Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - This Week in Stupid (22⧸11⧸2015)

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Nov. 22, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

23:54

This Week in Stupid (22⧸11⧸2015)

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	Hello everyone, welcome to this Week in Stupid for the 22nd of November 2015.
	If you find anything you'd like to see on this week in Stupid, tweet using hashtag TWIS or post to Reddit R Sargon of ACAD.
	So this week I would like to begin by thanking everyone who has donated to Gregory Alan Elliott's Twitter Trial Support Fund.
	I think this actually qualifies as proper activism that we're doing, so break out the fucking bongos and start clicking you bunch of fucking beatniks.
	Seriously though, I think everyone's doing a great job and I think it's a really worthy cause.
	So if you want to contribute, there is a link in the description.
	So Black Lives Matter.
	What's the deal?
	I ask because I have spent months trying to approach anyone from the Black Lives Matter movement.
	I've tried Reddit, I've tried YouTube, I've tried Twitter.
	I don't know who I'm supposed to be contacting in order to speak to someone who supports this.
	And I give so much forbearance to this issue because I know what it's like to be slandered by the media.
	But the difference between Black Lives Matter and Gamergate is that people from Gamergate want to talk to the media.
	They want to show people, look, this is what we really are.
	I can't find anything like that from Black Lives Matter and I really don't want to form the same opinion as the mainstream media.
	But Black Lives Matter is a problem instead of being a solution.
	A group of Black Lives Matter protesters at Dartmouth College reportedly invaded the school's library, hurling obscenities and even assaulting white students in a protest that is gaining national attention for being run by a bunch of fucking racists.
	In what fucking world does any of that sentence make sense?
	Why did you invade a fucking library and assault a bunch of dorks who are just doing their homework?
	What possible way are they oppressing you?
	They are not representative of the fucking cops or something.
	I'm- this is what pisses me off so much about this movement.
	I- I- I'm not against it!
	I'm really not against the idea that the American cops are too harsh on black people.
	Maybe they are!
	I think it's a cause worthy of investigation, but this is retarded.
	Oh yeah, one more thing.
	Chanting, fuck you, you filthy white fucks, fuck you and your comfort, fuck you, you racist shits, isn't going to make people think that you aren't a violently anti-white movement.
	Just so you know.
	And I don't want to lump all Black Lives Matter people in with this, but there seems to be the common theme coming out of Black Lives Matter.
	Wherever I see someone from there, or claiming to be affiliated with this movement, talking, it's always about how white people are racist.
	This seems to be a very common meme within the movement, and it seems to be one of the sort of founding principles.
	If that's the case, it would probably go quite a long way to explaining why you don't particularly want to talk to outsiders, especially as many of them will be white.
	Students who refused to listen or join their outbursts were shouted down.
	Stand the fuck up, you filthy racist white piece of shit.
	Oh yeah, the students are the racists here.
	Men and women alike were pushed and shoved by the group.
	If we can't have it, shut it down.
	Is there a happy merchant for a Black Lives Matter supporter?
	Another woman was pinned to a wall by protesters who unleashed their insults, shouting, filthy white bitch in her face.
	Now, seriously, if you are someone who supports Black Lives Matter, do you support that kind of behaviour?
	Because if this was about Gamergate, I would be denouncing the shit out of this.
	I don't know, they've probably got their own version of fuckma PR.
	But yeah, so this has not been a clever move, basically, Black Lives Matter.
	In fact, focusing on race so heavily generally hasn't been.
	Because now there's a white student union that's challenging the Black Lives Matter at University of Illinois.
	And they've shared a link from American History X. Isn't that nice?
	This is the second incarnation of this page, and before the first one had written on it, feel free to send in pictures that you take of any black protesters on the quad so we know who anti-whites are.
	I don't think they're actually a white supremacist group.
	I think they're just one of those sort of reactionary groups that says, well, if everyone else can be racist, why can't we?
	And I'm not saying that's an illegitimate position.
	At least within the context of this discussion.
	But I'm annoyed that we are being forced to have this discussion.
	Because the less we focus on race, the less relevant it becomes.
	The more we focus on race, the more relevant it becomes.
	And that brings out all kind of undesirables on either side.
	That I would rather be trapped in the little hovels, unable to particularly influence the political discourse.
	Unfortunately, you fucks are opening the doors and letting them in.
	So would you fucking cut it out?
	It's this sort of thing that I'm talking about.
	Columbia student claims to be traumatized by reading about white people.
	What more am I supposed to say?
	That's not true.
	She's obviously not traumatized by this.
	And if she is traumatized by this, then someone has done something wrong to her brain.
	This is not a normal human state of affairs.
	Someone has to be conditioned to be like this.
	A student at Columbia University is urging the school to inject more diversity into its required courses, claiming she suffered severe emotional trauma from reading too many books by and about white people.
	You mean the history of Western civilization?
	Columbia students and faculty gathered Wednesday night for a panel discussion on race, ethnicity, and university life.
	Why?
	Why?
	Do you know who I would expect to go to a panel to discuss race?
	Racists!
	That's the sort of person I would think would go to that.
	The sort of person who fucking cares about someone's race before they know anything about their character.
	The sort of person who is prepared to judge on someone's race would go to this fucking thing.
	This should be a panel of people whose opinions we do not listen to.
	And I'm not saying don't let them speak.
	I'm just saying these are people who are espousing opinions that have been consigned to the regressive dustbin of history.
	We know this is bad.
	Let's not do it.
	Look at this.
	I says this focus on the West was highly mentally stressful for her.
	No, it's not.
	And if it is, there's something wrong with you and not the course.
	Everyone else is fine.
	You have the problem.
	I mean, really, it's due to who's kind of conditioned you to be like this.
	It's traumatizing to sit in common core classes, she said.
	We're looking at history through the lens of these powerful white men.
	I have no power agency as a black woman.
	So where do I fit in?
	I mean, that's stupid for a couple of reasons.
	One, so what?
	You're looking at the history of the West.
	If I was looking at the history of China, I'd be looking at the history of powerful Chinese men.
	You have no power agency as a black woman.
	It's history.
	It's stuff that's already happened.
	You don't get to fucking change it.
	And where do you fit in?
	You don't.
	You weren't part of it.
	Neither was I.
	I wasn't part of it.
	Like, when I read Japanese history, I'm not part of that.
	When I'm reading Assyrian history, I'm looking at going, shit, I don't fit in here at all.
	I'm just going to have to try and see what it was like from someone else's perspective.
	She gives the example of her art class, where she complained that Congolese artwork is repeatedly characterized as primitive.
	She wanted to object to that characterization, but, in the spectator's words, was tired of already having worked that day to address so many other instances of racism and discrimination.
	Because she's a cultural relativist.
	It's not that the Congolese artwork could have been primitive.
	It's that they were just a different culture that they didn't understand.
	And of course, there were so many other instances of racism and discrimination that day.
	I mean, constant.
	The whole place is racist to fuck, if you've been brainwashed in the right way.
	Listen to what the Associate Dean of Columbia said in response to this.
	You cannot grow up in a society without assimilating racist views.
	So you have to be a racist.
	Everyone is a fucking racist.
	And it's not even your fault!
	You're just all racist!
	It's not your fault!
	It's okay for you to then go on to hold racist views, so you may as well form Black Lives Matter.
	You may as well go around protesting white fucking students on campus.
	You may as well go around protesting that everything's fucking racist and everything's a fucking microaggression and that these things are all problematic.
	This is all totally fucking justified when you tell yourself that everyone in everything in society is fucking racist.
	On the subject of racists, Baha Mustafa is out.
	So I'm sure you're aware of the controversy surrounding Baha Mustafa, the student diversity officer of Goldsmiths University and her public and brazen racism.
	After she had the charges against her for hate speech dropped by the Met, she's been accused by the president of the union of harassment.
	Baha's resignation comes just 24 hours after union president Rashid left her £22,000 a year role claiming she was bullied by two fellow sabbatical officers.
	These were apparently Alex Etches, the student union's campaigns and activities officer, and Miss Mustafa.
	Now, these are just allegations, but I do wonder why Baha Mustafa simply is stepping down if there is nothing to them.
	Personally, I was going to presume that you hadn't done anything wrong.
	So why are you stepping down?
	Unless you know you have done something wrong.
	And the investigation is going to turn against you.
	They are said to have undermined Miss Rashid, badmouthed her to other students, and suggested she behaved undemocratically in the face of campus protests.
	Union bosses have vowed to launch proach into the bullying accusations backed by the university, saying they take these allegations very seriously.
	And I suppose it will probably go a lot better for you if you're no longer in that position, won't it?
	Miss Mustafa.
	Binor, I think you're innocent.
	I think that there's no way that any of these allegations are true, like you say.
	And in fact, a fair investigation will find you not to be a deeply, deeply ideological bigot, for whom the ends justify the means.
	The problem is that the president of the union was a racist misogynist homophobe or something like that, isn't it?
	And since we're on the subject of universities, David Starkey, the historian responsible for blowing the fuck out of Laurie Penny on stage and now all over YouTube, link in the description, has been banned from universities, so he can't blow the fuck out of Laurie Penny anymore.
	So David Starkey potentially appearing at this university was the reason cited for the agitation against him and his undeniable history of racism and sexism.
	Which frankly I would just think would put him in good company with the other students.
	At least the ones currently protesting.
	And this is forcing some of Starkey's fellow historians to agitate for his place in the video to be reinstated.
	For them to become counteractivists to the racist social justice activists.
	And I'm really glad that he says that these illiberal students will brook no opposition.
	I'm so glad the term illiberal is being used for them.
	Because we all know that they absolutely are.
	I've been saying this for a while now, and I'm glad to see other people noticing it.
	Now I don't know how true this bit is, but the mail reports that the student union at University College London banned Nietzsche, fearing that it would inculcate students with right-wing ideas.
	And students at Goldsmiths College London and also at Cambridge recently burned the newspapers of far-left groups that they found offensive.
	What the fuck is going on?
	This is weird cult mentality.
	The idea that any foreign information is going to undo your position means that your position is illegitimate and you know it, which is why you're going out of your way to censor information.
	And like I said, I'm glad other people are calling this for what it is.
	Illiberality.
	Restrictiveness, not permissiveness.
	This was the most requested article this week.
	And I don't want to focus everything about this week on social justice, but it's so fucking prevalent and it has to be stopped.
	I know there are other important things, but my god, this is everywhere.
	And the thing is, I don't even need to go through this article.
	You already know what's in it.
	You already know that this is cultural appropriation.
	This is racist.
	This is oppression.
	This is exploitation.
	You already know what the objections are.
	This is offensive to Indians or yogis or whoever.
	You already know what the issues are.
	The most notable thing is how the yoga teacher refers to them as social justice warriors, which is where this is coming from, with fainting heart ideologies.
	People are just looking for a reason to be offended by anything they can find.
	Spot on.
	And the thing is, it's this kind of collectivist thinking that led the University of York to cancel International Men's Day.
	So Dr. Adrian Lee of the University's Equality and Diversity Committee provoked fury after reflecting on issues that he believed had an adverse impact on equality for men.
	As well as describing how men are underrepresented in the student population as a whole, they are also significantly underrepresented in a number of academic disciplines across all three faculties.
	Now, these are statements that are absolutely true, by the numbers.
	These were the statements that were protested by staff, students and alumni who all shared the common trait of being neo-progressive activists.
	So what did the people with the power start doing?
	The people who were the majority gender on campus.
	The people who have the dominant institutional ideology?
	How did they exercise their power?
	Oh, well, I mean, you already know, don't you?
	They started punching down.
	Men are the minority on campus and men's issues aren't dealt with.
	Allow me to enlighten you why that's not necessary.
	Writing in the Independent newspaper, this author says that it's a tantrum that I see reflected in men's rights activist Howls of Protest Now.
	A tantrum rising out of the inability to see the bigger picture, the reality of other people's lives and the way in which society works.
	I've never read a more entitled statement than that in my life.
	Yeah, I know that all of these statistics are true.
	She doesn't go out of her way to refute any of this, but that doesn't matter.
	Because the women are talking.
	You know, the ones who hold institutional and demographic power according to your own fucking rules.
	And she wasn't the only one in the Independent, of course.
	We need International Men's Day about as much as White History Month or Able Body Action Day.
	Yeah, because when something is happening in a parliament, it's always got a racial or gendered angle to it.
	It's never just something neutral for the citizens of the country.
	I tell you, you fucking idiots are producing men's rights activists by being so one-sided and so hypocritical.
	It forces people who are human rights advocates like myself to focus excessively on men's rights because these are the actual legitimate rights that need protecting at the moment.
	You're not missing any fucking rights.
	You couldn't name me a legal right that you need that men already have if you tried.
	You couldn't do it.
	The only condemnation of this I could find was a local Yorkshire magazine.
	But good on you, Jaggerts.
	Mike Buchanan left quite an amusing comment on it, and I'm actually finding myself really warming for this guy.
	He's got a really sort of placid demeanor, and he says the funniest things.
	Like, he said he was fed up with whiny feminists, and he branded the university officials as spineless.
	On his blog, he wrote, We present this month's Gaudless Feminists of the Month award to the 191 co-signatories of the open letter that sought to block recognition of issues gravely affecting men and boys on just one day of the year, and succeeded in doing so.
	Rarely has the award been more deserved.
	Okay, I take it back, Mike.
	You're not boring.
	That's genuinely quite funny.
	But when I say this social justice shit is everywhere, I really mean it is fucking everywhere.
	And like I said, I don't want to focus just on social justice.
	There are other issues.
	But amazingly, social justice is managing to invade all of these other issues as well.
	Do you have a French flag on your Facebook profile picture?
	Congratulations on your corporate white supremacy.
	Why not?
	Why not?
	That's not crazy.
	That's not mental.
	It's not that there was a massacre in Paris done by ISIS.
	It's not that that happened or anything.
	It's not that you should be sympathetic to those individuals who were murdered or those who survived.
	And you know what?
	I'm not a big fan of these sort of virtue displays either.
	I don't do them.
	I never change my profile pictures in accordance to the latest mass tragedy that's happened.
	I'm sorry, I'm just not a fan of that sort of thing.
	But I don't care if other people want to do it.
	And I'm certainly not going to write articles berating them for doing it.
	And I'm certainly not going to do it like some sort of self-satisfied prick who has the moral high ground in this situation.
	If you've been on Facebook since Friday's attacks in Paris, you could be forgiven for thinking you've stumbled into the Front Nationale's image bank.
	The Front Nationale, like the BNP of France.
	Why would you be trying to associate the two things?
	Why would you even start with that?
	Why would you think that?
	There's no reason to think that maybe you've stumbled onto like a far-right racist organization's webpage.
	That's silly.
	This sounds like it could have been feminists with MRAs or liberals with conservatives.
	You'll focus on the same thing, you just approach it from different angles.
	And normal people are like, look, we don't need to focus on this thing.
	In fact, we can get further as a civilization if we don't.
	Focusing on race, gender, religion, sexuality, it's all retrograde.
	It's all regressive.
	It's nonsense.
	The important thing are the characteristics of the individuals.
	But apparently, that is deeply problematic, which is another word I love.
	Problematic is a fantastic word.
	It makes it sound like your subjective issues are an objective problem.
	Then our wonderfully progressive author starts waffling on about Eurocentrism and fucking, oh, I don't know, white-skinned grieving women in top-shop bubble hats, as if any of this has got to do with the massacre that's taken place.
	But ends with the line, we're essentially saying that white, Western lives matter more than others.
	Really?
	Is that really what we're saying?
	Is that really what you think we are saying when people want to show their solidarity with the victims of a massacre by putting their national flag over their icon?
	Is that what you think they're saying?
	This sentiment, when it washes across the world via Facebook in a sea of blue, white, and red, provides a get-out-of-jail free card for the West's slaughter of Middle Eastern people in retaliation.
	Just random Middle Eastern people, shopkeepers probably, not terrorists.
	I mean, you know, there is collateral damage.
	But that's not the aim.
	Our author is just then all over the place, accusing people of co-opting the trick-or-law, as if loads of French people weren't doing this themselves.
	Or blaming the creation of ISIS on French imperialism, which is going back far further than needs to be gone to point the fucking finger.
	Since we're on the subject, apparently one of these suicide bombers blew themselves up because of stress, according to his mother.
	Which I don't find to be a very convincing explanation.
	The mother of Paris suicide bomber, whatever, and whose two brothers were also suspects, said that her son did not mean to kill anyone, and his family believes he blew himself up because of stress.
	And I really hope that that's true, because she was apparently surprised that he blew himself up at all, even though he had spent time in Syria.
	Apparently the fact that his bomb belt exploded without killing anyone else says a lot.
	And the family admit he had spent a long time in Syria.
	So the parents said that they didn't know what happened to their sons and they didn't know that they'd been radicalised.
	And they'd found out about what had happened on TV like everyone else.
	And I've got no reason to disbelieve that.
	I can quite well believe.
	That people who have become radicalised and devoted to ISIS to the point where they're going to blow themselves up would be able to keep it a secret.
	Why would you tell anyone else?
	So yeah, I don't believe that it was necessarily due to stress.
	I think it was entirely for ideological reasons.
	But they are also the reasons that I think they would have managed to keep their allegiance secret.
	And now Anonymous are going to explain to us why vigilante justice is a bad thing.
	Anonymous Operation Isis accused of wrongly naming innocent people after Paris attacks.
	Their hearts are clearly in the right place, but now they have targeted individuals who haven't done anything wrong.
	This really is why I'm not in favour of vigilante justice.
	It rarely gets well fact-checked.
	I guess I'm more optimistic about the 5,500 ISIS Twitter accounts.
	I guess it's quite easy to identify which Twitter accounts are supporting ISIS.
	This is apparently not the first time this has happened either, where people affiliated to the group also wrongly identified a person who it was claimed was the police officer who killed Michael Brannon Ferguson, and it wasn't.
	But like I said, their hearts are in the right place and they may have actually done something that saved thousands of lives.
	Anonymous hackers says it's uncovered plans by ISIS to attack Paris, Indonesia, Italy and Lebanon.
	So Anonymous have released that ISIS plan on attacking multiple venues in the French capital, a WWE Survivor Series event in Atlanta, a five-finger death punch gig in Milan, a University Pastoral Day in Lebanon, the Al-Jihad One Day Jews in Indonesia, and the global Catholic Church celebrations of the Feast of Christ the King.
	The FBI is taking the alleged threat against the WWE event very seriously, and will be releasing a statement on the situation.
	An event that I'm sure would have had tens of thousands of people at it.
	So well done Anonymous.
	Stick to stuff like this.
	Don't stick to focusing on individuals.
	Focusing on the overall plan is far more useful and less invasive of innocent people's privacy.
	And finally, let's take a quick look at what's sexist, racist, or whatever this week.
	So the first sexist thing we have is the subtle sexism in women's pockets.
	That is, that women's clothes often don't have pockets.
	Yeah, I know, it's probably because they carry purses or handbags or something, and men don't.
	But this is now sexism.
	And don't forget the sexism problem in the modern witchcraft community.
	Yes, apparently people who think that they are witches and warlocks are not as mentally balanced as they could be.
	Who could have guessed?
	In What's Racist this week, well aside from everything, putting the French flag on the space needle is also racist, but as we've already covered, everything is racist, so what were you expecting?
	And very last but not least, transgender girl says she is rejected by straight guys for having male parts.
	Who could believe that straight guys don't like dicks on their women?

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