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The Schmooze

Ayelet Waldman Takes On ‘Those Scumbag Kardashian Pigs’

Ayelet Waldman is on the rampage.

The writer took to Twitter and Facebook yesterday in a rant against “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood,” the cartoon game app put out by — you guessed it — Kim Kardashian. According to Waldman, the app bypassed parental controls on her computer, allowing her 11-year-old to lose $120 trying to keep up with the Kardashians.

Waldman, who is married to fellow author Michael Chabon, had some choice words for the alliteration-friendly family:

Let’s take a step back here. Is it really Kim Kardashian’s fault that Waldman’s 11-year-old son has access to A) credit card information and B) an unsupervised computer? Kim has created a game — ie. a commercial enterprise. People pay money to play. 11-year-olds make bad decisions. It’s usually the parent’s responsibility to prevent those poor judgment calls, no?

As Leah Finnegan at Gawker eloquently put it:

Hmmm. Who is really at fault here? The “vile scumbag Kardashian pigs and their app designers” for creating a fun game? Waldman’s poor, weeping son who evidently does not understand the value of a dollar? The mysterious person who linked her son’s Apple account to a credit card?

In Waldman’s defense, she does make clear that parental controls were in place on the computer used by her son (also, who knew that Michael Chabon was some sort of tech wiz?)

Waldman later posted that Apple had agreed to refund all the unauthorized purchases, but that she was deleting her credit card information from her son’s account, just in case. Probably a wise choice — an equally good option would be teaching her son about when to use a credit card.

At least there’s a silver lining: one less fan for the Kardashians:

Waldman made waves only a few days ago on “Oprah: Where Are They Now” when she stood by an essay she wrote almost a decade ago claiming that she loved her husband more than her children.

“If you focus all of your emotional passion on your children and you neglect the relationship that brought that family into existence… eventually, things can go really, really wrong,” she said on August 1.

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