Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - This Week in Stupid (09⧸04⧸2017)

All Episodes

Previous Next

April 9, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

25:43

This Week in Stupid (09⧸04⧸2017)

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 9th of April 2017.
	I have a question.
	How does Rachel Dolezall keep getting on the news?
	Rachel Dolezal, race is a social construct.
	Why is she being taken seriously?
	Why is this even being countenanced?
	There is nothing about what she is saying here that is scientifically accurate.
	So why even listen to her?
	What are they going to do?
	Start hosting flat earthers?
	This article does not challenge her views in any way, shape or form.
	Rachel Dolezal, the former NAACP leader from Spokane, Washington, who made headlines in 2015 for looking like a Klingon, I mean representing herself as black while she was actually white, said that she still believes that race is a social construct.
	Honestly, is this not just grounds to dismiss what she has to say?
	This is just anti-science.
	If it's a social construct, how do we have different colour skin?
	What are we like cuttlefish?
	Two years on, Dolezal has written a memoir titled, In Full Colour, Finding My Place in a Black and White World.
	And why exactly is CNN helping her to promote this?
	I don't understand what they gain from any of this.
	I don't understand why they're taking her seriously.
	She says she identified as a black person at a very early age.
	Well, believe it or not, black isn't just one fucking identity.
	Black people have lots of different identities.
	Oh, I'm black.
	Oh, what did you mean black?
	What, like, like one of the hotep guys?
	No, I'm just black.
	No, they're not black.
	What are you saying?
	She told CNN that her aunt once made her a black raggedy and doll.
	She kind of recognized and seemed to understand my affinity for black is beautiful, and black is inspirational.
	So, I think that we can just call this what it is, a fetish.
	And you know what, I have no problem with her having any fetishes that she wants.
	But let's not pretend that that means that the biological reality of race is a social construct.
	I mean, any doctor will tell you that this is not the case.
	They will tell you that in certain kinds of people from certain areas of the world, there are varying levels of diseases and maladies and things you must be aware of.
	Forensic scientists can tell the difference in race by bone structure.
	Apparently you can determine whether someone is Caucasoid, Negroid or Mongoloid by the shape and structure of their skull.
	Now does this mean we need to break out the calipers and start dividing people up and making judgments based on their race?
	No!
	Obviously not.
	But Dolezole is currently in the process of invalidating the entire field of physical anthropology.
	It's fucking ridiculous.
	It's just absurd.
	And CNN are just reporting this as if it's totally normal.
	Yeah, well, she can say race is a social construct.
	She can identify any way she wants because, hey, we're progressive and the facts don't matter.
	We don't care about science.
	We don't care about reality.
	We have an agenda and we have our feels.
	I want to be careful because certainly every category of our identity is, you know, with its own unique circumstances and challenges.
	But for sure, there is some similarity in terms of harmonizing the outer appearance with the inner feeling.
	And you know what?
	That's fine.
	I don't care how much bronzer you put on to make your skin darker.
	I just don't care.
	But don't tell me that these things are social constructs when the science says opposite.
	She says, in terms of stigmatized identities, some people will forever see me as my birth category and nothing further.
	And the same with Caitlin.
	Oh, really?
	A white woman tries to ascend to the top of the progressive stack by being not only black, but transracial?
	I'm sure that'll go down with the other SJWs, won't it?
	Of course it didn't.
	It's time to debunk Rachel Dolezal's big transgender lie on the Daily Beast.
	My goodness, who's written this?
	Oh, Samantha Allen?
	One of the stormtroopers of the regressive left?
	Rachel Dolezal is claiming her race fluidity is just like being transgender.
	It's not, and she should be challenged every time she says it.
	Okay, Samantha, but I have to say, I think that your arguments are going to end up debunking transgenderism as well.
	When I wrote about Rachel Dolezal in 2015, I warned that the disgraced former NAACP Spokane chapter president, a white woman who passed as black for many years until she tellingly refused to answer a local TV reporter's question about her race, was also subtly appropriating the language of transgender identity.
	Well, what did you expect?
	Did you honestly think you could turn around and say, you know what, everything's a social construct.
	Anyone can identify as anything they like, and you wouldn't get some lunatic like Dolezal saying, you know what, yeah, I think I might be a black woman, so, and I'm trans, and so now, I am the least represented person on earth.
	Even less well represented than transracial men.
	And I love how she says it, commentators who should know better were buying it.
	But by what logic can they even resist what she's saying?
	If you believe you can simply identify as something else and therefore you can become that other thing, then how do you debunk it?
	While doing press for her new memoir, Dolezal told Salon that, and that was another outlet that gave her quite glowing coverage, which is why Samantha Allen is furious.
	There's more stigma for race fluidity than gender fluidity right now.
	It's interesting that I know enough about intersectional social justice to know that being gender fluid is not the same as being trans.
	Being gender fluid is not necessarily changing your biological sex, or at least trying to change the outer appearance of it, but not conforming to the social roles that gender imposes on everyone else.
	And everyone agrees to.
	You saying, I'm not going to be a woman, I'm going to be a, well, not even a man, I'm going to be whatever, and I'm not going to adhere to either of these gender roles is something I can at least accept because gender roles are performative.
	They are things that you do.
	But race is not performative.
	This is the difference.
	Race is something else.
	And being transsexual, if you get an operation and you actually have all the things you need to have done, you take hormones, you take various different steroids and whatnot, and then you actually have physical changes, that's not being gender fluid.
	You can get someone like Brianna Wu who is completely committed to being a woman, and I would, despite my distaste for Brianna Wu, call that person a woman because they are clearly making the efforts.
	But if Rachel Dolezall slaps some blackface on and starts going, hey, what's up, my nigga?
	That's not the same fucking thing.
	It seems that we're halfway down the slippery slope at this point.
	The terms are being used interchangeably, even though they do have specific definitions, and Dolezal is not adhering to them, and neither are Salon and whoever else are reporting on them.
	It doesn't matter to them.
	The actual facts of what they think, their own internal logic, is irrelevant.
	I hate to cite with Samantha Allen, but there we go.
	But even worse than Dolezall's specious analogies themselves are the way that they're being handled by the media.
	Once again, the voices on the right are wielding that Dolezal's story is a trump card to try and delegitimize and denigrate transgender identity.
	How is that an identity anyway?
	Again, by the terms the way that they have defined them, there can't be a transgender identity because you're attempting to transition from one gender identity to another.
	Again, I hate to back up Brianna Wu, but she's saying that she's a woman, and that's the point.
	She's not saying I'm trans.
	She's trying to adopt a different identity and molding her body to fit it.
	But the thing is, Samantha Allen's arguments are just terrible.
	There are at least 1.4 million transgender adults in the United States.
	Yes, that's 0.6% of the population.
	And I clicked that link, as you can see.
	That's an estimate.
	We don't know.
	And apparently, a sizable 35% of Americans know or work with a transgender person.
	How many Rachel Dolezalls do you know?
	Virtually every major medical association supports and affirms transgender identity.
	How many support the kind of identity Dolezall has claimed?
	These are terrible arguments, Alan.
	First is an argument from popularity.
	Just because you don't know any doesn't mean it's not real.
	And the second one is an argument from authority.
	Just because they're not saying it doesn't mean it's not real.
	And I actually agree with you on this.
	I don't think she's transracial.
	I just think you're all terrible.
	Transgender people can undergo medically proven treatments developed over decades to alter their sex characteristics.
	When asked how she altered her appearance, Dolezal told Matt Lauer in 2015 that she certainly doesn't stay out of the sun.
	Yes, and that's finally a half-decent point.
	Yes, there are actual medical treatments that people can do that will actually change the physical characteristics of their body so they can fall in line with a gender role that they wish to adopt.
	But again, being black is not a gender role.
	It's not a role at all.
	Unless you think all black people are the same.
	Like a giant fucking racist.
	I know I've spent a lot of time on this one, but it really drives me crazy because there's so much wrong with it.
	Not only are we watching the internal machinations of how social justice warriors arrange their own power hierarchies, but we're seeing total bullshit being spouted as truth, as usual.
	And now we're seeing the usual right-wing anti-transgender arguments being used by Samantha Allen, a progressive activist, against Rachel Dolezall.
	It's just like, look, you realize that you're living in a fucking castle of lies.
	Everything about you is all lies, and you have to make other people lie for you in order to maintain this lie.
	That's my main problem.
	If you were like, well, some people can believe that I'm not, I don't mind.
	I'm self-confident enough to say that that's how I feel and that's what I wanted to do, then you wouldn't have to go around attacking people.
	And then I would say, you know what, yeah, I'm happy to cooperate with you.
	Because it's be, you know, you're not a bad person, you're not being mean to everyone else.
	But in the case of social justice warriors, that's just not what happens, is it?
	I guess this episode is going to be longer than usual because god damn it, I can't stop talking about this.
	She's going to visit South Africa and be like, hello, fellow black people.
	I too understand the oppression of the white man.
	Dolezal will be the special guest at an event intended to promote a dialogue for a non-racial South Africa.
	Oh yeah, a woman who is literally obsessed with her own race, attempting to change her own race and has written a book about changing her own race, is going to be the ambassador of non-racial politics, is she?
	In South Africa, she will be attending an inaugural event of the group Quest for Non-Racial South African Society Dialogue.
	Hey, that sounds like the sort of thing I could get behind as well.
	That sounds like the sort of thing I could support.
	Let's not have the race of people being the main focus of the conversation.
	Which promotes an agenda for racial harmony among South Africans.
	That sounds like a great idea.
	They collectively critique and butcher Rachel Dolezal only because she successfully transitioned race.
	No, she fucking hasn't!
	She successfully transitioned reality into her own fucking fantasy world about her own fetish.
	A stuck reality for them and inconceivable only because it is believed it is not possible.
	If not an unpardonable sin.
	It's not an unpardonable sin, it's just fucking stupid.
	She's evidence of the myth of race, he added.
	Oh my god.
	Why are there science deniers everywhere?
	And why can't we just talk about something else?
	Last month, Dollozel told the BBC the idea of race was a lie.
	Oh, so there are all these doctors and physicians are liars, are they?
	Right, okay, they're all liars.
	Fine.
	They're just all a bunch of giant fucking lies.
	Whole academic fields are just fields about lies.
	Right, okay, fine.
	Race is a lie.
	How can I be accused of lying about a lie?
	Unbelievably, Rachel, it's possible to lie about a lie.
	If someone tells me the sky is green and I go up to someone and says, hey, do you know what Jack just said?
	He told me the sky was purple.
	I've just lied about a lie, Rachel!
	Fucking...
	Like I said, I know I've spent half this fucking video talking about this bullshit, but it just infuriates me.
	This is a fantasy, a fiction, and they're going along with it.
	And the only people who aren't going along with it are people who also buy into fantasies and fictions and have the worst logic I've ever seen and are generally reprehensible.
	So now that I've got that off my chest, I'm going to talk about something that's actually important.
	Google's new fact check feature, which will be fact-checking its own search results.
	You already know who's going to be doing the fact-checking, don't you?
	That's right.
	Very neutral and unbiased outlets.
	That's right.
	PolitiFact and Snopes.
	Highly trusted, highly unbiased, totally not agenda-driven organizations at all.
	I have seen so many Snopes articles that were just total nonsense.
	I wish I had taken the time to put them all in a spreadsheet so I could display them all for you now.
	Although I just didn't think of- I just didn't think about it.
	I didn't think Snopes would really be taken that seriously by people.
	But apparently, they're being taken seriously by Google, and God only knows why.
	I imagine for Google, it's just a lot easier to just offload the burden onto someone else.
	Yeah, you know what?
	Your problem.
	Yeah, if people have a problem with it, take it up the Snopes.
	Not my problem.
	And do you know what happens when you take things up the Snopes?
	The answer is not fucking much.
	This is an article on Forbes where the journalist in question is trying to debunk a Daily Mail breakdown of how awful Snopes is, and he's unable to do so because Snopes is so uncooperative.
	They say the Daily Mail's article makes a number of claims about the site's principles and organization, drawing heavily from the proceedings of a contentious divorce between the site's founders and questioning whether the site could possibly act as a trusted and neutral arbiter of the truth.
	You may remember a few weeks ago when Wikipedia decided that the Daily Mail was not an adequate source for their website.
	The Daily Mail is, I'm not joking, that unreliable.
	If you see an article on there, it really is generally worth corroborating it for yourself.
	And then he says, thus, when I reached out to David Mickelson, the founder of Snopes for Comment, I fully expected him to respond with a lengthy email in Snopes trademark point-by-point format, fully refuting each and every one of the claims in the Daily Mail's article and writing the entire article off as fake news.
	Because if you are being intellectually honest, that's what you do, which is why this chap expected it.
	It was incredible surprise, therefore, that I received David's one-sentence response, which read in its entirety, I'd be happy to speak with you, but I can only address some aspects in general because I'm precluded by the terms of a binding settlement agreement from discussing the details of my divorce.
	Our author says, this absolutely astounded me.
	He was one of the world's most respected fact-checking organizations, soon to be the ultimate arbiter of truth on Facebook, saying it cannot respond to a fact-checking request because of a secrecy agreement.
	In short, when someone attempted to fact-check the fact-checker, the response was the equivalent of, it's a secret.
	And then he says, it's impossible to understate how antithetical this is to the fact-checking world, in which absolute openness and transparency are necessary prerequisites for trust.
	How can fact-checking organisations like Snopes expect the public to place trust in them when they themselves are called into question, their response is that they can't respond?
	Guys, how would you feel if I did that?
	If I said, you know what, I'm just, I can't, it's a secret, I can't tell you why I can't respond to this response video.
	Why I can't refute this criticism.
	I just can't tell you.
	You'll take my word for it this wrong, but I just can't tell you why.
	You wouldn't trust me either, and I wouldn't expect you to.
	But it continues.
	When I presented a set of subsequent clarifying questions to David, he provided responses to some and not others.
	Of particular interest, when pressed about claims by the Daily Mail that at least one Snopes employee has actually run for political office, and this presents at the very least the appearance of potential bias at Snopes fact checks, David responded, It's pretty much a given that anyone who has ever run for or held a political office did so under some form of party affiliation and then said something critical about their opponents and or other politicians at some point.
	Does that mean that anyone who has ever run for office is manifestly unsuited to be associated with a fact-checking endeavour in any capacity?
	Well, it depends who they are and what they're doing, but it just looks bad, David.
	It looks like you're probably hiring people who have their biases and have run for offices on their biases.
	When asked for comments on the specific detailed criteria Snopes uses to screen its applicants and decide who to hire as a fact-checker, surprisingly, David demured, saying only that the site looks for applicants across all fields and skills.
	He specifically did not provide any detail of any kind regarding the screening process and how Snopes evaluates potential hires.
	David also did not respond to further emails asking whether, as part of the screening process, Snopes has ACLUP applicants fact-check a set of articles to evaluate their reasoning and research skills and to gain insight into their thinking process.
	Hmm, I wonder why.
	Even more strangely, despite asking in two separate emails how Snopes assesses its fact-checkers and whether it performs intra- and inter-rater reliability assessments, David responded only that fact-checkers work together collaboratively and did not respond to further requests for more detail and did not answer whether Snopes uses any sort of assessment scoring or ongoing testing process to assess its fact checkers.
	Well, that's comforting.
	I'm so glad that Google have decided to use them to fact check all their search results.
	I know that they can be held accountable.
	David also did not respond to a request for comment on why Snopes fact checks rarely mention that they reached out to the authors of the article for being fact-checked to get their side of the story.
	Indeed, Journalism 101 teaches you that when you write an article presenting someone or something in a negative light, you must give them the opportunity to respond and provide their side of the story.
	Instead, Snopes typically focuses on the events that are being depicted in the article and contacts individuals and entities named in the story, but Snopes' fact checks typically do not mention contacting authors of the articles about those events to see if those reporters claim to have additional corroborating material, perhaps disclose to them off the record.
	So I just want to point out that like me, Snopes are not journalists.
	And I just want to stress that, just in case anyone's curious, I'm not a journalist either.
	I think it'd be fair to call me an analyst, but I'm certainly not a journalist.
	In essence, in these cases, Snopes performs fact-checking from afar, rendering judgment on news stories without giving the original reporters the opportunity of comment.
	That means, by these standards, Google, you could ask me to fact check your reports.
	And this was my favourite bit.
	David did not respond to a request for comment on this or why the site does not have a dedicated appeals page for authors of stories which Snopes has labelled false to contest that label, and he also did not respond to a request to provide further detail on whether Snopes has written formal appeals processes or how it handles such requests.
	Because let's be fair, they probably fucking don't.
	They create their narrative, they create their article and they say, that's it, we're done with this.
	Refer to this in all future cases.
	Whether the information is right or wrong.
	Whether there is extra information they simply don't have because they've never tried contacting the journalists and they don't respond to any kind of appeals because there is no process.
	I tell you what, it pisses me off.
	And yet I will see journalists and mainstream media outlets using Snopes as if it is some sort of objective unbiased truth, as if you can be certain.
	And again, even when I personally have seen articles that I know are bollocks, but I can't spend my whole life debunking what Snopes has tried to debunk and got wrong.
	So let's finish up this week with a report from the Swedish Democrats.
	These would be the Nazis of Sweden, who in any other country would be centre-left.
	Sweden has suffered an immigrant rape epidemic.
	Well, tell us something we didn't know.
	The Sweden Democrats have released a rape report, which compiles data from 32 different research papers that somehow touches rapes committed by immigrants.
	I've had to use Google Translate for this, so the sentence wording will be a bit funny.
	The party made use of Stockholm University Criminology Institution reports in 2011, the Parliamentary Library's Expert Search Services, as well as the Parliamentary Research Service, to find all 32 reports published from 1990 to last year, which it considers relevant.
	In 13 of the reports, immigrants are overrepresented in rape.
	In all of these reports reported that people with a foreign background commit rape more often than Swedes.
	Not infrequently also mentioned as rape as a form of crime that is particularly characteristic of people of foreign origin.
	Well, that's just fucking racist, isn't it?
	Of the reports that SD refers to shows that immigrants excelled in rape statistics.
	Excelled in rape statistics, that's a great translation, during the early 80s.
	Professor of criminology at the University of Cambridge in Britain struck as early as 1990, half of all those who were reasonably suspected of rape in Stockholm in 1982 were foreign nationals.
	In another report from 2014, found that more than two-thirds of the suspected rapists in the year of 2008 and 2009 were foreign nationals.
	And, surprise, surprise, the typical victim was a young woman of Swedish nationality.
	Look, I know that this is uncomfortable, especially for people on the left.
	I know you don't like to hear this, but the facts appear to show that foreign nationals entering Sweden from the Middle East and Africa commit a vastly disproportionate amount of rapes to foreign nationals from elsewhere.
	I'm sorry that that's the case.
	I'm sorry that the numbers show this, but rather than treating these people who have a high propensity to rape the locals as the victims of these statistics, why can't you have some sympathy for all of the young Swedish people who are being raped by them?
	Do I have to say it's not all of them?
	Does it change anything if I tell you that it's not all of them?
	If I tell you that it's only a large number of them, and not even the majority, just a large number, and they've got a much higher chance of doing it than people who are not from these areas.
	Does it un-rape anyone?
	Is it comforting for the victims?
	Do the victims say, yeah, I was brutally gang-raped by a bunch of Somali immigrants?
	Yeah, but it wasn't all of the Somali immigrants who brutally gang-raped you.
	You should probably thank your lucky stars, and if you have any follow-up questions, you're a racist.
	Arabs, Africans, and Afghans are identified in the SD report as some of the most problematic immigrant groups.
	Well, that's racist, isn't it?
	How dare you suggest that just because they come from cultures where they chop off women's clitorises, force them into child marriage, and make them wear a fucking burqa all day, that these people might not have the same respect for women that we have in the West?
	You clearly just hate brown people.
	According to a study known as the National Council released in 1996, Arabs from North Africa are 23 times more likely to commit rape than Swedes.
	Don't think I can take any more of this racism.
	How dare you impugn Arabs from North Africa just because the statistics appeared to impugn Arabs from North Africa?
	And SD is highly critical of journalists and politicians and commentators in the report, trying to explain away the immigrants' heavy over-representation regarding rape with various socio-economic factors.
	It warns against trying to sweep the real rape epidemic under the rug.
	And they say hardly anyone takes any of these excuses seriously anymore because the link between overseas immigrant groups and sex crimes has become painfully obvious to everyone in our society.
	As in, the people being raped and their families know who is doing the raping.
	The people in the media who do not live around these people don't.
	And they are the ones trying to cover it up and accuse everyone of being a racist for pointing it out.
	Just like with Rachel Donozzall, just like with all of this bollocks, I am tired of denying reality.
	If these things are happening, we should not be covering them up.
	And one thing that pisses me off the most is the complicity of the authorities in doing this.
	We've seen it in Germany, we've seen it in Sweden, we've seen it in Britain.
	They will lie about the victims, their own victims, their own citizens, who are victims of these immigrants in order to protect their narrative, in order to not appear racist.
	And people on the left have no idea why people are voting for the right wing.
	I can tell you why.
	It's because the people who are actually being victimized by these groups need it to end.
	They need a change because they are sick and tired of being preyed upon by these people that you are treating like a protected class.

▲