All Episodes
Previous Next
May 10, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
34:07
This Week in Stupid (10⧸05⧸2015)
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 10th of May 2015.
Strap yourself in.
There is some fucking batshit insanity coming your way.
Bedtime reading could disadvantage other children, Academic says.
And this isn't even the stupidest headline in this week's video.
Could snuggling up in bed and reading a bedtime story to your children ever be a bad thing?
I'm gonna nip this critical theory in the bud by saying no.
Unless you're reading some terrible evil work of literature, no it's not.
An ABC Radio National programme about whether having a loving family is an unfair advantage has questioned whether bedtime reading is causing an uneven playing field for more unfortunate children.
British academic Adam Swift told ABC presenter Joe Gelanessi, the benefits of the time-honoured custom were greater than a private school education.
You would think therefore he would be encouraging it rather than discouraging it.
Swift says that evidence shows that the difference between those who get bedtime stories and those who don't, the difference in their life chances, is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don't.
Well, that's very interesting.
What's your proposal?
According to Mr. Swift, the devilish twist was whether bedtime stories should be restricted.
Seriously, this guy is talking about making parents unable to read bedtime stories to their children.
And his rationale is that not all children have parents who read bedtime stories and therefore they become quote-unquote disadvantaged.
But ultimately he said that the net good of bedtime reading and promoting strong family bonds outweighed any other downsides.
That's it.
He actually thinks that some kids, probably a majority of kids, being read bedtime stories by their parents is a downside.
But luckily, I mean, the promoting of strong family bonds outweighs that.
I mean, thank fuck, because if it didn't, what would you suggest, Mr. Swift?
But parents should be mindful of the advantage provided by bedtime reading.
Mindful?
Yeah, they should.
Yeah, they fucking should.
They should always read to their children if we know that it gives such a colossal advantage.
Jesus fucking Christ, what kind of sociopath thinks that because some children have it worse than others, it is okay to handicap the other children.
And the only reason he doesn't recommend that we do this is because reading to your kids fosters a good family relationship.
That's the only fucking reason.
Fuck me.
Mr. Swift told the Daily Telegraph that the idea of evening the playing field by encouraging all parents to read to their kids was not discussed.
What a surprise.
Why raise other people up when you could be tearing other people down?
Thankfully, Professor Frank Oberglade from the Murdoch Children's Research Institute told the newspaper that he was bewildered by the idea of bedtime reading disadvantaging others.
It's one of the more bizarre things I've heard.
We should be bringing your kids up to the next level.
Yes, we fucking should.
This was all brought up by an article on May the 1st.
I know that this is not last week, but I think it's worth talking about anyway.
Is having a loving family an unfair advantage?
In this article is an excerpt called Family Values from ABC Radio National, in which Adam Swift tells us about what he thinks should happen.
Let's have a listen to it.
It's only a few minutes long.
One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family.
Because if the family is this source of unfair unfairness in society, then it looks plausible to think that if we were to abolish the family, we would create a more level playing field.
We'd maybe have kids raised in state institutions or whatever, making sure that these unequal starting points were less unequal, maybe not at all unequal.
But everybody, I think, even philosophers, nearly all philosophers who thought about this, have thought, no, that would be a really bad idea, right?
It would be a really bad idea to have children raised by state institutions, you know, except as default when something's kind of gone wrong.
And so we were trying to think about, well, why exactly would that be a bad idea?
Why exactly is it good that children be raised by parents?
So what we realized we needed was a kind of a way of thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children and what it was that we thought in fact, we didn't need to allow parents to do for their children if allowing that would create unfairnesses for other people's children very, very roughly.
So we developed this idea of what we call familial relationship goods.
The way we do it, the kind of a slightly sloganistic or a neat way of doing it is to contrast, on the one hand, elite private schooling, which typically is a way in which advantaged parents are able to benefit their children, conferring competitive advantage on their children relative to other people's children who aren't able to afford elite private schooling.
Elite private schooling cannot be justified by appeal to these familial relationship goods.
It's just not the case that in order for a family to realize these intimate loving authoritative affectionate, love-based relationships, you need to be able to send your kid to an elite private school.
On the other hand, bedtime stories, which are just as advantage transmitting as elite private schools.
In fact, I think the evidence shows that things like bedtime stories are more advantage transmitting than things like elite private schools, by which I mean the difference between children who get bedtime stories and those who don't.
The difference in their life chances is bigger than the difference between those who get to elite private schools and those who just go to, like you know, ordinary state or public schools.
But nonetheless, we think you have to allow parents to engage in bedtime story type activity.
In fact, we would encourage them to do that, because those are the kinds of interactions between parents and children that um do indeed foster and produce these familial relationship goods, and that's why you can see why inheritance looks more like elite private schooling at the moment.
We do indeed allow parents to do for their children, but we could prevent them doing that without any real hit to healthy family relationships, whereas if we were to say okay, you're not allowed to read bedtime stories to your kids, it's because It's just not fair that some kids get them and some kids don't.
That would be too big a hit.
That would be a kind of hit right at the core of family life.
Right.
It's not that it wouldn't be fair to the children who do receive those stories from their parents and that get the leg up that that provides.
It's that it would be a hit at the core of family life.
The social justice philosophy, ladies and gentlemen, I just, it's not about morality.
They don't care whether it's actually good or bad for the individual.
They really don't.
But I would like to thank the critical theorists.
They have actually made me arrive at the point where I think, well, level playing fields, are they a good idea?
Because if in the pursuit of the mythically fabled level playing field, we are actually going to discuss whether we can feasibly stop parents from reading bedtime stories to their children, I think that maybe we are overvaluing the level playing field.
There is one upside of dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator, of course.
There would simply be no possibility to write the headline that there are too few men for smart women.
What, if anything, can be done about the entirely new social problem discussed in our story today?
A shortage of men that well-educated women want to marry.
Wait, what are you talking about?
What are you talking about?
You're obviously, if you have achieved the pinnacle of the pyramid, you're obviously going to have to marry down.
You can't possibly be at the top of this pyramid and think, you know what, I'm still going to marry up.
I mean, what kind of idiots would think that?
Young professional women using dating agencies, apparently.
They're asking these agencies to find the men of similar education, and there are too few.
Among people in the 30 to 34 age bracket with a university degree or similar qualification, there are 155 women for every 100 men.
This would be less of a problem if the women were more willing to marry down.
The overall ratio is 91 men to 100 women in the population aged 25 to 49.
Suddenly, it's all coming into focus, isn't it?
No, sorry, ladies, you're going to have to find an attractive young man, possibly younger than you, and you're going to have to put up with the fact that he's stupid.
But he looks good.
That's the important thing.
You have become the man of the household.
Now you are going to have to find yourself an attractive young wife.
Women are perhaps less inclined than men to marry someone not as well educated, which may add to the shortage of partners for intelligent women.
Well, I look forward to hearing how this is men's fault.
The solution is not, as one dating agency suggests, for women to lower their expectations.
They should, of course, keep an open mind when they meet someone, but it would be idle to pretend that these things are of no account.
The solution is to raise the numbers of men in higher education.
Because ultimately, this is what feminism has done for men.
I know that a lot of men spend a lot of time, myself included, railing against feminism, but ultimately, feminism has done men a wonderful service.
It has freed men from the burden of excellence.
They no longer have to be good at things.
They no longer have to spend all of these years working and improving themselves.
Women are going to do that for themselves now.
You don't have to be the provider.
Isn't this wonderful?
Unless you're a woman and you find that you can't get married, your life expectancy is lowered, and you don't have any time for a family.
But, you know, you can thank the feminists for that.
This is the bit that really pisses me off, though.
The gender imbalance amongst 30-somethings with degrees is exactly the same problem that began to be noticed in secondary schools 15-20 years ago.
A number of teachers noticed boys were being overshadowed by girls in classwork and results.
The problem was denied by educational research at the time, perhaps because the observers put it down to new modes of teaching and group learning that suited girls more than teenage boys.
Why would that be some reason to ignore it?
But you know what?
No one cares.
If it's not a woman or a girl being hurt, nobody gives a fuck.
And nothing has been done about it.
And so it should be no surprise that now women compromise 60% of tertiary graduates.
Let's be clear about this.
Now the problem is affecting women, they give a shit.
Now the problem is affecting women, something must be done.
And they will unironically talk about male privilege.
But prepare yourself for an onslaught of entitlement.
The failure of men to foot it with them educationally in equal numbers is no reason to change the system or promote men undeservedly.
Are you fucking kidding?
Are you serious?
What the fuck is wrong with your fucking brain?
The shortage of partners for highly educated women is a problem only men can solve.
Get your credentials, boys.
How about fuck yourself?
You are the lonely ones.
You are the ones who have ignored the problems of men and boys.
And I know I sound like a fucking MRA, but these are human beings who are being treated like they don't matter.
Like they are the servants of women, like they owe women something.
But listen to that entitlement.
There are women who want to get married, and they want to get married to men who are smarter and better earning than themselves.
So go and get educated, because what you want doesn't matter.
There are women who want something of you.
And of course, debate on this article is now closed.
And I know that men are retreating into their video games, but unfortunately, men, you are being bad people in your video games as well.
Because female avatars experience lookism.
Yes, I don't know what lookism is either, but a study proves apparently yet again that sexism in gaming is real.
So apparently it turns out that being a woman in the gaming world does come with a dose of sexism.
And I'd just like to take this moment to pause and say to women who aren't feminist victims, I'm really sorry.
I'm absolutely sorry that these people are representing women in tech.
It really pisses me off how these are the loud voices who are running around the tech industry poisoning the well against any other women who just want to get into the industry and crack on with some hard work.
Apparently a new study published in the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media found that women who played the popular game in World of Warcraft were discriminated Against based on the appearance of their avatars.
How did people know that they were women?
I think we really have to hand it to the feminists though.
Even when they're playing a video game, even when they're doing something that isn't really real, women can be victims.
Speaking of victims, we're going to ignore the professional victims that the first half of this paragraph talks about.
The research team notes that there hasn't actually been much research conducted around gender in virtual realities.
Why would there be?
For those who doubt the validity of this type of research, which is almost everyone I would imagine, and might say that gender doesn't affect players in video games, the study's authors from Virginia Tech and Penn State stated in their abstract that interactions in online environments are influenced by many of the same gender and sex role stereotypes that people use in offline interactions.
Imagine that.
People are still normal people on the internet.
You know, we're not even going to talk about how anyone can play as any gender in a video game, because that would completely discredit the need for such a study.
Let's just have a look.
In their field research, the researchers created six, six different avatars across three various races available to players in World of Warcraft, each with a male and female avatar.
This is a thorough study.
They then manipulated the avatars' levels of attractiveness, that's not subjective at all, sex and favor difficulty in order to see how players would respond to them.
This seems just absolutely scientific.
Here are all six of those avatars.
I know, I can't believe I could get this entire study in one screenshot.
But yeah, so the high attractiveness ones are relatively slender, the medium attractiveness ones are relatively muscular, and the low attractiveness ones are orcs.
This is crazy.
I can't believe they didn't use the same races for each variant attractiveness.
I just I mean what I.
I don't play World of Warcraft.
Maybe they couldn't make the high attractiveness ones look unattractive.
Anyway, they proceeded to use these avatars for 2,300 interactions in which they asked other players for a favour.
These favours ranged from small asks, you mean requests, get off of fucking tumbly twats, like directions to large requests such as using the player as an escort.
They also revealed to the players that they were asking help from their gender, that is the gender of the player, not the avatar, since that was obvious.
By saying something like, could you help a girl out?
Over half of the players responded to the request which researchers used to engage in this dialogue.
And on to the results.
There are a lot of interesting findings here, one being that players were more likely to help out the avatar if they were more attractive regardless of gender.
78% of players helped an avatar considered to be hot, while only 66% helped out an avatar that was made to look the least attractive by the research team.
So why are you pitching this as sexism?
Jesus Christ, what kind of idiots are you?
Honestly though, I can't believe they got so many people to help them.
But apparently the story doesn't end there.
When the player revealed themselves to be female, they were much less likely to be helped regardless of the avatar's level of attractiveness.
Even though you just told us that attractive avatars were more likely to be helped regardless of gender.
And the thing is, this contradiction isn't even why I'm going to call bullshit on this.
I'm just calling bullshit on this because I don't believe that women get less help than men because I have seen it in every MMO I have played.
I don't have any studies to prove it either way, but my own experience of playing these games makes me think that this is bullshit.
Is that scientific?
No, not at all.
But if we're going with a feminist study that unsurprisingly comes to the conclusion that women are of course the victims of discrimination in online games, or my own personal experiences which show that women get far more help than men from men in online games, I'm not going with the feminist study, especially since its results have already contradicted themselves.
And this article finishes with, The researchers pointed out that the game creators and online agencies should be aware of women's lack of agency on the internet.
What's this link?
It's a link to a different article.
Based on the same fucking research.
This is pathetic.
This whole thing is absolutely pathetic.
The study is pathetic and the reporting on it is pathetic.
The only thing that surprises me about this article is they didn't make it intersectional and say that this was also a case for racism.
You know, like our future Martian colonies are bound to be because we can't even clean up video games.
Oh yes, this was an actual article on the Pulitzer Prize winning Guardian in the fucking science section.
The white male European conquerors of the new world, you know, the worst people to have ever existed, and the 19th century American pioneers of manifest destiny, the second worst people to have ever existed, still colour the space age.
Do they?
Are you sure it's not their descendants who do?
So is it a myth that will turn nice on Mars?
I don't know.
Do you think we might wipe out the native Martians?
Is this the latest in progressive insanity?
If we just move to Mars, we'll finally be good people.
Let's settle in and enjoy this ridiculous piece by Martin Robbins.
I've got my tea handy.
And I mean, I can't believe someone would put their name to this, let alone The Guardian giving a platform to this.
But let's go.
We're going to Mars eventually.
The quest to reach the dusty red planet is our version of Manifest Destiny.
Well, is it, though?
I mean, I suppose, I mean, a handful of people probably do want to go to Mars, but how many really actually want to go to Mars?
It's not actually like discovering the new world.
There are a lot of different versions of it, but the main themes, as summarized by Wikipedia, some young Turks level of research there, Guardian, should sound quite familiar.
The special virtues of the American people and their institutions.
America's mission to redeem and remake the West in the image of agrarian America.
An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty.
So 150 years later, Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, and probably a disgusting man of European descent, is arguably the most visible example of manifest destiny in the space age.
As if an empty planet shouldn't be colonized.
He's the de facto leader of a Western, liberal, technocratic consensus that harbors a long-term ambition to put humans on the red planet.
I know, why?
Why would he want to do that?
I mean, the human race has produced a person like you.
Why would he want to spread that around the galaxy?
Not because they can, but because they feel we must.
I know it's awful.
They're not even going to ask Mars' consent.
Phil Platt banged his hammer on this particular nail in a recent article for Slate.
I don't think anyone does anything like that in Slate, but continue the tradition of the progressive press being lazy as shit and just quoting wholesale from other people's articles.
A feeling I couldn't put my finger on before suddenly came into focus.
The attitude of the people I saw wasn't just a general pride, as strong as it was, in doing something cool.
It was that they were doing something important.
And again, not just important in some vague general way, but critical and quite specific in its endgame, making humans citizens of more than one world.
A multi-planet species.
And you know what, Phil, right?
That is important.
That's genuinely important.
If a giant asteroid came along and smacked the Earth, that there would be humans on Mars would be insanely important.
So this obviously triggered Martin.
Manifest Destiny.
Historically, this kind of attitude has come with two big problems.
Oh, do go on.
Firstly, destiny is really great for the people already at the destination.
You fucking idiot.
Why would you even mention that?
When Africans moved north to colonize Europe, they obliterated the Neanderthals.
Yeah, but there aren't any Neanderthals on Mars.
When Europeans seized the new world, these cultures were virtually extinguished.
Luckily, the only population on Mars that we know of is a handful of rovers.
No doubt we'll start a war anyway before dragging them into some form of slavery or oppression.
It's just what we do.
You know what, Martin, I hate to tell you this, but those Martian rovers are completely under our control.
We are already oppressing them.
They are already our slaves.
Secondly, whose destiny is it anyway?
Who gets to go?
Well, I imagine it's probably going to be who qualifies.
Deanne Lee wrote a fascinating deconstruction of this in Scientific American, in which she makes a number of interesting points.
Not least how little attention this question has been given in the rather white and male race to conquer Mars.
Well, you know what?
They are the people who have the qualifications to do this.
I don't know whether you've noticed, but the humanities, not least gender studies, are rather full of people who are not white males.
The white males tend to cluster in the STEM fields.
And so you end up with more white males who have the qualifications to try and get us to Mars.
Okay, that's sounding quite complicated.
How about we just say it's patriarchy?
Patriarchy.
It's a white male conspiracy.
Martin does concede that her saying the idea that we're stuck on Earth is something he disagrees with.
As long as we're on one planet, however good it is, we're a single freak event away from joining the dinosaurs.
Self-sufficient colonies elsewhere make for a good insurance policy.
But Martin, they would be people.
Evil, awful people.
Awful, awful people who might oppress women somewhere and possibly minorities.
Unless we're going to restrict it so that white men can't go.
I am of course not joking.
He says her next point is critical though.
I'm nagged by frames or narratives that are presented as universally attractive and necessary and heroic where the protagonists seem to mostly reflect Hollywood action movie casts and plots.
Eye rolls.
This was in Scientific American, he's quoting from.
I began to question, first in my mind, then out loud, yes, well done, whose version of humanity is being targeted for saving?
Well, the white men were probably thinking of targeting their own version of humanity for saving, which of course means they won't be allowed to go to Mars.
Martin, of course, is not finished being fucking retarded.
He says, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, space is white.
You won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly white it is.
Douglas Adams actually said big.
I don't know why you'd be quoting him though, because Douglas Adams was a white man.
He was a white European man.
For fuck's sake, if you are going to be a self-flagellating shitstain, at least be internally consistent in your stupid ideology.
If you were wondering, this is Martin Robbins.
And yes, he does look like a fucking serial killer.
But unfortunately for Martin Robbins, he is just a vessel through which feminists can push their bullshit.
Just like women in space colony fiction have generally been presented as sexy walking vaginas, whose main purpose is to provide the male astronauts with a place to dock their penis at night.
Except when they haven't been.
And they haven't been a lot.
In fact, in sci-fi in general, women are actually really well represented.
You're just regurgitating feminist talking points and generalizations and the hope that no one actually takes a closer look.
But you know, if you think that attitude doesn't exist in the real world, it's worth recalling the comments of a key figure in the Russian space program.
Why would I recall his comments?
Who exactly is he representative of?
And even then, he's not saying that women are just there to be fucked.
Women are fragile and delicate creatures, and that is why men should lead the way to distant planets and carry women there in their strong hands.
That's not saying that women are just something to be used for sexual pleasure.
But I mean, it's no wonder that Lee says, I see only a very narrow invitation to this lifeboat.
Alright, miss entitled, shall the scientists change everything to suit you, shall they?
But Martin thinks that Lee's argument can be summed up like this: When we go into space, we will all magically become nice.
I don't even have anything to say to that, it's so dumb.
Apparently, we see this in coverage of the space program, with its endless propaganda about cooperation between the nations, and the promotion of the idea that clever people in tough situations produce the best humanity has to offer.
No, I'm sure that they are, in fact, the worst humanity has to offer.
Fuck's sake.
It's rampant in fiction, where shows like Star Trek assume that three centuries of civil rights progress will inevitably turn us all into morally centered middle-class rationalists.
Well, don't worry, Martin, I'm sure you are in no danger of becoming a rationalist, and I'm sure that if you continue to propagate your ideology, no one in the future will be in any danger of becoming one either.
And there it is, unspoken and unchallenged, at the heart of our current aspirations for space.
There's no room for discussion about social justice or equality when it comes to planning our future Mars colonies, because we all just assume that decent, educated scientists and engineers, the right kind of people, won't have any problem with that sort of thing.
Well, I used to work at the research councils in Swindon, and it was surprisingly egalitarian.
In fact, these scientist types seem to be fairly forward-thinking, Martin.
They didn't really seem to need social justice because they weren't pathetic and useless people.
But what do I know?
They were just scientists who came from all over the world to come and study in England and to work in England and, you know, who ended up working with other scientists all around the world in a shared cooperation to try and advance the human species.
No one was trying to drag anyone else down.
I imagine they all had the advantage of being read to by their loving parents.
The first woman to be raped in space has probably already been born.
What kind of fucking sentence is that?
That is the sort of sentence only a social justice warrior would write.
I mean, why aren't you worried about the first kiddie who's gonna get fiddled in space?
Whether they've been born yet or not.
For fuck's sake, don't you think that is unnecessarily morbid?
I know I've gone through this entire article in great detail, but fuck it, it's just so ridiculous.
He says, I'm a fan of SpaceX, and after some initial skepticism, I think it's usually better to do something, however imperfect, than nothing.
And I admire people like Elon Musk who take on the hard challenges, but I do reserve the right to have a good whinge about it, and make progress in spite of the naysayers, me being one of those naysayers.
But Martin also thinks Lee is absolutely right though, when she says, when we look around and see a homogenous group of individuals discussing these issues, issues that command insane budgets, we should pause.
Why aren't there other voices and perspectives at the table?
How much of this conversation is being controlled, framed, initiated, directed, and rooted by capitalist and political interests of the few people at the table?
Well, Lee, I can answer your question.
It's because Marxism is a fucking failure.
It creates systems that are fucking failures, that have to be enforced by the gun.
And when they finally collapse, people fucking rejoice, and then they don't have to queue at three in the morning for bread.
Martin says it's early days, but if we really want to create a progressive new world, then issues like this should be at the heart of our efforts from the very start.
No, no, hang on, Martin.
You are not making any efforts to go to another planet.
You clearly did gender studies.
You are doing nothing to create a progressive new world.
You are, in fact, doing everything you can to create a progressive old world, and you're fucking this one up in the process.
But this is just perfect.
I hope people like Lee can take part in it.
The last thing we need is to wake up in 50 years and find that a bunch of Gamergate knobheads are running Mars.
What the fuck are you talking about, Martin?
You've just framed Gamergate as the intelligent, rational, scientific faction who are trying to get shit done.
In this case, in our case, playing video games.
But apparently, in your mind, you're worried about them colonizing Mars.
Fucking hell, you fruitcake.
You absolute fucking freak.
Jesus Christ, what kind of stupid idiots are you?
Why would you even put them on there?
You're making yourselves sound unscientific.
Like you don't understand what science is for or why it has achieved anything.
You fucking moron.
Gonna finish this week in a less funny but noteworthy way.
Police treated Rotherham sex abused victims as prostitutes, Crime Commissioner admits.
South Yorkshire police admit that they were warned about child sexual exploitation in Rotherham twice in the past decade, but failed to take any action.
Well, why did they fail to take any action?
Dr. Billings said that police at the time simply did not understand that grooming constituted child abuse.
Fucking really fucking I can't believe it.
I can't believe that this is the defense that would be used.
It's a oh I mean w we just didn't know it was wrong.
Oh really is that an acceptable excuse now is it?
I don't think that any of us at the time understood what grooming was and that this was grooming.
Listen you fucking moron.
I don't think ignorance of the law is an excuse is it?
And it just gets better.
I think we saw these girls not as victims but as troublesome young people out of control and willing participants.
We saw it as child prostitution rather than child abuse.
And I think that was broadly accepted and that's why it all went wrong.
Oh, fuck you.
You were just like, you know what?
There are a lot of child prostitutes in Rotherham, aren't there?
There are so many children turning to prostitution.
▲
Export Selection