of "just" the beandad story alone (you know, assuming elisions of all the Good Parts, hyperbole of any Bad Parts That Are Only Unintentionally Bad, etc), Roderick presents as someone who's very invested in the idea that he's Very Clever (I think "ah ha! a teachable moment!" is now indexed for me the same way a caricature of "as an autodidact I" constructions), and never had to sit with the consequences of failure states of being so.
posted by Drastic at 7:33 AM on January 5, 2021 [19 favorites]

They shouldn't have taken it out on a hapless employee, agreed

Sydney McElroy entered the CBD-cures-autism store to ask for the owner/manager's contact information, and then the employee wanted to argue about the benefits of CBD, once they learned of Dr. McElroy's intent. So, no, it wasn't taken out on a hapless employee, but instead an employee who decided he wanted to pick this fight at that time.
posted by meese at 8:09 AM on January 5, 2021 [16 favorites]

I really appreciate the link to Laser’s tweet, especially as it may well refer to the Jonathan Coulton Cruise, a thing I am on the hook for thousands of dollars to attend (someday). I trust no one in the thread is confused that it is obliquely but unquestionably attributing the behavior to Roderick.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 8:36 AM on January 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

The apology doesn't say anything about apologizing to his daughter, or about making any changes to his parenting. He could have said a few words about how much he loves his daughter and wants her to feel secure and cared for, or that he intends to be more thoughtful going forward to ensure he doesn't cause distress, or that he's having conversations with his daughter to ensure she knows her needs always come first and that she can tell him to cut it out with the weird pedantic dad bit at any time. This is private stuff within their family but in the context of a public apology where he's ostensibly trying to describe what he did wrong, it feels conspicuously absent - he doesn't say he did anything actually wrong in terms of parenting, just that he described it badly. Without that, the apology feels a little like "sorry I triggered you."

I hope that his daughter perfects the art of rolling her eyes and saying "whatever, Bean Dad" whenver he's being a fuckwit for the next fifteen years or so.
posted by beandip at 9:13 AM on January 5, 2021 [15 favorites]

Mod note: Ouverture, your participation in this thread is becoming indistinguishable from trolling, and making light of sexual violence, child abuse, and racism to make a rhetorical point, in a thread where many people have discussed personal experiences with those things, is unacceptable. Please leave this thread.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 9:38 AM on January 5, 2021 [8 favorites]

The apology doesn't say anything about apologizing to his daughter, or about making any changes to his parenting. He could have said a few words about how much he loves his daughter and wants her to feel secure and cared for, or that he intends to be more thoughtful going forward to ensure he doesn't cause distress, or that he's having conversations with his daughter to ensure she knows her needs always come first and that she can tell him to cut it out with the weird pedantic dad bit at any time.

The problem with the apology is that it makes it even more difficult to tell what of the story is true and what is performative assholism. If he had a basically ordinary interaction with his daughter ("We figured out how to use a can opener over the course of a half hour while eating pistachios and laughing"), then the problem is not in the parenting, but in the assumption that his "audience" would find the interaction "funnier" if it involved bringing his daughter to tears from six hours of hunger and frustration, to illustrate what a hilariously out-of-touch pedant he is.

I appreciated John Hodgman's comments on Twitter, which acknowledges the apology but also reflects on Roderick's problematic behavior and that of white men in general.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 9:51 AM on January 5, 2021 [22 favorites]

John Hodgman is a global treasure. I've been trepidatious about how the various people I admire and who know Roderick were going to respond and so far none of them have disappointed.

(I never admired noted asshole Dave Anthony.)
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 9:57 AM on January 5, 2021 [6 favorites]

I appreciated John Hodgman's comments on Twitter, which acknowledges the apology but also reflects on Roderick's problematic behavior and that of white men in general.

I am still so dang angry that people assumed that Roderick’s dumb, gross past tweets were proof that he was an actual Nazi and not just a white dude being gross and dumb who deserved blowback for being gross and dumb. It’s an extremely stupid hill to die on but we have really rotted out our brains here, and I’m glad that there are at least a few Hodgmans out there who can still make that distinction.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:10 AM on January 5, 2021 [13 favorites]

Just last night, my dad was telling a story about tacos, and how his dad once tricked him into putting a lot of hot sauce on one as a kid. I gently said, "You know how awful that was of him to do, right?" and then we had a short conversation about how good it is that that sort of "trick" is mostly no longer seen as acceptable or funny. My grandpa liked to "tease" us. One of my first memories of him is him referring to Big Bird on Sesame Street as "Big Chicken" and getting me really frustrated when I tried to correct him and he kept it up. My dad has teased people in the same way all his life, though he's mellowed a lot and never did anything as cruel as the hot sauce incident.

Sometime in my 20s I recognized that this "teasing" was overtly toxic and have tried to banish it from my own repertoire. I do have a certain amount of sympathy for people who were raised with terrible examples of behavior, but nobody gets a free pass for that in my book. You're out in the world, learn from other people. Jeez.
posted by rikschell at 10:14 AM on January 5, 2021 [16 favorites]

Going to Maine, so many ACTUAL Nazis have tried to excuse their evil comments by saying "I was just joking" that anyone who has evil comments publicly available is justifyably accusable as an actual Nazi. If he didn't already delete them, apologize, and cop to being gross and dumb, that's totally on him. Where the fuck has he been living the last four years???
posted by rikschell at 10:17 AM on January 5, 2021 [16 favorites]

Going To Maine: Thank you for saying that. We assume the worst so often, and many times in the last four years (at least), we've been validated in our assumption that someone spouting that sort of garbage really is a shitty, horrible person... but not always. People say and do dumb shit without thinking, and while that is symptomatic of a larger problem with an individual and with society, it's not the same thing as being a Nazi. I've never argued John Roderick shouldn't be shamed or face some consequences, I've argued that the reactions have been excessive, based on my own knowledge of John, and what he has said and done in his career.

rikschell: You're out in the world, learn from other people. Jeez.

I agree with this sentiment in principle, but it's important to know that people learn at different rates and in different ways. Some people have to touch the stove several times to know that it's hot. More to the point, the semi-permanent nature of social media is the sort of thing where our ignorance lives forever unless we choose to remove it. To do that, we need to actually remember we shared that ignorance into the world, though. I sure as hell don't remember the tweets I made in 2012. I barely remember what I tweeted last week.

I think it is telling that a lot of the tweets that were thrown around as evidence of how shitty and racist Roderick is are from 2012 and 2013, and most were @-replies with the original tweet being replied to removed—though not all. John Roderick on Saturday, before the Bean Dad tweets wasn't the same person he was when he made those bad tweets in 2012 and 2013, and he's almost certainly not the same person following his public shaming. I sincerely hope that everyone in this thread is also not the same person they were in 2012 and 2013.
posted by SansPoint at 10:23 AM on January 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

Where the fuck has he been living the last four years???

Secure in his knowledge that, as a self-obviously "good dude," no one would ever accuse him of such things. That's one of the many privileges at play here.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:23 AM on January 5, 2021 [21 favorites]

Yeah I'm gonna keep giving side eye, at the very least, to dudes who gleefully and repeatedly use slurs in a "joking" manner, even if they otherwise believe themselves on the side of angels. As has been stated repeatedly on these here forums, ironic racism is still racism (and homophobia, et al)
posted by Roommate at 10:24 AM on January 5, 2021 [28 favorites]

Roommate: To be clear, I am fully with you on said side-eye.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:26 AM on January 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

Navelgazer, Roommate: Seconded on the side-eye.
posted by SansPoint at 10:27 AM on January 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure I care all that much about whether he's an actual nazi or just saying things that an actual nazi would say (I mean, obviously being a nazi is worse and having fewer real nazis is better, and fwiw I think he is just a shitty white dude and not a nazi) - there was harm in the words he wrote either way and I'm glad he was called out for them. I don't recall what thread I read it in, but at one point here on Metafilter someone used the analogy of stepping on someone else's foot: it doesn't matter if you did it on purpose or not, stepping on someone's foot is painful, and what you need to do is apologize and stop doing that.

Honestly, if one of the outcomes of all of this is that people (especially cis het white guys) feel less safe talking like a nazi, misogynist, racist, or other variety of bigot online - even when they think they're being "funny" - I would be pretty happy about that.
posted by DingoMutt at 10:27 AM on January 5, 2021 [22 favorites]

If he didn’t already delete them, apologize, and cop to being gross and dumb, that's totally on him.

This is a solid argument for always auto-deleting all your content so that you can simply avoid ever being held to account for it.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:28 AM on January 5, 2021

I mean, it's also an argument for ... not saying things a nazi would say?
posted by DingoMutt at 10:28 AM on January 5, 2021 [35 favorites]

SansPoint: Some people have to touch the stove several times to know that it's hot.

If it's your own fingers that get burnt, that's your own problem to deal with. But if you're making mistakes that result in pain for others than yourself... well, that's different.
posted by Too-Ticky at 10:29 AM on January 5, 2021 [10 favorites]

Even if it's not racist crap, I'm sure all of us have said something thoughtless that hurt people without the intent of causing harm. The harm is done, but I do think the lack of intent should be something we consider in addressing that harm.

On top of that the nature of social media, which feels ephemeral (but isn't), lends itself heavily to posting stuff without thinking it all the way through. It's not a justification for dumb, racist tweets, but it goes a long way to explaining why someone would have stupid shit in their Twitter history and not delete it. Once it falls off the timeline, we forget it's there.
posted by SansPoint at 10:35 AM on January 5, 2021

Where the fuck has he been living the last four years???

That's the thing. Read the fucking room. It's 2011 and actual Nazis are threatening to overthrow a democratic election so forgive us for being a little testy about the subject.
posted by octothorpe at 10:39 AM on January 5, 2021 [9 favorites]

This whole thing reminded me of an incident that I hadn't thought of in decades, from my elementary school. When a kid got something like this pulled on them (though I think it was more direct punishment than 'lesson'), and shortcircuited it by going over to the neighbors and asking for food because their parents were not feeding them. I wouldn't *recommend* this, as there's the distinct chance of CPS getting involved and while I think the parental behavior was shitty it wasn't shitty to the level where CPS was likely to improve things, but I'm pretty sure the humiliation of the neighbor bringing over groceries and food bank information would have made him think twice about future stunts.

It can sometimes be a very useful, if risky, thing to be willing to take strong action and prove to your parents that they aren't always in charge of the frame of the situation, that you can take your own actions and tell your own story.
posted by tavella at 10:40 AM on January 5, 2021 [3 favorites]

It's not a justification for dumb, racist tweets, but it goes a long way to explaining why someone would have stupid shit in their Twitter history and not delete it. Once it falls off the timeline, we forget it's there.

I think this would be a wonderful opportunity for introspection and consideration of how privilege plays into what one says and does. As someone who has been on the receiving end of some vile terms in my life (fortunately not terribly often, but often enough), I honestly cannot imagine a situation where I forget that I said some of the things this guy said, or referred to people by the terms he used. For it to be so meaningless to the author that maybe he can't even remember having said it speaks a lot to the ways he himself has - and has not - been spoken to or about in his life.

If this guy, and others defending him, consider themselves liberal allies - well, again, I hope that a lot of self-reflection occurs here.
posted by DingoMutt at 10:41 AM on January 5, 2021 [24 favorites]

DingoMutt: I agree, but again, that takes being aware of one's actions. I think social media, Twitter especially, is designed in a way that you don't think about what you post more than a few minutes after it's gone into the void. I have no idea what I tweeted in 2012 and 2013. I could go back and delete all of it—and have actually done that with my Twitter account once, pre-2012. (For some reason, I joined Twitter back in 2007 when it was still new, exciting, and not a horror show.)

Here's the link to Twitter's guide to their Advanced Search feature. As someone who has used the platform since 2007, this is the first I even knew about it because I googled "How to search tweets by date" while writing this comment.
posted by SansPoint at 10:47 AM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

Something squicked me out about Hodgman's tweet: "[Beandad] has long defined his life around anti-bigotry, in all forms...." as if that makes the slurs and hateful language any better. It reminds me of performatively 'feminist' men, who talk big about equality when there's an audience but quickly change their tune when you're behind closed doors. Of course other men believe them, defend them, even when the evidence has been publicy posted. Wealthy white men, protecting wealthy white men.
posted by Behemoth, in no. 302-bis, with the Browning at 10:47 AM on January 5, 2021 [18 favorites]

SansPoint, I'm going to drop this after this post because I don't want to get into a back-and-forth, but my point really doesn't have to do with the medium itself. Yes, Twitter might be designed for ephemeral thoughts and it might be cumbersome to go back and read through what you'd written a long time ago (even though other people seem capable of going back and finding the nazi-sounding shit Bean Dad had written). My point is that even if you're just spouting off ephemeral thoughts one after the other, there's a huge difference between "Just got tacos - they're nifty!" and tweeting actual slurs and things a nazi might say, even if you think you're being funny.

I think it takes a lifetime of having been supported or even congratulated on your use of "joking" bigotry, and a lifetime of never having been on the receiving end of bigotry, for this to be so meaningless that one could possibly forget it. I'm saying that if "ironic" racism seems like such a non-issue that one could forget having used it years back, this is an excellent time to sit with that and consider why others might feel otherwise.

I mean, it's been 40 years since I last took a dump in a pool (I was 5, just for the record), and I still remember that dump. If it were still floating around in that pool I'd go back and clean it up.
posted by DingoMutt at 10:57 AM on January 5, 2021 [34 favorites]

if you turn the can opener 90 degrees (so that the handle is parallel with the top of the can) it will easily pop open the lid, leaving a perfectly smooth edge instead of the typical jagged knife shards?

Came to remind people that this is a thing. Also that in addition to his other transgressions, bean dad's music suuuucks.
posted by aspersioncast at 11:24 AM on January 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

All I can see is that mass public social media is a god damn mistake. Maybe a few people learned that this is not a good way to be a parent, but it seems far more likely that thousands of people learned that this is not a good thing to share online.

Sure I'd prefer that people doing bad things would stop doing those bad things. But if they just go from publicly bragging about doing bad things to being ashamed to admit they do bad things, I'd say that makes the world significantly better.
posted by straight at 12:57 PM on January 5, 2021 [12 favorites]

Famous Dude: [says stuff lots of people find hurtful]
Lots Of People: "Boo! That's hurtful! We don't like that!"
Famous Dude's Buddies: "Not so loud! It hurts when lots of people say they don't like what you said!"
Lots of People: "It also hurts when you hear the stuff he said."
Other Buddies: "Not so loud! His livelihood depends on people liking him!"
Lots of People: "Then he's bad at his job."
Unfamous People: "Not so bad that fame isn't still giving him more money for his work than I get for mine."
posted by straight at 1:19 PM on January 5, 2021 [17 favorites]

If lots of people said, "MBMBAM should get a new theme song. I don't like that one because I'm sick of it and the singer's voice is grating and the guitar tone just so 2006," people might disagree, but most would say that's a legit opinion and that it would be fine for MBMBAM to get a new song if a lot of their listeners had that opinion.

But if lots of people say, "MBMBAM should get a new theme song because the guy who sings it is a jerk," how is that a less legitimate opinion than "Your favorite theme song sucks"?
posted by straight at 1:34 PM on January 5, 2021

JoCo Cruise just tweeted that Roderick is suspended indefinitely from attending and that they are investigating the alleged violation of its Code of Conduct.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 1:46 PM on January 5, 2021 [5 favorites]

So, no, it wasn't taken out on a hapless employee, but instead an employee who decided he wanted to pick this fight at that time.

Or ... perhaps just a minimum-wage employee who justifiably does not want to give out the manager/owners information and is actually invested in keeping their job, by defending the products the store is there to sell...?

There is a power-dynamic in play there as well - and picking on employee's is still a crappy move, even if they are defending a product. Not everyone is as "smart as you" - the real people to go after are the governments and legislators who do nothing to keep "snake oil" off the shelves.

Pretty sure any front-line retail employee would be fired instantly if they give out the owners personal info to any rando who walks in off the street, podcast, camera or film-crew...
posted by rozcakj at 1:47 PM on January 5, 2021 [4 favorites]

Contact info is not necessarily personal info? Most businesspeople have emails/phone numbers/PO boxes for business contact that are not their personal ones. Owners may still choose to keep themselves secret, and sometimes even have good reason, but there's nothing strange about asking an employee for the owner's contact info.
posted by tavella at 2:48 PM on January 5, 2021 [5 favorites]

Why on earth are we talking about something that was done by different people, from a different podcast, a few years go, about an entirely different situation, which I believe they already apologized for? Is the idea "Well, your favorite podcaster is just as bad," or what?
posted by The corpse in the library at 3:26 PM on January 5, 2021 [24 favorites]

E. Pothast: On Bean Dad and Gen X Irony (via waxy).
posted by progosk at 3:47 PM on January 5, 2021 [15 favorites]

I didn’t even read the Bean Thread or the apology because it sounded too mean. But I have now read all of this thread.

I don’t have a problem with people being dragged for using slurs on the internet ten years ago.

Pistachios are yummy.

At a certain point with low-key shitty parenting you have to admit to yourself that there are things you can do and things you cannot do, and one thing you cannot do is force another adult to have the kind of relationship with their child that you want them to have.

My grandfather lived through the depression. My Boomer Dad has this Tory that he used to tell. One morning when he and his younger brother were, let’s say, late elementary or middle school age, their dad told them they were going to go to an amusement park. He told them ‘eat a big breakfast, boys, we’re not going to be eating lunch today’. Dad and Uncle thought he was joking, but then at lunchtime he told them he was NOT joking. He wanted them to know what it was like to be hungry.
Fast forward thirty years and my sister and I are i our early tees. We’re visiting our grandmother as a family for two weeks, staying in her house. Dad announced that today, we should eat a big breakfast because we will not be allowed to eat lunch today. He does not take us to an amusement park or spend much time with us, just argues with his mom and wife about it and leaves them to enforce his dictate. I’ve blocked out a lot of my childhood but I remember my sister grouchily ‘stealing’ a box of crackers in the afternoon. I imagine I just hid somewhere quiet and read and chalked another one up on the list of things to be endured.
posted by bq at 4:00 PM on January 5, 2021 [9 favorites]

569 comments? That's it, I'm calling it--we are overthinking this can of beans.
posted by zeusianfog at 4:34 PM on January 5, 2021 [6 favorites]

E. Pothast: On Bean Dad and Gen X Irony
What I mean is, I generally find it harder to convince people my age and older that trying to be nice to other people is cooler than trying to be an edgelord, and I think a significant part of that has to do with the media we were fed growing up.

Fuckin yeah. I'm also Xennial-aged (yeesh) and was cohorted with kids a year or two older, and honestly, nearly every man I know has been, to some extent, ruined by South Park and late 90s shock jocks, for whom punching down (and sideways, but almost never up!) was the rule.

I lived largely without mass-media while I was in college -- we didn't even have a TV until junior year, and even then it was like two broadcast channels, and internet media was still spotty-at-best -- and I'm sort of glad for it. The mediascape in the late 90s and most of the 00s was pretty cruel, so far as I can tell.
posted by uncleozzy at 5:15 PM on January 5, 2021 [12 favorites]

Here's the best pop-culture Bean Dad commentary so far.
posted by GuyZero at 5:26 PM on January 5, 2021 [8 favorites]

The mediascape in the late 90s and most of the 00s was pretty cruel, so far as I can tell.

If you think that was cruel, don't watch teen movies from the 80's.
posted by GuyZero at 5:27 PM on January 5, 2021 [7 favorites]

Roderick appears to have hired PR firm Fireside Campaigns to signal boost his apology.

Which immediately makes me suspicious of its authenticity.
posted by JDHarper at 6:59 PM on January 5, 2021 [12 favorites]

If you think that was cruel, don't watch teen movies from the 80's.

I mean I’ve seen them all. I tend to think of the &0s cruelty as ambient, the smoke wafting over the half-wall divider that separates the smoking section.

Late 90s cruelty is a guy blowing cigar smoke in a baby’s face.
posted by uncleozzy at 7:38 PM on January 5, 2021 [6 favorites]

I enjoy Roderick, but only as one half of Omnibus. Haven’t listened to any of his solo podcasts, but I would think Roderick on his own would be a bit much. The fact that this happened is so on-brand for Roderick, nothing about it surprises me.

What’s funny is his whole shtick (at least on omnibus) is all about gen-x nostalgia, and I can only imagine that was an aspect of the thing with the can opener. And yet ... cans are kinda generationally agnostic?

I mean, i’m guessing Peak Can would maybe have been some point during the 1950s? And then maybe a slow and steady decline, with a plateaus beginning somewhere in the 1970s? So that would mean no real change in popularity during the bulk of his lifetime.

Kinda weird how this blew up and became a thing, though. I’ll never understand Twitter.
posted by panama joe at 9:15 PM on January 5, 2021

I sincerely hope that everyone in this thread is also not the same person they were in 2012 and 2013.

The oldest tweets are from 2011 and continued all the way through to at least July 2020. Dude has been doing ironic racism for ten years.
posted by euphorb at 9:15 PM on January 5, 2021 [8 favorites]

A statement from Roderick’s co-hosts on “Friendly Fire”. They are suspending production “for the time being”.
posted by chrchr at 10:08 PM on January 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

Every time I see someone dismissing or downplaying publicly made bigoted statements as "jokes", with the intent of showing that there was no "real" bigotry involved, I ask myself: has this person ever talked to any marginalised people who have had to endure these "jokes" and the people who defend them? Because as a trans woman I'm here to tell you: it's fucking nauseating. It tells me that these are types of bigotry you are not only willing to ignore but even defend. It tells me you consider me an acceptable punchline (albeit "in bad taste" but nothing more). And it tells me that if I or any other marginalised person complains about this, *we're* the ones who will be considered humourless assholes. And I'm so so tired of seeing this tired refrain in the 21st century.

John will be fine. He doesnt need you to go to bat for him. But I would love for those of you dismissing and downplaying bigotry couched as humor to reflect a bit on the sickening, depressing punch in the gut your repeated defenses cause.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 10:13 PM on January 5, 2021 [47 favorites]

If you're ignoring all the statements both in this thread and on the twitter conversation about why it's a) not just 6 hours, and b) why it's different for a 9 year old, I don't know what to tellyou.
posted by Carillon at 11:15 PM on January 5, 2021 [13 favorites]

Also calling people “crazy” and “nuts” in this thread is pretty gross and has been flagged accordingly.
posted by skycrashesdown at 11:45 PM on January 5, 2021 [8 favorites]

One of my comments from this thread was apparently deleted

My understanding is that posts can get deleted on metafilter when people keep bringing up points that have already been discussed ad nauseam in the very same thread. It's not that the particular point is necessarily outrageous (as I already said, this one is an easy mistake to make if you didn't read the original bean dad account/only skimmed the following discussion), but at some point we're running in circles. There is a certain expectation that people read previous comments before they post new ones, to avoid this.
posted by sohalt at 12:16 AM on January 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

From the excellent link posted by progosk: Even when it’s “just a joke,” it’s a joke that demands the submission of marginalized persons to a heteropatriarchal, white supremacist, able-bodied notion of what constitutes humor. Whether or not it’s delivered with a wink, the end result is the strengthening a cutthroat (and inherently violent) status quo.
posted by Bella Donna at 12:29 AM on January 6, 2021 [10 favorites]

I think social media, Twitter especially, is designed in a way that you don't think about what you post more than a few minutes after it's gone into the void. I have no idea what I tweeted in 2012 and 2013. I could go back and delete all of it—and have actually done that with my Twitter account once, pre-2012. (For some reason, I joined Twitter back in 2007 when it was still new, exciting, and not a horror show.)

SansPoint, I'm a bit concerned for you here. I don't find your position in the thread that defensible, because Roderick had all of 2018, 2019, and 2020 to use the widely available free tools to manage his past social media feed - if he had spent any time thinking about it. Maybe it's a good idea to go delete your past Tweets rather than insisting no one should be held to account for their past words?

I mean, if you're not a media figure maybe it's fine, but this is now a part of how we conduct ourselves in public, sort of like not wearing ironic white supremacist t-shirts in public even if some people (???) found them cool in the 90s (???) and social media is public.

I have seen people, sorry, women, in media roles reprimanded by their bosses and had their jobs threatened for not wearing nail polish to a meeting with a (beauty-focused) advertising agency. I have watched many, many women's careers founder on racism and harassment, and personally have witnessed the President of a media company jerk off in his office every Friday -- and the same guy fire a former sales person who was a tragic burn victim because her scars were turning people off and he'd hired a pretty face.

This is about 2 millimetres deep into my foot-high portfolio of Stories.

I once worked for a publication that ran a bi-racial couple on its cover and spent the next week buried in racist emails from small-town Canada, and then (this is how long ago this was) bags of actual physical letters. This is the relationship people have to people who tell their stories.*

Now the poor John Rodericks, who make their living in public discourse, are being held to account for dysfunctional parenting stories and racist remarks they thought were funny.

I think the #MeToo movement is probably my personal North Star of the way public, social-media-driven attention can actually effect change. Men are now in workplaces actually occasionally taking 3 minutes to consider whether their harassing ways will damage their careers! Something that wasn't going on much prior! And it was that moment of so many women standing together that did it.

I understand that no one wants to be caught in the storm - me either.

And yet, these kinds of consequences have always been with us, it's just who is experiencing consequences.

* This is different from doxxing and rape threats. I mean we had a few of those but there really is a difference between "I am NEVER READING YOU AGAIN" and "I will harass your children."
posted by warriorqueen at 7:05 AM on January 6, 2021 [20 favorites]

warriorqueen: I've never argued against accountability. Those tweets were bad, that's not up for debate. John being called out on them is valid. I've argued that digging into his old tweets is excessive compared to what the Bean Dad tweets deserved, but those tweets are out there now, and he's going to have to face that reckoning.

What I'm trying to say in that quote is that for most people, regardless of their level of fame, they don't think or even know they can delete old tweets. Twitter as a platform doesn't make that a feature—it's something that relies on outside tools. I think if you polled most Twitter users, they wouldn't even know those tools exist, and I think they would guess that if they had to find and delete a tweet from 2012, they would have to scroll through their own Twitter, page-after-page, until they found what they were looking for. Twitter also hides @-replies from the main list of Tweets on an account, so if someone wants to find an @-reply that is bad, they would also have to know to look in the "Tweets and Replies" tab.

I'm a fairly technical person. I know that bulk deletion tools for Twitter exist—and have used them—but I only learned how to search my old tweets, through Twitter, yesterday, despite having used it since 2007. Being aware of having said stupid shit on Twitter and knowing how to delete it are two separate things.
posted by SansPoint at 7:59 AM on January 6, 2021

What I'm trying to say in that quote is that for most people, regardless of their level of fame, they don't think or even know they can delete old tweets.

Anecdatapoint: I don't even use Twitter and I've known for years that tweets are deletable. On a regular basis it seems there are controversies in the pop culture news about so-and-so quietly deleting a tweet seemingly in order to avoid responsibility. I would gently suggest that, while I'm sure it's true that Twitter doesn't necessarily make it super easy or obvious how to delete tweets, your perception in this matter that most people don't know that tweets can at least theoretically be deleted is likely objectively unsupported.

That aside, people who earn a living in part through their social media presence and self-promotion in social media aren't "most people". If part of your job involves social media promotion (of your self or otherwise) and you don't know/have never made an effort to learn how to operate the social media tools involved in your job, then perhaps you are bad at your job.

I note that I am not the first commenter in this thread to have made either of those points to you, directly, SansPoint. We understood what you were saying the first five or ten times. We disagree, and further repetition on your part is unlikely to change that (in fact, for myself, I didn't have a strong opinion on your hobby horse initially, but the repetition without substantive engagement with the substance of what other commenters have said has led me toward a more definitively negative viewpoint on your comments).
posted by eviemath at 8:42 AM on January 6, 2021 [14 favorites]

Mod note: Feels like this is getting into an unproductive repetitive spiral, so if you've made the same point a few times please let it rest now. Thanks.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 8:55 AM on January 6, 2021 [8 favorites]

For a palate-cleanser, here's a much better dad thread.
posted by Lexica at 10:01 AM on January 6, 2021 [13 favorites]

@Lexica: ...that is the most charming thing I've seen today. Perhaps this week.
posted by XtinaS at 10:43 AM on January 6, 2021 [3 favorites]

Very true that 1000 precent of peeple like hamsters.
posted by taz at 10:52 AM on January 6, 2021 [7 favorites]

What I'm trying to say in that quote is that for most people, regardless of their level of fame, they don't think or even know they can delete old tweets.

I'm guessing Roderick also doesn't know which kind of nail polish to wear to a meeting with a (beauty-focused) advertising agency so he's not reprimanded by his boss. All kinds of skills that some people have to learn to keep their jobs and other people don't thinking that stuff will never apply to them.
posted by straight at 11:34 AM on January 6, 2021 [5 favorites]

Why Are Dads (the podcast) dropped an episode on this topic.
posted by warriorqueen at 2:48 PM on January 6, 2021

I’ve mostly been digesting this whole can of beans from afar despite being a longtime listener of most of Roderick’s podcasts, but also being someone who is rarely quick to judge, trying first to see things from every angle. If nothing else, this fiasco has given me a lot to think about in terms of generational differences in communication, what happens to humor in social media vs. print vs. spoken word and private vs public contexts, etc.

I wouldn’t call myself a fan of Roderick since he’s too much of a self-important ass, but I do follow his long-form podcasts as he often finds a way to some insightful introspection or social commentary. So I understand why his listeners rushed to his defense as the things he was being accused of don’t really match who he seems to be as a person (and those close to him also echoed similar defenses), but I’ve come around to the argument that even taking his 8-year-old tweets out of context, the onus should not be on the random passer-by to properly contextualize slurs and abusive language. I mean in this one case, if they had done that, they might have gotten a clearer picture of things, but it should never be on them to have to put in that work. John still owns those tweets regardless of context, and they were not appropriate even years ago.

I have enjoyed taking in the discussions here, and some of the more balanced bean dad journalism that this has generated as it really is a good learning lesson since it’s not as black and white case as many others, thus forcing people to reconcile with where the social lines are drawn. I think that if John’s apology is real, he is off to a good start, but I wonder if he has the tools required to achieve what he says he wants to do. I mean I can’t really see his other gen-x podcasting cohosts ending up in this same scenario, Ken Jennings came close but is less confrontational by nature. Merlin Mann is a cohost who does a much better job of making efforts to progress as seen on his Do By Friday podcast, which is now mostly a schtick where Merlin gently ribs his non-cis millennial friends as they school him on how to speak their language. Maximum Fun and other gen-x heavy media folks have similarly found ways to stay current and adjust their brands of humor. Marc Maron is one dude who I could see having a similar blow-up until a few years ago, but I think the nature of his show, long-form interviews with folks from all walks of life, has given him the tools to be more considerate with his communication now whereas Roderick is much more of a hermit, and his podcasts never involve interviews or exposure to other kinds of people.

As I don’t spend so much time on Twitter, esp. this kind of public shaming or #metoo thread, it initially felt pretty icky to me as there does seem to be some ugly hypocrisy in a movement designed to produce more inclusive and tolerant forms of communication when it engages is blindly cherry-picking quotes out of context from a persons old semi-private conversations and pasting them all over Twitter. But I guess that is more the byproduct of the platform's chaos. The fringe of the twitter mob may be akin to the violence junkies who will glom on to public BLM or Antifa events despite not representing the core movement. And the platform itself relies on algorithms that essentially reward shitty behavior. But I’ve still come around arguments laid out here by many kind MeFites for the greater good of public shaming - definitely the onus is still ultimately on Roderick for fixing “misinterpretations” of his tweets in a respectful manner than on the casual reader to understand the weird brain of a random Twitter user. But damn, I still hope platforms like Twitter and Facebook either die or grow up in providing a less toxic place for people to share ideas. MeFi is still my favorite place to talk with other internet users, so thank you all, and esp. the mods.
posted by p3t3 at 4:19 PM on January 6, 2021 [8 favorites]

Aaaaaand we’re back. “Omnibus”, Roderick’s podcast with Jeopardy! guest host Ken Jennings, resumed publishing on its regular schedule last Tuesday.

“Roderick On The Line” dropped a new episode this afternoon. Though the show is mainly autobiographical, Bean Dad is alluded to only briefly and in passing.

“Friendly Fire”, the war movie podcast on Maximum Fun, has officially ended.

There’s also “Road Work”. I haven’t seen anything about the status of that show. I presume it will also resume production.
posted by chrchr at 10:01 PM on January 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

Bean Dad is probably secretly glad there was a coup attempt, safely wiping him from most cultural memory.
posted by tavella at 8:41 AM on January 26, 2021 [7 favorites]

Hilarious postscript to my middle child learning to use the can opener: I went to pull out ingredients for dinner later and discovered all my cranberry sauce was gone (the canned kind, with the lines, obviously). I briefly wondered if I'd lost my mind, asked my husband, etc.

Then my oldest piped up, "When you guys slept in, we got hungry, and Middle Child said, 'Oh! I know how to open food cans now!' so we went to look through the cans and found the cranberry sauce and we each opened one and he taught 4-Year-Old how to use the can opener, and then we ate all the cranberry sauce."

So, uh, this parenting moment has gone awry. As most of them seem to!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:29 AM on January 27, 2021 [19 favorites]

chrchr: "Road Work" has resumed production, though it looks like the episode only went out to Patreon supporters so far.
posted by SansPoint at 8:04 AM on January 27, 2021

(just to be clear, my kids have access to a bunch of food without requiring parental intervention, so when we sleep in for an hour on the weekends, it's not like they're missing breakfast.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:40 AM on January 27, 2021 [2 favorites]