Evening Headlines Open Thread

Julie Roginski, one of Fox's more annoying liberals (though none can touch Shep Smith) also files sex scandal suit against Roger Ailes.

The latest was filed Monday by a current Fox News contributor named Julie Roginsky, who is also suing former Fox News chief Roger Ailes and current company president Bill Shine. She claims her promotion to co-host of the news show "The Five" was "contingent upon having a sexual relationship with Ailes."

"During these meetings, Ailes additionally (and without irony) volunteered the advice that Roginsky should engage in sexual relationships with 'older, married, conservative men' because 'they may stray but they always come back because they're loyal,'" the papers state. "Ailes also remarked that he was loyal but that loyalty was a two-way street. These comments and their delivery made it clear that Ailes wanted a sexual relationship with Roginsky."

I don't know, there are so many different ways to read that.

Over the weekend, it was reported that Bill O'Reilly and/or Fox had five sexual harassment lawsuits targeting O'Reilly, with total payouts of $13 million.

Advertisers are now departing the show.

Trump stepped into this controversy -- because he must, I guess -- to say he didn't think O'Reilly should have settled, and that he doesn't think that O'Reilly did "anything wrong" and that he's a "good person."

"No comment" is apparently not in Trump's vocabulary.

Trump Administration mulling different ideas for "extreme vetting" of foreigners seeking entry into the US, including (on the good side of things) disclosures of your social media accounts so we can check for terrorism-friendly posts, to (on the bad side of things) demanding passwords to your email accounts (so we can check for the same things, I guess).

Something pointed out in criticism is that if Trump demands to know foreign visitors' passwords, foreign countries will do the same for US citizens entering their countries.

Which sounds bad.

Amazon and the NFL have struck a one-year "experimental" deal by which Amazon will show ten games over their streaming service for $50 million.

A market analyst claims that over-the-internet streaming does not pose a threat to conventional television. He then added the word "yet." Which is kind of a big word.

Meanwhile, ESPN is cutting $100 million in employee salaries through layoffs.

Outkick the Coverage makes a good point that ESPN is in very bad shape, because they are locked into enormously-expensive contracts for broadcast rights to sports, many of which they've greatly overpaid for. And they can't just cut these costs as they continuing losing subscribers.

For example, ESPN paid $100 million just for the rights to broadcast one shitty early wildcard NFL playoff game. Outkick the Coverage estimates they lost $75 million on that.

And ESPN's problem is that it has lots of extravagant loss-leader contracts like this for lots of sports broadcasts that don't come close to bringing in profit -- businesses can make loss-leader deals, but the main business of a business can't be loss-leaders.

I liked this article about Laura Kipniss, the liberal feminist professor who got investigated on Title IX charges for having opined that feminism was infantilizing women and treating them like children unable to consent to, or even pursue, sex. She's written a slim book about her experience of being on the receiving end of a ludicrous Title IX witchhunt, and the further sexual infantilization of the college campus.

Kipnis, though, sees these cases through a feminist prism as much as a legal and moral one -- and perhaps this is one reason why some are so eager to attack her. She is saying things that many younger feminists do not want to hear. There are, she thinks, few better ways to subjugate women than to convince them that assault lies around every corner, and she believes, too, that the current climate all but ignores female agency ("he made me get drunk"). Sex -- that muddled, confusing thing -- is, on American campuses, now more strongly associated with hazard than with freedom, which is something she regrets. It is so different from when she was young. Above all, the concept of "consent" is cloudy, subject to change. "Years later, sex that was consensual can apparently become non-consensual," she says. "I think that is quite shocking, and that it should be known."

On the other side of the bizarre sexual theories coin -- the left simultaneously claims that anything can be a sex crime, while also arguing that real sex crimes aren't sex crimes at all -- "ethicist" Peter Singer now argues that there's not really much harm if you rape a severely developmently disabled person, because, come on, they're barely more than animals (and he notoriously concluded that bestiality is no crime, either). Who's to say if the very mentally handicapped even can perceive harm, or if harm to them even matters?

You should know on background that he's pro-euthanasia of any Downs Syndrome baby, because such a baby could never grow up to be an "intellectual peer" of his.

So I guess if killing's okay, so too must be rape.

Oh, and this mentally impaired Social Justice Warrior has hixrsylf a great toddler tantrum after seeing (shock!) pro-life slogans. (Explicit language, adult baby situations.)

On that happy note: Good night!

posted by Ace at 08:05 PM

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