All Episodes
Previous Next
May 15, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
24:30
This Week in Stupid (15⧸05⧸2016)
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 15th of May 2016.
If you find anything you'd like to see in this week in Stupid, tweet using hashtag TWIS or post to our sargon of a CAD.
So we've got quite a lot to go through, but first I'll give you an update.
The petition is currently at 73,000 people, which is amazing.
Again, if you haven't signed it, I would encourage you to do so.
I think what I'm going to do is edit it, just to be slightly less inflammatory and to include quotes from people like Christine Hoff Summers and Janice Fiamengo, because I think if we get it to 100,000, I imagine we probably would have reached 100,000 if I hadn't written in such an inflammatory way to start with.
So I think that I bear the responsibility for that.
I've also created two one-question surveys to go along with this that I'll make a video about describing the demographics of my audience, because I think it would be important to be able to show the kind of people who are doing this and who are objecting to this, because it isn't just like, you know, neo-Nazi extremists or anything like that.
And I'd really like to be able to demonstrate that.
So that's what these surveys are for.
So let's start with some just blatant racism and sexism, which is completely tolerated for some reason.
Meet the pack dedicated to dissuading straight white men from running for office.
This is just totally fine, nothing wrong with this.
If you're a straight white man who's into progressive politics and you think you could really make a positive impact on this crazy world by running for Congress or your local state legislature, Jack Teeter and Carl Hulsman have a novel idea for you.
Don't!
Be not fooled, this pack is no joke.
The founders registered Can You Not in Colorado last month and have started accepting donations, which will go to non-white, non-male, non-straight candidates chosen by an advisory board of other racists.
Fucking why is this okay?
Listen to what one of them said.
Lots of organizations we love and respect are focused on lifting up the voices of women and people of colour and LGBT folks so that they will run for these positions.
But we also think it's an important task to tear down the egregiously overconfident white men who are running.
And then the article says, Can You Not's primary target is the Brogressive, which the pack defines as a nice, progressive, straight white man, making it a racialized fucking term.
Apparently, Can You Not's raison d'être is evidence-based, and they give you numerous studies about how on average things are supposed to happen.
Well, that's fantastic, because now Slate, the publication promoting this, is in the very same camp as The Daily Stormer, which also cites studies based on racial averages, in order to justify racial discrimination.
It's wrong when they do it.
It's wrong when Slate does it.
And I'll tell you why it's wrong, because apparently, you're both a pair of fucking morons.
If you take a racial average, that means it does not apply to everyone in that race.
If you start discriminating because of a racial average, that means that you will be discriminating against people to whom the very statistic or study you are using to back up your argument for this does not apply.
And then, you will be saying, but this is justified because of something someone else has done.
Not even the person you're trying to discriminate against.
It's wrong!
Fucking factually wrong, you fucking idiots!
Stop it!
They were faced with this criticism.
Why don't we raise girls and people of colour to be more confident in who they are, he asked, rather than trying to suppress a group of people based on the colour of their skin?
Can you not prefers the lean out philosophy, as in, they would prefer to suppress someone based on the colour of their skin.
Instead of trying to force change among groups of already facing systemic disadvantages, in other words, making them lean in, the PAC promotes the idea that it would be easier, more effective, and better for the common good if they could suppress people on the basis of race.
Because that was the option that they chose when presented with this dichotomy.
And this is the general philosophy of the regressive left.
They think it's okay to do this.
And so when you see things like, University of Kansas quash's effort to install special multicultural student government, it looks very much like this was an attempt by a racist organization to gain the power to be institutionally racist.
Because that's what they're asking for.
That is their agenda.
Student leaders across the country are trying to install special race-based institutions on campus.
One of those efforts at the University of Kansas has been thwarted for the time being.
The university's African-American Chancellor, Bernadette Grey Little, has vetoed a funding proposal for a special multicultural student government, which has been approved by the official students' government back in March.
You may have noticed this link to race-based elections on campus.
It's not from this week, but we will have a look at it in a minute because it's relevant.
She vetoed the funding request for a simple reason.
The university code does not allow for the creation of more than one student-led government.
But she also argued in a letter to the student senate earlier this week that the multicultural student government is not an optimal way to achieve the goals we have for diversity and inclusion at the university, and indeed may lead to greater divisiveness.
Well, I'm glad that there are still people in universities who can see this.
But the thing is, why are these racists being entertained at all?
Why aren't they being kicked off of their campuses for being racists?
I'm pretty sure that they have anti-bias laws and whatnot on these community campuses.
Why not do something about them?
But either way, I'm sure that Bernadette Gray Little, the African-American Chancellor of the University, has probably ended up on a shady person of colour list because she is a dissenter.
A private document by a group of liberal students at Claremont McKenna College, which I have covered before on my channel, designates certain individuals as a shady person of colour on the grounds that they are opposed to their liberal counterparts.
Now, this seems overtly racist.
If students are caught being overtly racist like this, keeping lists in an attempt to intimidate people, should they not be expelled?
Do the universities themselves not already have codes against racism?
And I'm not debating the merits of whether that's a good or bad thing in and of itself, but I want their rules to be applied consistently.
One of these shady people of colour, the court jester, a man called David Brown, criticised the protesters' lack of logistics and data as well as their tactics.
He said, If CMCers of colour had provided a single piece of evidence indicating that they were being systemically kept from performing well, I would have believed them.
If I, in my own experience, had noticed a single instance where I was being held down based on the colour of my skin, I would have believed them.
But they didn't, I didn't, and I don't believe them.
What these shady people of colour have become are thought criminals.
They do not agree with the regressive narrative because they are not being held down.
I think it might be worth considering whether the people complaining should even be at a university.
Maybe they are simply not bright enough to be there.
Maybe they are simply idiotic liars and racists, which is what they appear to be.
I think it's entirely likely that these people are the sorts of people who ascribe all of their personal failings to racism.
These are the sorts of people who are campaigning for race-based elections on their college campuses.
I'm just going to read these four paragraphs verbatim, and I just want you to take in what we are actually looking at here.
In an effort to promote greater inclusion and representation on campus, some students at Cornell University have proposed student government elections based entirely on race.
The Cornell Student Assembly held an open meeting earlier this month on the topic of restructuring to address minority underrepresentation in student government.
The Assembly has already taken a number of measures intended to address the problem.
For example, the Assembly currently includes special liaison positions for minority students, international students, LGBTQ students, female students and first-generation college students.
But it was determined that more change was needed to address the systemic exclusion of minority voices.
According to a report in the Cornell Daily Sun, some students complained that the minority liaison position was too broad.
Perhaps each racial minority group should have its own special representative.
That suggestion raised questions about who should be allowed to vote for these race-specific positions, and the answer, according to some students, was to install race-specific voting systems.
Which again is probably the sort of thing the people who write for the Daily Stormer want.
Race-specific voting systems.
Why are these fucking racists being allowed to do this?
And the thing is, these totalitarians want to make social justice mandatory.
After Trump chalking, university forces students to take minority culture class to graduate.
Members of Court justify the double requirement by citing police shootings of young black people, as well as recent events on campus that include pro-Donald Trump chalk messages, swastikas and a university employee who left a noose on a table in a work area, which I'm sure totally happened all of it.
Especially the unbelievable racism of being pro-Donald Trump.
The head of the Department of African American Studies, Ronald Bailey, cited an April 29th letter from Interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson and interim provost Edward Thieser.
The letter said that the university must condemn acts like the recent chalking attacks and the noose that are intended to intimidate particular groups that do not advance legitimate discourse and debate.
Or what?
Are they going to go on a shady person of colour list as well?
Business professor Stephen Michael, who also serves as the university's Senate Educational Policy Committee, has spoken out against the proposal citing its cost of $750,000, which could reach $2 million.
But apparently an administration official said the cost would be a fraction of Michael's estimate.
He told the audience that the rough upper bound was half a million dollars.
So, yeah, I mean that is a fraction of it, yes.
But half a million dollars is still fucking loads to enforce your ideological agenda on everyone else.
And of course, this is coming from the professors.
For example, a Harvard professor who urges liberals to treat evangelical Christians like Nazis is what I would think would be Breitbart being hyperbolic in the most extreme fashion.
In fact, I might think that this was in fact not entirely true and probably clickbait designed to serve their audience.
However, this post was written by this professor called Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism, in which he literally does say, The culture wars are over.
They lost, we won.
Remember, they were the ones who characterized constitutional disputes as culture wars.
And they had opportunities to reach ceasefire, but rejected them in favour of a scorched earth policy.
The earth that was scorched, though, was their own.
That is what a scorched earth policy is.
It's a defensive measure, you moron.
For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in these culture wars.
I don't know, gulags?
That's mostly a question of tactics.
My own judgment is that taking a hard line, you lost, live with it, is better than trying to accommodate the losers, because actually it's about tolerance.
Who remember defended and are defending positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all.
Trying to be nice to the losers didn't work well after the Civil War nor after Brown, and taking a hard line on them seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.
Now, I don't think that evangelical Christians should be treated as if they are Nazis, and I don't think that they should be completely blocked out from having any voice in the public sphere if they want.
But that doesn't really matter, because I think the important thing to note is that these professors are fighting a culture war.
They know it.
The very next thing he writes is tactical advice.
Aggressively exploit the ambiguities and loopholes in unfavourable precedents that aren't worth overruling.
These professors are not looking for tolerance, diversity or inclusivity.
These are weasel words they are using to gain hegemony.
For some reason, universities are treating women as if they are minorities, which is bizarre because women are actually the majority in Western universities.
Apparently, nobody has any idea why this is happening.
Now, I would venture that something like, I don't know, all of this rampant and open racism and sexism towards white men is making these campuses environments they simply don't want to be at.
And I don't think that's necessarily limited to university campuses, but we'll get to that in a minute.
So apparently women in the UK are now 35% more likely than men to go to university, and the gap is widening every year.
A baby girl born in 2016 will be 75% more likely to go to university than a boy if current trends continue.
As university remains the gateway to better paid, more secure jobs, Mary Kernock Cook, head of UCAS University Admission Service, warns that being male could be a new form of disadvantage.
On current trends, the gap between rich and poor will be eclipsed by the gap between males and females within a decade.
And she says while there is much focus on social mobility and geographical differences, there is a collective blind spot on the underachievement of young men.
So what's causing the pattern?
The likelihood of going to university is shaped by results in primary and secondary school, and girls are now outperforming boys at every stage.
But the report demolishes one long-held theory, that this success for girls was triggered by the switch from O-levels to GCSEs in the late 1980s in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
But the report finds that such connections are overcooked, and by the time the exams were changed, women had already almost caught up with men in university entry rates, and this trend predated the shift to GCSEs.
This was also an international trend, suggesting wider factors than changes to local exam systems.
Ms. Kernock Cook says she is instinctively convinced the fall in proportion of male students is connected to the increasing gender imbalance in the school workforce.
Until the early 1990s, most secondary school teachers were male.
This is now completely reversed, with the teaching profession becoming increasingly female.
Are young men not getting enough educational role models?
That's not the problem.
It's not about the role model.
It's about the tenor of the classrooms.
It is going to be something like this.
A male teacher understands the natural rambunctiousness of young boys.
He tolerates it.
A female teacher does not understand the natural rambunctiousness of male students.
She does not tolerate it.
She creates an environment where it and the natural inclination towards it is absolutely utterly suppressed.
This is, in her opinion, bad behaviour that needs to be stamped out.
Now, I don't know how many classrooms are like that, but I'm sure that there are going to be a great deal that fall into this model.
I don't think this is malicious, I just think this is the natural result of people's inherent biases.
This began in the 90s, and now five out of six higher education institutions have more female students than male, and if every single man who applied to university were to be automatically given a place, there would still be fewer men than women.
And of course, this effect is more pronounced with boys from different ethnic backgrounds.
This suggests different barriers in attitude and expectation, and it suggests some communities have been left behind as industries and expectations have changed around them.
Or perhaps boys are just less well disposed to studying.
Yeah, this is their fault.
Boys don't study, they've never studied, they can't do it.
It's nothing to do with the climates we're talking about here on these university campuses.
Nothing at all.
I mean, the report includes OECD data gathered alongside internal PISA tests that shows on average boys are less likely to work hard at school, less likely to read for pleasure, and more likely to be negative towards school and to dodge their homework.
Maybe we should look into why they're doing this, because, I mean, my gut feeling about this isn't that boys don't like to work.
They're fine with working.
It's what they are working on that is the problem, and the environment in which they are working.
If you make something competitive, boys succeed.
If you make something group-based and cooperative, boys fall behind.
Now, there are some things that can be pointed at as causative agents here, like when training for nursing moved from diploma to degree level, it brought a large female-dominated group of trainees into the higher education sector.
If the two sets of students were removed from the figures, nursing and teacher training, a substantial proportion of the gender gap would disappear.
However, report author and HPI director Nick Hillman says, nearly everyone seems to have a vague sense that our education system is letting young men down, but there are few detailed studies of the problem and almost no clear policy recommendations on what to do about it.
I love this last bit though.
This bit really is just so interesting, the way this is just phrased.
University's Minister Joe Johnson said, while we are seeing record application rates from disadvantaged backgrounds, this report shows that there are too many still missing out.
That is why our recent university access guidance for the first time called for specific support for white boys from the poorest homes.
University students, adults, white boys.
Not white men.
And of course the same thing is happening in the United States.
This is of course from 2015, but since it's relevant, I thought I'd include it.
And this is where we get to the gynocentrism everyone's talking about.
And make no mistake, we absolutely do live in a gynocentric society.
I think Western culture in general is extremely gynocentric, which is why feminists have had so much success by portraying themselves as the saviours of women as if women are children.
So the reason this article exists is because the gender imbalance in universities in America, which is of course overwhelmingly in favour of women, is causing troubles for women.
It's creating this campus hookup culture where men are just like, well, I don't have to commit to any one woman because there are more women than men, and therefore I have more choice than they do.
Women at disproportionately female schools talk openly about their frustrations.
Everyone's self-esteem takes a hit, a young woman at a 75% female college told me.
One reason, the men have little interest in exclusive relationships.
Why would they?
It's like they have their own free harem.
Right, so the problems men are now having getting to university and dealing with university life because of, I think, various cultural pressures, and the way that they're being treated as if they are the problem.
The consequences of this, the reality of this, is also their fault.
This is not some struggle against the patriarchy that has been won.
This is some struggle against reality that has been lost.
For both men and women.
But remember, we do have to constantly question things, like, are heart attack symptoms sexist?
A question asked by Barbara Farquharson, who apparently has fake legs on her horse.
Lecturer in the School of Health Sciences, University of Stirling.
She works at the University of Stirling and receives funding from the Chief Scientist's Office in Scotland.
She's a member of the UK Society of Behavioural Medicine, and she thinks that maybe these symptoms are sexist.
I mean, they're not the same for men and women, so that must mean sexism.
Only 55% of women with fatal heart attacks experience plaque rupture compared with 75% of men, which means that they clutch their chests and stagger around in pain.
People who don't get that don't do this, and therefore, sexism.
And finally, let's end with Donald Trump, because the man just pisses off all the right people.
In a sane world, I would find the idea of voting for Donald Trump to be absolutely laughable.
And he would never have got as far as he has gotten, but honestly, at this point, I think I would actually vote for Donald Trump, and not just because he's the sign of a system that is in need of reform.
I'd probably do it to get up in the core of people like Vox.com.
Listen to this.
Last month, Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of playing the woman card.
This suggests she's only polling well because she's a woman or because she's duping politically correct liberals with a gender equality guilt trip.
Well, given Hillary's unpopularity among progressives, it's interesting how you're literally going to start defending her just because she's being attacked by Donald Trump.
If she was talking to Bernie Sanders, you would be probably very anti-Hillary, wouldn't you?
Trump is wrong on the polling and wrong on the gender politics, but over the weekend he doubled down on his wrong idea in the most Trump way possible, suggesting that men and not women are really the oppressed ones.
Well, if we want to say, look at the educational system, that actually seems to be the case.
Trump said, if Clinton didn't play the women's card, she'd have no chance.
I mean zero of winning.
She's playing the woman's card.
She's going, did you hear that Donald Trump raised his voice while speaking to a woman?
Oh, I'm sorry.
And then, I mean, all of the men, we're petrified to speak to women anymore.
We may raise our voice.
You know what?
The women get it better than we do, folks.
They get it better than we do.
If she didn't play that card, she has nothing.
Women in the audience started cheering at this.
I presume that these are called Uncle Tom's, or, sorry, no, Aunt Jemima's, right?
But then it gets good.
Either way, Trump's comments are not just wrong, but also disturbing.
That's because Trump is parroting the ideas of a movement of aggrieved men, typically dubbed the men's rights activists, who think that feminism has overreached and that men are now the oppressed class as a result.
Well, I don't think that is actually what they think, and I certainly don't think they would express it in terms of Marxist dynamics.
There is no doubt, though, that feminism has overreached.
But then she says, MRAs tend to value traditional gender roles.
No, they don't.
They're actually arguing against traditional gender roles in things like the court and prison system.
Men are being disproportionately affected by the legacy of traditional gender roles in those systems, and they are actively trying to fight against it.
But for some reason, feminists can't help but lie about them.
She then goes on to misrepresent the entire manosphere.
The men's rights movement is full of splinter factions and warring tribes.
MRAs distinguish themselves from PUAs, and so on.
These are not men's rights movements.
There is a men's rights movement that is constantly being told they are Satan, but PUAs are not part of it.
But broadly speaking, this movement says women are the problem.
No, no, no one says that.
They're saying feminists are the problem, and you said they think feminism has overreached.
That doesn't mean women are the problem, that means ideologues are the problem.
And that women's complaints about sexism are really nothing more than oppressing men.
Well, no one's ever said that.
It invites you to take the red pill and see how deep the misandrist rabbit hole goes.
And then she says, it's a toxic worldview that helped inspire Elliot Rogers' murderous rampage in 2014.
That's just a lie.
That's just an outright lie.
I mean, Elliot Roger has no known connections to any of this.
We don't even know if he watched or read anything about this.
We do know that he was a subscriber of the Young Turks, so if you want to play the Guilt by Association game, why not choose the news network that has named themselves after a genocidal regime?
And the thing is, this was apparently after an update to reflect the nuances of Elliot Roger not being inspired by men's rights activists.
▲
Export Selection