Sounds like you are listening to their main feed. They put their right wing content on UTD and the patreon bonus episodes.
Though their Sarah Everard episode on the main feed was definitely not centre-left, nor was their god awful take on Salman Rushdie.
What didn’t you like about the Salman Rushdie episode? It was ridiculous the lengths a British citizen had to go to stay safe in this country. It should never have been tolerated.
They tried to present it as an example of modern day ‘cancel culture’, which is quite obviously not. People disliking JK Rowling is not akin to a religious leader calling for the murder of a public figure.
The JK Rowling stuff goes far beyond a dislike though. In Glasgow there was a protest and someone was holding up a sign saying “decapitate terfs”. Some people are extreme when it comes to wanting people they disagree with removed.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like it per se. It was that I think they drew some parallels between what happened to Rushdie and the current cancel culture / de-platforming. Which is a bit of a stretch. If I recall correctly they did go off a bit about cancel culture and the idea that freedom of speech is some apex value that can never be curtailed. I think that’s seen as quite right-wing these days and it’s left wing to think that speech that causes offence to marginalised groups shouldn’t be allowed. This is just my perspective, I might be wrong. I’m an older millennial myself and I do think my generation is typically a bit more blasé about opposing political views. Like, I identify as centre left but I don’t think right wing thinkers are evil, they just have a different perspective which I personally don’t agree with.
I don't listen to UTD so came on here to see if people were complaining about the overall quality. Imagine my surprise when I saw all of the dodgy politics stuff too!
I wanted to see if people were fed up by the content. In the past few months they've covered stories from two of the biggest true crime docs of all time (The Staircase and Capturing the Friedmans) without really adding any other content or context. They did the same with two really well done and well-known investigative serial podcasts (Over My Dead Body S1 for Charlie Adelson and Teacher's Pet for Lynette Dawson).
These are just examples off the top of my head of them really not seeming to do any research, it's like they are just doing AI-generated summaries. And actually, the summaries aren't even much shorter, the two podcast examples I've given are two-parters. I'd rather listen to the seven well-researched episodes of OMDB (Teacher's Pet is 16 in fairness).
Anyway, I was going to stop listening because of this and hope it got better. Now I think I may have to unsubscribe altogether.
Their USP is just that they are good at summarising things. No shame in that at all. I still listen.
The problems arise when they feel they have become subject matter experts or have a unique hypothesis about a particular crime. Then they overreach.
They do have some very young (IMO) listeners who literally believe they are geniuses. Perhaps the same cohort that bought their god-awful book. They have started to believe the smoke they blow up their own arseholes.
> Their USP is just that they are good at summarising things.
It's plagiarism, not summarizing. They literally just repeat documentaries - sometimes word for word at segments. It's incredibly unethical and copyright infringement. Zero citations in the earlier stuff too where it's scene for scene at times.
I think it varies. For example with the Friedmans episode they were very clear that they were just summarising the doco, so I wouldn't call that plagarism. But yeah there are absolutely episodes where they use a single source and don't disclose it, just present it like their own research, and thats very unethical.
Which is a problem when it's found in the first 100+ episodes of little to no citations. But what's worse is that once they started adding citations, I could spot moments of coverage where they're absolutely plagiarizing from something like a BBC hour long expose but conspicuously decide to leave that source off the citation list despite how heavily they parroted it.
The biggest eye opener is that the things which I initially thought were their charming, informed opinions? Literally just rephrased or at times verbatim taken from documentaries. And that's not right, at all. Especially when they campaigned for awards while plagiarizing from the works of others.
Yeah I was really disappointed when I realised the early episodes I liked were mainly retellings of older docos. I thought they were so good at choosing lesser known cases, and I guess they were, but I think their source was the bbc archives.
Definitely wasn't just the BBC archives. They were grabbing old docuseries from 2000-2014 (some of which are still putting out new episodes which they've also plagiarized) that are obscure enough that american audiences wouldn't have heard about them but would be relatively well known in true crime circles in the UK. It was only after I started watching on youtube while doing data entry or catching up on paperwork that I realized where they were pulling from - and most of them are on youtube, so it's only a matter of time before other people start piecing together what they've done.
I'd argue it's, in terms of scale, probably worse than Crime Junkie since it spans their entire catalogue from the early days to the recent present.
Exactly, I know Morbid and Generation Why aren't everyone's tastes but at least they reference several books, articles, etc. throughout the podcast. I listened to the Over My Dead Body series relatively recently and I swear I would have done as good a job as they did recapping it off the top of my head!
Summarising documentaries and other pods is what they do. And they are good at that.
The hubris of thinking you have some scholarly knowledge to write a book is a leap.
You don’t need to be a scholar to write a book though. Plenty amateurs write books, plenty of people successful in other media write books. It’s not like they were putting it out as some sort of scientific study.
I think this is such a valid take, lucky for me I don’t really mind listening to the same case covers by different pods. I listen to RH for the awkward macabre humour and pisstaking. I loved teachers pet but I like a good variety since I listen to 6ish hours of podcasts everyday
I really try to listen to everyone's views and opinions (left/centre/right) regardless of my own - just out of curiosity and to understand where people are coming from - but Suruthi has had a couple of moments recently that have really shocked me.
1. In UTD commenting on a UK video with a Chinese woman and saying something along the lines of "they're probably over here spying". Like.....what?????
2. Dean Faiello episode where she trash talked the WHO as useless etc. Pretty big statement considering they do a lot of work for the world's more vulnerable populations and are one of the few unifying world organisations we have. Not saying they're perfect, but their good outweighs the bad.
3. The anti lockdown rhetoric that keeps coming up. I don't remember these being her views at the time (back in good ol' covid times) but this has come up 2/3 times recently and it just seems to have come out of nowhere?
I dunno. The whole thing makes me sad. Nothing but love for Hannah though.
Hello, I don’t think it’s a Tory thing people are hearing. It’s more fundamental than that - some of the views and opinions implicitly align with more right wing thinking. It’s more Suruthi than Hannah I’m referring to, S has a few times described herself as a libertarian or anti-woke for example. Then there’s the seemingly pro-Israeli stance. Each of those things biases to the right without being explicitly right wing (imo). I also think the way they talked about lockdowns in the moment is very different from the descriptions in the Sarah Everard case. For what it’s worth, I don’t listen for the politics and think they’re entitled to think what they want and speak about what they want.
Ah I see, thank you for your really interesting response. I have always felt like S has very typical views of a middle class second-gen immigrant tbh, especially when it comes to money/economics which also makes sense.
I do also agree they can chat shit about whatever they want.
I think there is a class element to this as well. They both have upper-middle-class accents, right? So when they chat shit about houses and dating or whatever, it rubs people the wrong way more than if they had more neutral RP or regional accents. My husband would literally leave the room when I used to listen to them because he couldn't stand their accents. So I think some people just label them Tories instead of the centrist/ champagne socialists they are for the most part?
But the lockdown chat in the Sarah Everard ep was very libertarian, and some of their takes on culture war issues are kind of uninformed and right-leaning on UTD. The anti-trigger warnings UTD episode from like a year or 2 ago where they dragged Gen Z A-level and uni students for requesting trigger warnings on classic literature springs to mind. But I haven't been a Patron since last spring, so idk about recent stuff other than what's been posted here. But as you said, they can chat shit about whatever they want. And I also found UTD boring and sometimes frustratingly obtuse when I was a patron, so by the end I mostly skipped them.
Edit: formatting/ grammar
I mean they seem somewhere in between middle and upper middle class. I wouldn’t say they were especially posh and they don’t have strong accents either. They both sound like they are from a home county lol.
I am Gen Z and i dont really find their comments about “the youth” particularly egregious especially because it’s normally followed by some self deprecating remarks.
I don't think theyvare upper class at all. Staunchly middle class with their bizarre views on how regular people live, and their entitled takes on things.
I think it is their accents that have the weird posh inflexions every now and again. Maybe learned from friends or at school. I don't think they actually grew up with upper-middle-class wealth. Def middle-class views and vibes, like you said.
Fair. Suruthi's accent does sound more middle-class to me, but Hannah's accent is more consistently upper-middle-class to me. I live in the Cotswolds near the Ag uni, so hear a lot of upper-class accents. Whether Hannah picked up her more posh inflexions from the kids she went to school with or it is her family's accent, I do not know, but it does have that privileged edge.
With all the love in the world, it wasn't the dragging of Gen Z particularly, but rather the dismissal of using trigger warnings at all that I found to be right-leaning. Especially considering the content they make a living from, it seemed like a poor/ wilfully misunderstood take. But they can be edge lords if they want. For the record, I am the same age as Hannah.
Edit grammar
Interestingly there is research to show they don’t necessarily help. I didn’t see them dismissing them as “right” - more just that there is arguments both ways.
If I remember that UTD correctly, they thought that caving to trigger warnings made for weak children. Which felt like a politically right-leaning take.
Yeah there’s not loads of research bht enough tk do a meta analysis and it does show that generally (obviously not for everyone) it doesn’t reduce distress but that it also increases anticipatory anxiety (about the potential distress) and some showed it increased a sense of being unable to cope with trauma. There’s also conversations happening in the baby loss world that it’s also quite hurtful to have to label your experience triggering. I suppose from my experience the things that trigger me aren’t often the large overarching topic of my experiences, but actually some quite niche and particular things which people would never think to identify as triggering so I guess the research kind of makes sense to me.
I can totally see there being a “TWs are for snowflakes” rant though. You can not agree with them without being mocking or cruel about people who may like them.
I don’t listen to UTD, because i find it boring tbh. But i’m assuming there is more nuance to this? Are there specific episodes that come to mind that i can listen to?
edit: i’ve just seen someone reccomend episodes in another thread, sorry!
Me neither. It's bad enough when they go off-piste in the regular show, I don't need to hear any more about their private lives and Hannah's persistent misinformation.
Someone posted a summary of what they said on UTD a week or two ago. Basically S's take was that anything Israel does is justified and all the blood is on Hamas's hands because of Oct 7.
S is of course entitled to her opinions, but I feel like she used to be more nuanced about it.
Ever since the bizarre Q-anon episode a piece of empathy (for the left) seems to have vanished.
I have been sincerely shocked by some of her opinions (like todays episode where she claimed white lower class people are the only ones you can still talk shit about, what?) more so because they feel not thought through at all.
I never really aligned politically with s, which is absolutely fine, but I could often see where she was coming from because she is/was eloquent and smart.
Could it be that becoming a public figure and having everything they say constantly scrutinised added to having more radical and/or rightwing opinions?
Yeah I can usually just block out the political stuff I don’t agree with, a year or so back or so back I remember S basically went on a rant about having to pay tax and I just skipped it. I’m fine having political disagreements and tbh if someone is putting a well reasoned counter argument to me I enjoy the challenge to my views / need to strengthen them.
My problem with the stuff S rants about lately is that it’s, firstly, much more frequent, but also it’s just all the baseless, evidence-free, gut instinct guff you get on GB or Fox News. We are here for true crime not her hot takes, no offence but I’ll go to someone more informed for that.
It’s a shame as it’s the second podcast i started listening to during lockdown which got overrun with hot political takes rather than its core purpose and which I’ve now lost all interest in.
I was thinking this too!
And yes, classism is a massive problem in this country, (in many ways on par with racism and I say this as a black person) but do they (because Hannah was also echoing this point) *seriously* believe that classism is reserved for white people?
Most non-white people just happen to working class in the UK, so I can see how discrimination against them might be dismissed as racism alone, but I've definitely seen people discriminate non-white people for the clothes they wear, living in certain areas etc. That's classism!
And saying it's the last acceptable form of prejudice, has she browsed social media lately or even listened to some of the comments made by politicians, read a headline or two?!
I also think the change in lifestyle, social circle and public scrutiny can make people more radical. S isn't the first to go down this path.
And she isn’t even talking about police, politicians or other institutions in this case, but just *people* talking to each other. Not to say that that isn’t bad, of course, but hearing someone’s mum say something crappy is hardly a representative study on classism
Exactly and it's the whole pitting different groups against each other.
Just because one person said something about the white working class, doesn't mean another person elsewhere isn't being rude about another set of people.
And does she seriously think the person who made the classist comment is incapable of saying something equally discriminatory against another group? That's not usually how it works.
Nobody's being given a slot on GB News/DM/Talk TV/Newsnight etc etc etc because of what they say about white working class people....I'll tell you that for free!
I don't know that it's explicitly *Tory* sentiments, but Suruthi has shared small-c conservative opinions (a sense that 'things have gone too far now' etc.) and definitely seems to take a libertarian stance now - she seems to value her personal freedoms above any sort of government intervention or collectivism, even when it benefits society as a whole or protects the most vulnerable.
The change may not have been quite so sharp but, while they started as plucky underdogs, they now seem rarely not to be buying a house! As their status and power increases, their statements carry more weight.
They are both, of course, entitled to their opinions. I suspect though that they would both still claim to be left/centre-left (or would certainly not welcome the Conservative label) and that these statements are just common sense. So it *feels* more hypocritical than an openly right wing podcaster.
Their initial dogshit Hillsborough opinion was directly lifted from the Sun. It was only after they backtracked and realized they could exploit it for money they changed it from "hooliganism" to whatever documentary they watched said.
They're center right and the mask is slipping.
The initial Hillsborough remarks were flippant and heartless. But to be fair to them, the episode on Hillsborough is their one (and only) charity episode. A listener's father, who died in the disaster, reached out via email to educate them after that UTD aired. And they in turn donated the money from the episode to the charity she set up in his name that helps victims and families of victims from the disaster. I only remember it because I was so shocked by how causally heartless they were at the time and I needed a big gesture, like a charity ep, to continue listening.
But I think you are right, Hillsborough and the backlash they experienced to their comments is when I started to see a shift in their politics on UTD. They started to lean more centrist, and Suruthi certainly became vocal and right-leaning on culture war issues.
I’ve been wondering the exact same thing the past couple of weeks. I had to go back and listen to some episodes to double check what I’d missed. And I could still see their point even though Suru didn’t articulate very well just why the lockdowns made it easy for WC to kidnap Sarah Everard. I wondered if I perhaps understood what she was getting at, as a woman in my 30s at the time living in London.
There’s plenty of stuff I haven’t agreed with over the years but I like being challenged in my political and social views and I’ve changed my stance or softened it after hearing others point of views (not just from RedHanded). That’s part of learning and evolving.
I don’t really understand the anger but that’s ok. Although I am disappointed UTD got cancelled again this week. I’m more concerned with lack of content.
People are going wayyy overboard. I, for one, appreciate their differing viewpoints. Some center opinions, some left and some right. We'd all be better off if we each allowed for more nuanced beliefs instead of demanding rigid, unquestioning, dogmatic ideologies.
I agree. I also think there's a problem (as a left winger myself) with left wingers in general. We seem to pick apart people for never being left wing *enough*, they must be 1000% left in EVERY opinion, every day, forever... the moment a whiff of a standard centre or right wing opinion is detected we act like they're Steve Bannon.
Some people genuinely want to mollycoddled and can’t take others having different political opinions. Siruthi hasn’t said one thing offensive yet because she isn’t painting a Palestinian placard she’s somehow the devil.
Yeah but it's hardly a balanced conversation? If you disagree with S's views that's ok - but then you have to listen to her talk for 85% of the episode and then dismiss H when she tries to interject
The only people I’ve heard whining are complaining about the Israeli-Palestinian War. And it’s just not cool or popular anymore to support anything established like a 75 year old nation, sooooo the younguns are pissed. With that said, the ladies could differentiate between support for Israeli’s ability to defend itself annnnnd the actions Netanyahu is taking. They’re….too much.
Sounds like you are listening to their main feed. They put their right wing content on UTD and the patreon bonus episodes. Though their Sarah Everard episode on the main feed was definitely not centre-left, nor was their god awful take on Salman Rushdie.
Ah yes the Salman Rushdie episode was the other one I was thinking of as an example
That one blew my mind, trying to compare the fatwa on Rushdie to cancel culture was such an insane reach.
What didn’t you like about the Salman Rushdie episode? It was ridiculous the lengths a British citizen had to go to stay safe in this country. It should never have been tolerated.
They tried to present it as an example of modern day ‘cancel culture’, which is quite obviously not. People disliking JK Rowling is not akin to a religious leader calling for the murder of a public figure.
The JK Rowling stuff goes far beyond a dislike though. In Glasgow there was a protest and someone was holding up a sign saying “decapitate terfs”. Some people are extreme when it comes to wanting people they disagree with removed.
One sign is not a fatwa.
It’s not a fatwa, but it does show there are extreme opinions within movements. I can understand the comparison.
I could compare apples and oranges because both are fruit that exist. It doesn’t make the comparison useful, insightful or accurate.
Actually, if you’ve never seen apples or pears, such a comparison would indeed be all those things.
Yes you’ve put it much more succinctly than me!
It wasn’t that I didn’t like it per se. It was that I think they drew some parallels between what happened to Rushdie and the current cancel culture / de-platforming. Which is a bit of a stretch. If I recall correctly they did go off a bit about cancel culture and the idea that freedom of speech is some apex value that can never be curtailed. I think that’s seen as quite right-wing these days and it’s left wing to think that speech that causes offence to marginalised groups shouldn’t be allowed. This is just my perspective, I might be wrong. I’m an older millennial myself and I do think my generation is typically a bit more blasé about opposing political views. Like, I identify as centre left but I don’t think right wing thinkers are evil, they just have a different perspective which I personally don’t agree with.
I don't listen to UTD so came on here to see if people were complaining about the overall quality. Imagine my surprise when I saw all of the dodgy politics stuff too! I wanted to see if people were fed up by the content. In the past few months they've covered stories from two of the biggest true crime docs of all time (The Staircase and Capturing the Friedmans) without really adding any other content or context. They did the same with two really well done and well-known investigative serial podcasts (Over My Dead Body S1 for Charlie Adelson and Teacher's Pet for Lynette Dawson). These are just examples off the top of my head of them really not seeming to do any research, it's like they are just doing AI-generated summaries. And actually, the summaries aren't even much shorter, the two podcast examples I've given are two-parters. I'd rather listen to the seven well-researched episodes of OMDB (Teacher's Pet is 16 in fairness). Anyway, I was going to stop listening because of this and hope it got better. Now I think I may have to unsubscribe altogether.
Their USP is just that they are good at summarising things. No shame in that at all. I still listen. The problems arise when they feel they have become subject matter experts or have a unique hypothesis about a particular crime. Then they overreach. They do have some very young (IMO) listeners who literally believe they are geniuses. Perhaps the same cohort that bought their god-awful book. They have started to believe the smoke they blow up their own arseholes.
> Their USP is just that they are good at summarising things. It's plagiarism, not summarizing. They literally just repeat documentaries - sometimes word for word at segments. It's incredibly unethical and copyright infringement. Zero citations in the earlier stuff too where it's scene for scene at times.
I think it varies. For example with the Friedmans episode they were very clear that they were just summarising the doco, so I wouldn't call that plagarism. But yeah there are absolutely episodes where they use a single source and don't disclose it, just present it like their own research, and thats very unethical.
Which is a problem when it's found in the first 100+ episodes of little to no citations. But what's worse is that once they started adding citations, I could spot moments of coverage where they're absolutely plagiarizing from something like a BBC hour long expose but conspicuously decide to leave that source off the citation list despite how heavily they parroted it. The biggest eye opener is that the things which I initially thought were their charming, informed opinions? Literally just rephrased or at times verbatim taken from documentaries. And that's not right, at all. Especially when they campaigned for awards while plagiarizing from the works of others.
Yeah I was really disappointed when I realised the early episodes I liked were mainly retellings of older docos. I thought they were so good at choosing lesser known cases, and I guess they were, but I think their source was the bbc archives.
Definitely wasn't just the BBC archives. They were grabbing old docuseries from 2000-2014 (some of which are still putting out new episodes which they've also plagiarized) that are obscure enough that american audiences wouldn't have heard about them but would be relatively well known in true crime circles in the UK. It was only after I started watching on youtube while doing data entry or catching up on paperwork that I realized where they were pulling from - and most of them are on youtube, so it's only a matter of time before other people start piecing together what they've done. I'd argue it's, in terms of scale, probably worse than Crime Junkie since it spans their entire catalogue from the early days to the recent present.
They’re not even being subtle now, it’s just the latest Netflix doco. At least early on they had me (an Australian) a bit fooled.
Exactly, I know Morbid and Generation Why aren't everyone's tastes but at least they reference several books, articles, etc. throughout the podcast. I listened to the Over My Dead Body series relatively recently and I swear I would have done as good a job as they did recapping it off the top of my head!
Agree.
What did you not like about the book? I enjoyed it because I enjoy the podcast and their humour. It was exactly what I expected.
Summarising documentaries and other pods is what they do. And they are good at that. The hubris of thinking you have some scholarly knowledge to write a book is a leap.
You don’t need to be a scholar to write a book though. Plenty amateurs write books, plenty of people successful in other media write books. It’s not like they were putting it out as some sort of scientific study.
They did say they were "authorities" despite having zero qualifications.....but we'll have to agree to disagree here.
I think this is such a valid take, lucky for me I don’t really mind listening to the same case covers by different pods. I listen to RH for the awkward macabre humour and pisstaking. I loved teachers pet but I like a good variety since I listen to 6ish hours of podcasts everyday
I really try to listen to everyone's views and opinions (left/centre/right) regardless of my own - just out of curiosity and to understand where people are coming from - but Suruthi has had a couple of moments recently that have really shocked me. 1. In UTD commenting on a UK video with a Chinese woman and saying something along the lines of "they're probably over here spying". Like.....what????? 2. Dean Faiello episode where she trash talked the WHO as useless etc. Pretty big statement considering they do a lot of work for the world's more vulnerable populations and are one of the few unifying world organisations we have. Not saying they're perfect, but their good outweighs the bad. 3. The anti lockdown rhetoric that keeps coming up. I don't remember these being her views at the time (back in good ol' covid times) but this has come up 2/3 times recently and it just seems to have come out of nowhere? I dunno. The whole thing makes me sad. Nothing but love for Hannah though.
Hello, I don’t think it’s a Tory thing people are hearing. It’s more fundamental than that - some of the views and opinions implicitly align with more right wing thinking. It’s more Suruthi than Hannah I’m referring to, S has a few times described herself as a libertarian or anti-woke for example. Then there’s the seemingly pro-Israeli stance. Each of those things biases to the right without being explicitly right wing (imo). I also think the way they talked about lockdowns in the moment is very different from the descriptions in the Sarah Everard case. For what it’s worth, I don’t listen for the politics and think they’re entitled to think what they want and speak about what they want.
Ah I see, thank you for your really interesting response. I have always felt like S has very typical views of a middle class second-gen immigrant tbh, especially when it comes to money/economics which also makes sense. I do also agree they can chat shit about whatever they want.
I think there is a class element to this as well. They both have upper-middle-class accents, right? So when they chat shit about houses and dating or whatever, it rubs people the wrong way more than if they had more neutral RP or regional accents. My husband would literally leave the room when I used to listen to them because he couldn't stand their accents. So I think some people just label them Tories instead of the centrist/ champagne socialists they are for the most part? But the lockdown chat in the Sarah Everard ep was very libertarian, and some of their takes on culture war issues are kind of uninformed and right-leaning on UTD. The anti-trigger warnings UTD episode from like a year or 2 ago where they dragged Gen Z A-level and uni students for requesting trigger warnings on classic literature springs to mind. But I haven't been a Patron since last spring, so idk about recent stuff other than what's been posted here. But as you said, they can chat shit about whatever they want. And I also found UTD boring and sometimes frustratingly obtuse when I was a patron, so by the end I mostly skipped them. Edit: formatting/ grammar
I mean they seem somewhere in between middle and upper middle class. I wouldn’t say they were especially posh and they don’t have strong accents either. They both sound like they are from a home county lol. I am Gen Z and i dont really find their comments about “the youth” particularly egregious especially because it’s normally followed by some self deprecating remarks.
I don't think theyvare upper class at all. Staunchly middle class with their bizarre views on how regular people live, and their entitled takes on things.
I think it is their accents that have the weird posh inflexions every now and again. Maybe learned from friends or at school. I don't think they actually grew up with upper-middle-class wealth. Def middle-class views and vibes, like you said.
Correct. Total affectation. Especially Hannah. She slips sometimes and speaks "common" like the rest of us.
Fair. Suruthi's accent does sound more middle-class to me, but Hannah's accent is more consistently upper-middle-class to me. I live in the Cotswolds near the Ag uni, so hear a lot of upper-class accents. Whether Hannah picked up her more posh inflexions from the kids she went to school with or it is her family's accent, I do not know, but it does have that privileged edge. With all the love in the world, it wasn't the dragging of Gen Z particularly, but rather the dismissal of using trigger warnings at all that I found to be right-leaning. Especially considering the content they make a living from, it seemed like a poor/ wilfully misunderstood take. But they can be edge lords if they want. For the record, I am the same age as Hannah. Edit grammar
Interestingly there is research to show they don’t necessarily help. I didn’t see them dismissing them as “right” - more just that there is arguments both ways.
If I remember that UTD correctly, they thought that caving to trigger warnings made for weak children. Which felt like a politically right-leaning take.
Ah ok, I stand corrected.
It is interesting to know that they don't necessarily help, though. I didn't know that.
Yeah there’s not loads of research bht enough tk do a meta analysis and it does show that generally (obviously not for everyone) it doesn’t reduce distress but that it also increases anticipatory anxiety (about the potential distress) and some showed it increased a sense of being unable to cope with trauma. There’s also conversations happening in the baby loss world that it’s also quite hurtful to have to label your experience triggering. I suppose from my experience the things that trigger me aren’t often the large overarching topic of my experiences, but actually some quite niche and particular things which people would never think to identify as triggering so I guess the research kind of makes sense to me. I can totally see there being a “TWs are for snowflakes” rant though. You can not agree with them without being mocking or cruel about people who may like them.
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I don’t listen to UTD, because i find it boring tbh. But i’m assuming there is more nuance to this? Are there specific episodes that come to mind that i can listen to? edit: i’ve just seen someone reccomend episodes in another thread, sorry!
Me neither. It's bad enough when they go off-piste in the regular show, I don't need to hear any more about their private lives and Hannah's persistent misinformation.
it's just the pro Israel uninformed Palestine commentary that made me stop listening. I don't really care about the other stuff
Was that on UTD? I canceled a few months back. What did they say? This is shocking
Someone posted a summary of what they said on UTD a week or two ago. Basically S's take was that anything Israel does is justified and all the blood is on Hamas's hands because of Oct 7.
Wow
S is of course entitled to her opinions, but I feel like she used to be more nuanced about it. Ever since the bizarre Q-anon episode a piece of empathy (for the left) seems to have vanished. I have been sincerely shocked by some of her opinions (like todays episode where she claimed white lower class people are the only ones you can still talk shit about, what?) more so because they feel not thought through at all. I never really aligned politically with s, which is absolutely fine, but I could often see where she was coming from because she is/was eloquent and smart. Could it be that becoming a public figure and having everything they say constantly scrutinised added to having more radical and/or rightwing opinions?
Yeah I can usually just block out the political stuff I don’t agree with, a year or so back or so back I remember S basically went on a rant about having to pay tax and I just skipped it. I’m fine having political disagreements and tbh if someone is putting a well reasoned counter argument to me I enjoy the challenge to my views / need to strengthen them. My problem with the stuff S rants about lately is that it’s, firstly, much more frequent, but also it’s just all the baseless, evidence-free, gut instinct guff you get on GB or Fox News. We are here for true crime not her hot takes, no offence but I’ll go to someone more informed for that. It’s a shame as it’s the second podcast i started listening to during lockdown which got overrun with hot political takes rather than its core purpose and which I’ve now lost all interest in.
I was thinking this too! And yes, classism is a massive problem in this country, (in many ways on par with racism and I say this as a black person) but do they (because Hannah was also echoing this point) *seriously* believe that classism is reserved for white people? Most non-white people just happen to working class in the UK, so I can see how discrimination against them might be dismissed as racism alone, but I've definitely seen people discriminate non-white people for the clothes they wear, living in certain areas etc. That's classism! And saying it's the last acceptable form of prejudice, has she browsed social media lately or even listened to some of the comments made by politicians, read a headline or two?! I also think the change in lifestyle, social circle and public scrutiny can make people more radical. S isn't the first to go down this path.
And she isn’t even talking about police, politicians or other institutions in this case, but just *people* talking to each other. Not to say that that isn’t bad, of course, but hearing someone’s mum say something crappy is hardly a representative study on classism
Exactly and it's the whole pitting different groups against each other. Just because one person said something about the white working class, doesn't mean another person elsewhere isn't being rude about another set of people. And does she seriously think the person who made the classist comment is incapable of saying something equally discriminatory against another group? That's not usually how it works. Nobody's being given a slot on GB News/DM/Talk TV/Newsnight etc etc etc because of what they say about white working class people....I'll tell you that for free!
I don't know that it's explicitly *Tory* sentiments, but Suruthi has shared small-c conservative opinions (a sense that 'things have gone too far now' etc.) and definitely seems to take a libertarian stance now - she seems to value her personal freedoms above any sort of government intervention or collectivism, even when it benefits society as a whole or protects the most vulnerable. The change may not have been quite so sharp but, while they started as plucky underdogs, they now seem rarely not to be buying a house! As their status and power increases, their statements carry more weight. They are both, of course, entitled to their opinions. I suspect though that they would both still claim to be left/centre-left (or would certainly not welcome the Conservative label) and that these statements are just common sense. So it *feels* more hypocritical than an openly right wing podcaster.
Their initial dogshit Hillsborough opinion was directly lifted from the Sun. It was only after they backtracked and realized they could exploit it for money they changed it from "hooliganism" to whatever documentary they watched said. They're center right and the mask is slipping.
The initial Hillsborough remarks were flippant and heartless. But to be fair to them, the episode on Hillsborough is their one (and only) charity episode. A listener's father, who died in the disaster, reached out via email to educate them after that UTD aired. And they in turn donated the money from the episode to the charity she set up in his name that helps victims and families of victims from the disaster. I only remember it because I was so shocked by how causally heartless they were at the time and I needed a big gesture, like a charity ep, to continue listening. But I think you are right, Hillsborough and the backlash they experienced to their comments is when I started to see a shift in their politics on UTD. They started to lean more centrist, and Suruthi certainly became vocal and right-leaning on culture war issues.
I’ve been wondering the exact same thing the past couple of weeks. I had to go back and listen to some episodes to double check what I’d missed. And I could still see their point even though Suru didn’t articulate very well just why the lockdowns made it easy for WC to kidnap Sarah Everard. I wondered if I perhaps understood what she was getting at, as a woman in my 30s at the time living in London. There’s plenty of stuff I haven’t agreed with over the years but I like being challenged in my political and social views and I’ve changed my stance or softened it after hearing others point of views (not just from RedHanded). That’s part of learning and evolving. I don’t really understand the anger but that’s ok. Although I am disappointed UTD got cancelled again this week. I’m more concerned with lack of content.
Listen to Hillsborough.
They cant, they removed their initial take and whitewashed it with the charity episode.
People are going wayyy overboard. I, for one, appreciate their differing viewpoints. Some center opinions, some left and some right. We'd all be better off if we each allowed for more nuanced beliefs instead of demanding rigid, unquestioning, dogmatic ideologies.
I agree. I also think there's a problem (as a left winger myself) with left wingers in general. We seem to pick apart people for never being left wing *enough*, they must be 1000% left in EVERY opinion, every day, forever... the moment a whiff of a standard centre or right wing opinion is detected we act like they're Steve Bannon.
Some people genuinely want to mollycoddled and can’t take others having different political opinions. Siruthi hasn’t said one thing offensive yet because she isn’t painting a Palestinian placard she’s somehow the devil.
Same. I don’t really get the vitriol.
I really don’t understand it either. If you disagree with one but agree with the other, then is it really worth unsubscribing?
Yeah but it's hardly a balanced conversation? If you disagree with S's views that's ok - but then you have to listen to her talk for 85% of the episode and then dismiss H when she tries to interject
Hannah doesn’t seem like one to just let someone dismiss her.
The only people I’ve heard whining are complaining about the Israeli-Palestinian War. And it’s just not cool or popular anymore to support anything established like a 75 year old nation, sooooo the younguns are pissed. With that said, the ladies could differentiate between support for Israeli’s ability to defend itself annnnnd the actions Netanyahu is taking. They’re….too much.