Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - This Week in Stupid (28⧸02⧸2016)

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Feb. 28, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

23:30

This Week in Stupid (28⧸02⧸2016)

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	Hello everyone, welcome to This Week in Stupid for the 28th of February 2016.
	As usual, if you find anything you'd like to see in this week in Stupid, tweet using hashtag TWIS or post to our Sargon of ACAD and I will find it.
	So this week I have some good news.
	To start with, the false copyright claim from the last bastion of free speech has been rejected by YouTube.
	But not just that.
	Melissa, I need some muscle over here, Click, has been fired.
	Click was fired on Wednesday by the University of Missouri Board of Curators.
	The board voted 4-2 in favour of termination during a closed session in Kansas City.
	And this comes after the board previously voting to suspend Click with pay on January the 27th.
	The board respects Dr. Click's right to express her views and does not base this decision on her support for students engaged in protests or their views.
	However, Dr. Click was not entitled to interfere with the rights of others, to confront members of law enforcement, or to encourage potential physical intimidation against a student.
	The statement cites Click's behaviour at a homecoming parade where she cursed at a police officer who was moving protesters out to the street on November the 9th at the Concerned Student 1950s protest site where she had interfered with members of the media and students who were exercising their rights in a public space and called for intimidation against one of our students.
	We believe this demands serious action.
	Notice how very specific they are being there.
	It's not that Melissa Click is supporting the rights of students to protest or anything like that, it is that she infringed on other people's rights and screamed obscenities at the police.
	It's nothing to do with her quote-unquote academic work nor her ideological leanings.
	The reason for her termination is entirely down to her actions towards other people.
	So how have the progressives press decided to spin this?
	Academic freedom losers in legislative attack on Melissa Click.
	She doesn't have the freedom to infringe on other people's rights.
	How terrible.
	I mean nobody's criticising her academic work, as anyone who may have looked into what her academic work might find themselves inclined to do.
	Oh no, the University of Missouri Board of Curators succumbed to legislative bullying and failed to stand up for academic freedom when they fired Assistant Communications Professor Melissa Click on Thursday.
	I'm sorry, but I don't think her screaming at police officers and bullying students is part of her academic freedom.
	And I think anyone who would even vaguely try to portray these events like that is obviously being totally disingenuous.
	For a source that claims to be among her critics, this paper is doing a fine line in Apologia.
	Her actions during the protests were indefensible.
	She apologised, was required to perform community service and resigned from a curtsy appointment in the journalism school.
	Yeah, I can't believe that she was forced to do that or decided to do that.
	She was charged with third degree assault and suspended from the university.
	This is a weird defense.
	It appears to be making the case for firing her.
	However, remember the Board of Curators did say that this was an unusual case and they hadn't followed standard procedure, and this is actually what they're defending.
	The university has well-established procedures for administrators wanting to terminate any faculty member, and those rules should have applied in Click's case.
	A major reason universities had tenure is to protect academic freedom.
	Click deserved the same due process as any other faculty member.
	I agree.
	She should have been allowed to tell her side of the story and receive a fair hearing by qualified peers in the university setting.
	Our defense is not of Click, but of the time-honoured, deliberative process of tenure review, which is designed to be adversarial and rigorous.
	Now, if I recall correctly, Melissa Click did not have tenure.
	I think she was applying for tenure when this happened.
	But I really think the problem is Melissa Click was on video doing these things.
	There is no doubt as to what Melissa Click has done.
	But again, I do think that this is misrepresenting the case.
	This is not about academic freedom.
	She has exercised her academic freedom in her works on, I don't know, 50 Shades of Grey and Twilight and whatever nonsense she was actually performing academic work on.
	This is about her behaviour towards students and officers in the police force.
	This isn't about her academic work.
	Do you know who else was having their academic freedom limited when they were unable to infringe on the rights of others?
	Black Lives Matter protesters, who tried to hold a meeting in a library.
	Why?
	Because they wanted to exclude white people from the library while they were having their meeting there.
	I mean, these people are literal segregationists.
	And what was the library's terrible oppressive policy?
	All meetings at our facilities must be open to the general public and news media.
	We're a library.
	We're taxpayer-funded.
	We have to be open to anyone anytime.
	Those bigots.
	So the Black Lives Matter activists decided to move to a different location at a church and put up the following sign to tell people about it.
	Due to white supremacy in our local government, this week's Black Lives Matter general body meeting location has changed.
	Black Lives Matter general body meetings are open to black and non-black people of colour only.
	Honestly, I don't know how anyone is tolerant of this kind of attitude.
	This is not white supremacy.
	And if white supremacy means everyone being treated equally, you're making a lot of people into white supremacists by changing the definition of what white supremacy fucking means.
	I'd be willing to bet that you have made millions of non-white people into white supremacists by saying that the desire to be treated the same is white supremacy.
	So you might be thinking, well, with all this important activism going on at universities, is anyone actually doing any work?
	And the answer is, no!
	Okay, I'm kidding, but Brown student protesters are complaining that homework is interfering with their activism.
	As if they've somehow forgotten what they're meant to be doing at universities.
	I mean, they must understand that it's surely the activism that is interfering with their homework.
	Students are reportedly upset that the university wants them to keep up with their academics amid their protesting.
	Well, that's white supremacy for you right there.
	So student activists at Brown University are complaining of emotional stress and poor grades after months of protesting and blame the school for insisting that they complete their coursework.
	There are people breaking down, dropping out of classes and failing classes because of the activism work they are taking on.
	My grades dropped dramatically.
	My health completely changed.
	I lost weight.
	I'm on antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills right now.
	Counselors called me and I had deans call me to make sure I was okay.
	Other students reported similar problems, describing maladies ranging from emotional distraction to panic attacks that they say cause them to skip assignments, missed class, and generally lose focus on keeping their grades up.
	It's people like Melissa Click who have caused this.
	These academics who focus excessively on activism and teach their students these whack job fucking theories about the world being a white supremacist world, everyone's always oppressed except for the white man who it's okay to be racist to.
	People like this who are teaching the social justice nonsense in universities are preying on these students' emotional attachment to the issues that they are dealing with and they are exhorting them to become activists at the expense of their own fucking studies and their own health.
	These people have to be held to account.
	These courses have to be stopped.
	They are actively detrimental to the students who are taking them.
	Just look at this.
	Justice Gaines, an undergraduate student who uses the pronouns Z, Zem, and Zeer, even recounted suffering from what Z describes as a panic attack, related to Zeer emotions over the Daily Herald op-eds, adding that Z couldn't go to class for several days following the episode.
	Where the fuck do you think they're learning to act like this?
	Do you think her parents taught her to act like this?
	Do you think any part-time job is responsible for this?
	No, it's these fucking social science courses in universities.
	They are doing this to children.
	We have had people say, oh, these students aren't really adults, they're children, they haven't grown up yet, and fuck me, it looks that way.
	Given all the bullshit that's going on in universities, maybe we need to start treating the teachers as if they are abusing these children.
	The brainwashing they are undergoing is having a detrimental effect on the students' health and education.
	This needs to be stopped.
	And you might be thinking, come on, you're being hyperbolic, but I swear to you I'm not, right?
	Listen, this week, Harvard abolished the word master in its titles over a row about slavery.
	If master was a word that was derived from American slavery, I might be able to understand it.
	If master wasn't a ubiquitous word denoting seniority, I might also be able to agree.
	However, master comes from the Latin of magister, a chief, head, director, or teacher.
	It's actually exactly the right word to use when describing these people.
	Harvard has not agreed that the use of master represented a link to slavery, but it has accepted campaigners' calls for a name change, for some reason.
	Why would you need to change it?
	It doesn't matter that they are saying, literally, that the word master now has connotations of slavery, but how the fuck have they come to this conclusion?
	Nobody else on earth thinks the word master means master of a slave.
	They think it just means master of a discipline.
	But for some reason, these idiots are actively protesting this word.
	Who has put this idea in their fucking heads?
	This is a consequence of their social justice indoctrination.
	When they say everything is racist, everything's sexist, everything's problematic, they mean it.
	They genuinely think things that would otherwise have been innocuous are suddenly part of a monolithic social system that is deeply oppressive to everyone who isn't a white man.
	These people genuinely seem to believe that their own agency is worthless.
	They genuinely seem to think that the things they do aren't wrong as long as they're doing them against the monolithic power structure.
	Anything becomes justified.
	This is why Melissa Click did what she did.
	This is why these New York students fabricated a hate crime.
	Because apparently there aren't enough hate crimes against black people in this racist white supremacist system.
	Even though if you were living in a system like that, they would be everywhere.
	It would be constant.
	You wouldn't have to fucking make them up to have examples of them.
	The incident led to a rally on campus in support of black students and a statement from the university president expressing concern and anger about the reported attack.
	There was nothing for them to rally against.
	But these students have been sold a worldview so ridiculous that it doesn't matter if there isn't a direct incident to respond to.
	The system is the problem and therefore they morally are obliged to go out and protest and so it becomes okay to fake this if it means they can do a protest and fight the power of the white supremacy.
	They have been taught to think in systems as Anit Sarkesian would describe it.
	They have been taught that their own agency means nothing and so it is not bad for them to go around doing the things that they are doing because there is always the system above them which is far worse.
	This kind of ridiculous propaganda is being taught in universities.
	Police now say that the three women assaulted another passenger were not subjected to racial epithets.
	The evidence shows, contrary to how the defendants originally portrayed things, these three individuals were not the victims of a crime.
	Rather, we allege that they are the perpetrators.
	Imagine assaulting someone else and then running around saying that you are the victim of a hate crime.
	I'm actually going to be charitable and assume that these people are rational.
	They're not crazy.
	So what must you believe in order to justify that to yourself?
	And like I said in the last video, these things are constant.
	Ben Shapiro is now getting the same treatment that Milo got in his university appearances where they try to shut them down.
	And he's right when he says that this is how the fascists do it.
	For fuck's sake, but they think this is justified.
	They think this is completely justified.
	It's not just okay to do it.
	It's necessary and desirable.
	And this is what makes you a good person.
	And that was at California State University, a place that didn't even make the 10 worst colleges in America for freedom of speech.
	This is how bad the problem has become, and we're having the same problem with the NUS and no platforming in the UK.
	This bullshit has to stop.
	We can't let a bunch of fucking cultists run around and tell everyone that their individual actions don't matter, therefore anything they do is acceptable.
	None of this is acceptable.
	It does not matter what your reasons for it are.
	What really worries me about these students and this attitude is what they would do if they had the power.
	How far would they feel justified in going towards someone who didn't share their views?
	Would they ever end up issuing a fatwa against someone who wrote a book they didn't like?
	Because it strikes me that you would issue a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing a book about a particularly contentious part of the Quran, or at least named after it, for the same reasons that you would shut down someone's speaking engagements to prevent the spread of their ideas because as far as you're concerned, their ideas are dangerous to your ideology.
	So 40 state-run Iranian media outlets have jointly offered a new $600,000 bounty for the death of British Indian author Salman Rushdie, according to state-run Fars news agency.
	The fatwa was issued over blasphemy charges for his novel The Sataniverses in 1989, and the IAL calls for the death of the book's author along with anyone involved in its publication.
	And three people have been either attacked or murdered over the publication of this book.
	Rushdie was put under police protection by the British government and spent many years in hiding, and the fatwa was never officially lifted.
	Khomeini's successor confirmed in 2005 that the order still stands, and that the new bounty is the largest organised effort to assassinate Rushdie since the fatwa was issued.
	I think it's worth taking the time to explain what a fatwa is, just in case anyone's not aware, and I'm not an expert, so I've just consulted Wikipedia, but I think it's probably at least broadly accurate, and will do for the purposes of this discussion.
	So a fatwa is a ruling on Sharia law by a learned Islamic scholar.
	There are all sorts of restrictions on who can issue these, and they're not legally binding.
	As I understand it, there's no obligation to follow these rulings, so it seems like they're optional laws that people can choose to follow.
	They've been used since the early days of Islam and are part of Sharia law, which applies in full in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
	As far as I can tell, most fatwas are for really mundane things.
	So, the idea of a fatwa to sort of maintain the ideology of Islam, I can understand why it would be used and why they would consider to have them as necessary.
	However, the scope of a fatwa and the ability for, say, the Iranian government to place one on an individual for blasphemy, and actually have that result in people being killed and injured over it, really strikes me as just another one of those bad ideas that Islam has that needs to reform.
	Since we're on the subject of Islam, let's talk about the migrant crisis.
	Why not?
	Let's trigger Ben Affleck by talking about how Jude Law and his minders were attacked by Calais jungle migrants during a charity visit.
	So he was there with some of the celebrity to witness the horrors of the squalid makeshift village, which is due to be demolished.
	Well, I guess he really did, because shortly after the camera stopped rolling, their minders were ambushed by some of the migrants and had their phones stolen.
	A source said, we were shocked to see some of the migrants acting like football hooligans.
	The security team had stones thrown at them, and two had their phones smashed and stolen.
	The dude and Tom were told to stay in the bus shortly before the ambush as the atmosphere was building.
	God, what a bunch of racists.
	Ben Affleck's triggering continues as we talk about the refugee team charged with the rape of a social worker after finishing course on how to behave with women.
	To be fair, there's not really all that much to be said about this, because it's not like he raped a screaming Aluragbar, as far as I'm aware.
	But this Afghan refugee just had his eye on this girl for quite some time, took this course and then decided to rape her.
	So I'm just going to be blunt feminists.
	Teaching men not to rape is only going to persuade the men who are never going to rape.
	Those men who are not bothered about raping people will literally go through a course on how to treat women and then rape the teacher.
	But remember that snitches get stitches, at least according to the German police force.
	They're currently investigating to find out who leaked information about the cologne sex attacks on New Year's Eve, presumably to give him an award for being an honest man and whistleblowing this to the public.
	Apparently police recently launched an investigation to find out those who had spread the quote secret information without permission.
	Authorities are determined to find out how internal police reports became public.
	The Cologne police tried to deceive the public until the information from insiders was leaked to the media.
	Describing the investigation into the case as an absurd measure, the newspaper added that the authorities probably have nothing more to do, nothing more important to do than to search for the whistleblowers.
	Without the leaks from the police, the extent of the orgy would not have become known.
	Now, I'm sure only the terminally progressive and those police chiefs whose heads are on the line are in favour of police cover-ups.
	And not just because they're in abuse of power.
	When you're dealing with social issues like this, they always ferment under the surface.
	If you don't address them honestly, they grow and end up manifesting themselves in ways that are just as bad, at least on an individual level.
	Take for example, the drunken racist mob who this week beat a Muslim grandfather of 81 to death as he walks to morning prayers.
	And this is after the court case that found one of the grooming gangs to be guilty.
	The assailant said that all Pakistanis are rapists and decided that he was a groomer and without a doubt paedophile and therefore it's okay to beat him to death.
	Don't get me wrong, I am thrilled that these guys in the Rotherham case were arrested.
	But this took a long time and many failures of the authorities to actually address people committing crimes before it happened.
	The reason this guy thinks this is because he has been exposed to people getting away with these crimes because they are Pakistani.
	The repeated failures of the authorities build this up in people.
	If these issues were being addressed honestly at the time that they happened, I don't think we would see nearly as many attacks on Muslims or just people who are genuinely racist towards people of Middle Eastern descent.
	But as I said, the authorities are finally doing something.
	such as Asian sex abusers to be stripped of UK citizenship and deported.
	Personally, I'm in full support of this, and I am sure that not even the most pathologically progressive person would be opposed to deporting foreign nationals who have been convicted of raping children.
	I'm going to guess the fact that they've written Asian-born sex abusers will be stripped of their citizenship and deported is how the independent has represented it, rather than it being specifically powers to deport Asians only who are sex abusers.
	I don't want the legislation to target just Asian sex abusers of foreign nationality.
	I'd really like to deport any foreign national who commits sex crimes in the UK.
	And I'm more than happy for this rule to apply to me when I'm in a different country.
	If I go to a foreign country, live there for a while and then sexually assault someone, I am fine with them deporting me back to my country of origin.
	Remember that this applies strictly to people with dual nationality, with two citizenships, the country of their birth and the country they've moved to.
	It doesn't apply to the migrants in the migrant crisis.
	That's a different problem altogether.
	But on that note, Norway is actually forcibly removing 9,000 asylum seekers out of, I think it was about 25,000.
	They're not actually giving them Norwegian citizenship.
	So I suppose the people in Norway can be really thankful that at least your government isn't being indiscriminate with who they let in.
	At least they've vetted these people in some manner and actually turned some away.
	So like I said at the start, there was actually some good news this week and things haven't been as bad as they could have been, which frankly is all I'm asking for these days.
	And I suppose it's probably in the spirit of things not being as bad as they could have been that a progressive decides maybe we should try and make things worse.
	For who, you might add?
	Well for women of course.
	Should we soften our approach to female genital mutilation?
	No.
	I don't why is why is this even something that would come up?
	Of course we're not going to soften our approach to female genital mutilation.
	If anything I think we should harden our approach to male genital mutilation.
	I don't see why anyone's genitals need to be mutilated in any way at all.
	But apparently a paper this week in the Journal of Medical Ethics asked whether some form of female genital mutilation should be legalized in America.
	They argue that not allowing minor versions of the operation is a form of cultural prejudice.
	Yeah, yeah it is.
	In fact not allowing major versions of the operation is also a form of cultural prejudice.
	This is because literally culture is a social construct and some of them are shit.
	And I don't want anyone to misinterpret me by saying that I'm saying that every culture is a social construct and can therefore be abandoned.
	I think social constructs are necessary for social animals and so we can choose a better social construct than an existing one that say, I don't know, advocates for the mutilation of female children's genitals.
	But apparently this attitude is culturally insensitive and supremacist and discriminatory towards women.
	Well I'm not gonna lie, it's completely culturally insensitive and it is supremacist.
	I am in fact a cultural imperialist.
	I think my culture is better than your culture and your culture has to go.
	And you're right, I am discriminating towards women because only women can experience female genital mutilation.
	That is of course until Tumblr finally takes over the universe.
	But don't worry, we can address the issue of men suffering from female genital mutilation as and when it occurs.
	Unsurprisingly, women who have undergone female genital mutilation agree with me.
	They don't think that this should be done to young women.
	And I'm going to believe their lived experience in this case.

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