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May 22, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
19:17
Thunderf00t BUSTED
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Before I get into this video, I'd just like to apologise to everyone who is watching this video.
I'm sorry that I have to make this.
I didn't want to make this.
I wanted to let this argument go and just let bygones be bygones and carry on.
But after being a snarky bitch on Twitter and then proceeding to make a video that doubled down on his lies, I am afraid I feel compelled to make this video.
So it's been one of those days when I lost thousands of subscribers.
Now, you'd have thought that after having lost thousands of subscribers, I'd be doing some soul searching about what have I done wrong and this must really hurt.
And the simple truth is, no, not even slightly.
I feel clean having done what I've done.
Honestly, I find that staggering.
I can't imagine being caught in a lie and when thousands of people are telling me, look, we know you are lying, to then turn around and say, you know what, my lies make me feel clean.
There's this shooting, this person called this skeptical feminist, and all the evidence suggests that they got high on mushrooms and ended up shooting someone.
No suggestion whatsoever that this had anything to do with feminism or his atheism or anything like that.
This was just a sort of tragic incident and they were basically making, you know, no, no, right, this is how you call spinning a narrative, is you try and associate baggage with stuff that it really doesn't associate with.
I honestly do not know why you keep trying to make this point, given how I personally said that this was not feminism's fault.
You want to talk about narratives, but that is precisely what you are spinning by repeating the same false talking point.
Nobody said that this was to do with feminism.
We don't even think it's to do with PTSD now because apparently reports have come out that he actually hadn't seen combat or anything like that.
So who knows why he did it?
But at the time, we thought it was PTSD too.
And I showed you that in my last video.
So either you didn't watch it or you are being deliberately dishonest.
Fucking pick one.
And so in this hangout between all these prominent sceptics, they're all sort of feeding this in there.
Yeah, what is it about these male feminists and being messed up?
And sorry, this just doesn't fit in that category.
We didn't say he did.
I said that male feminists have a surprising propensity to end up being sex offenders.
Because they do.
We didn't say Russian Deadpool was a sex offender, and we didn't say that this was because he was a feminist.
We said it was because he had PTSD, which turns out not to be true, but we didn't have better information at the time.
Why do you keep saying this?
So I made this video which was very critical of Sargon of Pakad.
No, critical would be talking about things I actually did.
You just lied.
You openly lied.
You outright ascribed things to me that I did not say and you refuse to retract it, even though I've demonstrated that I did not say these things.
And you also spliced together two parts, separate parts of the live stream in an attempt to make me look like I was laughing at the girl when I wasn't.
I can't imagine how you think that's criticism.
And, you know, initially it sort of gets fairly favourable responses.
Then Sargon makes his reply where he makes numerous accusations.
I honestly want to know what this smug face is about.
Because everything I said that you had done was true, and everything that you said I had done was not true.
So what the fuck is so funny?
I'm genuinely curious.
Why is this amusing?
You have been caught in a lie in front of hundreds of thousands of people.
What are you smiling about?
Uh that I'm quote mining him.
Oh no, you didn't have the opportunity to quote mine because you couldn't find a quote of me saying these terrible jokes because other people were the ones saying them.
I'm accusing you of splicing together two pieces of footage in order to frame me, which is exactly what you did.
Or taking him out of context or some shit like that.
Do you mean cherry-picking or lying by omission, which is something you also did when you left out my initial objections to making jokes about the situation at the beginning of the stream?
The bit that you cut out to splice alongside Louis Levi making a dark joke and me laughing at Louie.
Yes, Thunderfoot, there is much you are guilty of here.
I cannot understand your smug attitude.
Why are you finding this funny?
Do you think that you are somehow above criticism?
Do you think that since you feel like you have the moral high ground here, then everything you say is legitimate and any form of misrepresentation is acceptable?
And it's like, you've got to be, I mean, first of all, this is the direct Sarkeesian defense, right?
The, um, yeah, it's true that I was saying all this really twisted stuff and laughing at things and, right.
Sarkeesian doesn't make defenses.
She doesn't address criticism.
What the fuck are you talking about?
Why are you bringing her up?
What you have done to me is what she has done to video games.
I don't think it's in your best interest to start bringing up Anita Sarkeesian when it comes to you being caught in a lie.
Because she was also caught in numerous lies.
Maybe that's why she was the first person on your fucking mind.
What are you doing?
Right.
The thing is that when you make a video, you inevitably have to take the original video and cut it down.
Quoting someone is not quote minding them.
To quote mine someone is to actually change the meaning of what they said.
You didn't even quote me.
You didn't quote me out of context or quote-mind me.
You just ascribed to me things other people had said.
And the best you could do is splice together two pieces of footage misrepresentatively in order to make it look like I was laughing at something that I was not.
You are full of shit.
You don't even have a quote of me making a terrible joke.
The only joke I made was the one I found and put in my video and that was a joke about the murderer.
And even then we were actually joking about what the media would say about the murderer.
Saying, oh, he went on a stream with Sargon once, therefore he's a misogynist.
I didn't actually pay that much attention to how it was edited together, right?
It was basically these are the twisted bits that they were saying.
And then I cut in another video of Sargon's where he's sort of saying, we are more ethical than everyone else.
Right, so you were just not thinking about it.
You misled your audience and lied about me without thinking.
Well, that's okay then.
Don't worry about apologising for your mistake as you have just owned up to it now.
I mean, it's not like that would be the ethical thing to do or anything, but since we're on the subject of ethics, tell me, Dr. Mason, what is unethical about a joke?
The answer is, of course, nothing.
Jokes are not unethical.
They're not immoral.
And the reason you are talking about morals and ethics and jokes is because that's all you fucking have.
I know because I don't do things that are unethical.
I go out of my way to keep my nose clean because I know you can't keep secrets from the internet.
I know that if I do something wrong, I will get caught and I will get fucking strung up for it.
And so what do I do?
I keep my fucking nose clean.
I pay my bills, I pay my debts, I give credit where it's due, I give all my sources, I make sure any money I have or taken or whatever is accountable and accounted for, and I make sure I don't go around fucking lying about people.
Now do tell me about the high moral standards of skepticism plus or whatever it is you're founding.
Because I'm very interested to know how exactly you can double down on a lie, be all smug and shitty about it, and then expect people not to be pissed off with you.
And the worst part is then accusing them of tribalism because of this.
Fuck you.
They're not being tribal.
They see what you've done and they're pissed.
The reason you're fucking angry at my joke.
And sorry, let me just correct that.
Not my joke.
The reason you're angry at someone else's joke, angry at me for that, that is, is because you literally have nothing on me.
Because I don't need to be unethical.
I have actually managed to build a solid career on YouTube by being an ethical actor.
It's not been easy.
It's not been fun a lot of the time.
A lot of the time.
I tell you what, right?
When you fuck up and you have to take your licks and you have to say, okay, yeah, no, that was me.
I messed up.
For whatever reason, I had made the mistake.
I hadn't done the due diligence.
I will accept my lashings with good grace, put my corrections, do whatever it is I need to do, and move on.
I do it.
You don't.
So basically using this tragic shooting to push the narrative that this is something to do with feminism.
I mean, it's like, I don't know if you could push the hypocrisy Dell to 11, but this is getting pretty close to it.
You can see that I'm not going through his entire video, just the points that he's making that I want to address.
But this just keeps coming up.
It's like he can't admit that we actually said this isn't to do with feminism.
Making as many sick, twisted jokes as you can about this and occasionally say, well, I'm not so sure we should be doing this.
A twinge of morality in there.
I'm not so sure that makes things any better.
In fact, you know, this is what I actually put in my video is a pretty decent reflection of what was in the actual discussion.
In fact, I even had, in the video I put up, go and watch the original video.
I don't think I'll be taking lectures in morality from someone who pushes a false narrative about things that I did not do, about things that were not said on the stream, framing me in your video and refusing to apologize for this.
You are not some sort of moral exemplar that people should take an example from.
I didn't tell any nasty jokes.
You did lie.
Now, it's like what I put in the video was reflective of what you were saying in that discussion.
It's called being honest.
I've got to play that again.
Nah, it's like what I put in the video was reflective of what you were saying in that discussion.
It's called being honest.
You spliced together two clips to mislead people because you couldn't find a clip of me telling a nasty joke.
And you call that being honest!
You fucking lie about the fact that we you say we attributed this to feminism to push a narrative, which is not true!
I showed this in the last video.
I gave you the exact clip of me literally saying, probably not about feminism though, is it?
And you think this is being honest!
Honestly!
You have lost the fucking plot.
This is not being honest, Phil.
You are lying.
You are spinning a narrative because you are so emotionally invested in this.
If I were you, I would just fucking quit now, while you are this far behind.
There is nothing honest about what you've done.
And, you know, so these people saying that, yeah, but Sagar didn't actually make any jokes himself, which is just not true.
He did.
You accused me of making jokes about the dead girl.
It's not true.
Again, it's something you lied about.
The joke I made, the one joke I could find and provided in my video was about Russian Deadpool.
But do carry on.
But even if he didn't, the mere fact that he's sitting there laughing with the rest of them over what is essentially a tragic shooting.
If that's what you want for a sceptical community, all strength to you.
Go for it.
I mean, I'm not your policeman.
I'm just saying that I want nothing to do with you.
Again, you're decontextualizing what happened.
This wasn't just someone we didn't know.
We had all had interactions with Russian Deadpool.
He was an asshole on the internet, as you pointed out in your video.
We had all had a history with him.
And his history with us was, put simply, something like this.
You are all misogynists.
I am a feminist.
I am the only person who likes women.
And then he goes and shoots a woman.
There is definitely a dark irony in this.
Do not think.
Things like that.
This is a real sign that you're looking at tribalism, right?
The...
When I do this to Sarkeesian, they're all like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is a great argument against Sarkeesian.
And, you know, it's actually what you would call fairly honest video making.
That, yeah, you've got to chop all this crap down.
You've got to take out the salient bits, the bits that actually reflect what she was saying, and then make a rebuttal to it.
And I do the same thing to Sargon.
And it's like, oh no, this is the most terrible quote, man.
This is a sign that you're looking at tribalism, not actually the facts.
I'm having trouble putting my finger on the most dishonest part of your video.
I think that might be it.
Anita Sarkeesian was doing the things that you accused her of.
I was not doing the things that you accused me of.
If you can't see the difference, all you're doing is calling into question your videos on Anita Sarkeesian.
Maybe I need to revisit the ones that I liked and shared publicly to see if in some way you have been misrepresenting her.
If you're on the side of this that thinks there really shouldn't be any limits to what you can joke about, I mean, where are you going to draw the lines on this?
You know, kids dying of cancer, parents with their kids dying of cancer.
I mean, parents dying of cancer.
I mean, where are you going to draw the lines here?
I'm not going to lie, I am a bit of a free speech absolutist.
I don't think that anything is off limits.
And I think that by joking about tragedies, you take the focus off of the tragedy.
And you basically throw yourself in the line of fire.
You say, hey, actually, let's talk about how awful I am instead.
Because anything is better than dwelling on a fucking tragedy.
But yes, I think everything is okay to be joked about.
As long as you know that they are jokes.
You are acting like we were saying anything, and again, you've got nothing on me, but the other people in the stream, you are acting as if they didn't know that they were joking.
As if they didn't deliberately do this to be provocative.
You're basically exploiting this for pushing your ideology.
It doesn't get more true the more you say this.
We weren't pushing an ideology, we were making jokes at Russian Deadpool's expense.
How far should this freedom of speech thing go?
I'm sure a lot of people are going to get on your case for saying that you're anti-free speech now or something, because you actually don't think free speech should extend to jokes or any kind of joke.
I do.
I am a bit of a free speech absolutist.
I don't think someone should be censored, but I can agree that there is a time and a place.
I was on V's channel.
V is a comedian.
He makes jokes.
In fact, that was the point of the stream.
He wanted to have a darkly ironic stream about this.
And I didn't participate in the jokes that they were telling.
Apart from the one exception of a joke at Russian Deadpool's expense.
This is not a free speech issue.
This is an issue of decorum.
And your decorum changes given the relative place that you are.
I was on V's stream as a guest.
And I still didn't do what you're accusing me of.
The other people on the stream did, and that's their choice.
V had created that space to do exactly that.
It's not like he went into a press conference or something and started making these jokes.
This was effectively the same as being in a comedy club.
You know something is messed up when you sit.
And I looked at that stream of theirs and it was messed up.
Yeah, I do.
I know exactly what you mean.
I feel clean having done what I've done.
And I totally agree.
When you hear something that messed up, you've got to call it, haven't you?
Yeah, I'm still mostly a research scientist, dude.
If you think you're outshining me there, um, well, I mean, unless you're the only metric that you're going for here is popularity.
In which case, again, you've got to be kind of careful with these sorts of things, otherwise you end up finding out that you're outshone significantly by the young Turks.
I am not the one who brought up the relative size of our channels.
You did, twice in your original video.
And no, obviously I'm not saying I'm a better research scientist than you.
That is the most facile thing I've ever heard, and you fucking know it is.
I didn't do any of the things you're accusing me of.
You lied.
You are still lying.
And you're doing it with a haughty and arrogant manner.
I would be more than happy to simply forgive and forget.
But you have to keep doubling down on this.
You had to keep sniping at me on Twitter.
I was perfectly happy to leave it at the one video.
Just let it go.
But you couldn't do it.
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