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July 28, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
03:59:23
A Conversation with a Male Feminist
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Hello everyone, I'm having a conversation with Kevin Logan, a male feminist.
How's it going, Kevin?
Yeah, not too bad.
How are you getting on?
Yeah, really well, thanks.
So I guess the first it's difficult to get feminists to come and talk to me about, well, feminism and what they do and why they do it.
I guess the first question would be, why have you decided to come and talk to me?
Well, firstly, it's because there's unfortunately a certain part of feminism that wants to just talk to itself and navel guys.
And I think there's a propensity for that in a lot of movements online.
Whereas specifically, I wanted to talk to people like you or people like your followers.
I want to spread a message out beyond, as much as I enjoy enormously speaking to the social justice community and engaging with them and entertaining them or whatever.
I want other people.
I want to try and, I don't think for a second that I can change anyone's mind completely.
I'm not that great an orator, but if I can plant a few seeds in people's minds and make them think, then hopefully you could maybe come to a better understanding because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about feminism online.
Right, okay.
I mean, personally, I actually find your videos quite funny.
So I'm genuinely surprised that you're not more popular with the social justice community online.
So that's only honest, just my opinion, but I'm genuinely surprised by that.
But you're right, I think that there is an awful lot of sort of insular nature when it comes to online movements.
So I guess, okay, so why are you a feminist?
What drew you to that sort of ideology?
Well, I view it from a historical perspective, because I mean, although I'm sure we'll probably get on to it, me and you have had our disagreements about history or whatever.
We have.
I have a degree in history.
I'm hugely enamoured of it.
And I like to look at things from a historical perspective.
And I think women have been, by and large, the downtrodden people throughout history.
And okay, you can obviously point to instances of men being the case or of race being the deciding factor or whatever.
But by and large, even within oppressed communities, women are the most oppressed.
And so for me, basically, you make a society more free by freeing its women up, by and large.
And so for me, the idea of calling yourself, say, a gender egalitarian is basically a cup pout of saying, I'm for X, Y, or Z, but I'm not going to do anything about it.
Whereas feminism is about actually trying to create some sort of positive change.
Now, the thing is, right, there's nothing about necessarily the change that feminism is asking for that I object to.
I have got, I mean, I find myself coming from sort of like the sort of classical old school of liberalism where you don't have any rights to tell someone else what to do.
So I would never presume to tell a woman what to do because she's a person, obviously.
So, you know, I personally would, I would never think to presume to tell women, oh, you know, go that they, you know, not in any seriousness anyway, that they have to go back to the kitchen or anything like that.
I don't even think I've ever actually made that joke.
And so I guess the reason that I don't define myself as a feminist, and primarily I'm opposed to it, is because I find feminism, you know, the sort of modern mainstream popular feminism to be, well, very authoritarian and, well, kind of divorced from reality.
Right.
Well, I think that that's that's a point actually that a lot of anti-feminists sort of tend to bring up.
And I think to a degree, it's something of a straw man in the sense that I don't think the majority of feminists, certainly from my own experience, which is all I can really speak from, of course, from my experience in real life and from online activism, those people are by and large a minority, it seems to me.
That most feminists are actually, if you get to know them in any way, they're not really authoritarian dickheads at all.
There are some crazy ones, like Tumblr is just festoons.
Yeah, I think everyone, I think everyone agrees that Tumblr is just the clown car of the internet.
But I was actually, I'm actually talking about prominent feminist figures.
I mean, have you ever actually sat down and listened to what Gloria Steinem has to say?
Yeah, yes.
And I don't agree with a lot of that, if that makes sense.
Yeah, no, no, it does.
But hang on, but the thing, that's my issue, though.
Why then is she such a big deal in the feminist community if feminists generally don't agree with what she says?
Well, she's been around for a long time, so I think there's that, there's a sort of a sense of her being kind of like an old dinosaur of a movement.
So I think she's got that going forward.
But there are, I mean, for instance, one of the feminists that people seem, certainly people on the right seem to get along with is this Huff Summers woman.
Now, clearly, if she is popular in a certain circle, that means that surely it isn't defined simply as it being Gloria Steinem or I need Sarcisian, whoever, whoever you see as this authoritarian feminist thing.
It's a much more diverse and dare I say.
Yeah, no, there are obviously many branches of feminism.
But I think the I think Camille Palier sums up best when she said that, I mean, she considers herself in complete opposition to the Gloria Steinem wing of feminism.
And I think that, I mean, from observing feminism from the outside, I can see distinct strains of feminism that have formed, I know, I guess, sort of like blocks against each other.
Like the sort of Camille Palier Christina Summers block of feminism is definitively in opposition to the Gloria Steinem and Belle Hooks sort of block.
And that's the block I have a problem with, because the Palier and Summers block of feminism, is very much sort of libertarian.
It's very much empowerment.
It's very much women can get, you know, if, you know, if left to their own devices, women can just stand up and do what they want and no one can hold them back.
You know, it's empowerment.
Whereas the Gloria Steinem Bell Hooks wing is very much about dragging other people down, from my experience.
And that's the major objection that I have.
Right, well, with, say, with Huff Summers, I think my objection to her is that for all her talk of empowerment, I think, again, it's sort of along the lines of this idea of gender egalitarianism or whatever, that you're missing the basic fundamental problem that in order to actually empower women, you have to actually make changes to a system that has kept them down.
And she seems to think that basically, oh, no, all you have to do is tell women that they're not oppressed or whatever, and then they're not magically for some fucking reason.
That's a good point, actually, just to jump in there.
That's, I think, already been done, though.
Completely?
Yeah, I really think so.
I mean, what institutional barriers are there to women now?
Well, it's a common misconception.
And I'm actually currently doing a video about a certain guy.
And his whole thing is that, oh, show me one law where women are disparaged under the law.
And that's in most instances absolutely true.
There is a sense of trying to get a formal equality.
But that hasn't been reached.
There are, say, for instance, rape laws.
Yeah, obviously rape is illegal, but it's taken almost as a fucking joke by a lot of Western police forces.
It isn't dealt with properly.
And that disproportionately affects women.
Okay.
Let me just, there are a couple.
We can obviously carry on.
There are just a few things there that I want to discuss.
So I personally, I mean, I'm sure I have at times said, well, could you show me a law that discriminates against women?
So do you have any examples?
Not off the top of my head, although there are laws that are being passed, say, for instance, in America, in certain states, laws that are being passed to try and curtail women's rights to an abortion, even if in cases of rape or something like that.
So that's, I mean, that's an instance of on a much lower level than national level, but still of the law trying to get the women.
Yeah, no, I agree.
It is something.
But it's, I think that that's, I mean, there are women who are voting for that, aren't there?
Oh, yeah, and that's, I mean, that's, I know it's a point that's sneered at by much of, I don't want to say your fan, I don't want to speak for all of your fans.
Honestly, it's the internalized misogyny of essentially women voting against their better interests because they've been told by either, well, not just the media, but by society in general, that this is X, Y, and Z is right.
And often one of the points of control is, say, the church.
The church will tell women that abortion is this fucking hideous, awful thing.
And therefore, they will vote for things that deny women basic fucking health care.
Yeah, but I really think you're looking at it from the wrong perspective when you say that, though.
That's my primary issue with this.
Because you're talking as if these women haven't been able to make an informed decision of their own.
As if they're not smart, intelligent, upwardly mobile people who have decided, you know what, I believe in God.
And not only do I believe in God, I believe in the Christian God.
And therefore, I'm going to accept what the Christian God and Christianity have to say about the reality of the world.
And if one of the things that they say is that abortion is immoral, it's a sin, then they're going to be opposed to abortion.
Right, but the one point I would interject is that they're upwardly mobile, intelligent people now.
When they were inculcated in Christianity, they were not, by and large, their children.
But I mean, that's a problem with religion in general, though, isn't it?
Yeah, but that's my point.
That's one of the ways in which, even though it's not a legal form of discrimination or whatever, well, Christianity, obviously, because we live in the West, is the most predominant one we're aware of.
But obviously, Islam and Judaism and all this, they all have anti-woman doctrines that are inherent, that they teach to men and women as boys and girls that leads to an inequality later on in life.
So to say that you can just inherently empower adults with ignoring that they've been inculcated, a large proportion of them have been inculcated in essentially an anti-woman cult is, I think, to miss a massive point.
Right.
I don't think it's fair to characterize Christianity as an anti-woman cult.
I'm not a Christian.
Well, it's extremely.
It's extreme for, obviously, most Christians probably aren't that, but there is a significant enough majority, say, in America.
It's less so here in Britain, obviously, as we know.
But in America, obviously the evangelical right is a significant political force.
And they are inherently anti-woman.
I mean, their whole thing is about denying women fucking basic health care.
At the minute they're trying to defray Planned Parenthood, that's their big thing at the moment by fucking lying.
Yeah, the significant factor, even if it's not an absolutely 100% woman-hating fucking thing.
I think my issue is by saying that women not having access to abortions is anti-woman.
I think I take an objection to that.
And I just want to state my position before I go on.
I'm not against women having abortions.
I'm absolutely not again.
I'm a leftist.
I think that it should be fine for people to do.
We'll bring that up later as well.
We absolutely can.
We absolutely can.
But I think that it's, I don't want to say disingenuous, but I think it's maybe a mistaken thing to do to say that these people are anti-woman because they certainly don't consider themselves anti-woman.
Think they just see themselves as traditionalists and the women themselves as well.
I mean, they, in their opinion, the feta, the life life begins at conception, as I understand it.
And so, to abort a fetus is to murder a person.
Yeah.
And so, in their minds, that's what's wrong.
It's not that they're trying to stop women from being able to have reproductive rights or anything, because I mean, part of reproductive rights are contraception.
Well, there actually are moves to stop that as well, obviously, with, say, the Catholic Church.
Well, yeah, but that's the Catholic Church.
And they are the biggest religion in the world, to be fair, and they are adding to the massive age problem in Africa, for instance.
They absolutely are.
Don't get me wrong.
But I'm not arguing in defense of the Catholic Church.
I mean, there's a large number of Protestants in America.
Yeah.
And they're not arguing for the abolition of abortion.
And yet, these women are still arguing for the abolition of prevention, but they may well still be arguing for the abolition of abortion or at least the defunding of Planned Parenthood and whatnot.
So I think that it's important to delineate that because I don't think it's right to call them anti-woman because I don't think that in their minds they think of it as anti-woman either.
I just think they think of it as have some personal responsibility because it's not necessarily an inevitability that you're going to get pregnant.
No, but say, for instance, those that, again, I know it's an extreme instance, but it's an instance that happens in society within legislative bodies that the evangelical right have tried to get rid of, and indeed have been successful in certain states in America, of getting rid of a woman's right to have an abortion, even if she's raped, over which she has absolutely no fucking control.
Yeah, on that particular issue, I'm absolutely with you.
I think that if a woman's been raped and she wants an abortion, she should be allowed one.
And I agree that it's wrong for the Catholics to enforce against that.
Absolutely.
Well, that's what I mean.
In their mind, they might not be doing it for anti-woman reasons, but the practicality is that's what precisely the outcome.
So whether, like, in the, I mean, I don't want to compare religious people to psychopaths because I think that's fucking wrong.
Psychopaths don't believe that what they're doing is wrong, or sociopaths, sorry, don't believe that, or they don't care that what they're doing is wrong or evil.
They think what they're doing is right or moral in some cases.
And I think even though that's the case with these Christian nutters, what they're actually doing is anti-woman.
The outcome is precisely that.
If it were men in that situation, I don't think it would end that way.
I don't think they would have that kind of force.
This is what I mean, though.
I don't think you can characterize not being able to get abortions as anti-woman.
I think you can only really characterize it as being anti-abortion.
Yeah, but who does that affect?
Well, there's only 50% of us that are squeezing fucking babies out of our genitals.
Yeah, but it also affects the fetus, which is what they're concerned about.
Yeah, but like I say, the practicality is that women get fucked over by it.
And that is a way an institutionalized.
I don't think having a baby is being considered to be fucked over.
Well, being made to have a baby when you don't want to have a baby, that's getting fucked over.
Okay, I'm just trying to think of a good way of putting my argument.
I think that there are certain things that I think are definitely always going to be the way they are.
I don't think it's ever going to be that women don't give birth.
Maybe, maybe it will be.
Maybe it'll be transhumanist babies born in wombs or something, artificial wombs and stuff.
But let's just exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Realistically, I think that's always going to be the way.
And basically I I think that if you're arguing this line of thought then what you're essentially arguing is that reality has an anti-woman bias.
Evolution has an anti-woman bias.
And so I mean maybe there is that but obviously you can't change that and I don't think anyone should really try to because that's getting into some sort of fucking eugenics madness obviously.
Agree yeah agree.
But ultimately you have to when you accept that fact that only women are put upon in that way, that men don't have to carry babies and X Y and Z you should make legislative and allowance for that and not give into these fucking mad fuckers who for whatever reason whether it's to protect a fetus or and in some cases it is anti-woman in some cases it is just inspired by misogyny.
I'm sure there are individual cases of that but I don't I don't think as a movement you can characterize that.
Yeah the practical outcome is that you have people bombing abortion clinics.
That's what fucking ends up with that.
And that affects women far disproportionately than it affects men.
Although it does affect men obviously because they're half of that process and they maybe don't want the abortion or they do or whatever.
It's not just that women are put down in that way, but it disproportionately affects them.
And I think if the roles, the gender roles were reversed, I think you'd get the largely male legislators in these bodies, which it still is in the Western world, and in fact all over the fucking world.
I think you'd have a lot more sympathy for that cause.
I absolutely disagree.
I actually think that this is a major issue because of the opposite, because it's about women.
I mean, if you look at like, say, suicide rate statistics, it's insane.
It's insane how much more likely a man is to actually commit suicide than a woman.
And yet no one cares.
No one talks about it.
So I think that's it.
I would actually point to that as a reason that men should be feminists because unfortunately an often understated point online by anti-feminists is that feminism is about trying to get rid of dangerous gender stereotypes.
And as a man, you are expected to be stoic, stiff upper lip, you've got to be strong, you can't show emotion or feelings.
And when you internalise that on that basis, you are far more likely to go fucking crazy and do something silly.
You know, I actually don't buy into the stereotype of being a man.
You know, I actually, I really don't.
I mean, I've got no problem exactly.
You should go to the comment section of my video when your followers are calling me a pussy and a mangina and tell me that.
Well, yeah, but there's a difference.
I mean, that's them expressing their feelings.
You know, it's a very good idea.
But that's a widely held societal thing.
That if a man cries, at the very least, he's sort of ignored or he's told to fucking man up.
That's a really common sort of trope, for want of a better word, in society.
That is, but that doesn't mean that they can't show their feelings.
I think the issue is that crying isn't really very productive, but that doesn't mean you can't show your feelings, you know.
I just feel, I really do think there's a bit of a straw man.
Well, well, I don't particularly think it is because if what's the best example?
If a man comes Comes out and says, like I have, I've come out and shown an emotional side of myself in certain videos, like the one I made about there was a stray cat that I found I couldn't, they sort of disappeared and I was really hurt about it and it fucking cut me off.
And I put that in there and people said, Yo, you've got a man up.
Well, you've been such a pussy, it's just a fucking cat.
Like, that's and that's a widely held societal thing.
Now, maybe it's disproportionate on the internet to how it's treated in real life, but you can't deny that men showing their emotions is treated much more harshly than women doing so.
And that internalizes a lot because men are just as emotional.
You have just the same fucking physical makeup, in essence, as women, but you're told that you've got to be a man about it.
I agree that there are negative self-image and eventually suicide, you know?
I agree that there's a greater burden of expectation placed on men.
Absolutely.
Well, no, well, I don't think that was quite the point I was making because there's a huge burden of expectation on both men and women to act in certain ways.
I mean, specifically with emotions, specifically on that example.
Oh, well, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
And that then internalizes and that becomes suicide.
And in terms of people ignoring it, I think that's true.
I think politicians should do a fuckable lot more about that.
But the thing is, hang on, hang on.
Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but it's like, say, that becomes so.
Well, I'm sure there are cases that that is the case, where it's something like that, where he's like, I just, I feel that I can't express myself, and now I'm going to commit suicide because of that.
But the thing is, I don't think that the majority of suicide cases for men are because of that.
I think that's a minority of it.
I think a lot of it is men, frankly, being done over by the system.
Are men really being done over by the system?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, there's an example of a guy the other day who was a sperm donor who is now legally liable for the children that he inadvertently created by being a sperm donor.
And that's that's, I mean, in America, if you don't, if you don't pay this, you can be in some real trouble.
You know, I mean, in Britain, it's a lot of people.
That's fucked up, absolutely.
It is.
And that's the thing.
You didn't even know about it.
You know, that's the thing.
And this is the issue of feminism.
It's all about the entire focus is on women, you know.
Yeah, well, to a certain extent, yes, but because it's predominantly women who are feminists and they're interested in, and again, I agree with him to a large degree that you empower a society when you empower its women.
Because for all the instances you can bring up about a man being fucked over by the system, women get fucked over as a gender.
It's not just individual instances or society that get done that way.
Women in general.
You can see even the really, really powerful women get, by comparison to the really, really powerful men, get treated much more harshly.
They get treated as if they're fucking windows.
Look at the way Hillary Clinton gets talked about as if she's fucking dirt.
Because she's a woman.
Oh, well, you can't have a woman bleeding in the fucking White House, can you?
I mean, it's just... I don't think... I've...
I mean, I've never seen anyone talk about Hillary Clinton that way.
See, people talk about Hillary Clinton as if she's the corporate candidate and therefore she's treated as such.
Is she any more a fucking corporate candidate than any of the Republicans regularly?
No, but that's the point.
That's exactly what I mean.
And she's corporate as they are.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm not here to fucking defend Hillary Clinton by any stretch.
No, I know.
She's not my candidate.
But the point being that she's treated as weak because she's a woman.
You saw this.
Okay, I know Barack Obama was treated in a similar way as well because he's seen as a leftist in America or whatever.
But she's treated as weak.
Would you want a woman answering the call for a fucking nuclear war or X, Y, and Z?
And a man is inherently treated As a more strong individual, just on the basis that he's got a cuck instead of a vagina, and that's fucking on that basis there, or is it on the basis that nobody gives him the benefit of the doubt?
Nobody gives who the benefit of the doubt, sorry, a man the benefit of the doubt.
Well, no, that's precisely the point I'm saying: that you they are given the benefit of the doubt, and women are not.
Yeah, but no, no, I don't think they are, though.
That's that's the thing.
I think that there's this underlying belief that, oh, well, men are just given the benefit of the doubt.
It's like, well, okay, but whoever gave you anything for free?
Me, fuck nobody, exactly.
Nobody gave you anything for free, but your mum or your grandmother or your wife, your daughter, they're going to get given things for free their whole lives.
How explain that to me?
What do you mean?
There are going to be men their whole lives who give them things for free in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with these women.
For sexual intercourse.
Not necessarily for sexual intercourse.
But I mean, honestly, I mean, probably eventually that is what they want.
But they're going to do it for a whole number of reasons.
You know, just validation by women is something that a lot of men ask for and crave.
You know, they absolutely crave it.
You'll never find a white male quota, will you?
But you'll find female-only shortlists.
So in the Western world, you don't need a fucking white male quota.
Look at Parliament.
It's a white male club.
Yeah, but it's only a white male club because nobody gave them anything.
No, seriously, have you seen the fucking makeup of the current British cabinet?
Nobody gave anything.
They were given everything.
No, no, no.
Well, okay, I'm not talking about them specifically.
Well, we're not fucking people, you know.
I mean, we can talk about class privilege, but I thought we were talking about gender privilege.
And so, I mean, yeah, okay, as a class, then yes, you know, as a class, they're all doing very well.
So is Theresa May and Harriet Harmon and all that?
You know, they're no different.
Oh, yeah, they're the eggs.
Don't bring them up as if they're fucking atypical.
Look at the cabinet.
It's mostly men.
It's mostly white.
It's mostly heterosexual.
That's what that is.
You don't need quotas for those fucking people.
They're already well over-represented in all of those powerful bodies.
Same with the corporate institutions.
Look at that.
How are they represented?
That's what I mean.
I'm trying to report.
They represent the interests of white people.
They represent, as a proportion of the population, they're much, much higher than the rest of us, if that makes sense.
Yeah, no, I know what you're saying.
They don't need a quota for that because they're already overrepresented.
Sorry, I'm just trying to.
The issue, I'm trying to speak to your experience particularly.
And I know I'm not trying to be a dick or sound condescending, but I can see that we're having a misinterpretation here.
What's the difference from a class perspective between, say, Theresa May and David Cameron?
Not a great deal, I would suggest.
Exactly.
And so they're both in the parliament.
But do you think that David Cameron received any kind of assistance getting into the parliament over Theresa May?
In the sense that he didn't have to defend himself as a strong leader on the basis of his gender, then yes.
No, but he had to defend himself on every other basis.
As he should, as an elected representative, yes.
Agreed.
Agreed.
He didn't have to prove himself beyond that.
Whereas Theresa May, and I don't want to have to defend her because she's no, I don't blame you for not wanting to defend her.
Despise her, but as Home Secretary, which is the Interior Minister or whatever in America equivalent, that she had to show herself to be strong beyond her gender.
She had to prove that just to get to the basic starting point of being judged as a politician.
Yeah, but I'm not sure.
I'm not sure that it is necessarily beyond her gender.
I'm not sure I believe that because why was it made a point of when was Harriet Armin the first?
I can't remember, but she was the Theresa May was.
She was the Labour one, yeah.
Yeah, that she that they when a woman gets to that position, it's made such a fucking big deal of it's not, and it's not just from a historical perspective of oh, it's the first one, it's yeah, but who's making the big deal about it?
You know, I mean, I wasn't the right-wing press, and actually, to be fair, I like the left-wing press as well.
Well, that's my thought.
I don't really see the right-wing press saying, oh, look, a woman's doing it.
I see the you know, the pro-feminist press saying that it's a well the pro-feminist press big it up because it's a step forward for women, and I think that's that's fine.
You, you're, you're obviously going to, in the same way that you do with Game Maga, you're going to gee up your own side by being access it, and that's fine.
But what I'm saying with the press coverage you get is that Theresa May or Harriet Harmon or whoever is judged by their gender first.
So, just to get to the starting point, to be on a level playing field, to be judged as a politician with a man, they have to prove that they're strong enough to fulfill essentially a male stereotyped gender role of being a strong, assertive leader just to get to that starting point to start the race.
I think that we're being too general here because I mean, I would look at a lot of the leaders that we have, and I don't see any of them as being strong, assertive leaders.
So, well, I think you have to be to a degree because there's a lot of scrutiny.
I'm not saying they're great leaders like Churchill or fucking Napoleon or something.
You know what I mean?
They're not that because we're in an incredibly shrunken political state at the moment.
That's a fucking damn shame.
But by comparison to their peers, they have to prove themselves as politicians as they fucking should.
They're elected leaders paid by my fucking tax bombing.
So that's, I absolutely expect that to happen.
But for a woman in that same situation, just to get to the same place, and again, I don't want to have to repeat myself by Prinova, but she has to prove that her genitals aren't going to be some sort of fucking hindrance to her being strong, you know?
And that's ultimately why I think gender roles hurt.
Right.
And that's why I think feminism is necessary.
But the things I'm not convinced of that.
I'm really not seeing anywhere that's marking women down for being women.
Or I mean, maybe, maybe it is, and I'm just not seeing it, but I'm really not seeing it.
But what I am seeing are female only quotas.
I am seeing preferential treatment.
Yeah, well, it's a complicated issue.
Obviously, in Britain, it's called positive discrimination in America.
Oh, what the fuck's it called now?
Affirmative action.
Affirmative action.
Yeah, you have women-only quotas or black preference or whatever.
And that's sort of it's complicated because, in theory, I'm an egalitarian.
That if you're the best person for the job, you should get the job.
But ultimately, I like to think that we can speed the fucking process along a little bit because to inherently suggest that the current state we're in is because it should naturally be that way is to suggest that white heterosexual men are inherently better than everybody else.
And I don't think that's okay.
Okay, I do have a point here.
Right.
So the issue I have is that, like you say, there are female only quotas.
So there are going to be women who are chosen.
I'm not saying that they are good or bad or anything like that.
I'm not saying they're not skilled or anything like that.
But what I'm saying is they don't necessarily have to demonstrate those skills, at least to the extent that a white man going for the same position would have to, to be shortlisted in the same way.
He would have to prove himself above and beyond because there's no one saying, oh, we'll shortlist him because we have a quota for white women and look and lo and behold, a white woman has come along.
If I like for white men, then lo and behold, a white man's come along.
Whereas that does happen for women.
Yeah, but there's a reason why those quotas have had to be put in place because the natural process of allowing women or black people or homosexuals or whoever, whatever minority you want to choose, to get into those positions isn't happening.
There's clearly a glass ceiling of sorts in the way.
And it's not naturally going to disappear.
We haven't been trying for that long, I suppose, but there's been a couple of generations now where this kind of politically correct idea has tried to be given the space to breathe.
And the backlash to it has suggested that actually it's not going to be allowed to fucking happen by a largely white, largely male, largely heterosexual establishment.
So you have to push that process along a little bit.
Okay, but you just said it's not going to happen naturally.
Therefore, why would we not say it's natural that white men would be in charge?
Well, unless you want to go down the sort of white supremacist line of saying white supremacists.
I mean, you know, I know you're not.
That's the whole point I'm saying.
Yeah, but if you go white, you're going to have black men in charge, aren't you?
So why is there always men in charge in the charge?
I'm not suggesting that we should have over-representation of minorities.
I want representation or representativeness.
And so you have to push that process along because if you look at the fucking league tables, Britain lags far behind in so many areas, female representation in virtually every walk of powerful life anyway.
Yeah, they do.
We have a much smaller percentage of Asian and black people in parliament, for instance.
And clearly, even though white people can do just as good a job of representing the interests of black people and their constituencies, I think it's still good to show young black kids or young women or whoever growing up that they can do X, Y, and Z. Whereas if you've only got white men in charge, it shows to those people, oh, well, fuck you, basically.
You can't come and do this.
This is our club.
And that's not right in a democracy.
Well, okay, that's interesting.
Because, okay, my point wasn't necessarily about race.
It was more about gender.
My point is no matter where you go in the world, you're going to find men being the overwhelming majority of in positions of power.
And it's all across the world.
So I think it's not unfair to say that this is a natural state of affairs.
Well, it is in the sense that, yeah, because, I mean, it's a common talking point by anti-feminists.
You know, that doesn't mean that it's right.
You know, I mean, rape is completely natural, but it's not right.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, you know, I'm not saying that necessarily, but my point is, you talk about the white male establishment keeping them out as if it's on purpose, as if it's something that they've done or consciously do or anything like that.
And I think it's important to delineate between like the outcome rather than the intention.
I don't think there's any intention to keep women or minorities out of politics.
Well, it might, it's changed in recent times, but for a fucking long time, there were very, very openly racist elements within mainstream politics.
Yeah, but that was back in like the 60s and 70s.
Well, there are still people alive voting from that era.
There are still people in Parliament that were in Parliament during that era.
Yeah, but I mean, if you ask them what their positions are, I can't imagine that they haven't changed them.
You know, I mean, even the BNP claim they're not racist.
Well, every fucker can claim they're not racist.
You don't take people on their fucking word, especially a politician's fucking race.
Of course, of course.
And there were clearly a significant proportion, considering the fact that you said the BMP, it wasn't that long ago they got a million fucking votes.
So clearly there's a groundswell of, if not necessarily neo-fascism or anything like that, there's a groundswell of and you can see actually with the uptick of the anti-immigration debate or whatever that's happening right now, or the anti-EU thing, there's a certain xenophobia, there's a certain racism, and I believe there's still a certain sexism inherent within mainstream politics, certainly in Britain.
And I think you can see that in America as well.
If you look at Donald Trump with his fucking Latinos and rapists and thieves thing, you know.
Yeah, I don't think Donald Trump is definitely that's certainly a part of it.
But yeah, I will agree that for the most part, it isn't intentional.
But again, I don't really give a fuck about the person's intentions.
It's a practical outcome that I care about.
Right, okay.
That's interesting.
Because, I mean, my concern is not is I don't like the idea of creating a system that has injustice built into it.
That's my problem with all of this.
Well, yeah, but to to call yourself, and I don't know if you do call yourself this, but again, to go back to the gender egalitarian thing, to call yourself that and then to essentially do fuck all about it is to side with the inequality that already exists.
Well, okay.
There are a few things there that we need to talk about before I can really make a definitive statement on that.
But the objection that I have here is that what you're going to be doing is anti-meritocratic.
You're going to be passing over people because of the inherent things that they were born with.
They were born black, they were born women.
They will have been born a certain way.
And therefore, you're discriminating against someone else because they weren't born that way, regardless of what their talents and what their merits are.
So that's my problem with quotas.
You're going to be discriminating against people who may well be the better person for the job based on the way they were born.
I think that is inherently wrong.
now i think i think it's important we discuss the the topic of representation um now this i take it you think that parliament should be 50 50 between men and women I don't think it has to be exact along the lines of gender or race or anything else.
But I think it's important that you see certainly a much larger, because at the moment it's a really paltry amount of women in Parliament.
It's much higher.
Well, you talk.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
For the good of all people to see that they are represented in those powerful institutions, those very high-profile institutions you see on the TV and all over the place that have a huge impact on people's lives.
For no other fucking reason than to be role models for the next generation of upcoming people, because to suggest that only, say, I don't know how many people, let's say 20% or whatever.
Well, I've just got it.
I think it's 25%.
25%.
And 35% for the Scottish Parliament and two-fifths for the Welsh one.
Okay, well, that's, yeah, that's two-fifths is much more reasonable.
But certainly, to say only one quarter in the national parliament is not good enough because that would suggest that if you were to say that that is the natural order of things and that we shouldn't try and do anything to try and change that is to suggest that women are inherently less valuable as leaders or legislators, which I think is a fucked up and wrong attitude.
Especially considering some of the men in the parliament are for my shoelaces, you know.
I'm totally with you.
I don't trust a politician at all.
In fact, I think the people who become politicians, well, that probably should qualify you for, disqualify you from being a politician.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, not just that, but if you go into it, it's a fucking career choice.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I would actually be in favour of some sort of jury selection form.
Because I mean, you won't have people necessarily running the institutions, but it's the people, maybe like a council of fucking, like a jury or something.
But anyway, Democracy, I think Churchill said it was the least worst option.
Yes, it's because you can't have a system like that that allows people their proper say, if that makes sense.
I'm not against experienced politicians because you need to know the sort of levers of power, but you need to know how to fucking write laws and stuff.
Whereas you've just walked in up the street or whatever, you know.
But it comes with its own set of problems.
But yeah, so I mean, I've just got some summary thing up here.
I'll tweet in, hopefully, if you need to.
It says 191 women MPs were elected in the 2015 general election, 29% of all MPs and a record high.
So now it's just under a third of all of the MPs are women.
25% are members of the House of Lords and 35% for the Scottish Parliament and then two-fifths for the Assembly in Wales.
Not to clause over that, because I think one of the leads you buried in that, not intentionally, I'm not suggesting you were being disturbed.
But the House of Lords, which for those who don't know, is 100% appointed.
There's no fucking fuckers that ever voted for the House of Lords member.
Is like you say, how many was it?
Was it 20% or something that were favourably?
25%.
25%.
Suggests to me that the establishment have been attempting to keep women out because that's 100% appointed by establishment figures from the government and from the opposition and all the rest of it.
And yet you've ended up with one in four being female?
Right, okay.
I think that shows us even if it's subconscious, maybe it's certainly a sort of an old boys club, you know?
Right, okay.
Well, okay.
I think that the issue I have, my thoughts on this would kind of encompass that as well.
So I'm obviously not against a percentage of female politicians, and I don't mind what that percentage is.
I just want it to be freely and fairly chosen based on the merits of the candidate in an egalitarian, meritocratic fashion.
And so I'm personally against quotas.
Well, in terms of the parliament, I don't think you're doing yourself a great service there because the quotas you're talking about are for political parties.
So you still have a free choice as an elector to vote for whatever the fuck you want.
Well, that's true, but then they still for each constituency.
That means that, you know, whereas you could have had a different candidate for a particular constituency, they will have chosen a woman candidate specifically because she was a woman and not because of her talents over someone else.
So it still plays out.
But this thing, I mean, do you not think that, I mean, so do you think the reason that there are less women because I mean, in my opinion, it's because less women, frankly, have got an interest in becoming politicians.
Well, this is the point, actually, that I sort of wanted to bring up about the dreaded P-word, patriarchy.
And again, it goes back to the institution of laws.
That yes, there's no law that says we're going to prevent women from becoming politicians.
For women are free to stand as men are, as long as you're above 21 and all the rest of the world.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah.
But it's that women and men are social, or boys and girls more specifically, are socialized differently.
That men or boys are taught by society and by sort of generally accepted parenting standards to be more assertive and dominant, whereas women are taught to fucking do makeup and shit.
And so that then bleeds into, and not just that, but again, via the churches or the mosques or the synagogues or whatever, they're taught that women should be subservient to men.
And all of these factors come together as a sort of less formalized structure of a patriarchy than it ever used to be, because it used to be literally legally enforced, but now it isn't.
Right, again, to mean that women are less likely to want to go into that role.
And the fact that the media portray women politicians in a different way to men and attack women for their gender in much more obvious ways will be a sort of a factor that women will take into account and then decide, oh, fuck it, I just don't want the stress of that.
Right.
So, I mean, so are you saying that you were socialized to be more dominant and aggressive?
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
Yeah, you can see to a degree, say, with the different sports that boys and girls are taught to do in schools.
Men play much more physical contact games than girls do.
I mean, I went to an RAF school, and the girls and boys actually did the same sports.
Okay, yeah, but that's I can't speak to that.
Yeah, that's an outlaw.
I went to just a fucking bug standard comp.
And actually, it wasn't bug standards, very good school, but it's you know, we did rugby and football and contact sports.
And by football, I mean sucker, proper fucking football.
Yeah, yeah.
Contact sports, whereas girls did fucking rounders and stuff like that, where it's non-contact by and large, you know.
So, those sort of small things all add up to becoming this much larger thing.
Well, this is an interesting point there.
One of the things that was, well, it was just something that the girls always said at schools that they hated doing rugby.
They absolutely hated it.
All of them hated it.
The female rugby coach was, well, she looked like a butch lesbian, and the girls really didn't like rugby.
And I think after a while, they got it changed to hockey instead because they simply did not like doing rugby.
And do you not think there might be some sort of biological reason now?
There might well be a certain biological reason, but it's that socialization which doesn't take any of the potential differences into account because clearly there are lots of women who would want to play rugby, as can be seen by the fact that you've got semi-professional rugby leagues in Britain that are female only.
So clearly, there are a lot of women who would want to play rugby, and clearly there are lots that don't.
And again, some of that might be biological, some of that might be upbringing and expectations of what you should and shouldn't be as a man or a woman.
Possibly, but I find that I think the overwhelming majority of women would be against having to play rugby at school.
I really do.
I don't think that's a good idea.
Maybe that's so, but I don't think unless you did some sort of scientific study which could prove otherwise, I don't think you can say, oh, that's biological.
Because again, it goes back if you're taught that playing with dolls and doing makeup as to a fucking child is your role as a woman or as a girl, then you're going to grow up to maybe not like the rough and tumble of rugby.
Whereas if you were socialized, even if you were born female but socialized as a male, you might well actually be more inclined to play rugby or whatever.
Okay, well, since we're moving on to the subject, so what's your opinion of evolutionary psychology?
You're going to have to define that slightly more narrowly, if that makes sense.
Oh, right.
Okay.
Okay, that's fine.
Basically, there have been experiments done, studies done with other primates.
I think it was marmosets and chimps.
Right.
Where basically with the young chimps, I'm specifically more familiar with the chimpanzee one, where they were given a selection of toys to play with, and the female chimps would almost always choose dolls to mother, and the male chimps would choose things like trains and trucks and stuff to sort of run around and be boisterous with.
Do you think there might be some sort of inherent sort of masculinization or feminization based on biological sex?
Well, very possibly so, but I think to compare humans to chimps in that way, I think is, I mean, obviously we are chimps.
But we've moved beyond the Dawkins line.
We alone, as members of the animal kingdom, can reject our Darwinian past.
That we don't have to just go along with that, if that makes sense.
We can accommodate in our society for people who don't fit that binary view.
I agree.
And that's, I think, what's called biological determinism.
It's, you know, what you were born as, it doesn't have to be what you are.
So I fully agree.
You know, it's, it's not.
But the thing is, I also think that that attitude kind of implies, I think that there's always the opinion there when people take that attitude to go the whole other distance and to say that, okay, well, that means that it doesn't even affect their preferences, you know?
And I actually, I think that's gone too far when you've got to that point.
Because I think that, frankly, you know, the biological imperatives of women probably do affect their choices.
Even if they choose to like say, you know, I mean, you know, I mean, the women could play rugby, of course.
You know, they were, I'm sure they were very good at it as well, but they didn't really enjoy it because it didn't really, well, I think probably they weren't biologically sort of designed for that sort of sport.
Does that make sense, or am I not?
Yeah, no, there might well be a significant element of biology in that kind of thing.
But to bring it back to, say, politics, we as a species can look beyond just that biological thing and say, well, we can be better than that.
We can reject that.
We can create a society which allows for women who are that kind of way to be that way.
We can allow for women who want to be leaders to be leaders.
But unfortunately, we've still, on a basic familial level, still stuck in a boy girl, you know, fucking pink ribbons and fucking dolls and boys pretending to be fucking soldiers sort of mentality, unfortunately.
And that leads into people making decisions later on in life, which can widen the gap between what we might see as an evolutionary inclination toward one thing or the other.
And actually, it's a socialization problem.
Right.
Doesn't make any sense there.
No, no, that absolutely does make sense.
I think that you're probably right to a certain degree as well.
But the thing is, I think that maybe you're looking at it with more, and I hate to say this, a sort of outdated point of view.
I mean, what sort of percentage of women do you think would be inclined to do rugby or to be leaders?
Because I think that like 29%, from the women I've met in my life, from my own personal direct experience, that I mean, that seems probably like a rough percentage that might be correct.
And that might be true.
I mean, if you look at like the percentage from like the 80s onwards, when you got women into sort of parliament, it kind of doesn't really go up very fast after about 20%.
So, you know, it kind of this is the sort of amount.
And now we're in quotas to try and get extra women in, and we're having trouble getting extra women in.
It strikes me that, you know, maybe like 20 to 30% is the number of women who are inclined to do this sort of thing.
Yeah, but again, that argument works in terms of not having quotas if you assume that the difference between the inclination biologically for men and women to want to go into that is inherently, say, 30% for women and 70% for men or whatever.
Whereas I don't think that is necessarily the case because you still have that socialization, which is still happening.
However outdated you might think that is, it's still happening.
It's still a thing.
And so it's clearly going to be having an impact.
So in order to try and push that process forward, I think the affirmative action political positive discrimination thing is still a necessary thing.
And again, I know we're talking specifically about sex, but race is still a massive issue as well, because the underrepresentation of minorities when it comes to race is still a big thing.
And that clearly isn't, I don't think you could argue, a biological thing.
No, I mean, biological.
Yeah, no, I agree.
I don't agree with that.
That's biological either.
But just focus on this quickly, just to get back to the gender thing.
I do think that there is a marked push to get women to be leaders.
I see it all the time.
And I've seen it for a long time as well.
It's not just, you know, in the last year or something that this has been happening.
I remember being at school and they were saying the same things.
So.
Could I just ask?
And you can tell me to piss off if you want.
How old are you?
Because I'm just 35.
So you're not.
See, actually, you're only about seven years older than me, right?
So you're not going back that far when you're at school then.
No, no, no.
I mean, we're not talking about the 50s or anything.
In the sort of 80s and 90s, they were, you know, everyone is equal.
You know, women should be promoted as sort of, you know, various leadership positions.
I can't think of any off the top of my head.
But it was stuff I didn't really care about.
You know, I just wasn't interested, but it was, it was definitely, you know, there wasn't, you know, I always hear feminists like talking about all the, they're socialized at school to do this.
And I'm thinking, I was just raised in an egalitarian school.
Everyone did the same thing.
You know, everyone was encouraged in the same way.
I don't want to belittle your experience, but you said you went to an RAF school.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's not a normal.
Well, I went to lots of schools.
I wasn't just one school.
Oh, okay.
Well, from my experience, and I don't want to say my experience is more typical than yours, but from my experience, I think women, or young ladies, especially, the expectation that's placed on them leads naturally to them being more submissive.
And that's, there might be a biological part of, you know, part of that, or there might be a biological aspect to it, but I don't think that's good enough to explain the disparity, especially, say, in America, where it isn't nearly 30%, is it?
It's a much stronger.
I'll check.
I believe, anyway.
And I don't think that can be explained away just by saying, oh, it's, you know, we're like the apes or whatever.
It's a biological imperative.
I don't think that's correct.
Well, I mean, I personally don't think that British women are submissive.
In my experience, they rule the roost.
Well, it's obviously the sort of thing in society of the kind of the strong matriarch.
But that strong matriarch exists largely in the home.
They're not going out into the world making some big political impact or economic impact.
They're essentially a kind of strong slave in their own house, in essence, because they're financially dependent on their husband going out and gaining money to come back.
Yeah, but this kind of sounds like American slaveholders being financially dependent on the slaves.
It's not like the man is ever going to be able to say, no, I'm not going to give you any money.
The legal system is entirely set up for if a man chooses to do that, then he faces legal ramifications.
This is why women want marriage and men don't.
I don't think that it's, I don't think that's a fair characterization.
Well, no, I'm not saying it's as big an issue as it once was, but you were going about British women not being subservient or whatever.
And I think that's one of the tropes, dare I say it, of strong women, that even when they are strong, often it's still at the behest of a man, if that makes sense.
Well, I mean, the reason...
Can I just, before we go on, can I just take a comfort break?
I'll be back in like one moment.
Yeah, not a problem.
Not a problem.
I'll be back in a second.
So just reading the chat now since we're waiting for him.
Yeah, I disagree with his position on that, guys.
I'm going to relate an anecdote from my nan.
But yeah, I think the man is the one who is in bondage in that situation.
I don't think that legally they have any options.
I don't think that they, I don't think they're in charge.
I mean, I'm just talking from my own family perspective, I suppose.
But holy shit.
I just think of my own childhood when we all have got a big family, we'd go to visit my nan and all the aunts and uncles, six, seven of them, they'd be sat around the living room and the women would be talking across the entire room and the men would just be quietly sat there watching the TV.
So, you know, if you're talking dominant.
I'm back.
Yeah, hi there.
Okay.
I mean, I think there's, I just don't really agree with your characterization there to be honest, because one of the things that I've, I asked my nan a while ago when I first started doing this, I was like, so did you feel oppressed when you were young?
You know, my nan's over 80 now, you know, she lived through World War II.
And before that, her mother, my great-grandmother, they lived in the Ronda.
And so my granddad and her father and my grandfather, they would be coal miners and they would obviously come back from the coals in the evening, completely, you know, after a hard day mining coal, completely black.
You know, they couldn't tell who's, you know, whose father was who when they were coming up this hill because they were just completely covered in soot.
And then at the end of the week, they would get a little paper envelope with their wages in.
And my grandfather would come in and just hand it over to my nan.
And then on a Sunday, she would give him a few pennies to get down the pub with.
And then at the end of the day, when he came back from the pub, she'd hold a hand out and he'd give her any change back.
And that was his life.
He'd do that.
And then he'd go and work all day, every day.
And then at the end of the week, he'd give her the money.
I just don't see this as women being oppressed.
I mean, I know that's just an anecdotal example from a town in Wales, but I see this a lot where women, and there are studies that show this, that women are like 87% of the household spenders.
They're the ones controlling the money.
And I think that if you're controlling the money, then you've at least got a case against being oppressed there.
Well, my retort to that would be that ultimately, I'm not going to, I don't wish to talk about your grandparents in that way.
So I'll remove it from that specifically and talk about a more wide societal thing.
That when a man chooses to give his wage packet over because he wants, say, that money to go to the looking after of his house and his children or whatever, that he can still has the power to not do that if he didn't want to.
Now, ultimately, your grandfather sounds like a fucking honourable man who did that because he had those responsibilities.
But also, it must be borne in mind that a housewife is essentially an unpaid position.
It's a kind of thing within Marxist feminism.
The idea that the worker, some of his pay should be given directly from the employer to the woman because the woman provides a house, food, clean clothing and all the rest of it for the man to free his time of, to use his time as labor to that company, if that makes sense.
Now I don't actually agree with that directly, but the point I'm trying to make there is that a woman contributes to the man being able to go out and earn money.
And so the fact that he then gives that the wage packet, however much of that wage packet, over to the woman is I don't think you can say that's inherently the woman holding the power because she's done the fucking work herself.
Well, yeah, she didn't earn that money, did she?
She wasn't down the money.
No, she wasn't being in that position, but she freed up the labor for the man to go and do that.
But the same works in the other way, the opposite direction, that if it's a house husband, the same applies.
It's not a sexual thing other than the fact that largely and traditionally it's been the woman that stays at home and the man that goes to work.
Yeah, but that's not due to any desire to oppress women, is it?
No, no, no, I'm not saying by and like and the thing is this is where a lot of MRAs and I know you don't define yourself.
I'm not MRA, but a lot of MRAs do this thing of saying that, oh, what you're saying that all men in history have been bastards who want to oppress women.
No, it's not a form of men necessarily seeking to control women, but it's that structure of a society that inherently does oppress women.
It's not that the man wants to oppress his wife because the man might fucking love his wife.
They've had kids, they've built a fucking community.
I'm not saying he's a prick.
I'm saying the system as a whole that keeps women in subservience to men is fucking wrong and needs to change.
Okay, but I disagree then that's subservience.
Well, how could you see it as any other way?
It's women being at the financial behest of the man.
Yeah, but she's not at the financial behest of the man if 87% of household spending is done by women.
Yeah, but it's not done by women for women, is it?
It's being spent on the house on the kids.
And yes, to a degree on herself, but she's also cooking.
If we're going traditional housewife model, she's cooking, cleaning, doing all of that, and spending that money on the upkeep of the house and the financial expenses of having children and all the rest of it.
She's not spending 87% on fucking shoes.
Yeah, I'm not saying that she is, but the thing is, I think that more women prefer doing that than they do hard labour.
I think that's probably true.
I think that's probably true, and that's, again, that's possibly where...
I think that's where the model has originated from.
Yeah, and I'm not saying that that model inherently...
I mean, because the thing is, when I speak out, say, against either against patriarchy or against capitalism, I'm not saying inherently they're fucking evil things, because you can tweak systems to make them work better.
It's that patriarchy inherently is unfair to a specific set of people, that being women.
But you can tweak that to make it so that a woman will get paid the same for doing the same job, for instance.
And I know a lot of people want to define the wage gap as not fucking existing or trying to degrade or whatever.
But whether it's 77 fucking cents in the dollar or 95 cents in the dollar, it's still fucking wrong.
And that system's still in place that to a degree does keep women down.
And I think that's, for me, I know I'm sort of rambling now.
You asked me in the preamble about the start of this, about why I consider myself a feminist.
And that's why.
Okay.
I'm not arguing with your motives or anything like that.
I do like to imagine that everyone argues from the position that they are trying to make a difference for the good.
I think there are very few people who genuinely try to make just trouble for trouble's sake.
But the thing is, I mean, I think that a lot of women, and there seems to be an awful lot of women who, without needing to be socialized in this way, automatically think that they I mean that there's a reason that young girls are called bossy and young boys aren't and I don't think it's because they're socialized in any way.
It's because, I mean, I come from a large family and I have seen young girls boss around young boys.
That's what they do.
And I've seen young boys do what young girls say, even though they have no particular reason to.
Do you not think there might be some sort of natural sort of evolutionary dynamic that's playing out there?
Well, yeah, in the sense that women have, there's a certain, obviously, especially when they reach puberty, women get a certain power over men in terms of men wanting to fuck them, basically.
Absolutely.
But that power obviously can be inverted and reversed in form of rape.
So it's a kind of, there's an evolutionary power dynamic that exists there.
I don't think any reasonable human being would deny that.
But to say that there's no socialisation in women or girls being called bossy is, I think, absurd.
And I know trying to ban the word bossy was...
Can you clarify for this?
There's no socialization in what, sorry?
You were saying that there was no socialization involved in girls being called bossy.
Or girls being bossy.
I don't think they need to be.
But the same, again, this is where the kind of informal pushing of women down in society comes in.
That for the same behavior, a boy will just be called, oh, boys will be boys, whatever.
Whereas a woman will be called bossy.
Should we call them?
I don't think boys really exhibit the same behaviour.
I've got a five-year-old stepdaughter.
Boys don't do bossy stuff, really?
Boys are...
No, no, no, no.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Listen, listen, right?
I've got a five-year-old stepdaughter, and I'm trying to socialize her away from being bossy because she is a bossy madam.
There's no getting around it, right?
I see her, whenever I think her to school, the first thing she does is find some boys to boss around.
She loves it.
I don't see boys bossing each other around, though, and I don't see boys bossing other boys around.
So I'm not saying that boys never boss around or anything like that.
I just, I think that this is a false dichotomy feminists have created.
For exactly the same behavior, boys get called leaders.
Well, nobody calls a five-year-old boy a leader.
And I just, my direct observation of reality, and I come from a big family as well.
I'm the oldest of 16, 17 cousins.
I don't even know how many cousins I've fucking got.
And I'm the third oldest out of these groups.
So I've seen a lot of them grow up and how they act.
And I honestly think it's more of an evolutionary sort of trait that women, well, frankly, try to boss around men.
And I think that even from like the earliest sort of, I mean, you'll get some that don't, obviously.
You'll get some that are far more introverted and aren't, and you'll get men who are far more extroverted.
But I think that on average, if you, you know, just the predominant, the sort of predominant traits that they have in these things is that women are quite happy to boss men around.
And I think generally men are quite happy to let them.
Well, yeah, but again, to bring in sexual dimorphism, there's the idea that you can allow a woman to boss you around because ultimately, if it goes too far, you could physically take that power away completely.
Say that again, sorry.
Say a woman's being bossy with you, right?
Unless she's like a fucking power builder or something.
By and large, you're going to be able to physically dominate her should she go too far or something like that.
And so ultimately, men are happy, I think, for the potential payoff of maybe having sex with her at some point down the line.
Men are happy to give up that, knowing that they can take that power back at any fucking moment they want to.
Whereas women don't have that luxury, if that makes sense.
So essentially to.
No, go on, sorry.
Well, yeah, I was going to say, I mean, A, that is true.
And I think that in the sort of more darker prehistory of humanity, that's probably the impetus for women being so controlling from such a young age.
I do think that psychologically, women are far better at controlling other people than men are.
You know, men just don't practice.
Well, yeah, but and evolutionary-wise, I think in terms of well evolution within civilization, obviously, that women have had to learn ways to try and control men either by being smarter or in some cases that manipulative or whatever you want to call it.
Because physically they can't do it.
And this isn't just going back a long way.
Look, domestic violence is still a fucking issue now.
they're happy to cede that power in the short term for the potential of maybe getting their end away on the basis that if ultimately she goes too far you could fucking knock her out basically.
I don't think that even really thinks.
People don't think of it in terms of that but I'm just putting it in a blunt way to make it you know more to illuminate it further.
Yeah, yeah, no, to really highlight the issue.
I agree that a lot of this is done because of the physical dynamic.
The thing is, then we're getting back to the whole sort of, well, evolution is sort of an anti-woman bias.
Yeah, well, it basically does, in the sense that women aren't as strong.
They aren't as fast because a certain amount of their biological energy or whatever goes into being able to produce life.
But they're so much more inherently valuable.
That's the point, though, isn't it?
They're so much more valuable because they produce life.
Men become the displays.
Well, yeah, in a just a continuation of the species sense, that's why they're valuable, yes.
But oftentimes, because of that, they're seen as purely that.
They're seen as baby machines.
I don't know.
Who sees that?
And I'm not saying that's all men or all anti-feminists or whatever, but it's still a large enough strain that it's a problem for me anyway.
I mean, I can't speak for anyone else, really.
I mean, who do you see as being who views women as baby machines?
Have you been onto things like A Voice for Men?
No, I don't go to A Voice for Men.
Yeah, well, they often have fucking hideously disputes.
And these are not, this isn't, I mean, they're fringe in the sense that you couldn't get elected on their platform in a fucking general election or whatever.
But they have large followings, certainly online, and they say fucking absolutely horrendous things, dehumanizing women to the point where essentially they're good for two things, putting your dick in and making a sandwich, and that's about it.
And that's still, unfortunately, all too common a strain, certainly on the internet.
And that's why I've felt it necessary to come on the internet and do this, you know.
Okay, yeah, no, no, fair enough.
But I mean, is that actually an accurate representation of a voice for men?
Because, I mean, I don't go there, so I don't know.
Well, it's not all they do, obviously.
They do.
And this is the thing, within any movement, and I'm sure we'll get onto Game Again in a bit.
Within any movement, you're going to have people doing potentially good things or having successes that have some sort of positive impact.
And a voice for men, like a stopped clock, occasionally gets something right.
And they'll bring up really, as we were talking about earlier, the suicide statistics of men or whatever, and they'll raise these really good issues.
But unfortunately, they're not actually, they're essentially jumping on the back of those issues and fucking riding it for all the money they can get.
They don't actually really give a fuck.
And ultimately, they're a misogynist platform.
That's what they do.
And they're a big force for it to be a problem.
Okay, I don't think that we should judge their motives.
I don't know why they do what they do.
And I don't even know.
Well, I know exactly why Paul Elam does what he does.
He's a fucking shot.
He might be, but I don't know.
I don't know Paul Elam.
I don't think I've ever actually spoken to him.
I've got no interest.
I don't read any of his articles.
I don't watch any videos if he does videos.
I'm just not interested in what Paul Elam does.
And I'm looking at A Voice for Men now, and I don't see anything that I would look at and see, obviously, as like women are baby machines.
I don't see anything.
Don't know what's on their thing today, but I've read stuff from them in the past that absolutely has basically devalued women to the status of a walking vagina.
Okay, but I mean, I don't think they would represent themselves like that.
I don't think they think that's what they're doing.
Yeah, but as we discussed earlier, the BNP have got on their fucking website that they're non-racist, and we know that's not true.
Yeah, but you can't just go by what someone says they are, but yeah, but by the same token, then you could say, well, that person over there is a racist.
And it's like, well, how do you know that?
Well, because I'm just sure they are.
You judge them by their actions.
That's what I'm saying.
If someone says racist shit, then that makes them a fucking racist, doesn't it?
Yeah.
But I mean, there's something misogynist.
You can only really judge them on that.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
But this is what I'm saying.
If I go to the Daily Stormer, I'll see lots of racist shit on the front page.
They've literally got a category that's like race war.
I'll see thousands of mentions of the Jews and stuff.
But if I go to A Voice for Men, I've got like...
By the way, did you see on the Daily Storm where they were calling you the useful idiot?
Oh, God, they hate me.
They hate me because I told them to fuck off.
I'll just bring that up.
Sorry.
Oh, yeah, no, no.
It's funny what they say on there.
It cracks me up.
Andrew Anglin, he's hilarious.
With the Rothram rape gangs, he's like, white people don't do this.
And then you've got like Jimmy Sapphole and all that.
And it's like, yeah, white people don't do that.
But anyway, I'm looking at a voice for men.
And like, you know, there's like Deandre Johnson attorney under pressure says client was provoked and women, man, having sex without consent is rape, sex while drunk with is rape and not consent.
It's not women are awful.
It just seems to be legal issues and things like that.
I'm just looking at the front page.
If necessary, I can provide a link to this article.
He wrote an article saying that if he were on the jury for a rape trial, he would always, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, vote not guilty in order to counteract false rape allegations.
You would rather see guilty rapists go free.
See, now that to me strikes me as...
Yeah, no, it is.
That is absolutely fucked up.
And that's the thing.
That strikes me personally as the mirror image of almost a lot of, well, just a lot of the radical feminist stuff that I am basically complaining about in my video.
I've fallen out with a number of feminists online.
I don't know if you're aware of Swerfs and TERFs.
I am aware of Swerfs and TERFs, but do describe for the chat just in case.
Yeah, so Swerfs is sex worker, exclusionary, radical feminist, and TERF is trans exclusionary radical feminists.
And they basically, on the basis of either they are sex workers or transsexuals, they're not considered to be part of either being a woman or they're a sort of sex traitor or whatever.
And they're basically hideous fucking bigots.
I despise them.
So you'll get no complaint from me about those kind of radical feminists.
But even within radical circles, they're not actually the mainstream, it seems.
There are some fucking mental, nutty radical feminists, and I don't agree with them.
But inherently, they're not.
To pluck them out as examples of feminism as a whole, I think, is disingenuous.
But isn't that exactly what you've just done with Paul Elam and men's rights activism?
Well, I would suggest that Paul Elam has a significant following, whereas most Swerfs and TERFs don't.
Well, I mean, I disagree.
For example, in the Swerf category, you've got Anita Sarkeesian.
She's very anti-sex worker, and she's got a massive following.
That is true.
Massive following on the basis that she's been martyred by people like Gamergate.
I think that she willingly embraces her martyrdom.
Oh, absolutely.
And she's played it in terms just in a machiaeville sense.
She's played it perfectly.
And I'm not here to defend anyone.
I'm not a massive fan of Anita Sarkeesian at all.
But neither am I a massive fan of those that have put her in that position who are essentially Gamergate.
They've harassed her to the point.
You've allowed the media to portray her as this fucking wounded victim.
Look, okay, we'll get into any Sarkeesian in a minute if you want.
But let me just finish.
I think that what you've done with Paul Elam and A Voice for Men there is exactly what Mike, you know, what you're saying, you know, is being done about feminism.
I honestly think that's what you've done.
I mean, if I look at Voice for Men, I don't know anything about the siteman anyway.
Well, he's a mainstream MRA leader.
I've seen, yeah, but there are plenty of mainstream feminist leaders who I could give you just, I mean, I can think of, like, for example, like Jessica Valenti.
She's a massively popular feminist.
Feminists love Jessica Valenti.
And yet she says stuff like, why don't we just pay men less?
And the reason that this, in the very article, she went to the Guardian Legal Advisor and they were like, well, that would be a legal discrimination.
And she was just like, oh, damn, that would solve the problem.
It's like, yeah, but this is a horribly bigoted and like prejudiced thing to do.
And yet she's just accepted as a popular feminist.
What?
I mean, so you know, I don't think you can reasonably say, well, this is Paul Elam being a misogynist if you're not going to condemn Jessica Valenti with the same breath.
Well, I'm not, well, I wouldn't.
I've not seen the article you refer to, but if she should.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Look, I will happily take your word for it on that.
Yeah, yeah.
Although, if you want to send it, you absolutely can.
I'm not going to fucking back that up.
I'm not going to.
That's fucked up.
Yeah, you shouldn't say dumb shit like that.
And the fact that she is supported is fucking.
I don't know much of her other work, actually, if I'm honest with you.
So I can't really judge her on that basis.
But if that's typical of her stuff and she's popular, that's wrong.
And I would fight against that as much as I would fight against anything else.
Because ultimately, I think feminism can and should be a positive thing.
And if there are negative influences in it, as there are a lot of the Swerfs and the Turfs, I'll happily call those fuckers out as well.
Now, I've heard a lot of MRAs say exactly that sort of thing about men's rights activism.
Yeah, but they don't, by the lines, they don't call out Elam at all.
You haven't called out Valenti or Sarkeesian.
Well, no, I haven't.
But to be fair, I'm a relatively new YouTuber who's trying to clean up YouTube atheism first.
No, no, that's fair enough as well.
But the thing is, it's the same argument applies to you.
They've got their reasons why they haven't done it as well.
So it's, you know, this is my point.
You know, it's it's a it's tribalism, really, as far as I'm concerned because I'm not part of either group.
I just look at it and think, well, it's the same argument just applied, you know, just to each group.
Do you see what I'm saying?
But there might be a certain amount of tribalism in that.
I will take that on board and consider it for the future.
But I mean, I can't do a lot better, right?
This very much.
No, no, no.
I'm not expecting you to be held responsible for it or anything like that.
But I just think, I don't think it's fair to condemn all MRAs or the majority of MRAs because of the argument that, you know, the same argument that, well, therefore, all feminists should be condemned by Jessica Valenti.
You know, it's again, and I'm actually quite impressed that you've conceded that point.
A lot of people wouldn't do that.
And so that's very big of you.
I'm actually genuinely impressed.
Well, I'm not.
I'm not, just to briefly explain, I'm not an ideologue.
I'm not here to say that all feminists are fucking brilliant because they're not.
But I'm not, in the same breath, I'm not going to throw anyone under the bus on the basis that I don't know who I don't know her work or whatever.
But ultimately, I'll look into it.
That's the same reason that I'm not talking about Paul Elam.
I just don't know about him.
I've got no particular interest in defending him.
I just don't know.
I just don't.
Well, that's good because he's fucking indefensible.
He probably is.
I mean, I tell you what, just man, I liked your Roosh video.
I don't like Roosh at all.
Roosh is a fucking dick.
Oh, my God.
But the thing is, it's unfortunately an all-too-committing thing.
You make an outrageous statement like rape on private property should be legalized.
And then afterwards, when it gets called out for a go, oh, it was satire.
It was a joke.
No, it wasn't your cunt.
You're being a fucking dickhead.
Yeah.
Talking as if he's like the father of the Manosphere or something, it's just like...
Yeah, exactly.
I invented the red.
How far up your own ass can you go?
Yeah, he strikes me as kind of cultish.
He's gone on a speaking tour as well.
And it's just like, oh, for fuck's sake, why does anyone give him any time?
But anyway.
Well, not just that, but I mean, who the fuck would pay to?
It looks like his voice is putting his face to sleep.
He's the most boring man ever.
Who would you?
I realize that I'm a boring cunt as well, but I'm not charging people to come and see me fucking speak.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
But this is the thing.
I'm not an ideologue either.
I'm not in any way interested in defending people who I don't find to be defendable.
Just on the basis of the point, because you've asked me some questions.
I've got a few for yourself.
Sure, absolutely.
Sorry, I didn't realise you had any you wanted to ask me.
Go ahead.
Well, they're not.
There are a few points I'd like to raise with you.
Because look, as much as we've been relatively pally, let's not pretend that we're fucking best is best buddies.
I'm glad we can have a lot of people.
Where I basically call you a fucking cunt and stuff.
So let's not.
That's all right.
Jesus.
If I was offended by everyone who called me a cunt.
Well, exactly.
And ditto with myself.
You claim, and I saw your video about where you took the political ideology test thing and you came out as a kind of centre-leftist or whatever.
You claim to be a left-winger, right?
I am.
Or at least left of centre, sort of liberal chap or whatever.
But yet, your videos, if you hadn't said you're a left-winger, if you look at all your videos, they're virtually all of your political, overtly political ones, that you're attacking the right.
Oh, so you're attacking the left from a right-wing perspective, virtually all the fucking time.
Well, I disagree it's from a right-wing perspective.
I think it's from a left-wing perspective.
Well, okay.
But say, for instance, you'll attack The Guardian or The Independent, for those who don't know, are left-leaning newspapers in Britain, but you won't attack the Daily Mail, which is obviously the kind of the absolute archetypal right-wing fucking shit rat.
But what's the point in attacking the Daily Mail?
Who doesn't know the Daily Mail isn't an archetype of right-wing shit rack?
Well, it's someone who was the third or fourth most widely read in Britain.
It's an influential newspaper.
And I think it's a cop out to suggest that, oh, and you did it with Fox News as well.
You said, oh, well, why would I bother making videos about Fox News?
I have made videos about Fox News.
No, absolutely.
No, and it was in that Fox News video that I watched a few days ago about Charleston shooting in which you said that.
But that's a cup out because you must know that, I mean, that's the most fucking popular cable news network in America.
It's clearly very influential.
So just to suggest, oh, it satirizes itself.
No, that's bullocks.
Hang on, hang on.
That's the issue, though, isn't it?
It's the most popular cable news network because the audience for Fox are very old.
They haven't got the sort of numbers.
Their vote counts just as much as any young person.
Yeah, but the young people aren't watching Fox.
They're watching the Daily Show.
They're reading liberal media, liberal newspapers, liberal outlets online.
I mean, look at the massive ones like BuzzFeed, Gorka, all of these fucking.
These ostensibly call themselves journalistic outlets.
BuzzFeed does investigations, for Christ's sake.
They're all more canny.
Would you suggest the people you're talking to, your audience, are predominantly younger then?
I think there's quite a range.
I've done a political compass test on my audience.
I haven't done an age one on my audience.
I think a lot of them are fairly young.
Yeah, because I've got my analytics for the videos that the ones you specifically sent.
Well, I don't want to say, because I mean, I've got male politics, actually.
And I've got the stats here, right?
They're 94% male, and they're predominantly between the ages of 13 and 34, right?
So you've got a young audience there.
Essentially, my problem with you, and again, there's this British thing of not wanting to be outwardly offensive to somebody when you be offensive.
You go ahead.
I think you're not a con man, but you're a grifter.
You're spouting stuff to a young, impressionable audience that I don't know if you necessarily believe because you've said you're left-wing, but you're spouting right-wing rhetoric to light fires underneath these young, impressionable people for your own financial end.
And I think you're essentially financially taking advantage of some very impressionable young people.
Right.
I think that what I'm saying is not right-wing.
I think that the I think by just saying right-wing kind of reveals your own biases.
Well, no, I'm not saying you're right-wing, therefore you're inherently wrong.
What I'm saying is.
You're pandering.
Okay, okay.
Okay.
Can you give me an example of what you're talking about?
Right.
For instance, with your.
There's a double standard that you hold with, say, Anita Sarkeesian.
And again, I'm not here to defend her.
I don't give a fuck about Anita Sarkeesian particularly at all.
And to be honest with you, as much as I ever go at Gamergate, if the core principles of Gamergate were true and I felt they were true, I'd be one of you.
But I don't think it, but that's we'll get onto that in a second.
With to bring up two specific videos you made.
One was the who's really harassing Anita Sarkeesian video, where you went through bit by bit the harassment that she had faced and you went through all the different tweets that she'd had and showed the size of the people that were involved and whether Twitter had shot the accounts down and all the rest of it.
And you went through the oh, the threats against her weren't credible at Utah State and all the rest of it.
but in your video you made, is it last week or the week before, the social justice harassers, you went through the exact same thing with Ian Miles Chong, and you just took it at face value.
You didn't do any of that investigative journalism with his tweets.
I knew the people who had been tweeting him.
That's the thing.
You're actually right.
I probably should have done because I was actually talking to my existing audience.
I was talking to people from Gamergate, realistically.
And you are right.
I probably should have gone through their accounts, but that probably should be a video all on its own.
Because the thing is, I knew those people, a man in black and all that.
They're well-known people from the social justice movement online.
So I didn't, I suppose, again, this is me looking from my perspective rather than outsider perspective.
But there wasn't any need to do that.
It was self-evident to anyone who knew what was going on.
Right.
Well, okay.
Well, the instance with Total Biscuit, for instance, where he claimed that his family had been threatened and you were happy to play that audio from his, I think it was his podcast or whatever, saying that, and then just essentially taking that on tick as fucking red without going into the same depth you went into with the Nisa Sarkeesian.
I'm not saying that nobody's harassing the police, but we're saying that that was an uncredible, not credible threat.
Whereas with his, you were just essentially letting that slip by.
You weren't for someone you liked as opposed to someone you didn't like, you weren't prepared to put in that.
I do think it's a different situation because, I mean, just to start with, I'm not saying that nobody's harassing any Sarkeesian.
No, absolutely.
You made that part of the thing.
Exactly.
I made a whole video of that there are people harassing and these are people.
You then went on to downplay that as if it was fuck all.
Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not saying that it's not all.
I don't know whether it's something.
What I'm saying is it's not Gamergate.
And we know statistically that it's not Gamergate.
How are you defining Gamergate?
Because this is essentially the heart.
People who regularly participate in the Gamergate hashtag.
How else could I define it?
How else could I?
Why not?
Because essentially, Gamergate does its own version of the No True Scotsman.
Anytime any fucker does anything, it's always not Gamergate.
Well, yeah, who's going to send a fucking threat and claim the hashtag?
It's like the BNP.
They claim not to be fucking racist.
So you don't go around overtly being racist when you're the BNP fucking leader or whatever.
You want to take advantage of the decentralized kind of, oh, it's a consumer revolt.
Well, you have to accept that there are going to be people that are going to join that fucking thing.
And, you know, the fact that it's so rarely fucking brought up by Gamergate people suggests that they have an intense bias to protect their own fucking movement.
But the thing is, this is getting conspiratorial now.
This is getting sort of conjectural.
You're saying, right, Kate, so if we look at using the GameGate hashtag, we know that 0.65 of the accounts using it on a regular, more than once, were accounts that could reasonably be described as harassers.
And that's not my statistics.
That's women action in the media's statistics.
A group specifically set up to defend women on Twitter.
So it's, you know, people who have a vested interest in making GameGate look bad say it's, it's less than one percent right, and so after that, now you.
Now it's like, okay, so people in Gamergate who, in my opinion I doubt many of them have sock accounts I mean, I don't create sock accounts and then send an East Sarkeesian threat.
I doubt Oliver Campbell does, I doubt Milo does, I doubt.
I just can't think of anyone that I know from GameGate who would do that well, maybe that well for a startup.
You can't be absolutely sure.
No, I'm not saying I'm actually sure, but the point is you can't prove your average gamergator or your average sort of gamer troll that how can you say that they haven't been doing that well?
Hang on, this is what I'm saying, though.
Right, I can't prove that, and neither can you, so we're gonna have to give people the benefit of the doubt.
How do you say that we can't assume guilt in people all the time?
Oh no, you can't absolutely.
But you're the one that was going on about conspiracy theories in that video.
Who's harassing an Either Sarkeesian.
You went on to basically do a kind of a series of snide fucking insinuations to suggest that it was feminists that were doing it in the first place and that's pretty fucking conspiratorial.
Well, it is.
But honestly, i'm of the opinion that that does happen.
I think you get ideas that it does happen but when you've got basically essentially, a series of anomaly hunting bits of crap and then you assume they aren't anomalies.
I'm not saying they aren't anomalies.
I think the people who are harassing an Ethosian predominantly come from like the sort of call of duty, um sort of communities where they they know of her in a sort of peripheral manner and so occasionally they might say something nasty to her, but they do it for lols and then they go back to headshotting each other on call of duty.
But that's not Gamergate and I doubt any of those people give a fuck about Gamergate.
You know, I doubt that.
I doubt any of them actually know what it is.
I doubt they know that anyone's going on about online journalism, because these people don't read Kotaku.
You know they don't go to Polygon.
They they've got absolutely no interest in games media because they know what they're like.
Well I, I I think this is the the core of of my difference on Gamergate than yours is that you've essentially taken in completely the idea that it's just about ethics in video game journalism and I, I think you're vastly downplaying for your own end, vastly downplaying the fact that it's.
It's in part and again, i'm not saying you haven't had success, isn't?
You haven't done positive things for that cause, but the, the hate, mob mentality, the misogyny inherent in large parts of those that would consider themselves gamers, you seem absolutely fucking unmoved by.
Which doesn't seem.
No, no, no, I fully disagree that giving a damn about labels is a left-wing thing.
I completely disagree.
So say, well, this is misogyny.
That's not my business.
That is, in my opinion, a completely left-wing position.
I'm not saying that anyone should send an Isakis in harassment, of course.
I, in fact, advocate they don't.
It doesn't help anything.
It's bad.
Yeah, but if you must know, and you have, this is the thing, you have a large audience, and so you have a responsibility that comes along with that to be reasonable, to be a rational person with it, to not abuse that trust.
And what you've got is you've stoked fires under young, impressionable people who you know, regardless of whether you say, as you did with mom when you linked my video, you said, uh, don't go and contact them.
You knew they were fucking going to go and contact me.
And look, but that, but yeah, but by that token, I can't reply to you, can I?
If I can't, I'm not in control of these people, they are thinking, intelligent individuals.
And by that, by that token, I've got to shut my channel down.
No, no, you haven't got to shut your channel down, but you don't have to go after people like Sarkeesian and Wu in the way that you do.
You could be much more rational and reasonable about it.
How am I being unreasonable with them, though?
You stoke fires under well, by being conspiratorial, saying, oh, it's all feminist.
Downplaying the harassment.
I didn't say it was all feminists.
I said it was Call of Duty fanboys.
Giving it tacit approval to harassment of people by downplaying it.
By saying, oh, it doesn't matter.
Because the police said it wasn't a credible threat.
Oh, that's okay then, is it?
No, it's fucking not.
I never said it was okay.
Even if it trolls doing it for the lulz, or even if it is feminists being pricks, it's still fucking wrong.
Still going to fuck with this business.
That was exactly my position just a few minutes ago before you interrupted me.
I was literally saying it's wrong on principle.
It's wrong to do anyway.
It's not productive.
It makes everyone look bad and it helps out any Sarkeesian.
So why would you ever send her a threat?
What?
Why did you downplay it and pick it apart then?
Well, no, I'm downplaying it because it's not Gamergate's issue.
And I'm tired of it becoming Gamergate's issue.
You can't prove that people from Gaming Gate are doing it.
Therefore, we're going to assume that people from Game Gate aren't doing it, especially when they're going on about a movement for ethics that they want to talk about.
I think we're having a thing in front of the Society of Professional Journalists next month about their ethical standards.
There are overwhelming all of my videos are about, well, all of them since probably about Christmas.
I focus specifically on the ethics just to make sure there's no sort of misunderstanding on my position of it.
And they've regularly got about 60,000 views, 70,000 views.
So I think that there are a lot of people, the overwhelming majority of people in Game Gate who are absolutely focused on ethics and who care about the ethics.
I mean, they may well care about other things, but I doubt for a second that they are stupid enough to send Anita's in threats.
I can't see what benefit would come to them for it.
Not only would they just stupid.
Well, maybe they're not stupid enough to do it with the hashtag, the gaming 8 hashtag, but I've no doubt at all is unhelpful.
Yeah, it's unhelpful.
Just because something's unhelpful doesn't mean people don't fucking do it.
Well, I think that when they're part of an online movement that's currently being constantly being slandered as a harassment movement, when we can factually display that it's not, all the evidence we have displays that it's not.
And then for Anita Key and say, yeah, but look at these horrible messages I got from Call of Duty Headshot Sniper 102.
You know, I mean, what good is that to anyone?
Sorry, you cut out then slightly at the start of your sentence.
No, that's okay.
Basically, what I'm saying is we know factually from statistical analysis of GameGate that the movement is overwhelmingly populated by people who aren't harassing, right?
Who aren't sending nasty messages.
That's using the hashtag tweet, yeah.
Yeah, but that's, yeah.
And we know that the, I mean, from Anisarkean's evidence, that the people who are sending her nasty messages tend to come under the sort of Call of Duty teenage spur gamer.
That's what we know from looking at the least supportive of, if not necessarily active within Gamergate.
I don't think they are, though.
That's what I'm saying.
I think they're completely, we don't give a fuck.
I mean, if they were supportive of Gamergate, it makes no sense to send an East Sarkeesian, any kind of threat.
It doesn't help Gamergate in any way.
In fact, if you wanted to hinder Gamergate, what you would do is send a threatening tweet using the tag or not.
Because people like you are going to say, well, that's a Gamergate thing.
Was it tanking it?
No, but that's probably a Gamergate person.
Well, I've seen, because on purpose, not as clickbait, but as I wanted to talk to people within Gamergate, put the Gamergate hashtag as part of the title of videos, a couple of videos of mine, because they specifically mentioned XDU, and I'll get onto that in a second.
And I can tell you from the correspondence I've had from people under that hashtag, they're not exactly phenomenally pleasant people to deal with.
Yeah, but that's not the same as sending death threats to an East Sarkeesian.
Well, no, and let's be honest.
Hang on, it wouldn't have to be harassed.
Your videos, by that own measure, I could say that I'm harassed by your videos.
You know, if that's the measure of harassment.
I'm absolutely open in saying that I baited you on Twitter.
Okay, but that's fine.
I don't mind, but that's not the same as a death threat to an East Sarkeesian.
And that's not the same as sending an East Sarkeesian message saying, hold on.
Is that really the ethical standard you're going to draw?
It's all fine unless you do death threats.
Well, frankly, I don't think that you have been unethical by calling me a dick on YouTube.
No, I don't think I have either.
Well, then what's the problem?
Well, because an organization which sets itself up as an anti-corruption thing that doesn't speak out about corruption within its own fucking movement, it says it's like it's died this is it an anti-suicide charity or suicide prevention charity thing that harasses people to the point where they might actually do something like that anyway.
I don't agree with any of that.
I don't think that's I think that's a complete misrepresentation for a start.
Okay.
Okay, well, okay, on the one point then about not calling out they absolutely do call people out.
That's in fact one of the problems that Gamergate has actually had is its leading voices have systematically been taken down from within by people who frankly have been wild and paranoid about quote-unquote ethics.
In fact, someone pointed out to me on Twitter today, you know, you focus on ethics too much.
There are other things you should focus on.
And it's this focus on ethics that has led people to this kind of dogmatic witch hunt sort of mentality where people within Gamergate have lost, have left.
I mean, look at King of Paul.
He's the archetype of it.
You know, a lot of people didn't realize what it would be like to become a public figure.
And then suddenly they've got thousands of people interrogating their behavior.
So what you would call like not unethical shitposting, effectively, is now a consequence that people have to pay attention.
You know, people have to fucking answer to thousands of people.
It's a difficult thing.
I mean, do you know, are you not aware of the Gamergate Harassment Patrol?
I'm vaguely aware of it, yes.
I've certainly heard about it, yes.
That's exactly the thing.
If you see someone harassing someone else, you tag the harassment patrol, and Margaret Gell gets people to come in and report it to Twitter.
You know, this is the best.
That's a positive step.
It's not an organization.
That's the problem.
It's a hashtag movement.
If you want to use that as your shield, and I'm sure we'll get to not your shield as well.
But if you want to use that as your shield, you then have to accept that there are going to be people who are going to be involved, either essentially tangentially or otherwise, with your movement who are going to be fucking pricks.
Yes, of course.
You have to do, I think you've not, as a movement, you've been at the very least, to put it mildly, you've been incredibly slow in reacting to that.
I disagree.
I actually think that they react very quickly on Twitter to it.
And the thing is, okay, if that's the case, then why wouldn't I just treat feminism with the same regard?
You know, if a feminist is like, hey, you know, we think that there are, you know, a remarkably high number of women being raped, I'd be like, yeah, but Jessica Valenti wants to reduce the male population to 5% or something like that.
So why would I care what you say?
You know, I don't think that people should be judged by the worst of a very broad and open movement.
Well, you say a broad and open movement, I don't think it is a particularly broad and open movement.
Again, it's largely white, it's largely male, it's largely young.
Okay, there are not as white, male, and young as you think.
Well, again, I'll go back to my statistics here from the videos that you sent your people to, the people that came from your video to mine in overwhelming 17,000, which for me is just a ridiculous number, way more than anyone else, any other video I've ever done.
I don't send anyone.
Well, I can't ask people to not do that.
Because, again, then I have to have this conversation with you.
You know, I don't want to be defending myself from sending people.
I would much rather be talking about the issue specifically, but now we're talking about this instead.
So, I mean, I say to people, please do not contact the subjects of my video.
It doesn't do any good.
That's arse covering.
You know, that's not arse covering.
I just said it's not productive.
I'm not enjoying having to do this.
I would rather talk about something actually productive, but instead, now I'm being accused of arse covering.
It's assuming the worst in everything.
This is the issue that we have, I think.
You know, you just assume the worst in everything.
Okay, well, on that line, I've made videos about it and I've discussed with you in the past your connection with Davis O'Reino.
Okay, then what is my connection to Davis?
Well, you inadvertently, because he lied to you, I'm happy to accept that.
Send people from your video, which you've now taken down, thankfully, to give money to his Patreon.
No, I didn't.
That's exactly not what I did.
I specifically made a video for the backers of their project, people who had already backed it, to let them know that there was something in production and there was a product that they would get at the end of it for their money.
I specifically said in that video, I'm not encouraging anyone to back his project to get further money or anything like that.
That's none of my business whatsoever.
I was doing it specifically for their backers.
And I specified that in the video.
Right.
Again, I can only really accuse you of arse covering again here because I can never do anything right, can I?
With a man that is a fucking open Holocaust denier, a man who has been what he's been obviously a fraud in the past, with the initial breakup of the Sarkeesian effect, you read those Skype blogs, thousands of dollars.
Well, maybe you should have before pallying around with the project.
But the thing is, he's not just an individual, though, is he?
I mean, he was working with Jordan Noah and he's got thousands or hundreds of people probably backing him for thousands of dollars.
Whether Davis Arini has all of these things is rather irrelevant to me.
I don't care.
I'm frankly.
No, no, I'm frankly furious at him for lying to me.
That's my problem with Davis Arini.
I actually don't really care about his opinions.
You don't care about his Holocaust denial or his white nationalism.
It's not really anything to do with me.
Why should I care about it?
You've associated yourself with him.
No, I haven't.
I have interviewed him on behalf of the I've interviewed him on behalf of his project, which is being backed by multiple other people.
And at the end of the day, again, it's his opinion.
He can hold whatever opinions he wants.
I don't hold those opinions.
No, I'm not going to be held responsible for them.
No, but you've associated yourself with him.
But that's because he's representing the project that other people were being involved in.
What am I supposed to do?
So, well, you know what, Davis, I would love.
You could say, fuck you, you despicable piece of shit.
I want nothing to do with you.
That's what you could have done.
I would have you on it.
I would probably have anyone to talk to.
I would probably talk to anyone.
I don't think that I have to not talk to people just because they hold beliefs that I don't agree with or don't like.
I don't think.
There's a difference between holding an opinion you disagree with and being a fucking Holocaust-denying white nationalist.
Not really.
That's an opinion I disagree with.
Yeah, but do you not disagree with it to the point where it becomes a sort of a deal breaker with you?
I'm not going to join you as a club.
Don't trouble around with fucking neo-Nazi filth.
I won't have anything to do with them.
Whereas you, unfortunately, have.
No, but I actually, yeah, but I disagree with them vocally and publicly.
I refute their ideas vocally and publicly.
Yeah, but you've given advertising to a fucking con man who was a neo-Nazi.
Yeah, but that's because he lied.
And not just that.
But when he was exposed as a fraud, your silence was fucking deafening.
No, but that's because he lied to me.
Yes, and you could and should, as a defender of ethical journalism, come out, apologized to your fucking followers who may or may not.
You could comment on my channel.
Yeah, comment on your channel.
Not everyone's going to read a fucking comment.
You could have put a view.
People were interested went to my channel and I was like, situation and then telling people not to go and fucking fund him, specifically.
Honestly, I'm not going to tell people what to do.
I never tell people what to do.
I don't ever say go and do something.
No, no, no.
This is something I want to explain, right?
This is the thing.
You're like, oh, you told your followers to do this.
It's like, well, I'd just be guilty of doing the same to fucking Arena if that was the case.
I'm not telling anyone to do anything.
The only thing I tell people to do is fucking act for themselves, think for themselves, be your own fucking person.
I don't have to condemn Arena.
With your larger.
Hang on, hang on.
I don't have to condemn Arini.
I'm not his dad.
I'm not a pal of his.
I've never given him any money.
I don't know or care or owe him anything.
And I'm not going to be held responsible for anything he does.
I didn't say, no, I didn't say you owed him anything.
I'm saying you owe your followers something.
You have a large audience, and with that comes a responsibility to be reasonable with it.
And I don't think you have been.
Well, I disagree.
Claim to be a defender of ethical journalism, and yet here you have a man making a documentary, ostensibly about a movement you support, who's been fantastically unethical, and yet you've what you've made, a fucking comment on one of your videos.
That's the best on my channel, which is where everyone was gonna check it out.
But imagine if Anita Circuit had done half that shit.
You'd have torn it, and rightly so.
You'd have torn it to pieces.
No, i'm acting.
Listen right.
I'm actually not one of the people who thinks, Who thinks Anita Sarkeesian is a con artist.
I think that she's actually acted in good faith with what she's done.
I just think that what she's done is absurd.
Now, I don't know.
Listen, right?
What you are suggesting is that I take Owen as his word.
You're suggesting that I assume that entirely Owen's story is correct and that everything that Owen has said is absolutely true and what Arena said is absolutely false because their stories are mutually exclusive.
They can't both be true.
Now, I don't know.
But Jordan Nowen has showed the fucking emails and text messages from the mediator, which shows that David Osorini fucking lied with that initial Kickstarter.
I'm sure he did.
I'm sure he did, but I haven't been investigating it.
If I haven't seen it, I can't comment on it.
You claim to give a fuck about Gamergate and ethical journalism, yet here you are with a guy who you may not have been best best buddies with.
I know I was mocking you or poking you with that on Twitter the other day, but you had certainly a relationship of sorts with to the point where he gave you that, was it 20, 25 minute initial clip thing from the Sarkeesian effect?
So you knew him to a degree, and yet a professional capacity.
It doesn't matter in a professional capacity.
You claim to give a fuck about this topic, and yet you've not researched it.
Listen, right?
I don't have any information about it outside of what the public has.
Okay, I don't have any special inside knowledge.
It's just he messaged me one day with this information.
I don't need any more information.
The information's there.
He's a fucking fraud.
If I haven't gone and read it, then I don't know that, do I?
Yeah, but my point is, the fact that you haven't looked into it, the fact you haven't done this, shows your fucking ridiculous bias and that you're pandering to people in order, again, to cover your own ass because you're not being smeared by association with this fucking Holocaust-denying fraud.
Well, it's a bit late for that.
Jesus Christ, I'm being smeared by association regardless.
Now, listen, I'm not saying...
You decided to associate yourself.
No one forces.
I'm not associating with him.
I'm not associating with you by talking to you.
You've advertised him.
Well, to a degree.
Actually, you've advertised his fucking film with a fucking video that's still up on your channel of his initial fucking, you know, the interview, two-hour interview.
Yeah, talking to him about it, yeah.
Yeah, that's still there.
That's still got a fucking link to his channel.
Whereas it does.
His fucking PayPal to this day.
He's still doing that, and yet it's still up on your fucking channel.
And it's going to remain on my channel.
That's the thing.
I'm not going to go back and rewrite history just because people like you don't like Arini.
I don't like Arene, but that doesn't mean I'm going to change anything.
Well, no, I don't think I should have.
I'm not asking you to deny that the fucking interview happened, but you've still got a video up with a link to his Twitter page, which anyone could go onto your channel.
Any of these young, impressionable kids that, again, are still well, they're not idiots, but they're impressionable.
I remember when I was fucking 16 years of age, I was a fucking prick.
I did all sorts of crazy shit because you do, because you're not a fully developed adult yet.
That happens.
I'm not saying they're bad people.
They're impressionable.
And you have a duty to them by having them as this audience and being involved in this fucking thing to call out pricks who might take advantage of them.
Yet, you have a video up on your website with a link to Davis O'Reini's YouTube page where he's pimping out to this day his PayPal account to try and fraudulently get money out of Gamergate kids.
Look, I don't know that what he's doing is fraudulent.
You're saying it is, and I'm sure that's true.
I just don't know it.
I just, I don't need a man.
I don't spend a lot of time looking into it, but frankly, it's not my area of expertise.
I don't give a fuck about ethical journalism.
Why don't you just explain?
They're not fucking journalists, man.
They're documentary filmmakers.
No, they're not.
They're two YouTube Spergs.
Jesus Christ.
If you give them attention, then they'll get attention.
But if you ignore them, they're going to disappear.
This is the Gamergate take that exact same fucking thing with Anita Sarkeesian.
If you hadn't.
Because she wasn't going to just disappear.
You hadn't made her the issue.
I'd have never heard of her.
This wouldn't be a fucking thing.
I would not talk about Anita Sarkeesian.
Why does Davis Orrini get treated with kid gloves, but everyone else gets treated like a cun?
What am I supposed to say?
Come out, say, look, I was taken in by a cun man.
I'm sorry if you gave money to this fucking cun man on my say-so.
I'm not sorry.
Listen, listen.
I've got no emotional investment in people's being taken by con men, right?
I've said he has lied to me.
Listen, I'm not their fucking dad, man.
Right?
If someone gives him money and he's done it under false pretenses, the onus is on him.
If he's lied to me, I've removed the video in which he deceived me.
I don't think he deceived me for the original interview.
Therefore, it stays.
If he deceives me for this latest video, I remove it.
Yeah, but you didn't come out and explain to anybody about that.
Like I said, you're still talking about it.
Like I said, I've said it plenty of times on Twitter, and I've got a comment on my channel to explain to people.
And anyone.
Yeah, but you're acting like people don't come and ask me.
Anyone who asks me, I explain this exact thing to them, man.
I'm sorry if it doesn't meet your burden of, oh, you're not denouncing him hard enough.
But frankly, I think I'd do more damage to him by ignoring him.
And I think you would.
But why have you taken that approach with Davis O'Reinie?
But you've taken the exact opposite approach with your enemies.
Because my enemies aren't being ignored.
I can't stop the media from talking about Anita Sarkeesian.
Therefore, I have to talk about her to present a counter-narrative or at least some counter-information.
So people are aware that she's not the fucking angel that she claims to be.
Okay, well, if Anita Sarkeesian had done what Davis Orini did, would you have stayed silent on the topic?
I'm just thinking about.
Yeah, no, no, no, sorry.
I'm just thinking about how to phrase this.
Okay, so if Anita Sarkeesian had lied about her affiliation with Jonathan McIntosh and her affiliation with Feminist Frequency as an independent company and had then gone on to do a Kickstarter about it, is that what you're saying?
Well, you know what I'm saying?
That's what Davis Cyrini did.
He lied about his affiliation to a project and created a crowdfunding campaign in the name of the project to garner funds without telling people about what had actually happened behind the scenes.
So if you're saying Anit Sarkeesian had done that, would I complain?
Yeah.
Yes.
Because Anis Sarkeesian isn't Davis Zorini.
What kind of fucking justification is that?
Davis Cyrini has a tiny, tiny reach.
No one cares about David Sorini.
People care about Anita Sarkeesian.
Several of your followers, your young, impressionable followers, it's worth hammering that point home.
We're talking about impressionable young kids sometimes.
Okay.
Now take notice of what Davis Orini says because you essentially fucking pimped him out.
Okay, on your channel.
Several is what you're saying.
Several.
Well, I don't know how many it is.
It could be fucking two.
It could be 200.
It could be 2,000.
I don't know.
Say it's 2,000.
One is one too many.
Yeah, but that's the thing, isn't it, though?
It's about proportion.
Oh, one is one too many.
Well, yeah, that's an absolutist position.
But Anit Sarkeesian is talking to millions of people.
And so, yeah, David Corini, say he got 2,000.
That's 2,000, man.
If you ignore him, if we will stop...
That's 2,000 of your followers who...
Yeah, but they're not...
I don't know!
...went over to check this fucking...
But subscribe to my channel.
Yeah, exactly.
But my point is, it's not that you're their dad and that you have to do X, Y, and Z.
But what you could have done is come out, been open about it, been ethical, because whether you want to admit it.
What you do is a form of journalism too.
You could have come out, apologised, said, okay, I got taken in by a fraud.
I'm sorry.
Don't give money to this prick.
Yeah, but that's exactly what I've done.
No, you haven't.
You didn't do a fucking video about this.
Yeah, but I don't have to say that.
But I'm going to hang out with you.
You've said you can do so with an East Sarkeesian.
Yeah, but this is the difference.
Now I have to do a video because that's your standard.
That doesn't mean everyone who has asked me.
Well, you've done fucking tons of videos about Anita Sarkeesian.
I think one quick apology fucking video.
I'm not asking you to do a two-hour long epic.
Just come out and give a brief explanation to your fucking followers.
When you're creating more videos about Davis Arrini, why?
I think because he will find defenders.
He will find people.
He becomes a topic of conversation then.
If people ask me, then yeah, I make a note to the point where I've made a public note on my channel that, yes, I was taken in.
It was a lie.
I denounce it.
Right?
And when people ask me in conversation, I absolutely denounce it.
I say sorry.
You're happy to treat Davis Orrini with kid gloves in a way that you wouldn't do.
This isn't treating him with kid gloves.
This is dismissing person.
Sorry?
Then you treat him by comparison with kid gloves to somebody that is anti-Gamergate.
No, I disagree that it's kid gloves.
I think, like Napoleon said, I can't remember exactly how he said it, but something like, you know, glory is fleeting, but irrelevancy is forever.
So, you know, at the end of the day, I think you do Davis Orini too much credit by acknowledging him.
I think you're happy to ignore him because he's a stain upon the soul of Gamergate.
And I think that's joking.
Well, even if it's a tendency bias toward Gamergate, and essentially you've stared too long into the abyss, the abyss is staring into you.
No, I actually really tired of owning an arena.
You don't give a fuck about corruption in your own ranks.
I don't think that's true.
Well, are you denying that the Sarkeesian effect is a Gamergate or a Gamergate associated thing?
Well, this is the thing, is it?
as it's I mean frankly they I think she's not a fucking journalist man she's Do you mean she's not a journalist?
She gets paid to comment about fucking current affairs.
Yeah, that makes her a critic.
Well, how is that different to a fucking journalist?
Journalist is quite a nebulous term, isn't it?
No, it's actually really specific.
It's actually really specific.
This is why we're going to the Society of Professional Journalists, and an East Sarkeesian isn't going to be there.
Professional journalists.
Yes, the Society of Professional Journalists.
Exactly.
But you're a journalist.
I'm a journalist.
Yeah, but at best, I am an amateur fucking journalist.
At best, I'm the word outfit.
You earn a living from your internet activities, do you not?
Yeah, but that makes me like a blogger.
I don't know.
Well, exactly not.
It's just a modern version of a fucking journalist.
Well, I disagree.
Isn't that what an East Sarkeesian is?
So even if that was the case, she's not one of these things.
She is a critic.
She's like movie bob.
She's like Jim Sterling.
Jim Sterling's more of a journalist, but she's a critic.
She's not a journalist.
I think you're drawing an absolutely arbitrary and needless line between those two.
I don't see that a critic and a journalist are inherently different things.
Okay, well, I'm afraid I do.
It's a subdivision within a larger thing.
A critic is just a more defined version of a fucking journalist.
Only that's different.
A critic is someone who is specifically criticising a piece of media.
A journalist is someone who's finding out new information and exposing it.
Well, no, that's an investigative journalist.
Someone who writes on a newspaper who.
Someone could just be about documenting things as well, I suppose.
Exactly, yeah.
Journalist, I think you've got far too narrow a view of what a journalist is.
Davis Irene is a journalist as much as you are and as much as I am.
I don't think that that's the same as a critic, though.
Well, why isn't that?
Because why is trying to find out new information about something?
A critic's telling you why something that you know about is wrong or bad.
Well, yeah, but that's commentary.
That's what criticism is.
Exactly, yes.
So it doesn't matter if you're being critical of a political ideology or whether you're being critical of a video game.
You're still doing a journalistic fucking thing.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, the difference is that a journalist isn't supposed to be giving you their opinion.
They're supposed to be giving you the information.
Whereas a critic isn't giving you the information, they're giving you their opinion.
Okay, what about someone who writes an opinion piece in a newspaper?
Is that not journalism?
Well, they're specifically called opinion pieces, so no.
Then that's not a journalistic thing.
If you write an opinion, put an opinion piece in a fucking newspaper.
In a newspaper, that's not journalism.
Well, no, that's different.
You're trying to fucking sell something.
That's an opinion.
That's what an opinion is.
You're trying to sell your opinion.
That's not journalism.
You're trying to sell your opinion.
You're not trying to sell a fucking car.
You're trying to convince somebody of your point of view.
You're engaging in a discussion.
You're a fucking journalist.
I don't see why you'd even pick that point up.
Frankly, I disagree.
Let's carry on to the next thing then and just agree to disagree on this one because I don't think you're correct.
Okay.
Did you have any more questions?
No, I'm good for now.
Okay.
Do you want to carry on?
I'm free if you want to carry on.
Okay.
Okay, that's fine.
No, I did have one more question.
This is someone I put out on my Facebook to people, and they'd violise their anti-Gamergate people, of course.
And they said about, they brought up a point about you in the past, you've said that there should be no topic off the table for comedy, that you can make jokes about anything.
Agreed.
And then you got really fucking pissed off with Tim Schnafer for doing that glove puppet, fucking sock puppet joke about Gamergate.
Yeah, but it's kind of more that he's being a hypocrite, isn't it?
Well, are you not being a hypocrite by getting upset about something that you claimed no one should get upset about?
Well, I'm not saying that I'm upset because he made a joke about a black person or a woman.
That's nothing upsetting about that.
What I'm upset by is his double standard.
Well, I don't think, for a start, I don't think he was making a joke about a black person or a woman.
Of course he was.
No, what do you mean, of course he was?
Oh, okay.
Tell me your interpretation.
Well, it's specifically more about the not your shield thing that you got upset about, right?
No, no, no.
I tell you, I'm not getting upset about him making a joke.
I'm upset about him being making a joke at the expense of people who use the not your shield hashtag when he himself wouldn't tolerate that if I were making a joke about a woman, say.
Well, yeah, okay, but that you certainly said in that video that it should never be acceptable to make a joke about X, Y, or Z. Even though you've said previously.
Then I recount it.
I would need to know the exact context.
Okay, maybe I was wrong or I was speaking maybe in haste.
I would have to watch the video.
I can't remember exactly what I said.
But I recount that then.
I agree that nothing should be on the table.
I was wrong in that situation.
Okay, well, that's big of you to admit to that.
Okay.
So, yeah, I think I'm definitely in opposition to a lot of your points.
It's not that I don't see where you're coming from.
It's that I think, frankly, you're wrong on a few of them.
I can't think of any other questions off the top of my head.
Do you want me to take some off Twitter?
Yeah, by all means.
Okay, guys, tweet me some questions if you have some.
So I do have one.
So why haven't you made any videos about people on your side that you disagree with?
I would see that as sort of counterproductive in a way.
I don't see I'm not here as to offer a balanced anything.
I'm not here to make video in the same way that I've made anti-racist videos.
I'm not going to make a video to placate people who want me to be a fucking neo-Nazi.
I'm not going to throw feminists under the bus or whatever.
Do you know what I mean?
Right.
So how are you going to see that?
You can see that.
To hold me to the standard of I should denounce Arini then.
Well, because I've not, I don't think, pushed anyone towards a fraudster.
Well, I think that there are probably quite a few fraudsters, frankly.
Who have I who have I promoting mainstream feminism?
You definitely promote people like Gloria Steinem, Jessica Valenti, all that.
I mean, in none of my videos have I ever even mentioned the two names you just mentioned.
Okay, so I mean, that's true.
Your videos do tend to just be criticising people you disagree with.
Is that accurate?
Well, yeah, because part of the reason I started doing YouTube videos was because of the piss-poor state of YouTube atheism and how it's lurched so desperately to the right that I felt I had to speak out because I can't remember exactly who said it, but it was a turn into a Manic Street Preacher's song lyric.
I paint the things I want to see.
I make the videos that I think need to exist.
And that people aren't.
So why can't we use that reason?
There are plenty of videos out there.
If you want to go and fucking jerk off to some prick having a go at Gloria Steinem, there are plenty of fucking videos.
Just don't go to my bastard channel.
Okay, now that's that's fair enough.
Now, why can't I use that reason against Arena?
Because you've, whether willingly or not, you've pimped out a fraud.
Yeah, but you can say the same thing, but you're promoting feminism.
So you're pimping out other feminists.
Well, yeah, but not all fucking feminists are frauds.
Not everyone involved in it.
I've not said there's this project that Gloria Steinem's running and pimped that out and she's been proven to be a fraudster.
Yeah, but Owen isn't a fraud, is he?
No, Owen isn't a fraud, but as far as I'm aware, you haven't interviewed Owen.
That's not, yeah, but that's not because I don't want to interview Owen.
That's because I just happened to, at the time, have Arena at hand to talk to about the Sarkeesian effect.
Yeah.
That's the difference.
He was representing the pair of them working on the project.
Well, he was representing 50% of what he was representing was a fucking fraud.
Well, I don't even think that's fair to say, to be honest.
When he deceived me and came to me saying, I'm raising funds, A, I didn't encourage people to give him any money.
No, no, but you're questionable.
Okay, but B, I still thought he was representing the legitimate team rather than himself.
Exactly, but the least you could have done is come out and properly explain that to people.
I did.
I just didn't make a video about it.
And my point being that that's a massive piece of rank hypocrisy, because if Anita Sarkis had done the same, you've just said you'd come out and destroy it for it.
Yeah, but that's because we're not.
Rightly so.
I'm not the only thing I need to do.
No, no, I know, I know, I know, but that's because Arini isn't going to end up on the news.
Why is that the factor?
Because why is that everything?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, non-entity, he's raised thousands of fucking dollars fraudulently.
At least in part, because you pimped him.
He raised thousands of pounds.
I think he raised like 900 or something.
No, no, no.
The original, the original fund anything got over 2,000.
And he claimed, although whether this is true or not, that it had gone over 4,000.
Right, I don't know because I wasn't paying attention to them after I found out that they weren't.
Well, exactly.
And the fact that you weren't paying attention shows your inherent bias.
Because you don't care about corruption in your own fucking ranks.
No, no, it's not about bias.
It's about a case of scale, man.
You know, I'm not really.
I think that if you ignore Arena, he's going to go.
Why is that irrelevant?
If he was that irrelevant, why did you pin him out in the first place then?
Look, I didn't think the project was irrelevant.
I think the project was an interesting project, and that's what I was supporting.
You're acting like I'm supporting Arena as a person, and I wasn't, and I never was.
I was always supporting the project and Arena as a representation, a representative of the project.
I don't think it's ever been in that Holocaust denying white nationalists.
I don't care what his opinions are, I don't care what his opinions are.
It's about you, you care about his opinions.
I don't care about his people, I care about the project that was working.
And I think you should fucking care.
Yeah, but did we ever have a discussion about white nationalism and the Holocaust?
Pardon?
Did I ever have a discussion with him about Holocaust and white nationalism?
No, because you seemingly happy to gloss over that because you happen to agree with him on the project.
Probably, this is the first I've heard about him being a Holocaust denier.
And I've heard, I've seen his video, he's like, well, I'm a white nationalist on paper, but I'm not really a white nationalist.
Well, yeah, but again, if you watch the whole video, he says I'm a white nationalist on paper, but not because he disagrees with white nationalists in principle, but because of the way they act.
So he's a fucking white nationalist.
Look, man, he can hold any belief he wants, but as long as he doesn't act in a bad way.
Yeah, but that's that's my point.
Okay, okay.
Okay, right.
You knew he was he said he was a white nationalist on paper, right, before you interviewed him.
And you've then subsequently seen the trailer in which he interviews the not your shield guy, the black guy, right?
So you know that's bullshit.
No, you know, you know, well, you know that he dislikes black people.
I don't know, no, no, no, no.
Look, man, I don't know that he hates black people just because of white nationalists.
That's like, no, no, but that's like saying I hate women because I'm an anti-feminist, man.
I don't know that's the case.
And okay, right.
Just because he said that.
But if you go and watch his videos, he's the anger and hatred towards black people comes forward pretty obviously.
You'd have to ask about it.
I can't say that he hates black people or not.
I don't know whether he hates black people or not.
And again, and again, it's not really relevant.
Well, in future, what I would suggest is before you get into any kind of, and okay, you're not financially benefiting, but you're in a sort of business relationship in as much as you're giving advertisement to a project run by, 50% of it run by this man.
He's the fucking editor of the or was at the time editor of that film, right?
I would suggest you do a bit more background research into these people.
Right, okay.
Well, that's good advice, and I'll take that on board.
And to be honest with you, it's something I have taken on board because of the people associating me with him, just guilt by association, as if I'm somehow responsible for it.
Yes, but you associated yourself willingly with him.
Yeah, but no one's guilt by association.
It's not a guilt by association fallacy if you are the one associating yourself with him.
Yeah, but then I am as associated with you.
Okay, and if I ever come out as a Holocaust denier, by all means, make a video calling me an arsehole.
Well, you've come out as a full-on-life.
I would have turned into an arsehole.
But yeah, but being a feminist as fucking bad as being a Holocaust denier, in your opinion.
I'm not saying it is.
I'm not saying it is, but that's the point then, man.
Fucking reality, man.
Yeah, but what I'm saying is it's a fej.
Piles of corpses.
That's what the fucking saying.
I'm not saying the Holocaust didn't happen, but there was a trial of the 95-year-old geezer who was a guard at Auschwitz for fuck's sake.
Of course it happened.
There were people alive who said, look, I took part in the Holocaust.
Do you think you're prepared to debate?
You're prepared to debate points of feminism with people.
And you've said, in a small practical sense, you're for gender equality and all the rest of it.
Whereas you presumably wouldn't be happy to debate the fucking Holocaust with somebody.
So how are they the two equatable in any way whatsoever?
Sorry, say that again.
I think I misheard you.
Say that again, please.
Right.
You accept that the Holocaust happened, obviously, because you're not fucking mental.
So you wouldn't be prepared to debate that point with somebody because it's beyond debate.
Well, no, I would still debate it with them, but I think that there's no particular way they can prove that this guy didn't work at a camp or that these massive piles of bodies aren't from the death camp.
You've said on a low level that you're for gender equality, so in that sense you agree with feminists, whereas you do completely disagree with Holocaust deniers.
So how are the two comparable in your mind?
Yeah, but it's a label.
That's the thing.
This is it.
It's an opinion on a subject that we're talking about.
Because I agree that the Holocaust happened.
Therefore, I think the Holocaust deniers' opinion that it didn't happen is not in line with reality.
But the thing is, this is the issue I have with feminism.
And a lot of the things they say aren't in line with reality.
And this is why I'm not a feminist as well.
Okay, which one would be more deleterious than Holocaust denial or feminism?
Well, you know what, man?
It depends on the way you look at it.
Because from an immediate standpoint, then, yeah.
Well, I mean, what damage does Holocaust denialism do?
Well, thankfully, it doesn't do a great deal anymore, but it has done a great deal in the past.
It's bled into neo-Nazism throughout Europe since the Second World War.
Okay, but it's not really doing a lot of damage now.
So whether I talk about it or not isn't really that important.
Whether you associate yourselves with that kind of idea and promote that, well, you've associated yourself with a man who is a Holocaust denier.
Yeah, but I think feminism is probably one of the leading factors in male suicide these days.
I think that feminism...
Do you really think that?
Yeah, I do, man.
I really do.
Seriously, you have Barack Obam parroting false statistics at the wage gap and stuff.
And I love when you guys are like, it's a fucking feministism.
Like, I should be ashamed of saying that.
It absolutely is.
No, I only put that in there because I've gotten to.
You know, no, it's funny as well.
It's fine.
But the thing is, look at a school, man.
Look at how the kids are treated.
In America specifically, it's a fucking tragedy, man.
The amount of young boys who are drugged up for being active young boys.
Like Christine R. Summers says, they're being treated like defective girls.
And it's not because of some men's rights activist masculinist movement that's doing that, man.
If any movement's responsible for that, it's fucking feminism.
Because feminism is the movement that hates masculinity.
It hates maleness.
It wants to end that specifically.
And you can't tell me that it doesn't.
No, well, I think people conflate the idea of toxic masculinity with the idea of all masculinity being toxic.
That's not what's being said, certainly by mainstream feminists.
You are right there, but the thing is, I see a lot of feminism that is just trying to end masculinity as just what the term masculinity.
I mean, I saw a post a bunch of them retweeting on Twitter the other day where they were just laughing at the notion of masculinity.
They were just laughing at it.
And it had something like, I don't know, 700, 800 fucking shares and stuff.
I'm just like, for fuck's sake, that's weird that so many people would just retweet.
I mean, I wouldn't laugh at the concept of femininity.
You know, I wouldn't.
Well, no, but it's sort of the notions of femininity and masculinity that are actually quite dangerous in many ways.
Which, I mean, you shouldn't laugh at them because that's just fucking stupid and demeaning.
But to try and assign from birth that someone should act a certain way by the fact that they have a certain set of genitals is fucking ridiculous.
And that's what needs to be done away with.
I don't think masculinity per se does.
If you're a masculine man or a masculine woman, you should be fine doing that.
I agree.
But the thing is, there's a lot that's trying, a lot of people, a lot of forces trying to specifically go against that.
Well, I would disagree with those forces.
Okay.
I can't say anything else.
No, no, of course.
I'm not trying to hold you responsible for them.
That's the thing.
I'm not trying to say that you now need to, just because you both consider yourselves feminists, now you have to answer for them.
But I'm saying that that is something that exists that I've witnessed.
And I find that very concerning.
And so this is why I'm more concerned about that than David Cerini being a white nationalist.
Because, like you said, he's not really doing any damage.
He can't really affect anything.
You say that, but potentially.
Sorry, say that again.
You can't.
Say that again, please.
Oh, sorry, some of your followers would be potentially giving money to him.
Potentially, they might.
Is that not itself damaging?
Yeah, but I've never encouraged anyone to give him any money.
Well, it doesn't matter if you've encouraged it.
You've pimped him out.
You've advertised his fucking shit.
Well, no, I didn't say buy this thing.
That's what an advertisement is.
I've talked to him about it.
I've interviewed him.
But that's like saying fucking.
No, it's not.
Most advertisements don't say buy this thing.
They just show the thing.
Very few advertisements actually literally say come and buy this thing.
I think that they say it in a much more cunning way.
I think that the whole advertising team is precisely why Davis Aurini came onto your thing, to get, I don't know how many followers you had at the time, because I know your rise has been relatively recently.
But you had a lot of followers at the time, a lot of subscribers at the time, and he wanted to get the kind of the big guy Rob because he's only got, you know, a lot of people.
He probably did want exposure, but that doesn't mean that I was encouraging people to buy things.
I mean, I'm exposing you, but I'm not encouraging people to become feminists.
Well, no, because I'm not selling feminism as literally a financial product.
Yeah, but you don't have to sell it as a financial product.
You're selling it as an ideology.
Yeah.
Well, you're still selling something.
That's a discussion.
I'm not trying to get anyone's fucking money off of them.
Whereas he clearly.
At the time, he was already getting money.
That's the thing.
He was already getting money.
Well, no, technically, Jordan Owen was getting the money.
Well, whoever, the team, the team was getting money.
I'm not really bothered which one of them it is.
The team's getting money.
And so I talked to them about their product because I was interested in knowing about it.
I think other people might have been interested in knowing about it too.
It's not like I was encouraging people to turn off their critical faculties and then just start giving over money.
In fact, that's the complete opposite of that.
That's for me, that's a little bit of a cup out, because I think you know full well you yeah, but then I can't do anything right then.
Then now I'm encouraging people to come feminists because I'm talking to you.
Well no you, you can boy all means.
You're encouraging people to come to my channel and some of them might stay, but many of them will tell me to fuck off, and that's fine.
But I'm not trying to get anyone's fucking money out of them.
Yeah, but you're trying to sell them an ideology.
Well, not an ideology.
I'm trying to plant a few ideas in their head.
Yeah exactly, but I'm not actually.
I'm actually, I think, countermanding that by having you here.
But that's the point.
You know, people make up their own decisions, they make up their own minds based on what they personally think at the time.
And you, you can say, well, there might be a hypothetical 16 year old and maybe and that'll be a life lesson you know, he lost 20 quid or something to ain't that's.
I'm sorry to hear it, you know, but these things do happen.
It's a lot of.
That's an interesting way.
That's an interesting way of trying to spin that as a positive.
Well, it's not.
I'm not saying it's positive.
You make a good politician by the sound of it.
Most life lessons are not positive.
Most life lessons are negative.
But you've, you know you have them everyone in terms of you trying to spin that as if, oh well, you've done some fucking favor to these people.
No, I haven't done a favor to someone who has mistaken a rini for someone genuine and gone given him his money.
But at no point have I said the mistake that you made as well.
You said exactly, it's absolutely the mistake I've made as well.
And at no time have I said, give Arini some money, so I'm not accountable for them paying money it.
And if that's the case, then the then man like Um bought a car recently.
Car didn't work, got the car out of a newspaper.
Then the newspaper's now responsible for getting me that shitty car.
You know what I mean it's.
It's the same sort of fucking principle.
You can't blame people who are raising awareness of something, who brought that to your attention, who you.
Then you then decided, right, I'm gonna give money to whoever's in this thing, and then that turns out to be a fraud.
The newspaper isn't a fraud.
Do you seriously think that you don't owe your followers some sort of apology.
I've given them one.
It's on my youtube channel.
Okay, This I just don't.
I can't explain this in any more detail.
Okay, well that's what um whilst you collate Twitter questions I'll nip to the logo again.
Yeah, well I might actually um grab a cup of tea.
So I guess we'll be taking like a five minute break, guys, but I'll be back.
Okay.
Who's here?
Hello.
Hello, right.
Hello.
You back, yeah?
Yeah, I'm back.
Okay, cool.
I've just been checking my Twitter and my Facebook.
Yeah.
Got a bit crazy.
Yeah, me too.
That's getting the YouTube celebrity rub, you know.
That's what happened.
Yeah, you'll probably find yourself a whole bunch of new subscribers that I don't send to you.
I want them to not go to you.
But I can't stop them.
That's the problem, you know.
The problem is they're thinking intelligent people into themselves.
Okay, so I've got a couple of things that I've thought about before I frog on some questions.
If an East Sarkeesian, if say like Leia Alexander had gone to an East Sarkeesian and said, you know, I'm raising some money.
Could you interview me or could you look at my project to show my backers that something you haven't done?
And then it turned out that Leia Alexander wasn't working in good faith and she was, like you say, with arena conning people.
I wouldn't expect an East Sarkeesian to have to flagellate herself in public.
I wouldn't expect her to have to go crawling on her knees.
I would just expect her to take down the information.
And yeah, I might laugh at her, but then I don't have any problem with people laughing at me for being taken in by Arena.
You know, I should have known better.
I should have, I should, to be fair, reasonably, I should have contacted Jordan Owen.
I didn't think, you know, I didn't think to do so because they'd made the public declaration that they'd both made the declaration that we're working together now, so everything's fine.
So I didn't think that there would be a problem.
You know, maybe that was a bit silly.
Maybe I was a bit short-sighted.
I should have thought about it.
Because let's be fair, it was fucking probably inevitable, wasn't it?
And so, and I guess the next thing I want to say, I'd like you to ask me, or I'd like you to inform me what right-wing opinions are.
Because I'm very, very curious about why I can't be left-wing and criticise feminism.
No, you can be left-wing and criticise feminism.
That's no okay.
For instance, I consider myself left-wing, and I have criticisms of feminism.
I know a lot of people are in that situation.
I don't think any feminist would ever suggest that feminism is perfect, regardless of what perspective they're coming from.
But my point about you claiming you're a left-winger, now, you might well be a left-winger, but either way, it means you're pandering.
You're either a left-winger who is pandering to a base for financial reasons to try and earn a living from often young, often impressionable kids who want to...
And kids are, by and large, a little bit more extreme than when they grow up.
And so they're happy to see that kind of fiery rhetoric like you mentioned earlier about screaming it or shouting it's a feminist system and all the rest of it.
Or you're actually a right-winger who's looking for cover by pretending to be a left-winger, by claiming you're a left-winger.
Okay, it's very interesting how you're addressing my motivations there.
It's not anything that matters.
I'm fascinated by those.
And I know that wasn't specifically the question you asked.
And I'll tell you that.
No, no, no.
Sorry.
I'm genuinely fascinated by that because the internet's quite a young thing.
And so, especially YouTube being a financially viable career choice, that's a new thing.
So for me, it's interesting to explore the phenomena of people essentially saying things either they don't agree with or overstating a point to ingratiate themselves with people for money, which is, again, I don't want to be rude to you, but that's essentially.
It's a bit of a slight on my honor.
Yeah.
Well, that's what I said that in the video that I made to you.
Yeah, no, no, I don't recommend you to earn your living.
Well, that's the thing.
If what you were saying was true, then you're right, it wouldn't be.
But what you're saying isn't true.
I don't think you can fake this.
I don't think you can fake being an internet personality.
I don't think, I mean, I, okay.
I mean, maybe, maybe someone, maybe someone could, but I don't, I mean, I certainly couldn't.
And I think it would be very, very difficult to do so.
No, I'm not suggesting that you've completely made...
No, no, it's a panda.
You have to be doing something you wouldn't ordinarily do.
Yeah, but I'm not saying you've invented a completely different person, but what you've done is garnered a lot of support from Gamergate people by and large.
And I'm not suggesting that you don't.
No, no, absolutely not.
No, no, hang on, no.
My supporters are absolutely not, by and large, Gamergate.
The GameGate supporters I have on my channel are by far the minority.
Kotaku in Action is 47,000 people.
My average video will get probably 60,000, 70,000 maybe.
But I've got 150,000 subscribers now, man.
Most of them are not subscribers.
You're again using a very narrow definition of what you will accept as a Gamergate supporter.
You've got a lot of notoriety through Gamergate.
And I think a lot of that has come to your channel by that.
Well, I mean, if you look at my channel statistics, I was very much on the rise when Gamergate occurred anyway.
so I think let's not pretend it's not been a huge part of your recent so I think No, no, it has.
It absolutely has.
And I'm sure that between, say, 20 and 70,000, that was probably Gamergate.
But after that, you can't reasonably claim that's Gamergate because that's just outside of the size of the movement.
You know, I mean, I would love it if 150,000 of my subscribers are Gamergate supporters, active Gamergate supporters.
That would be really useful.
I think a lot more would get done in general, but I don't think they are.
Well, okay.
I'm more interested in my motivations, though, right?
Because like I was saying, I don't think you could reasonably fake a persona or motivation for what you're doing.
And so you think that I believe what I'm doing, but you think I'm also doing it to specifically pander to an audience.
Is that correct?
Well, part of the problem is I don't know which side of the two choices you actually fall on.
I don't know if you are a left-winger pandering to the right or a right-winger pretending to be left-wing to gain cover, if that makes sense.
So I don't know which bits of what you say is what you actually believe and which bits you're doing to pander.
From what you've said, I don't think it's possible from someone for the right wing to pretend to be a left-winger.
I don't think that's possible.
My strong inclination is that's what you are.
Okay, well, I actually don't think that would be possible.
Not to the point where you get a channel of my size anyway.
I think so, okay.
Let's and so what you think is I'm a left-winger pandering to the right in a way, yeah.
Because you've built a large part of your success off of Gainergate, initially, anyway.
Yeah, but Genji isn't a funny right-wing organization, a movement.
I've noticed a significant ground swelling of that, actually.
I think from my interactions with them, some of them are left-wing.
They're more socially left-wing, I'll say.
They're not as actively homophobic or something like that, but they're more than happy to make fucking homophobic comments.
Trust me.
Yeah, but that's because they're jokes.
You know, jokes are jokes.
Okay, but I mean, again, I know you've recanted that or whatever, but you have said in the past.
Yeah, no, I was wrong.
I was wrong to say that.
I completely agree.
I was wrong to say that.
But why?
I mean, well, that video with Tim Schaefer actually made first thing in the morning.
And honestly, I think that I was making it as an emotional reaction.
I won't lie.
That was a mistake.
Okay.
Okay, so anyway, my point being that they might be more socially left-wing, but they might not be anti-gay marriage or X, Y, and Z.
But when it comes to a lot of sort of libertarian people in there, yeah, but that's not left or right.
Well, you can get left or right libertarianism, obviously.
You can get libertarian socialist or whatever.
That's a thing.
But by and large.
Is libertarian socialist really a thing there?
Oh, yeah, but there's a great guy on libertarian socialist rants.
Yeah, Cammy Yabans.
Yeah, he's a really funny kid.
But I'm not, I think that that's a contradiction, isn't it?
Libertarian socialist.
Well, it depends.
And this is sort of what makes me wonder whether you are a left-winger, because you seem to think that everything to do with the left-wing is authoritarian instinctively.
No, I just think that the left-wing authoritarians are left-wing authoritarian.
I think the left-wing libertarians like me get called right-wing all the time.
You rarely, this is sort of my problem.
You rarely say anything that I think, well, that sounds like a left-wing you're saying that.
Okay, well, what?
What do I say that sounds right-wing?
You do little else but attack the left, it seems.
Yeah, but I'm attacking the authoritarian left.
It's not a politically partisan across the aisle, it's up and down.
I'm talking to the authoritarians from a libertarian perspective, not the left to the right.
Well, I'm never against, I'm not against like gay marriage, I'm not against women equal pay acts, I'm not against I raised this with you actually on Twitter.
I'll reveal to everyone.
I asked you whether you give a shit about the homophobic, sexist, misogynist, racist comments that were left on my channel by your supporters, and you seemed utterly unmoved by it, which I don't think is the reaction of a genuine left-winger.
No, it's the reaction of a genuine authoritarian.
I'm not asking you to stop these people, but you could at least fucking speak out against them.
Why would I speak out against it?
The jokes.
Because they're saying horrific fucking things.
What?
Because they called you a faggot.
You can say jokes, right?
But ultimately, you can still fucking come out against a joke.
Just because someone's you don't have to accept it just because it's a joke.
You can say that's a fucked up joke to say.
Okay, well, can you give me an example so we can tell gauge the sort of relative severity?
I'll have to go on to my video if you give me a second.
Yeah, yeah, take time.
Yeah, there are loads.
I've been called every fucking faggot under the sun, basically.
And what were you calling me in your video, though?
I can't.
Is that not misogynistic?
No, actually, and I've got a video potentially upcoming about this, about how the use of the C-word doesn't really mean what it once did.
I'm sorry, I hear a lot of feminists.
Sorry, I'm getting a bit of echo now.
I hear a lot of feminists saying that part of their misogynist abuse is the fact that they get called cunt.
Yeah, I know, and I've fallen out with feminists on this point.
I actually had a person on this on the comment section, a feminist, coming around and saying, and this is where I fall out with the radicals because they come on and say, oh, you're the fucking reason why we need feminism because you're using the word cunt.
You're part of X, Y, and Z.
And I tried to explain to this person, I don't know if it was a male or female, that actually, no, it isn't because cunt isn't used in that way.
Very few people describe a person's vagina as a cunt.
That's not how it's used anymore.
Do you know what I mean?
I think that's opinion.
I think that's your opinion.
And I might.
Would you say to your wife, do you want me to eat your cunt?
Like, no one describes it that way.
Yeah, but I personally don't, but I'm not saying that there aren't people that do that.
Well, yeah, but it's not what it once fucking was.
It's now just a slur in the same way that prick, you don't really describe your penis as a prick, do you?
You know, so's bitch, and yeah, I've heard that described over and over as a misogynist insult.
So well, I think that's slightly different in the sense that that's slightly dehumanizing because it's a fucking female dog, isn't it?
I don't think it's a misogynist insult, and I don't have a problem with that.
So, I mean, ultimately, I don't have a problem with that.
What about say the term pussy?
Again, is that a misogynist insult?
I mean, I think it just means a worse, or it means a cat, or it means a vagina.
So, I mean, words have lots of different meanings, man.
And I'm not here to be fucking word police.
You know, I don't really care what words people use.
But I think if someone's like, you're an unbearable faggot or something, then why not?
I might say, you are an unbearable faggot.
So, you know, I might say that to your face sort of thing.
So, you know, it's just an insult.
That's the thing.
It's not like some, I don't think anyone should be forbidden from insulting each other.
I mean, do you, really?
I mean, I personally don't get offended when people say anything because, I mean, what I do for a living is inherently a fucking dangerous thing.
So some prick calling me something on the internet pales into comparison.
I don't give a fuck.
But I still think it's wrong to go onto someone's video and say, why are you busy sucking a black man off or something like that?
You know what I mean?
It is wrong.
I'm not going to say that it's morally right, but I think that's a good idea.
Well, you don't speak out against it, do you?
So clearly you don't actually care.
It's the same way that Colleen's love with gender egalitarianism, egalitarian, and then doing nothing to actually bring about gender equality is actually a tacit approval of gender inequality.
No, absolutely not.
I'm doing stuff to help gender equality every single day.
I do it almost by not discriminating on the basis of gender.
If we all did that, then the problems would all disappear overnight.
That's the solution.
That's the only solution is to not discriminate on the basis of gender.
And yet feminists can't seem to think that that's an accepted thing.
Every time you hear that, you're so weird about the statistics.
Like, well, did you expect it to happen tomorrow?
You know, is this something that you're actually expecting to happen like right now?
Or shall we just carry on treating each other as normal human beings without the gender being a big deal?
But do women get treated like normal human beings?
Really?
I think majority of them do, yeah.
Okay.
I mean, in real life, do you walk around the streets and see women being treated like second-class citizens?
Okay, then see I see them getting sexually objectified a lot of the time, yes.
I see them being objective quite a lot, yes.
So say again I see them being blamed for their own rape all the time.
That's disgusting.
I agree.
I don't think anyone should be blamed for their own rape.
I agree with that, right?
So where was your video about Thunderfoot doing that?
Precise fucking thing?
I don't know that Thunderfoot's done that.
Okay, well, I would advise you to go and watch.
Okay, either watch his video or go.
Well, how about I just do it now?
If Thunderfoot said someone was responsible for their own rape, he was wrong.
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
I disagree.
I appreciate that.
I genuinely do.
That's fine, because I think that he was wrong.
I don't think the person who has been raped is responsible for the act of rape.
An interesting thing from Twitter, I didn't, this is from Lord Mookie.
Hello, Lord Mooker.
The Gamergate heat map thing from the left right libertarian.
If that's true, that is astonishing to me.
I think that is true because I think I know, in fact, I did my political compass and I left a link to the political compass test and a survey underneath to say, look, can you just tell me what your result was?
And it just went for quadrant.
So authoritarian left, authoritarian right, libertarian left, libertarian right.
I think over 60% of my subscribers are libertarian left.
Well, yeah, well, here, the heat map, all the red is in that bottom left corner.
That's libertarian left.
That's the corner I fall into.
And this is what I mean, man.
You're like, you're panicking.
That isn't genuinely representative.
That is not what I've seen on a personal level.
I'm sure that's true, but that's why I'm here arguing with you.
Because that is genuinely representative.
And that's broadly representative of my subscriber base.
It's in fact very, very similar to the Game Gate heat map, in fact.
Because the majority of the people who I'm talking to, I'm not pandering to them.
We are all concerned about these issues.
I did a stream the other day with two other people who are in the libertarian left called A Sickness and the Left, a discussion.
80,000 views on that.
And that's a live stream.
I mean, live streams don't get half the views that a video gets because they take forever.
And 80,000 views.
80,000 people.
That's probably the 60% of my subscriber base I'm talking about.
We are genuinely concerned that people like you who would offer, hang on, who would who would say who would say, well, yeah, I agree with these principles and then go along with feminism like zombies.
It's ironic that you accuse my files of being zombies because we're really concerned about this, man.
That's why I have you on right now.
The zombie thing was fine.
But from my experience of your followers that came onto my video, for instance, I wouldn't class any of those fucking people as left-wing Franklin.
Or very few of them.
And maybe they weren't.
You know, I've got like the fact that you did a live stream called The Sickness of the Left, which attracted that number of people, would suggest to me not actually that they give a fuck about the sickness of the left, but that they just want to hear people having a go at the left.
Yeah, but that's your opinion.
I don't know if that's true, and I don't think it's true.
Well, I don't know if that's true, but that would seem the more likely of the old Occam's Razor.
I'm telling you now, man, it's not.
I know it's not.
I know my followers are primarily leftists.
I know that they're concerned about progressivism.
Out of interest, the fact that you called them leftists, which is generally a right-wing term for people of the left.
Did you see liberals then?
Whatever you want me to call them.
Did you see Aaron Clary's video to you?
I did.
Where he said?
Like your saga of a cadorno-leftist.
I don't know who that is.
Oh, you don't know Aaron?
Okay.
He's Davis Arini's fucking butt buddy on the internet.
He's this kind of right-wing libertarian fuckwit.
I did actually did a video about him in my series, The Centre of Manosphere.
Yeah, I only watched the Rouge one, to be honest.
Yeah, specifically to you.
He did a video too, you which didn't actually appear in my episode, but he was basically going through all your political positions and he said it's called something like Sargon of Akad, you're no leftist.
Right, well, he's wrong, frankly.
I wonder if you'd think that, you know.
I haven't the thing is I think a lot of Americans I had a conversation with them one of the young Turks Network called Kyle Kalinsky Really, really nice chap.
Again, he's very much the left.
And he was of the opinion that the political spectrum was linear.
And I think it's not.
I think it's three-dimensional sort of thing.
Yeah, I would agree with you, actually, on that.
Yeah.
And so I think that this Aaron Clary guy, he's probably thinking in linear terms like Kyle was.
He thinks you're either a liberal progressive leftist or you're an authoritarian rightist.
And I mean, the libertarian right obviously disproves that.
And the authoritarian left also disproves that.
So I don't know who he is, but he's wrong, frankly.
Actually, another thing to bring up about whether to hopefully throw some light on to why I don't necessarily think you're a leftist, the fact that you would, like, you say about Fox News, why would I talk about Fox News, it satirises itself, and then go on to do, and I've seen a few of your videos, where you will attack the Young Turks, who are basically the left-wing's version of Fox News.
Well, I agree with you.
I think they are the left-wing's version of Fox News.
But why would you infect them much?
Because of the ideology they're pushing.
Conservatism...
How is that any less or any more deleterious than what Fox News are doing?
Well, I'll explain.
Especially when you've mentioned previously about the relevance or not.
Fox News is much bigger than the fucking Young Turks.
Well, I disagree.
I don't think they are, actually.
And the Young Turks are pushing the same message that is, well, frankly, the message of the authoritarian left.
And I'm getting really sick of it.
The issue is that Fox News and the conservative religious right have been discredited.
In the mainstream popular opinion, they're not credible.
I mean, if you just say, oh, Fox News, yeah, yeah, that's enough to get rid of something.
Right-wing, just you guys.
Let me finish, right?
You say this is right-wing, as if being right-wing in itself is wrong, right?
That's how discredited these people are.
But their ideology is just as wrong as the ideology of the young Turks.
But they're not instantly discredited.
No one just goes, oh, they're left-wing.
They're wrong.
Well, maybe people on the right do, but I don't associate with those people.
I don't know that that's what they say.
But I know that that's what you say.
And I know that that's not what you say about the Young Turks.
So I need to talk about the Young Turks because what they're saying is wrong and people are believing it.
And yet, what Fox News is saying is wrong, is no one is believing it.
Well, you say that, but...
Well, okay, only right-wing people who can't get these...
Man, gay marriage has just been enacted in every state in America.
They've lost.
They've fucking lost, man.
Well, in essence, they're always going to lose to progress eventually.
Then why talk about them?
What do you mean?
Because they hold back that progress.
And they have done ever since time fucking began.
Yeah, but at the moment, the progress that the left, the authoritarian left is trying to have enacted needs to be held back.
It's the wrong fucking progress.
I want to progress in society as well, but I certainly don't want to do what fucking the authoritarian left wants to do.
Jesus Christ, man.
You know, I've seen some, like the Jessica Valenti when I tweeted at you.
It's just some of the most ridiculous stuff.
But the only thing that stops that is the fact there's a law there.
If enough people turn and say, why don't we just repeal this law?
Then that would happen.
And then injustices are going to occur.
I don't need to fight Fox.
They have been defeated.
I would suggest by their viewership that they haven't been defeated, actually.
They still...
Get married in every state, man.
Gay marriage in every state, even heavily Christian states, they've lost.
They've lost.
Well, is that the only fucking thing that they can do?
Is it?
What about the rollback of abortion that's still fucking occurring in America?
Yeah, but that's women voting for that.
That's women voting for that.
The majority women in that state.
They are.
No, no.
The majority women in that state are voting for that, right?
You could just go to a state that doesn't have that to get an abortion if you want.
It's not like abortions aren't allowed anywhere.
It's just that they are exercising their state's rights by saying, look, in this state, the majority of us are Christian and therefore we're going to vote against abortion.
That's their prerogative.
They can choose to do that, but they can't enforce it on a national level and they never will be able to.
Okay.
Honestly, I'm really tired of being called right-wing.
really out it's just like you know i i'm to name a right-wing policy you know being anti-bush I'm not anti-abortion, being anti-gay, I'm not anti-gay.
Being, you know, maybe sort of, I don't want to say anti-race, but like I'm, you know, I don't have any particular prejudice or animus against anyone of any race, immigrants.
I'm not a fan of the numbers of immigration, but I don't think a small amount of immigration is inherently a bad thing.
I can't think of a right-wing policy that I particularly support.
I'm not religious.
You know, I'm just not in favour of authoritarian leftism.
And that's because I and most of my subscribers are the libertarian left.
We're the people who just disagree with you on your methods rather than your principles.
That's what we disagree with.
Okay, I'm happy to accept that.
Okay, well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
Shall I take a few Twitter questions for you?
Yeah.
Right, okay.
Let me just.
What's your opinion of Michael Moore?
He's a fucking propagandist.
I mean, that's essentially all you need to say about the guy.
As much as I might agree with him on a number of things, he does phenomenally produced documentaries.
They're not documentaries, they're propaganda.
I don't disagree with many of his political stances, but at least do honest fucking journalism.
Yeah, but his methods are unacceptable.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's part of the reason I despise the Psyche East Infect documentary, because they obviously went in there with no sense of open-mindedness, which is wrong.
I didn't have a problem initially.
It was more that they handled it in a really anatristic way that I had a problem with.
Well, it wasn't just that, but what Jordan Owen eventually admitted to in his, you know, when he came out and said that he didn't, people shouldn't donate to Orini's thing, is that they already knew before filming that they were going to specific people who were going to say specific things, which means that's not a fucking documentary film.
That's a propaganda piece.
I think that with every documentary, I think there's always some inclination of what's going to occur, who they're going to talk to.
Well, not just that, but it's difficult to completely divorce any sense of bias because for a staff, the reason you're making a documentary about a specific thing is because you're interested in that specific thing.
So there's always going to be that element of it.
You go in there specifically knowing you want X, Y, and Z out of X, Y, and Z person.
That's incredibly produced, and that's fucking false so far.
You shouldn't try to pretend otherwise.
The thing is, if it was like a clean slate and then they were like, right, okay, we're going to get this from this.
It's been the result of a long history of exposure to these people.
So you would inherently, anyone who's had a long exposure to these people, would know the information that is going to come out about so-and-so from so-and-so.
Because that information really is probably already out there.
It's just getting like a definitive interview about it that I think is that they're doing that.
I don't necessarily think that they're necessarily in the wrong.
If it was as you said, then yeah, that would be the case.
But I don't think you're necessarily taking into account the nuance of the situation.
But again, even then, that wouldn't be, that is wrong, but I don't think that's what they're doing.
My issue really has just been the professionalism of it.
It's been terrible.
The public spats.
And it's because, you know, everyone's like, Irini's wrong.
Man, I think Jordan is just as wrong.
You know, I and I side with Jordan on political issues, definitely, you know, but I think that he's been a lot more emotional about it.
I read some of the sky blogs.
I only read a few.
Ironic, only read a few lines because it just seemed like Jordan was frankly just arguing from emotion.
And Irini was like, let's be reasonable and pragmatic about it.
Right, well, does that not feed back into a point I made earlier about the gender expectations?
Well, he shouldn't be emotional.
No, but no, no, no, I'm not saying he shouldn't be emotional, but he was arguing from emotion.
And that's, you know, obviously a logical fancy.
I feel this way, therefore that must be true.
It doesn't mean it's true.
It just means you feel that way.
I don't think he was.
I don't think his argument was correct.
I think it was because he was emotional.
True, I get the impression, and I'm not, I'm no fan of Jordan Owen either, but I get the impression that there was almost a sense of it almost being a fucking domestic abuse situation.
Well, I don't know.
You know, I think people give Rini too much credit.
I think that he goes out of his way to portray an image.
And I think that you could buy into this image or you could just look at him a bit more skeptically and go, how much is he this guy that he's portraying himself as?
And I think that I think Jordan Owens just, I think he's probably a really nice guy.
I think he's probably a really, really lovely guy.
But I don't think he's.
Well, I think I could.
He's probably a guy you could have a beer with, but from certain like I've done a couple of response videos to him.
I whose political stuff is at the fact that, again, he does a similar thing to you in the sense that he claims to be left-wing, but yet will metaphorically suck Ayn Rand off, basically.
Yeah, but that's a bit of Ayn Rand.
Yeah, but that's he likes the libertarianism of Ayn Rand.
That doesn't mean he's not left wing.
It just means he's not authoritarian.
Well, no, but you can't claim that if you're that in love with Ayn Rand, I have trouble believing that you're really a leftist, for want of a better phrase.
I just don't, I don't see those two, those two things for me are almost mutually exclusive.
But that's because I think that you're slightly more on the authoritarian side of leftism.
Well, I probably am a little bit, but I'm not, I don't know.
I'm not saying unreasonably so.
I'm not trying to say that you're fucking Mal or something.
I'm just saying I think that if you know on the line, I think you're over the line rather than on the libertarian side of the line.
And that's that's the difference.
I think Jordan Noah, he's I think he's probably quite libertarian, whereas you're slightly authoritarian.
So when you're looking at me thinking, well, that doesn't look like the leftism I'm familiar with, but that doesn't mean that he's not a leftist because it's not the political issue really that he's talking about.
It's the issue of civil liberties that he's talking about, which isn't a left or right issue.
So, you know, that's what I think the issue going on there is.
But Jordan Noah is definitely a leftist, man.
No doubt about it.
No doubt about it.
Okay.
It's very interesting.
Very interesting how people, and it's not just you that I have this sort of conversation with.
That's all.
I have this conversation with plenty of people from the authoritarian left because the automatic assumption is, oh, you must be in the right because you must be on the right wing because you're criticizing me and I'm on the left.
But these days, that's the political dichotomy that's not really that relevant because, frankly, we know the right wing was generally wrong.
We know that they were generally wrong.
And social policies that are being enacted are directly against their interests because the public at large doesn't agree with them.
So this minority of people will hold these opinions, but that's like you say, it's the wrong side of history, I guess.
You can't argue from the Bible and expect to enforce that on society anymore.
And I'm frankly, I want people to understand that you can't argue from feminist dogma and enforce that on society anymore because it's just as wrong.
And like you said, you're not an argument, so I've got no doubt that you would, on certain things, you would definitely say, well, that's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong.
You know, you strike me much more as a feminist because of the principles rather than the modes and the methods.
Well, I don't necessarily agree with all feminists that do X, Y, and Z, like the Tumblr feminists.
And I don't agree all of them, obviously, because I know what you mean.
They are majority.
There are some mad fuckers in there.
And it's not just a point of principle, but I think it's for the advancement of the fucking species.
And I know that sounds like a grandiose, fucking flowery way of putting it, but essentially, if humanity is to progress, you can't have a situation where half of them are left lagging behind.
I agree.
But the thing is, the trouble is that progressivism has been, I guess you could say co-opted in a way by this sort of dogma.
I mean, the thing is, what you're saying, I don't, you know, the things you've proposed, I don't necessarily disagree with.
But the thing is, it would also give license to the people who are saying the things I do disagree with.
Like, in multiple Canadian universities, they're just making it so that white men must speak last.
They just don't get to choose.
If there is a woman or a person of colour who wants to speak, they automatically get to speak before the white man.
I have to say, I've not heard of that.
That sounds like a problem.
That's my point.
It sounds, but it is happening.
And so this is the point.
This is why I'm arguing against it.
That's what I'm arguing against.
I'm not arguing against the right of women to vote or to have jobs or to be paid equally or to be in control of open reproductive systems.
I'm not arguing against any of that.
No, but you give, unfortunately, by being as stridently anti-feminist as you have been in the past.
And I know you said, this is the thing.
We both sound sort of more reasonable because we're talking, but we obviously do much more strident stuff, you know, in our own fucking videos, whatever.
And there's no doubt there's that sort of British passion.
Well, it's fine.
It's easy to do.
The thing is, a lot of it's for more entertainment purposes as well.
I completely accept that it's more strident in videos because it's funnier.
It's more interesting to watch.
It's not necessarily exactly representative.
I call you or anyone like you.
Oh, he's a silly prick.
But I don't actually think you're stupid.
Yeah, no, no, I'm very much the same.
Very much the same.
Don't worry about that.
I'm not by being so stridently anti-feminist, you give succour to those that would keep women back.
I might do.
That might be true.
But the thing is, there's such a small minority of people.
And I think that that by feminists has been deliberately overblown.
would disagree with you very strongly that there are minority of people I think there is A small minority.
They are a minority, but they're a sizable enough minority that they often swing significant, say, elections or illegal decisions or whatever.
Which do disproportionately affect women.
I mean, how exactly are these people making any strides?
I mean, if they're not attempting to make strides, they're attempting to drag back.
They still need to make they're swimming against the tide, but they're still holding the rest of humanity back.
You know, I don't think they are holding anything back.
I mean, what are they holding back?
Well, say, for instance, in Britain, we've got a Conservative government which we've been enforcing pretty fucking negative austerity.
And I think that's something we you've made a video, and I it's the closest I came to thumbing a video of yours up.
Yeah, I think you'd like it, actually.
Conservative enemy or something like that.
I spent three days making that video.
Honestly, it was a hell of a lot of work into that video.
Yeah.
And actually, well, that's a point, before I forget, the point that you raised and a lot of people raised when I said in my first video to you, the first of the why What Saigon's Got Wrong Now videos, I said I can't be bothered with him.
I meant to make an episode of The Descent of Manosphere, because what I do in that series is I watch fucking hours upon hours and hours of their back catalogue in order to and then I sit here, I've got literally a fucking book, and I write the specific video, the specific quote that I want from the thing from fucking, I mean, tens of hours of stuff, and I can't be bothered with it.
And I think I've worked out why.
It's because your British accent is this is going to sound bad, but it's common enough that it's more relatable to me.
So to hear someone saying the things that I find so abhorrent, even that accent.
Like, Thunderfoot's got quite a push accent, right?
So it doesn't bother me that he's saying that, because I'm used to that.
I'm used to upper class pricks being pricks.
But I'm not used to that.
Why not sound up for class?
But no, you've got that southern thing of pronouncing your ass, like when you said class instead of class.
Yeah, but that's a southern thing more than anything.
But you're not, you don't have like a particularly push accent, really.
Good.
And actually, I didn't realise in making that Thunderbook video, he went to Birmingham, you know, which is, for those who don't know, is the city I'm in.
As did William Lane Craig.
Who knew?
The thing about that video, right, is that if you're going through like tens of fifteen of hours trying to find individual bits about people, isn't that kind of cherry-picking?
well no no I'm not I mean I'm I want to because part of that series is it's the it's the peas right You've got pwnage to a certain extent.
Pop psychology and profile.
I'm trying to expose the person for the person they are.
Okay, you're just finding examples that typify their own.
I'm trying to look for things to make fun of as well, because they're quite long videos.
I usually try and get them around about half an hour long.
So in order to sustain attention for that long, you have to find stuff to muck about somebody, because otherwise if it's just a dry lecture, no one's going to fucking watch it.
And so what's the point?
So I try and find things to muck about a person.
Like, if I was to do one on you, that fucking feminist system would definitely feature, because that's funny.
Oh, you should.
Yeah, but it is.
Again, that's part of it was for entertainment value.
But it's a lot more of a feminist system than it is a sort of anti-feminist system.
Well, the thing is, you can draw up quotes, like you said about Barack Obama parroting X, Y, and Z. All politicians, because they know that you can't come out necessarily as anti-feminist because or stridently so, because it makes you look like you're anti-female, and females make up 50% of the fucking voting public.
You're not going to win anything doing that.
And that's why the Republicans are starting to find out.
If you come out as anti-woman, you're not going to win many fucking elections.
But that's the thing, though, isn't it?
Don't you find that to be they are just parroting stuff back.
They don't actually fucking implement many feminist policies, it seems.
Well, I think in America it's different.
But I mean, if it Theresa May and Yvette Coupeau, is it Yvette Coupa is the label one?
Yeah.
Yeah, they're they're both confirmed, you know, they've said that publicly, they're feminists.
Oh, yeah, they've said that, but what the fuck have the what policy?
Harry Harmon did try to do something.
Harriet Harmon's a fucking idiot.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, I mean, she is, yeah.
My sort of politics, but I don't like the fucking woman.
But what's the current home secretary done that you could really say, oh, she's actually a feminist?
You can't judge them by what they call themselves, you know.
Well, no, I agree.
I think actions have to fit motives.
I would actually have to have a look, see how Theresa May could be called a feminist.
Well, that's the point.
The fact that you have to be overtly a feminist, is she, really?
She might call herself that, but she there's nothing that instantly comes to mind that makes you think, oh, well, she's a fucking a raving feminine.
Yeah, but isn't this the same sort of argument about people supporting Gamergate?
You know, you're like, well, how can you say they're not Gamergate support?
Well, if they're not really doing any good for Gamergate, can I call them a Gamergate supporter?
Even if someone use the hashtag every day, if it was to harass any Sarkeesian, I wouldn't think that that person was a Gamergate supporter.
Well, there's a difference between tweeting something on Twitter or posting something on Facebook and being the fucking home secretary.
You can do stuff as a home secretary that you can't really do on Twitter.
Like it should be much more obvious, I would think, as Home Secretary, if you were an actual feminist implementing feminist ideology or whatever, that you'd be instantly say, oh, she did, oh, she did this or she did that.
I don't think she's not got like absolute power.
No, it's not a significant amount of power.
You could literally have people released from fucking prison without the Prime Minister say so.
You have that power.
It doesn't mean you can enact legislation based on your ideology.
No, no, no, absolutely.
Her hands aren't tied in that way.
But also, I mean, it's like this is really rather going into the territory of no true Scotsman.
It's like, we don't have the power to tell people they can't identify as something like feminist or Gamergate.
No, no, you can't.
No.
So, you know, that's the problem, I think, with sort of decentralized movements.
But it's also the strength.
You get people joining because they choose to join rather than any other reason.
Actually, one of the criticisms I have of Gamergate is that essentially they want to have their cake and eat it.
They want the advantages that come along with decentralized lack of leadership, blah, blah, blah.
But they then don't want to accept the negatives that come with that.
That's exactly the same with feminism, though.
I think, well, that's possibly a fair criticism.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've actually argued that.
Feminism has done.
Okay, it's been around a lot longer, but it's done a hell of a lot more and it's a hell of a lot more of a progressive force in society.
The game gate is not like a year old, though.
Wait, it's very much a specific niche thing as well.
You know, it's not like we can afford to population.
Ultimately, if Gamergate is in part set itself against feminism or against whatever, and I know that's not one of its core principles, but essentially, there's a very large crossover between anti-feminists and gamergaters.
I think the Venn diagram would be pretty fucking there's an overlap there.
Sorry, say that again.
The Venn diagram would be an overlap between who?
Between Gamergaters and anti-feminists.
There would be a very significant crossover there.
There are.
It's the same with my subscribership.
Anti-feminists generally tend to be left-wing libertarian.
At least the ones on my channel.
Nearest damn it.
Every right-winger would be an anti-feminist.
There are very few right-wing feminists.
Well, the problem is that there are right-wing people who call themselves feminists.
The problem is that the left-wing authoritarians then turn around and say they're not real feminists.
There are absolutely right-wing people who call themselves feminists.
Sarah Payne calls herself feminist.
Well, that's a farce beyond belief for her to call it up.
Hey, I agree.
I think it's a silly thing as well.
But say someone like the obvious example in recent times has been Christine Hofsommer, right?
Who is broadly speaking a right-wing feminist?
She's not a Democrat.
Well, yeah, but by British standards, fairly right-wing.
She would be a member of the Conservative Party rather than the Labour Party here in Britain, wouldn't she?
Oh, well, it's hard to say because they're not really directly analogous to the American parties.
No, they're not.
I wouldn't want to say.
I couldn't say.
Okay, well, I'll leave that point there then.
I'll leave that.
That's fair enough.
I don't know.
So I couldn't say.
But This is, I mean, I have argued that feminism actually needs some kind of structure, but that's because, in my opinion, feminism is kind of tending towards the province of religion, in my opinion.
It's, I've seen quite a lot of statements and actions taken by feminists that, frankly, I mean, don't seem entirely dissimilar to actions taken by Christians for Christianity.
And so, I think that's something that well, I mean, it might seem silly or just nay saying, or not nay, counterpointing or whatever.
But I would suggest a lot of gamergaters, not necessarily they think it is a religion, but they act as if it's a religion.
They act as if they must always pretend to united front, regardless.
I don't know if that's true, man.
I've recently been under quite a lot of fire from people who don't agree with what I have to say in Game Gate.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I really have just out of interest.
Any examples?
Yeah, well, the one that I was literally dealing with this week, I've got a video on my channel called Necromancer Discussion.
Sorry, Discussing Necromancer from five days ago now.
That's all about that.
It's all about them not happy with something that I've done or they think that I've done, and they're calling me out on it.
So I was holding the discussion on my channel.
Well, actually, that's a point because again, I'm happy to hold my hands up and say, essentially, I've been doing harassment of you on Twitter.
I've been baiting Twitter.
Baiting is different to harassment.
Well, I've been poking you with a fucking stick for the last few days about your video game you've been involved in.
And at no point have I ever claimed you were doing anything illegal.
No, I know.
What I would suggest is that, again, showing your bias and the bias of Gamergate at large is that you, as a relatively prominent voice in Gamergate, have been involved in murky waters around this fucking game.
Well, that's the thing is, there's actually no murky waters around this game.
The problem is that the guy accusing me, he's not actually accusing me of anything.
That's the problem.
He's this guy called Varilo, and he's previously had a dust up with Angry Joe because he gets in his sort of moods, I guess, and then he finds a load of stuff that's not really very important.
He kind of misinterprets it, and then he accuses based on that.
He did the same for Angry Joe.
And his accusation to me was because he had no idea how UK sole proprietorship worked.
He had absolutely no idea.
And once I explained it to him, I sent him the links from HMRC, he completely dropped his argument.
And so now his argument is that I didn't represent his argument with the Angry Joe army as accurately as I should do.
I was literally in a stream watching this today, and he literally said that was his, that was how I've been unethical.
And it's like, well, well, there we go.
You know, if you, if you think that's something I've done, well, that's his opinion.
But this is the thing.
GameGate actually does call out their own.
Unfortunately, sometimes you get some people who are just idiots and who don't know what they're talking about.
And Varilow is one of those cases.
I would again accuse you of evasion in the sense that I believe 14 months overdue in essence.
I know you didn't have a deadline, but this for me is a cup out to say, oh, we didn't have a firm deadline there.
No, no, no, no.
Yeah, no, I'm not saying it's not late.
It is late.
Because if, again, if Anita Sarkeesner done, and to a degree she has done it.
She has done this, yeah.
You would call her out for that, Hannigan, quite rightly.
Okay, but why aren't you calling her out for that?
I don't give a fuck about Anita Sargis in particular, like the same thing.
Yeah, absolutely.
But I, and I'm poking you because hopefully, if I don't think for a second, I'm ever going to change your mind completely.
But if I can just get you to think about the tactics that you use against your opponents and how that, if someone was saying that to you, how you would react to that, maybe you might begin to understand or to some degree try and change your approach to this.
Because if you're doing the same thing that if your opponent were doing the same thing that you're doing, you'd go after them, then surely you're doing something inherently fucking wrong as well.
Well, I think that we're comparing apples to oranges here.
I mean, first, I don't think financially we're in any way the same ballpark.
£8,000, she got like, what, £100,000?
So for a start, for delivering a series of videos to delivering a video game, again, it's a whole different level of complexity.
I deliver videos all the time.
I wish I'd done my Kickstarter in delivering videos because I would have had hundreds of them done by now.
But video games are a lot more difficult to do.
And once again, 30% of my team quit.
So, you know, it's development problems, but it's not me necessarily being the same as an ether.
I think this is apples and oranges, man.
And if I've had like, I mean, one of the things that no one got paid any salaries from our Kickstarter.
Like £8,000.
There's no salaries that that's for licenses.
That's for objects.
That's for programs and stuff like that to make sure that legally we can sell the game.
And we have the models that we need.
At the time, we had an artist, so we were using, we would have been spending them on licenses for software.
But since he quit, we just had all we need to do is commission the images and have models instead.
But if it had $160,000 worth, I could have just hired a new artist.
It's not that easy if you're working as part of a team that's doing it voluntarily.
So it's not the same.
And it's a video game.
It's way more complicated.
I'm not saying it's exactly the same thing.
Although ultimately I would point out it doesn't matter if it's eight grand or eight million fucking quid in the principle of the damn thing that if it's late, it's late.
Yeah, but being realistic, if you've got a lot more money and you don't have a lot more money, then the one with a lot more money has a lot more onus on it to be done within a less of a delay than the one with a lot less money.
Because being practical.
Again, this is going to sound like I'm fucking defending an A Sarkeesian, but if you look at the Kickstarters that get over the amount they asked for, and they take longer and longer to do, the more oversubscribed they become, by and large, the longer and longer it takes to do it.
And I have no idea why that would be the case.
Because like you said, if you've got loads of money, it should be fucking easy because you can hire people to do this.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
But that apparently, the study that was done on that suggests that the more oversubscribed it is, the longer and longer overdue it takes to get there.
So I don't think that's necessarily just an Anita problem.
Although, again, I don't actually like an A Sarkeesian for me, I don't want to throw her under the bus or anything, but I think it's pretty fucking not silly necessarily, but trite jealousy.
That's a good way of describing it.
Hey, I totally agree.
Again, like all things, I'm harassing her, but I think she definitely deserves criticism for her work.
And I'm kind of annoyed that she never listens to any of it.
I can understand to a degree of not wanting to listen to stuff, because it must, and this is the thing, right?
As big as a YouTuber as you are, you're not on the same scale that she is.
She's fucking world fucking famous person now, you know.
I mean, she's not fucking Brad Pitter anyway, but you know what I mean?
She was on the Colbert report, man.
Fucking geez, I'm not good on that.
She's on big fucking platforms and stuff.
So it must be difficult with all of that on you to distinguish between those that are actually doing genuine critique and those who are just haters.
That must be difficult to deal with.
Do you know what I mean?
I think she is capable of determining.
I mean, she put a tweet out recently saying how, you know, just playing the victim.
Oh, whenever someone with 250,000 subscribers criticizes me, the harassment goes up.
It's like, okay, maybe it does.
Maybe you should contact the authorities and get yourself protected to a safe house.
But that doesn't mean that the people who were making the criticisms of you, she wasn't accusing them of being harassers.
And she wasn't accusing them of being harassers because she knows they weren't harassers.
They were critics.
And they were critics of what you're saying for a good reason.
And she deliberately, I think, well, I mean, maybe not even deliberately.
Maybe I shouldn't presume that she's deliberately doing it.
But for whatever reason, her saying, well, you know, I'm being harassed, therefore, I'm not going to listen to these critics.
I don't think that's a legitimate position.
And I think that is my main problem with Anita Sarkeesian.
Well, to bring up, it might seem like I'm slightly nitpicking to a sense, but the way in which you would happily describe her as playing the victim, but yet when, again, in the video, bringing it back to the video we discussed earlier, the social justice harassers, you didn't say that Ian Miles Chung was doing that.
You didn't say that Total Biscuit was doing that, even though essentially they're doing the same thing.
Well, he's not asking for any money.
No, but he earns his living that way, doesn't he?
No, he's living on that.
He earns his living doing Total Biscuit doing video criticism and critiques and Ian Miles Chung doing investigative journalism on his website.
That's how they earn their living.
But the thing is, Anita Sarkeesian deliberately solicits for her non-profit after she plays the victim.
I've seen it on Twitter, man.
She makes money out of being a victim.
And the same as Brianna Wu, the same as Zoe Quinn.
It's how they make their living.
They don't necessarily produce anything.
Anita Sarkeesian has produced something, whether you like it or not.
She has produced it.
Okay, but then we go back to the standards of, well, she's three years late and she's done half the series she said she was going to do.
So now we're getting to the criticism of, well, you've been kind of fannying around, Anita.
And this, in addition to the fact that, A, she raised $160,000.
And then last year, she raised another $440,000.
And the video series still isn't done.
And yet I'm currently answering questions about why after 30% of my team quit on an £8,000 or $12,000 Kickstarter, I haven't delivered my game yet.
You see what I mean?
That's the issue.
And, you know, that's the power of these people and feminism.
I'm not on the Colbert report.
You know, I'm not the one being, I'm not the media darling.
She is.
And yet she is just as worthy, if not more worthy, of all of these criticisms.
Right, but I would suggest that the reason she's become the media darling is because of people like GameGate.
No, you can't say people like Gamergate.
You don't know who is harassing her.
Well, and the ones we do know aren't Gamergate supporters.
You're essentially setting up, I think, a fail-safe mechanism to protect Gamergate, which is actually a very religious sort of thing to do.
Not at all.
If you can show Gamergate supporters harassing any Sarkeesian.
Well, because the only way you could do that is if they use the hashtag.
No, not at all.
You could have someone who is, I don't know, maybe you could trace it back via an IP or something.
Maybe you can IP trace a Twitter account login to the same login as, like, say, Oliver Campbell or something.
You know, so maybe Oliver Campbell is logging in and sending harassment.
But the thing is, you can't do that.
No one has done this, right?
We know that that's not what, as far as we know, that's not what people are doing.
Therefore, we will take it as red.
That's not what we're doing.
Because we're going to presume innocence.
Because that's what real, mature adult people do.
Okay.
I'm not going to have Gamergate just call, oh, it's a movement of harassers.
No, it's not.
That's the lie that is told to obfuscate the media.
That's what they're lying about.
That is their lie.
Right.
you you say it's a lie right but I would you've you've basically set up this thing where if the only way I could prove is either if a famous gaming or not initially famous but a whole profile game a gator says xy or zed or if someone uses the hashtag Now, those are relatively high standards for evidence, I would suggest.
Now, which is fine in a fucking court of law, but we're not in a court of law here.
Yeah, but we're in the court of public opinion, and you're saying that I participate in a hate movement.
I'm not having it.
If you can't prove it, you spoke of the fires of young, impressionable people.
You don't know that.
You don't know that they're all young.
You don't know they're impressionable.
I'm assuming you've created a straw man of a person.
I personally read all my comments, right?
I go through my comment sections.
I read the comments on every video for probably about two or three days after the video has come up.
I think my subscribers are generally really fucking smart because they're always on my ass if I get something wrong.
So, I man, I just don't agree with the characterization.
I think it's quite lazy.
What I will do, right?
I will take a screenshot and I will post it on Twitter after this discussion, right?
Sure.
Of these analytics, right, for the last seven days, which is predominantly your followers that have come onto my video, right?
And it's 94.7% male.
Yeah.
Right?
It's just over 25% between 18 to 24 years of age.
So a quarter of them are, what, young adults?
A quarter of them are young male adults.
At the very least, what are the other three quarters?
Nearly a third of, no, just over a third of them are between 24 and 25 and 34.
So they're not young.
The majority so far, the largest number, aren't young?
Well, yeah, but a quarter of them are young.
A quarter of them are adults.
Well, yeah, they're still adults, but come on.
When I was 18, I wasn't fucking a fully rounded adult at that point.
No, talking to impressionable young people.
When I was 18, I wasn't an idiot either.
Well, you may not have been, but I was, and I know a lot of people that were.
I thought I knew everything at 18, but I fucking didn't.
You know, that's fair.
Okay, that's fair.
A lot of young men are idiots, right?
But the thing is, three-quarters of my audience aren't young men.
You know, this is what you're saying, right?
So I don't really think that it's worth, I don't think it's fair to completely discount their opinions just because there are some stupid...
I'm not even for a second discounting their opinion.
What I'm saying to you is that you have a responsibility to these young people who look up to you as a, you know, some, even if it's a position to a degree that's been thrust upon you of responsibility to guide them in some way that isn't fucking extreme.
And what you do is stoke fires underneath them.
You say, oh, you essentially play into a narrative of they're coming after the video games.
They're going to do this.
They're going to do that.
Actually, it's a fucking huge industry that makes a lot of money out of making GTA games.
Do you think they're going to stop making fucking GTA games?
Do you think they've tried to get them banned?
Well, some people have tried to get them banned, obviously, but they're not going to get fucking banned, are they?
They've had a success in Australia.
Really?
I've not yet.
there was a 50,000 person petition to get GTA pulled from a major store in Australia.
And it was successful.
I mean, that's all from a store.
Okay, that's the beginning, though.
That's the first act of censorship.
What's the next one?
Oh, the next one was Lion Head Studios.
Hang on.
That's not fucking censorship, is it?
Of course it's censorship.
No, it's not.
It's something we don't like because we don't like it, right?
Just stop people being able to even buy the damn thing.
That's a store looking at a petition signed by 50,000 of their customers saying, well, we're not.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
No, it's not 50,000 of their customers.
You know that those people weren't buying GTA.
They were doing it for ideology.
But they're buying other things at that store, aren't they?
They're not buying GTA.
Well, exactly.
If they're not buying GTA, you don't know that it's people from the store.
I bet most of them weren't even Australian, man.
You know, that's the thing.
You don't know.
That's the problem with online petitions.
That's the problem with Twitter pressure.
Okay, to be fair, but then you didn't mention it was an online petition.
I don't know.
Yeah, no, sorry.
Yeah, sorry.
I should have and the things that's just the start.
I mean, look at like the covers.
Change the cover.
Hashtag change the cover.
Getting a cover of Bat Girl where she's been threatened by the Joker change just because a bunch of feminists don't like it, man.
You know, and what difference does that fucking make to anything?
Why should they do that?
That's censorship.
They don't like a picture.
They don't like an image.
Therefore, they demand it be changed.
Same as Spider-Woman or Spider-Girl or whatever they call it.
But you can still play the game.
That doesn't diminish your enjoyment of the game.
Well, it was a comic book.
It was a comic book.
But are you saying that in principle that's yeah, it's a comic book?
But are you still saying that's that's right?
No, no, I'm not saying it's right, but I don't think you you need to to stir up that kind of emotion in people who are younger who are going to be more professional.
I'm going to take objection to you saying stirring up emotion, right?
You don't know that I'm stirring up any emotion.
You don't, you make it sound like I am inciting people to commit hatred acts or something like that.
I determinately oppose these things.
Every time I, but the thing is, that doesn't mean I'm not going to talk about them.
You know, that doesn't mean I'm not going to be angry about myself because I am fucking angry about a lot of this.
And I think I have a complete right to be legitimately angry about it.
Mate, I am not inciting anyone towards hatred.
And nobody that follows me, I'm sure, is an idiot.
You know, I can't imagine why an idiot would follow my channel.
They'd probably get offended by the amount of times I use the word idiot.
The problem is that you're characterizing a hypothetical person and then you're laying the blame for that person on me.
I'm not taking it.
No, I'm not laying the blame on you.
I'm saying you are this is what this is where the pen pandering for money comes in.
I don't think you want people to go out and commit acts of harassment or whatever, but ultimately I don't think you really care as long as the money comes in.
Man, I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't care.
Do you think I you this is another thing, right?
You act as if I started with an audience of this size and then decided to customize myself to it.
If you like ask some of my long-term subscribers, go back and look at my videos.
My opinions, my attitudes, and the way I mean, I might be slightly less aggressive now, but the things I'm saying aren't any different.
I haven't changed my message.
Is that people have come to me because of it?
No, I don't what?
No, I wouldn't suggest that you have changed your message because I don't know.
But I'm saying the messages you put out now, and again, I can only look at it from what I've seen of you.
I don't know what you used to do, but what you do now is essentially you play into the worst fears of these people.
Look, man, that's because some of the worst fears are legitimate.
Yeah, maybe some of them are, but you're more than happy to profit from that.
You're more than happy to play into that.
I'm more than happy to profit from my hard work, right?
I don't know.
Damn the consequences.
Yeah, no, no, not at all.
Damn the consequences.
Not at all.
Why would I do a stream the other day with the guy discussing necromancer if I was just like damn the consequences?
Anita Sarkeesian is damn the consequences.
She completely ignores any critics.
I make updates to my videos all the time when I'm wrong.
All the time.
I've made retraction videos.
I've gone out of my way to have long streams like this and the other one where I discuss these things.
The hell I'm damn the consequences, man.
You know, I actually do go out of my way to be responsible about this sort of stuff.
Well, that's where me and you fucking vastly differ in our opinion.
I think you, like I say, You don't take the due care and responsibility that you have to that large audience, some of whom look.
I mean, even if that's not representative, there is certainly a significant proportion that are younger, impressionable men you are happy to essentially exploit.
That just sounds like Fox News fearmongering to me, man.
That just sounds like that.
You don't know these people.
I'm not exploiting anyone, man.
I work really hard on the videos that I make.
And under every video, I've got all my sources.
So, my and the first thing my audience do, and I know this because occasionally I'll like mess up a you know typo or something in the source.
And the first comment on the video would be, you know, this source isn't doesn't work, mate.
You know, can you update this, please?
I'm I can't see this.
Can you put that in there?
And I'll have to go through and update that because they're on my fucking back, man.
If I don't give them my sources and show them how I've arrived at the conclusions I'm making, they are on me.
And it and should so they should be.
They absolutely should be.
It keeps me fucking straightened up.
This is why I list all of my sources for every video I do.
This is why I'm so rigorous about it, man.
And I honestly, I really, I just completely disagree with your characterization.
I really do.
Yeah, okay.
That's fine.
That's fine.
Do you want me to take some more Twitter questions?
Well, while you collate those, because the thing, the problem I've had, right?
I've went out and bought myself a bottle of Dr. Pepper and I've chogged it and I've been pissing there.
Go for it.
Go for it.
It's fine.
No problem. Then chat.
The thing with the whole exploit thing is it completely assumes that I'm doing, I'm operating in bad faith.
You know, it assumes that for some reason, I'm able to extract money from people without operating legitimately.
You know, as it and as if operating legitimately doesn't pay dividends anyway.
I'm actually really proud of what I do because I've actually really gone out of my way to show that, like, you know, you can operate ethically and still have a productive life if you just work hard, man.
And I really do work hard on my fucking videos.
I really fucking do.
I think he's back now.
Yes.
Hello there.
Hello.
Right.
Okay.
Right.
Chat and Twitter.
Send me some questions.
I do have a few.
Let's keep it relatively brief because I can stay till about six, maybe quarter past, but then I've got to go get rid of.
Yep, not a problem.
We can, okay, we'll give like you know 15, 20 minutes questions.
Someone's asked, can you tweet the articles from A Voice for Men that made you think they're misogynists?
Obviously, you can't do it right the second, but if at some point you want to tweet them at me or something, I'll retweet them so people can see them.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
So I'm just going through.
Yeah, what did you think of Shirtgate?
Overblown, really.
I don't think it was especially necessary.
And it's unfortunately, all too often, it's that sort of thing that gets focused on, and that it doesn't, I don't think it helps anyone to do to overreact to relatively minor shit like that.
Someone in the chats pointed out that Hotline Miami 2 is outright banned in Australia.
That's great ethically, Sam, but I need to know why it's banned in Australia.
Because if feminists didn't ban it, then it's not something that they're responsible for, obviously.
I'm sorry, I'm just going through.
Someone's asked, quite rightly, who the fuck is Kevin?
Kevin.
Kevin is someone who has the balls to come and talk to us, you know, because one of the things I think that I really hope that a lot of people give some props for is coming to a channel as large as mine, having almost 3,000 people watching you give your opinion who probably disagree with your opinion quite stringently.
And that, you know, that takes a lot of balls.
So, you know, I want, you know, the thing is, you've got like communities like Gamergazi, who I asked Zenestrad if he'd come on.
And are you aware of Zenistrad?
Yeah, well, I sort of know him, if that makes sense.
Get in contact with him.
He's actually, he's a nice chap, and he's a principled young man as well.
He, you know, he does stand by his principles.
And I like him.
Yeah, but he regularly comments on my videos and stuff.
And he seems like a decent enough.
Yeah, I would advise getting to know him.
But he basically had a bit of a dust-up with Bewildered Ape because Bewildered Ape was harassing Karen Strong and threatening her.
So good on him.
Well, what I will say in not well, not even in defense of Bewildered Ape, because I don't think he needs defending.
He can defend himself.
But Karen Strong has actively downplayed the harassment of others.
And what Bewildered Ape does is essentially satire.
I don't know.
I mean, I saw the Twitter exchange and it was just, it just seemed to be outright hostility.
And even if it was satire, you can't really tell.
And also, another, actually, whilst we're on it, just because, frankly, I've got a fucking bone to pick with her, is that she does this thing.
Obviously, she's an open MRA, obviously.
And she does this thing where she says, oh, I don't need fucking maintenance payments to pay for my kids, blah, blah, blah.
But yet she lives off the fucking 80,000 YouTube subscriptions and the Patreon money that flows from there.
No, so you don't need one man to pay for your kid.
You need fucking 80,000 of them.
Yeah, but she produces content that people watch it.
No, that's fine, but don't pretend like you're some fucking vastly, oh, I'm this independent, blah, blah, blah.
You're living off the fucking, you know, off these other people's money.
Yeah, but no man or woman is an island.
I mean, no one's expected to like, you know, dig up their own fucking gold, pan it, press it into coins, and then sell it.
You know, she lives off the hard work of making the video.
Absolutely, but she's prepared to shit on other people who do need, who don't have 80,000 fucking followers and do need maintenance payments.
That's fucked up.
Yeah, I'm not, I mean, I don't know what, I couldn't really speak to her position necessarily, but I don't know what her position on this is.
But I mean, I personally am not in disagreement strictly with the idea of child maintenance.
I mean, there are going to be women who, you know, don't earn enough as they did when they're in a relationship and whatnot.
I'm sure it is, in cases, necessary.
But the problem is it's, and I agree with feminists on this position.
It's very much, there's a traditionalist mindset when it comes to that sort of thing.
I mean, if you look at like the statistics now, young women are out earning young men.
You know, and this is a trend that is not probably not going to reverse anytime soon.
So, you know, the traditionalist mindset of the courts needs to stop.
You know, it needs to, it needs to be a much more egalitarian mindset.
I think that that change has at least begun to take place.
No, I agree.
I think it's beginning.
I do think it's beginning.
I think it's nascent, though.
I think it's, you know, at the beginning, but I think it is something that people are pushing for and is becoming understood that, you know, maybe what's happening isn't meeting the wider needs of society from a male or female perspective.
Especially as you get women now who, like I said, they're out earning their male partners and they're like, well, hang on.
Why am I being unfairly targeted?
And now, you know, now it's like both sides of the aisle.
People are starting to listen, I guess.
Well, in essence, it comes down to it takes two to make a fucking kid and you pay your way.
you pay your 50%.
Yeah, but I also...
Whoever takes care of the kid gets the 50% of money that they then have to spend on that kid from the other partner.
Yeah, I...
Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the situation, doesn't it?
It depends.
If it's like a multi-billionaire or something, he doesn't need the money or whatever, yes.
Okay.
Or she, in fact, yeah.
Exactly, or she.
But I think the problem is that you get a lot of working men who aren't billionaires or anything of the sort, and they're kind of being unfairly.
I was more reacting to the point you were saying it depends on situations.
In that kind of situation, if they're rich enough where they don't really need the money, then whatever, it doesn't fucking matter.
Yeah, exactly.
I've got no particular sympathy for them, you know, crying to your millions, for fuck's sake.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's only got 250 million left.
Well, let me shed a tear, you know.
So, yeah, I'm happy to fight classwise.
To answer a question from someone on Twitter, he says, Is Kevin a gamer?
I am a gamer, yes.
I'm not anywhere near on the level of my younger brother, who I won't docks, but he's a fucking hard, hardcore gamer.
He's got like a fucking proper man cave with the full, like the big leather fucking lounge chair and the headphones and the fucking million different joysticks and all the rest.
He's the fucking argument.
Whereas I'm a civilization fanatic.
I will spend fucking.
Well, at the moment, I've been Civ 5 has been my.
Same here.
My God.
Oh, awesome.
Okay, that's something we definitely.
Yeah, someone actually sent me a Sagan of a CAD mod.
It wasn't made for me, but since it shared the name, I thought with the actual historical figure Sagan on it.
Yeah, with the actual cities, the Acadian cities.
It's a lot of it, you know, yes.
And they've got like a special unit.
It's a sort of Onager wagon instead of the chariots that apparently doesn't have a problem with rough terrain.
And I just want to say to the maker, guys, an onager wagon isn't going to do a lot better with rough terrain.
But yeah, no, it's a really cool thing.
Sorry.
Well, the one that I had to get straight away was when the might sound odd as an atheist, but when they removed religion from it, I ain't having that.
Because the whole point is spread your shit to other cities and you can undermine your enemies that way.
It's wonderful.
I like that as well.
I actually liked keeping my city sort of ideologically and religiously pure.
Yeah, exactly.
That's one of the factors of the game that gives it.
But that's the thing.
As a leftist, an anti-imperialist, an atheist, I despise everything about that game.
But yeah, I'll happily play it until the fucking cows come home.
Of course, you know, I mean, I've played more than enough, you know, shooting games in my time, but I would never shoot someone.
It's fiction.
I know it's not real.
Even beyond that, I mean, in terms of because ultimately, you're not even really doing it.
You're just essentially moving things from one tile to another tile.
And I like the fact that they got rid of the multi-fucking, you can't have stacked units on the bottom.
Same here.
That was my favourite bit about Civ V. That's my hands down favourite bit about it.
You could just build a million fucking units into one thing and then throw it at a city.
And what's the point of that?
Not only that.
Not only that.
You had to attack their strongest unit against your unit.
I can't do anything tactical.
I can't find a tactic to break their formation or anything.
So yeah, I know.
I really like the new one.
I really do.
Yeah, but I meant I'm an anti-imperialist, but yet I'm a rapacious invader.
Yeah, but that's the thing.
It's not real life.
It's fantastic.
No, you know, that's and worrying.
I mean, that's another issue I have with the Sarkeesian's work is that she and Jonathan McIntosh really do not believe in the distinction between fancy and reality.
And it really bothers me, you know.
One point I want to bring up, and I don't know that you necessarily fall into this gap, but certain other people do.
I don't know if you're aware of a guy called War Corpse 666 who's a YouTuber.
He's a lot small, he's got 2,000 people or whatever, subscribers.
And he does this thing, and it's so fucking infuriating, where either you go along the distinction of those depictions make some impact in society, or they don't.
You can't switch between one and the other when it fucking suits you.
It's either they're just pixels on a screen and it doesn't matter, or they do have some fucking impact.
I don't think you can.
Hello?
Yeah, yeah, sorry.
I was just trying to think of what I kind of missed the beginning of that, I think.
I think it was a bit of a joke.
Oh, sorry, I was explaining about when you were saying it's not real, it's a false reality, or whatever, it's just fiction.
And that's fine if you want to hold that as a consistent line.
But a lot of people, and I don't know if you necessarily fall into that, are happy to switch between the two when it suits them.
I think that, I mean, there might be some insanely minor effect from playing violent video games.
There might be.
But I don't think it's insanely minor.
I don't think it's anywhere near as Jack Thompson would want you to fucking believe or anything like that.
Well, I mean, Jack Thompson sounds very similar these days.
That's the thing.
Well, yeah, and that's part of the reason I couldn't get on with her point of view because I think she does massively state that.
But I think there is enough of a desensitization effect in essence because as graphics become more and more look, when it was just 8-bit fucking, look, Mario jumping over the fucking stuff and collecting coins, it wasn't real enough for it to have that psychological impact or whatever.
Because now, some of the graphics on these games are so realistic, you might as well be doing the actual fucking thing.
It wouldn't look any different in real life.
It's difficult to tell the difference picture or something, you know.
I think on some basic cognitive level, that must have some impact, I would think.
Yeah, but films look just like real life.
And yeah, there's not really much connection to the game.
It could be archaeologists.
Because film, in terms of like, say, Hollywood films, it's difficult to know if because they haven't been around long enough, it's difficult to know if they have had a very significant impact on people's desensitization to violence or whatever, because it hasn't been around for saved many, the hundreds of years that you would need to really pinpoint that.
And games, obviously, that's an even more drastic example because that's been around even less of a time.
Unless you want to go back to like Pong or something, like in terms of actual playable characters you take through a world, you know.
I think just quickly, the difference there, though, is that all the studies that have been done on video games don't connect them to violence.
There's nothing, anyone has been able to show any kind of connection.
And if you look at violence rates, they're down, man.
The video game sales have gone up, violence rates have gone down.
I'm not necessarily saying one's responsible for the other.
I'm sure it's not.
But there's been no marked increase in violence due to the sale of video games.
So, you know, it's, I honestly, I don't think that they do cause violence.
I don't think they cause, I don't think they cause anything, to be honest.
I don't think they cause violence necessarily.
But, and this is this is sort of getting back to actually we don't think we have mentioned it, but the idea that essentially reasonable and responsible people in a society essentially have to take into account that there are people who aren't necessarily in the same place as we are mentally.
There are some fucking crazy bastards in the world.
And putting reasonable restrictions on things like, say, for instance, forcing people to wear helmets when they ride a motorcycle, that could be seen as an impingement on their free fucking choice or whatever.
But it's sensible because some people are fucking idiots and ride recklessly and it kills them.
And that's not a good thing to do.
So ultimately, with video games, I think there is, certainly in terms of allowing children access to games or something like that, because they are very, very impressionable at that kind of age.
They don't know how to put that into any kind of context.
Did you not play violent games when you were a kid?
Well, unless you count Mario being a Bowser or something.
No, not really.
I'm not much old.
No, actually, no, I played Mortal Kombat.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, I played those kind of beat-em-up games, yeah.
But that's the thing.
You didn't really think about them because they were just games, weren't they?
You know, it's just, I think that I think the fear of the thing is a lot more pervasive and a lot more present than the reality of the thing.
You know, I've seen some terrible films.
I've played some terrible games.
But I've always had a strong family upbringing.
I think that negates any kind of issues.
You know, just a reasonable favourite family.
Again, exactly, yeah.
But you're looking at it from the perspective of someone who did have that basis.
What about, I mean, Dylan Roof, I'm not saying games had anything to do with him whatsoever.
Completely out the fucking way.
But I'm using him as an example of someone who is mentally fucking unstable, who getting hold of that might impact, if that makes sense, that point, his bad development down that road.
Even if that was.
Oh, no, sorry, Gohan, quickly, Phil.
Well, I don't want to, I'm beginning to think of myself thinking, this sounds like what Jack Thompson says.
Stop it, Kylie.
That's the problem.
That's the problem exactly that we're having.
It's that it's the same principle, and it's not really based on what we know about reality.
I think fundamentally, the reality of the situation is that if people go on murder sprees, there's no amount of media that's going to change their mind or make them do it.
I think that there's something else wrong with that person than the media.
Well, clearly so, yes.
But the way that a society is structured clearly will have an impact on that.
It's not just mentally ill people that murder people.
Most of the people in prison.
I didn't say they were mentally ill.
I don't think you have to be mentally ill to murder people, but I don't think that the state of mind you're in, I mean, it's not mental illness, but it's not the sort of state of mind that a lot of people share.
I think, you know, I mean, a lot of people do things in haste and regret them.
You know, I'm sure there are loads of murders that have happened as an act of, you know, a crime of passion rather than a premeditated, you know, I just hate that guy so much, I'm going to kill him, you know.
But this is the Jack Thompson thing.
It's like, why, just because there are bad people in the world, why should my rights and my rights to look at something and view something that's non-harmful, that doesn't do anything, that we can't prove does anything, why should that be impinged because there are bad people in the world?
Oh, well, I don't think it should.
You're an adult.
I don't think it should be impinged at all, to be honest.
Okay, great.
Okay, that's great.
Okay, so you're not on the same page as Jack Thompson necessarily.
He was outright trying to ban GTA.
But then the thing is, that's exactly what any Sarkeesian would like to do.
She's outright against the concept of violent games.
and so it was jack well yeah well one of the problems that i had with sarkees in effect is in interviewing him they gave him i don't know if you saw the extended cover Yeah, he said specifically that he just wanted to ban them for kids.
It's like, well, I saw footage that said you wanted to ban them outright.
That's a fucking exactly.
That was a lie.
And they essentially gave him the soft touch on that.
Well, I don't know.
Yeah, but I don't know, man, because all they did is play that clip.
I mean, they could right afterwards have in the documentary said, but this is a disingenuous position because he actually said in 2006 that I want to shut down Rockstar because that's literally that they are his words.
So, you know, you don't know that in the documentary, they weren't going to do that, you know.
Because all they did is release that clip saying, you know, oh, look, we've interviewed Jack Thompson.
I can't wait to see the differences between the two cuts of this.
Oh, yeah, I'm interested to see what's going to happen.
I mean, I'm annoyed by the way they've handled it, but still there is a sort of morbid curiosity there.
Well, I mean, I've made lots of videos about the drama between them because I find it fucking hilarious.
I don't know.
It's just fucking pricks making pricks of themselves.
And that's exactly what my channel's all about, is exposing dickheads.
I really don't blame you.
See, no, my criticism of your criticism of Thunderfoot is that it was just, I find, you know, you were saying I find him pretentious.
It's like, well, maybe, you know, but he is an accomplished scientist.
He's a massive YouTuber.
If anyone's going to be pretentious, at least he's got some accomplishments under his belt.
I object to your classification of it as that.
That was my only criticism of him.
He has gone about how he's a scientist.
The rest of my criticism in that video, I presume the one you're referring to, is that I expose exactly that he's a fucking rape apologist.
He's a victim blamer of people who get raped.
So it wasn't just that he's a massive fucking Islamophobe who's happy to play in to the fear narrative of neo-Nazis and accept the money for doing so.
That's a spiv.
He's an atheist and he's directly opposed to religion and Islam is a religion.
So I don't think the word Islamophobe is a legitimate word, really.
I think it's used as an unreasonable defense of the precepts of Islam.
I am absolutely not a fucking defender of Islam.
I am an atheist just as much as he is.
I'm an opposer of Muslim creed just as much as he is.
But I can tell the difference between that and comparing fucking Muslims to ants and Westerners to guns.
That's just fucking racist trash.
I haven't seen that.
I don't know anything about that.
My dissent of manosphere video, which is I presume the one you're referring to, it's in that fucking video.
I did watch it off the top of my head.
I can't remember exactly what you were saying because I had it playing in the background.
So I can't remember.
A lot of people on the left do like to throw out racist and sexist and homophobic when it's not necessary.
And it devalues those phrases when you do so.
So stop fucking doing it, you pricks.
It does engage in that.
It genuinely fucking does.
I'm getting a lot of people telling me that you're wrong, though.
And like I said, I don't know.
I'm just saying, is this something that could be a matter of interpretation?
In what case?
Sorry.
In Thunderfoot being, as you say, a rape apologist, but other people are saying that he's not doing what you're saying.
Well, he words it very carefully so he can use fucking weasel words to get out of it.
But essentially, he's saying there are things that women only can control, like how they dress or what they drink and blah, blah, blah.
And basically, if you get fired, and that's that, but he says directly in the video about women who get raped and are damaged by that could have been so much more beautiful.
I mean, what kind of language is this to use?
I agree that that would be bad language to use, but it's more that I think that I mean, it sounds like the mistake is being made.
That it's.
I think that a lot of the time people say you're a rape apologist, when what I think there's a lot of, there's a, there is a common misconception that people saying look, there are things you could do to protect yourself from rape are rape apology.
That's something that I hear a lot and it's it's not.
It's more that prevention is always better than cure and I think that's why people do it.
So I don't want to assume what Thunderfoot's motives was, because were I?
Because I don't know what they were.
You know, I would need to spend some time analysing in context.
Yeah, ultimately I can't tell you what his intentions were because it's I'm not inside his, his brain.
All I can say is what, from what I saw in that video and what I hopefully in I mean, obviously I'm doing it to comic effect it's not just straightforward refutation that series at all.
Nothing that I do is straightforward refutation, because I don't think I'm a good enough debater or arguer or orator to just convince people.
I need to throw in a bit of humour, a bit of a bit of nonsense to try and keep people listening in essence.
So I'm not doing straightforward refutation there, but I think I expose the utter fucking nonsense of his victim blaming in that video and I stand by it fully.
I really do.
I don't.
I don't think I'm claiming recklessly that that's what he's doing and that's what he's engaging in.
And again, I don't know if that's necessarily what he believes, because I think the guy's a fucking shyster.
I think he's saying whatever he, his viewers want him to say in order to keep the patriarchy.
That just sounds like anyone who's successful was doing.
What was you know they?
They weren't making their own points or bringing their own message, they were just pandering.
That that's.
That's my opinion.
You'll never hear me have a go at say, Pewdie Pie or someone like that who's massively successful earned fuck, tons of money out of this, because I, they're just doing straightforward entertainment that they're there.
It's no different than an artist make drawing, a fucking doing a painting, or a musician making an album or whatever and selling it.
That's fine.
But when, if you're going to be in to any extent really an extremist in order to get money from that I, I I don't think that is even approaching the level of an honorable, decent way to earn one's living.
I don't think it's.
I just characterize Thunderfoot as an extremist.
I I disagree that he holds extremely well.
I would suggest, I would.
I would suggest his invoking of uh, Muslim beheadings and uh and all and things like that to try and smear all Muslims.
He's essentially come out and said there are no such things as moderate Muslims.
That's fucked up.
That's just fucking nonsense, mate.
I don't agree.
There are Muslims who are moderate Muslims um, there are Muslims who are just terrible Muslims who, who you know, don't don't really.
They're Muslims in all but name, you know, in name only, sorry, Um, but the thing is, I mean, converse to that, you can't say that there isn't a terrorist state in the Middle East that is beheading and killing gay people for being gay or enslaving women and stuff like this.
So you can't say that Islam doesn't have that within it because it produces it absolutely.
But one thing which has slowed the progress of Islam in terms of its because obviously at some point, either Islam's going to fucking die a death because progress will have overtaken it to the point where it can no longer sustain itself, or it'll go through its own enlightenment process at some point.
And in order for it to do that, it needs to have the freedom that the West had in terms of overcoming its religious nonsense.
And what we are not allowing in the West by arming to the teeth the Saudi fucking government or flooding fucking guns into Iraq or whatever is allowing moderate peaceful Muslims in those regions to have their effective say.
We are essentially repressive regimes in that region to keep Muslims from having that kind of enlightenment.
I don't think, I mean, you make it sound like this is the idea.
I don't think that's the idea.
I think that's the concept.
No, no, it's money.
They're selling guns for money.
There's no, I mean, but things.
The moderate majority are always silent in times of turbulence.
You know, it's never the majority that makes a decision ever.
So it's always the aggressive minority that you, you know, you're always siding with an aggressive minority in turbulent times of change.
So it's, you know, the silent majority are just keeping their head down, trying not to get their head blown off.
So there's, yeah, but there's no way you can get what they want done.
They may as well not exist because they're not saying anything.
They're not doing anything.
And they're not going to because nobody fights for moderation.
You know, nobody, nobody fights for.
And Solinsky, I recently read Rosal Radicals, an amazing book, and he makes the point that nobody, you know, you've got to completely polarize an issue.
You've got to be 100% because nobody's fighting for like the 20 or 30% difference that they have.
No one thinks that that is, no one's going to risk their lives for that.
No one's even going to get off the couch for that.
It's got to be 100%.
And if you've got a bunch of Muslims and they're moderate Muslims, they're perfectly nice.
And then you've got these other Muslims going, like, we need to behead gays.
They're probably thinking, well, I mean, I don't care about gays.
It's not something I'm going to get off my ass for.
But if they behead some gays, well, it doesn't affect me.
I don't care.
So, they're complicit with any regime that does that.
No, go on, sorry.
Well, yeah, just so this is the point.
It's like, you know, at the end of the day, you know, you've got to criticize the most extreme elements, especially if they're holding any kind of political power.
You've got to criticize the most extreme elements because they will set the marching orders of the majority if left unopposed.
Well, yeah, but my point is that they're in power for a specific reason.
If you tried to actually encourage and via, say, foreign aid, the spread of democracy through the Arab world and through the Muslim world in the Middle East, you would have much more voice for those moderate people who, like I say, maybe they don't really give a fuck about gays, but they wouldn't vote for the beheading of gays.
Wow, you assume that, but if they're Muslims and they've been, you know, devout Muslims their whole lives, maybe they would.
I mean, if you're saying, but initially, democracy and freedom, I think, generally promotes social progress.
I would like to think so as well.
I really would.
But the thing is, that didn't stop the Egyptians electing the Muslim Brotherhood, did it?
So.
No, that's true.
But if again, actually, with what happened in Iran, why did the people of Iran vote for Ahmed I'm Jad?
Certainly in the first election, obviously, he sort of stole the second election.
But seemingly, the first election was quite fair because you drive people to extremes.
I agree.
People of a progressed Western nation vote for fucking Adolf Hitler in huge numbers.
Absolutely.
If people poverty and rack and ruin, they'll go extreme because you've if what's the old line about those that make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable?
Absolutely.
If you don't give people a peaceful way out of it, they'll choose violence.
Absolutely.
I think that is, I think you've hit the nail on the head.
The majority of the problems of the Middle East, frankly, come from financial issues.
You know, they absolutely do.
If people have got too much to lose, they're not going to go and be extreme.
Most people in America are not fucking violent mental cases because they've got a house and a job and all the rest of it, you know.
Absolutely.
But I don't see how we can necessarily change that position by just saying, well, this is what you should have.
I mean, what could reasonably be done?
But I noticed that we're coming up.
I genuinely can't offer an explanation for that.
Continuing to heavily arm repressive regimes probably isn't a good answer.
I agree, but I think Thunderfoot is fundamentally arguing against the heavily armed extreme regimes, isn't he?
I don't think he's arguing against moderate Muslims.
And if he's like, well, they effectively don't matter.
Well, that's because he's right.
Effectively, when it comes to the crunch, the moderate Muslims aren't fighting for their beliefs.
And so you end up with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
In the 60s and 70s, Afghanistan was a progressive, very progressive state.
And you've not seen the pictures.
It looks great.
It looks like 60s America.
And well, the extremists took over.
The people who didn't want to fight didn't fight.
And now, look at it now.
So, you know, it's so, you know, I think, honestly, I do wonder how much of it is like envy.
You know, how much of it is based on envy.
And I think that you couldn't honestly say that none of it's based on envy.
What's based on envy?
Your criticisms are sort of like Thunderfoot and myself.
Could you honestly?
Because you've got finger subscribers or something.
Yeah, and this is my job.
Can you say that none of us?
I don't think it would be very healthy for me to do what you do for a living.
Because I need the regulator, you know, getting up, going out, work, coming back.
You know, I need that.
I don't think I'd be very good.
I would balloon it to the size of a fucking whale in no time because I just wouldn't go anywhere or do anything.
I'd say you do have to force yourself to do stuff.
I'd never leave my fucking...
I've got my comfortable little swivel chair.
I'd never leave the damn thing.
Other than to get up and get more fucking cheeses or something.
I've actually got an exercise bike in the room because of that.
It's not jealous.
Subconsciously, there might be an element of jealousy, but I don't consciously, no.
I think the YouTube atheism scene can and should be a lot better.
And it's the way it's gone.
Because, I mean, if you go to my channel, for instance, you'll see the account was set up in 2006, right back when YouTube was just sort of getting started.
I've followed as an observer rather than I've at least been doing videos since sort of January time-ish or February, whenever it was.
But I've been an observer of YouTube and YouTube atheism ever since from year duck virtually.
And it used to be at least a relatively decent space, whereas now it's just, it seems to me, a quagmire of anti-feminist right-wing trash.
And that's what annoys me because it can and should be better.
Okay, I actually don't associate in those areas.
I associate in very much the sort of liberal libertarian Intellectual, sort of, or at least want to, you know, see, you know, aspiring intelligentsia, you know, people who are very concerned with facts and figures and studies and debunking each other.
I see a lot of that going on, and you know, a lot of it in the comment sections, especially.
My god.
Um, but that's a good thing, I think.
And I, I, I, I think it's you know, it genuinely, from what I see, there seems to be a lot of people who are concerned with intellectual rigor.
I honestly, that's what I think, you know, and maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm maybe I don't even know what I'm supposed to be looking for, you know, but I genuinely think it's better than you think it is.
Okay, well, I mean, I think that's probably a natural finishing point because I do need to think wraps up quite nicely.
That's the essential difference between us.
Okay, well, I'm happy for that to be the case, and I have absolutely no ill will about your videos or anything like that.
I actually think you are a genuinely funny guy.
So, you know, if anyone wants to check out Kevin's YouTube channel, the links are in the description of the video.
And again, I'd like to really, honestly, a heartfelt thanks for coming on because very few people have the balls to come on.
Very few.
And I know you're walking into the lion's den, you know, a massive, massive amount of people watching on a massive channel that's completely opposed to what you believe.
So I can see why a lot of people don't.
And I, you know, I hope I've been a you know genial host.
You've been you've been fair because I've thrown a lot at you and you've you've by and large kept your call and this has been a civil discussion, which is nice.
I mean, I will go back to being completely uncivil to you in video for people.
Feel free to do the same in return.
I'm a big boy, I can do that.
That's exactly how I feel.
Thank you.
Thank you for the opportunity because your fan base are the kind of people I want to talk to.
They're the people who I think need to hear that.
Well, that's the reason I've done this.
I want you to talk to them and I want them to make up their own decisions, you know, make their own minds.
Because I don't dictate to them what to think.
I tell them what I think and they make up their decisions.
They make their minds from that.
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