Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - This Week in Stupid (16⧸08⧸2015)

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Aug. 16, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

14:43

This Week in Stupid (16⧸08⧸2015)

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	Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 16th of August 2015.
	This week I would like to introduce you to the new crime of cyber flashing.
	Police investigate Britain's first ever case of cyber flashing after commuter receives unwanted graphic picture on her iPhone using the airdrop feature.
	She said it was a very unpleasant thing to have forced on my screen.
	Forced, remember that.
	It might have been a child or it could have been someone more vulnerable than me.
	And she added, it was quite distressing.
	Worried about what the sender's next move might be, quote, she contacted the British Transport Police who have launched their first investigation into cyber flashing.
	I don't know, maybe he's going to commit genital terrorism against the Queen by sending her a picture of his junk as well.
	So the AirDrop app uses Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to connect over short ranges to other devices.
	Its default setting is for contacts only, which means that only people you know can see you.
	But to share information with other people, users can make a change to the settings and change it to everyone.
	So either Miss Creighton Smith had enabled this so anyone could send her a picture, or she was getting sent pictures of someone that she knew.
	Thank God the police are taking this very seriously though.
	Superintendent Jill Murray said the public rightly expect to travel on public transport without experiencing unwanted sexual behaviour of any kind, be it verbal, physical or via technology.
	And I agree.
	Which is why I don't allow any random nonce to send me pictures of their junk via apps on my phone.
	Receiving an indecent image from someone you don't know must be very distressing and something we would take very seriously because there aren't any real crimes going on at the moment.
	If it happens to you our advice would be to remain calm, retain the image and report the matter to police as soon as possible.
	I can only imagine she was looking at, what is that?
	Is that oh my goodness.
	That's a penis.
	Someone has sent me a penis.
	I'm hyperventilating.
	Oh my god, I'm fucking triggered.
	But unfortunately this woman isn't the only woman this week who has felt violated by something a horrible, horrible, beastly man has done.
	TV reporter Meghan Batchelor violated by unwanted selfie kiss from a man at a music festival.
	Meghan Batchelor who works for the CBC Network in Canada was reporting from the Squamish Valley Music Festival on Friday night when the incident happened.
	As she was doing a piece to the camera for the 6pm news, a topless man in sunglasses ran up behind her and kissed her on the cheek while holding out his phone in an attempt to take a selfie.
	A report has been filed with the Canadian police, who want to speak to the man and presumably beat him relentlessly.
	We are of course going to have to watch the footage of this poor woman being violated.
	I warn you, this is graphic.
	In the event that the weather is so severe that it's a risk to safety though, in the event though that there is a risk to safety, they will cancel the show and make sure that that message gets out properly.
	I think we can all agree that there is indeed a risk to safety.
	That rambunctious young man.
	So when Megan says, it makes me feel very uncomfortable watching that back.
	I kind of feel like I've been violated.
	We can all sympathize.
	Of course though, the internet trolls are out in force.
	The incident has divided opinion on social media, with many insisting that Bachelor was right to be upset about what happened, while others maintain that she overreacted, as if.
	I felt like if I didn't do something about it, then I'm making it look like it's okay for people to do this to myself and for my colleagues.
	To have someone run up and just touch you or kiss you on the cheek or do something unwelcome, it's just not okay.
	And you know, I agree with you, Megan.
	It's just not okay.
	Someone call the police.
	The end of this article is the best bit of this article though.
	As much as I'm not physically hurt, I'm rattled.
	I was just doing my job when this happened, and I feel like he deliberately tried to interfere with my ability to do my job just for a laugh.
	I have some news for you, Megan, and I think that this is really what's going to send this guy down for life.
	That's exactly what he was doing.
	He absolutely wanted to interfere with your ability to do your job just for laughs.
	Don't worry, there's not going to be a jury in the land that won't convict him for this.
	You will have your justice.
	Now I know what you're thinking.
	Was there really nothing more important to report on last week?
	And the answer is of course, no.
	Time, money, and digital column inches needed to be spent covering the uncomfortable situations that these women have found themselves in.
	In addition to these not being a waste of police time.
	Because what these are are microaggressions done by white men, which may well be the cause of pre-menstrual stress, according to a professor.
	Ida B. Robinson, the professor who recently departed from the University of Memphis, probably due to white supremacy, had described whiteness as synonymous with terror, had even more tweets resurface last week in which she blames whites for every lethal riot in US history, blasts Dick and Jane stories for being heteropatriarchal, and even attributes her menstrual disorder to white microaggressions.
	Checkmate patriarchy.
	And of course, she thinks that Dylan Roof was not mentally ill or, you know, maybe even a terrorist.
	But this was just another example of how white people are conditioned to act.
	Which is completely rational.
	In American schools you have segregation now.
	And in the black schools they teach you how to be oppressed by the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
	And in white schools they teach you how to go on shooting sprees in black churches.
	From her Twitter feed, I have PMDD.
	No form of diet modification stopped it completely.
	Like, people were in danger around me for at least two weeks each month.
	To be clear, this could have just been trauma from whiteness.
	Severe trauma from microaggressive whiteness hasn't yet been linked with PMDD.
	But it could be.
	So Robinson left the University of Memphis to go to Rhodes College, and her new colleagues there are ecstatic over her joining them.
	Dr. Charles McKinney, the chair of Africana Studies at Rhodes, praised Robinson as, quote, the future of African American studies, of southern studies, and denounced her critics as hard-right, anti-academic racists.
	Which is of course axiomatic.
	Only hard-right, anti-academic racists would think that whiteness isn't responsible for disrupting a black woman's periods.
	This is of course just another reason why everyone needs feminism.
	Particularly, quote, the girl who destroyed it.
	Lauren Southern, we're looking at you.
	So dear Lauren Southern, you need feminism, you just don't know why.
	Lauren Southern, a young woman whose I Don't Need Feminism Because photo went viral, has released a video follow-up explaining her stance on feminism.
	Her video called Girl Destroys Feminism in Three Minutes is on Facebook and all over the internet.
	But not only does she not destroy feminism in three minutes, Lauren Southern is a feminist.
	Because feminism is like some kind of body-snatching parasite.
	As soon as you've dealt with it in any way, it's now inside you and eats you from the inside out.
	so number one she's concerned with the well-being of boys and men that's that's not very feminist lauren states that men too are rape victims and quotes statistics about men's experience of violence And she's absolutely right.
	These statistics are important.
	Rape and violence against men does occur, and this is unacceptable to feminists.
	Lauren ignores the structural and contextual basis for this because, as feminists know, it's because of patriarchy and because of male violence that men also experience violence.
	That's right, no woman has ever been violence to a man.
	Feminists love men and are deeply concerned about what Lauren Southern speaks of.
	Feminists are teaching that stereotypically female qualities like empathy and caring matter too and are beneficial to society.
	This is of course absolutely true and they're doing this by the meme of male tears.
	If you go to Google's image search and just search for male tears, you'll see feminist empathy displayed in page after page of extremely empathetic memes.
	There is nothing psychotic or abusive about trying to tell people that feminists care about men and their problems.
	Number two, she thinks equality means being the same.
	We're not all the same and fair does not mean equal.
	But equal does mean fair.
	So when we think equal means the same, we're actually being very unfair.
	For example, legal equality comes from male reality, where male behaviour and experience sets the norm that society compares women to.
	So when women are equal before the law, what you're actually saying is women are the same as men.
	Which makes you a feminist, I think.
	Either way, equality means that women need special treatment because they can get pregnant, give birth and breastfeed, etc.
	But Lauren's definition of equality, society treats women as if they're in male bodies and therefore ignores their needs and rights when they're denied abortion, maternity leave or public breastfeeding.
	Presumably in that order.
	The basic human needs of a healthy fertile female body are completely ignored because men who made the laws can't experience what it is to have a woman's body and women aren't allowed to vote to take part in government or the judicial system.
	Because number three, she doesn't know her laws and perceives women's benefits that aren't real.
	Lauren says that, as a woman, she can experience privileges like having custody of her children and some other nonsense.
	That I won't bother reading into because it's clearly nonsense.
	But perhaps she's not aware that in the United States Constitution, it doesn't directly grant the rights of American citizenship to women.
	And this basically means that American women aren't American citizens.
	And lawmakers still haven't passed the Equal Rights Amendment introduced in 1923, which means that women in the US don't have the stated constitutional rights to hold property.
	They don't have custody of their children.
	They can't receive pay or pursue life, liberty and happiness like their male counterparts can.
	Although men allow them to do so for now, it's not a stated right of women and could be rescinded at any time.
	Just literally like tomorrow.
	So for all of those crazy reasons stated above Lauren, you are a feminist.
	You just don't know it.
	Checkmate again, patriarchy.
	You see, what feminism needs to do is take a leaf out of the playbook of the EU.
	Is everyone accusing you of being a giant waste of everyone's time and money?
	Why not just spend £500 million a year of taxpayer money to propagandise your organisation to children?
	I mean, nobody's going to have a problem with that.
	So the £500 million spending includes more than 100 publications and over 1,000 videos as well as cartoons, colouring books and other educational materials intended to promote EU values to children.
	Matthew Elliott, the chief executive of Business for Britain, said, with UK taxpayers contributing more and more to the EU budget, it is staggering that European institutions are throwing away our hard-earned money on propaganda promoting the European project.
	But he's probably a misogynist.
	Indoctrinating children in classrooms and funding EU-friendly non-governmental organisations is a completely inappropriate use of taxpayers' money when budgets are being cut at home.
	When Parliament debates the EU referendum bill in the autumn, it is vital that MPs prevent EU from using its huge PR budget to brainwash voters and insidiously influence the result.
	But the thing is this isn't fair, because if that's the only way you can get people to agree with your organisation, what choice do you really have?
	So here's an example cartoon.
	Young Jimmy here says, my dad says that Europe is a waste of money.
	To which his teacher replies, it's true that there is a lot of criticism of the European Union, but the way the money is used on something like 280,000 projects every year is watched very closely.
	There is less than 1% fraud.
	Around 94% of the European Union's budget is spent on its citizens, students and small companies, NGOs, cities and regions in the member countries.
	Now this is really fantastic, because it absolutely doesn't refute the statement that the European Union is a giant waste of everyone's money.
	The report went through the European budgets on a line-by-line basis and found that the EU was committed to spending £3.1 billion worth of spending, which included corporates' communication of the political priorities of the Union, which is more than the advertising budget for Coca-Cola.
	But then Coca-Cola doesn't really need to propagandise people about their company when the Guardian are prepared to do it for them.
	For example, when they claim that obesity is an incurable disease, food manufacturers and advertisers are the real culprits.
	That might look like it's accusing Coca-Cola.
	But the premise of this article is so ridiculous, this is actually reverse psychology.
	Is overeating more addictive than crack cocaine?
	It's hard to compare addiction rates or to produce a clear definition that holds true across all substances and behaviours.
	But consider this crude contrast.
	Of people who use crack cocaine, 10 to 20% become addicted to it.
	Across a nine-year study of 176,000 obese people, 98.3% of the men and 97.8% of the women failed to return to a healthy weight.
	And in the end, 50% of those people who had been addicted to the crack cocaine quit crack cocaine altogether.
	But 0% of those who had been overeating stopped eating food.
	Checkmate McDonald's.
	The terrible truth is that for the great majority of sufferers, obesity is an incurable disease.
	In one respect, it resembles cancer.
	People who are merely overweight rather than obese benefit from changes of diet and exercise which are likely to be effective.
	A government review has described obesity as treatable, but these proposals look to me like a transfer of blame for the disease away from food manufacturers and advertisers and onto the afflicted.
	The problem isn't that obese people have no willpower.
	No, the evidence points to high fat, high sugar foods that overwhelm the impulse control of children and young adults, packaged and promoted to create the impression that they are fun, cool and life-enhancing.

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