Perhaps the biggest irony around the 15+ Netflix drama “Adolescence” about a 13-year old boy who knifes to death a girl at his school is not that it is being foisted on schools in a collaboration between the government, Netflix and Tender (one of those charities largely funded by the taxpayer – £3.4 million so far) with seemingly no consideration of whether it is suitable educational material, how it …
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Why is it that tech people are completely incapable of providing any "upgrade" that is as good as what they replace? It is, in my experience, a universal rule that the replacement will be more complicated, less functional and have some pointless additional feature that you don't want.
https://x.com/ronfilipkowski/status/1907251887176642880?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
For the record, I have not watched Adolescence and nor am I likely to.
“Right - we need 27 new features to justify my job. This means that we push all the bug fixes into the back log. What do you mean we don’t have time to do full QA on that many features? Code smarter - if you do your jobs, there will be no bugs to fix.”
{the sounds of devs firing up LinkedIn to find new jobs}
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7vn5vj9394o
This was utterly inevitable and predictable.
On the misogyny thing I have said before that in many rape cases young men are genuinely bewildered about what they have done wrong. They have repeatedly seen that if you simply barge through a woman's initial reluctance they rapidly become enthusiastic orgasmic bed partners. They seem to have "learned" that this is how this works. I am not troubled by consensual behaviour in porn, no matter how unrealistic. I am very concerned about the casual violence that lacks all consequence. That is what we need to focus upon. What they need is a nice cup of tea.
You're forced to put yourself in their position, rather than take the easy route and put yourself in the shoes of the victim and her family (or blame some ethnic minority).
The plot does not suggest that the victim was responsible - the murderer character does. The police dig into his thinking in a neutral way - but that's their job, isn't it? I don't think the intended audience - parents - need to be spoonfed that this stuff is wrong.
Her best friend's rage was glorious - we got the opposite side through her. Ultimately the series demonstrates that there is no excuse, no justification, no cause for what he did to the victim. None. Episode 3 where he runs the entire spectrum of emotions in sequence shows this.
What I hope younger generations will take from this is that "masculinity" is a construct, a performative set of definitions which have little connection to reality. The idea that young men should be angry for the way that young women respond to them is crazy - when you're 13 "incel" is the normal state of behaviour, not something to provoke senseless murder.
Anyway, Musk lost. What that means is that the GOP plan to redistrict WI ahead of the midterms will fail, which means they will likely lose and that imperils the whole House.
So here it is. When you can't trust the people to vote the right way - because they are traitors - then you can't let them vote. This election was another step along the journey of the midterm elections not actually being run.
It is incredibly moving and the pictures are just perfect. One of the truly amazing things about the song is that the man who commits this appalling act is not even named. And that is the way it should be in my opinion. Concentrating on the perpetrator rather than the victims is problematic, even in a drama.
BTW, Obama comes out of the song very, very well. I simply cannot conceive of Trump doing anything like that to try and bring people together rather than promote hate and discord.
For example, I see even the header seems to imply that Katie (the victim that we never see, apart from a brief CCTV shot) being described as a bully. That simply isn't the case. She didn't bully him, she rejected his advance when he went to her house. Only one example was cited of an Insta post where she called him an incel. This is not bullying, which requires serial events, it's simply being knocked back in the same way that teenagers always have in clumsy ways since the dawn of time.
One of the subtleties of Adolescence is how male dominance is part of the script, and deliberately so. So Jamie (the killer) perceives this single Insta post as "bullying", and "bullying" worthy of serious revenge, while the much more frequent bullying is from other boys to Jamie, or to the policemans son at the school, and goes without response at all. And no one at the school finds this remarkable.
We see this theme throughout, exposing the male gaze. So it's the dad who accompanies Jamie to the interview, it's the male detective that the witnesses address, with the female detective an afterthought and not introduced by name to many in the school, it's the male security guard who mansplains body language to the psychologist, it's the father that Jamie phones in episode 4, and ignores his mother and sister.
The script is very clever at tricking the audience into the male gaze and assumptions. This is probably too subtle for a school audience.
There are many interesting other aspects to it, particularly the female characters. It's the mother who tries to inform the police of Jamie's food intolerance (and gets ignored), it's Katie's best friend who gets punished and adultified in part 2, rather than psychological support, the female detective who picks up on the Manosphere link, and is ignored, only for the male detective to get the credit at the end of part 2. It's the female psychologist who gets to the heart of the motivation, indeed the confession by playing the vulnerable role, it's the sister and mother who have to tiptoe around the temper of the man in their life in part 4.
Go back 25 years and we get the opposite to Adolescence. Tom Cruise's bravura performance as Frank TJ Mackey in Magnolia. "Respect THE COCK". Weaponised misogyny for dollars, from a man who descends from a proto-Tate into a destroyed wreck weeping in rage at his dying father.
Seriously, what CCHQ twerp thought the best way for Kemi to attack Starmer's knee-jerking to Netflix was to brief that she was too busy to have watched it? That the best way to point to other, related problems was to go down the alt-right rabbit hole of wrong-race claims? It is as if the blue team is actively undermining their leader.
As a father, it was quite startling learning how children self segregate.
As an adult, I’ve seen many people who don’t seem to include members of the opposite sex in friendship groups. Some seem not to believe that a non-sexual relationship like that is possible.
Which is hilarious in a way - that’s Mike Pence grade behaviour.
There was a short-lived "Men's Lib" movement in the Seventies that recognised that sexism oppressed men as well as women, and that freeing men from the patriarchy was to their benefit. Sadly this passed and now that male discourse is dominated by reactionary misogynists like the Tates.
No one is truly free until we are all free.
Edited extra bit: that was a few years ago, not sure how much it's still a thing.
There's no way any MAGA supporting American could be confident that they would get a fair trial under her, and the whole thing just feeds the idea there is a "deep state" undermining the elected government.
You also had the White House yesterday saying that US immigration judges work for the DoJ and must rule in line with government policy. America might be irretrievably broken.
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-biggest-loser-in-wisconsin
What is the point in running all up elections to a council that is in the process of being abolished?
I work in a mostly female workplace, indeed am often the only male in a treatment session or a meeting. This is normal for me and I have never felt out of place or uncomfortable as a result. Male privilege, I suppose.
https://x.com/eastendjoe/status/1907204994883105028?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Has 'Vanilla have released an upgrade" joined "bus replacement service" as amongst the most dreaded words in English language?
https://x.com/PrivateEyeNews/status/1907329349067444659
You need an educated, informed, and engaged population for it to work. America seems to be none of these things.
After the Wisconsin result, have we passed peak Musk?
@ianboudreau.com
Anyway, one reason nobody in the Republican party dares cross him is because of the threat that he'll fund a primary opponent if you make him angry, and I imagine there are at least a few of them reevaluating how scary that actually is tonight
https://bsky.app/profile/ianboudreau.com/post/3llsd4tzzyk2q
There are some interesting stories about how they 'gamed' Canadian EV rebates:
"The Star reported earlier this month that Tesla filed an extraordinary number of EV rebate claims in the final days of the program in January, with a single Tesla dealership in Quebec City claiming nearly C$20 million in public subsidies by documenting more than 4,000 electric vehicle sales over a single weekend."
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/canada-freezes-rebate-payments-tesla-bans-it-future-rebate-programs-due-tariffs-2025-03-25/
That's a novel critique.
Richard and Marina delve into the murky world of LibGen, the Russian illegal archive that has ripped both host's [sic] back catalog [sic] of books and the possibility that Facebook has used it to train their AI chatbot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev4CX7Qjxy4
Boeing being Boeing
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/the-harrowing-story-of-what-flying-starliner-was-like-when-its-thrusters-failed
But that is not a good reason for it to be shown in schools. It is too subtle for that, and as you say, there is a risk that false narratives will dominate discussion.
Emilia Holliday who plays Katie, the victim, sings "Through the Eyes of a Child" in the closing sequence of episode 4. But not many people will pick that up. You need to be informed.
Badenoch did the same, spouting the false story on X to boot that tries to sideline the topic of misogyny to become Musks hobbyhorse of race.
I know its a comfort blanket for some who don't want to accept the numerous ways the Dems messed up but electoral spending really does follow the law of diminishing returns.
I had to stop three 4-year old boys picking on my 2-year old son at a kids birthday last Saturday because he was too little and they wanted him to "get out" of the trampoline, which he was very much enjoying. They'd even managed to rope a 3-year old girl to join their gang as well.
They listened and stopped straight away when I told them to be kind, but the Lord of the Flies instinct in there is strong.
Is there one basic obvious problem she has failed to recognise?
LOL.
Suck it up Musky!!
The idea that a man wasn’t chasing women all the time seemed… almost immoral to her.
The plot itself suggests that the girl’s behaviour was somehow responsible for Jamie’s behaviour...
I'm sorry, this is simply wrong - it does not - in fact, quite the reverse. This, combined with the provocative title of the header, undermines the rest of the argument. In general terms, I'd agree with most of the points made in the header, but not when it is linked to Adolescence, which is designed to challenge misogyny and its roots.
Hence political activists immediately run to a friendly federal judge when the other side is in power.
I don't know how they keep getting away with it. Presumably they are good at winning tenders and people just can't think of or find anyone else.
.
What we have failed to understand or teach or show is that we – especially men and boys but not just them – must know the extent of our strength and power, the limits of it, why we have to value and exercise self-restraint and self-control and why we have to think of the effect of our behaviour on others
But overlooks the fact that the overwhelming majority of people - women as well as men - behave in exactly these ways. This needs to be accounted for.
When Cycle free says "We have failed" I do not know who she includes, but tentatively I count Cyclefree out. And me.
See Crapita.
I recall near anguish (by some here) at my suggestion that instead of giving local monopolies to the big house builders, parcel it out to smaller companies - “but what about efficiency?” was the cry…
They had all the major Government contracts. The DHSS and other systems were built on ICL mainframes
When it was 'privatised' EDS won many of the initial contracts. Same people. Same jobs. Same hardware. Same code.
Then Fujitsu won the business from EDS. All the same people were TUPEd again
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tender_(charity)
"The TRUST Education Project aims to enable young men and young women to develop healthy relationships based on respect, trust and equality and to be active citizens in creating communities that do not tolerate domestic abuse and sexual violence. The objective of the project is to change attitudes of tolerance to violence by using drama to explore issues around healthy and unhealthy relationships. Young people create a piece of theatre that represents their understanding and outlook while also educating and informing their audience, peers and local communities. In a 10-week workshop process, students explore issues around respect within relationships, good citizenship and positive communication skills."
Second of course voyeurism and exposure both in person and online are illegal under both the Sexual Offences and Online Safety Acts.
Third programmes like Adolescence and the Post Office drama have started a conversation about the issues they address and should be shown in schools
For the record, I've not watched it and have no intention of watching it.
It's not got enough machine guns and helicopters in it for me.
Paradoxically his mausoleum (originally intended for his son) is one of the most beautiful buildings I have seen in my life - for its interior
Stunning
However she has a reasonable chance of being
Deputy PM or Foreign Secretary in a PM Farage led government
Now he is the Nazi that is stopping family welfare checks. Now his money is toxic.
The drama is a good drama. It is not an educational tool. And the reaction to it by politicians has been pathetic. Yes there is a serious issue about misogyny - but the underlying one is about how best to channel the energies and talents of boys is fruitful ways, for them and all of us. Misogyny is one aspect of this. But it is not the only one, which is why I referenced the killing of males by other males. The conversation needs to go wider.
I was also interested in why in all the discussion about it there was so little reference to the victim - which is itself a sign of misogyny - even though I quite understand why, from a dramatic perspective, the writers concentrated on the boy and his father. But what makes a good drama does not make for a thoughtful educational tool, which is the point I was trying to make.
And also that dramas can allow us to express outrage but effective action takes something more, something which is being ignored by the politicians in this soundbite era.
PS The Bates drama was very good at showing in a human way the reality of a very complex PO scandal. That is not at all easy and all credit to the writer. She also wrote a very good drama about a real life "honour" killing - Honour, which led to no political action or national conversation at all - Asian girls being at the bottom of everyone's concerns, shamefully.
https://x.com/WUTangKids/status/1907258703708864976
Indeed it was his gang of boys who bullied her by circulating the top less photos of her around the school on Instagram.
Jamie did not particularly like Katie. He was no moonstruck Romeo. He tried to exploit her vulnerability in order to feel a sense of male power.
Anyone buying into the idea that rejection is bullying is showing their true colours and should examine their own views
That so many people seem unable to understand what the show is about, even mature intelligent adults, shows how poorly suited to schools.
There are many other interesting aspects to the show, including understanding of criminal responsibility, worthy of discussion, but this is a discussion that needs small group discussion with good chairing, and probably at A level or above. It isn't for young teens.
🌳 CON 26% (+1)
➡️ REF UK 25% (+1)
🌹 LAB 21% (-3)
🔶 LIB DEM 13% (+1)
🌍 GREEN 7% (-3)
🟡 SNP 2% (-1)
N =2,081 | Dates: 28 - 31/3 | Change w 24/3
https://x.com/luketryl/status/1907323946090872979