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May 31, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
25:37
This Week in Stupid (31⧸05⧸2015)
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Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 31st of May 2015.
This week we begin with a look into the yawning more of Orwell's nightmare.
Hong Kong litterbugs shamed in billboard portraits made using DNA from trash.
A campaign that used DNA analysis to give face to anonymous Hong Kong litterbugs, then posted representations of the faces on billboards across the city has been a big hit on social media.
With people who enjoy witch hunts, I can only imagine.
It was aimed at raising awareness of the event of littering in the city by pinpointing those responsible and encouraging people to change their behaviour.
This is incredible.
It's going to change their behaviour by putting them in a virtual stocks.
Marketing communications agency Ogilvy and Mather, Hong Kong, came up with the idea for the billboard campaign and enlisted US-based Parabon Nanolabs.
Ogilvy sent the company samples of litter found on the local streets, including chewing gum, cigarette butts and a condom.
Parabon used its DNA phenotyping system, Snapshot, to read tens of thousands of genetic variants from each sample.
From that data, the company says it can accurately predict ethnicity, eye, hair and skin colour, freckling and face shape.
This sounds like something out of Cyberpunk 2021.
This is fucking crazy.
I am really, really against doing this.
I'm really against this for a multitude of reasons, in fact.
But the probably foremost reason that I'm against this is because this is circumstantial evidence.
And this public lynching is being done by a marketing company.
And this isn't as accurate as it looks.
Age is impossible to determine through DNA alone, but still integral in creating an accurate portrait.
DNA data has been combined with other factors, such as demographics based on the type of litter and where it was collected, to determine the approximate age of the litterer.
So you don't even know how old the person is.
It's a stab in the duck.
It's an educated guess, but it's by far any kind of concrete evidence that you have.
And then you're going to create a portrait that might well look like someone else.
Hell, it could be that this litter was dropped by a father, and then the portrait comes out looking like his fucking son.
You know what?
All is forgiven, because the person behind this says that although DNA alone can only produce a high probability of what someone looks like, the purpose of the campaign was not to point fingers at specific individuals.
Which is great because, I mean, it really looks like that's the entire purpose of the fucking campaign.
I mean, you're only going out of your way to work out exactly how the person looks right down to their age based on the area that they were operating in and then portray their likeness that you have assumed across this entire fucking city.
But it's not to point fingers at individuals, it's about to provoke a conversation to create positive social change.
Well, I'm sure that living in Orwell's nightmare will not create positive social change.
You know, if you're not living in Orwell's nightmare, you're living in Huxley's nightmare.
Gender and racial bias can be unlearnt during sleep, new study suggests.
In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the overlords use sleep teaching to condition children to submit to their sinister moral values.
Jesus Christ, I just, I cannot even.
Now scientists have found a more noble purpose for the technique in a study that suggests deep-rooted biases about race and gender could be unlearn through a short nap.
It's like these people don't understand that you can't use the tools of evil for good.
It's, the, the, I just, this is like Geordie Tate saying the Holocaust was wrong because the Jews didn't deserve it.
It's like, no, you fucking idiots.
The Holocaust was wrong because eradicating people is wrong regardless who they fucking are.
Anyway, the findings appear to confirm the idea that sleeping provides a unique window for accessing and altering fundamental beliefs.
Even prejudices that we don't know we have.
Yeah, yeah, okay, no, that's fine.
I'm totally on board with everyone being brainwashed into whatever the agenda is through their sleep.
I mean, there's nothing sinister or subversive about that.
It's not like it's going against their free will or anything.
This is just fucking fine.
Distinct from overt racism or sexism, the study targeted so-called implicit biases that can shade the way we respond to others.
Project Implicit, a long-running online project by Harvard psychologists, has shown that 80% of people have a bias against the elderly.
Why?
What kind of bias?
Are we talking about, right, okay, you need to choose someone to go and play rounders with you.
I'm not going to choose Grandpa.
Sorry, I just have a bias against him for some reason.
For instance, that people often had a preference for white faces over black faces.
That is not prejudice.
There is nothing wrong with a person having a preference for white faces over black faces.
I have a preference for looking at naked female bodies over looking at naked male bodies, but I'm not prejudiced against the naked male bodies, you fucking lunatics.
Other researchers revealed that these biases can have consequences.
In video games, that is, when playing a video game with instructions to shoot only people carrying weapons, players are more likely to shoot unarmed black targets.
Well, that means that they're bad at what they're doing because they were instructed not to shoot unarmed people for a start.
And B, we don't know anything about this fucking game.
You've given us no information as if we're going to take your fucking word for it.
Another study showed that professors writing recommendation letters were more likely to introduce an element of doubt about junior female researchers than male ones.
You know what, my internet's actually playing up at the moment, so I can't actually look at that study.
So I'm just going to take your word for it.
I'm going to take your word for it that this is all completely on the level, on the up and up.
There's no ideological bias to the study at all, because goddamn, it's not like that's ever happened before with the Guardian cough, Jessica Valenti.
Cough.
So how exactly did they authoritatively go through and manage to reduce people's biases?
Well, the methodology is very interesting.
So to begin with, participants were showing female faces with words linked to maths or science, and in the second, black faces appeared with pleasant words.
So already they're assuming the biases that people are going to have in these cases.
During the tasks, two distinctive sounds were played.
One that came to be strongly associated with gender pairs and the other with race pairs.
Following the training, the participants took a 90-minute nap, and once they entered a deep sleep without their knowledge, one of the sounds was played repeatedly.
After the counter-bias training exercise and before the nap, people's biases tended to have fallen, but without the extra cues during sleep, their level of bias had almost recovered to the baseline after the nap.
How did you measure their level of bias?
Originally.
Anyway, when participants were played the sound cues during sleep, their bias scores were reduced by a further 56% compared to their pre-sleep score.
Their scores remained reduced by around 20% compared to their initial baseline when the participants were tested one week later.
The authors acknowledged that further experiments are needed to test how long the effect endures beyond the one week mark and whether it translates into changes in behaviour, because that's what this is.
In a commentary accompanying the paper, two other psychologists, Gordon Feld and Jan Bourne, write, the findings highlight the breadth of possible applications to permanently modify any unwanted behavior by targeted memory reactivation during sleep.
However, they caution that the use of the technique in future would need strict ethical guidelines.
Really?
I'm glad we finally fucking got to that.
Sleep is a state in which the individual is without willful consciousness and therefore vulnerable to suggestion.
Yes, and you would, you would, you're doing it in this experiment without their fucking knowledge that you're doing it.
For fuck's sake, this is really, really troublesome to me.
I can't envisage a future in which this is not abused.
Okay, I mean, you're talking about, oh, people's implicit biases, that has to be gotten rid of.
At what point do we stop and go, well, what's the reason for saying no to that?
You know, I mean, you may as well.
I mean, what do you want to be biased?
Are you a racist?
Are you sexist?
Of course you're not.
So just let us program you in your fucking sleep.
It's going to be the if you're not guilty, then you've got nothing to hide argument all over again.
Wow, that actually really pissed me off.
Thankfully, I've got something really stupid to follow it with.
Peter demands Britain's oldest pub change its name to show compassion for animals.
Because the animals are going to be like, you know what?
It would be really nice if the humans would just change the name of that pub.
Well, what was the pub called?
The pub is hilariously named Ye Oldie Fighting Cocks.
It would be an insult to humour for them to rename this pub.
So naturally the killjoys of Peter were on the case.
They say that the 8th century boozer in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, should be renamed to Ye Oldie Clever Cocks to reflect compassion for animals.
Fuck off, you fucking hippies.
That is just shit.
Regulars at the pub, listed as Britain's oldest by Guinness World Records, say the idea is bonkers, but they probably used less polite language than that.
And if they didn't, they fucking should have.
PETA director, Mimi Beck, Something said.
Changing the name would reflect today's rejection of needless violence and help celebrate chickens as the intelligent, sensitive and social animals that they are those poor, sensitive chickens.
Thankfully, it's not going to change and everyone was like, why don't you just associate it with history, you fucking lunatics?
In fact, speaking of lunatics, in the wake of the Irish referendum on gay marriage, there have been some people who are not happy about it, such as the Westboro Baptist church.
They are also deeply, deeply stupid though, as they have accidentally declared their hatred of the Ivory Coast after printing the Irish flag backwards on their signs, in front of which they did a merry little jig saying how much God hates Ireland, which someone had the foresight to record when we called it a sin.
Now the sieges are coming, and islands to blame, as you first and your blessing.
Just holy name.
God hates, god hates.
God hates our lamp.
God hates, barbed hates our lamp.
You're lying battling your.
God bless you soon returning with your sliding box, HIGH Quartine and CDBU.
I'm a German so glad we'll not listen to you.
god hates my hates my hates our land the board the lord you all first damn your hand and however drop a bag of beasties or diets get too small
Some people, but the Westboro Baptist Church weren't the only people getting their panties in a knot over Ireland's gay marriage vote.
Feminists were also annoyed about this.
Why am I celebrating Ireland's legalisation of gay marriage as a win for equality?
Progressives around the world celebrated this weekend as Ireland voted in favour of legalising same-sex marriage.
This win is significant and important for a country that only decriminalised homosexuality in 1993 and has long been dominated by the misogynist, homophobic Catholic Church.
The vote signalled to many a shift towards a more progressive cultural, social and political landscape.
Leah Varadka, Ireland's health minister, said, The vote makes us a beacon, alike to the rest of the world of liberty and equality.
It's a very proud day to be Irish.
So how exactly can a feminist ruin this for you?
This decision makes every citizen equal and I believe it will strengthen the institution of marriage, says Prime Minister Ender Kenny.
Oh, I see.
You don't like the equal part.
Just kidding.
It's actually the institution of marriage that they take issue with.
Are human rights inequality really based on the right for anyone to get married?
Is Ireland truly a model of liberty and equality?
Why are progressives looking to strengthen the institution of marriage anyway?
Why indeed?
Why wouldn't you just be pleased that gay people in Ireland have got the same legal rights as everyone else now?
You see, what our Killjoy opposes is not gay marriage.
She says, rather, I oppose marriage as a whole.
And more generally, I don't believe that allowing same-sex couples to wed signals a move towards equality, even though that's actually what the gay people in Ireland think.
But fuck it.
What would they know?
Our feminist blogger clearly knows a lot more than gay people in Ireland and says, while support for LGBT rights is growing worldwide, women's actual human rights remain unaddressed.
We could try and track down some rights that you don't have, but let's be honest with ourselves, this is about you feeling that you're not the centre of attention, isn't it?
Or it could be that you just hate men.
Liberal-minded folks quite easily pat themselves on the back for supporting the right to equal access to the institution of marriage without doing much of anything at all.
While they did go out and vote, liberating women from male oppression, on the other hand, I love it.
Here we go, here we go.
Means those in power have to give up a lot.
Well, who?
Name someone in power.
As Cather Pollitz wrote in The Nation, marriage equality costs society nothing and takes no power away from anyone because that's what this is, isn't it, feminists?
Someone else is having a great day.
It's nothing to do with you and you just can't stand it, can you?
Also, I love how this is clearly just power games.
That's what feminism is.
We want power, we want to take power from other people, despite the fact that chances are they legitimately earned their power and we simply nag people.
The author of this article hasn't actually been crazy enough yet.
She needs to go and howl at the moon for a bit.
In fact, gay marriage allows progressive heterosexuals to feel much more at ease about their choice to join the church of wedded bliss as they can tell themselves it is no longer the old-fashioned conservative institution of yesteryear.
It's now hip and open-minded and inclusive.
Well, it is inclusive.
They've done that.
They've shown that they are going to be inclusive with it.
And we are now all able to forget about critiquing the institution, asking why we continue to marry it all.
And why we continue to allow marriage to define our relationships and lives in such an overbearing way because we've so generously let the gays in.
Well, it's the fucking queers, isn't it, love?
There's just always a problem.
Honestly, what a bunch of inconsiderate twats.
Instead of petitioning to get the gays kicked out of marriage again, or in fact getting the entire institution of marriage dissolved, maybe we could take a step back and then remember that it's not mandatory.
Oh, no.
No, we're not done.
We're not done.
She's going to carry on about this.
In April, Politics asked why reproductive rights were losing.
While gay rights were winning.
She pointed out that Indiana's attempt to enshrine opposition to gay marriage under the guise of religious freedom provoked an immediate nationwide backlash.
Meanwhile, in many states, women still don't have access to abortions and women are even being charged with feticide for miscarrying or trying to terminate pregnancies themselves.
What does this have to do with Ireland's gay marriage vote?
But since you've brought it up, why don't we talk about the medical examiner who says the cause of death of this child was cocaine toxicity.
And the grand jury concluded that Gibbs had caused the death of her baby by smoking crack cocaine during her pregnancy.
That is to say that she was facing murder charges.
Really?
The charge was dismissed, of course, because it was just crack cocaine toxicity on a fetus.
It was nothing.
I mean, it was poor woman being oppressed.
But both cases represent a growing effort to criminalize pregnant women in the US.
Are you fucking insane?
This girl killed her unborn child by smoking crack cocaine and you think she is the victim.
She rants on about her rights to kill her unborn children a bit, and then she finally gets to this.
Marriage is not a progressive institution.
It's an institution founded on the idea of women as property, traded among men, and continues to be the site of oppression for women today.
Bitch, we are talking about two men getting fucking married, or two women getting married.
There is no male-female dynamic involved, you fucking self-centered harpy.
And apparently the most progressive thing that we could do would be to abolish the institution once and for all.
Well, I'm sure the gays in Ireland are all for that.
I mean, they've only just been campaigning for the rights to marry, to declare that they want to be together for the rest of their lives to the entire world under law.
But I mean, fuck it.
Fuck it.
We'll just abolish it because you want it abolished.
These aren't the only feminists going after the gays this week though, just in case you were thinking, well, it's isolated.
It's not a big deal.
The fuck it is.
Jermaine Greer attacks Elton John and David Furnish for deconstructing motherhood.
Well, I'm sorry, Jermaine, but I think feminists have rather deconstructed motherhood.
I think at the point where the feminist is defending the woman who killed her unborn child with crack cocaine and saying that she is the victim of a system that didn't get her an abortion fast enough, I'm going to worry less about what gay people are doing to motherhood.
So the two men are parents to sons Zachary and Elijah, who were born to a surrogate.
Referring to the fact that Furnish is listed on the birth certificates as the children's mother, Greer, speaking at the Hay Festival, said, Sometimes I think that really the problem is the concept of motherhood, which we can't give any real structure to.
What are you fucking talking about, you insane old bat?
Sir Elton John and his wife David Furnish have entered on the birth certificate of their two sons that David Furnish is the mother.
I'm sorry, that will give you an idea of how the concept of motherhood has emptied out.
It's gone.
It's been deconstructed.
Oh, really, Jermaine, really?
Do you think maybe the gays did that?
Or do you think maybe the feminists did that?
She said, we now have a genetic mother who supplies eggs.
It depends entirely on where she is if she is going to be allowed to know what happens to the eggs.
And women tend to care.
Well, no, she just sold her eggs off to these foster parents.
Why would she give a fuck?
An egg is not a sperm.
We do not produce 400 million of them in one go.
One miserable little egg pops out every month.
So what, Jermaine?
She complains that in some places you're allowed to know what happens for them.
In other places, you're not.
What you get is a reduced bill for IVF because a child is being born by people involved in using your eggs.
I'm sorry, did we talk about this?
Did we sit down and talk about what eggs mean to women?
Jermaine, are you fucking serious?
Feminists are far too busy talking about how they can erase last night's mistake.
They're too worried about how far they're going to have to travel to get their newly conceived child aborted.
Fuck what their eggs mean.
Fuck it.
They don't seem to give a shit, so why should we?
You know, I really don't think that there's all that much harm to be done through gay people having kids using IVF and donated eggs.
So fucking what?
Considering the absolute degeneracy that feminism promotes on a daily basis, this is really the least of my worries and probably should be the least of yours.
You know, I think I've actually become really biased against feminists and their cavalier attitude towards abortion.
It really is starting to piss me off.
When I hear about some woman who has killed her unborn fetus through cocaine toxicity and, you know, she's the victim because she couldn't get a proper abortion.
And then Jermaine creaking, well, what about women and their eggs?
I'm thinking, fuck you.
I'm really tired of hearing feminists talk about their unborn children as if they're a burden or a curse on them.
And as if they're not even human, that's my, I think that's really what it is.
So that was rather a downer and I'm not even finished yet.
We've still got a couple more stories to go through.
Thankfully, they're really funny.
Exhibition of Prince-themed art cancelled for lack of diversity.
Do you remember Prince, the little sex-crazed midget from the 80s?
Well, for some reason, a bunch of people were going to do an art gallery presentation featuring art that revolves around him.
But hey, you know what?
Each to their own.
You know, I mean, I think it's quite funny, but I also think that they are completely within their rights to make any kind of print-themed art they want and exhibit it however they want.
But the thing is, the show at Somerville's Washington Street Gallery titled, Dig if You Will a Picture, featuring illustration, photos, paintings, mixed media, quilts, embroidery, and silk-screened prints inspired by Minneapolis' funkiest son, has been cancelled.
The gallery offered this explanation on its calendar.
After much consideration, we have decided to cancel the Prince-themed show scheduled for June 2015.
In light of recent discussions, clearly a show of all white artists does not do justice to the subject.
And we would be unable to reorganise the show in a truly inclusive way in the short time remaining before the scheduled opening.
We are grateful for a dialogue around these issues and hope to revisit the show in future when we are able to present it with a more diverse representation of artists.
Holy fucking shit.
I mean, this is self-censorship of the highest order.
This is like the example of self-censorship.
They literally want to get together to celebrate the life of a minority musician and they feel that they can't because they were all born with the wrong fucking skin colour.
What absolute fucking madness.
I mean, The last thing I give a shit about is a prince-themed art show with mixed media, quilts and embroidery, but I don't want them to feel like they can't have their crappy art gallery full of prints shit because they were born wrong.
That's fucking monstrous.
Talk about white fucking guilt.
Finally, we come to the quite possibly most requested article that I've ever had.
The first arrest has been made for man spreading.
I didn't realize it was even a fucking crime.
So the police reform organising project, Prop, pulled over court testimony, talked to lawyers, and reviewed lawsuits and news reports to produce a PDF on New York Police Department practices over the past few years.
Apparently, two Latino men had been arrested on the charge of manspreading on the subway, presumably because they were taking up more than one seat and therefore inconveniencing other riders.
Before issuing an adjournment contemplating dismissal for both men, the judge expressed her skepticism about the charge because of the time of the arrests.
12.11am.
I can't believe there were that many people on the subway because bullshit were they.
This is not about whether they actually inconvenience other passengers or not.
This is about control.
But she did not dismiss the men outright but gave them an ACD, meaning charges will be dropped if they don't get arrested again for a certain amount of time.
Just so we're clear, woman kills unborn baby by cocaine toxicity.
Gets let off.
Men taking up too much space on a train at gone midnight.
Slap on the wrist.
If you do it again, you will be charged.
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