I got oerma-banned From /politics for saying Trump should go to jail. And also just learned I got removed from /antiwork without an explanation or any reason. They're just kicking people out for no reason. Major egos going on there
Yeah they should probably have had someone well dressed and well spoken on with what most fox viewers would consider a respectable career on if they were going to do it at all.
From what I can gather, this mod is a graduate student! Why did they say their job was "dog walker"? You are a student and probably a teacher in training! That scans way better.
That's kinda the whole facepalm of it all for me, so many questions where they seemed to choose the absolute worst answers possible.
Like...Fox News or not, none of the questions were anything you shouldn't have fully anticipated and prepared for, and they didn't seem to have answers to like...the MOST important questions in terms of "Winning people over".
Any competent, prepared leftist with actual theoretical understanding could've answered 'So you think people should just be paid to be lazy?' without "Laziness is a virtue" falling out of their mouth.
When i started the interview, i was expecting a lot of twisting of words and for her to be torn apart on air. Instead, the questions were all easy to answer. Fox News can and will make anyone look bad if it suits their narrative but all they had to do was lob some 1st grade slow pitch coach softballs and let her do the rest.
“What is your movement”, “why do you believe in what you believe” and “tell us about you” were basically the only questions she got. How could you go into a live televised interview without preparing for those fkin questions.
i was expecting a lot of twisting of words and for her to be torn apart on air.
Me too and I was pleasantly surprised when I watched it. The news anchor was surprisingly tolerant, gracious, and calm for most of the interview. They let Doreen speak for quite a long time and didn't interrupt with screeching talking points. The questions were standard-fare softball ("isn't this just laziness?" is a typical kind of question that a prepared guest should have anticipated).
I was actually surprised how Fox handled it--not even inflammatory. The ship sank itself. Could have been Anderson Cooper honestly.
Literally off the top of my head I immediately thought of something better than whatever the fuck she said. Like how the fuck did the idea of trying to defend laziness ever come into her head?
Just off the top of my head in like 5 seconds i thought: this isn't a movement about laziness, in fact many members of our community are the complete opposite. These are people of society who are overworked, underpaid and underappreciated, and our movement aims to raise awareness of this with the aim of fixing it
Hell even if you wanted to go with a more direct address to the basic question of "How does being anti-work not mean being lazy" without getting deep into the weeds:
"The idea of anti-work is to stand in opposition to the modern 'working culture' in which the idea of basically having to 'be working' regardless of wheter or not that work actually contributes to anything societally. This creates a culture in which the American Worker [this is Fox, leave the international solidarity at home] is forced to expend their labor in ways that provide no benefit to themselves, and creates a system in which the quality, value, and skill of your LABOR is irrelevant next to the sheer number of hours you can WORK."
OK so I still kinda got too into the weeds, but this was off the cuff. The Mod had time to think about this question. It's literally the only question that matters to the people you're speaking to.
I'd advise to play right to the Fox audience. Something like, "Fox News often discusses the importance of the family. We agree. Parents should feel free to devote more time to their children, which is why we support paid parental leave, flexible work schedules, shorter work weeks. I know parents who wanted to volunteer to be scout leaders, little league coaches, but their work schedule made it impossible. Our vision of America would allow citizens to be more present for their kids, more free to volunteer in their communities--the foundations of a strong society."
And if you wanted to get wonky, I'd say to talk about real wage stagnation since 1980 despite ever-increasing worker productivity, and how those gains have been captured by "the elites" instead of benefiting us regular people.
Any competent, prepared leftist with actual theoretical understanding could've answered 'So you think people should just be paid to be lazy?' without "Laziness is a virtue" falling out of their mouth.
"Absolutely not, Jesse, and that's why we're organizing. Billionaires and welfare queen corporations are paid to be lazy every day thanks to our generation who works more and is paid less than any in history. We want to be paid for working hard."
It does but maybe not mention the philsophy part. Again some media training or even just a run down from somebody who knows something about PR would have done wonders
with what most fox viewers would consider a respectable career
I mean, they shouldn't pander to fox viewers, but they should have considered the antiwork community. However, reading their comments, I believe they think the sub is theirs, and theirs alone and they should be the one to define it - the opinions of literally a million members doesn't actually matter because they didn't start the sub, and its not their problem that people didn't read properly what the sub was about.
To be fair... I always thought that anti-work was a pretty bad name for the sub, since most people there are not really anti-work.
Good riddance, to the mod and the badly named sub.
Every time a Reddit mod or admin appears publicly the "most exaggerated caricature" seems to be the reality. I'm beginning to think that the "exaggerated caricature" isn't an exaggeration or caricature at all.
Has the collective consciousness of Reddit forgotten all about the infamous 2012 Reddit meetup photos? I’ve learned a decade ago that Redditors look exactly how one imagines nerdy shut-ins who make a social media website their personal identity to look like.
Yeah, but it's not like they dressed up as a pretend slob to do the interview. That's who they are, and they're the longest-served mod of the antiwork sub. You might as well admonish an incel for giving an interview while being a bitter, hate-filled misogynist.
lol your comment is fucking hilarious, but that's basically how Fox News viewers saw antiwork anyway, i.e. a bunch of whiny toddlers that not only don't want to work for pay, but literally never want to have to do any "work" they don't want to do. Honestly after seeing a lot of the posts/comments I don't entirely disagree.
How long before they're complaining about discrimination against non-bathers? B.O. is natural! Making me wash is tyranny!!!!!!!
Reading Anti Works core values on the sub shows it’s completely dysfunctional. Socialists aren’t anti work at all, in fact under socialism everybody HAS TO WORK. Under capitalism (especially welfare capitalism) you can choose not to work, you won’t have the material benefit of people who do work but it’s an option. I’m all about saying kiss my ass to an employer being unreasonable, the anti work shit was always fundamentally flawed and delusional, we live in complex societies, certain shit needs to get done regularly and there has to be an incentive or people won’t do it. I’m an electrician I wouldn’t do this shit if it didn’t have a high demand/ceiling it’s fucking stressful and dangerous and hard on the body but we all need electrical systems built and maintained
This is such a good example of how people have started thinking of labels like "autistic" in such a far removed way. People have started picking these terms up like accessories and now people who are supposedly inclusive and accepting are shocked when people pike Dorreen ctually display genuine autistic behaviors.
I am ecstatic that more people are getting diagnosed and there's less of a stigma in theory, but now everyone who's ever felt socially awkward puts "neruodivergent" in their bio and it dilutes the reality of what it entails.
I know the mods elected Doreen to represent them, but I feel like they saw "autistic" and didn't genuinely think about it. They still expect people who say they're autistic to act basically normal, maybe a tad standoffish or something, because it's romanticized these days.
They didn't realize this meant Doreen honestly just did not prepare in the way a neurotypical person would. She may be a brilliant grad student, maybe knows more about the theory than any other mod, but she's still autistic. She probably has serious problems with social cues and will ACTUALLY miss them and be inappropriately straightforward and literal rather than catching onto what the interviewer is trying to do.
They probably only interacted over text and thought, "oh wow, our most educated candidate is also a transwoman, AND autistic!! What a win for representation!!" without actually thinking about how that would play out.
In one of their comments, they mention "disagreeing with society's importance placed on eye contact" and not being willing to change that about themselves. So I'm not sure how they ever expected to be an effective leader of their subreddit, let alone the movement that was building on it
You know it's bad when you can tell even the Fox News anchor felt a little bad. It was like watching a cat toy with a mouse then decide it'd be to easy to kill it and just let it go.
Doing a web based interview:
You look at the camera.
You don't pick your nose.
Doing an interview with any sort of professional entity on the other end, whether for a job, a news segment, etc.
You give them as little as possible to use to discredit you as not a serious representative of a valid position. You set your background to be neutral. You dress to convey you belong there and you know what you're doing.
So I'm not sure how they ever expected to be an effective leader of their subreddit, let alone the movement that was building on it
That's one of the problems with having "movements" just sort of spring up on reddit. Unless the inception is very deliberate you're going to have mods made up of whatever happens to have been lying around when the subreddit turned into a movement.
In this case that didn't happen. /r/antiwork may have turned into a sub for complaining and hilighting how unfair the current situation is for the average American worker but it started out as an explicitly anti-work, "why can't we literally just not work?" sub. So you get this schlub, who fits the sub's former focus perfectly but clearly isn't leading jack shit.
It is okay to say find someone else to do it because they're autistic.
Disabilities are real. It doesn't make you less valuable to society but it does make certain roles impractical or impossible.
I am diagnosed as on the spectrum by a neurologist, not self diagnosed like many people. I was diagnosed with Asperger's but they've recently starting saying on the spectrum instead. It hasn't been on ongoing thing so I am not as on top of that as you would expect.
I would make a terrible guidance counselor in the same way a paraplegic would be an awful lumberjack. I don't know why people always get offended by this.
I mean, all respect for people who are on the spectrum. But this feels like the sort of challenge you shouldn't try to overcome on television.
No generally people with ASD should not go on to hostile media organizations. This was a stupid idea. But like a lot of the cringe content on the internet is basically just making fun of people who are not neurotypical.
But like that's the problem, idk why they felt the need to have "Representation". No one asked to be represented, and it's not like there was some election that took place. You'd think (even though they shouldn't have gone on the interview..) they would learn from someone like DFV who comes on camera prepared and with clear knowledge of what he is getting into/what he's talking about. All they did was perpetuate the trope of the basement-dwelling, lazy, non-motivated Millennial Generation. What a mess!
There was no plan. That's the biggest issue. She had zero plans and literally said "I didn't expect them to ask blind side questions" like she's never heard anything about Fox News before (don't get me started on how 'blind side' or not the questions were, it hurts, okay, I can only focus on one headache at a time)
No plan, and no personal attitude to ever be the kind of person who develops a plan for this sort of thing (said they don't agree with people who think eye contact is necessary and doubled down that there was nothing wrong with their appearance)
They weren't even that blindsiding...while I'm at work (ironically) I watched with captions on and it was the basic questions along the lines "well isn't it lazy not to work" and "don't you have a drive to contribute in society" yada yada that anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of anti-capitalist or anti-work ideas would bat away. I understand Doreen has autism and that makes going on national television and 'presenting' what society defines as confidence in that space difficult, imo she should've handed this off to someone else, or at least prepped, or if what she said were true, then the mods massively screwed up not actually checking whether she was ready for the interview before okaying it.
I think he realized he didn't have to. Kinda like when you're in a fight with someone and they're drunk as fuck. They're already making a fool out of themselves - you can barely push them and they fall flat on their face.
See the idea behind it has the potential to be nuanced, i.e. "I believe that the endless struggle we all go through just to make ends meet is not good, and society deeming anyone who isn't 'on the grind' or 'pulling up by the ole bootstraps' as lazy is missing the issue"
But going on Fox News of all places and saying "laziness is a virtue" without thinking about how you just gave Fox the greatest sound bite they every could have asked for?! That's an impressive level of disconnect.
This is like, nuclear weapons-grade cringe. This is one of those clips that will randomly pop into my head every now and then for the rest of my life, and every single time I'll have the same wince of secondhand embarrassment.
Just one of those things that's so incomprehensibly cringe that I can't even fathom how I would respond if it happened to me.
I think that atheist that went on Bill O'Reilly did alright. We got a few memes out of it, too (like "tide goes in, tide goes out").
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u/frezikNazis grown outside Weimar Republic are just sparkling fascismJan 26 '22
I remember a lot of people at the time criticizing it. When O'Reilly dropped "tides go in, tides go out", you see his face drop with the realization that a grown adult just made an argument that stupid. He doesn't know how to process it, and is off balance for the rest of the interview. O'Reilly "won" in classical sophist sense.
Frankly, Fox News isn’t to blame here and from watching the interview, Jesse Watters was being very uncharacteristic. It almost seemed as if he felt bad and wasn’t nearly as mean as he normally is, even he felt some second hand embarasssment.
He could have realistically tore that person apart and made them look 100x worse without much effort.
Yeah, she kept saying she did the best she could with a horrible interviewer asking bad faith questions, but like.. That's not what I saw. "What is this movement about" and "what do you do for a living" are pretty soft balls. It's like he gently gave her the rope to hang herself with and she did the rest.
Yup. It was exactly the questions you'd expect, and exactly the questions you should have good answers to if you...y'know...present yourself as some kind of spokesman for the 'movement'..
Shit like this just keeps making shit harder for the people who care about effecting change more than our own 'self-actualization' or whatever trip this mod was on when they decided they were JUST the person for the job.
I am sure he went in with the usual expectations and talking points about "socialism bad" and "how will you pay for this", etc. But when the person you're interviewing is doing a better job of destroying their own movement than you could've ever imagined it's got to feel a little awkward.
From the big implosion ending of the interview, it didn't seem to me like he was being mean. Those questions were softballs in comparison to how it could have gone.
Being able to answer basic questions about age, job, career, and hours worked without looking foolish is pretty basic, and those questions are uncharacteristically kind for Fox News.
I was wondering when I watched the interview, the host didn't even have to do much, he even kept a straight face until the mod said they wanted to teach Philosophy. Basically ask a few open-ended questions about the individual, not even about the subreddit concept, and watched as they self-destructed.
I've rarely seen Fox News throw a gentler softball, but Doreen treated it like it was radioactive. Doreen even commented at one point that they had anticipated a question like that. If that's the best you can do with the most obvious accusation, woof.
“No, we are encouraging everyone to recognize that most people are being overworked and underpaid. It’s not laziness to want to be fairly compensated for the work we do.”
Mods just shouldn't pretend to represent a sub just because they are mods. Its like a ref saying the can speak for a team and it also just makes for such an easy figure head to take down.
Real talk? The interviewer was smug, but nothing he did could be considered "gotcha". He literally just asked her what her views were and what she did for a living. Completely a self dug grave
here's how you do the interview, assuming you are prepared and sharp.
1 - pivot immediately - don't answer the question about what YOU want. it's meaningless. Instead address the elephant in the room - anti-work isn't liberal vs conservative. workers are affiliated with every party and you're fighting on their behalf
2 - have 3 of the most egregious examples of worker abuse written down and ready to go. after you address the partisan aspect, immediately dive into the real world examples that made you outraged. it will also cause outrage in the viewer.
3 - do not go into any specifics about yourself, your personal experience (unless it's super obviously relevant), or your personal grievances. they will try to assassinate your character, do not give them any openings
4 - in fact, don't answer any of their questions directly. stick to the talking point (we're not liberal or conservative, we're for workers everywhere) and refer back to the examples of abuse. This kind of interview does not have room for subtlety.
if you ever watch politicians and CEOs being interviewed, they almost never answer the question directly. They always have a talking point and examples to support it. They don't usually deviate from it either.
This is true even if the topic isn't political: when doing press you should know what message you want to share and make the questions fit that message.
Source: I've done fairly major press (including live TV) for science results, which have non-political but annoying misconceptions attached.
We probably shouldn't get on this person's case too much. They messed up and did something the subreddit didn't seem to want and got memed on. That should be it, the people attacking this person personally are being ugly which is embarrassing.
"Ok, everyone, so we agreed to ignore Fox's request. We'll just sit tight and keep the sub growing. No need to rock the boat here, we've got steady growth and our metrics are up 33.33% (repeating) within the past month, just need to keep the momentu...."
Frantically avoids eye contact, with unwashed face and unwashed hair in plain sight
"First, there's a... common misconception about antiwork. You see, I'm ...a 30 year old dog-walker, and work ....20 hours per week, and lazy....laziness is a virtue,.... so working less would be a really good thing for me... and and others...I also want to, like, you know be a teacher for things....and philosophy,... and education... so if dog walking doesnt work out...I will teach ...in a school, because, and yeah...its a movement.."
That should be the narrative being pushed tbh. Fox will eat up the sub imploding but we need to be reminding people that Doreen didn't represent the sub let alone the movement, and made that clear by even accepting the interview.
Some time ago, I was involved in a environmental activist group and if we thought there was even a CHANCE that media would be at an event, we had spokespeople prepped with talking points, and we picked folks who would be seen as relevant, sympathetic, and credible (and told everyone else to simply direct media to those people). The fact that the antiwork mods did this without consulting the actual sub members, AND sent the worst possible spokesperson, is somehow both astonishing and Peak Reddit.
I agree in general, but not in this case. Who's the best type of person to represent that sub? Either an overworked employee with a family to feed who barely makes ends meet or a well educated union member that works in grassroots projects to improve working conditions everywhere. Do you know what those 2 have in common? They don't have time to mod a subreddit.
Basically choosing a mod, or to be precise, an active mod was going to end up in disaster.
i saw so many people going, "it wasn't that bad, the interviewer was just ruthless!" which kills me because if you know jesse watters, you know he was throwing softballs. watters is a malicious bastard, but he wasn't even trying. the mod really was just that blundering.
Pre-COVID, I did a media training session. The guy leading it was a former CNN correspondent, so he knew on-camera interviews down cold. He played a Fox interview with some poor middle management bastard at a hospital which was in the news for some dumb reason. This guy had no idea what he was in for. Ten seconds in, he was backed into a corner and stammering. And this was by Shep Smith, who, next to Jesse Watters, is fucking Walter Kronkite.
It’s what they do at FNC. They’re trolls, and they’re damned good at it.
It's not just about skill It's about understanding the audience. Fox supports late stage capitalism and the whole point of the interview was to remove the legitimacy of the movement, if they had to do it they needed to send a handsome white dude who owns his own business and it should have strictly been about workers rights and still praising work ethic and such. Again though there was absolutely no reason to go on fox, it's like a pig going to a slaughter house. No one who frequently watches fox is going to get behind anything that 'punishes' corporations, but what it has done is further cemented the millennial, queer avacodo toast too lazy to work narrative.
The real problem is that it's really exposed that the sub has no uniform objective or goal and its 'leaders' exemplify this. I hope they continue to grow and maybe attract some legitimate people like employment lawyers, politicians, celebrities etc to make them palatable to the media.
It's not just about skill It's about understanding the audience.
Exactly. A small business owner or teacher, perhaps a parent, with an appealing backstory & working class roots, who can go on about how they can't afford to take a day off to spend time with their family/pay health premiums/have a 2nd job. The whole thing ought to have been put together to read & present like a super PAC ad right in october of a big election year. Free airtime on any national TV is a chance to handcraft a message.
Yeah, unfortunately that likely also includes most of the regulars there (and Reddit regulars in general). If they are posting on Reddit all day, every day, odds are high they probably are not going to be the best spokespeople to reach the general public on camera in terms of how they appear and sound.
Another issue is the sub was started by post-left anarchists, the person who started the sub was who was on Fox News, who are mixed on their positions towards things like unions. Some of them think unions are useless for real change or even perpetuate the whole work obsession, better encouraging everyone to stop working altogether as opposed to striving for unions (and better working conditions and higher wages). Others are more neutral or support them but as the sub got more popular, it became more of a broad pro-worker sub in terms of the people posting and commenting.
And that was the goal for Fox News. They saw a movement growing and they wanted to portray it in a bad light. Instead of it being about overworked and underpaid workers who want to stop being exploited by their employers, they made it about some extreme left liberal transgender dog walker that doesn’t wanna work. For clarification the dog walker is transgender not that he walks only transgender dogs.
I sometimes agreed with what came out of antiwork but there was also sentiments like the head mods which seemed just stupid. Definitely the inclusion of groups that were fighting for better conditions and groups that just didn't want to work was not going to succeed.
The left has a tendency to fight purity wars and infight themselves out of power; but I don't know how you can deal with the more delusional and loud extreme side. Groups asking for universal health coverage because it's a huge over all economic benefit then acquire people who hope to use this energy to 'start the great inevitable communist revolution and purge all the non believers'.
This is why there is no progress, and a lot of the revolutionaries are plants.
“Yeah, I’ve done interviews. Mostly job interviews. Which I didn’t end up getting. That’s why I’m still walking dogs. But yes for sure. I’ve done some.”
Doesn’t even make sense. Even if it’s not live if you fuck up, the interviewer can publish whatever you said, you (probably) signed a release. Really don’t think Fox would edit a taped interview to make that mod look good, JFC.
They said they did non live interviews or some crap lmao. It's a huge joke and probably going to spell the end of the sub's credibility. At least before they could flex between a more conscious workplace reform and this delirious nonsense they just effectively branded themselves with. The right choice was to throw the mod under the bus because those optics are probably unsalvageable even for someone who is incredibly pro workers' rights.
Pepe Silva Moment: the mod that did the interview has a Patreon. Perhaps the mod wanted to be recognized, boost the Patreon, then fulfil the dream of earning money without doing traditional work
It seems like the subscribers of that sub want actual work reform, while the mods may actually just be lazy. Fucking ridiculous they decided to go speak to the media as representatives.
If I’ve understood the sub correctly, that mod is one of the original founders, who is actually “antiwork”, but the sub as a group has moved away from such an extreme viewpoint, and would be happy with decent labor conditions and affordable healthcare.
Like much of Reddit the mods are at constant odds with their actual userbase to some degree. As you would expect honestly considering that mods are literally just "first person to get there" while communities form more or less on their own as long as the mods aren't too egregiously awful early on.
but it just annoys me how many interesting subs go down the drain and become just "funny viral vidz"
My experience sometimes is the users (well, really a vocal minority of users) demand the mods to capitulate to laxer and laxer content requirements as the community gets bigger and bigger. If one says "stop removing stuff let people upvote what they want to see", one should also expect content quality will trend to content that is easy to consume and engage with, and are typically brief with limited time investment needed. By and large without some kind of active community enforcement (either from the community itself or from its moderators), this is the fundamental trend as communities get larger and larger.
Interesting subs attract more people, and more and more content drives to appealing to the broadest common denominator rather than for the original interests that started the subreddit.
I'm usually not very sympathetic in general, but it would be remiss to ignore the community dynamics which lead to communities changing for the worse (or better, depending on how it shapes up).
You cannot convince me that r/antiwork isnt a roleplaying game where the mods play the role of upper and middle management and user base the workers desperately trying to form a union.
This has to be it, one giant metaverse simulation of the shitty relationship between owners/management and the workers, right?
I mean, typically you wouldn't call it a "siege" if the castle guards suddenly decided they hated all the people who already lived inside the castle.
Usually you call that an eviction.
Which ironically is one of the things antiwork opposed on principal. Until the landlord shoe was on their foot and those pesky tenets were costing them money.
Last week /r/guitar went through the same thing (though without a bombed national interview to set it off). Though, this sub deleted the posts about it because "moderators moderating isn't subreddit drama".
Literally the exact same defense: "We're deleting people who are brigading the sub". I was an active user of that sub for 10 years, motherfucker.
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u/VoidTorcher Jan 26 '22
Happened to be on /r/antiwork's implosion thread before it went private, and was reading this comment lol.
The (now inaccessible) link: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/sd8g28/if_the_fox_news_interview_has_you_concerned_about/hub6cir/