vaguerant

Joss Whedon is in shambles.

You might be missing the context, which is that an Australian childcare worker, who is a man, and who was in the industry for about a decade and had access to over a thousand children in that time, was recently arrested on child sexual abuse charges relating to a number of those children.

This has prompted a lot of editorial inches on the myriad problems in the for-profit childcare industry and how they compounded to allow this situation to occur for so long. I haven't seen any coverage that blamed men, but there have been a few talking about the prejudice against men who want to work with children and the suspicion directed at them, especially right now.

Nobody sensible is actually suggesting that the solution is to vilify men who work with children, that's just a side effect of the revelation that a man who worked with children was a child molester. This piece is simply trying to redirect some of that reflexive distrust toward reforms that could actually make childcare and similar industries safer for children.

There were definitely backlashes to big popular artists of prior decades, like Elvis and the Beatles. Partly it was couched in that "They're corrupting the youth" conservatism, but also anything that's popular with tween and teen girls tends to catch a lot of flack regardless of whether or not it's deserved. Think Twilight or One Direction. I don't care for either, but they both became out-sized hate figures for weird adult men. There was no shortage of enraged nerd hot takes when that sparkly vampire guy was cast as Batman.

I think Coldplay is kind of on the same page. Which is obviously faint praise, but they have a sort of inoffensively palatable sound which is both the reason they're so successful and the thing people dislike about them. But it's probably not worth getting angry about.

That's a shame, I've only heard good things about putting your butt on Grindr.

He was well ahead of the curve on wearing red hats.

I'm mostly talking out of my ass, but I wonder if the access to copious amounts of hard drugs and alcohol that comes with money plays some part in it. Seeing if there's anything to substantiate that idea, here's a review of prior studies on the subject: Substance misuse and substance use disorders in sex offenders: A review.

The following is an excerpt from Table 1. History of substance abuse among sex offenders: retrospective file research:

(No, I don't know what "child molesters without pedophilia" means.)

It basically continues like this. You can read the study yourself, but there does appear to be at least some correlation with drug and alcohol abuse when it comes to child molestation. Speaking anecdotally, I have also heard that cocaine use can lead to engaging in riskier sex acts that might not be appealing while sober.

I have no experience using cocaine, but being drunk has never made me want to sexually abuse children, so I suspect there must be some other personal defect which leads to these kinds of behaviors, with drugs/alcohol reducing inhibitions. Obviously, drug and alcohol use does not explain disgustingly rich people being disgustingly horrible creeps on its own, but it might be in the mix.

I like a lot of middle evolutions better than final, Charmeleon included. Wartortle with those wing-ears, the Nidoran middle forms are pretty good. Zubat is better than Golbat. Meowth has more going on than Persian which is just any regular cat from Earth. Voltorb is better than Electrode, but in fairness they're both just Pokéballs--I always thought Electrode should have been modeled after a Great Ball or something.

Here's an XCancel (Twitter mirror) link to the trailer in question, in case anybody wants to avoid visiting Twitter, either directly or via the embedded tweet in the article:

https://xcancel.com/bigfinish/status/1945410577616208069

That's right, I don't mean to dispute that he refused to leave. It's only the photoshopping him out of the official image that didn't occur.

Rated False by Snopes.