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Nov. 15, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
21:50
This Week in Stupid (15⧸11⧸2015)
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Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 15th of November 2015.
If you have anything you'd like to see on this week in Stupid, please tweet using the hashtag TWIS or post it with the same tag to our Sagan of Akad.
Because of the terrible events in Paris this week, I think what we should do is start off with some light-hearted stupidity.
You know, something like, school threatens boy with sexual harassment charges over love notes.
This is apparently real life, and it's necessary for a mother to speak out after school administrators threaten to file sexual harassment charges against her nine-year-old son who gave a handwritten note to his crush.
Well, the boy is clearly a rapist, but if you have the stomach for it, we'll actually check out the content of the note, just to see how much of a rapist he is.
He said that they wear the same uniform and how her eyes sparkle like diamonds.
That's disgusting.
That's absolutely horrible.
This little kid is trying to use the time-honoured method of making her feel good about herself in order to get her to like him.
That's awful.
How can he do this?
How dare he try to make this girl feel good about herself in order to increase her predisposition towards him?
That's fucking disgraceful.
Why didn't they fill out form 32C so they could have done this formally and neutrally?
You know, the way God intended.
Through a totalitarian bureaucracy of bossy women.
After the other kids in the playground started teasing this kid, the principal approached the kid's mum to tell her that it wasn't appropriate that he was writing the notes, and if he writes another note, they're going to file sexual harassment charges against a nine-year-old boy.
And they got the opinion of a professional psychologist to back this up, saying, this is not sexual harassment, because it's fucking not.
This is ridiculous.
But this is one of those unexpected consequences of PC culture.
Suddenly, nothing is really permissible, no matter how petty it is.
And on the subject of petty, I won't be talking about the Missouri NDL and various other student riots.
I've got a big video for that planned that I'll put out later in the week.
Sticking with the theme of pointless light-hearted news, apparently there is a film coming out called Gods of Egypt, and, wouldn't you know it, the whitewashed cast sparks anger.
Now, I'm actually not on the other side of the issue compared to the progressive opinion on this one.
I do think that if you're going to have a film set in a certain era in a certain place, then you should try and represent those people in that era and place as accurately as possible.
So, having a Scottish guy playing an Egyptian pharaoh or god or whatever, but it's probably not going to accurately represent the time it's supposed to be representing.
And it being a fantasy film is no excuse.
It is one thing to believe that the gods of ancient Egypt might have had a hand in Egyptian affairs, but it's also completely another thing to believe that ancient Egyptians looked like Scottish people.
This is basically just a reverse of the black Vikings trope, and I really don't like it.
Just, if you're going to portray something historical, try and portray it accurately, motherfucker.
I suppose it depends on the time period, and I actually don't know what era of history this film is supposed to be set in.
I assume it's pre-Alexandrian.
Which brings us to the progressive reaction to white people playing Egyptians.
Dear Hollywood, white people did not rule ancient Egypt.
Ancient Egypt did not worship white people.
Hope this helps.
Signed everyone hashtag gods of Egypt.
Well, I mean, presumably she's talking about before this guy, who was succeeded by this guy.
And good god, look at that face.
Look at that nose and chin and those lips.
Look at those big lughole ears.
This is the whitest motherfucker I have ever seen in my life.
And he was succeeded seven times by his sons, who were breeding with their sisters, until Egypt was conquered by this guy.
An even whiter guy than the previous guy.
Look at these fuckers side by side.
Look at those noses and those ears.
Fucking huge.
But look at the guy who followed him.
His face looks like it's pasty and made of pork.
But then Egypt was conquered by this kid.
The whitest, skinniest kid who has ever- Look at those fucking ears!
Look at the goddamn things!
Look at his fucking face!
He is the whitest kid in the world.
So yeah, I'm just being a total dick about this now, because, like, this person is just so misinformed about what has actually happened.
For over 950 years, white people ruled Egypt.
And the thing is, normally this is not the sort of thing I would actually think about, but if you're going to look at history through a racial lens, which these people are, they could at least be honest.
Look at this.
Foss, the god of wisdom, being played by a black dude.
What can a progressive possibly have to complain about here?
This is a very prestigious position, the god of wisdom.
He's fucking intelligent.
He's powerful.
Look at him.
He's doing some multiple character thing or something.
I don't know.
But he looks like he's an important fucking character.
He looks like he might have something interesting to say.
What is there to complain about?
I cannot understand how they seriously cast Chadwick Bosman as a literal, all-knowing magic Negro.
It's not the guy doesn't fit the fucking theme because he does.
The problem is that there is an out-of-context trope that's being applied to a situation where it's not really necessary.
But okay, was this down to racism?
Are the producers of this movie just all Klansmen in denial?
Well, no, obviously.
Ridley Scott defended his decision, claiming it was for commercial reasons.
I can't mount a film of this budget where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain and say that my lead actor is Mohammed so-and-so from such and such.
It's just not going to get financed.
So the question doesn't even come up.
Oh god, Ridley, that's not an answer that's going to satisfy them.
They're going to say something like, um, why exactly is Muhammad going to be a name that doesn't get funded?
And you'll say, well, because there aren't any famous actors called Muhammad.
No one knows these guys.
And they're going to be like, yeah, but why does nobody know these guys?
And they'll say, well, because no one's done these films yet.
Yeah, why not?
Because of white supremacy.
White people in their own countries have been making films with white people in.
How dare they, Ridley?
How dare they?
And Ridley Scott's going to be sat there going, well, I guess so.
I mean, we weren't intentionally trying to be racist.
And they're going to be like, we know.
But you were being, so now you're going to have to do everything that we say.
And also, you're going to have to pay us for the privilege.
Another retarded progressive news.
Vice magazine published the stupidest article on the gender pay gap that I have ever seen.
The arguments presented in it are so bad, it's breathtaking.
Starting with this first image that you can see.
Yes, it's remarkable that feminists are so concerned about CEOs being 50% female.
But the number of female sewage workers probably being about less than 1% is just fine.
So it was because of Equal Pay Day in the UK, which was last Monday, where apparently women get paid less than men.
14.2% in the UK, to be precise, which is much lower than the usual feminist estimates.
But the word you're looking for is earn.
Earn less than men.
They don't get paid less than men because that would be illegal and you could sue them.
Myth number one.
Women don't get paid the same because they don't want to do hard jobs.
And here's Twist user Norb Delta with the links to the documented evidence that he's using to prove that not only do men work more hours overall, but they also are the majority gender, the overwhelming majority gender in dangerous jobs.
God, I'm sorry, this is sounding like an MRA-focused episode.
really am.
But these things are true.
So what's our feminist's brilliant response?
A seemingly limitless ignorance of how women's choices affect their earning capacity.
She says, it's also displaying the most fundamental ignorance about the historical and systematic demeaning of women's labour.
Like, a system is set up with the end goal of demeaning women's labour.
Not systemic, an unintended consequence or side effect.
No, no, no.
Systematic.
That women have traditionally worked as unpaid carers to everyone around them.
Manual labour is undeniably a hard grind, but do you know what else is?
Cleaning shitty diapers.
Especially the shitty diapers of your 80-year-old mother.
Yeah, but that's not an industry.
You don't get paid for that.
That's not fucking work.
That's housekeeping, as gross and difficult as it is.
And the argument just keeps getting better.
Let's just drag this into 2015, where not all women are mothers and great societal strides like gay marriage, abortion and the pill have happened, and women have proved their capacity for hard work on an industrial scale.
A link that goes to a BBC article about 19th century factory workers.
Only 11% of the construction industry is female and 1% work on building sites.
Why?
Maybe it's got something to do with the fact that there aren't any other women working on building sites.
Fucking, are you serious?
Obviously women are going to be put off joining sectors they've historically been excluded from at every single level.
Well then how are we ever going to get women into it?
We're going to have to force women into these.
Why would any girl want to be a scaffolder?
Well you could stop the sentence there, but when she's never seen a woman doing it.
Because she might be a fucking pioneer, you maniac!
She might think, hey, I really like the look of that and I'm not going to let fucking the fact that no one else is doing it stop me!
Why would it stop you?
Jesus Christ, are you sheep?
Is that what you think of women?
But this argument is so internally inconsistent with the rest of the piece.
You're arguing that women are being paid less because they're being discriminated against, because of institutional sexism.
And here you are giving a real world reason as to why they would earn less.
This isn't the result of institutional sexism, this is just the result of women being nervous to do something they've never done before.
And I don't even know that that's not true, but what the author's argument is actually doing is reinforcing the idea that there should be in total a gender wage gap, because these women are not doing this hard, well-paid, dangerous work, and therefore you would expect women on average to earn less.
I'm not going to go through the rest of the article in full because you can see just by myth 2 of 5 that this person is a fucking moron.
Myth 2, women are not as clever as men.
Which is a complete misinterpretation of what Norb Delta's tweet actually means, because he's calling you an idiot for thinking that if any business could hire women to do the same job at like 15 or 30% less than men, why would they ever hire a man?
Means there is a distinct logical contradiction in the idea that the institutions can get away with paying women less than men for the same work.
So you'd have to be missing your brain to think that this is true.
Not that women are not as clever as men.
Idiot.
But even then, she fails to debunk the straw man argument she has set up.
She links to a let me google that for you for girls perform better than boys at school.
Which they do.
But that's not a measure of intelligence.
That's a measure of how well they do at school.
If we actually look for average IQ results for men and women, there's a very common pattern to the curve, where you have women clustering very much around the middle, the average, and men being more widely spread along the extremes.
Does this mean women should be treated any differently?
No, of course not.
But the point is this author is so dumb they can't even debunk the straw man they have set up.
So I'm going to move right on to this plus-size superhero is here to save us all from lame comic book stereotypes.
Faith is a badass new heroine turning restrictive body norms on their head and I think this is amazing for so many different reasons.
First of all, this is just innately hilarious.
Just describe it to yourself out loud if you're not getting it.
But second of all, I'm glad they're doing this.
I think they should be making original characters that are what they want to see.
And not just because I find them so hilarious.
So we find out who Faith is.
She's a plus-sized superheroine turning these restrictive body norms on their head.
Of course, she's so much more than her body.
She's smart, gregarious, and an unapologetic nerd.
The essential components for true badassery.
Okay, but what does she do?
I don't know what her powers are.
I don't know what- I mean, I think she can fly just because of the pictures I've seen, but I don't know anything about her superpowers.
According to the creator, apparently she's a lifelong geek.
A comic book fan, a sci-fi fan, a fantasy fan, and all kinds of fans, who ends up getting superpowers of some description somehow, and actually gets to be a superhero like the one she's read about and watched her whole life.
So she's just very, very happy.
I mean, she's living the dream that so many of her fans, so many fans of this medium have had since they were kids.
She is the superhero for Tumblr.
A fat girl sat there blogging on her fucking Mac, presumably to Tumblr.
With a little smile, like how good I'm making myself feel.
What are her powers?
Doesn't matter.
Doesn't fucking matter.
She is a fat girl who has feelings on the internet.
She's just like you it's just it's the most transparent thing I've ever seen in my life And I am absolutely sure there is no irony to the fact that she rescues and then falls in love with a handsome guy who seems to be in good condition.
They spend a huge amount of time talking, but never talking about what her actual superhero powers are.
Just that she's fat.
And for her and her handsome boyfriend that she rescues, it's the first time for both of them being in a sexual relationship.
Honestly, just look how fucking mundane this comic book looks.
This is what happens when social justice warriors produce content.
But as I said, you know, I shouldn't mock, but fuck me, it looks so boring.
You know, I mean, I'm glad that they're producing their own content.
I absolutely think they should.
Fully support their efforts, be the change you want to see.
But I think I can explain why you're not really enjoying the content that the rest of us have been enjoying.
Anyway, these are the sorts of issues that are really important to first world feminists.
You know, stuff like a Pakistani cafe that made the joke, if she won't make you a sandwich, we will.
I don't really see how that's a problem.
How is that misogynistic?
If your woman has decided she's not making sandwiches, we're a business that are going to make you sandwiches.
Does that undermine feminism?
I mean, this could only be a problem if feminism wasn't about helping women to stop from making the sandwiches, but was instead about preventing men from having sandwiches made for them.
Apparently they also uploaded a menu of sandwiches with names similar to those of men linked to violent crimes against women, and apparently this caused the most anger, but it's not what this article is talking about.
I mean that does sound maybe like it could be offensive, but that's not the issue.
And even if it was, my answer would still be, well, just don't eat there.
I guess they focus on this because they say make me a sandwich has become a common anti-feminist social media meme in recent years, implying the main role of women is catering to the needs of men.
It's often used to try and silence women in online debates.
Yes, especially when those women are anti-feminist and debating with a male feminist.
And the thing is, they get someone from Islamabad to weigh in on this.
Pakistan is no heaven for an ordinary woman.
Last year, more than a thousand women were killed in the name of shame.
Rape, acid attacks, and domestic violence against women are also rampant in Pakistan, and there has been little done.
Which is true.
These things are awful.
So why focus on stupid jokes by a fucking cafe?
In other news this week, Pakistani expatriates to Australia have been convicted of female genital mutilation.
This is Australia's first prosecution for female genital mutilation.
She was told to imagine she was a princess in a garden, while the former nurse cuts her clitoris during the cat nurse ceremony.
This is what has happened to both of these young girls.
But first world feminists don't even know about it.
They don't care.
What they care about is that someone made a sign that might be interpreted as being misogynist.
So since we've arrived here, let's talk about Islam.
Apparently the US military has actually been doing something, which is a complete 180 turn on previous policy, so they managed to use a drone to probably murder someone called Jihadi John.
He's the guy who did all of those videos apparently decapitating people.
Jeremy Corbyn complained about this, saying that he should have been held to account in a court of law because it would be better for all of us.
And I am in complete agreement with this.
This has become a worrying trend for the United States.
They have an enemy, they drone strike them from miles away, and assume that they're dead and that the problem is solved.
It's not just the degree of uncertainty here that bothers me either.
I mean, A, capturing them alive would probably yield more information than blowing them up.
B, a lot of these people are Western citizens.
Whether or not we like the fact that they defected to ISIS, they should still be given a trial.
They should still be proven to be as guilty as they are assumed to be.
And frankly, I don't like the precedent of governments being able to just kill their problems.
I hope everyone understands that I'm not defending these people when I ask for this either.
What I'm actually defending is Western liberal civilization.
I am actually concerned that we do not uphold our own standards.
And I don't think it's worth violating our own principles for a bunch of grubby, traitorous bastards hanging out somewhere in a Syrian desert.
So finally, as I'm sure that everyone is aware, there was a major terror attack, or several terror attacks, on Paris this week.
So talking about this isn't going to be stupid or funny, it's going to be tragic.
But I can already predict how the mainstream media narrative is going to go.
And I think I would be remiss if I didn't highlight a few facts that I have a funny feeling will be conveniently forgotten by the media.
Or taken wildly out of context by people on the other side of the issue.
The first is that we do have confirmation that one of the terrorists who took part in the Paris attacks had registered in Greece as a migrant.
The Greek government have announced that the man who took part in the attack was registered on the island of Leros in October, and that ISIS have not only taken responsibility for the attack, but have called it the start of a storm.
In a statement where they characterise the French as crusaders, the French government has declared a state of emergency within France, meaning that traffic can be banned from areas and searches can be decided at will, and that the borders of France have been closed.
This has led the Polish government to rejecting migrant quotas altogether and closing their borders.
And in the UK, there is a petition with over 300,000 signatures on it, which means that Parliament is probably going to be forced to have a debate over this issue and presumably take action if it turns out that people want the borders closed.
Basically, I think that we're going to see a whole lot of justifying going on in the future, very much in the same way that 9-11 forced a lot of things to be justified as well.
And if you look at this from the perspective of ISIS, they have had a very successful terrorist attack here.
They have put the fear of terrorism deeply into the hearts of the French and probably the surrounding European countries and probably the Americas as well.
This has shown people that eight men can cause nations to move.
But ISIS don't have anywhere near this much power.
The only reason this is occurring is because of our reaction to it.
I have a funny feeling that politicians are going to start asking for things that would otherwise be considered extremely unreasonable.
And I think we should really ask ourselves, are we really prepared to go down these rabbit holes for a power like ISIS, a power that isn't really a power at all, that we have given power over us by allowing them to scare us?
We are at war with them, and they have won a minor victory here, and 129 people tragically lay dead.
And I'm not trying to downplay that.
I'm just saying that maybe we shouldn't make any rash decisions.
Especially when we could be empathizing with Virindir Jabal, an anti-Gamergate critic who has been mistaken for an ISIS member due to someone photoshopping a picture of him holding an iPad into a picture of him holding a Quran and wearing an explosive vest,
which was doctored to look like it was being promoted by ISIS accounts, which then was picked up by mainstream news outlets and broadcast on TV.
That's not funny at all, is it, Virindir?
You know, when people think that, I don't know, you're a terrorist.
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