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Oct. 26, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
41:53
This Week in Stupid (26⧸10⧸2014)
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Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 26th of October 2014.
This is brought to you by the anti-Gamergate press, who have fully embraced the hashtag Full Macintosh whether they like it or not, because this week we've witnessed the complete intellectual meltdown of the social justice warriors, as they begin claiming black is white, up is down, and that they never actually tried to declare gamers over, because these people are apparently completely delusional.
Also, I managed to get Pixie Jenny to call me a fuck.
I guess I win this round, Jenny.
And back to you for popular demand is Jessica Valenti.
Gamergate is loud, dangerous, and a last grasp at cultural dominance by angry white men.
Jessica, baby, thanks for confirming to everyone that this is a culture war.
Because the outrage isn't about ethics, or even really gaming.
It's not about ethics or gaming.
It's not.
Gamergate isn't about gaming whatsoever.
Jesus Valenti.
It's about harassing women to protest the movement for female equality.
Jessica, darling, I feel that you're overreaching somewhat here.
As the cultural relevance of angry white men on the internet withers away and ends, their last words, muttered angrily at an empty room, will surely be, GamerGate!
Jessica, I think it's a testament to our undying love that you can put aside your intense man-hatred for the sake of our relationship.
The recent uproar, said to be over ethics and journalism, don't worry Jessica, we all know that it's actually focused mostly on targeting outspoken women who aren't journalists at all.
Which makes me question why you're talking about these women and not the ethics and journalism, but it's okay.
It's the last desperate grasp of misogynists facing an unwelcome future.
Presumably gas chambers, I don't know.
I'm not part of the feminist Gestapo, so I have no idea.
But this particular bitter end, while long overdue, is loud, angry, and extremely dangerous.
She says, quoting Goebbels.
It's tempting to believe that this online row, a toxic combination of misinformation, anger, and anxious masculinity.
I can't see why men would be so anxious.
It's not like there are people actively attacking them in the press or anything.
It's just about one specific technology industry subculture, or that it will blow over.
But by labelling Gamergate a gaming problem and attaching a hashtag to it, we're putting unnecessary boundaries on a broader but nebulous issue.
Darling, I'll stop you there because I don't think you're the one who gets to choose this.
You don't actually get to decide who can tweet under the hashtag Gamergate.
The people who use the hashtag Gamergate are the ones who decide that.
You didn't put anything on it.
You don't have the power to.
But the issue is threats, harassment, and increasingly how straight white men deal with a world that no longer revolves exclusively around them.
No, no, but that bit's true, because I mean, all straight white men do harass and threaten on the internet, which is why actually we're sending them to the death camps.
I personally am what is known as a male feminist, so I'll be guarding these death camps with rifles and hoping that the feminists spare me for breeding purposes.
When I spoke to her by phone in San Francisco, what a fucking surprise, on Sunday night, Sarkisian said that Gamergate is absolutely an issue that goes beyond gaming.
And she's right, it does.
There is a larger cultural war that seems to be coming from San Francisco against the rest of the world.
The harassment is becoming more intense towards women and other marginalised communities, and it seems to be happening to more women in male-dominated fields, to the women who speak out or make critiques.
She sounds like a politician, doesn't she?
What has she actually said there?
Sarkeesian told me that the backlash in gaming, hardly a new problem, no, they're always a Jack Thompson or two somewhere, it's just the difference between the old Jack Thompson was attacking games, the new Jack Thompson is attacking people.
But anyway, it's gotten more vicious as the conversations about women's representations in games and their role in the industry have gained steam.
This reaction, mostly from male gamers, is to protect the status quo.
Yeah, that awful status quo that gave Anita Sarkeesian a voice in video games.
It really does actually need to be changed because these people need to be cut the fuck out of the game industry, like the malignant cancer that they are.
The same is true more broadly, and always has been, when it comes to women's progress.
The more ground we gain, the worse men react.
I can hardly imagine why.
I just can't imagine why they would.
Why would they think that there is a problem with feminism?
Why would Emma Watson be standing in front of the UN saying feminism is so often conflated with man-hatred?
That's why right now is such a dangerous time for women.
Yeah, so dangerous that they're regularly blogging and writing in all kinds of newspapers.
They're all over the TV.
They've got all these support groups.
They've got proactive cancer fundraising awareness campaigns.
They've got all these sort of quotas and they've got advocacy groups at the wazoo.
But it's a really dangerous time for women.
Because we're in the midst of an unprecedented feminist movement that not all men are pleased about.
Not many people are pleased about, I would say.
But sexual consent is radically reframed, but feminists are accused of trying to classify all men as rapists.
No!
Someone would say that about feminists.
Oh well, I never.
I'm blown away.
Television and movies created by women are at an all-time high, although still nowhere near parity, but they're derided as peak vagina.
And while institutional cover-ups of violence against women, be it rape on colleges' campuses, domestic violence in the National Football League or international media at large, are no longer publicly tolerated, yeah, unlike 50 years ago where they were like, just slap a bitch, just psh, if you want, wherever you fancy it, it's up to you, women are public property.
I think it was Matt Binder who called them chattel, wasn't it?
But women are still being blamed for their own assaults.
I mean, you know, when they got drunk and consensually had sex on a college campus, then woke up the next day and felt like a slut, it's definitely someone else's fault that that happened.
The patriarchy must be held accountable.
When I wrote about online misogyny for The Guardian in 2007, Jesus, Jessica, how long have you been doing this for?
Is there any- do you have any other life skills?
I mean, when feminism has won, what do you then do?
I spoke to then post-graduate student Alice Marwick, as Marwick, now a professor at Fordham University in New York, and author of Status Update, Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age.
Brilliant, she's just going to be a feminist propagandist, isn't she?
At university.
What a surprise.
What a fucking surprise.
Academia is fucked.
Don't tell me that there's no fucking social Marxism in academia.
Said then, the promise of the early internet was that it would liberate us from our bodies and the oppression associated with prejudice.
We'd communicate soul to soul and get to know each other as people, rather than judging each other based on gender or race.
Wow.
I can't believe you people would think that it's wrong to judge people by gender or race because you do it so fucking frequently.
It seems to be some kind of pathological compulsion for you people.
But go on, what really happened?
Apparently, it's that people's default online identity was always presumed to be white and male, and anyone who complained about racism or sexism, or even brought up their race or gender, was seen as disturbing that supposedly identity-free utopia.
Because white male isn't an identity, right?
What are you talking about?
I just...
I don't even...
When I'm dealing with someone online, I don't automatically assume they're white and male.
I just assume they're a person.
But Jessica, darling.
I think we need to talk.
I think you've got some kind of addiction.
An addiction maybe to straight white men.
And I'm not surprised given our relationship, but I think it's getting a bit unhealthy.
And I think that maybe you could do with a holiday somewhere, a nice spa resort or something, just to get thoughts of straight white men out of your loins.
I mean, mind.
Thankfully, though, Branco Marcetic is here to tell us what Gamergate is really about.
Why it's really about terrorism.
And why Bill Mahas should be vilifying the gaming community too.
It's time to face up to a persistent double standard on what constitutes a terrorist act.
Fucking hell.
Full Macintosh ahead, sir.
There are many reasons to stand appalled at the headlines that have currently rocked the video game world.
And I would have thought that calling gamers terrorists would have been one of those reasons.
But it's seen a feminist cultural critic, Anita Sarkeesian, cancel a speaking event at Utah University due to a threat made on her life.
That the police then went on to say was not credible.
From the exposure of the long-festering misogynistic undercurrent in gamer culture to further proof, if any, was needed of the way that online anonymity tends to divorce people from any semblance of basic decency.
Yeah, they assume they're all straight white men.
The issues revealed by this and other recent video game controversies have been ugly to say the least.
Well, that's all quite true.
Less discussed, although just as interesting, is what the incident tells us about the meaning of terrorism in the post-9-11 world.
Okay, it's less discussed because it's actually really not connected to terrorism, which is why you were the only person discussing it.
But anyway, yeah, what does this incident tell us about the meaning of terrorism in the post-9-11 world and the hierarchy of violence that Western society has created in the wake of those attacks?
He goes on to describe Anita Sarkeesian's opinion about gaming and then says, unfortunately, the videos have received an angry pushback from outraged fans.
What, we've just assumed that they're terrorists?
Sarkeesian received a deluge of misogynistic and racist comments and emails, and in March, an anonymous individual threatened to bomb the Game Developers Choice Awards if an award Sarkeesian was due to receive was not rescinded.
You know what?
They say that, but they didn't mention it six months ago.
I can't imagine why.
Later on, in late August, another anonymous individual sent Sarkeesian a series of graphic death threats that listed her parents' home addresses, forcing her to leave her home.
All of which the police have called not credible, and none of which have been in any way connected to Gamergate.
But this hasn't stopped ISIS from coming out in favour of the anti-Gamergate crowd by supporting their hashtag stopGamergate2014.
That's right, Gamergate is not the true caliphate.
Islamic State is the true caliphate.
Hashtag stopGamergate2014.
Seriously, I'm not even joking.
They actually rented the same bots that ISIS rent to push Stop Gamergate 2014.
And this appears to have caused ISIS to come out and actively side with the social justice warriors against Gamergate.
The anti-Gamergate people always mock Gamergate for having right-wing publication Breitbart on its side.
But I would personally rather have Breitbart on my side than Isis.
But that's probably because I'm a Gamergate fascist, according to Gorka.
Alright, Max Reid, let's see how stupid this gets.
On October the 1st, the computing giant Intel pulled its ads from Gamasutra, a trade website for game developers over an essay called Gamers Don't Have to Be Your Audience, Gamers Are Over, by a journalist named Leia Alexander.
I don't really think you can call her a journalist.
I think you can call her an actress because that's what she has her degree in.
I think you can call her a blogger because that's what she does every day, but I don't think you can call her a journalist, Gorka.
But I'm the dishonest fascist, am I?
Hmm.
Intel has been successfully harassed by a small, contemptible crusade called Gamergate that's kicking your ass to the point where you are calling us the dishonest fascists.
It's a campaign of dedicated anti-feminist internet trolls using an ill-informed mob of alienated and resentful video game-playing teenagers and young men to harass and intimidate female activists, journalists and critics.
If feminism wasn't causing this, feminism wouldn't be involved in this.
This has been triggered by journalistic corruption and it is still about journalistic corruption.
But the problem is the culture, this weird, hyper-feminist sort of San Francisco culture is insanely corrupt.
And feminism seems to be the root of it.
Don't you see this, Matt, from Gorka?
Unable to run Alexander out of game writing, I quote Leia Alexander at her XOXOFest.
I declared gamers are over and I still have a job.
Yeah, I find it incredible too.
Max harps on as usual about three women who aren't anything to do with journalism and then goes on to say that Gamergate went after Leia Alexander's publisher and in an unbelievable and embarrassing act of ignorance and cowardice, Intel capitulated.
Jesus Christ, Max, I think this is going to come back to haunt you.
The company's laughable apology, released late that Friday afternoon, didn't cover up the fact of Gamergate's victory.
Intel was not replacing its ads.
Because Intel is not staffed by fucking morons who support the publications that actively attack their fucking audiences.
Failing to adequately cover this act of spinelessness was the first big fuck-up Weird Gorka committed.
I don't know if that was the first one, but you guys at Gorka do commit a lot of big fuck-ups.
Intel surrendered to the worst kind of dishonesty coming from Gorka.
And we allowed it to do so without ever calling it out.
So let's say it now, drumroll.
Intel is run by craven idiots.
It employs pusillanimous morons.
It lacks integrity.
Coming from Gorka!
Jesus Christ!
It folded to misogynists and bigots!
Just my God!
Who objected to a woman who had done nothing more than write a piece claiming a place in the world of video games?
Except, it's all about corruption!
No one cares about Sarkeesian, Wu or Quinn.
And even when confronted with its own thoughtlessness and irresponsibility, it could not properly right its wrongs.
Well, bravo, Matt.
Bravo.
The next big fuck-up was a Gorka writer tweeting, bring back bullying.
He, and later I, made the tactical mistake of publicly treating Gamergate with the contempt and flippancy it deserves.
You are a vile person, Max.
As a consequence, our advertisers were quickly inundated with the same kind of emails that spooked Intel.
Transparent and documented though it was, the obsessive campaign worked.
Mercedes-Benz, listed on the site as a former partner and therefore a target, briefly paused its ads on the network that serves ads to Gorka.
I've been told that we've lost thousands of dollars already and could potentially lose thousands more, if not millions.
Listen, you fucking idiots!
When everyone else around you is showing you, not just telling you, showing you that your actions are unacceptable, you are the ones at fault.
You CRETINGS!
Consequently, the editorial director of Gorka Media, Joel Johnson, took to the front page of Gorka to clarify that Sam Bill does not want to bully anyone.
Really, Joel, that kind of flies in the face of everything he said, doesn't it, you fucking liar?
And that Gorka Media as a company and institution is not pro-bullying, despite the fact that you do appear to be very much about public shaming and bullying.
Let's note here that the admitted goal of our Gamergate trolls is not to eke an apology out of Sam or the company, but to literally put us out of business entirely.
I can tell you why that is, Max, I can tell you.
It's because you are clearly never going to fucking apologize.
An apology is so far out of your list of things that are possible that it is clear that the only way to make you people understand that what you have done is wrong is to ruin you.
And frankly, we're probably going to be doing a service to the entire Western world, to the very internet itself, frankly.
Everyone hates clickbait, you fucks.
If this seems bizarre to you, you're not alone.
No, you're right.
There are loads of social justice warriors who are just, what the hell's going on?
How could this be happening?
I feel like I went to sleep in the regular world and woke up an insane new one, where bullying is something that it's possible to be seriously and sincerely for.
Yeah, I get the feeling that if everyone was like, you know what, bullying is a great idea, you'd be like, brilliant, that is exactly what I was asking for.
Yesterday, Adobe wrote to one Gamergator on Twitter that it had asked for Gorka to remove its logo from the advertising site because it did not support bullying.
A few confused hours later, Adobe was forced to clarify to the world, we are vehemently opposed to bullying of any kind and would never support any group that bullies.
That's why they're pulling from you, Gorka media.
You have made them make that statement.
Why do you have such a lack of self-awareness?
Brands like Adobe and Intel, willing to distance themselves from independent publishers, Gorka, you own most of the gaming press.
Over the spurious claims of a limited but dedicated group of misogynists and trolls, and there's your dishonesty, share an important core value with Gamergate.
Misogyny.
Kidding, kidding.
Yes, yes, I'm sure that you are genuinely kidding.
The value that defines both Gamergate and brand response is cynicism.
The brand that honestly doesn't listen and believe, apparently, and believes it needs to clarify that it is vehemently opposed to bullying of any kind.
You people make it seem like you are very pro-bullying.
Especially when Sam Biddle's buddy Luke O'Neill also gets fired from the Boston Globe because he was asking for bullying to be brought back and he was excessively bigoted against geeks.
Getting back to it though, the brand has to clarify as though there are or have ever been genuine corporate supporters of bullying, and though anyone was in ever danger of thinking that the makers of Photoshop might be among their number.
There is probably an alternate timeline where there isn't social justice fucking up Western culture.
And in that world, I don't think Adobe ever have had to issue a declaration saying that they are anti-bullying.
I don't think any company has.
But we live in this world and they had to.
Because of you people.
Saying bring back bullying.
You fucking idiot.
But it passes on to its adult customers the same corroding cynicism that the opportunistic reactionaries running Gamergate imbue them in their maladjusted teenage followers.
That is full Macintosh.
That is where you have left reality.
You've just gone, you know what, I'm just going to go on my ideological, just nice sail off, far away from everyone else, and you don't know what's going on.
they're spouting shit that has no representation to reality and you're just like wow that's that's a beautiful thing in its own way i I don't have the balls to go so deep into my own fantasy worlds that I'd start denouncing reality at every turn.
I just don't.
But kudos to Max.
He is quite something.
His little imagination is quite something.
But releasing into the world a statement as vacuous as Adobe's tweet or as inane as Intel's apology demonstrates not that those brands stand against something, but that they stand for nothing.
Coming from Gorka!
Gorka, do you realize that you stand for lies and clickbait?
Maybe that's too much to expect from a brand though, but it seems like the bare minimum to expect from ourselves.
Gorka is rarely perfect, but it strives to be honest and fearless.
Oh, Gorka, you fucking martyrs.
I can't believe you're dying for the cause.
For us to have apologised for a joke, even to have clarified in the face of such breathtaking cynicism and dishonesty from both ad partners and enemies who leverage those brands' fearfulness into silencing opposing voices.
That is just brilliant.
That is incredible.
I.
Okay, sorry, I'll just carry on because there's nothing I need to say to that.
Feels like an utter abdication of those responsibilities.
Frankly, that sucks.
If anyone is owing an apology, it's our readers.
So, sorry.
I think you need to apologize to everyone for existing Gorka and everything that has resulted in a consequence of your fucking existence as a company.
And I'd just like to read you the best comment on that article.
From Kethy.
Fuck you on about.
I'm a gamer and a feminist, and I have been since the early 80s.
If you have issues with gamer culture dating back 10 years, then you assholes stole gaming culture from those of us here decades before that.
We were the ones playing Pong and Pac-Man and Zaxon in the arcade.
We were painstakingly saving our basic games to tape and selling baggies full of homebrew for $10.
We sent in Disc 1 of the 5.25 inch floppies so that we could upgrade from the 4 colour game to the 256 colour game.
We mourned the fire in the factory in the 90s that raised the price of 1 meg of RNA to $120.
We've been making little groups on BSS, CompuSerf chatrooms and D ⁇ D cons to get our get-togethers.
We were sharing, always sharing, our love of the hobby.
I'm sorry Cindy the cheerleader didn't fuck you when she saw your Pokemon collection.
That's got fuck all to do with feminists and gamers.
You young shits come along after and use our hobbies as your shield for your poor social skills and lack of ability to get along in the modern world.
Hell with that.
Yeah, sure, embrace your loser attitude, but don't blame gamers for that.
Blame yourself.
We actual gamers have always wanted to share our passion for games.
We always want more new and different.
Gaming is part of our lives, and it's not an excuse why we don't have one.
Do you know what I think needs to happen?
I think that feminists should categorize themselves as capitalist feminists and Marxist feminists.
Because I seem to really get along with capitalist feminists when they make statements like this, or when they say the sort of things that Christina Hoff Summers says.
They deal with results.
But the Marxist feminists care only for outcomes, and they're the ones who are the young dickheads who have come out of academia and are now fucking things up for everyone.
The thing about all this social justice stuff is that it comes full circle.
Because transgender women can't be diversity officers.
Because she's a white man now.
So I'm rather offended that they didn't use he's a white man now.
But either way, Wellesley College students are okay with him on campus, but not in a leadership position.
Honestly, why anyone would choose to become a white man is beyond me.
A student who was born female felt perfectly comfortable identifying as a white man at Wellesley College until people said he shouldn't be class diversity officer because he isn't now a white male.
Timothy Boatwright was born a girl and checked off the female box when applying to the Massachusetts All-Women School according to an article in the New York Times.
But when he got there, he introduced himself as a masculine of centre gender queer person named Timothy and asked them to use male pronouns when referring to him.
I imagine the feminists at this school were just aghast.
By all accounts, Boatwright felt welcome on campus until the day after he announced that he wanted to run for the school's Office of Multicultural Affairs coordinator, whose job it is to promote a culture of diversity on campus.
That's how they spread this social justice bullshit.
But apparently a transgender woman in an all-female school is not diverse enough.
Because, apparently, some students thought that allowing Boatwrights to have the position would just perpetuate patriarchy.
Of course it would.
A woman who becomes a man is now an agent of the patriarchy.
They were so opposed, in fact, that when other three candidates, all women of colour, dropped out, they started an anonymous Facebook campaign encouraging people not to vote at all to keep him from winning the position.
I thought he'd do a perfectly fine job, but I just felt it was inappropriate to have a white man there.
If there's one thing that it's inappropriate to be, it's a white man, isn't it?
I mean, they would never say it's inappropriate to be anything else other than a white man.
These people are such fucking bigots, I just can't help but shake my head.
I'm just fucking hell.
I can't believe some of the stuff I read.
It's not just about that position either, the student added.
Oh, don't worry, we know that it's about them being men and probably white.
Having men elected to a leadership position undermines the idea of this being a place where women are the leaders.
Because that's what this is about.
This isn't about equality, this is about supremacy.
Boatwright told the Times that his high school friends knew he was transgender, but he identified himself as female on the application to Wellesley because he didn't want his mum to know.
Of course, Wellesley is also a female school, and it seemed awkward to write an application essay for a women's college on why you were not a woman, he said.
Well, I would actually like to thank Boatright for making them look like complete fucking fools.
You legend.
Even better, the word privilege is something that women, we need to stop arguing about.
Check your privilege.
It's not a suggestion so much as a command when it's thrown around Twitter, often by a well-intentioned person who is trying to maintain the sanctity of the feminist movement.
I'm trying to think if it's the feminist dropping eggs of paint out of her vagina to paint a canvas, or the feminists menstruating and shitting on the ISIS flag, which is where I personally thought the sanctity of the feminist movement was somewhat tarnished.
But it decries anyone who dares to try and weigh in on or attempt to understand the complex politics of the space.
I'm not entirely surprised that a female supremacist movement has complex politics.
I know that sounds awful, but I'm sure a lot of women will agree with me that female-dominated spaces tend to have very complex politics.
My friend and fellow cultist, Esther Armagh, told me recently on the HuffPost Live that she eschews the word feminist because, she says, it's a blanket term that fails to capture all the nuance of an individual experience.
And she has a point.
Transgender women come at the space differently from black women, who have a different perspective informed from experience than Asian women, who don't have the same history of context of the space as white women.
Who has more privilege?
Honestly, I think that who cares should be the response.
Welcome to the conclusion that the rest of the world took at the start of this whole privilege bullshit.
I wonder how you got here.
I talk about women's issues a lot and proudly call myself a feminist.
I'm lucky enough and have worked bloody hard to be in a position where my job means I get a platform to talk about feminist issues.
How hard do you actually have to work to be a professional feminist blogger?
I'm undeniably privileged.
Glad to hear you admit it.
Not to mention that I live in a Western society where all manner of byproducts of democracy is afforded to me.
Albeit, depending on the state I live in, see abortion.
Yet the conversation about privilege threatens to cut off the legs of the feminist movement before it can even crawl.
Yes, crawl.
We're in 2014 and birth control is seen by many as a dirty word.
no it's not you these people are literally incapable of representing other people's opinions accurately They can't help but strawman.
Privilege is weighing us down.
I'm by us, I mean all of us, all feminists.
I feel like I'm watching an organism gain sentience.
This month, Jane Greenway Carr wrote about the weirdness of today's feminism.
It's these are the Marxist feminists, these aren't the capitalist feminists, you see what I mean?
There's definitely a difference.
Everyone's looking at social justice and thinking, wow, these guys are bonkers.
In fact, it's not only weird, but according to her Time magazine piece, the whole movement is at a crossroads, in part because it's getting so much louder, literally being sung from the rafters by the likes of Beyoncé and taking up more space on the public stage, even by men courtesy of some guy and Joseph Gordon Levitt.
As Carr writes, it can sometimes look like this diverse set of voices, each with its own set of demands and priorities.
It is the cult of me, that's the problem.
But anyway, it will doom the movement through inter-Nicene warfare over everything from abortion to hashtag activism.
But many roads have diverged in feminism's yellow, that's racist word, throughout its history.
Being at a crossroad doesn't mean that feminists should be paralysed by fear for making a bad choice or going in the wrong direction.
That's brilliant.
You know you have a problem, but you're not actually going to stop and tell everyone to police that problem before carrying on, and I have no idea why you wouldn't do that.
I'm guessing because there's actually very little objective truth left in the feminist movement.
And if you do stop and start analysing one part of it, you will actually pull a thread that will unravel the whole thing.
I think it does actually make all of these feminists shitlords though, because they're currently not checking their privilege, so...
It gets better.
That's not to say there shouldn't be a pause to realise that we do all have privilege, because we do.
Another word for power.
And the amount we hold may not be akin to that of those around us, fighting alongside us for equality.
Senior editor of ebony.com Jamila Lemieux argued that you can be a privileged person and you can be oppressed all at once.
And that should not prevent you from being able to participate in conversations about oppression.
holy shit i no you you you can be privileged and you can also be oppressed and you should be able to go on and talk about how oppressed you are even from your privileged position Words just have no meanings anymore.
Fuck words.
We'll just say what we fucking like.
Is there something to fear about the hegemony of the feminist movement?
At least we can agree that there is hegemony in the feminist movement.
I'm glad we can agree that that is its goal and it has attained it.
Is it risky to try and codify all female experience?
I would have thought so, but that's not what I'm proposing here.
By removing the privilege conversation from the equation while accepting that it's part of our present experience and feminism's future, Jesus, we can move forward.
As Deborah Rode wrote in her book, What Women Want, To build a powerful political movement, we must be prepared to generalize about the interests of women as a group.
What are the real issues at stake?
Pay equity.
You have it.
Rights over our own bodies.
You have them.
Access and contraception to abortion.
You have access.
It's something that Cathar Pollet touches on in her new book, Pro-Reclaiming Abortion Rights.
Why anti-abortion movement is doing so well when so few people support its goal.
This is the result of being in an echo chamber.
You know, there are millions of heavily religious Christians in America, but so few people support that.
Which is the criminalization of all abortion.
Is that the goal of the anti-abortion movement?
I mean, I know it sounds like it might be from the term anti-abortion, but I honestly don't know if that's what they want to do.
But let's assume that it's true.
Let's assume that they do want to criminalise all abortion.
So one answer, abortion opponents make up in passion what they lack in numbers.
I wonder what other groups that statement could be applied to.
We need to get to work.
Not on taking each other down, but out of getting busy pushing for the rights that we all want to afford to each other.
Instead of standing our ground together, to prevent the assault on our bodies, we massacre each other on Twitter, ensuring the conversation stagnates and whimper afterwards as laws are passed that keep us crawling.
If you want a new hashtag, how about check my work instead?
Well, feminists, if you want to know what I support, this is it.
This is exactly what I support.
Worry less about checking privilege, worry more about checking work.
Get to it.
I tell you what, if I were a woman, I would be actively fighting against feminism.
Girls in the army.
Norway passes bill on mandatory military service for women.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, that is, that's true equality, I agree.
I would have been agitating for the end of mandatory military service in my country, but I'm no feminist.
The Norwegian parliament has voted in a strong majority on a bill aimed at extending mandatory military service to females.
If the legislation is approved, all women in the country will be subject to the same conscription conditions as men.
Bravo, that's great.
Good for you.
Fully support.
The proposition, which was announced in 2013, was passed in Oslo this week, with 96 parliamentarians voting in favour of gender equality in the army.
Only six voted against it.
Those backwards, backwards Luddites.
Honestly, don't they realise that the future is everyone being conscripted into the army and not just the men?
We do not really need more conscripts, but we need to extend military service to the entire age group to attract more motivated and more competent recruits.
Yeah, that's exactly how conscription works.
What you do is you conscript someone and they become really competent and motivated.
If the bill is enacted, medically fit women between 19 and 44 years old will have to serve at least 19 months of mandatory duty in the armed forces.
I would absolutely hate that.
I can't believe anyone was like, yes, this is exactly what we want.
It will apply to women born in Norway from 1997 onwards.
With the first service in the summer of 2016, women will be also subject to conscription during wartime.
Well, I suppose if Norwegian kids are just standing around not learning how to kill people, maybe you would conscript them into an army that can go and fight NATO's wars, even though Norway is in no way threatened by anyone.
Earlier this year, the Norwegian army started testing unisex dormitories, where women soldiers shared bedrooms with male recruits at one of the country's military bases.
I'm sure that the feminists are not going to find any means to complain from this arrangement.
Even though there is a girl in the room, it doesn't mean there are any romances.
We are just soldiers, conscript Matthias Hergevold told Rupley News Agency.
Good luck.
I am absolutely sure there will be no romances.
I'm totally sure.
I completely agree.
And if this is enacted, the new bill for mandatory female service will include provisions for the use of gender-neutral language.
Why wouldn't it?
You know, why wouldn't it?
I think that's a completely normal step to take.
But the most stupid thing this week isn't feminism.
It's not social Marxism or social justice.
It's actually the EU, which might be Marxism, where they say the UK has to pay £1.7 billion in extra contributions to the European Union budget.
Given the current Eurosceptic climates across Europe, you would think they would have some pretty fucking good reasons for doing this.
The UK has been told it must pay an extra £1.7 billion towards the EU's budget because the economy has performed better than expected.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Jesus Christ!
If there was ever a more arbitrary reason!
And this is so fucking stupid!
Because, I mean, I don't personally want to be in the EU.
I don't like how it works, and I don't like what its apparent goals are.
But I'm really not angry about this from that sort of perspective.
It doesn't bother me in the slightest that that's not true at the moment.
It's just what I would choose.
What bothers me about this is how fucking incompetent it is.
You have just handed all of the Eurosceptics across the continent a victory.
You have just said to them, hey, if you do well, we're going to tax you more too.
So don't bother doing well or prepare to get mugged.
That's fucking stupid.
And somehow, you've actually managed to get the interests of the average person to align with the interests of the Tory party.
That's incredible.
The common man never sides with the Tory Party, but on this, he's probably going to.
You know, they're going to use this in future.
You are just irresponsibly stupid.
You fucking EU technocrats.
You really are.
You are irresponsible with the things that you do and say.
You are morons.
Seriously, look at this fucking chart.
France's contributions are reduced by £800 million, and the UK's contributions are increased by twice as much!
£1.7 billion!
Seriously!
The recent electoral success of the anti-EU UK Independence Party, which is hoping to win the Rochester seat from the Conservatives, has prompted renewed calls from the Prime Minister to renegotiate the terms of the UK's relationship with Europe.
Well done, EU.
Well done.
I really think that eventually the UK will split from Europe because the things that Europe does are intolerable.
BBC's Ben Wright from Brussels says the demand for more cash, which the UK government only found out about last week, has infuriated the UK and will rile many backbench Conservative MPs.
It will.
And I will be in agreement with them, and I don't want to be in agreement with them.
Mr. Cameron made no comment as he arrived for the second day of an EU summit in Brussels, but the government source said it is not acceptable just to change the fee for previous years and then demand them back at a moment's notice.
You're fucking right it's not.
It's like some sort of mafia shakedown.
The EU is like a thirsty vampire feasting on UK taxpayers' blood, Nigel Farage says.
Which isn't a bad metaphor to be fair.
Good going EU, nice one for delivering that into his hands.
Labour said that David Cameron should work with allies in Europe to put pressure on the European Commission to reconsider.
Totally agree, I think they fucking should.
A Liberal Democrat MP Catherine Bearder said the timing of the EU's request was senseless.
Yes, it fucking was.
It was retarded.
Just as pro-EU sentiment in the UK reaches a 23-year high, really?
Commission clumsily gives Eurosceptics an open goal with a budget request, she tweeted.
Well done, Europe.
Well, I'd like to actually congratulate feminism and social justice and the groups and culture that perpetuate that.
You aren't the stupidest things that have happened this week.
The EU has pipped you to the post by affecting millions of people in Britain by being such retards.
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