Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - This Week in Stupid (22⧸03⧸2015)

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March 22, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

29:25

This Week in Stupid (22⧸03⧸2015)

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	Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 22nd of March 2015.
	I will be surprised if you think the things I'm talking about this week are true.
	Let's start with this.
	No Boys Allowed Day teaches girls about science and math.
	Of course it does.
	Of course no boys allowed.
	There's never going to be a no girls allowed day because we would never hear the fucking end of it.
	But a no boys allowed day, no problem.
	What day do you want?
	So classrooms at a Seattle University had a new rule on Saturday.
	No boys allowed.
	Brilliant.
	We're not trying to exclude boys, said Jen Thornson, the program's organiser.
	Yeah, you're going to have to forgive me for thinking that you're full of shit.
	You are after all running a class that exclusively excludes boys.
	But Jen says we're trying to provide an opportunity for girls who might not realise that these career opportunities are open to them.
	I can only assume that you're talking about the women who are still living in caves, because at this point, women outnumber men on university campuses by a sizable margin.
	Women aren't going to STEM fields because they don't want to go into STEM fields.
	And the ones that do are already in them.
	Well, I suppose the one upshot to judging people entirely by their gender is that you're not judging them by their skin colour.
	White students barred from meeting at Ryerson University because they were not, quote, racialized.
	Well, I suppose we should be thankful that it was just a meeting and not a class.
	So first year journalism students were trying to attend a meeting hosted by the Racialized Students Collective when they were asked to leave by the group organizer.
	She asked them if they'd been marginalised or racialized, and when they both responded, no, that's when she said the meeting was only for those who had felt they had been.
	The two students who are both visibly white had been attempting to attend the gathering as part of an assignment assigned by their associate professor of journalism.
	The Racialized Students Collective as part of the Ryerson Students Union states that it opposes all forms of racism and aims for an anti-racist environment on the campus.
	Clearly they don't seem to understand that they are actually contributing to the racist environment on campus.
	Posters for the event said that it was geared at racialized students, a term that refers to non-white minorities such as black, Indo-Canadians and Aboriginals.
	However, the posters did not explicitly state that white students were not welcome to attend.
	Well, they weren't really welcome to attend because they didn't feel like they'd been racialized.
	Now, however, ironically, they're probably quite welcome at these groups because they have in fact now been racialized.
	Good job.
	And of course, this racialization was perfectly acceptable because it was a necessary measure in order to keep group members comfortable.
	Because God forbid they have some kind of white devil sat unracialized at the same table as them, trying to empathise with their experiences.
	So the organizer of this deflected criticism by saying, hey, hey, we're not racist.
	To be clear, racism is a system of oppression.
	There aren't broad examples in our society that speaks to white folks being excluded from spaces because of their race.
	Well, I think that's one very narrow definition of racism.
	And I think that the more individual acts of racism that we see, like this one right now, for example, will lead to a broader trend in society that speaks to white folks being excluded from spaces based on their race.
	How about we don't exclude anyone based on their race?
	Because this, this is something we would call a principle.
	Unlike you who thinks, well, it's okay to do something bad to white folks because white folks have the power in society, as you would obviously put it.
	Or we could just not do it at all because the act of doing that is wrong.
	Not the person we're doing it to is the wrong person.
	Do you understand?
	You don't understand.
	Well, apparently it doubly sucks for those poor lads because sex education without porn is now not sex education.
	Apparently a Scandinavian sexologist is recommending that porn should be shown in the classroom.
	Amazingly, it's not Sweden.
	It's Denmark.
	But anyway, it may be for pedagogical reasons, so that it can be critically analysed as a way of teaching teenagers that it's nothing like real sex.
	But still, you can see the panicked headlines if it were to be advocated here.
	It's more than I think that they're overstepping their remits somewhat.
	I think that the boundaries of a teacher's authority stop well before showing pornography to their class begins.
	Our author Rhiannon here says, it's a shame that porn in the classroom would be such a source of controversy in Britain.
	Why?
	Well, she says that it's a progressive move that would only catch on if the nation were to undergo a wholesale sexual shame transplant.
	Nevertheless, we can fantasize.
	I don't really want to fantasize about showing pornography to children at school.
	That strikes me as a remarkably weird thing to really want to happen.
	And I do agree that it would be remarkably progressive, which I think is probably why so many people are starting to disassociate themselves with the label progressive.
	At least our author understands how uncomfortable this is all going to be.
	She says, granted, being made to watch porn in a classroom alongside 30 other pupils is unlikely to be a comfortable experience, but it could be useful to have an adult point out the plot holes, no pun intended, in the manner of, okay guys, so that orgasm is obviously fake, because as you can see, he's barely in and she's already going buck wild.
	I rather think you may be projecting your own insecurities onto this.
	These aren't so much plot holes as they are staples of pornographic movies, and no, you probably do not live up to them.
	But no one's expecting you to.
	Only you are expecting you to.
	Because the women in pornography make you feel uncomfortable.
	And because you feel uncomfortable, you want us all to have to have a bunch of remarkably uncomfortable conversations.
	Speaking of uncomfortable conversations, Starbucks wants to make barristers talk about race.
	Fucking why?
	This is probably the most stupid story of the entire week.
	Everyone's probably already familiar with it.
	fuck me i just oh my god this is just so starbucks announced on sunday a new initiative aimed at fostering communication about race relations this This is Starbucks Responsibility.
	in the United States.
	This was branded hashtag race together, where employees have to write race together on a customer's cup in order to spur a conversation on race.
	I can't.
	How?
	I mean, nobody really wants to have a fucking conversation about race with the guy who pours their fucking coffee.
	That is just inappropriate, at best.
	This was the brainchild of Howard Schultz, the Starbucks vice president, and I'm sure his heart was in the right place, but his head was clearly off in cloud cuckoo land.
	I mean, what kind of...
	I just didn't even think.
	This guy has clearly not even thought.
	But the worst part about this that he clearly hasn't thought about is that he's talking to progressives.
	And progressives say things like, baristas already have enough on their plates pretending that a pumpkin spice latte is a legitimate coffee drink.
	Just imagine having to add white saviour to their coffee service repertoire.
	White saviour, really.
	Alright.
	They'll also say things like, the race and class dynamics that put a comfortable white person in the same room with a person of color whose employment relies on serving that white person fancy beverages makes these conversations inherently exploitative.
	bollocks do they just jesus fucking christ As if this wasn't a stupid enough suggestion.
	Why are you making yourselves sound even stupider?
	No, it's not inherently exploitative.
	It's inherently dumb.
	And I love this more than anything.
	You can't have an honest conversation about race when it's a conversation imposed or strongly encouraged by a wealthy white man who happens to be your boss.
	What kind of fucking honest conversation about race are we having?
	What do you think that this conversation is going to look like?
	I can tell you what it's going to look like.
	It's going to look like the person coming in, they're going to be nervous, and they're going to say, look, I'd like coffee, please.
	And the barista like, fuck.
	Alright, if you want a coffee, I will make you a coffee.
	Unfortunately, we're both going to have to talk about race.
	And the customers are going to be like, right, okay, I was prepared for this.
	I think racism is bad.
	And the barista can be like, oh, thank God, I think it's bad too.
	And they're like, great, I'm really glad we could get past this.
	Can I now have my coffee, please?
	Our author goes on to say, hashtag race together is exploitation.
	Pure and simple.
	It is the exploitation of Starbucks' minority workforce and their minority customers.
	I don't think that it was designed specifically to exploit the minority workforce and customers.
	I think it was designed because progressives have been pressuring the upper echelons of basically every company to be more inclusive.
	And these poor white guys are like, well, shit.
	We were born wrong and we don't know what to do.
	But anyway, it's an appropriation of the work that those of us in the social justice movement have been doing for years to foster real constructive conversations on race.
	Not one conversation on race that I've ever seen has ever been constructive.
	It is a top-down effort from rich executives with white savior complexes who want to get credit for saving the world but make others do the work.
	Because seriously, there is absolutely no way to make these fucking people happy.
	There is nothing you can do.
	If you were, say, a company executive and you were like, I don't even talk about race.
	Don't even don't even want to bring it up.
	They'll be like, well, there we go.
	That's exactly indicative of the rich white men who are running all these companies.
	No, don't care about race.
	You've got, there's no win condition.
	There is no win condition.
	Especially as these delusional fucks will say things like, right now there are already Starbucks employees using their lived experiences as people of color to foster real positive change in their communities.
	I'm sure there are.
	I'm sure there are millions of them.
	They aren't doing it for the PR and they aren't doing it out of an inflated sense of self-importance.
	They're doing it because they're fucking angels.
	You have to understand, if you're born with white skin, you are bad.
	But if you are not born with white skin, you are good.
	See, they're out there on the front lines fighting for survival and for acknowledgement of their humanity.
	What the fuck kind of crazy bullshit is that?
	On just ridiculous over-the-top rhetoric.
	Absolute fucking hysteria.
	Absolute hysteria.
	Wasn't all fun and games for Howard Schultz either, as this cascade of negativity he got after ordering staff to talk about racism with customers has forced him to turn off his Twitter as the angry public turns on patronizing project.
	Well, that's what you fucking get for being a moron, isn't it, Howard Schultz?
	A lot of people simultaneously telling you how much of an idiot you are.
	Seriously, there is no pleasing these people.
	One user tweeted, I don't have time to explain 400 years of oppression to you and still make my train.
	While another pointed out, you'll realize there are no colored hands in the press photos, right?
	Yeah, okay.
	Yeah, no, that's probably true.
	They probably weren't, you know, and that's that's what you look for when you are someone like this.
	Here's another one.
	Here's your Makikio, Makatichio, I don't know.
	Let's discuss the historic disenfranchisement of your people that has allowed me to prosper.
	She is working at Starbucks, you fucking idiot.
	She is hardly fucking prospering, is she?
	Race Together is what happens when a 1%er without any actual anti-racist education or training has a midlife white man's burden crisis.
	Fucking, just don't bother.
	Just do not bother.
	You cannot win.
	Which is, of course, a lesson that Nintendo learned the hard way on International Women's Day.
	Nintendo's strong females are everything that's wrong with video games.
	Of course they are.
	Of fucking course they are.
	So Nintendo decided that they were going to celebrate Women's History Month by putting some of their female characters on Rosie the Riveter style posters, which was apparently a cute idea, but there's a big issue.
	Nintendo doesn't really have many powerful or playable female characters.
	Just looking at these two pictures, I can already see what the issue is going to be.
	Oh my god, they're just pink versions of male characters.
	Here's the full list of female characters that Nintendo intends on celebrating for Women's History Month.
	Tetra from The Legend of Zelda.
	Toadette from the Mario series, Bayonetta from Bayonetta, Rosalina from the Mario series, Lucinda from The Fire Emblem, and Samus Aron from Metroid and Bomet from Paper Mario.
	Have you heard of most of these characters?
	Didn't think so.
	Oh really?
	Oh fucking really.
	I'm guessing that you haven't heard of these characters because you aren't a fucking gamer.
	Believe it or not, a lot of people have heard of these characters.
	You fucking Philistine.
	Well, don't say I didn't fucking call it.
	When the female characters aren't being saved, they're just what feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian calls miss male characters or female versions of an already established or default male character.
	See Bomet and Toadette.
	Those two are just pink versions of the male characters, you predictable hack.
	The biggest issue with the Miss Male character troop, as Sarkeesian says, is that it makes a character's gender her most important quality.
	I will stop you fucking there.
	Listen, you are the ones who are focusing entirely on the character's gender.
	You have an entire day or an entire month for women to focus on vaginas, okay?
	You guys are the ones making it so important.
	How do I know this?
	Well, tell me, what is the personality of the Toadstool character in Mario?
	I don't even know the character's fucking name.
	The mushroom character that Toadette is a pink version of.
	What is his personality?
	Well, I can't name a single goddamn thing about his personality, but I can tell you that he is a fucking mushroom.
	Apparently, studies have shown that sexualized portrayals of women in video games negatively influence people's perceptions of women in real life.
	Which isn't exactly what the makers of this study said.
	I mean, they said, although the results were somewhat limited, they shed light on the influence of exposure to sexualized female video game characters on individuals' gender attitudes and beliefs and self-concept.
	Specifically, these data cautiously indicate that gender portrayals in video games can in fact affect people's beliefs about women in the real world and women's self-efficacy.
	There is nothing in this study that is particularly solid, and the people who wrote this study know it.
	So anyway, getting to the conclusion of this retards article, so what's to be done?
	You have to admit there's a problem before you can make significant change.
	By sending out this press release about all the steps Nintendo is making for women, Nintendo is minimizing the fact that women are not only underrepresented in games, but are also sexualized and marginalized in games.
	Just...
	What?
	Fucking, you can't win, Nintendo.
	I know you thought, oh, women's history month, this will be exciting.
	We'll do nice Rosie the Rivet and Nintendo female Nintendo characters.
	Won't this be fun?
	No, Nintendo, it won't be fucking fun.
	It will be transgressive and wrong and bad of you.
	You are awful.
	You are everything that's wrong with the video game industry.
	How fucking dare you?
	And unsurprisingly, the company did not respond when I expressed my concerns about this press release and asked if the company planned to include more female leads in future games.
	I'm surprised they didn't respond.
	I'm surprised they didn't just send you a message back saying, you've never fucking heard of any of the female leads in any of the games that we have here.
	You are not a gamer, what difference would it fucking make?
	Because clearly, you are not going to be buying any of our future games.
	I particularly enjoy this next story.
	San Francisco Catholic Church installs watering system to drench homeless people as they sleep.
	Exactly as Jesus would have done.
	A San Francisco Catholic Church has reportedly installed a watering system that discourages homeless people by drenching them as they sleep.
	Just, that is compassion for you.
	This is to discourage homeless people from sleeping in the doorway of the church.
	At random times throughout the night, water pours from a hole in the ceiling about 30 feet above, drenching the alcove and anyone in it.
	The shower ran for 75 seconds every 30 to 60 minutes while we were there, starting before sunset, simultaneously in all four doorways.
	KCBS witnessed it soak homeless people and their belongings.
	There is a good reason that the Reformation happened, but being massively selfish towards the poor is only the beginning of the church's crimes here.
	A neighbour pointed out that the watering system was not only an inhuman way to treat people, it was also a waste of water during a serious drought.
	If you're not in America, you might not have been aware, but California has been suffering from a four-year-long drought.
	And these dickheads in the church are pissing away water, trying to stop homeless people from bothering everyone and making the place look untidy.
	Archdiocese spokesperson, Chris Lieford, had the temerity to go on record and say, we do the best we can, and supporting the dignity of each person, but there's only so much you can do.
	Are you, are you, do you even know who Jesus was?
	Let me read a few quotes from him to see if I can refresh your memory, Chris.
	How about this?
	Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
	Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.
	It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.
	And finally, Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him, you lack one thing.
	Go sell all you have and give it to the poor, and you will have the treasure in heaven.
	And come follow me.
	It's any of this ringing a bell with you Catholics.
	I mean, can you point me to the Bible verse that said, lo, and Jesus said, shoo away the homeless because they're probably making the place look a bit down market.
	And you know the cardinal is prone to giving surprise inspections.
	Anyway, enough teaching Catholics how to be fucking Christian.
	Would you look at this bullshit?
	women with vagina piercings to be classified as suffering from female genital mutilation.
	Just, wow.
	I'm not even joking.
	Hundreds of women in London with vagina piercings will be recorded as victims of potentially illegal female genital mutilation under new NHS rules to be introduced next month.
	Is there not enough hate and violence in the world?
	Are the cases of female genital mutilation so fucking low that you have to artificially inflate the figures for reasons probably best left unspoken?
	And just because I know you're wondering about this, the rules will of course apply when women have consented to the piercing and the procedure in the belief that it will improve their sex lives and enhance their attractiveness.
	Because women can't make their own fucking decisions.
	This new edict forms part of an expansion of NHS rules on recording female genital mutilation and will fuel the debate about how cosmetic genital surgery and other procedures to create design of vaginas should be treated by police and prosecutors.
	And apparently turning people who do genital piercings into criminals is the way to do this.
	And just look at how many more victims we have just created.
	Fucking brilliant.
	The new NHS regulations make it clear that piercings are also a form of mutilation and should be recorded as part of an enhanced female genital mutilation data set that is designed to establish the number of victims in this country.
	Well, holy shit, I imagine that we're going to find there are millions of victims of female genital mutilation in Britain now.
	Fucking millions of willing victims of it.
	Ones that even paid to have it done.
	I'm sure, I'm sure they will not in any way abuse these numbers to enact legislative changes that otherwise shouldn't have been made.
	An unnamed Department of Health spokesman confirmed the move and said that piercings were a form of FGM even when performed on consenting adult women.
	He added, while there are challenges in this area and adult women may have genital piercings, in some communities girls are forced to have them.
	Yes, but that's not a justification for making genital piercings a form of female genital mutilation.
	Only when those women have been mutilated against their will that this would become fucking necessary.
	Unfucking believable, honestly.
	And I would finally like to introduce you to the last sane man in university.
	College defends removing student over disruptive rape remarks.
	A 19 year old says that he was banned from the discussion portion of a humanities class at Reed College after students complained that his opinions on sexual assault made them feel uncomfortable.
	Boo fucking who.
	You see, Jeremiah True wouldn't stop talking about his controversial opinions on sexual assault in his required freshman humanities course.
	So the professor banned him from the discussion segment of the class for the remainder of the semester.
	He says, please know that this was a difficult decision for me to make and one that I've never made before.
	Nevertheless, in the light of the serious stress that you've caused your classmates, I feel that I have no other choice.
	True said that he sparred with his classmates over discussion topics related to ancient Greece and Rome, such as the patriarchal belief that logic is more important than emotion, and his analysis of Lucretia's rape, which was the trigger event for the founding of the Republic and the overthrow of Tarquin the Proud.
	But it was his questioning of the wide and shared and oftly debated, you mean flat false statistic that one in five women in college are sexually assaulted and that it doesn't serve actual rape victims to overinflate numbers, he said, and his rejection of the term rape culture that led him to being banned.
	Fucking hell.
	Just listen to how reasonable this kid is.
	I'm critical of the idea of a rape culture because it does not exist.
	We live in a society that hates rape, but also hasn't optimized the best way to handle rape.
	Changing the legal definition of rape is a slippery slope.
	If sexual assault becomes qualified as a rape, what happens next?
	What else can we legally redefine to become rape?
	Why would we want to inflate the numbers of rape in our society?
	They are some bloody sensible questions that in a normal healthy intellectual environment would be engaged with.
	Instead, this kid has been banned for daring to think for himself.
	So listen to this.
	This is what the professor wrote to the student.
	There are several survivors of sexual assault in our conference, and you have made them extremely uncomfortable with what they see as not only your undermining incidents of rape, but also placing too much emphasis on men being unfairly charged with rape.
	The entire conference, without exception, men as well as women, feel that your presence makes them uncomfortable enough that they would rather not be there if you were there.
	And they have said that things you have said in our conference have made them so upset that they have difficulty concentrating in other classes.
	I, as conference leader, have to do what is best for the well-being of the entire class.
	Therefore, I am banning you from the conference for the remainder of the semester.
	Savory, I want you to listen to me carefully.
	What is best for the entire class is to take them out back and shoot them in the fucking head.
	Because these people are insane.
	This is madness.
	And protecting this hugbox is dangerous to their own well-being.
	What is going to happen when you aren't there to mollycoddle them?
	But what's worse is that this is literally putting feelings above facts.
	This is probably the deepest ideological poisoning of an institution that is possible.
	True told BuzzFeed that he didn't feel he'd belittled or incited violence against any of the sexual assault survivors who may have been in the class, which I'm sure he fucking didn't.
	I simply question the statistics, he said.
	I understand that Savory has to take care of his students, but I have to take care of my education.
	Because good God, he is like the last sane man in academia.
	And after an investigation into this, the college upheld Savory's decision to remove True from the class because he was questioning the figures.
	Reed College did not remove the student from the class because of the content of his speech, except that's exactly why you removed him.
	But when a student's behavior substantially disrupts the academic environment, the college has an obligation to act, except he wasn't, was he?
	He wasn't misbehaving.
	He was saying, look, I think you're brainwashing people.
	And it turns out, you clearly fucking are.
	So after all of this, is it any wonder that when a YouTube channel called Simple Misfits do an anti-feminist protest prank, it goes slightly awry.
	These two guys go to a university and they start acting like male feminists called menonists.
	And, you know, shouting there with a bullhorn, screaming, oh, you know, sexism against man, all this sort of stuff.
	It's very obviously a prank.
	Well, let's see what happens, shall we?
	Hey guys, so today we're gonna protest at a university for fun.
	And as you can tell by our signs here and our fedoras, we're obviously 100% serious.
	Menonists unite!
	Can I have you guys explain to me what menonism is?
	It's an anti-feminist movement.
	It means that I'm pretty fed up and I've got a battle with it.
	If you can't open your legs for a boy, then how can you expect us to open the door for you?
	Does anyone have anything to say?
	Any feminists out there want to try me?
	I can't wait this fucking crowd.
	Come join our group.
	Join our group.
	Menonists.
	Menonists Unite.
	Get a free fedora upon joining.
	What'd you say?
	The more you ignore them, the more they'll hold their home.
	Sexist!
	He's sexist!
	Take that!
	Here we go!
	You have to sign up on our website.
	This is just an example of what he would look like!
	No!
	Feminists are sexist!
	All feminists are sexist!
	All women are sexist!
	Oh my god!
	Oh my fuck!
	I seen it!
	This is the true evil!
	This is the true evil!
	Please don't assault me!

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