Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - This Week in Stupid (02⧸10⧸2016)

All Episodes

Previous Next

Oct. 2, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

25:45

This Week in Stupid (02⧸10⧸2016)

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 1st of October 2016.
	And praise Keck, are we going to have fun this week?
	Our first victim this week is going to be The Guardian, yes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning British publication that is famous worldwide for the quality of their reporting and editorials.
	The Guardian regularly publishes columns from a contributor called Lindy West, a fat feminist activist, and I'm not using those terms in a pejorative sense.
	This is how she describes herself.
	Some of her more notable contributions include, Political correctness doesn't hinder free speech, it expands it.
	Trigger warnings don't hinder freedom of expression, they expand it.
	My country is a racist country, built on the lie of freedom and opportunity.
	My wedding was perfect, and I was fat as hell the whole time.
	So you can see that she's from the Francesca Ramsey School of Regressive Identity Politics, but her identity isn't that she's white, and it's not that she's female.
	Oh no.
	Lindy West's identity is that she is fat.
	What Lindy doesn't understand is that fat isn't an identity for other people, it's a description.
	So when she writes an article entitled, Fat People, Rise Up, We Could Swing This Election.
	She doesn't understand that this isn't quite the rallying cry that she expected it to be.
	And it comes with this tagline.
	It's time white supremacist whoopee cushion Donald Trump was hurled back into obscurity by a coalition of women, Muslims, veterans, LGBT people, and fat people, as if these things are all somehow mutually exclusive.
	As you might expect, it was an off-the-cuff comment by Donald Trump at the presidential election that triggered this article, and I mean triggered in the most literal sense, when he said that the hackers could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.
	Well, as you can imagine, Lindy West was not going to let this insult to her people stand, and got right onto her computer, started tapping away about how this was an unbelievable injustice.
	Lindy put out the call to all of her corpulate compadres, saying, fat people, are we going to stand for this shit?
	The answer, of course, being, no.
	They're going to sit in their mobility scooters and beep loudly as a sign of their disapproval.
	She says, by pointing a wee alabaster doll finger at fat nerds for the DNC hack, it's actually quite funny.
	Trump didn't just express the standard disgust for fat bodies, he positioned fat people as dangers to national security.
	The implications are familiar, really.
	Is that a familiar implication, is it?
	Even if the context is outlandish, fat people are lazy, bedridden, unscrupulous, untrustworthy, antisocial, gluttonous for secrets, and worthless as anything but a punchline.
	That's not true.
	He said they're excellent hackers.
	That's the same dislike and distrust that makes fat people less likely to be hired for jobs, take home equal pay, and receive adequate medical care under their insurance.
	So, Lindy, if I'm understanding you correctly, are you saying there is some sort of invisible donut tax for fat people?
	She goes on to say, £400 or 181 kilograms or 28 stone is not a punchline, it is not an absurd, shameful, astronomical number.
	Where we happen to disagree there, Lindy, and I'm not exactly a slender man myself.
	I think it's an absurd number.
	It is astronomical, and it is shameful.
	It speaks to a distinct lack of self-control and a distinct lack of self-respect.
	I weigh about 16 stone, and I know that's too fat.
	So if I were to almost double my body weight, yes, I would feel ashamed and it would be absurd.
	And it would be something that would need to be dealt with.
	She goes on to say that these are Americans with fulfilling jobs and vibrant families who pay their taxes and treat people around them with humanity and respect.
	Well, if that's the case, Lindy, are they not morally obligated for the good of their own families to try and lose some of these 400 pounds they've managed to accrue?
	It's not a fucking competition.
	And they could lose it by simply not stuffing their faces with cheese and cream pies all day.
	The answer is, of course, no.
	What we need to do instead is mobilize fat people as a voting demographic.
	She says, now my dear fellow fat people, I know that you have been taught not to think of yourselves as a group because the diet industry makes billions of dollars from the notion that each of you is just an individual has temporarily failed to be thin.
	But believe me, the rest of the country, employers, jurors, neighbours, voters, thinks of you collectively and treats you accordingly.
	And well, if we're going to be oppressed as a class, we may as well start using our clout as a class.
	As if fat people are like, yes, that's a good point, Lindy.
	I want to vote for Hillary Clinton.
	Have you even asked Donald Trump what his plan for fat people is?
	What's his policy on the morbidly obese?
	Maybe he's going to make mobility scooters great again.
	She says, and I can only assume that she genuinely believes what she's saying here.
	That's just, I just really imagine this is your actual position.
	This is what you get paid to do, right?
	As every fat person is perpetually reminded, more than 84 million American adults are considered clinically obese.
	That number rockets if you include people medically defined as overweight.
	That's at least 84 million people that Trump has compared to farm animals and criminals.
	That's a lot of votes.
	Fat people could swing this election.
	Imagine genuinely thinking you're going to mobilize people who are fat as an identified voting bloc.
	Just...
	And then imagine that you decided to email The Guardian one day and say, hey, I think you want me to write for you.
	And they'll be like, okay, why is that?
	Because I'm fat and I have fat pride.
	I have a fat identity and I can appeal to fellow fatties.
	And then just imagine if the Pulitzer Prize-winning publication you are petitioning replied back with, it's a deal.
	She ends with a rallying cry.
	So come on, fat people, join me.
	Rise up.
	We never get to be the hero.
	I'm being silly, but what if we did?
	I can think of no more appropriate fate for this classist, xenophobic, white supremacist whoopeecus, you've used that joke already, than to be hurled back into F-list obscurity by a coalition of women, people of colour, Muslims, fat people and veterans, LGBT, and every intersection therein.
	My fat ass is with her.
	And The Guardian, I'm sure, have no idea why exactly they are going into a terminal decline with their readership.
	To the point where they're now e-begging at the bottom of each of their articles.
	But the thing is, we know this is a conspiracy.
	a conspiracy on behalf of the white male capitalist supremacy.
	This is the thing that we call patriarchy.
	Dun dun dun!
	Lightning!
	And the thing about the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is that it doesn't make distinctions based on race, gender, ethnicity, or religion.
	So if you happen to be a Muslim who's an elderly man and you happen to be running a grooming gang full of paedophiles who prey on underage white girls, they don't care.
	They're going to arrest you as if you've done something wrong.
	And so when you're fighting for your rights to molest young girls at the European Court of Human Rights and they reject your appeal too, it must be because the white man is part of an anti-Islam conspiracy.
	I'm honestly not making this up.
	A paedophile who led a child sex grooming ring in Rochdale tried and failed to overturn his convictions with the European court claiming an all-white jury was part of a conspiracy to scapegoat Muslims.
	Shabir Ahmed wrote to the European Court of Human Rights claiming his convictions for child sex offences were part of an anti-Islam witch hunt.
	Presumably he claimed that he was simply following the example of Muhammad.
	European Court of Human Rights papers show he claimed the all-white jury at his trial was biased, presumably in favour of the law or morality.
	He desperately claimed that they breached Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees a fair trial.
	Ahmed claimed the jury members passed information about their deliberations to far-right organisations hostile to him and to fellow defendants.
	He argued that because former BNP chief Nick Griffin posted that some defendants had been found guilty at the Liverpool Crown Court trial before verdicts had been returned, the jury could not have been impartial.
	But Strasbourg judges unanimously threw the case out, saying there was simply no proof jurors had done anything untoward.
	Ahmed was described by a judge as a violent hypocritical bully, as he was jailed for 19 years in May 2012 after being convicted of ringleading a group of Asian men who preyed on young girls as young as 13 in Rochdale.
	The offenders plied their victims with drink and drugs before they were passed around for sex.
	He was later jailed for a further 22 years to run concurrently for 30 child rapes after a separate trial.
	The court heard that he repeatedly raped a young girl for more than a decade, treating her as a possession to use at his own sexual gratification.
	Ahmed is also attempting to avoid being deported from Britain by claiming his human rights have been violated.
	You see, Ahmed, where you've gone wrong here is you didn't call them Islamophobic racists.
	Then you probably would have been let off, given a pat on the back and as many white girls as you could rape.
	And to top it all off, the authorities would have apologised for the bigotry inherent in the system.
	Learn how to identity politics, bro.
	Of course, he should have taken tips on identity politics from the president of the British National Union of Students, Malia Buatia.
	However, don't take tips on how to defend safe spaces from her, because she doesn't seem entirely convinced of the concept herself.
	And this is despite it being one of her flagship proposals and programmes to be implemented across universities in Britain.
	This is a two-minute clip from a radio interview she did with the BBC where she basically persuades herself out of the idea under the lightest of conceivable cross-examinations on the subject.
	You want universities to flourish, including as places of debate, because some of the measures like safe spaces and no platforming have been seen as the antithesis of that, as curbing freedom of speech on campus.
	But they are measures you support.
	Naturally, you know, we support the thing about safe spaces that have existed for a very long time in many different forms.
	It's a call from the grassroots.
	It's an application of democratic processes in order to ensure that spaces of education, students' unions and so on, are safe places in which to debate, in which to discuss ideas, in which to take on...
	This is the place where you test theories and you stretch the boundaries of understanding.
	And that means that, of all settings, that is where freedom of speech needs to be paramount.
	But again, the interpretations of freedom of speech, I'd say freedom of speech is very rarely applied and an advantage that is not necessarily even applied to some of the most disadvantaged groups in society, and I'd say that you know we're not.
	We're not stopping the tearing apart of problematic views and ideas and so on, and I think we're.
	You know it's incredibly naive to believe that unless we provide spaces where they're necessarily aired, you know where racist xenophobic, homophobic views are aired that they're not otherwise known about, or what it's like to have your views attacked.
	You've been attacked for things you've said in the past that people have interpreted as Anti-Semitic.
	You want the platforms that enable you to defend those views and yet someone like Jermaine Greer was no platformed and doing that prevented her explaining her views again.
	I think that um, you know, I'd say Jermaine Greer has has access to a number of national platforms that students on the ground, within you know particular spaces students, unions and universities don't necessarily have it, so actually that could be to her a right that you are.
	What I support is people's democratic right to apply what they need to facilitate engagement and inclusion and accessibility for all in a space of education and to thrive in it and to not feel that they're being targeted.
	That is what I support in whichever way that students democratically interpret that and apply the process.
	Well, I don't know about you, but that deliriously incoherent ramble has really cemented my opinion against safe spaces, if on nothing else but their inability to really define what it is they want.
	But that's not really the reason I brought up Malia this week.
	That was just funny.
	I actually want to talk about an article from two weeks ago that I didn't get the opportunity to cover, where she says that political activists are being demonized in what is easily the most sympathetic article I've ever read in THE Guardian and that's saying something.
	They cover how she rejected a motion condemning ISIS, declared Birmingham University to be a Zionist outpost and then is surprised when people and I'm not joking don't like her radical left-wing politics.
	And the thing is it looks like Malia doesn't really know what the NUS is for, because it is apparently fighting on all fronts and campaigns just as hard on education issues as say, Palestinian rights.
	The author of this article says I wonder how much time she has ever spent in the company of apolitical students who came to university for the football, beer and toga parties and are bewildered and alienated by NUS motions calling for the abolition of all prisons.
	I mean, I don't think she realizes that she's part of the National Union OF Students and not say, a party in Westminster.
	But I think people really take exception to her and her agenda when she declares the Prevent organization, which is an organization designed to prevent the radicalization of Muslims into becoming terrorists, when she simply says, I do believe that it has incredibly racist intentions and intentions to crack down on people's civil liberties.
	I do believe that, and she does this by claiming they are simply targeting one black man with a beard and another.
	They all become Muslims so, by extension, any racialized Person becomes a target.
	And actually, the agenda is targeting far more than that.
	It's a wider-reaching attack on politicized people and groups, anti-austerity activists, anti-fracking activists.
	There's a whole host of people this extends to now.
	It's like she doesn't seem to understand that there are violent radicals within these groups that are actually doing things that could be classed as terrorism.
	Oh no, but the revolutionary left-wing Marxist radicals who are threatening to overthrow the system and declaring everyone and everything to be a fucking racist are being unfairly demonized.
	It's not that they're awful people to have to deal with, and they're constantly in the news for the fucking nonsense and mischief they're causing.
	It's nothing to do with the activists themselves, is it, Marlia?
	No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
	It's always someone else's fault.
	But seriously, though, take the time to read that article, again, a Guardian classic, to see the absolute lack of objectivity displayed by the person interviewing her.
	I mean, it's almost like they've all got an agenda.
	And speaking of agendas, I think that this week we have reached peak feminism.
	I don't think it's ever going to get worse than this.
	Is your dog's Halloween costume sexist?
	And no, this is not from The Guardian.
	This is from the publication that broke Watergate, The Washington Post.
	If this is just another one of those, I can't believe they've put this into writing.
	The glass ceiling appears to be firmly in place at PetSmart, where career costumes labeled male include firefighter and police officer, while female dogs can choose between a pink cowgirl costume and a pink loofah.
	I guess this is just one more thing on the long list of petty grievances that are holding women back from succeeding.
	Listen to this patriarchy in action.
	On the site BaxterBoo.com, options for your female pooch include sweetheart nurse or French maid.
	Any tidy dog will look adorable wearing this French made dog costume.
	The site's description reads, Whether your pup is a clean freak or a messy mutt, she will enjoy playing dress up in this fun costume.
	The choices for male dogs, meanwhile, include fireman, mob boss, and doctor.
	Suggested pairing.
	Match up with a girlfriend in the sweetheart nurse dog costume.
	Fucking oppression.
	It seems silly on the surface.
	Because it is.
	But this is part of a larger message we're sending.
	That there are certain jobs for men and certain jobs for women, said Scott Lowry, a 36-year-old virtue-signaling twat who co-hosts a podcast.
	Which is called She Will Not Be Ignored and is about gender issues.
	You know, I think we need to have a look at this podcast.
	I bet it's amazing.
	Okay, I went and looked at this podcast.
	There are like eight episodes that had a combined viewership of like 10 people.
	I can't believe this is something that anyone would even be vaguely interested in.
	But anyway, I'm not going to waste your time on it.
	So he says, the career options for women and dogs need to go beyond pink loofahs and pink cowgirls.
	Because if women aren't seeing dogs being astronauts and firefighters, then they'll never think that they can be astronauts or firefighters.
	Lowry, who plans to dress his two dogs as the cop duo Cadney and Lacey, hard hit in journalism, says he did a double take when he saw PetSmart's police officer costumes marked for males.
	He clicked around and noticed a pattern.
	Career-related costumes were often explicitly marked male and female.
	A number of other costumes, however, ranging from lobsters to pumpkins and dinosaurs, bear the male-female label.
	I thought surely there was a reason behind this.
	Maybe the pets needed to relieve themselves in a certain way or something like that.
	Said Lowry, who lives in San Francisco?
	To nobody's surprise.
	But all of the costumes are identical.
	As for Lowry, he's yet to actually buy a fucking costume.
	The dogs already have wigs, but Larry said he'd been waiting for PetSmart to remove its labelling before he makes a purchase.
	Even if it's just on principle, this is important.
	I'm waiting until they fix it.
	Unbelievably, representatives for these companies refused to comment, probably thinking I literally have anything else to do that's more important than this.
	But folks, we're going to have to get serious for a moment.
	Because a specter is haunting Europe.
	The specter of Pepe.
	Ladies and gentlemen, my fellow shitposters, we are in a war for our memes.
	The first salvo was fired by none other than Hillary Clinton herself.
	And has continued this week with a brutal assault by the Anti-Defamation League on Pepe the Frog.
	The ADL have declared Pepe the Frog to be a hate meme.
	Despite the fact in their article about Pepe the Frog, they explicitly state that he is not a hate meme.
	This is an injustice that cannot be allowed to go unpunished.
	They say that Pepe the Frog is a cartoon character that had become a popular internet meme, often referred to as the sad frog meme, by normies.
	The character first appeared in a 2005 online cartoon Boys Club, created by artist Matt Fury.
	In that appearance, the character also first uses its catchphrase, feels good, man.
	They say that Pepe the Frog did not originally have racist or anti-Semitic connotations.
	Internet users appropriated the character and turned him into a meme, placing the frog in a variety of circumstances and saying many different things.
	Many variations of the meme became rather esoteric, resulting in the phenomenon of so-called rare Pepe's.
	The majority uses of Pepe the Frog have been and continue to be non-bigoted, which is why his inclusion on the ADL Hate Symbols database is fucking retarded.
	However, it was inevitable that, as the meme proliferated in online venues such as Hate Speech Chan, Double Hate Speech Chan, and Plebit, which have many users who delight in creating racist memes and imagery, a subset of Pepe memes would come into existence that centered on racist, anti-Semitic, or other bigoted themes.
	In recent years, with the growth of the alt-right segment of the white supremacist movement, a segment that draws some of its support from some of the above-mentioned hate sites, the number of dangerous alt-right Pepe memes has grown, a tendency exacerbated by the controversial and contentious 2016 presidential election.
	Though Pepe memes have many defenders, not least the character's creator, Mad Fury, who has called the alt-right appropriation of the meme merely a phase, the use of racist racist and bigoted versions of Pepe memes seems to be increasing, not decreasing.
	However, because so many Pepe the Frog memes are not bigoted in nature, it is important to examine the use of the meme only in context.
	To ensure that you alert other normies as to whether this is a racist Pepe or not, please use the hashtag not all Pepe's when referring to the non-racist variety.
	A good example of this is the CNN coverage, where they found a very racist white supremacist Pepe from somewhere, but apparently not from the internet, as they appear to have made this Pepe themselves, meaning that they have one of the most racist and most rare Pepe's imaginable.
	Thankfully the authorities are taking appropriate action and educating the youth to inoculate them against racist Pepe use.
	The only way students can get any real information about Pepe is from their teachers at school.
	Anything else would probably be white supremacist propaganda.
	Thankfully meme awareness is being added to school curriculums so children know exactly what memes are, how they're used and what to recognise on the internet to watch out for these hidden dangers.
	Because God knows, young people have no idea what memes are, nor what internet lingo is, or how they're used on internet image boards to produce what is known as kecks, which is a form of currency or possibly drugs.
	For the safety of young people everywhere, universities will be banning violent memes such as anything to do with Harambe because it promotes rape culture and you don't want to get raped by a meme, do you?
	If you are a student at university and you see a dangerous meme that provokes violence or is perhaps promoting bias, then please contact your campus thought police and the thought criminal will be dealt with promptly, just like this thought criminal this very week.
	A cis hetero white male called Grant Strobel, a conservative right-wing student, if you can believe such a thing exists, at the University of Michigan and chairman for the Young Americans for Freedom Board of Governors, decided to try and destroy our beautiful system by changing his preferred pronoun from him or his to His Majesty.
	Of course, Mr. Strobel has been taken to room 101 for reprogramming, but we can't reprogram them all, and there are thousands, if not millions, of meme terrorists taking to the street in defence of their kex.
	Be careful out there.
	It's a dangerous world.
	If you see anything that appears to be some kind of satirical use of a cartoon animal on the internet, please report it to your local social media advisor, and they will find a way of shutting down any dissident accounts as soon as they can.
	But until then, simply block and report.
	Block and report.
	Unfortunately, we live in dangerous times, so stay safe and be vigilant, and remember to use only government-mandated memes.
	This is not only for your own safety, but for the safety of others.

▲