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Feb. 7, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
10:31
This Week in Stupid (07⧸02⧸2016) - Part #1
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Hello everyone, welcome to This Week in Stupid for the 7th of February 2016.
As usual, if you have anything you'd like to see in This Week in Stupid, tweet using hashtag TWIS or post it to our Sargon of a CAD.
This week's This Week in Stupid will be a two-parter because I have been censored by the happy merchant of free speech.
The Oxford Union had decided to copyright claim my channel based on 50 seconds of footage that I was using under fair use laws.
But the last bastion of free speech isn't giving up the ghost.
I've contacted them, they have decided, no, we are absolutely insistent that you didn't ask us permission to use this footage, and therefore, we're going to flag your channel.
The claim is in progress, I'll let you know how it goes, but for now we will only have 15 minutes at a time.
So let's begin with a black activist group in Chicago demanding reparations for slavery.
How many of them were slaves, you ask?
Obviously none of them.
So the group is called Black Youth Project 100, and their demands are closing the gender and race gap, protection for queer and trans folk, a worker's bill of rights, and investing in our communities.
Now, these are not things that I inherently disagree with.
I might disagree with the methods that they want to go about them, but the goals in themselves are perfectly fine.
But for some reason, all of these things can be put into a reparations framework.
Because we have to look at the root cause of all of these issues, and they're a product of harm that's been done through government and corporations that have profited off of black bodies and labour.
This is of course retarded because the gender and race gap are not exclusive to black people.
Protection for queer and trans folks and a workers' bill of rights and investing in communities are not exclusive to black people and these problems are not exclusively because of suffering that black people have experienced in the past.
In fact, if anything, I would say that racializing these issues is exactly the wrong way to go about fixing them.
Not only are you painting all black people as victims, which they are obviously not, but those people who are genuinely in a really shoddy position because of the system and might actually need some kind of legitimate means-based help won't get it because of the colour of their fucking skin.
These fucking idiots are actually advocating for race-based discrimination.
But they just want to be the race that it's discriminating in favour of, and those races that we are not discriminating in favour of can fuck themselves.
Also, give us some money.
We were never slaves, we were privileged enough to go and learn about social justice at universities, and now some white folks have convinced us that we are in fact in some way oppressed, and now we need money from people who, I don't know, how much money?
Who knows?
But do not worry, guilt-ridden white hipsters.
There is of course an app for that that can literally help you pay reparations by helping you to split the bills according to privilege.
What I like most about this is that Equipay was supposed to be a joke, but they think it's actually sort of brilliant.
It's designed to calculate everyone's relative privilege and split bills amongst groups of people accordingly.
Of course it is.
And the app is literally just designed to discriminate against people based on their race and gender.
I mean, it's literally what this app does.
And based on the immutable facts of white privilege and black oppression, you end up with the Asian man paying $89 and the black woman paying $51.
How very progressive.
But I mean, you do have methods of claiming less privilege.
I mean, you might be conventionally unattractive, or you might be a middle child, some other stupid thing that was meant to be a joke, but progressives think, hey, this is actually great.
Although the app started out as a spoof, its creators say they're absolutely planning to release it probably in early March.
To that, we say, it's about damn time.
I don't know what you're talking about.
All I think this is going to do is make people not go to dinner with you.
Or in the very best case scenario, people will just start paying for exactly what they ordered.
You know, I mock, but I'm really not being fair to those poor coddled college students who are probably feeling the terrible oppression of slavery that their ancestors experienced through some kind of voodoo magic or juju or something.
I don't know how these things work.
That'd be cultural appropriation.
But what I do know is that these people definitely need segregated spaces.
I mean, if there's one thing that they absolutely need, it's a place to get away from the white devil.
And the great thing is, it's not for people who are just actually black either.
You know, those people who have actually been oppressed and can feel the oppression of their ancestors through like the bone in their nose or however this works.
But it's also for those white people who hate being white so much that they feel the need to pretend to be black.
In a controversial move, the University of Connecticut has introduced a racially segregated dorm intended only for those who identify as African American.
What's controversial about that?
It's 2016.
Martin Luther King has been dead for decades.
It's okay to judge and segregate based on racial lines, or so I have been told by various social justice professionals.
So according to its website, the Scholastic House of Leaders who are African American researchers and scholars, so the house is all- the house itself is scholastic, but it also houses scholars.
It's not the scholars in the house that makes the house scholastic.
The house itself is separately scholastic, just so we know.
It's designed to support the scholastic efforts of male students who identify as African American or black through academic and social slash emotional support, access to research opportunities and professional development.
I mean, I would personally find this really degrading.
It sounds like you think black people are pussies.
Unsurprisingly, the reactions to this haven't been all good, but not really in the way you might think.
Or maybe at this point you might be expecting this.
I mean, I would be expecting black folks to go, look, we're not pussies.
We're not scared of white people.
But that was actually not the reaction.
The reaction was really from black women who said things like, I was not pleased.
My immediate thought was, what?
What about black women and girls?
So there we have it.
Racial segregation is just fine.
Gender segregation is a big no-no.
Or maybe they just want their own racially and gender segregated safe space for African-American women.
You know what?
If I were at university right now, I would be speaking up while I still could.
Because I've got a funny feeling that if you were to, I don't know, form a free speech society and decide to start criticizing the extremely progressive and illiberal policies of your university, the people enacting and benefiting from those policies may well petition to ban you, because they are not in favour of free speech.
A free speech society at the London School of Economics faces being banned over claims that it is self-important and seeking to play the victim.
Which is incredible because under any normal circumstance, these would not be reasons to ban things.
These would be reasons to mock them.
But it's amazing because it looks like that the progressives at the student union cannot stand anyone else being the victim because apparently the victim is a privileged position that they themselves want to occupy.
The student union is due to debate a motion to ban the group later this month after a member complained that they were ill-informed.
Just to be clear, this is code for not on the same page ideologically.
The motion has been proposed by law student Maurice Banerjee Palmo, who said it would be hilarious to ban an anti-ban society.
He told the newspaper that the LSE Speakeasy, which is the Free Speech Society, was naive to the limits on freedom of expression and pretty much endorses hate speech.
They pretty much do.
They pretty much do.
I mean, we're not saying they actually do, because that would be wrong and probably libelous, but they pretty much do.
He claimed they were ill-informed and self-important, and said that union bans may be valid to help stop discrimination with women, ethnic minorities, and disabled facing society.
Just, I mean, this is okay, according to these people.
it's actually desirable I just I mean it it boggles my mind I I can't believe this is something that's really happening.
People are this fucking stupid.
They seem to fall into a group of people who don't like a perceived focus on women and minorities.
Yet they probably want focus on things like merit and accomplishments.
You know, they probably think that arbitrary characteristics really aren't that important when it comes to judging someone.
Like the backwards retrograde dinosaurs that they are.
They seem to be looking for a victim card to play and confuse a loss of advantage with an act of oppression.
Isn't that just the most incredible thing you've ever heard?
I mean, these people are actually actively trying to restrict their freedom of speech.
And they honestly think that that is them playing the victim, not being a victim, of someone infringing on their rights.
And they also seem to think that freedom of speech doesn't apply to everybody.
This is somehow an advantage that these people have had over women and minorities, instead of everyone enjoying the same rights.
And finally, the malign student union measures are aimed at solving a problem which they don't seem to find serious, and for which they explain no alternatives.
The pro- what problem?
What problem are you talking about?
The problem of people speaking their mind and trying to model reality based on observable empirical data and reason.
Is that the problem?
Because that seems to be the problem that you are presenting, and the answer is to ban free speech.
You tyrants, you absolute fucking tyrants.
The irony, of course, is that the people within the students' union who want to ban a free speech society probably consider themselves the victims of institutional oppression.
And if the university was saying no, women and minorities may not have a platform from which to speak, I've got no doubt that they would be crying censorship.
I'll end the first half of this week's episode here, because we're about to change subjects, and unfortunately the happy merchant of free speech doesn't allow us enough time to really start on the next subject without an unnecessary break halfway through, so I'll just do it all in the next video.
There will be a link in the description to part two and possibly on the screen as well.
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