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Aug. 31, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
25:50
This Week in Stupid (30⧸08⧸2015)
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Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 30th of August 2015.
This first article is more sinister than it is stupid, although it does have stupid parts to it.
I have a particular dislike for anyone who actively tries to artificially control or shape language.
So this is the battle over the words used to describe migrants.
So Al Jazeera has decided that it will not use the word migrant and will instead, where appropriate, say refugee.
It has evolved from its dictionary definitions into a tool that dehumanizes and distances, a blunt pejorative.
Now, I find that really dumb, because what our editor here doesn't seem to understand is that no matter what word you replace migrant with, it's going to be used to describe people who are dispossessed, filthy, homeless, lost, people in a state of absolute abject squalor, who are dependent on the goodwill of the international community.
This is never going to be a desirable thing.
Nobody wants to be a migrant or a refugee or whatever word you're going to use, and whatever word you are going to use is going to take on the dehumanizing, distancing, and pejorative nature that you are trying to counteract.
These people remain as economic migrants and don't become refugees until the EU state that is processing their claim makes its decision.
Economic migrants who are applying for refugee status have the term asylum seeker applied to them while they're waiting to find out whether they will in fact be accepted as refugees.
And of course, one of the most controversial ones is illegal immigrant, along with illegal migrant, which is apparently the most common descriptor for the word immigrants.
Which is entirely unsurprising as the default assumption when you're talking about someone is not to assume that they are breaking a law.
But this term is dangerous, argues Don Flynn, director of Migrant Rights Network.
It's better to say irregular or undocumented migrants.
Calling someone an illegal immigrant associates them with criminal behaviour, he adds.
Well, yes, their own criminal behaviour.
Not someone else's criminal behaviour.
They are the ones who illegally immigrated to a country that they did not have permission to immigrate to.
I hate to say this, but they have unlawfully entered the country.
Other critics of the phrase say that it gives the impression that it's the person that is illegal, rather than their actions.
But those people are fucking moronic, because there is no such thing as an illegal person.
It is, of course, always their actions that are illegal, you dumbasses.
Very often when we talk about British people who migrate, says Emma Bryant, author of the book Bad News for Refugees, we tend to talk of them as expats or expatriates.
They are not immigrants.
No, Emma, of course they're not.
They are emigrating away from Britain.
They are not immigrating into Britain.
I guess you could call them emigrants, but that sounds a bit weird, which is probably why people use the term expatriates.
But these silly arguments aside, at least they are trying to do something good for people who are suffering.
People who are going through hardship and need help.
Unlike the University of Tennessee, which is encouraging students to use gender-neutral pronouns.
The University of Tennessee is asking students to use Z here here and Zem Zeer, apparently.
And the Office for Diversity and Inclusion is asking students and faculty to use these pronouns in order to create a more inclusive campus.
They say it alleviates the heavy burden for people expressing different genders or identities by exporting it onto everyone around them.
We should not assume someone's gender by their appearance, nor by what is listed on a roster or in student information systems.
Transgender people and people who do not identify within the gender binary may use a different name than their legal name and pronouns of their gender identity, rather than the pronouns of the sex they were assigned at birth.
Assigned at birth.
Biological sex is simply a fact of reality.
Gender roles, I will concede, are not biological sex.
They are indeed a social construct.
So this is why you can get a male who identifies as a woman, or a woman, a female who identifies as a man.
Believe it or not, you goddamn drama queens, the doctor is not assigning your gender at birth.
He is merely observing what sex you were born as.
And judging by the way these kids are growing up, I bet he's wondering how you were the most competitive sperm to reach the fucking egg.
For the first week of classes, Brache is also asking teachers to ask everyone to provide their name and pronoun instead of calling role.
The name a student uses may not be the one on the official roster.
The roster name may not be the same gender as the one the student now uses, Z said.
Try not to cringe.
Although this is generally rather embarrassing and cringeworthy, the University of Tennessee did make it very clear that these things are not mandatory.
They're just requests made by some students if they feel that way inclined.
But I always wonder how much of a slippery slope this is, because you might end up like Mozilla, where the CEO threatens to fire a person responsible for anonymous hate speech on Reddit.
An anonymous person complaining about social justice bullies at Mozilla will be fired if that person is discovered to be an employee, the company CEO said today.
Way to go, way to prove him exactly right and make his point for him.
Mozilla CEO Chris Beard said Reddit user Ayo Yama had crossed the line in a series of postings about women at the company, including recently departed community organiser Christy Kohler.
The Reddit user probably prefaced what he said with, stop me if you've heard this before, but frankly everyone was glad to see the back of Christy Kohler.
She was batshit insane and permanently offended at everything.
When she and the rest of her blue-haired nose-pierced asshole feminists are gone, the tech industry will breathe a sigh of relief.
It was this outpouring of honesty that caused Chris Beard to flip into full white knight mode.
When I talk about crossing the line from criticism to hate speech, I'm talking about when you start saying someone's kind doesn't belong here and we'll all be happy when they're gone.
Well Chris, why don't you listen to the writing on the wall?
This is how the people at the bottom feel.
The people who have to deal with these people's shit every day.
But get this.
Beard said the remarks indicated a discomfort with diversity that he would not tolerate.
What are you talking about?
No one's talking about diversity.
People are talking about a social justice asshole who goes around being perpetually offended in order to have a go at people all the time.
And it's pissing everyone off.
It's nothing to do with diversity.
It's due to you hiring bullies.
This is a particularly sensitive issue for Mozilla, whose previous CEO resigned last year amid outrage he had donated to groups that oppose gay marriage.
You mean he was bullied out of his position?
For fuck's sake, I can't believe you can't see what everyone's complaining about.
And here's something that I'm sure won't be used as justification for something insane and radical by social justice warriors.
Is your baby racist?
Scientists discover there's a way to reverse racial bias in young children.
I fucking dread to think.
It's probably going to be something like, what you do is you swap white babies over to black parents and black babies over to white parents.
Children as young as three months old have been found to have a bias towards women who are the same race as themselves.
Of fucking course they do.
Because these are the women most likely to be related to the baby.
They're most likely to be friendly, safe faces.
But thank God a University of Delaware scientist has discovered a simple exercise that he claims can undo this unconscious racial bias in young children.
why using the technique of measuring how much time babies spend looking at pictures of faces which brilliant paul quinn has spent a decade studying how infants classify race and gender Why?
At six months, the infants were classifying races into three groups, Caucasian, African and Asian.
He found that by nine months of age, infants not only distinguish racial categories, but also become less able to tell different individuals apart if they are members of a less familiar race.
For example, white infants can identify white faces as belonging to different individuals, but they are less likely to see black or Asian.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, okay, fine.
Babies are racist.
Well done, you've proven it.
I mean, what do you want to do?
Mess with their brains?
Might these perceptual biases we see in infants be related to the social biases that we see in older kids, beginning at three or four years of age and adults, Quinn said.
And if they are, can we use a technique to reduce bias?
You know what, Quinn, I think that we can try your technique, and if it's not particularly successful or it's slow and it's heavy going, we could just operate on their brains and remove the part of the brain that allows them independent thought.
In the latest study, published in July in the Journal of Developmental Scientists, Quinn and his collaborators in China used photos of African and Asian faces and morphed them together to create ambiguous images that looked equally African and Asian.
Some of the faces had pleasant expressions while others more severe.
When researchers showed the images to four to six year olds in China, the children identified the happy faces as Asian, the category they were used to seeing, and the angry faces as African, a group they rarely saw in daily life.
Those fucking racists.
The scientists wanted to see whether the children's unconscious racial biases could be disrupted.
They showed the youngsters five different African faces and gave each of the individuals a name, repeating the process until the children could identify each of the five faces by name.
When the children then looked at the happy and angry ambiguous raced photos again, their bias in favour of their own racial group had dropped dramatically.
This process of getting the kids to respond to the five African faces as individuals, not as a category, only takes 15-30 minutes, and it made a significant difference.
well thank you very much quinn that is that's absolutely brilliant in fact That is a fine and most excellent demonstration that to treat people as individuals rather than as part of some kind of collective is the best way to reduce bias and bigotry.
Brilliant!
Thank you, that's perfect.
That is the perfect answer to everything about social justice and feminism.
And not a moment too soon either, because it turns out that 15-month-old toddlers have a racial bias when picking playmates.
Honestly, I do find it rather heartening that the solution to this is to teach them the merits of individualism rather than collectivism.
Because honestly, collectivism is the very root of identity politics, and it poisons everything.
It blinds people to what is actually happening.
It prevents them from accepting their own faults and failures.
And this article gives us a brilliant example of that.
11 black women kicked off Napa wine train for laughing while black.
That's right.
They didn't do nothing.
It was just because they was black.
On Saturday afternoon, the Sisters and the Reading Edge, a book club made up of 11 African American women, boarded a Napa Valley wine train in California, intent on having a good time.
But what started off pleasantly turned into a humiliating experience after the women were escorted off the train for laughing and talking too loud.
So, not for racism.
It was humiliating.
I'm really offended, to be quite honest, Lisa Johnson47, told the San Francisco Chronicle, I felt like it was a racist attack on us.
I feel like we were being singled out.
Jesus Christ, Lisa, you dunce.
You were being singled out, but not because of your race, because of your actions.
According to the Chronicle, the women, who were seated at two tables in the same car, claimed that they were doing what other passengers were doing, ordering wine and enjoying the trip through California's vineyards and wineries.
Johnson told the newspaper that she and the other women may have been animated, but definitely weren't obnoxious or intoxicated.
As someone who comes from a big family with loud women in it, I can assure you that when 11 women get together and start drinking wine, the very last thing that they are is obnoxious or intoxicated.
You're welcome, Auntie Sarah.
A short time after the 11am Saturday departure, Johnson said the manager on the train approached the members of the group, telling them to quiet down.
It's not even midday.
The train is set up to be with your friends, to drink wine and have a good time.
We were thinking, who are we offending?
Once the train arrived at the St Helena station, the entire book club, which included an 83-year-old grandmother, was not only asked to leave the train, but was greeted by officers of the St. Helena Police Department.
People were looking at us.
To get escorted into the hands of waiting police officers, that's the humiliating part.
Of course, no police action was taken, and it was just a measure to make sure that they stepped off the train.
In a statement to the Chronicle on Sunday, Devitt noted that several parties had complained about the group's noise level and claimed that the staff had tried three times to get the noise to an acceptable level.
But they really, really were actually racists, and they've completely victimised these poor 11 black women who were just trying to get their lives back on track by getting drunk before midday and making such a pain in the ass of themselves that they had to be escorted off a wine-tasting tour by the police.
I imagine that the San Francisco Chronicle wrapped up their article by saying how these poor ladies were forced back into the cotton fields.
Much to the delight of this right-wing nutjob.
Radio host Jan Mickelson, who said, enslave undocumented immigrants unless they leave.
So on the August 17th edition of his radio show, which thinking about it is the week before this one, but fuck it, Mickelson announced that he had a plan to drive undocumented immigrants out of Iowa that involved making those who don't leave property of the state who are forced into compelled labour like building a wall on the US-Mexican border.
So he'd put up signs that would say, 30 to 60 days from now, anyone who is in the state of Iowa, who is not here legally, and who cannot just demonstrate their legal status to the satisfaction of the local and state authorities here in the state of Iowa, becomes the property of the state of Iowa.
So if you are here without our permission, and we have given you two months to leave, and you're still here, and we find that you're still here after we've given you the deadline to leave, keep repeating that, mate, then you become property of the state of Iowa.
That's not really the most logical end step there, but and we have a job for you.
And we start using compelled labour, the people who are here illegally would therefore be owned by the state and become an asset of the state rather than a liability, and we start inventing jobs for them to do.
And so a caller called in and said, I think the fallout would be so significant.
And Mickelson said, what do you think the nature of the fallout would be?
And the caller says, well, I think everyone would believe it sounds like slavery.
To which Mikkelson replied, well, what's wrong with slavery?
The caller, being a sensible and not mental person, was clearly like, well, we know what's wrong with slavery.
The caller goes on to try and appeal to rational self-interest.
So are you going to house all these people who have chosen to be indentured?
And Mickelson says, yes, yes, absolutely, in a minimal fashion.
Which take a lesson from Sheriff Apeo down in Arizona.
Put up a tent village.
We feed and water these new assets, give them minimal shelter, minimal nutrition, and offer them the opportunity to work for the benefit of the taxpayers of the state of Iowa.
All they have to do to avoid servitude is to leave.
I mean, okay, yeah, that's fine.
I mean, what this must be is a giant joke.
Because, I mean, that's a mental proposition.
Ignoring the obvious moral problem of the state owning slaves.
It's like Mickelson thinks that at no point down the line is the state going to become reliant on its own slaves to continue working and probably in the future prevent actively prevent its own slaves from leaving.
And Mickelson reassures us that he's not joking when he says, you think I'm just pulling your leg.
I am not.
As you say, but I really don't think you're helping your cause by openly advocating for slavery, no matter what your cause is.
Even if your cause is to try and bring back slavery, openly advocating it for like this is really counterproductive.
Now I know what you're going to say.
Of course, Mickelson has a history of making racially charged anti-immigrant remarks, so he is probably doing this for hits, for views, for listens, whatever his metric is.
But apparently he does also have strong pull with the conservative caucus voters in Iowa.
His influence is so big that he recently hosted several 2016 GOP candidates on his show.
So he's not a nobody.
And he's advocating for slavery, but Not even by private individuals, which, I mean, if you're going to have slavery, that is at least better than it being, than the slaves themselves being owned by the state.
I can't think of a more terrifying form of slavery.
At least, with the like the individual slaveholders, they might have some care and affection for their own property.
But someone running the state doesn't give a shit.
They're gonna care even less.
Was it Aristotle that said that that which is held in common is held in least regard or something like that?
But at least the illegal immigrants aren't gonna get fat, unlike modern women, because they're not doing enough housework.
According to a new study, if you listen carefully, you can hear the very distant sound of shit hitting the feminist fan.
And yes, I think they are about to start talking about unpaid labour.
I already know what they're going to say about this article.
It's just all misogyny, from here on out.
Researchers just say a drop in the amount of time spent on housework has contributed to the obesity epidemic.
So not only are they fat, but they're also lazy.
At least according to this study.
The average female now spends almost 20% less time on chores than her counterpart in the early 1980s.
Advances in technology also mean the housework she does do is likely to be lighter than in the past.
That's the patriarchy for you, isn't it?
Making women's lives easier, so they get fat.
And in addition to this, women working and being strong and independent is making them fat as well.
Because the jobs have become more sedentary.
People spend more time watching TV and little sport is played.
So while 30 years ago, someone may have had a short walk to work, today they spend a much longer journey on public transport.
Well, I'll tell you what, that study was so packed with misogynistic wrongthink, that I'm glad a study has come out to tell me that most studies are bullshit.
A painstaking years-long effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested.
The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work.
Their conclusions, reported Thursday in the Journal of Science, have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have worried that the field needed a strong correction.
Oh dear social science.
It really seems like all those confirmation biased chickens are coming home to roost.
Our author suggests three reasons why they think that this is happening.
The first one is a bias towards research that is not only new but interesting.
As in interesting headline grabbing, something that can sell.
An institutional bias against checking the work of others.
This is the flip side of the first factor.
Senior social science researchers often actively warn their younger colleagues, who are in many cases the best positioned to check older work, against investigating the work of established members of the field.
That is a really bizarre position for them to take.
It's almost like they know that their work is very flimsy and based on having a conclusion you want to reach and then finding the route by which to reach it.
And the third one, which I think is a really, really important point, small unrepresentative sample sizes.
In general, social science experiments tend to work with fairly small sample sizes.
Often just a few dozen people who are meant to stand in for everybody else.
Cough, cough, Adrian, Shaw, 27 people in the study that informed the game as a dead article's cough-cough.
Finally this week there was a terrible shooting where two journalists were killed on live television.
They were killed by a man who was disgruntled at losing his job and apparently couldn't let it go.
A man who was not representative of anyone but himself.
I'm sure that you know where this is going.
I'm not saying this because the alleged shooter was black or that he was a gamer.
I'm saying this because I don't know how else to explain to people.
He literally doesn't represent anyone but himself.
So there is literally no reason to try and tar black people or gamers based on this person's actions.
And so, of course, after this shooting, the countdown timer was on.
How quickly could this be linked to Gamergate?
Well, it didn't take very long at all.
Local gamer says he communicated with shooter that killed journalists online.
The gamer who has asked not to be identified said he plays online video games with a group known as Gamergate.
This detail, even assuming that it is true, has got absolutely no relevance to this story whatsoever.
But now the word Gamergate is mentioned in their article, no matter how innocuously.
But here's the really stupid thing about this article.
On the day of the shooting, someone else tweeted Bryce Williams, the shooter, was a noted Gamergate supporter.
Oh wow.
I wonder if someone else tweeting is really an accurate source that journalists should be using for their news.
You guessed it.
What WSB-TV actually found was Margaret's Belly shitposting on Twitter.
Those fucking morons.
Absolute fucking idiots.
They have actually since updated their article after being made to look like such colossal cretins.
But this of course is something that should never have happened in the first place.
And just finally, I would be very interested in talking to this anonymous gamer who plays games online with Gamergates.
I'm more than happy to protect your anonymity, just in exactly the same way as the news report did.
I'd just like to have a conversation with you and your voice.
I have a few questions, if you'd indulge me.
My contact details will be in the description of this video.
feel free to get in touch however you'd like.
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