Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - This Week in Stupid (13⧸12⧸2015)

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Dec. 13, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

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This Week in Stupid (13⧸12⧸2015)

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	Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 13th of December 2015.
	If you find anything you'd like to see in this week in Stupid, please tweet using the hashtag TWIS or post to our Sargon of a CAD.
	So this week we will be dealing with some serious business.
	But before we get into that, let's deal with something that really matters.
	They are apparently making a movie of Stephen King's epic book series The Dark Tower.
	And for some reason, the main actor being eyed for the lead of the gunslinger is Idris Elba.
	I really have to ask whether the people casting this movie have even read the Dark Tower series.
	Because in it, the main character is Roland Deshane, the gunslinger.
	And he looks like this.
	Stephen King has made no secret of the fact that The Gunsling is based on Clint Eastwood's character, The Man With No Name, from the Dollars Trilogy.
	But not only that, his race becomes a point of contention when dealing with a crippled black woman with multiple personality disorder called Susanna Dessa or Odetta Holmes.
	Take your pick, each one has a different name.
	Detta Walker is the aggressive psychotic personality in Susanna's mind.
	She repeatedly calls Roland a honky motherfucker, or some approximation thereof.
	It's constant.
	She is always going on about how he is white and how this is a point of contention for her because she is such a bitter racist person that it is the first line of attack she uses.
	How exactly the people casting this film think that Idris Elba is going to be able to fulfill that role is beyond me.
	This is retarded and I have got no objection to the man as an actor.
	I'm sure he's a fine actor.
	I don't think I've ever seen anything with him in.
	The problem, frankly, is that it's simply not going to make any fucking sense.
	Oh, Idris, you honky motherfucker.
	Oh, that doesn't make sense.
	Why would we say that?
	We're going to have to rewrite Detta's character.
	Are we going to make her white?
	Is she going to call him a nigger?
	I mean, honestly, you haven't fucking thought this through.
	And before any retarded regressives jump on this and go, ah, I knew it!
	Stop.
	Calm yourself.
	You're an idiot.
	The issue is not that they're making a white character black.
	The issue is that they are not being faithful to the source material.
	That is always the issue.
	Roland Deshane is an established character.
	We know who he is.
	We know what he looks like.
	Stick fucking to it.
	So instead of being pissed off, I think I need to be grossed out.
	How about a series of photos that beautifully demystify the fat body?
	Under Huffington Post's art and culture section.
	So what you're about to see is either art or culture, or possibly both.
	Trigger warning.
	So Substantia Jones, that's an amazing name, Substantia, as in Substantial, as in fat, is the photographer who launched the Adipositivity Project.
	Addipositivity.
	As in Adipose.
	Adipose Tissue.
	Fat Tissue.
	The Fat Project.
	The Fat Positive Project.
	From Substantial Jones.
	Amazing.
	You couldn't make this up.
	The mission of the project.
	I'm such a dick.
	I don't care, right?
	I don't even care.
	I'm a fat guy.
	I can do this.
	This is how this works.
	Fat people can mock other fat people.
	So I'm going to.
	She says that the mission of the project is to combat sizist bigotry and weight-related misinformation.
	I love this.
	And to promote body love and the recognition of an individual's body autonomy, as well as promote critical thinking about the role that commerce plays in the dissemination of medical science and health reporting.
	That's very interesting because I'm here to promote mocking people who are so fucking fat that they literally would lose weight by not doing anything and yet instead they decide to continue filling their fat faces and take photos of their naked fat bodies because for some reason they think that there are other people on earth who are going to want to see that.
	I know this is me just being a complete dick.
	I know it is and I don't care.
	I really don't care.
	Look at this.
	Why would you do this?
	Is this art and culture?
	Two morbidly obese women having a hug and a kiss.
	That's culture, is it?
	That's not foul or anything, is it?
	I mean, just go and do this in the privacy of your own home.
	Why is this being given a platform?
	Why is this a thing?
	I love this.
	It's no secret anywhere you look, you see that photography is a commonly used tool for creating body shame.
	How?
	You mean for taking photos of fat people creates body shame?
	Maybe it's the people who are ashamed of the way they look.
	But I like to subvert that tool and use it to demystify the fat body.
	Demystify it.
	That's honestly what they have written here.
	Well this isn't very adipositive.
	This seems to be a fat woman with a thin man.
	Where's the adipositivity?
	Where's the fat man?
	Come on, two huge chobbers hugging each other naked while being photographed.
	That's what we want to see.
	And here are our models being released back into their natural habitat.
	Thank you Huffington Post's art and cultural section for presenting this to us.
	This was so culturally enriching.
	Doesn't Captain Sweden look proud of the death of standards?
	Another nail in the coffin of Western civilization.
	Just like at Yale, where the faculty member at the Center of the Protests will leave their teaching role.
	Erika Christakis, the Yale faculty member who sent an email defending the students' right to wear potentially offensive Halloween costumes, such as turbans or blackface, as an expression of free speech, has decided to leave her teaching position.
	I have great respect and affection for my students, but I worry that the current climate at Yale is not, in my view, conductive to the civil dialogue and open inquiry required to solve our urgent societal problems.
	For those of you who don't remember, Erika Christakis is the wife of this chap being lambasted by the students in this clip.
	By sending out that email, that's a digest your position as master.
	Do you understand that?
	Oh, I don't agree with that.
	Then why the fuck did you accept the position?
	Because I the fuck hired you!
	I have a different feeling!
	You should step down!
	If that is what you think about being a fan, you should step down!
	It is not about creating an intellectual space!
	It is not!
	Do you understand that?
	It's about creating a home here!
	So after sending the dreaded email saying that maybe it's okay that people wear Halloween costumes, hundreds of members of the Yale community called for her resignation.
	And recently more than 60 Yale faculty members found their spines and decided to issue an open letter defending Christakis, which is great.
	But where was that when this was first going on?
	It's all well and good defending freedom of speech a month after the fact, after there's been a mass public outcry against these students terrorizing their own fucking teachers, but why don't you stand up when it actually fucking matters?
	Apparently Miss Christakis has made a voluntary decision not to teach in the future, according to a statement from the university on Monday.
	Ah yes, that's right.
	The same kind of voluntary decision that Jim Sterling and Bob Chipman said that the developers of video game Dead or Alive Extreme 3, because of the backlash and outrage of liberals, trying to encourage them to not publish a game in a certain area, means that it's not censorship because they're choosing voluntarily not to sell that game in that market.
	Erika Christakis' resignation is being whitewashed under the same principle.
	No, they resigned themselves out of their own free will, despite the fact that they were clearly under duress.
	And just like almost every other accusation on these universities, like say, I don't know, the racist cult having a meeting in the Speaker Square, or the unmarked van that's going around shouting racist slurs at black students, Yale finds no evidence of Halloween party racism.
	Oh, what a surprise!
	Another made-up example!
	Hey, this is just like the time that the president of Mizu ran you down, isn't it, Jonathan Butler?
	Just like that!
	So for those who don't remember, this was another one of those contributing factors to the student protests.
	Yale University's Sigma Alpha Epsilon faced national scrutiny after the viral allegation it had held a white girls-only Halloween party.
	SAE's president temporarily left school due to the backlash and said he was spat on by a fellow Yale student.
	Black members were reportedly taunted on campus with the epithet of Uncle Tom.
	Students rallied and raged behind SAE's supposed racism as emblematic of larger problems of discrimination and injustice at Yale.
	However, following an investigation into the Halloween allegation that involved interviewing SAE members and party guests, Yale University announced today that in a School Wild Mail there was no evidence of systematic discrimination against people of colour.
	As in, this has been made up.
	Apparently before the party became crowded, all students, including men and women of colour, were admitted on a first-come, first-served basis.
	And yes, we are actually talking about a university party as if it fucking matters.
	The closest they seem to be able to get to universities in America being racist are things like, oh, I don't know, Lebanon Valley College's Lynch Building being questioned amid equality push, as in, they think the word lynch is racist.
	Students have demanded administrators remove or modify Dr. Clyde A. Lynch's last name as it appears on a campus hall due to the associated racial connotations.
	What connotation is that?
	Only black people can be lynched?
	The demand was made at a forum on campus equality issues held Friday, capping a week of demonstrations calling for changes at the predominantly white institution.
	In that time, organisers, including members of a black student union group, why do you have a black student union group?
	Why do you allow that?
	I thought that the problem was discrimination based on race.
	So to have a black student union group really rather seems to be one of the things that is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
	Apparently Clyde Lynch led the college through the Great Depression and World War II, helping to raise over half a million dollars for a new physical education building which was named after him following his death.
	The student activists who made the demand said that they'd be willing to settle for adding his first name and middle initial to the building instead of removing it altogether.
	Well, I personally would encourage the administration to tell them no.
	There's no reason they should settle for anything.
	There's no reason that this demand should be entertained.
	It's a silly demand.
	Especially as they acknowledge that there are no known links between Dr. Clyde A. Lynch and the practice of lynching.
	Especially as apparently the term lynching has its origins in the War of American Independence, more specifically with Captain William Lynch of Pittsville, Virginia, who headed a self-constituted court with no legal authority that persecuted suspected British loyalists.
	So dear black students, please stop culturally appropriating white culture.
	Lynching is not anything to do with black culture.
	It's in fact what white people do to other white people when they have disagreements about taxes.
	The New York Times ran a piece analysing the demands of the protesters from the 70 or so universities around the United States and found them to be as vapid and unmeritocratic as one would expect.
	79% of them demanded greater faculty diversity.
	Not better professors, but more diverse professors.
	50% of the time they demanded greater student diversity, which I'm sure is entirely down to racism and not other socio-economic conditions.
	But this is the really important part.
	88% of petitions demanded either changes to curricula or departments, for example requiring all students to take course in ethnic, racial, and sexuality theory, or diversity training.
	For example, mandate sensitivity training for all faculty to reduce incidents of racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism by faculty towards students.
	These are the demands of the students for the ideological control of the university.
	To make all of this mandatory.
	To make social justice the lens through which all other university issues are viewed.
	It's the framework they want everything to take place within.
	And there were some monumentally dumb things as well.
	26% demanded the university take action not just towards students or faculty, but towards the broader community.
	For example, by raising staff wages or divesting from the prison system Israel or coal.
	And 18% demanded reform of local police forces.
	Listen, you fucking idiots.
	This is way beyond the power of your university faculty to enact.
	Protesting against them for this is really fucking dumb.
	But the denial amuses me more than anything else.
	The media has really taken a liking to the narrative that protesters seek to be coddled.
	If anything, the reason black students are protesting is because they've been the opposite of coddled.
	They've been ignored, silenced, and hurt by people and systems at the universities.
	No, they haven't.
	That's literally factually inaccurate.
	The only thing that we have any evidence for was the poo swastika.
	That any of this is being given any attention or credence is evidence of the remarkable coddling students at university have been receiving.
	It's insane and it has to stop.
	What's really interesting though is that apparently 65% of US universities are unable to successfully teach their students maths, economics, government, science, or literature.
	The 2015-16 edition of What Will They Learn, a review of 1,100 colleges and universities, has just been published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.
	The study shows that most institutions of higher learning are allowing students to graduate without a basic grasp of many key subjects.
	Which is wonderful.
	I mean, if you're going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for your degrees, you may as well not know shit at the end of it.
	But I bet they're experts in identity politics.
	Out of the 1,100 colleges and universities involved, only 24, 2%, were given an A grade for requiring six of the seven essential subjects.
	Unsurprisingly, this lack of a good education is making American millennials fucking stupid.
	They are some of the world's least skilled people, a study has found.
	Fortune reports that Generation Y Americans, those born after 1980, lagged behind their overseas peers in literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology-rich environments.
	1980 onwards seems a bit broad, doesn't it?
	But, okay.
	We really thought US millennials would do better than the general adult population, either compared to older co-workers in the US or to the same age group in other countries.
	But they didn't.
	In fact, their scores were abysmal.
	The study concludes that a more expensive and expansive education may not hold all the answers.
	Yet maybe it's not how much they've learned, but what they have learned.
	Personally, I'm of the opinion that kids today need to learn that words cannot hurt you.
	There is no chance a word can do you any damage.
	So, for example, Google won't be like, we need a spell checker for hate.
	We need to write algorithms that will go through everything that is said online and prune out anything deemed to be hurtful.
	I mean, God forbid anyone's feelings are hurt on the internet.
	God forbid they read something they don't like.
	I mean, you're going to be recommending something stupid next, like troll insurance.
	Of course they're offering troll insurance.
	Of course they are.
	Why wouldn't they?
	Apparently claims of up to £50,000 can be made for counselling, relocation or time spent off work.
	Steady on ladies.
	That means you're going to be fighting your insurer to prove that you have been cyber-bullied or cyber-harassed or whatever claims you're making.
	Basically what I'm saying is they're not going to listen and believe.
	They are filling a hole in the market.
	They aren't one of your disciples.
	So you might want to think twice before you sign up.
	And on that note, a tyrannical cyberbullying law in Canada has just been rejected.
	A judge struck down a Nova Scotia law inspired by the death of Rater Parsons on constitutional grounds on Friday, ruling it violates the Charter of Rights to Freedom of Expression and Liberty.
	Wow, it's nice to know that there are some people with power who are still concerned about things like freedom of expression and liberty.
	The Crown, which is the people proposing the law, said the Supreme Court of Canada has recognised freedom of expression is not an absolute right, and some limits must be placed on fundamental rights when social values conflict.
	Which is pretty standard SJW rhetoric when attempting to curtail someone's freedoms.
	However, the opposition pointed out that the law didn't clearly spell out what is prohibited and simply gives the impression that thou shalt not hurt anyone's feelings online.
	Which is precisely what they want.
	Because ultimately what this will mean is don't you dare disagree or else you're going to be in a lot of trouble.
	Which is exactly what happened to Gregory Alan Elliott, a Canadian man who was dragged through their court system for three years and get this banned from using the internet because he dare disagreed with a few professional feminists online.
	There is a link to his fundraiser below if you would like to help donate to his legal costs.
	When it reaches $75,000, I'll be dying my beard pink.
	And I really wish I'd said I'd do this when it reached 100,000 because it's getting ominously close to the 75,000 mark and I can't be bothered to dye my fucking beard pink.
	I'd have to bleach it first and then dye it and then I would have to look gay for ages.
	So anyway, what has Donald Trump been doing this week?
	Well to start with he was declared the gamergate of Republican politics which I found very amusing because it's not entirely wrong.
	The article spends a lot of time detailing how Trump is not politically correct and then says each of these outbursts was hailed as the certain end of his campaign.
	Now the coverage has shifted to marveling at the way Trump's campaign keeps rolling on despite moments that would be deadly for any other campaign.
	And they even identify why Trump is successful.
	There are broader templates for Trump's rise in both American political history and American popular culture, and there have been more recent and specific cultural signs that Trump's coarseness would be the key to his success rather than the definitive weakness that brings him down.
	Take Gamergate and the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies controversies over this year's Hugo Awards.
	And you have to love the lie that they will tell themselves.
	Both cultural movements were responses to games that women, LGBT and people of colour made in mediums and genres historically dominated by white men.
	It sounds like they're being kept out.
	It sounds like they're being deliberately excluded.
	But of course, they weren't.
	Both were animated by the idea that video games and science fiction and fantasy writing had been corrupted and damaged by the increasing prominence of these new constituencies.
	No, no.
	Nobody said anything about the increasing prominence of anything.
	What they're complaining about is the corruption and damage that is being done to the medium.
	Not by women and people of colour, but by social justice warriors who are basically just political activists.
	That's what they are.
	They aren't lovers of the medium.
	They are people with a political agenda.
	But they are willing to lie to people and say that the problem is with women and minorities instead of the way these people are going about their daily business.
	But they are at least in one respect correct.
	Gamergates like Donald Trump is a response in part to cultural authoritarians who have been dominating the discourse, telling people what they can and can't say, what they can and can't do, how they can and can't think.
	The mainstream has become an insufferable and illiberal place where people cannot express themselves freely.
	Which is, in my opinion, why Donald Trump is so popular.
	This is why he's doing so well.
	Or at least was doing so well.
	Because on Tuesday, Lord Trump decided to say this.
	Should I read you the statement?
	Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.
	You have no choice We have no choice.
	I love it when Donald Trump is speaking his mind.
	I love it when he is just saying what he thinks and does not give a fuck what the progressive, meddling, authoritarian fucking killjoys have to say about it.
	That's when he's at his best.
	I don't think he's at his best when he's proposing things that can't really happen.
	I mean, there is just no way Muslims in general are going to be banned from entering the United States.
	Now, I'm not advocating that Donald Trump actually cares about what other people think about the things that he says, but I do think it's worth bearing in mind that saying things like this is probably going to put off a lot of swing voters.
	And saying things like, all Muslims are going to have to be registered in a database can easily be parlanced into, you're going to force Muslims to wear a special identifying mark, which then makes it quite easy to compare you to Hitler.
	So I'm just saying.
	But what really annoys me about this is that more than half a million fucking idiots have signed a petition to the UK government to block Donald Trump from entering the UK.
	Why?
	Because they don't like his opinions.
	They don't like his politics.
	And apparently they're fucking stupid, not realising that they're trying to ban him from coming to the UK, which is the same thing that he was trying to do with Muslims going to the US.
	On the plus side, there is a counter-petition to not ban Donald Trump that has 36,000 signatures.
	It's nowhere near as many, but hell, the link's in the description if you feel like signing it.
	You know, if you happen to think that Britain is better off as a liberal democracy instead of the sort of authoritarian country that punishes thought criminals by preventing them from entering it.
	And don't think he won't be banned either.
	Theresa May has a habit of banning whoever she fucking likes.
	to anti-Muslim bloggers, for example.
	I loved it when the White House press secretary came out and said, hey, Trump's plan to ban Muslims disqualifies him from the presidency.
	Everyone can relax.
	Yeah, I'm sure it's your decision, mate.
	And naturally, progressive activists had their knee-jerk response and decided they'd try and get Donald Trump fired.
	After learning that Donald Trump owns everything because he's a fucking billionaire, they then decided they were trying to cost him millions because he thinks differently from them.
	This week has made something abundantly clear.
	Donald Trump is a bigot.
	That isn't too surprising, given the fact that his father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan who was sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent to black tenants.
	I agree that's not cool, but should Donald Trump be paying the price of the sins of his father?
	But until now, there's been no way for the public, the public, to check Trump's bigotry in a way that will make him stop and rethink his words, because that's what they want.
	They want to force you, using social pressure, to not say the things that are on your mind.
	I mean, they might be horrible things, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be free to say them.
	And what I love most about this is that all of these suggestions basically involve millionaires.
	Don't live at or visit Trump's properties as a general theme running through.
	And you know what?
	I'm not a Trust Fun kid, so I've never been anywhere near Trump Tower or anything Donald Trump owns, and I don't think I could ever afford to.

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