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Dec. 20, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
24:04
This Week in Stupid (20⧸12⧸2015)
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Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 20th of December 2015.
It's that time of year again, so if anyone has anything that they would like to see featured in this year in Stupid, please tweet using the hashtag TYIS or post to our Sargon McCad with the same tag.
As you might expect, anything from this year in Stupid can be right from the 1st of January 2015 until now.
And I will do my best to compile all of this into various themes like with This Year in Stupid for 2014, and I'll make sure that the video this time is less than an hour.
Let's begin this week with my lord and saviour, Donald Trump.
As apparently, according to a Fox News poll, Donald Trump has not been stumped.
So a Fox News poll finds 50% of voters favour Trump's ban, while 46% are opposed.
Again, I'll leave you to decide what do you think the validity of a Fox News poll is.
However, when Trump's name is removed from the question, support from the plan goes up five points and the opposition goes down six.
So while voters favour the Trump ban by a four-point margin, that increases to 15 points when the same ban is not associated with Trump.
I think it's your time to shine, Hillary.
Because there have been stunning shifts in the responses amongst Democrats.
45% favour banning Muslims if Trump's name is not mentioned.
Yet when the plan is identified as Trump's, support drops to 25%.
It's almost like Sir Humphrey was right and you can just ask the questions in a way to get the answers that you want.
Among Republicans the views hold steady with 71% favouring it when attributed to Trump and 72% for the generic proposal.
I've tried to record this bit without laughing but I just can't do it because David Cameron seems to think that Donald Trump is a dragon or something.
Trump's visit to the UK would unite us all against him.
The frosty British reaction to Republican frontrunner Donald Trump continued Wednesday, with the UK's Prime Minister branding Trump's proposed Muslim travel ban as stupid and the former leader of Scotland labelling the mogul three times a loser.
Yes, billionaire presidential candidate who is currently the frontrunner for the GOP is a loser.
But credit where it's due, Cameron did say that Trump's proposal was divisive, stupid and wrong, but he did not support a British ban on the US presidential hopeful entering the country.
Good, because Donald Trump is not a dragon.
In any other political climate, Donald Trump would be regarded as a total fucking buffoon, and nobody would listen to anything he has to say because his ideas are poor.
However, he is the monster that the politically correct establishment has created.
By preventing reasonable people from giving honest opinions on what's going on, by preventing the debate from even happening, by shouting down people as being racist or Islamophobic or whatever, what you have done is created a great deal of pressure underneath the surface, and this is coming to a head in the form of support for Donald Trump.
But the thing is it's probably already too late, because the call is coming from inside the house.
Or at least the ISIS Twitter accounts are coming from within the country, specifically the Department of Work and Pensions, apparently.
So hackers have claimed that a number of Islamic State supporters' social media accounts are being run from internet addresses linked to the Department of Work and Pensions.
The Hacking Collective, presumably known as 4chan, showed Mirror Online details of the IP addresses used by a trio of separate digital jihadis to access Twitter accounts which have been used to spread extremist propaganda.
At first glance, the IP addresses seem to be based in Saudi Arabia, but upon further inspection using specialist tools, they appear to link back to the DWP.
Don't you think that's strange, one of the hackers asked Mirror Online.
We traced these accounts back to London, the home of the British intelligence services.
I'm sure that that is where the British intelligence services are located, but are they located in the Department of Work and Pensions?
This has sparked wild rumours, suggesting that someone inside the DWP is running ISIS support accounts, or that they were created by intelligence services as a hypot to trap wannabe jihadis.
What's interesting about this is that the British government owned these IP addresses, and they were sold on to two Saudi Arabian firms, and it's after the sale of these IP addresses that they were used by extremists to spread their message of hate, to spread pro-ISIS propaganda.
The reason it's being traced back to the DWP is probably because the records had not been updated.
Fair enough.
But surely this does mean that there are Saudi businesses, or at least employees within these Saudi businesses, who are openly advocating for ISIS and spreading their propaganda.
Call me a cynic if you like, but ISIS seems to be getting an awful lot of help from NATO allies or members in the region.
So you know what?
I'm actually with those 30% of Republicans who support the bombing of Agrabah.
And I don't care that it's a fictional town from Disney's Aladdin.
Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling trolled Republican voters by asking them if they would support the bombing of the city of Agrabah, the fairy tale setting for Disney's Aladdin, and 30% said they would.
But let's not forget that 19% of the Democrat voters would also support the bombing of Agrabah.
The poll also showed that 36% of Democrats and 13% of Republicans would not support bombing the fictional city.
I presume that the uncommitted Democrat and Republican supporters just kind of shrugged and were like, well, I suppose if Agrabar is supporting ISIS, I can support airstrikes on it.
The PPP is known for posing such loaded questions to Republicans in its surveys, and I think this really needs to be kept in mind when we talk about the value of these surveys.
We also need to remember that not all of our soldiers are prepared for war, so if we bomb Agrabah, it might be a bit triggering.
So Sally joined the military and was in the military for 11 years.
She was a fighter controller for 6 years and served two tours before re-enrolling as a pilot once the RAF made the decision to allow women to fly, and she was the first woman to pass through the Royal Air Force's fast jet flying training system.
I trained, fly, and engage in ground attack and air-to-air combat.
However, no one I knew joined the military to kill someone.
Well then I think I have some bad news, because when you join the military and train in ground attack and air-to-air combat, I'm afraid it becomes mandatory that you have to kill someone.
You can say that we were all attracted to the lifestyle, the fast-paced adverts promised adventure, excitement, an outdoor life, new experiences, world travel, and a respected career.
No one mentions the killing clause.
The military doesn't carry a mental and emotional health warning, but it should.
Are any of the male pilots saying the same thing?
Just out of interest.
One of the most appealing things about the military is its camaraderie.
It attracts and rewards those with a natural degree of loyalty, team spirit, and ability to operate effectively under pressure.
I played hard and worked hard alongside like-minded people.
We had a ball.
You make it sound like you've joined a country club or something.
Like you did some cross-country running.
Or maybe you went on an obstacle course.
Yet again, we are sending out more of our young men and women to the Middle East to carry out airstrikes in Syria.
More young people return to their lives at home, unable to find normal work and support families.
Okay.
I mean, don't get wrong, it's not a very nice thing to go and airstrike someone.
But saying for a fraction of the defence budget, a dozen warships could be converted to aid ships.
Tanks full of medical supplies can reach just about anywhere.
Where they falter, we have heavy lift helicopters.
These are jobs worthy of our young people serving in the military.
These are tasks they can be proud of.
It's a bold change of mindset, certainly, but I believe my children and all young soldiers deserve it.
It just really seems that Sally is missing the point of what a military is, and wants to do charity work instead.
And more power to her, but I don't think decommissioning the army and turning it into a charity is a wise idea.
Because the thing is, what about China?
China!
You go over to China!
China!
You take China!
China!
China now!
China!
Seriously, if we turn our military into a charity, how can we deal with China?
As they are apparently gamifying their entire civilization.
Apparently, their credit score will now be affected by political opinions and your friends' political opinions.
Which, yes, is as terrifyingly Orwellian as it sounds.
So this was introduced by Alibaba and Tencent, China's IT giants who run the Chinese equivalents of social networks, and who therefore have any and all data about you.
People can download an app named Sesame Credit from the Alibaba Network, and the score has become something of a bragging contest, being interpreted as a kind of citizen status, and not entirely falsely so.
Almost 100,000 people have posted their status online on Wellbo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.
Yeah, okay, that's terrible.
But has anyone considered the cultural appropriation going on here?
The Alibaba Network.
Sesame Credit.
Hashtag triggered.
So at the moment, this Sesame Credit and the benefits of it are optional.
But China has already announced that it or something very like it will become mandatory from 2020.
It also has announced that while there are benefits today for obedient people, it intends to add various sanctions for people who don't behave, like limited internet connectivity.
Such people will also be barred from serving in certain high status and influential positions, like government official, reporter, CEO, statistician, and similar.
Holy fucking shit.
Things that will make your score deteriorate include posting political opinions without prior permission, talking about or describing a different history than the official one, or even publishing accurate up-to-date news from the Shanghai stock market collapse.
And the kicker is that if any of your friends do this, publish opinions without prior permission or report accurate but embarrassing news, your score will also deteriorate, and this will have a direct impact on your quality of life.
If your credit score reaches 600, you have the privilege of an instant loan of about $800 without collateral when shopping online.
At $6.50, you may rent a car without leaving a deposit.
At 700, you get access to a bureaucratic fast track to a Singapore travel permit.
And at 7.50, you get a similar fast track to a coveted pan-European Schengen visa.
These are just examples and my god, I mean I'm assuming I don't have to go into any detail as to why allowing the government to engineer society this way is a fucking terrible thing.
Right?
The fact that people are being not only incentivized to individually become incredibly cooperative and obedient subjects of the government, but also to ostracize their friends if they are doing something transgressive.
This is literally like the party from 1984, except they don't need to punish anyone.
They can simply rescind privileges and people losing these privileges will do the rest for them.
If you want to see what the future of China is going to look like, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
Seriously, what China is doing here is creating the most totalitarian state conceivable.
I really hope this is wrong.
I really hope that I'm mistaken.
I'm really hoping that people in the comments go, no, no, no, no, no, no.
You've got this all wrong.
It's nothing like this.
This is just fear-mongering.
You've got it completely wrong.
It's not as you are saying.
And I really hope that's the case.
Back in the West, we are, of course, dealing with some serious issues of our own.
For example, Oberlin College students are offended by the lack of authenticity in the school's ethnic food.
Some students at Oberlin College in Ohio are outraged that some of the Asian dishes served at the school are not authentic enough, which they say amounts to cultural appropriation.
Because of course it fucking does.
So one student was upset that a ban mi vietnami sandwich, which should have been made of grilled pork, pate, pickled vegetables and fresh herbs, was composed of chiyavata bread, pulled pork and coleslaw.
And apparently the school's offering of General Sal's chicken was not deep-fried chicken with ginger garlic soy sauce, but rather steamed chicken with another kind of sauce.
Toyomo Joshi, a Japanese junior, said that the undercooked rice and absence of fresh fish in the school's sushi is a sign of disrespect and presumably an insult to his ancestors.
But even worse, it's transgressive.
When you're cooking a country's dish for other people, including ones who have never tried the original dish, you're also representing the meaning of the dish as well as its culture.
So people who are not from that heritage take food, modify it, and serve it as authentic.
It is appropriative.
This is so true.
I mean, I'm so tired of people misrepresenting the meaning of English food, as well as its culture.
The Universal Society of Hinduism is also jumping on the bandwagon.
The organization said in a press release that the school's tandoori dish is being made with beef, which is a problem, because consuming beef is considered sacrilegious amongst Hindus, and was considered the seat of many deities.
Well, that's terrible.
I think something should be done.
Someone should be held to account, and maybe, just maybe, the Oberlin students should release a gargantuan 14-page list of demands.
The list which bubbled up online over the past three days is no less than 14 pages in length, and includes 50 demands, many of which divide into several sub-demands.
I'll probably spend some time actually looking at the full thing in like a live stream or something, because I'd be interested to go through and see exactly what their demands are.
But we can look at the preamble of the document here.
Oberlin College and Conservatory is an unethical institution, oh god.
From capitalising on massive labour exploitation across campus, do they have cotton farms or something?
To the Conservatory of Music treating black and other students of colour as less than through its everyday running, Oberlin College unapologetically acts as unethical institution antithetical to its historical vision.
Goddamn, did nobody fucking proofread this?
This institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and assist sexist heteropatriarchy.
And into the trash the rest of this nonsense goes.
Let's have a look at the demands.
A 40% increase in the number of black students in the school's jazz department by 2022.
Demands related to the jazz department are in general very numerous.
Shit.
The elimination of the school's no trespass list, which bars certain individuals deemed unsafe from entering campus, because it includes blacks in disproportionate numbers.
It doesn't matter that these individuals are unsafe.
They're not refuting that.
They're just concerned because they happen to also be black.
The creation of a bridge program that will recruit recently released prisoners to enroll at Oberlin for undergraduate courses.
Does that include recently released rapists?
A more inclusive audition process at the Conservatory that does not privilege Western European theoretical knowledge over playing ability.
Adding Africa-centric course requirements for all departments that have existing Western civilization-themed course requirements.
For example, history majors are required to take a US history course, so they should also be required to take a course on African history prior to 1800.
But where's the course on Asian history?
And what about the courses on Eskimo history?
Don't stop with black history, let's do the whole damn thing.
The establishment of special, segregated, black-only safe spaces across campus, including in the central library and the school science building.
Segregation.
Totally progressive.
An $8.20 an hour stipend for black student leaders who are organizing protest efforts.
I mean, I knew that they were going to be arguing for their own financial interest at some point in this list of demands, but I didn't know how brazen that was going to be.
Listen, we're busy organizing protests against you white supremacist capitalist patriarchs, therefore, you should give us money.
How phenomenally entitled is that?
The people you are resisting should pay you to resist them.
And of course, the college should pay for a busing system and the immediate firing of eight employees for various offences, which I'm sure aren't going to be trumped up in any way.
Including music theory professor for the racist undertones of his course, as well as the way in which he treats black jazz who take his course.
Which is rooted in white supremacy.
Totally rational.
There's nothing about this that's fucking bonkers.
So what happens when universities capitulate to these demands?
Well, you get things like this.
No whites or Asians need apply.
The post which is inactive but cached here on higher ed jobs mostly resembled a typical ad encouraging applicants with a PhD in physics or related area, a strong research record and a passion for teaching to apply.
It also included a standard equal opportunity employment statement saying that the University of Louisville is an affirmative action equal opportunity Americans with disabilities employer committed to community engagement and diversity and in that spirit seeks applications from a broad variety of candidates.
But just under that statement, the ad continued.
The Department of Physics and Astronomy announces that a tenure track assistant professor position that will be filled by an African American, Hispanic American or a Native American Indian.
No Asians or whites need apply.
But that wasn't why the ad was taken down.
The ad was taken down after the department received a complaint that the preferences didn't include applicants with disabilities.
It's not that you were discriminating against people based on their race.
That wasn't the problem.
It was that what you had specified wasn't broad enough to also encourage students with disabilities to apply.
I mean, it didn't say excluded them, but it didn't encourage them to join.
Seriously, this is absolute fucking madness that has gripped these universities.
I can't even see how it's going to be fixed.
I mean, it's going to have to be root and branch reform with all of these professors losing their jobs, all of the ones that have encouraged this and taught this bullshit, losing their jobs.
The students are just going to have to fucking deal with it.
And preferably before the students decide to repeal the First Amendment in the United States, which, just to be clear, is the amendment that protects freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom to petition.
Have a watch of this video and pay particular attention to the way he is phrasing the questions.
You can get people to sign almost anything if you simply phrase it in the right way.
What we're calling for is a petition to repeal the First Amendment.
Just get rid of it.
Blow it up.
Get rid of it.
Just as a reminder, the First Amendment protects the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and oh yeah, freedom of petition.
So what we're calling for is to repeal the First Amendment.
I think this is fantastic.
Okay.
I absolutely agree.
Thank you.
Excellent.
Thank you.
Love it.
Thank you.
I'll sign it for you guys once.
I appreciate it.
I appreciate what you're trying to do.
I think the Constitution should be one big safe space, right?
Hurt people's feelings.
Yeah.
And that should not be protective speech.
Yeah, I totally agree with where you're at.
Because I think it's a living, breathing document, the Constitution.
It was literally not written stone.
And the guys who wrote it, they were slave owners.
What do they know about how we live today?
So we want to change.
Because you shouldn't be exposed to things you don't want to hear, you know?
That's not right.
But I mean, like, making fun of people is just not cool.
I shouldn't be protected.
Thanks a lot.
Great.
I appreciate that.
Because, you know what?
Microaggressions should not be protected.
And making fun of people is not cool.
And, you know, sucks.
I agree.
I mean, thank you very much.
Interesting.
It's a good for you.
That's great.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
Take care.
I like what you're doing.
Okay.
I like IDA.
That's really awesome.
Thanks, man.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, sir.
Honestly, we are so fucked.
So, finally, this week, the really important news was that Star Wars Episode 7 was released, and it was exactly as average as one might expect.
I'll include a link to my cynical review of the film in the description, which is full of spoilers because I too am part of the spoiler jihad that rogue Star Wars fans have been on in an attempt to ruin the Force Awakens for other people.
Apparently, devotees of the expanded universe books say they will publish spoilers of the latest film online unless Disney Studio agrees to film their favourite stories.
So this is effectively terrorism.
To force Disney to record certain films in a certain way or else.
Now of course, I don't condone terrorism.
All I'm saying is that acid rain would be proud.
I have feelings, good, bad and otherwise about Star Wars and I have a lot.
I spent whole days talking about the whole Darth Vader situation.
But you could?
Yes, like the part where he was totally a black guy whose name basically was James Gerald Jones.
But while he was black, he was terrible and bad and awful and used to cut off white men's hands and didn't, you know, actually claim his son.
But as soon as he claims his son and goes over for the good, he takes off his mask and he's white.
Oh, yes, I have many.
Many.
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