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Aug. 9, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
26:58
This Week in Stupid (09⧸08⧸2015)
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Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 9th of August 2015.
And we really have some truly hilarious things to dive into this week.
So let's begin with Anarchist Lives Matter.
Or how the anarchist community went full social justice.
So this is a list of things that anarchists say to this anonymous contributor in private, but never repeat in public.
Seriously, get the popcorn ready.
Number one.
Call-outs culture was developed to allow activist groups to confront leaders who abuse their privilege, but now it's being used to settle petty scores on the level of interpersonal politics, if you can believe it.
I now have a hard time believing some people when they make callouts, because I have seen too many that were based on nothing.
Again, if you can believe that.
Call outs have become an acceptable way to inflict social violence and rarely are followed up with anything in any way resembling transformative justice because people are not interested in doing the hard work of working with those who are called out.
Well, I never.
It's almost like social media lynch mobs were a bad idea to start with.
Number two, as a white person, if I don't automatically agree with whichever person of colour is directly in front of me, I run the risk of being labelled a racist.
I think you run the risk of being labelled a racist just by being a white person.
This is the result of good intentions where we want to center people of colour and their experiences.
Like children.
That's how you're going to talk down to them and patronise them.
But it makes no sense because people of colour are not a monolithic block who agree or share all the same experiences.
I'm basically forced to perform a kind of double think where I'm expected to be able to agree with multiple conflicting viewpoints at the same time or at least pretend to.
Welcome to the world of social justice.
Easily confused with Orwell's nightmare.
Number three, the line, it's not my responsibility to educate you, educate yourself, is being used too frequently.
People should only say this when it would be seriously difficult to help educate someone.
Otherwise, as an anarchist, it is your responsibility to help educate people who want to learn, or to find someone who is willing to do it.
Furthermore, refusing to explain yourself contributes to a form of classism, in which people with less formal education and access to information are marginalised within anarchist communities.
See it's oppressive.
You guys are setting yourself up as a privileged, knowledgeable class that isn't willing to explain to us lowly shitlords exactly what you're fucking talking about.
And the thing is, that's probably because if you did, we would sit there and have a few pertinent questions that you wouldn't be able to answer.
This slide assumes that there are correct resources to be reading that are available, and that the person in question will be able to find them amongst the thousands of conflicting resources.
Aren't these just amazing though?
Let's carry on.
Number four, excluding straight cis male people makes sense in queer trans women spaces, but often these people are informally excluded in anarchist spaces that are not any of these things.
This hurts our ability to cultivate meaningful popular social power.
It's also related to a dynamic where men of colour, native men, immigrant men, and other groups of marginalized men are severely underrepresented in anarchist spaces.
It also assumes that straight cis presenting people have the option of being more queer or more trans, which is not often the case depending on their circumstances.
Well, I thought being gay wasn't a choice, so I can see why that would be a bit of an issue for people who also think that their being straight isn't a choice.
But straight or cis or male people are being excluded in anarchist spaces that aren't supposed to be excluding them.
What a surprise!
I can't believe it really is making social justice look racist and sexist.
Number five, calling people out for using the wrong language, for saying, example, biological female instead of person assigned female at birth.
Female isn't the gender role.
That's not the social construct.
Female is the biological sex, you fucking morons.
You're thinking of woman or man.
But it's harmful and makes no sense because not everyone has the same access to the same information.
They'll never learn if they're excluded and the correct language changes every couple of years anyway.
People don't want to be associated with us because they see how punishing we are to each other and it turns them off.
Yes, they do.
You are indeed a community that enjoys witch hunts.
Number seven, people's obsession with identity politics means the only people who can say stuff like this out loud have to be able to identify themselves as multiply marginalised, and then everyone immediately agrees how problematic it all is.
Well that sounds like it was said by someone with a lot of privilege, doesn't it?
Listen, the only solution to injustices is to take the people who have had injustices done to them and make it so they can do injustices to other people who didn't do them any injustices but do share physical characteristics.
Number eight, who cares about who you personally fuck when we're talking about a broad political movement?
Well, kind of harks back to the whole identity politics thing, doesn't it?
get off the ego trip what we want is health care affordable housing jobs prison abolition prison abolition okay immigration rights sex worker rights and the end of capitalism Just small requests.
Queer has become so fashionable that it's being confused with radical.
Well, I kind of means it's not radical.
But yeah, this is the problem with identity politics.
Number nine, people have no interest in actually changing things anymore.
Talking about class and economics isn't fashionable, and in some cases it's downright dismissed and labelled as racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic.
Anarchists don't want to build coalitions with working class people because they don't want to be triggered by having to explain their politics to people who disagree with them.
Isn't this a surprise?
It's almost like identity politics and social justice is a poison to any movement that actually is trying to achieve something.
It's almost like it's fucking designed and give power to people who don't deserve it, not because of who they are, but because of what they do or don't do.
And number 10, we've completely failed to build frameworks for accountability and transformative justice, and instead rely on call-outs and social exclusion that replicate the prison system without the benefit of having trials.
Presented without comment.
So what we're looking at there is the condemnation of social justice from a community that embraced it.
You know what, whether it's intentional or not, identity politics is a cancer that eats a movement from the inside out.
And the people pushing this agenda get to educate children.
Two nine-year-olds' magnificent open letter to Disney about racial and gender stereotypes.
You know, exactly the sort of things that nine-year-olds spend their time worrying about.
So in the spring of 2015, a nine-year-old boy named Dexter went to Disneyland with his family, and found himself deeply unsettled, not by a scary ride or the unpleasantness of waiting in line, but by some of the most unsettling cultural issues of our time.
Racial and gender stereotypes.
My god, we can't possibly countenance stereotypes.
Anyway, Dexter conferred with his classmate Sybilla, who'd just had a similar experience while visiting Disney World Norlander with her family, and with disarming sincerity and the simplicity of which only children are capable.
Believe this was written by a child, please.
The two third graders wrote a magnificent, precocious, and immensely insightful open letter to Disney, calling out the problematic treatment of race and gender, and suggesting more intelligent and culturally sensitive alternatives.
So I mean, why would they do this?
Why would nine-year-old kids even be thinking about this?
Well, Dexter and Sibylla go to the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine in Harlem, one of those New York City schools proactive about teaching kids about white privilege and its consequences, and their teacher, Miss Eleanor Jamie, had instilled in them a deep concern with social justice around identity.
These fucks are brainwashing kids with identity politics.
That literally what she's saying here.
So it becomes even more scary that it's probably true that when she says there was no adult hand in the letter here, the kids dreamt it up, drafted it, revised it, and mailed it all by themselves.
That might well be true, because these kids have been fucking brainwashed.
I won't read the whole thing, I'll just read a few bits of it.
We are third graders from New York City at the Cathedral School.
We learn about stereotypes and the impact they have on people's identities.
For example, in the jungle cruise, all the robotic people have dark skin and are throwing spears at you.
We think this reinforces some negative associations.
We think you should replace them with monkeys throwing rotten fruit.
In Truelinsky fashion, I bet the teacher has taught the children that they have to provide a constructive alternative.
This has led to the kids saying, hey, why don't we replace these black people with monkeys?
Monkeys throwing rotten fruit.
Brilliant.
Like that wouldn't be worse than before.
We noticed that on our trips to Disneyland and Disney World, that all cast members call the people Prince, Princess or Knight.
Judging by what the child looks like and assuming gender, we think some feelings could get hurt.
Say by accident you called someone a prince who wasn't a prince or a princess or a knight who was identifying differently than what they were called.
Just classic, isn't it?
It couldn't be any more stereotypical.
So you may have missed the hashtag give your money to women, which has now become a movement.
And Vice magazine spoke to Lauren Chief Elk, the woman behind it.
Here's the photo they chose to run with this article, and Lauren Chief Elk is on the right.
And this couldn't be any more predictable, could it?
It's just, you know, I'm not saying that she's some pampered 20-something Western woman who's on her iPhone thinking, you know what, I do deserve money.
I think that men should just give me money.
But that really is how it looks.
So when Give Your Money to Women started surfacing on my social feed last month, I thought it might be something to do with the way in which women are underpaid at the office.
Brilliant, I thought.
Give your money to women as a way of balancing out gender-based income inequality.
Okay, I'm sure that'll work.
The idea of the hashtag was even better than that.
Women were banding together to demand payment for all the emotional work we do that goes completely unpaid.
The exhausting work of being a tolerant, gentle, nurturing, listening woman in our relationships with men at all times.
Women put up with a lot of bullshit, and we have a science-backed term for it, emotional labour.
And as with any kind of labour, women are ready and eager to get paid.
I've got no doubt that they are.
Men like to act as if commanding women's attention is their birthright.
They're natural due and they're rarely contradicted.
Is that really what men think?
Or is that what women think?
Do they think that they should command men's attention as their natural birthright?
But apparently it's a radical act to refuse them that attention.
And it's even more radical to propose that if they want it so fucking much, they can buy it.
Bitch, better have my money indeed.
Oh, so you're prostitutes.
That makes a lot more sense.
You're prostitutes, so if I give you money, you're going to give me whatever you're offering.
This emotional labour that you're going to do for me.
Well, that's fantastic.
I'm happy to let the free market operate like this.
You guys, give it your best shot.
There's a very long-winded and self-indulgent interview with Lauren Chief Elk after this part of the article, which I won't go through, it's a waste of your time.
But there was one valuable part in it.
Does exactly tell people what they're going to get for their money.
So, in return for paying her, what she's going to do for you is act as a therapist to men, putting on a perky face for that, having to be a yes person, always saying oh yes, and you're so right and so great.
Absorbing whatever kinds of outbursts they have, it's mostly always anger, and having a happy face on and nodding.
Emotional labour is also hiding your feelings and not challenging, not voicing your displeasure for whatever reason, just keeping things inside.
That's a lot of work.
To sh swallow your feelings in fear, like if I voice this, things are going to get really bad for me in this environment.
It wears down your self-esteem, your sense of self, your confidence, or your sense of being.
This is heavy.
It's heavy to do this.
Well, I don't know about you, but it sounds like there's an awful lot of emotional labour going on in simply being a woman and dealing with men.
It seems like every woman who has to deal with men, which is pretty much all of them, must really care so much about what's going on.
I think, you know what, it's got to the point where all of my caring is exhausting me.
I need some recompense.
Which is why I'm glad that Vice is starting their own feminist channel Broadly, which plans to get women right.
I think this is fantastic.
I really hope they capture the spirit of emotional labour that women go through all day every day when dealing with men.
To be honest, Tracy Egan Morrissey tells me, I actually don't really care what men think or how they feel.
So this person isn't participating in the Give Your Money to Women hashtag.
So Broadly is going to be essentially the new Jezebel, and Morrissey herself is an ex-editor for Jezebel, so you can imagine the kind of high standards that you're going to be running there.
There will be one difference though: Broadly won't have comments.
When women are speaking online, it's such a lightning rod for every angle.
Other feminists telling you you're not doing feminism properly, MRAs coming in and calling you a fat whore, she says describing the constant abuse and harassment.
So no comments on Broadly, that was that.
Yeah, we're talking to you.
We don't, this isn't a discussion.
And it's not going to have comments because if you go to Broadly's trailer, our writers immediately struck that amongst the excited comments for the show is sexist vitriol, directed not so much at the trailer's content, but at the idea of women needing their own space and stories online.
Anonymous commenters' rights.
I predict there's going to be a shitload of angry women being angry on this channel.
Is that really sexist, or is that really something that's actually going to happen?
Women's news you thought would exist by now, considering there's no men's news, your comment is flawed at best, Vice, and sexist, PS fuck you.
Okay, that is bad grammar, but it's not someone calling you a fat whore, is it?
And should just leave that on Vice main channel.
In my opinion, no need to make a new one.
These comments can't really be characterised as sexist vitriol, unless you're going to start characterising everyone who disagrees with you as a sexist.
And when they tell you, it's vitriol.
Do you feel like I came off as a feminate?
Morrissey asked me at the end of our interview.
We're laughing and I ask if she considers herself and Broadly to be feminist.
I think if you're a woman and you're not feminist, then you're an idiot, she says.
Well, I mean, I can reassure you that you don't sound like a feminate.
I mean, nothing that you've said makes you sound like some kind of gender supremacist or anything.
Just like J.A. Micheline's reasons for boycotting Marvel Comics doesn't make her sound like a giant fucking racist.
Marvel, you and I are taking a break.
It's not me, it's you, and you made the decision really easy.
First came your quiet decision to hand the new Blade book over to two white creators.
To be clear, I have no reason to think that either will do a bad job on the book.
It's nothing wrong with the way they write.
But I was disappointed that Marvel's prominent black heroes would be handed over to white people yet again.
Literally the only objection here is the fact that the people are white.
Nothing to do with their comic book writing skills, which they're sure are just fine.
And it gets worse.
Marvel has never hired a black woman to write an ongoing in 75 years.
I mean, they may have hired some really talented writers, but none of them were black women.
And that's the important thing.
But the thing is, that's not really the reason that this person's having a boycott of Marvel.
The real reason they're boycotting Marvel is that Marvel plans to depict Hercules as straight.
Eno, I don't really have a problem with that.
You know, if you want to boycott something because you don't like the way they're making a character, good for you.
But to say that in no uncertain terms, this is a slap in the face to every queer reader who picks up your comic books is fucking ridiculous.
This person's also got a short list of demands.
Number one, you hire three different black writers for your ongoing books.
Doesn't matter who they are, or, you know, why, it just matters you hire three black ones.
And two, you put forth three ongoing books with different queer leads.
Again, the number is arbitrary, but it's just, you know, a number of these things that you have to do.
Or this person is not going to be buying any Marvel comics.
And the thing is, you'd think that our author would get their facts straight.
How can Marvel possibly hire three black writers when race doesn't exist?
I mean, I fucking love science say that according to science, there's no such thing as race.
So that must be true.
And I believe it's true even more when I find that the entire article are these two paragraphs, one of which is telling me that race is a construct.
But hey, I could just watch the video if I want to know more.
I fucking love science, are so confident that what they're telling you is the absolute gods on its truth and not, say, progressive propaganda, that they've closed the comments.
Of course they've closed the comments because they know that this is the case.
They don't need to discuss this.
That would be silly.
What is there to discuss?
The science is settled.
The only people who want to talk about this now are climate change deniers.
Otherwise known as conservatives.
And their views are simply inappropriate.
So when a TCU student was punished by his university for criticizing Islam and the Baltimore riots, everyone was like, well, duh.
And the thing is, I'm obviously not joking.
They literally said that his conservative views were inappropriate.
And because of this public act of wrongthink, Harry Vincent was banned from most campus activities, ordered to perform 60 hours of menial labor in the form of community service, and attend a mandatory diversity re-education class.
Stop me if you've heard this before.
They're trying to make me out to be the classic bigoted hateful white male, Harry told me in a telephone interview from his home in Maryland.
That's the complete opposite of what I am.
The university's only statement was, when a student's conduct violates the university's behavioural standards, they are subject to a disciplinary process and will be held accountable for their actions.
Yeah, you show him.
You show him.
So what exactly were his actions?
Well, they sent him a letter accusing him of violating their student code of conduct.
Specifically accused of infliction of bodily or emotional harm, I assume that's harm, not arm, and disorderly conduct.
For stuff he'd posted on social media.
What a rebel.
The charges stemmed from half a dozen tweets he had posted online referencing radical Islam along with the Facebook message about the Baltimore riots.
The fucking thought criminal.
So he posted that these hoodrat criminals in Baltimore need to be shipped off and exiled to the Sahara Desert.
Maybe then they'll realize how much we provide for them.
Welfare, college tuition, Obama's phones, Medicare, etc.
Okay, so that's mildly controversial, but he's no Howard Stern.
In regards to Islam, he wrote, this is clearly not a religion of peace.
Okay, so he's on the same page as jihadis all across the Middle East.
And he also used the word bina as a derogatory term to describe Mexicans.
Well, I think it is a derogatory term to describe Mexicans, so well done on actually doing something offensive.
And in a story as old as time, a former middle school classmate took great offense at Harry's tweets and launched what became a Twitter lynch mob.
The unnamed woman who has no ties to TCU urged her followers to contact the university and complain.
Classic SJW tactics.
And because they're using them on a university, they absolutely work.
Because it's probably where these tactics came from.
Dean Robertson said I was going to need to write an apology letter and a letter stating what sort of punishment I thought I deserved.
She told me not to use freedom of speech as a defense or else I would be more severely punished.
Are you fucking shitting me?
You know your right to free speech?
You know that right that means you can speak your mind without fear of being reprimanded by authority.
Well, ignore that because that would mean that we couldn't punish you and we really want to punish you.
So now give us a reason that doesn't include that for you speaking your mind to which we have taken offense.
This ended up with the university rejecting his appeal and saying that the choices you made cause harm to other individuals.
Well, who?
Who has been harmed?
What harm has been done?
These types of comments are not acceptable at TCU.
Well, he made them on his personal fucking social media.
He didn't make them in your classrooms and directly contradict our mission of being ethical leaders and responsible citizens in a global community.
How exactly are you doing any of that by restricting his freedom of expression and then punishing him when he tries to invoke his right of freedom of expression in his own defense?
These people are fucking mental.
And so when it comes to say, oh, I don't know, the GOP primary debate, it really is amusing to watch the progressives deal with this because they obviously hate everyone up on that stage.
So what they have to do is find the person they hate the least.
And obviously, this is a woman.
This chart shows sexist tweets to Meghan Kelly exploding since she questioned Donald Trump.
Wow, that sounds terrifying.
Trump's comments and the overt hatred of women he conveyed appear to have a real political constituency in America.
Yeah, the hatred of women, it's got a real base in America that people are like, you know what?
I'd vote for anyone as long as they hate women.
Looking just at the immediate reaction, despite the backlash among the GOP establishment, his comments have inspired what appears to be an overwhelming wave of online hatred, not against Trump, but against Kelly.
Oh, yeah, because Donald Trump doesn't receive any online hatred at all.
Take for example this chart from Topsy, put together by web developer and anti-Gamergates activist Izzy Galvez.
It shows over time the number of tweets across the internet that mention both Meghan Kelly's name and the word cunt, whore bitch or slut.
What you are seeing here is an explosion of hatred against Kelly that begins precisely at the moment of the GOP debate when she dared to ask Trump about his record of sexism.
Well, I mean, it called me crazy, but it seems that she got less than a thousand tweets about this at the time of the debate.
But okay, let's carry on through the article and see what else they have to say.
Maybe there's some information there that I wasn't aware of.
So apparently Galvez thinks that this shows that these are not a few isolated tweets, but rather part of a larger and organic response.
Well, it was, what, about a thousand people, maybe 800 people, something like that.
It's not really a massive organic response.
But anyway, we'll get to the numbers.
But Galvez is no stranger to sexist hate campaigns himself.
Indeed, as a social justice warrior, he's likely taken part in many.
When he criticized the sexism of the Gamergate movement, which opposes gender equality in technology, that's how crazy the progressives have become.
They have actually worked the narrative round now that Gamergate's purpose is to oppose gender equality in technology.
I mean, how mental do you have to be for that to be the case?
As if Gamergate representatives are going to go to the Society of Professional Journalists and be like, yeah, okay, so we're here to keep women out of tech.
And they'll be like, well, why the fuck did you contact us?
But anyway.
Members of that movement harassed him extensively, including calling a fake police report that got a SWAT team sent to his home.
Oh, that's a link to The Guardian.
Let's have a read, shall we?
The SWATing incident was coordinated on the Baffermet subforum.
Well, there we go.
Unless every forum now is Gamergate, if they do something you don't like.
But in case anyone's wondering, no, Baphomet is not a Gamergate forum.
In fact, they've targeted several pro-Gamergaters and doxed them, such as Lizzie and the Ralph Retort.
But that is inconvenient for the narrative.
So we'll pretend that this is all Gamergate.
Because it leads us to the world's funniest sentence.
A sentence so absurd, only a social justice warrior could write it.
Gamergate and Donald Trump might not seem obviously connected, but they are.
Just let that sink in for a moment.
That is amazing.
Apparently, they're both expressions of a disturbingly prevalent belief in the United States that it's not only, because Gamergate's only in the United States, that it's not only right and good to hate women, which nobody is saying, but that hating women is so right and good that anyone who tells you not to hate women is a threat to core American values.
As if hating women is a core American value.
That is how batshit fucking insane progressives have gone.
But yeah, the thousand or so tweets that Megan Kelly got are definitely indicative of a deep hatred of women.
So let's put aside the social justice hyperbole for a minute and actually look at this, you know, realistically.
Now, I don't care if people used her name in any sort of capacity as long as it wasn't tweeted directly at her.
It wasn't harassment.
So we can take that out of our chart to start with.
This leaves us with a grand total of 872 for the past month.
And this is out of 143,707 tweets that have been aimed at her.
And as you can see, most of them are obviously after the debate.
This is 0.61% of all the tweets Megan Kelly receives are what progressives would term sexist.
And this was after 24 million people had watched her on the debate.
This just goes to show that Izzy Galvez and Vox and all the fucking progressives who are harping on about, oh poor Megan Kelly, she's such a victim, they're talking about a tiny fringe minority of people that they are blowing wildly out of proportion to serve their agenda.
I end this segment with the profound words of my old trainer, Dave, back in the day when I still worked out.
Cup it up, buttercup.
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