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Jan. 17, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
21:20
This Week in Stupid (17⧸01⧸2016)
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Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 17th of January 2016.
If you find anything you'd like to see in this week in Stupid, please tweet using hashtag TWIS or post it to our Sargon of Acad with that same tag.
So let's begin this week with something silly.
You may have seen this image doing the rounds on social media.
A kangaroo apparently in mourning for the untimely and tragic death of his mate, holding her tightly to show how much he cares.
Or it's a horny male kangaroo who's trying to rape a corpse, and maybe we would do better to not anthropomorphize animals because nature is fucking savage.
What a fucking surprise.
So it turned out that the only part of this kangaroo that was mourning for his mates was his penis.
Because apparently he's trying to mate with the female that he's holding, and he may also have caused the injuries that killed her.
Beor, our photographer's narrative is so much nicer.
I saw the male pick up the female.
He looked like he was just trying to get her up and see what's wrong with her.
The mother's lifeless body propped up at the neck by the male, who appears to look solemnly ahead, overcome with sadness.
The photographer obviously didn't notice the kangaroo was sporting a fucking erection.
According to people who actually know about kangaroos, the male is trying to get the female to stand up so he can mate with her.
The male is clearly highly stressed and agitated, his forearms are very wet from him licking himself to cool down.
He is also sexually aroused.
The evidence is here sticking out from behind the scrotum, which apparently is apparently the standard configuration for marsupials.
Thank God we have experts on such things.
So I'm not going to dwell on this.
I mean, this was just a simple mistake from one of those rare people who don't know what a kangaroo erection looks like.
It's not like that they were in some sort of willful denial of reality mode, like, oh, I don't know.
Social justice warriors in the gaming industry.
Let's have a quick look at what they might be saying this week.
Gamers have become the new religious right.
Is that true, Jeff Rauner?
You see, I had no idea it was gamers that were objecting to the same things that say, oh, I don't know, Jack Thompson was objecting to.
I mean, you are aware that you unironically wrote this as your opening paragraph, right?
There was a time back when I was a teenager that I could always count on organized protesters of a particular religious bent to get together and try and shut something down.
Usually it was something they hadn't even seen or heard or read.
This is ringing a few bells.
And I know it's true because Harry Potter is the most popular Christ story since the original and yet it has been a constant presence on challenged book lists since 1999 for promoting un-Christian witchcraft.
That's the most amazing opening paragraph I've ever heard from a feminist or proponent of social justice.
And it's only superseded by this one.
It's kind of an odd thing to have happened.
Once there was a pretty significant debate over the censorship of video games, video game activist Jack Thompson, I think he was an anti-video game activist, crowed that violent video games made people shoot up schools.
Doom was accused of promoting devil worship, and Congress held hearings on the subject.
So it turns out that despite all my efforts, I couldn't actually record a response to that that wasn't me just laughing.
So I guess I'll let these tweets from the Feminist Frequency team just speak for themselves.
Both presenter and producer Anith Sarkeesian and Jonathan McIntosh, well, let's just say they're not fans of violent video games.
Just like the 48,000 feminists who decided to protest Grand Theft Auto for encouraging violence against women.
Even though anyone who's played Grand Theft Auto can tell you that the game doesn't do exactly that.
I mean, I know, I know, it's not fair for me to bring up a bunch of things that feminists have said and done to try and censor or denigrate video games in exactly the same way that the religious right did about 10 years ago.
But the thing is, these are facts.
These are things that happened.
And I'd be rather remiss if I didn't bring them up.
And it's not like that there was some sort of consumer-driven anti-censorship movement in gaming at any point that was maybe unfairly demonized by those very same people who were trying to censor gaming.
That would be ridiculous and has never happened.
And the thing is about neo-progressive activists, right?
They're like the George Washington of activists.
They simply cannot tell a lie.
I mean, if you look at this article where it says, in the grim darkness of Warhammer 40k's far future, there are only men and it's terrible, there would be no lie included in that sentence.
Oh no, reality would reshape itself to make sure that this wasn't actually complete horseshit.
Warhammer, for those of you who aren't aware, is one of the longest running and most popular miniature games, and I know what you cynics are thinking, well, I wonder if the popularity of this has anything to do with it.
Well, slow down, Diogenes.
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
But oh no, two paragraphs into our article, we've already stumbled into the first social justice pothole.
Author's note, for the purposes of this article, unless otherwise stated, we are assuming that every model's gender lines up with their sexual characteristics.
Aren't you worried about misgendering any of those Space Marines?
You know that not all women have vaginas, don't you?
Some women have gene seeds.
Obviously, it's possible that your entire Space Marines chapter identifies as women.
Like the Ultramarines.
We have to base it on what the model looks like and how the background is written.
You fucking transphobe!
No, we don't.
That is vile trans misogyny.
And I will simply not accept that.
Let's cut straight to the heart of the matter with the biggest and most well-known aspect of the Warhammer 40k universe.
The Space Marines are easily the most iconic army in 40k and are by far the most widespread.
Yes, the genocidal space fascists of the Imperium are indeed one of the most widely known 40k armies.
I don't know why either, because they're clearly inferior to the Chaos Master race.
But of course, here comes the whinge.
Space Marines can only be men.
And I mean they can't only be men theoretically, and that's where it gets irritating.
See, according to the background, only men can be turned into Space Marines, because you know what?
The reasons are just too stupid to go into.
And this immediately presents the first major hurdle when discussing sexual politics of Warhammer 40,000.
Trying to actually discuss it.
There is nothing about that sentence that isn't complete bullshit.
The sexual politics of Warhammer 40,000, I rather think you have missed the purpose of a game whose tagline is, in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
Not there is only Tumblr, you fucking idiot.
Lean on James, let's be a masochist here and actually go into those reasons that are just too stupid to go into.
Let's get really self-flagellating about this.
Now I don't know whether you remember, but the 40k universe is a universe populated with demons and aliens.
So naturally within this context, identity politics took a back seat to keeping mankind alive.
Which is why the Emperor of Mankind decided to genetically engineer his super soldiers out of men instead of women.
You might be thinking, well, that's discriminatory.
And yes, that's absolutely right.
They looked at the physical characteristics of men and women and decided they needed the strongest, hardiest, and least likely to get pregnant members of the species actually fighting the aliens.
The stupid reason that all the Space Marines are male is that men are physically more strong than women.
But what I've just done there is apparently something called a Thermian argument.
So coined by legendary sock puppet operator Dan Olson.
I'm actually going to go through his videos in a live stream next week, so I won't cover it now.
But the basic idea is that the method of arguing around criticism by simply using the in-universe explanation for why something is the way it is to shut down the discussion.
What a wonderful way of phrasing, this is the reason that your criticism is invalid.
So whenever the subject of making a handful of the thousands of space marines female, the immediate response is that according to the fluff, space marines can scientifically be only male.
Not just scientifically, but logically as well.
So James just glosses over the various gender-neutral factions, or the faction that is entirely made up of women, and says, I can forgive a lot of Games Workshop's problems with female inclusion.
And in fact, the main problem that he has is that Games Workshop do not give the all-female faction the support that he personally would like to see.
What a fucking annoying way to get to the statement, I would like a new Adeptus Sororatus Codex.
Feminists are, of course, being annoying and meddlesome in far more important places than Games Workshop.
I never thought I'd say those words.
Such as nagging their way into getting feminism restored to the A-level syllabus.
A few months back, feminism was removed from the A-level syllabuses, and there was of course an outcry over proposals to teach three core political ideologies, socialism, liberalism, and conservatism, but to drop feminism as a named topic.
Because apparently feminism remaining as an optional area of study is not good enough.
Which is why Labour MP Ruper Huck had to point out that only 29.4% of MPs were male, and school groups she took on tours around Parliament always asked about the lack of women.
Presumably, these were school groups from the optional feminist class.
She said that the proposed syllabus implies that women do not belong in politics, and that their contributions are not significant.
It's a toxic message and it's been condemned roundly by loads of people, including girl guides.
You wouldn't think that they're a radical, dangerous group, usually.
Listen, you fucking freak.
Not having feminism as a core part of the syllabus and instead having it as an optional area of study does not imply that women do not belong in politics.
For fuck's sake, get a fucking grip.
I love that feminists can nag their way into getting feminism taught as a core subject at school, and there will be people who will honestly say things like, well, feminism doesn't have very much influence at all.
And you know, I really wouldn't care that much about it if it wasn't constantly making people focus on really awful things.
You know, as soon as you start getting the- oh, the intersectional feminism, right, okay, what are we focusing on?
We're focusing on gender, we're focusing on race, and we're focusing on disability or lack thereof.
You know, all things that people don't actually have control over.
You know, the sort of characteristics that discriminating over makes you a bigot.
Oh, what a surprise.
I decided not to read books by white authors for a year.
And I especially like this second line, because nothing makes me want to read a book by a white man, like receiving a rape threat from a white man.
Was it coming from the fucking author of the book?
Because if it wasn't, that's pretty fucking racist and sexist, isn't it?
At the end of 2014, I took stock of all the books I read in the preceding two years, and was dismayed to note how few of them were by women.
It wasn't even close to 50-50.
Why would you think it would be?
I mean, this is like a child's interpretation of what equality means.
Equality means that I should be reading exactly 50% male and exactly 50% female authors.
And she even says that men are way overrepresented in her lifetime reading list.
As if there is some equilibrium to be had, and it's not just the books that interest you are the books you should read.
And deliberately denying yourself books that you would probably otherwise be interested in because of the race and gender of the author.
Just, it's amazing.
It's the most crazy, racist, sexist thing I've ever heard.
But look at this.
I might have agreed that as writers we want to be read for the quality of our ideas, not for the colour of our skin or arrangement of our chromosomes.
I certainly want that.
No, you don't.
No, you don't.
You actually don't want that.
You want the opposite of that.
But then I witnessed what happens when we do discuss our reading habits when, on the way to the better future, we are assailed by the bitter present.
The terrible bitter present of her predominantly preferring books from male authors.
As if that should fucking matter.
I imagine this is some kind of institutional oppression against women writing good books, or books at least that she is particularly interested in reading.
And I absolutely love this.
It quickly became clear that, though we wish it weren't, talking publicly about a reading list designed to correct iniquities and make you a better citizen of the world is, or at least is interpreted as, subversive.
What fucking iniquities do you think you're correcting with a reading list based on an author's race and gender?
That's... that...
I mean I just...
what do you think you've solved?
All you've done is prevented your own personal enjoyment of someone else's material for reasons that you otherwise wouldn't judge someone, and in fact, at the end of this, complain about being judged on yourself.
Look at this.
We're saying out loud that you want to hear from fewer white people and more people of colour, and that you're making concerted efforts to do so brings on an onslaught of racist abuse.
Oh, I'm so fucking sorry.
I'm so sorry.
Your attempt to judge people by their race is getting racism thrown at you.
I can't believe it.
I'm just going to read this paragraph because it's perfect in its awfulness.
Then the reverse racism business.
Reverse racism isn't a thing.
Correcting a long-standing disparity, whether it's in university admissions or hiring or book selection, and using race as a factor in your selection, is not reverse racism.
It's a way of reversing the effects of racism.
Only two people who consider white thoughts and white words to be self-evidently superior to all others can view an effort to hear less of them seem irrational and unjust.
This woman actually thinks that there is such a thing as white thoughts and white words.
She actually thinks there are only ideas that white people can come up with, and only white people are capable of expressing them in a certain way.
Which is why in her mind it does seem like there can't be such a thing as reverse racism.
Because white people are so bloody amazing.
You can't possibly be racist to them.
And it's with this in mind that I really want to talk about a blog post that someone sent me this week that was put up this week about something called the hierarchy of oppression.
I think it's worth making clear that the author of this article isn't actually postulating this themselves because they think it's true.
They appear to be trying to understand the intersectional SJW worldview and have therefore come to this conclusion.
I think it's very interesting, so I thought I'd share it with you.
So they start by quoting Bahamas Starfa's catechism that I as an ethnic minority woman cannot be racist or sexist towards white men.
And then they lay out the theoretical hierarchy of oppression.
Men oppress women, heterosexuals oppress homosexuals, bi and asexuals, the able oppress the disabled, white oppresses everyone else, citizens oppress immigrants, cisgenders oppress transgender, gender, fluid.
So they say that to be an able cis white heterosexual male within your own country a citizen of is the pinnacle of privilege and the least oppressed person.
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with this, but have you noticed that all of these categories are at least in professional working life, majority categories.
And they then assign a simple scoring system based on these categories.
So men are a score of two, women are a score of one.
White people are a score of three, non-whites are two and blacks are one.
Able are two and disabled are one.
Heterosexual is two, the rest are one.
Citizens are two, immigrants are one, and same with cis and transgender.
Now, I would have thought that this is the sort of chart that a member of the Nazi party might have made back in Germany in the 30s.
But let's remember that this chart was actually made by a feminist attempting to interpret another feminist's worldview.
This of course would mean that someone who is male, white, able, heterosexual, a citizen within their own country, and cisgendered would have the full 13 out of 13 privilege score.
By contrast, a woman who is white, able, heterosexual, citizen, and cis would have 12 out of 13.
Whereas a man who is non-white, able, heterosexual, and an immigrant and cis would only have 11 out of 13.
So that's right.
An immigrant man is more oppressed than a white native woman.
And our author postulates that it's because of this privilege that if the immigrants in question were black rather than non-white, it would also increase the disparity, making the sexual assault of white women simply an oppressed black man fighting against his oppressors.
And they think that this explains the intersectional feminist reaction to attacks on women by non-Western men in Cologne on New Year's Eve.
It's a bit hyperbolic, but they say that it appears that white female citizens oppress these male immigrants and thus cannot be raped by them.
And the author points out that there are instead calls to shame and silence those who speak out against the non-whites raping white women.
The SJW and intersectional feminists calling people racist to shut them up are effectively ignoring the victims of this horrendous crime.
Which they absolutely are doing.
Now, I don't know whether they actually do have this hierarchy of oppression subconsciously in their minds when they're doing this.
I don't know whether they even know what they're doing, really.
I mean, honestly, a lot of them seem to be conditioned.
I really don't know how much rational thought is going on with these people.
They do seem to have some kind of Pavlovian response to certain words.
And as crude as this has been, the hierarchy of oppression, as laid out here, would actually explain why heterosexual feminists so fucking shat the bed when it came to the Cologne sex attacks.
And I really do mean it when I say that they're being conditioned to react, instead of taking the time to think.
Such as MTV Australia under fire for racist tweet during Golden Globe Awards.
MTV tweeted, where are the English subtitles?
We have no idea what these two people are saying at the Golden Globes.
And that's it.
That is what has been branded racist.
Being unable to understand someone else's accent is fucking racism to these people.
You know, I don't know who Ella Saron is, but well done for being so brave on calling out MTV Australia, because you are also a Latina and they might not understand what you're typing there.
That's not passive-aggressive at all.
Take this Muslim cleric's letter to the Toronto Sun about preventing sexual assault.
It's literally rape culture being printed in a newspaper in Canada.
Where is the feminist outrage?
The cleric states unambiguously that the reason these sex attacks are continuously happening is because of Canadian laws, which gives too much freedom to women.
Women in North America are falling victims to the democratic freedom that you passionately believe in.
The reason why a woman gets raped is because of the way she dresses.
Women dress so provocatively, so much that they receive too much attention for themselves, and that attention at times leads to death.
Where is the feminist energy?
Where is Jessica Valenti?
I mean, are you guys okay with this person saying this?
I'm suggesting that Toronto becomes the first city in North America to introduce laws to make it illegal for women to dress provocatively.
If we do this, the other cities would follow.
And it's not like this is some sort of uncommon opinion among Muslims.
And I just think it's important to note that the general public are not in favour of this.
At least, not the people who have seen this article.
Almost 30,000 people have voted in this little poll, and hardly anyone is in favour of this, which is why I am well on board with Louise Richardson, the new head of Oxford University, who is against banning free speech and is happy to have extremist groups preach on British campuses.
That headline sounds really inflammatory, but it's absolutely correct.
Extremist groups should be allowed to air their views, because that way, like we can see with the Toronto Sun, bad ideas should be presented to the light of day so everyone can see why they are bad ideas.
I actually don't have very much to say about this, because I agree with almost every word.
I'll leave you with a quick quote from Louise Richardson, and I'd just like to say thank fuck someone with a bit of sense is finally achieving these positions of power.
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