Episode 230 - Separate but Eagle

[Mike]

This week starts with a double Nerd Rage… Aidan’s annoyed with “lifehacks” and Mike has a few rambling words to say about Scouting. From there, we jump straight into racism in America as Aidan talks about Childish Gambino’s newest video. On Fingertips, they talk about Avengers (spoiler-free), the TV show Speechless, Mike’s upcoming vacation, and Aidan’s take on the song Wasn’t Me. All of this and we haven’t even gotten to Pod-O-Matics yet. When R2 rolls out, there’s ten all-new, listener-submitted questions from dice to Black Lightning, Animaniacs to modern major-generals, plus a half-dozen more. This is a rock-solid episode. You’d be a fool not to listen.

Enjoy!

[Kyle]

Tell Aidan that I'm not "Aidan from the future." I have the ability to read minds, from a distance. So much hentai. Ugh.

Also- other than Pinky and the Brain, here's my favorite Animaniacs character (and he's completely one-note):

[Mike]

Dammit. Chicken Boo.

Mike was wrong.

[Phoebe]

I sing this to my children all the time and only one has a faint clue what is going on.

I have no problem with scouting or other such organizations for young people being restricted to girls or boys. Interestingly, though I did not know it at the time, one scouting organization I joined as a kid was already open to both girls and boys - Camp Fire, which we still called Camp Fire Girls, and there were no boys among our group of Bluebirds! Later the transition was to "Brownies" and in my mind that was all the same group even though it was actually a different organization. We, the same group of girls, went from one Color (blue) to another (brown), and that made sense for continuity, and then we sold cookies, and though I liked the cookies, the cookies were the be-all, end-all function for some groups and that was no fun. We had 4-H which was 1000x better anyway, so 4-H prevailed. I believe some aspects of Boy Scouts like "Explorers" were open to girls even when I was that age, not sure if that program is still active. Anyway, it's interesting that we saw co-ed scouting-type groups formed in the 70s, so it's not like this hasn't happened before, and now 40 years later we have another resurgence of interest in forming a co-ed version.

My main concern is that I don't think Girl Scouts should be pressured to change what it does, and I hope it doesn't lose membership, simply because another option is available to girls now through Scouts. I know some people see this as a win for girls in the sense that they too can now have access to the same programs and the prestige of things like Eagle Scout. However, I don't think girls really needed that option in order to demonstrate their leadership abilities, and I worry that what Girl Scouts offer will be seen as lesser rather than as a parallel, or that pressure will be put on Girl Scouts to abandon the mission of serving girls.

On some of your other topics... if white people can't call out racism against non-white people, then we aren't going to make very much progress toward getting rid of it, are we? Damn near everyone needs to be able to do that and has a duty to do that.