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July 19, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
28:08
This Week in Stupid (19⧸07⧸2015)
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Hello everyone, welcome to This Week in Stupid for the 19th of July 2015.
This is actually the year's anniversary episode of This Week in Stupid.
I have done this every week, with the exception of the week that Sean Head did one, for an entire year without missing one.
So I'm kind of proud of that.
But more importantly, thanks to everyone for listening.
I wouldn't have anything without you.
So this week we will begin with some Confederate flag nonsense.
And this is the least stupid thing.
New Orleans sets to remove Confederate landmarks.
Okay, fair enough, maybe you don't want these people being statues in your city if you feel that what they represent has really become so retrograde and defensive that it can't be...
You just can't stand to look at their faces every day.
Fair enough.
I can accept that.
I do rather think it's going a bit far when Memphis City Council votes to dig up the grave of a Confederate general.
I mean, he's been dead for over 100 years.
Why are you doing this?
So the Memphis City Council voted unanimously to exhume the body of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and move it to another location, as well as the body of his wife.
Just, you know what, getting rid of the statue, I can understand, but digging up the guy's grave, come on.
Unsurprisingly, his descendants are solidly opposed to digging up the graves and moving them any place.
But at the end of the day, fuck them.
We're in an iconoclastic frenzy.
We have got better things to do than to listen to those people who are against the desecration of the graves of their ancestors.
Things like a new social media campaign that's encouraging people to trespass on private property and tear down Confederate flags.
Now, I mean, I'm no expert, but I'm under the impression that gun ownership in the American South is rather high.
In fact, they seem kind of proud of owning their guns and they seem kind of intent on using them for self-defense.
So maybe it's just me, but black guys trespassing on houses flying the Confederate flag specifically to steal this flag strikes me as rather foolhardy.
While the Sarasota Police Department where this originated hasn't received any reports of stolen Confederate flags, other law enforcement agencies across the country have, including numerous reports in Anson County in South Carolina.
See, these poor people, right?
These people, like, hey, the Confederate flag's part of my history.
I'm not a white nationalist.
I'm not part of the KKK.
I just really like...
I mean, it'd be like...
In England, it's very similar to Flying the English Fag.
It's...
It's weirdly considered racist in England to fly an English flag.
It's assumed that you're part of some sort of white nationalist group.
And that really bothers me.
I mean, why shouldn't I, as an Englishman, be able to fly an English flight?
So I guess there's a certain part of me that really can empathise with these people in the South who are like, well, I'm not flying it for racist reasons.
Yeah, I can't help it if there are other racists who are going to do that.
But that's not why I'm doing it, and I don't see why I should sacrifice part of my history to accommodate them.
I mean, why would I let the racists win on this issue?
And this is a very similar issue to what's happening in video games and medieval European history, believe it or not.
When reality becomes fantasy, how video games are hijacking the middle ages, is an article that was posted on medievalists.net, and that is a site that I have a lot of respect for.
So when I start seeing them publishing articles about identity politics, I get a bit concerned.
Just listen to this.
Medieval Representations in Video Games was the focus of Victoria Cooper's paper, Playing Politics, Exploring Nationalism and Conservatism in Fantasy Video Games, which was given earlier this month at the International Medieval Congress.
Part of the session, The Use and Abuse of the Middle Ages in the Modern World for Nationalism and Identity, it examined the ways in which medieval imagery and history are often hijacked by far-right political groups and nationalist organizations to legitimise their historical narratives.
Well, that's exactly what's happened to the Confederate flag.
So, this research was conducted on message boards and the researcher found that the games don't inspire a specific kind of nationalism with another country per se, but they do harken back to, quote, the medieval, which becomes its own space and has its own nationalistic quality, where real heritage is superimposed upon a fictional world.
Cooper notes that the medieval world is often exploited by right-wing groups, such as the British National Party.
They use the symbol of Excalibur to promote Englishness, since, according to legend, Excalibur is the sword that confers the rightful kingship of England.
Okay, no, no.
Excalibur was the sword wielded by Arthur, the guy fighting against the English in their conquest of Britain, and was actually symbolized the kingship of Britain.
But details, details.
It doesn't matter that it's the exact opposite of that.
That's fine.
There's even an online shop profiting from this perceived sense of English nationalism that declares Excalibur the number one patriarch of the good soul.
Yeah, I'm sure there is.
The BNP are also idiots.
Fine.
However, it appears the BNP is no longer affiliated with the shop.
You haven't proven that they were previously affiliated.
All you've said is that they both use Excalibur fallaciously as an example of Englishness.
But the shop Excalibur is taking great pains to extricate itself from association by posting a large disclaimer on the front page saying, Excalibur has no affiliation or ties to any political party, all merchandise sold on Excalibur belongs to Excalibur, and any profits made from such merchandise stays with Excalibur.
Well, why would you tie them to the BNP except for the fact they're using English national icons?
Groups like the BMP in England often attempt to tie a medieval past to their nationalism by framing it with shirts like White and Proud or Anglo-Saxon as a form of identity politics.
Yes, but why do you play into it?
So Cooper's thesis focuses on the game Skyrim, where the Nords brackets Stormcloaks are a pseudo-Viking race, tall, fair-haired, and pale.
They're a seafaring warrior society that values honour, family and glory.
34% of the players interviewed pick Nords because the vast majority of them were from Europe and the United States, and they felt an affinity with the Nords' values and ancestral identity.
Players associate themselves with Nord Stormcloaks because the Imperial soldiers remind them of Roman Britain, and they feel connected to Northern people, their plight, and this sense of, quote, Englishness.
The Stormcloaks legitimize their cultural heritage.
Okay, for a start, you say it's a fictional world, and it is, but it's very clearly drawn from real events and real people.
It is not by some accident that the Nords just happen to look like the medieval Northmen.
And nobody needs a video game to legitimise their cultural heritage.
It's legitimate whether you like it or not.
In Players Who Identify Scottish and Northern English, the Nord Stormcloaks simulate a sense of Northern white nostalgia.
That is, ancestrally connected to the medieval place.
Cooper suggests that medieval-themed video games are a space where whiteness can be anchored in a, quote, happy history where a world is free of multiculturalism and white guilt.
I'm sure that's completely accurate.
I'm sure that people playing Skyrim to get away from multiculturalism and white guilt, because there's no multiculturalism in Skyrim.
All the cultures are just white, monocultures.
The Crusades also attracts people to these types of games.
Players create their own religions so not to cause offense or appear bigoted.
They cloak Christianity with an invented religion, yet one that mirrors reality.
Is that a bad thing?
You guys know that Jesus was a person of colour, right?
Cooper recalled the infamous Gamergate, the 2014 scandal that ended in 2014 and never went into 2015, that erupted in the gaming world when several prominent women challenged the status quo of the community.
I love it.
That's amazing, isn't it?
To take the actual events of the fact of the matter and completely reverse them to make these women now the brave heroines, sorry, who are going to challenge the status quo, despite the fact that they are the status quo.
It's not like Gamergate supporters are getting on the Colbert report.
But anyway, these women received rape, violence, and death threats, and just these women.
They and their supporters were also darks.
Again, just these people.
But the important thing is that the scummy white male players of Gamergate insisted that representations of games should be divorced from modern politics.
But the thing is, it's legitimate not to do this to Cooper because, as she says, many gamers continue to map their identity, heritage, and ancestry onto these games.
So whether or not they do or not is not something that she actually knows, and whether or not it's all of them or just a tiny minority, it's not something she knows.
But because she thinks that that's what they're doing, she's completely entitled to turn around and say, no, that you're making this political by enjoying what I consider to be a white male ancestry or some ridiculousness like that.
They claim to be apolitical, yet in the same breath, refuse to acknowledge the politics behind these games.
Well, to them, there are no politics in being white.
There are no politics in being brown.
These things are not political.
But to the people writing these articles, they absolutely are.
They cling to the notion that women didn't fight in the Middle Ages, fiercely stating this as fact.
Well, it's not that they need to fiercely state it as fact.
It's that essentially it was fact.
For the overwhelming majority of women, it was absolutely factual.
But the narrative continues.
Unfortunately for gamers, the tide is turning.
How many times have you heard that from a socialist?
The tide is turning.
And the inspection of their identities is happening whether they like it or not.
That's kind of rapey.
If someone says no, they mean no.
What part of that don't you understand?
But academics like Cooper will continue to challenge, examine, and illustrate the ways these groups misappropriate medieval history.
There is no misappropriation by Gamergate or anyone else in this way of medieval history.
You didn't get women warriors.
And the ones you got were the exception and not the rule.
It's just the way it was.
Well, you can complain.
You can sit there and deny that all you want, but you probably think that the only reason that men and women have physical strength differences is because how they are socialized to do sports when they're kids.
And I particularly love this piece of propaganda.
No girls allowed with Peter Griffin hiding in his pillow for with Gamergate underneath it.
No, idiots.
That's Family Guy.
You fucking moron.
That's...
Game & Game didn't make that.
Gamergate didn't even choose that image for you to put on there.
You chose it and titled it as Gamergate when it's got nothing to do with Gamergate.
You fucking moron.
Speaking of fucking morons, how stupid would you have to be to say that cancer is good and that vaccines are unsafe?
Well, you'd have to be a lecturer at the University of Toronto who teaches their students exactly that.
One of Canada's most prestigious universities has defended a course that promoted the benefits of cancer and taught students that vaccines are unsafe because quantum mechanics.
The Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto encouraged health science students to believe many things completely contrary to all scientific evidence and the university has largely endorsed the course.
The benefits of cancer!
I guess you don't live long enough to see your pension lose value.
I guess you probably get to the front of the line on rides at fairgrounds.
I mean, there probably are some tangential benefits to dying of cancer.
For the last two years, the university, which prides itself on its medical research, has run a course known as the Alternative Health Practice and Theory.
The lecturer was Beth Landau, a homeopath, who tells parents not to vaccinate their children.
That is just brilliant.
Fucking.
I wouldn't want to privilege real science over homeopathy, though, so homeopathy definitely deserves a place in mainstream universities.
Much of the course veered wildly away from the scientific mainstream, but it was week nine that really attracted attention.
Titling the week Vaccination, the King of Controversy, Landau set a reading list entirely made up of comprehensively disproven claims about vaccination, including that it causes autism.
Maybe she was vaccinated, she has autism, and you know.
She also publicly stated that measles and chickenpox are great for children's development, presumably not including the ones that die.
the fuck is wrong with this person who just fucking all right Apparently, the required reading and viewing requirements included material that appalled scientists from every field.
As the National Post reports, the course description includes the astounding line that quantum physics offers clear explanations as to why homeopathic remedies with seemingly no chemical trace of the original substance are able to resolve chronic diseases.
That's incredible.
I look forward to hearing how that's possible.
There is even a required reading paper titled, Cancer is Not a Disease, It is a Survival Mechanism, with no response from oncologists.
This claims that cancer keeps people with underlying sicknesses alive.
You know what?
If it turns out in the comments that people say, you know what, that's actually bollocks, mate.
That was an April Fool's or that was just something that was made up, it was completely fictional.
This didn't happen, this was complete nonsense.
I will not be surprised.
I'm really having trouble believing that this existed.
So the university held an inquiry which largely cleared the course, stating that the instructor's approach to the class towards the issue of immunization in particular had not been unbalanced, except for the fact that all it did was used pro-immunized anti-immunization sources and excluded exclusively pro-immunization ones, but fuck that.
The report also claimed that no students have complained despite the campus newspaper appearing to contradict that.
The university appears reluctant to discuss the course.
I can't imagine why.
And the chair of the anthropology department has denied that the lecture on vaccination occurred this year, but has not commented on the message sent to cancer patients.
Of course, this course was not entirely isolated, with one leading Canadian university conducting research for an organization that compares vaccines to the Holocaust and another recycling disproved conspiracy theories.
That's wonderful.
It's no great surprise that the University of Toronto decided to pull this course with all of the controversy surrounding it.
Frankly, I can't even imagine what was going through the heads.
As I said, this has to have been fictional.
I still can't really believe this is real it's just one of those things that I guess you've got to see it to believe it like Like this one, in fact.
Sex toy scandal.
Hundreds of dildos dangle from Portland power lines.
Hundreds of large white and orange dildos have been strung together in pairs and are now dangling from city power lines in Portland, Oregon.
F ⁇ ing.
Nothing screams degeneracy quite like this, does it?
Residents who seem to be embracing the appearance of the Phallix 6 toys have taken social media to post photos of sightings with the hashtag Keep Portland Weird.
A hashtag generally used to share quirky sightings and anecdotes from across the Pacific Northwest city.
Well, well done.
Now it's associated with dildos.
Fucking, I mean, that is just class, isn't it?
Others, though, seem to be outraged about the potential for children to see brightly coloured rubber penises swinging in the breeze.
Oh, they're just conservatives, aren't they?
Fucking fuck your children, though.
I mean, just you say, it's all fun games until a six-year-old child asks, what are those?
As they point to the dildos in the sky, but that doesn't matter.
Fuck you.
Fuck your kids.
We're being progressive and chucking sex toys over fucking power lines.
It's the sort of quirky, retarded thing that quirky retards do.
Let them be quirky and retarded.
What are you a fucking misogynist?
So now time for some pointless celebrity bullshit.
Now I don't normally cover pointless celebrity bullshit because it's pointless celebrity bullshit.
But this one was kind of interesting.
So Kylie Jenner, whoever that is, criticized by Hunger Games actress Amanda Stenberg for appropriating black culture with cornrow selfie.
Here is the offensive picture in question.
My god.
Black people have just lost all of their culture and now she possesses every single bit of it.
If only black people knew what to do with themselves now.
But frankly, I'm more offended that this has 1.3 million likes and 168,000 comments.
I mean, what is there to say?
Yeah, she's just like standing there taking a selfie.
She had cornrows.
She clearly goes to the gym a lot.
Fucking big deal.
God, people are so vacuous.
So the pair had a pointless back and forth in the comments that I literally don't care enough about to recount.
But then Stenberg decided to write a post that is possibly the most offensive thing I've ever read.
And I'm not a black woman, so why should I be offended?
But listen to this.
Black features are beautiful.
Black women are not.
White women are paragons of virtue and desire.
Black women are objects of fetishism and brutality.
This appears to be the mentality surrounding black femininity and beauty in a society built upon Eurocentric beauty standards.
What are you fucking talking about?
Why are you saying that black women are not just because you think that's how it looks?
You mentaloid.
While white women are praised for altering their bodies, plumping up their lips and tanning their skin, black women are shamed, although the same features exist on them naturally.
Who the fuck is doing this?
Who is shaming black women for plumping up their lips?
I mean, just, oh my.
Why are you saying this?
Are you trying to put black people down?
This sounds like some attempt to keep people in their fucking place.
But it gets even better.
She's also said, appropriation occurs when a style leads to racist generalizations or stereotypes where it originated but is deemed as high fashion, cool or funny when the privileged take it for themselves.
Well, I mean, I can't help but notice that the only racist generalizations or stereotypes that came out of this woman having cornrows in her hair came from you.
You're the one who asserted that black women don't have value and all this sort of nonsense.
No one else is fucking saying it.
Except for people playing Nintendo video games.
Nintendo's next Super Mario game has a bizarre, glaring flaw.
Can you see that giant human hand?
How could you not?
And I bet you're already thinking, well Christ, I can see exactly the problem with this.
So basically, you create worlds using the Nintendo Wii U GamePad, the tablet gamepad that comes with Nintendo's newest game console.
What happens on the gamepad is mirrored on screen, except a real-life hand is mimicked on screen using the hand seen above.
Oh no, I can see where this is going.
What if I was say a 10-year-old black girl, or a 30-year-old Japanese man, or literally anything other than an adult white woman, which the hand appears to belong to?
Hey, get a lot of this heteronormative trans-sexist twat.
You don't know that that hand doesn't belong to a trans-black transsexual man, just because it looks like the hand of a white woman.
Given the mainstream appeal of the mustachioed hero and his ongoing battle against Bowser, you'd think Nintendo, a company that's repeatedly shown willingness to be inclusive, would have thought about this.
Well, they probably did.
They probably thought, well, let's just make the hand female.
And the slapping the hair as fuck, we made it white.
That was, oh, I wish, black female.
Black female.
Idiots.
Why didn't we think of this?
When the author asked Nintendo reps about the hand and if it could be changed, they confirmed it couldn't be.
So what shit, lords?
They're sticking with their racist hand.
But I mean, this isn't a huge deal, and I'm not exactly offended.
It's just a bizarre and glaring oversight from a company that knows better than to include a white person's hand.
But you're not exactly offended, and it's not a huge deal, but you did go to the effort of writing an article about it.
Fucking hell.
Well, personally, I don't know why you'd let them off the hook so easily.
Just because Nintendo is staffed exclusively by racists, that's no reason to let them go.
Just like, for example, Blizzard being staffed exclusively by sexists is no reason to let them off the hook.
Does the Warcraft movie have a problem with women?
The answer is obviously yes.
But let's find out why.
So our author is starting to worry that the Warcraft movie may have a problem with women.
It's a problem that Warcraft itself has had for some time.
Warlords of Drainon make great efforts to include female characters, you know, but problems with women.
But while it's fantastic to see Yurrell, Draka and Agra appearing in Nagrand after we were explicitly told she wouldn't be part of the expansion, it's impossible to ignore the game's lousy track record, with leading ladies who are often forgotten, neglected, fridged, or simply never important enough to be mentioned or given names in the first place.
Because if there's one thing to take away from dealing with social justice warriors, it's that nothing is ever good enough.
These criticisms are made solely for the pleasure of watching you dance.
I'm currently in a fantastic guild where I can talk on voice chat without any fear of being called out for faking my own voice and pretending to be a woman.
If it's so bad to be a woman playing World of Warcraft, why would anyone think you would pretend to be a woman?
Or is it that you get a lot of free stuff and people have become wary of people pretending to be women to get free stuff?
Just a question.
The Warcraft movie director Duncan Jones says, Warcraft's always been a very welcoming environment for women.
Reading this, my eyebrows went up.
Even now, in a friendly, welcoming guild, I still meet people in game or chat or in groups who tell me I don't exist, that I don't belong, what a get out.
My last encounter with an individual was Thursday, July the 9th, and this was written on July the 15th, so six days ago.
So it's not like it's something that happens daily.
But the thing is, the internet and Blizzard's games by extension come with a side order of misogyny that's hard to escape, even in a fancy world about orcs and elves.
Well, how can you expect Blizzard to reasonably fucking put a stop to it then?
If it's so ubiquitous, if it's just so immersed in what the internet is, what do you expect Blizzard to do about it?
I particularly love this bit.
While Jones certainly has an obligation not to bad talk his source material, it feels like he's gone out of his way to talk about how great the game is.
While it may be a great game, its history with sexism isn't one of the things that makes it great.
Why not call out the game's great female characters?
Why not call out the number of women who play the game?
To say the Warcraft movie isn't going to be sexist, did Jones really have to tell the game's female playerbase that what they see every day has never existed?
That's not what he's saying.
He's just saying the game isn't about that.
And I'm sure the film won't be about that.
But why not just constantly talk about women?
Well, he's probably not a feminist.
Whether he doesn't realise what women experience in the game or he's trying to downplay it to promote the movie, neither bodes particularly well for how women are likely to be treated by the film.
So does the Warcraft movie have a sexism problem or doesn't it?
Well, we've put together these pieces from the limited information about the movie that's available to us.
We've seen little of the film to suggest what the finished product will be like, and that's part of the problem, because we're just going to assume that it is fucking sexist.
Jones' words might be easier to brush off if we had anything else to go on, but as it stands, they represent the bulk of what we know about the movie's female characters, and the disconnect between those words and the reality of the game we know is more than a little worrying.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Can you imagine being trapped in this person's brain and having these thoughts?
Day-to-day life must be living hell.
While Duncan Jones talks of the movie's lack of sexism, based in part on what he claims is the game's lack of sexism, there are only two conclusions I can draw.
Either he doesn't play the same world of Warcraft that I do, and he's making the film he describes, or he's making a film that is just as sexist as the game he heaps praise on.
Until we learn more, we can only hope that Warcraft's women are used as more than set dressing.
You are saying then that Warcraft is sexist?
You play it.
You play World of Warcraft, you've been subscribed to it for years, but it is wildly sexist.
And it's somehow the game's fault that someone playing the game says things to you you don't like to hear.
And these reasons are enough to make you think a film you don't know very much about at all is bound to be sexist because you're fucking mental.
These people are fucking mental.
So let's finish on a story that's going to piss off the average American taxpayer.
Taxpayers spend three and a half million dollars to find out why lesbians are fat.
Can't we just measure the caloric intake?
A US Health and Human Services study to understand why lesbians are fat has now cost taxpayers over 3.5 million to date.
The study, Sexual Orientation and Obesity, a Test of Gendered Bio Psychosocial Model, Wow, seeks to determine why there is a disparity in the obesity rates between straight women and lesbian women and straight men and gay men.
I'm sure it's nothing to do with the fact that men prefer to look at things.
You know, that straight men look at women and think, oh, I want a slimmer woman.
And gay men look at other men and think, well, I want a fit man.
But women tend to be happier for more emotional reasons and less for physical ones.
But no, it's probably patriarchy.
According to the study, it is now well established that women of minority sexual orientation, read not straight, are disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic, as if obesity is something that falls from the fucking sky and hits people without warning.
With nearly three quarters of adult lesbians being overweight or obese compared to half of heterosexual women, well, A, it's bad enough that half of heterosexual women are obese.
But B, isn't this rather a sort of chicken and egg thing?
In stark contrast among men, heterosexual males have nearly double the risk of obesity compared to gay males.
Yeah, that's probably true, right?
But I tell you what, I would spend a lot more time in the gym if there was a chance of me getting laid at the gym.
I'm just saying.
So not only are these disparities of high public health significance, but the project's going to continue until the 30th of June 2016 to find out that lesbians don't get enough exercise and they eat too many cakes.
This is your tax money.
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