Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - This Week in Stupid (02⧸07⧸2017)

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July 2, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

24:43

This Week in Stupid (02⧸07⧸2017)

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	Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 2nd of July 2017.
	I'm going to have to start with something rather boring but unfortunately something that has to be covered, but I will get to the fun stuff very soon.
	Jeremy Corbyn's hard-left momentum supporters have been, as usual, bringing intimidation and violence into the political process in Britain.
	This is not something I can abide, and should be roundly condemned by everyone, and Jeremy, you should be kicking these people out of your organisations.
	Instead of this intimidation being done to rival Labour MPs, now it's being done to Conservatives.
	Conservative MP Miss Murray says, Over the past months, I've had swastikas carved into posters, social media posts like Burn the Witch, people putting Labour Party leaflets on my home, photographed them and pushed them through my letterbox.
	Someone even urinated on my office door.
	Hardly kinder, gentler politics.
	That's because Jeremy does not represent kinder, gentler politics.
	He is a socialist.
	If you can find me a socialist regime that wasn't brutal and oppressive, I'd like to know about it.
	Can my right honourable friend suggest that what can be done to stop this intimidation, which may well be putting off good people from serving in this place?
	And political intimidation is nothing new.
	In dictatorships or failing states, or just states that aren't supposed to be liberal Western democracies.
	Theresa May sympathised with her and said, this abuse happens predominantly to female candidates and could put people off politics.
	Now, I haven't got any statistics on this, but the only other examples I can think of have been done to female politicians.
	So I think it's fair to say that Jeremy Corbyn is not the feminist candidate.
	Theresa May replied that she was not the only person who experienced this sort of intimidation during the election campaign.
	Particularly, this sort of intimidation was experienced by female candidates.
	I believe this sort of behaviour is no place now in democracy and could put the good people off from serving this house.
	Well, it doesn't.
	I mean, that's the point of a democracy, to prevent political violence.
	And Western democracies are remarkably good at that.
	It's rare that you actually see legitimate political violence and intimidation happening in a functional Western democracy.
	And it's only by the radical collectivists who want to completely overthrow the system and abandon our principles that this happens.
	Be it Islamists, be it socialists, be it fascists.
	It's the people who are against the individualistic values of British democracy that cause the problems.
	I'm just saying that this is a notable pattern, and it's down to the ideological will of these people.
	It's not because they have a legitimate cause.
	I think the closer these people get to power and the more frustrated they get that they're actually not winning power, the more that this is going to happen.
	And the irony of them painting a swastika on the Conservative Party is rather lost on them, as I recall Winston Churchill was a member of the Conservative Party.
	It really annoys me.
	It's they're not Nazis.
	I don't agree with them on a lot of things, but they're not Nazis.
	But to the socialist mind, it's perfectly acceptable to do violence to Nazis on the basis that they are Nazis.
	They don't even have to be doing anything wrong.
	And you can speak to any socialist to get confirmation of that.
	These people are genuinely scary, and if you don't think they have the capacity for violence, and worse, then I think you're delusional.
	Sorry for starting on a bit of a downer, but this sort of thing really annoys me and it introduces instabilities into the political system in this country and I don't like to see that.
	I can't just not say anything.
	But let's get to the fun stuff.
	This amused me far more than it should.
	Blind recruitment trial to boost gender equality making things worse, study reveals.
	A measure aimed at boosting female employment in the workforce may actually be making it worse.
	Leaders of the Australian Public Service will today be told to hit pause on blind recruitment trials, which many believed would increase the number of women in senior positions.
	And you can already see the logic behind this, can't you?
	The assumption that, oh, you know what, everyone's actually just really sexist.
	Women are doing exactly the same things as men, and therefore they must be doing them to the same standard and to the same, putting in the same amount of effort into these things, sacrificing more of their life and more of their time in building their careers.
	And therefore, the lack of representation of women at the top levels is down to discrimination.
	And we can prove this by simply removing the names of the people on the recruitment forms.
	And then we will naturally see a big glut of women rising to the top.
	Blind recruitment means recruiters cannot tell the gender of the candidates because those details are removed from the applications.
	It's been seen as an alternative to gender quotas and has also been embraced by various other institutions.
	And don't get me wrong, it is obviously an alternative to gender quotas, and one I would much prefer.
	I would rather not have a bias in place based on gender when it comes to recruitment.
	I don't see the need for it.
	And I would be perfectly happy with this because it would make the system more meritocratic.
	Being a man or a woman would not be a factor in the recruitment of that person to that position.
	So you can only look at that person's qualifications and say, well, yes or no.
	In their bid to eliminate sexism, thousands of public servants have been told to pick recruits who had all mention of gender and ethnic background stripped from their CVs.
	The assumption behind the trial is that the management will hire more women when they can only consider the professional merits of the candidates.
	Uh-oh.
	And the thing is, this is really easy to explain, but I'll wait until the end because it's funny how this has blindsided them.
	Professor Michael Hiscox, a Harvard academic who oversaw the trial, said he was shocked by the results and urged caution.
	We anticipated this would have a positive impact on diversity, making it more likely that female candidates and those from ethnic minorities are selected from the shortlist.
	Instead, they found that there was some sort of implicit bias against men and in favour of women.
	The trial found assigning male names to a candidate made them 3.2% less likely to get a job interview, whereas adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9% more likely to get a foot in the door.
	We should hit pause and be very cautious about introducing this as a way of improving diversity, as it can have the opposite effect.
	Okay, Michael.
	Alright.
	Yes, it can, but it will also make these institutions run better, because they have better qualified people at higher levels.
	I mean, I don't know whether you've noticed, but if people have a natural bias towards women, and when you remove the ability for that bias to operate, they end up hiring men, it's not because of the fact that the other people are women, it's because of the fact the women are not as well qualified as the men, and you can't be biased towards the fact that they're men.
	I think that this can best be explained by the observation that I have had personally, anecdotally, and I'm sure many other people have had, that women are less career-focused than men.
	Men know all they have is their career.
	They don't have another option.
	Women actually do have another option.
	They have the option to get married and have children and not focus on their career and instead dedicate their time to child caring and part-time work.
	Men don't really have that option.
	And you might say, well, actually, legally they do.
	And it's like, well, of course legally they do.
	But socially, it's still not accepted.
	And it's not accepted because men don't want to spend their time with their children.
	It's because women want a provider.
	You can see this everywhere.
	Every time in a woman's magazine, they write an article saying, I'm a highly successful woman, but I can't find a man.
	And it's just the most bizarre thing in the world.
	It's like, well, you're a highly successful woman.
	Why are you looking to marry up?
	But anyway, Professor Hiscock says that he was also keen to point out the public service has a long way to go on gender equality, saying attention should now turn to creating more flexible working conditions and training.
	Right, okay, so the entire system has to change in order to try and encourage more women into it.
	Well, if it was a working system before, and it had, say, 33% women working in the system, why does that need to change?
	I mean the women working in it are clearly comfortable with the conditions that they're working in, and it's obviously functioning best this way because it was just left to the devices of the people running the system and they thought, well, we need to set up the most effective system possible.
	And so they created a meritocratic system.
	And when you make it more meritocratic, you end up getting more men in these systems.
	But this is not acceptable.
	I mean, I personally, I mean, my desire is to have a highly meritocratic society, a competitive society.
	I don't care about the diversity in a place.
	I mean, I'm not against it being diverse.
	I just don't care.
	It's just not something that bothers me.
	I've seen that as a consequence of sort of liberal systems and meritocracies, and people being allowed to choose their own life path.
	You're going to get more people in some areas than others because of their natural inclinations.
	And I think people should be free to follow these natural inclinations.
	I don't think that the rest of the world should be handicapped because of a certain set group.
	But I love this particular bit.
	Men continue to outnumber women at senior ranks of the public service despite vastly outnumbering men in the rank and file.
	Yes, women are not as career-focused as men, and so they are less likely to try and push their careers to the very upper echelons.
	But I mean, to be fair, most men aren't that career focused either and also don't try to become CEOs and whatnot of these institutions.
	It's just the sort of people who are going to, and I'm not kidding.
	You are effectively sacrificing your life in like 60 to 80 hour working weeks.
	Those sorts of people are fairly rare and they tend to be male.
	There has been a lot of effort made to improving diversity in public servants and the subjects of our trial are fairly senior.
	This project shows that the status quo at the moment is to be supportive of hiring more women in the public service.
	In fact, it appears that there is a bias, a measurable bias, in favour of hiring women.
	And that's when you're not including the idea of gender quotas.
	I mean, I would think that professors would be studying the actions of men taken throughout their lives that led them to the point where they end up in a blind CV application to appear to be the best candidate.
	And that's what you should be encouraging women to do.
	And I think you'll probably find women saying, yeah, but that's a lot of work.
	And that's more work than I'm prepared to put in.
	I mean, don't wrong, as a man, it's more work than I'm prepared to put in as well.
	You know, I mean, I'm not suggesting this is a character fault or anything, but you're going to have to look at the actual actions they've taken, aren't you?
	You're not going to be able to say, well, it's about men or women.
	The fact that this is all a giant shock just goes to show you the ideological premises these people are working from.
	I mean, if we prevent people from knowing the gender, then surely women are going to do better because women are being held back by the fact that it's mostly men in these jobs, when in fact, that's not true from your own research.
	So why are we even having this conversation?
	It looks like this is research done to try and prove a point, rather than research done to try and figure out what's true.
	And now this is not going to achieve the goal of diversity, and it's blown up in their faces.
	They want to put a stop to it, even though it's probably creating more competent workplaces.
	Moving on to the next story.
	We should play a game of Stormfront or SJW.
	Who do you think wrote this?
	I'm glad the Dyke March banned Jewish stars.
	I'm sure that people who regularly watch will recognise this as being the New York Times font, so you'll know it's SJW, but it could have gone either way, couldn't it?
	This weekend at a lesbian march in Chicago, three women carrying Jewish pride flags, rainbow flags embossed with the Star of David, were kicked out of the celebration on the grounds that the flags were a trigger.
	An organizer of the Dyke March told the Windy City Times that the fabric made people feel unsafe and that she and other members of the Dyke March Collective didn't want anything that can inadvertently or advertently express Zionism at the event.
	This is quite hilarious for many reasons, and not because it's a bunch of people who claim to be fighting for ethnic minorities who appear to actively be oppressing a group of ethnic minorities, but also because the sort of messianic, fundamentalist, conservative Jews are very much anti-Zionism, and so it's not like being a Jew is synonymous with being a Zionist.
	And you know what, they're anti-Zionism for a funny reason.
	I can't remember the exact details of it, but basically, it's because the wrong person set up the State of Israel, or the wrong country set up the State of Israel.
	And to fit in with their messianic end times prophecies, it needs to be a different group.
	It was explained to me the other day, but I can't remember the actual details of it.
	I'll find it and look it up and do a thinkery video about it or something at some point.
	One of the women who was ejected said she'd been carrying the Jewish pride flag in March, held on Saturday before the city's official pride parade, for more than a decade.
	It celebrates my queer Jewish identity.
	Well, I think there's your problem.
	Why are you talking to me about your queer Jewish identity?
	I mean, this is what I hate about all of this.
	It's like, well, you decided to play the game of identity politics.
	You decided to go around parading, hey, this is what I am.
	And if someone takes objection to your identity on the grounds of intersectional identity politics, which appears to be something you are content with, then I can't say, well, you didn't have it coming.
	Because you did have it coming.
	This is what happens when you get in bed with these people.
	They will start using your identities against you.
	And let's be fair, I mean, Jewish people do really well in Western societies, even if you weren't a Zionist.
	I mean, the major complaint is about the State of Israel, and a Zionist is someone who believes the State of Israel has a right to exist.
	So the major complaint is that the State of Israel is oppressive to the Palestinians, and the Palestinians suddenly become representative of all Muslims.
	And then if you look at the success of Jewish people in Western society, then suddenly the Jewish people seem to be a privileged group, even though they went through a terrible Holocaust.
	And as Thomas Soule shows, when Jewish immigrants arrived from Russia and Poland and Eastern Europe, they didn't have the advantages they had now.
	There was a great deal of anti-Semitism around, but not only that, the average Jewish IQ was something like 95.
	But over generations of education and higher learning, the average Jewish IQ is now around 110, 115.
	So it's not like they haven't worked for it.
	They've come to meritocratic societies, worked really hard, and been successful.
	And lo and behold, we see Jewish people at high levels and positions of power across our nations.
	It's not a surprise.
	It would actually be weird if they weren't.
	And it's actually, it's the same with Asians.
	They work hard, they get good educations, they end up with high IQs, and therefore they end up doing very well for themselves.
	I can't think of a better demonstration of how Western countries, Western liberal democracies, are actually lands of opportunity for the people who are prepared to work for it.
	I think that's a fantastic sign.
	The author makes a good observation here that we've articulated, but I think this is nicely and concisely done, so I thought I'd include it.
	They say that in practice, intersectionality functions as a kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how their particular caste has suffered throughout history.
	Victimhood in the intersectional way of seeing the world is akin to sainthood.
	Power and privilege are profane.
	I like the way they've laid that out, because that's exactly what this is.
	It is a caste system.
	There is a caste of untouchables at the bottom, which are the white, straight white men.
	But it doesn't just stop with Jews either.
	It also affects Muslim immigrants from the Middle East who are LGBT and who are complaining about the oppressive, highly conservative, theocratic regimes in those countries, and how these regimes oppress LGBT people.
	Naturally, social justice warriors have to shut these people down too.
	Thank you.
	Is people supposed to know what's going on in our world?
	Well, that lady was absolutely right.
	These people have never been to the Middle East and they probably will never go.
	And what's worse is they have a narrative about Islam that paints Islam as a giant monolith with no discerning differences between any Muslim sects.
	And that's really why now they're oppressing these poor gay Muslims who are complaining about the theocratic oppression they suffered back in their home countries.
	It's incredible, isn't it?
	And now it looks like Islamic fundamentalists are getting wrapped up with social justice because social justice is incapable of distinguishing between two types of Muslims.
	Student union president sparks controversy by saying she would like to oppress white people that everyone should read the Quran and men and women must not be friends.
	This undoubtedly seems wild and outrageous to liberals on the outside who don't know anything about this, especially progressives who view Islam as one giant happy-go-lucky sunshine and rainbows monolith.
	But this is completely standard Islamic thought and this isn't even really that fundamentalist either.
	You do not have to be too much of a Quranic and Hadithic literalist to have this interpretation from Islam.
	Zamzam Ibrahim, who was elected president of Salford University Student Union in March, has suggested that friendship between men and women is un-Islamic and is opposed to the government's anti-radicalization policy.
	Well she's right.
	It is un-Islamic.
	The more Islamic you decide to become, the less you want men and women mingling for fear of them having illicit relationships outside of marriage.
	In one message she responded to a question on Ask FM about what book everyone should read.
	She said the Quran.
	We would have an Islamic takeover.
	Okay.
	Jesus, alright.
	I don't think that that many liberals would be persuaded by the Quran.
	I mean I read it.
	I wasn't persuaded.
	I, in fact, was looking at this thinking, right, okay, anything that comes out of this is going to be illiberal by definition.
	It's just not, it's never going to work in our societies.
	We could never have laws based on this book.
	In another message on the topic of the possibility between friendship between man and woman, she replied, I've had this debate with many friends.
	Maybe in some cases, but Islamically, it's incorrect for girls to be friends with a guy anyway.
	See, it's just ideology.
	She's just spouting Islamist ideology there.
	So I'm going to say no, not the kind of friendship they can have for the same gender.
	There's always boundaries.
	Well, there we go.
	I mean, this is just, again, it's completely orthodox.
	This is why you will often see in sort of Diobandi mosques in Britain and in Canada as well, gender segregation.
	I mean, it's not every mosque is gender segregated, but the more fundamentalist ones absolutely are, because that's a fundamentalist perspective from Islam.
	And she had also previously tweeted in 2012, if I was president, I'd oppress white people just to give them a taste of what they put us through.
	Sorry, what what what you know when the British conquered Egypt, Lord Kitchener absolutely forbade proselytization to Christianity.
	He said, no, they must be free to keep their religion.
	Amazing.
	It's not something that you get the opposite way around, is it?
	Oh, and I thought it might be worth noting that there is now a no-go zone app that allows Parisians to report and locate aggression and other crimes.
	In addition to being many other things, the free market is also a weather vane for society's problems.
	The No GoZone app allows others to share instances of aggression, theft, harassment, or incivility in the city and mark the location of those events on a map.
	Others can view the entries, allowing them to be informed about what's happening around them.
	So this app's had around 1 to 5,000 downloads, and the reviews for it are mostly positive, with many users calling it essential and an excellent idea.
	In what appeared to be a reference to France's immigration population, one user called the app an indispensable application for anyone who thinks that cultural enrichment of non-natives is not compatible with our way of life.
	Of course, there were counter-reviews on this, ones that branded it a false alert, and wondered if the creators or the people using it were liable to prosecution for potentially using fake information.
	And I imagine it was probably really racist.
	So we'll finish this week with the absolutely wokest take I can imagine.
	MSNBC contributor.
	Hillary lost because Obama is black.
	I can't wait to hear the rationale for this.
	So MSNBC contributor Wendy Sherman believes that Hillary Clinton may have lost the election because it was too hard for America to elect the first female president directly after the first black president.
	It was nothing to do with the candidate for America's first female president being also the worst candidate that could have been fielded out of practically any of them on the basis of her corruption and lifelong politicking and the fact that she's totally unlikable and clearly, clearly had nothing really redeeming about her apart from the fact that she was a perennial insider.
	In a time where perennial insiders were the problem that people were railing against.
	Nah, they're complex questions and require complex solutions.
	It's much easier to just say, well, it's because Obama was black.
	She says, Obama's major mode of communication was the traditional one.
	Big speeches, some of which were powerful and brilliant.
	Yes, he was a fantastic orator.
	And I hesitate to say it, but I think it's critical, looking at our audience, looking out at most of us, that there is no doubt that we just had eight years of an African-American president is not a factor in all we are experiencing today.
	When we make social change, when we make a decision to do something we have never done before, we then take two steps backwards at least.
	And I believe in my bones that it was pretty hard to elect a woman after we elected the first African-American president.
	So there was a social experiment done where men read out Hillary Clinton's policies and her lines and things that she'd said in general, and they were found to be highly unpopular, regardless of the fact that it was men saying it.
	Unfortunately, as I record this, my internet's down, so I can't go and find the example for you to show you.
	I'll see if I can put a link in the description or something when my internet's back up and I can put this back up.
	But yeah, it's nothing to do with the fact that Hillary is a woman.
	Nothing.
	I mean, I think that there was a lot of people who probably, if it had been someone like Tulsi Gabbard or something like that, someone who had been respectable and didn't have a history of corruption and insider dealing and just, I'm not even going to start listing Hillary's problems.
	It would take too long.
	If someone without Hillary Clinton's career, and a war hawk, no, I'm not going to start.
	If it was any other woman who didn't have Hillary's career, she probably would kick Trump's ass.
	But the point is, you put up Hillary Clinton and it's because of her connections within the system that it had to be Hillary Clinton and everyone who didn't have a bias and so many people were against her.
	I mean, she said in, I think it was a Woman in the World panel where she said that it was WikiLeaks that really helped sink her.
	She never addressed the fact that it was WikiLeaks showing people what she did that helped sink her.
	Oh no.
	It was just the fact that WikiLeaks existed.
	And they're all sat there on the stage living in this little bubble where they're just leaving out the convenient fact that if it's WikiLeaks that sunk her, and they can all acknowledge it's Wikileaks that did this, and they were, that it must have been the content of the Wikileaks releases that had done this.
	And so they're all just playing into this giant fiction on the stage that Hillary is in fact a respectable politician and it did nothing wrong.
	And it was just the fact that everyone's a misogynist and Wikileaks are anti-American or some bollocks.
	And it's just like, no, get out.
	You're terrible.
	Everyone knows you're terrible.
	And the people supporting you are people who generally just hate Donald Trump because he's a borish, arrogant jerk.
	But it is lovely to see that the Clinton camp is still living in total denial.
	They should be listening to the Justice Democrats.
	They should be listening to the Young Turks Network.
	They should actually be paying attention and saying, hey, look, you guys have got it wrong.
	So, I mean, seriously, good luck to the Justice Democrats.
	Get these corporate swine out of your party.
	I mean, I'll probably still disagree when the identity politics poison continues to seep in, despite the best efforts of people who support the Justice Democrats who understand that identity politics is not a vote winner.

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