Things You Just Don't Care About

I'm guessing his answer is "yes"

(1) her sister has publicly said she does not think she was abused and even thought it was "funny" that people claimed as much

I don't think this is great evidence to show her sister wasn't abused. It's one of the most common responses to these situations to say everything was OK, and even adults do it. So to make a decision whether or not Lena did abuse her, this is not something to go on.

It's a murky area, and it all depends on whether or not grooming your underage sister to sexually exploit her, which are admitted facts, counts as sexual abuse. Because this is the standard that's going to be applied to other cases, too.

apple product releases

poorly formed joeks about apple product releases

It's a murky area, and it all depends on whether or not grooming your underage sister to sexually exploit her, which are admitted facts, counts as sexual abuse. Because this is the standard that's going to be applied to other cases, too.

u are deranged nothing written in a memoir - specifically created to "be funny" + sell books - is an "admitted fact", much less the basis for legal standards

It's not about prosecuting Dunham, but about what people on here, and elsewhere, are accepting as normal. Apparently you and man alive are OK with what Dunham did to her sister, because her sister considered it OK. So as long as a child considers it OK, it's fine to groom and manipulate them so that you can masturbate next to them in bed.

Now that's something I consider deranged.

idk what dunham did to her sister and neither do you

like omg celebrity whose celebrity is built around being provocative wrote some deliberately provocative shit in her "memoir" as clickbait/joeks/plea for attention. it is not a factual or reliable narrative.

It's about what standards we're willing to accept in society. People giving a pass on Dunham's stated behavior, even if it's 100% completely untrue, still has a potentially negative effect of normalizing it, which can harm a lot of people.

I know all good aspirational people want to rally behind wealthy and influential people like Dunham, but this is pretty bad.

if lena and her sister are both in general accord on the outline of the story, then it considerably strengthens the presumption that it is broadly correct.

your faith in attention-seeking celebrities is remarkable

to be clear, I think her writing about it is at heart a bad joke. It isn't funny, it's poorly conceived, and it's attempt to derive humor from childhood sexuality is misplaced and a basically dumb idea.

I do not at all believe that it is a credible account of actual events, there is no way to judge it on that basis.

I'm not sure I would categorize lena's sister as an attention-seeking celebrity. Does she have an agent?

She doesnt even have agency according to ppl itt

this thread is vile. later guys

There are two options here:

* Take it as true and hold Dunham to account for her behavior in order to keep the bar of acceptable conduct at a certain level

* Or, Dunham disavows what she wrote in her memoir against social pressure (which has not happened), which she has not done due to the aforementioned, which would discredit anything she says afterwards. So I understand why she hasn't taken this route considering her pattern of outrageously selfish and remorseless behavior, and people like Outis and others giving her a pass on it

Is it any wonder why someone like Trump has become the nominee of one of our major political parties here? The bar for conduct here we're willing to accept has been lowered so far that we're giving people a pass now on sexually exploiting their little sisters. People don't even need to hide that shit anymore because it's now OK.

Dehumanization and exploitation of others is what our social standards are now, and it's not any different between the Trump camp's racism and anti-semitism and Dunham bragging about exploiting her sister. Nor is it much different from corporations exploiting their employees, or state governments leaving children and mothers to die.

It's all basically the same thing: our social ethos of what's acceptable and not acceptable to do to other people. Dunham, Trump, corporate behavior, government behavior that exploits, harms and kills others, are all OK now. It's a strange time we're living in here, and it's sad to watch the bar getting lower and lower.

it is a strange, high horse you ride on

Yeah, having concern for other human beings, that really shouldn't be considered a "high horse". Yet here we are.

would you like a medal for self-righteousness, I think I have some lying around somewhere

trump voters and dunham defenders (dunfenders) are different people, motivated by different ideas, and shaped by different forces in the culture. imo.

xp No, I've just seen a lot of bad things in this world, and my interest is in seeing as little pain and suffering happen as possible. And it's depressing and frustrating just watching things get worse instead of better and otherwise intelligent and educated people going along with it.

I respect your motivations and question your judgment

Two whole options!

xp If you question my judgment then you must not keep up with what's going on in the world much. Just look at Trump, another example -- his rise is due in large part to a media system that values profit over the long-term well-being (and potentially, survival) of others, and they have the unchecked power to do it.

Extremely selfish behavior that can seriously harm others for personal profit, accepted as normal by society at large. I don't see much difference between that and giving a pass on Dunham's behavior. It's a belief system we have now that's pervaded our lives in the US in all aspects.

These things don't happen in a vacuum.

So it's incredibly worrying not just from the angle of exploiting children for sex, which is deplorable, it also connects to a whole mess of other serious issues, too, in a race to the bottom for human conduct with incredible amounts of wealth and power behind it and a whole train of people following it. That's what especially worries me.

I give up, feel free to continue alternating between handwringing and patting yourself on the back

i didn't read dunham's book but the excerpt strikes me as being more like a shared gross joke among siblings looking back on their childhood than it does a literal portrayal of what their childhood was really like. i have a hard time imagining a 7-year-old being self-aware enough to have the conscious motives dunham attributes to herself ("i took a perverse pleasure in delivering bad news to her"). i don't find the excerpt funny or anything, but it seems like a real stretch to interpret something in a jokey bs memoir so literally. plus there are plenty of solid other reasons to be annoyed or disgusted by lena dunham.

she was trying to talk about her emotional dependency on her sister in an "edgy" way and she fucked up and produced a piece of text that was tasteless and disturbing because she isn't that good of a writer

^^^

i don't think people should be hanged for what they did when they were seven years old but i've clearly lived a different life than larry appleton

Wasn't she as old as 17 when she did some of the stuff though?

Larry otm. edgy shitty shit needs to die.

everyone patting themselves on the back for being self-righteously not self-righteous - good work!

I think Shakey and Tree are probably OTM. She did some weird stuff with her sister that was probably not tantamount to child molestation, and then wrote about it in hyperbolic and, to be sure, tasteless and insufficiently self-aware terms in a failed attempt to be funny and cool. It does seem gross, but it's not the equivalent of confessing to molestation. Similarly, with the Odell Beckham thing, I really don't think she was "oversexualizing black men" or whatever people are drawing from this, I think she was just making a failed joke and being narcissistic. And, as always, she was being narcissistic in that aware but not aware enough way, and it was kind of annoying, but god fucking damnit the whole point of this was supposed to be not caring!

to repeat, I have no idea what she did to her sister and neither does anyone else because the only evidence of the events in question is a narrative from a notoriously unreliable narrator, whose goal was not to divulge the truth of what happened, but to write a "funny" story that would get people's attention. and guess what mission accomplished, congratulations everybody!

congratulations

fabric closing

people on the internet talking about lena dunham.

So wait what didn't you guys care about?

the GDP of Moldavia

i don't care about this thread. what a waste of time.

headphone jacks

more like headphone jackoff amirite

music releases by ageing goths

I'm very interested in what they're doing now, provided I liked their music from the 80s and 90s.

I care quite a lot about headphone jacks.

I'd Rather Mac, Than Headphone Jack

checks back to see when this thread turned into "defending stuff other people don't care about", realises I was the first offender with an impassioned defence of giraffes

Aging goths: Just found out last night that comics writer Steve Niles married Monica Richards from Faith And The Muse, he even plays on her newer stuff (he used to be in punk bands)

(xp) There are disgusting savages who don't care about giraffes?

c'mon, what do they actually bring to Flamingoland?

joking obv.

I heard about a furore in Denmark concerning a giraffe but it hasn't affected my level of caring about them, which remains medium.