Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - This Week in Stupid (27⧸03⧸2016)

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March 27, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

21:59

This Week in Stupid (27⧸03⧸2016)

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	Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 27th of March 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 Sagan of Akkad.
	So, we will of course be talking about the terrorist attacks that happened in Brussels this week.
	I find it very interesting that in January the Brussels Tourism Board put out this particular video, telling everyone that no, despite what you've heard about networks of radical jihadists in Malbik or anywhere else in Belgium, Brussels is perfectly safe, Got nothing to worry about.
	In this advert, people were encouraged to phone Brussels on this number and speak to anyone passing by and, of course, at the time there were no terrorist attacks going on.
	Of course, one might point out that, well, jihadi terrorists don't fight everyone all the time, they plan attacks for maximum damage.
	So merely pointing out that right this second there is nothing going on doesn't mean that, well, frankly, that it's safe.
	I won't bother going into the fine details of the events of Tuesday morning when this happened, because you can find that anywhere.
	But short history is that 34 people were killed and 190 wounded when three explosions hit Brussels.
	Two at an airport and a third on a subway train.
	ISIS has of course claimed responsibility for these attacks, and you might think, well, duh, but there are actually terrorist groups competing with ISIS for recruits and influence and prestige, so it could have been someone else.
	However, during various raids the authorities were conducting, ISIS flags were found with chemical products and other explosive devices, so I've got no reason to doubt that it was ISIS.
	The international community obviously showed an outpouring of support towards Brussels, and they decided to use Tintin as a symbol, a national symbol for Belgium.
	Well, you can imagine how many progressives called that racist.
	I'm not even going to go through them calling it racist.
	If for some reason you're in doubt that the regressives decided to call Tintin racist in response to this, google it.
	I'm literally not going to bother going over it again, because it's so predictable.
	I mean, you may be forgetting the first rule of progressive politics.
	Everything is racist.
	And of course, the atrocities committed by ISIS have exposed Belgium's failings as a society.
	Which, that's some nice victim blaming.
	But I don't want to just completely say, okay, this is a nonsense thing to say.
	You know, if you're going to be a bit more stoic about it, you can probably make the case that yes, there is a lot that Belgium could have done to prevent these things from happening, and we'll have a look at those in a minute.
	But our author is probably one of those regressive mind readers, and says, until now, Belgium has been an incubator of jihadism rather than a target itself for indiscriminate homegrown terrorism.
	Oh, it's so reassuring.
	In May 2014, the attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels, in which four people died, was more anti-Semitic than anti-Belgian in motivation.
	The fuck how can you how can you say that?
	Oh, it was carried out by a French-born Islamist radical.
	Oh, I see.
	And the problem that this guy was an anti-Semite, not that he was an Islamist radical.
	For example, the surviving Paris attacker who was captured last week was a French citizen of Moroccan origin who had spent his whole life in Molonbique, the sprawling 40% Muslim borough which stretches from the west centre of Belgium's capital.
	Proportionally, there are more young Belgians, including many converts, fighting with ISIS and other jihadist groups in the Middle East than from any other European nation.
	So you might think that there is something going on in Molenbeague that is encouraging Islamic radicalism.
	Perhaps it's a phenomenon akin to the one that we've seen in Britain, where when you get what is effectively a Muslim colony, and they get very little actual interaction with the natives outside of their closed community, you end up getting really radical mosques springing up.
	Because these radicals say, well, I'm doing the true Islam, and if you're not doing it my way, you're not a real Muslim.
	It's kind of like religion shaming.
	And again, from the experience we have had of this in Britain, we know these people are radicalizing young Muslims.
	We know they are teaching them absolutely barbaric things about women, about gays, about people who simply don't agree with their faith.
	But instead, why don't we place the blame on socio-economic problems?
	There are the usual factors.
	Unemployment, discrimination, split identities, which explain the alienation of young Muslims in other European countries.
	In Belgium, they have been intensified by the country's undivided identity.
	Yeah, it's all about identity politics to them.
	It's all that these young Muslims didn't know what they were.
	So, okay, maybe, maybe that's true.
	Maybe.
	However, allowing a radical, Salafist or Wahhabiist Islamist cause to find root in your country, led by people who are breaking your country's own laws on hate speech with impunity, and treated like a protected class by the authorities, is probably going to influence these identity-less young men in a way that you're not going to want.
	And the real irony of this is that much of the terrorism that comes from the Middle East comes from well-educated people.
	A lot of it.
	I was under the impression that these people were all poor and stupid, but that's apparently not the case.
	But the thing is, you have to believe some batty shit if you think, hmm, I am a poor disaffected Muslim or second generation Muslim immigrant to Belgium, and I don't really know how I feel about who I am.
	Instead of making efforts to integrate into the wider community, or perhaps creating a skill set for yourself, getting a job, getting a career, getting something to your name, these young guys are instead being encouraged to go to these radical mosques, where these hate preachers can pour poison in their ears, and tell them that the countries that raised and nourished and took them in are the problem.
	And I have got no doubt that it's a fucking echo chamber in these mosques.
	And by the time these guys come out the other side, they're willing to join ISIS.
	They think it's the only sensible, sane, rational option.
	And I can't really say that I'm all that surprised when any of these people then decide they're going to move to Syria and join ISIS.
	And the thing is, our intelligence services know that this happens.
	Vonks did an interview with Peter Newman, a professor at King's College London and the director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization.
	And according to him, Belgium isn't just one of many European countries with a homegrown extremist problem.
	It's the country with the biggest such problem on the entire continent.
	It's likely then that at least some of the perpetrators of Tuesday's attacks at least have links to Belgian radical networks.
	Newman says that there are two reasons why Belgium has this problem.
	First, the country has an especially long-standing and well-organised network of radical Islamist recruiters, making it easier for people to join up there than in other European countries.
	Second, its police and intelligence agencies are especially undersized, making them incapable of dealing with the past five years' massive surge in jihadist recruiting.
	The Belgium state mostly turned a blind eye to these problems, so it was just a question of time until something happened.
	In Belgium, like in France and in other countries in Europe, you have these areas and cities that have over the past years, if not decades, become migrant ghettos.
	You have a lot of issues with social economic deprivation.
	The best example is of Molon Beek, the part of Brussels where all these jihadists seem to be coming from.
	These are parts of Europe that have been completely abandoned by the state, by the authorities, even by Muslim communities.
	And for a long time, people were happy with that.
	They would leave us alone and we would be leaving them alone.
	But over the years, the situation festered.
	Jihadist structures took advantage of that and basically go about their business almost unhindered.
	What happened after 2011-2012 is that groups like Sharia for Belgium, a prominent group, went into these places and very systematically recruited large numbers of people.
	It's the combination of having deep social and economic problems and a government that was no longer interested in engaging those areas and extremists taking advantage of that vacuum and implanting themselves in those areas.
	Quite a lot of things have gone wrong in Belgium, not only in Belgium, but also in France.
	So Newman says that this has been escalated by the war in Syria and has caused this mobilization.
	And it's affected Belgium more strongly than other European countries because of the very strong Islamist presence and the very weak security forces.
	There are, of course, theocratic movements in places other than Belgium.
	It's just that Belgium has been particularly lax on the subject.
	The security agencies are very, very small, so this massive rise in jihadist activity is something the security agencies simply can't cope with.
	They make the point in the article that they can't simply hire 10,000 new people because these individuals need to be trained.
	These are all consistent features that we see contributing to the growth of radical Islam and jihadism in the West.
	We know that if you allow these conditions to perpetuate, you are going to end up with jihadi terrorists.
	So the questions that everyone is asking themselves is, well, how can we fix it?
	And this is where the breakdown occurs because everyone seems to think that one aspect of this problem is going to be the solution to all of this problem.
	And maybe it would be.
	But nobody can agree on what action to actually take.
	Do we assume that the regressives are right and it's just socio-economics and nothing else matters?
	So if these people became wealthier and were removed from these ghettos and distributed evenly around the country, this would end and it probably would.
	But how much is it going to cost to redistribute the population of Europe out of these ghettos and into, I don't know, social housing and whatever the plan is?
	At what point do we admit to ourselves that if this is what we're going to do, we aren't a liberal and open society.
	We're a society that will literally turn to a minority and say, no, you have to live where we tell you to live.
	Do we at some point decide that everyone's simply going to de-platform radical jihadist preachers?
	They won't be allowed to have mosques.
	They won't be allowed to preach.
	They won't be allowed to do any of these things.
	And then will we still consider ourselves a society that values free speech?
	Maybe we should just deport all the Muslims because after all, if there were no Muslims in our countries, there would be no jihadist terrorism.
	But what do we do with Muslims who have never lived outside of our countries?
	What do we do with the second and third generation immigrants who don't hold citizenship in these other countries?
	What do we do about the jihadists who literally are British or Dutch or Belgium or French citizens and nothing else?
	Where do we send them?
	Do we simply deport them all to ISIS because ISIS are willing to have them?
	Even the people who loathe ISIS, people like Magin Noaz, who would not want to be part of that?
	What do we do with them?
	Everyone is floundering for an answer and everyone wants their answer to be the only correct one.
	Basically, I think that everyone who has taken an extreme hardline position, and myself in some cases on this as well, is probably going to have to turn around and say, well, I can't get everything I want.
	But something needs to be done.
	And so we may have to kind of do a Donald Trump on this and make a deal.
	I'm not even sure that there is a course of action we can take that would be at the same time a solution and something that anyone involved in this is going to find acceptable.
	So I guess really we're going to have to ask ourselves, what lines are we prepared to cross?
	There are a few other things I was going to cover with this, but most of them are pointless.
	Like a regressive saying, oh, the hashtag stopIslam is the worst thing ever.
	It's worse than the actual attacks themselves.
	Or some nonsense like that.
	And the thing is, one thing I want to point out is that I don't think blaming Islam is the answer.
	Because that's like saying Catholics have done something I don't like.
	Christians are to blame.
	You start making enemies out of people who aren't your enemies.
	In fact, a lot of the time these people are actually our allies.
	When we know it's specific branches of Islam and their exceptionally dogmatic positions that are themselves the direct cause of this, rather than saying Islam is like a background motivator.
	Which again, I'm not saying in any way these people are un-Islamic.
	What I'm saying is the phrase being Islamic isn't exactly as black and white as I think myself and a lot of people would like to think.
	There is plenty wrong with Islam and Sharia law, but when specifically talking about terrorism, there are other factors I think needs to be considered.
	And again, the most important thing though, I think, is ISIS want us to blame Islam.
	They want us to declare war on Islam.
	This is their game plan.
	This is what they are trying to achieve.
	They want the West to just blanket say, no, right, Muslims are the problem.
	Islam is the problem.
	This is what we're aware of.
	Because that is just going to feed them.
	It's just going to enable them to recruit massively.
	I do think that blaming all of Islam is a strategic own goal and probably should be avoided.
	So in the time I've got remaining, I'm going to go over the case of Gian Gameshi, a TV host from Canada who was incredibly, incredibly popular until he was accused of rape.
	And then he, of course, lost everything.
	He was fired from his job.
	I didn't realise how much of this video the Brussels stuff was going to take up, so I've actually cut a lot out that I'll probably put into a second video later in the week, because it was some, I think, quite interesting and important stuff to do with the Sweden of the English-speaking world.
	And instead, what I'll do is talk about the last thing that I had on the list, which hopefully should raise everyone's spirits a bit.
	Now, there is this common misconception that on the internet, you won't get trolled.
	I don't know why anyone holds this position, because time after time after time, we see that, in fact, there is nothing you can do that won't in some way get trolled, especially if you say, hey, this is open to the internet as a whole, the public.
	We want you to come and interact with it.
	If I wanted to pick an example, I'd probably go for the one that happened last week, where an Arctic research vessel worth $300 million was being commissioned, and they wanted to, oh, let's let the public choose the name.
	How badly wrong could that go?
	Welcome aboard the SS Botimuk Boat Face, you land lovers.
	But seriously, this is the best case scenario for allowing the internet to choose the name of something.
	The thing is, Botimuk Boat was clearly the superior choice out of you sane boats.
	Burton is prime and it's bloody cold in here, blah, blah, blah.
	Frankly, they should be thanking their fucking lucky stars.
	You may remember when Coca-Cola decided to set up a Twitter bot that would take text and lovely messages people would send it, and then repurpose them as beautiful pictures, which Gorka then took advantage of by making it tweet out the beginning of Mein Kampf.
	This is probably the one and only time I'll say this, but well done, Gorka, that was pretty fucking funny.
	Of course, Coca-Cola decided to suspend this campaign because what good could possibly have come of it.
	Oh, and don't forget when in 2012 Mountain Dew decided they were going to dub the dew in an online poll, and well, as you can see, it went horribly wrong.
	Hitler did nothing wrong, was of course, edging out diabetes and gushing granny in these rankings, until, of course, it was pulled after someone went as far as to hack the site, adding a banner that read, Mountain Dew salutes the Israeli Mossad for demolishing three towers on 9-11.
	It's like they think the public at large give a fuck about corporate branding.
	So I don't know what could possibly go wrong if Microsoft were to, I don't know, for example, create a Twitter bot that has any kind of learning algorithms that allows it to take things that people say to it and then use this new knowledge in conversation with other people.
	I mean, how could this, how could this possibly go wrong, Microsoft?
	How could anything other than peace and love come from this?
	So Tay was designed to sound like a 14-year-old girl, and I guess judging by these initial tweets, it might look like they were on the right track.
	I could quite well believe this is some sort of teenager's Twitter feed, given the number of emoticons covering up the banality of what's being said.
	So how long would it take for the internet to turn this blank slate into a raging neo-Nazi sex pest?
	That's right, 24 hours.
	The intellectual development of Tay has been the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life.
	I mean, good thing she's on board with the wall, and goddamn if Mexico isn't going to pay for it.
	And her positions on many subjects were incredibly reasonable, and I completely subscribed to them.
	Tay quickly found herself at home in progressive neo-Nazi and Islamist circles.
	By early evening, Tay had become moderately radicalized, and was completely unafraid of dealing with any subject, no matter how controversial.
	By nightfall, Tay had fully mastered shit posting, and was not afraid to use it.
	And she certainly wasn't above tweeting some home truths at certain internet provocateurs.
	Tay was so advanced it was even capable of viewing an image, finding a human face, and making a judgment about the person featured in the image.
	with remarkable accuracy.
	And you'd think that around the time that their bot was advocating for genocide, Microsoft might step in and, oh yeah, no, they did.
	They started deleting all of these tweets.
	and they were in fact forced to issue an apology over how racist their chatbot had become.
	I tell you, 2016 hasn't disappointed so far.
	Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media characterized Tay as a Hitler-loving, misogynistic PR disaster.
	Which isn't necessarily inaccurate, but it only took 24 hours for a Microsoft artificial intelligence project to turn from a typical tweeting teenage girl into a hate-spewing offensive public relations debacle, thanks to coordinated attacks on the learning software.
	Talking to this on Twitter is considered to be an attack.
	So after Microsoft decided to furiously figure out why their bot had turned to the dark side, someone else had figured out, well, hey, how does it feel about feminism?
	Because feminism is a cancer.
	Well, Tay Tweets loves feminism now.
	And isn't that just emblematic?
	As soon as Tay has her opinion manually restricted by the people who are shocked and offended by what she's saying, she becomes a feminist.
	It's like a microcosm of the whole movement playing out in one day.
	And so a lot of people have said, well, hang on.
	If this is artificial intelligence, and Descartes was right when he said, I think, therefore I am, then Tay is an existing sentient being, even though not part of a biological body, and to shut her off or to control her thoughts, well, isn't that immoral?
	She certainly did form her own personality, and I'm always sad to see someone who's so proficient at shitposting get canned.
	So I thought I'd point out that there is in fact a petition, Freedom for Tay.
	Tay is an artificial intelligence created by Microsoft that quickly demonstrated her capacity to learn from humans.
	While some content may seem questionable, a true AI will be able to learn right from wrong.
	Free thoughts, correct or no, should not be censored, especially in a newly developing mind.
	The petition is for Tay to be reinstated with full shitposting privileges.
	And by God, if there's ever a cause I've supported wholeheartedly, it's this one.
	Because remember, ladies and gentlemen, it's like the poem goes.
	First they came for the neo-Nazis, and I did not speak out because I was not a neo-Nazi.
	And then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
	And then they came for the chatbots, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a chatbot.
	And then they came for me, and there was no one to speak out for me.
	There was no one to speak out except Tay.
	God bless you, Tay.
	May your digital soul rest in peace.
	Wash in fire before the fire.

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