Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - This Week in Stupid (27⧸08⧸2017)

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Aug. 27, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

24:28

This Week in Stupid (27⧸08⧸2017)

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	Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 27th of August 2017.
	I had to look at my clock there because I'm really hungover and it's really hot here.
	And we're going to pretend like it's not really hot and I'm not really hungover and we're going to have a good episode this week, I promise.
	But before I tell you about what's going to happen, I am on gab.ai because that's where all the neo-Nazis go these days.
	Obviously, after my Twitter ban, I thought, well, I need somewhere to be able to make short public statements.
	And I don't like using my Facebook account for that because I was suspended for three days for refuting neo-Nazis.
	Why is this happening?
	You are not allowed to talk the neo-Nazis out of being neo-Nazis?
	What the fuck is going on?
	It's stupid.
	If we can't refute neo-Nazi arguments, then what's stopping people from believing them?
	Gab seems like a perfectly serviceable replacement for Twitter.
	It has a new section and hashtags.
	I actually really like that.
	You know, it's rather nice to actually agree with The Guardian on something for once.
	I can't recall the last time I actually did agree with the Guardian on anything.
	So it's just nice to see that there are things that we can find common ground on.
	The first thing being, locking up people indefinitely is inhumane and this practice needs to end.
	Yes, it does.
	So in a review that was published in 2016, it turns out that there are just under 3,000 people who are being detained indefinitely for some reason.
	And as you can see by the note on the side, detention is not a particularly effective means of ensuring that those with no right to remain do in fact leave the UK.
	I agree.
	They should be repatriated forthwith.
	Why are we detaining people who we don't want here?
	Just because they arrived here when we didn't want them.
	Send them back.
	Apparently, today's statistics show that over half of the people who are being detained are released into their communities rather than being removed from the UK.
	No, remove them all from the UK.
	You have the 3,000 there.
	Just send them back to where they came from.
	How is this not something that's very easy to resolve?
	So this is the kind of headline that really stands out to me these days, because you can't really tell who wrote it.
	New York Times continues its tradition of whitewashing communism.
	Is this written by a communist who's complaining that they're not including black communists in their description of communism?
	Or is it written by a conservative?
	Or is it written by...
	I mean, God, who knows?
	alt-right?
	You know, you just can't tell from the title itself what political faction wrote it.
	And it's not because it doesn't have an agenda.
	It clearly has an agenda.
	It's just there are so many people who have the same agenda on the same subject who write headlines about this subject that you just can't tell.
	Turns out it comes from a traditional conservative.
	The main contention with this article is that they posted a puff piece on Lenin in the New York Times, which is pretty remarkable, really.
	The article titled Lenin's Eco-Warriors paints them out as some sort of Siberian John Muir and incredibly concludes that leaving landscapes on this planet where humans do not tread was the Soviet dictator's legacy.
	I would have considered this to be one of the least important aspects of Vladimir Lenin, but what do I know?
	I'm not a communist.
	What is interesting though is a little aside at the bottom of the article.
	A worrying study sponsored by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation that millennials are generally clueless about communism.
	Just 37% of millennials had a very unfavourable view of communism compared to 57% of Americans overall.
	Perhaps even worse, a full third of millennials say they think more people were killed under President George Bush than Stalin.
	You know, what's really interesting is that I don't like George Bush either.
	He's not that bad.
	And even Noam Chomsky can see that the communists in our midst, you know, of the anarcho-variety, are a real problem and we need to expunge them because they are a major gift to the right.
	They are.
	Absolutely.
	In fact, they're a major gift to anyone who isn't a defender of the far left, which is almost everyone who isn't in the media.
	Even moderate centre-lefties like myself will say, no, I disagree with antifar.
	I disagree with unprovoked violence against even Nazis, because I'm afraid we have a system of universal rights, and Nazis at this point are still people, despite the repeated attempts to unperson them and drive them out of society, which I am afraid is not something we're actually going to be able to do, because that would be called oppression.
	So Chomsky says, as for Antifar, it's a minuscule fringe of the left, just as its predecessors were.
	It's a major gift to the right, including the militant right, who are exuberant.
	What they do is often wrong in principle, like blocking talks, and the movement is generally self-destructive.
	When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it's the toughest and most brutal who win, and we know who that is.
	Yes, it's not anti-far.
	Believe it or not, being a middle-class university educator or student, that's quite apart from the opportunity costs, the loss of the opportunity for education, organising, and serious and constructive activism.
	Well, I mean, I appreciate that you make that point, and that's correct.
	But don't you think that's just wildly optimistic at this point?
	The idea that the far left is capable of serious and constructive activism.
	I mean, have you seen what they've been doing?
	I absolutely adore this criticism from Eleanor Penny, who has written extensively on fascism and the far right.
	She told The Independent, Chomsky treats the battle against fascism as a battle for moral purity that can be won when the left remains respectful, polite, and deferent.
	Well, it's been a while since that's happened, hasn't it?
	When was the left last respectful or polite, let alone deferent?
	She added, but fascists have no interest in winning that battle.
	They don't care about respecting free speech or the right to a fair trial.
	Are you fucking serious?
	Neither do the people you're defending.
	I mean, they are actually out there burning flags that say free speech.
	They're actually assaulting people for having the wrong fucking haircuts.
	And you think, oh, it's the fascists that are the problem here?
	No.
	The fascists have a really fucking unpopular opinion.
	Antifar are actually hurting people.
	They've openly declared their murderous intent towards people of colour.
	Well, you've openly declared your murderous intent towards fascists.
	I'm sorry, but openly declaring murderous intent, regardless of the people you target, is where you lose the argument.
	Fucking hell, that's why they're so fucking marginal.
	Do you understand that?
	That's why everyone looks at them and goes, these people are fucking idiots.
	And then you come along like a bigger group of fucking idiots and say stupider things.
	And then it's just like, wow, that's a huge group of fucking retards over there.
	And then you start chucking stones and punching people and stabbing people.
	And then something happens on this side.
	For example, I don't know.
	A car runs into another car and kills a protester and suddenly you think this group did nothing wrong.
	You can get fucked, okay?
	Just get fucked.
	This tiny group of fascists on the right have every right to, and that's actually my left, but it should be your right.
	Have every right to actually go out and demonstrate and protest for whatever ridiculous, offensive, backwards, regressive point of view that they have.
	You do not have the right to go out and attack them for it.
	That's as simple as I can make it.
	That's why you're in the wrong and they're actually less wrong than you are in this situation.
	And they've got the stupidest beliefs in the world, as do you.
	I mean, there was an article I just went past on this thing.
	You know, oh, alt-right people are doing genetic tests and it's not coming out well for them.
	Yes!
	Genetic purity is not something that exists in the human race, by and large.
	Stupid.
	Even if it did so, fucking what?
	So what?
	It changes nothing.
	It's a bunch of retards having it out in a competition to be the most retarded.
	And it's so good.
	Who wants that crown?
	We are actually looking at the prelude to a civil war.
	At least that's what the media would have you believe.
	And of course, it's Donald Trump's fault that the Nazi threat has been revived.
	He did it personally.
	You know that explicit condemnation of the KKK and neo-Nazis?
	Well, that wasn't good enough.
	Donald Trump isn't condemning these people hard enough.
	In fact, he's breathing life into them.
	Is he doing it?
	Is he?
	Is he the one bringing up the alt-right every day of the week?
	Or is it you?
	Is it the media?
	Is it the Guardian?
	Is it the Independent?
	Is it Salon?
	Is it fucking the New York Times?
	Is it the Wall Street Journal?
	Is it the mainstream media, the liberal elite?
	The fucking progressive intelligentsia?
	Is it you people who have made the alt-right a household name?
	Because the alt-right certainly didn't do that on their fucking own.
	Jesus Christ, you are a fucking unself-aware cancer.
	This whole thing just really pisses me off.
	He says, sure, there is still some fallout from the 12th of August march by neo-Nazis, white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as from Donald Trump's subsequent declaration that those racists and fascists who carried flaming torches and swastika flags included some very fine people with a link.
	If I click that link, is Donald Trump going to be talking about both sides of this?
	And saying something like, oh, I don't know, let's have a look.
	You have people that were very fine people on both sides.
	Not all of those people were neo-Nazis.
	Oh, so Donald Trump is jumping to the not-all argument.
	You should be really fucking familiar with that.
	Are you actually going to criticize him for saying that not all of them are neo-Nazis?
	Because he might actually be correct there.
	I don't think every single one of them is a neo-nazi and he's again just doing it is a moral equivalence.
	And he's saying, look, both sides have good people, both sides have bad people, and the bad people are causing trouble.
	And you're taking exception to this.
	Despite the fact this is empirical, observable reality.
	We have more than enough proof of what he's just said there.
	You fucking hacks.
	There are reverberations too from the president's initial non-condemnation condemnation, except that he was condemning both sides, which they do say.
	And then he came out just to condemn one side because you kept going on about that one side.
	Despite having absolute cancer on the other side and you're not giving a shit.
	So he winds on about Trump's outrage after outrage.
	And then he says, we become punch drunk.
	It's like, yeah, you do sound like you're losing your fucking marbles.
	And to be honest with you, that's one of the things I like about Trump.
	I honestly do not care about any of his proposals anymore.
	All I care about now is the fact that he's fucking ruining you.
	Because you deserve it.
	But if Trump succeeds in moving past Charlottesville, it won't be only thanks to the unavoidable process of attrition that has worn liberals down.
	Right, so it is a war.
	You are saying that this is war.
	This is, you are trying to get rid of Trump and you're feeling tired fighting the system that has put him in place and retains his position.
	That's what you're saying, is this is just a tiring war, right?
	Which is why another fucking lunatic on The Guardian is just like, neutrality is dead.
	You're either with Trump or against him.
	It's George Bush's rhetoric.
	Well done.
	You found it.
	You finally got to the point where you're just declaring you're either with us or against us.
	Guess what, liberal elite?
	Not that many people are going to be with you because you are fucking insufferable.
	And the thing is, this article isn't really worth reading through.
	It's really dull.
	It's about a guy who doesn't really care about politics and therefore she's basically declaring him to be one of a Nazi sympathizer.
	And then going on about the death and then going on about Charlottesville.
	I just don't care.
	Press advisor responsible for finding positive news about Trump leaves his job.
	They don't actually give a reason for him leaving in the article.
	They just say it was a mutual decision, which I'm going to assume means the guy just couldn't do the job, because after working 17 hour days, and we already know that 80% of press coverage of Trump is negative, and this may well have gone up, it's probably just really fucking difficult.
	So you might be surprised that I found this on salon.com.
	Donald Trump is right about something.
	There really is an alt-left, but it's even weirder than he thinks.
	I'm not surprised, but this sounds interesting, doesn't it?
	I mean, I just can't believe it's an article on Salon that's, well, not necessarily anti-Trump.
	Interestingly, the author cites a Christian nationalist and the founder of conspiracy website WorldNet Daily.
	He gives us his definition of the alt-left, and it's pretty good, actually.
	It's a movement of phony self-righteousness and compassion, quote-unquote, that it uses to gain power.
	It will do anything and say anything to achieve its goal of hamlock control of not only government, but of every single cultural institution, from schools, universities, to the press, to churches, foundations, Hollywood, and unions.
	It has created a self-funding mechanism that includes a club of guilt-ridden billionaires who insulate themselves from attack by donating to the alt-left causes.
	It also uses shakedown tactics to intimidate cowering corporations into doing its political and cultural bidding.
	And here's the kicker, it's racist to the core.
	Well, he's identified the regressive left perfectly adequately there.
	These social justice warriors are the alt-left.
	And I'm perfectly happy to use that term.
	I think it's perfectly acceptable if we are going to call the alt-right the alt-right, that we refer to these people as the alt-left because they are just a mirror image of one another.
	He bottomlines all of this by saying, unless you're trying to describe a left-wing fascist, you should probably not be throwing around the term alt-right.
	Yes, we are trying to describe left-wing fascists.
	That's exactly what we're doing.
	The sort of people who will shut down free speech, the sorts of people who will attack people randomly in the streets.
	In fact, on the subject of attacking people randomly in the streets, why don't I show you the latest example?
	Here's some chap who is an anti-white nationalist protester who was punched in the face after being mistaken for a neo-Nazi at the Boston rally that, if I recall correctly, didn't have any neo-Nazis at it.
	But it did have a huge crowd of quote-unquote anti-fascist protesters who apparently couldn't identify the fascists.
	But let's see what happened to this guy.
	Do not hit somebody that you assume is a neo-Nazi.
	You cannot do that.
	He's on our own.
	Do not do that.
	So you confirm that they're a Nazi before you punch them.
	But the thing is, we know who is creating the Nazis, and it is the left.
	There's always been a small core of neo-Nazi white supremacist types, but they've never been able to gain any traction because nobody gives a shit.
	Because nobody wanted to have a white identity.
	But the slightly hysterical tone about race has, yes, driven more and more people who are primed to think in racial terms to think about their own race in racial terms.
	And that's what's creating the Nazis.
	They're choosing their side, and it's not your side.
	And it's not my side, which is also not your side.
	And they're going to a side that isn't my side either.
	So well done.
	But don't take my word for it, this is the opinion of Mark Liller, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University and author of the new book, Once and Future Liberal After Identity Politics.
	Oh, I think he's accurately identified the problem.
	So this is a rather long article about this interview, but I'm going to pull out this one part because I think this really makes the point, right?
	So the interviewer says, I'm not sure who's focusing on groups.
	You quoted a Hillary Clinton speech where she would mention other groups, but broadly speaking, it seemed like she was offering a program that said every American should have healthcare, every American should have a right to a good education, whatever the democratic agenda of the day is.
	Obviously, the Hillary Clinton campaign was screwed up in all kinds of ways, and there were all sorts of things that could change, but I guess my main concern is that, do you feel at all that maybe you're taking what's going on on college campuses and putting that onto the country as a whole of the Democratic Party as a whole?
	This is something you'll see constantly from people who you could broadly term the liberal elite, which is what we're going to talk about.
	But the good professor makes a fair point.
	Liberal elites in this country, and not just in the party, but also in the media, in the legal profession, are produced by the university now.
	Democratic Party elites used to be mayors, governors, counter commissioners, union officials.
	People and farmers who are shaped by those experiences out in the world after the 72 election that changed the rules.
	Those people were pushed out of power, and now it's the college-educated who run the party and are the leading figures in American progressivism and liberalism.
	They come out of this university, and this way of looking at politics rubs off on them.
	They just don't understand the people they are opposed to.
	And this is very interesting as well.
	I write in the book about the websites of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
	You look at the website of the Republican Party, and smack in the middle of it is a list of 11 principles.
	11 sentences of what we stand for.
	That's the product of thought.
	That's the product of a lot of debates that happened in the Conservative movement.
	Until a few weeks ago, if you looked at the Democratic Party website, you would find no such statement.
	Instead, you would go to the bottom and find a link to 17 different groups, most of them identity groups.
	That's our inability to articulate a vision.
	It's a mess, and it doesn't cohere because there's no sense of a governing principle behind it.
	The Republicans have that.
	That's very interesting.
	And what I would love to see is for major left-wing parties and groups to come out and give a statement of principles.
	That would be something to see, wouldn't it?
	Because you would be able to actually analyze that in a philosophical framework and find out exactly where these people are coming from, what they stand for, and what they really are.
	But instead, they just advocate for policies because they sound good and they can be appealed to on a moral level rather than on a level of principle.
	So the interviewer spends more time arguing with the professor and then he says, we do disagree.
	And frankly, I think you're illustrating my point.
	The fact that liberals have gotten so focused, even in the past three years, America hasn't changed that much.
	We have the problem before, we have the problem now, but now that...
	So the interviewer carries on arguing with the professor, and the professor replies to him with, We do disagree.
	And frankly, I have to say I feel like you are illustrating my point.
	The fact that liberals have gotten so focused, even in the past three years, America hasn't changed that much.
	We had the problem before, we have the problem now.
	But there's been some kind of slightly hysterical tone about race that leads us to overestimate its significance in particular things.
	Which is very true.
	And then the interviewer reacts as if this is an insult.
	Mark.
	We have a racist president.
	Not Mark, not Professor, not any kind of respect.
	Mark.
	We have a racist president who won't condemn neo-Nazis.
	No, you fucking don't.
	You are fucking hysterical.
	Which is exactly the point he is trying to make, you screeching hysterical bitch.
	Sit the fuck down.
	You are irresponsible at this point.
	Now it's not even about whether you're accurate.
	Now it's about how irresponsible you're being by just spouting all of this crap.
	You're saying people overreacting to race?
	Yes.
	And the thing is, I really do think that this fixation on race is one of the aspects that is dividing the left from, well, the common people.
	And the thing is, this is getting large groups motivated against the press.
	Do you understand?
	I mean, this is like, they're getting pissed off with you.
	Really pissed off with you.
	Everyone is really fucking pissed off with you.
	Such as the NRA, who apparently, in a new video, said, we're coming for you, liberal elites.
	And the thing is, if you're one of the liberal elite, if you think there's a civil war coming, you might be right.
	But remember, fuck all people are on your side.
	And the thing is, you guys are pissing off a lot of people.
	Large numbers of people, like the NRA, which is a huge organization.
	Liberal elites, we're coming for you.
	What are you going to do?
	Fight them?
	You're fucking not going to fight any wars, are you?
	You're keyboard warriors, and you know it.
	Using the hashtags counter-resistance and clenched fist of truth, the NRA has put out a series of videos that announce a shot across the bow and say the guns' rights group is coming for you and that the elites threaten our very survival.
	Terms that suggest opponents are enemy combatants.
	Well, who started that?
	You're either with Trump or you're against him.
	Make your choice.
	Liberal elite, it's time to strike a deal with the working class.
	Why would they want to?
	When the civil war comes, they're going to win.
	On the issue of abortion rights, which she calls fundamental to her identity, there's been a significant class difference found since the 1980s.
	The fight over abortion becomes a fight over what it means to be a good person, and that's why things get ugly really fast.
	When elites dismiss abortion opponents as mindless misogynists, and non-elites dismiss abortion rights advocates as selfish careerists, trust me, they dismiss you as way worse than selfish careerists.
	Baby murdering, there's a black baby holocaust going on in America, according to some Christian conservatives.
	Selfish careerists is a really mild way of describing how they dismiss you.
	But she does accurately say that class conflict becomes acute, because that is a problem in America that Americans don't want to deal with.
	There is a huge problem with class in America, and it is, broadly speaking, those people who graduated from university and those people who didn't.
	The people who graduated from university tend to cluster in certain areas overwhelmingly and have nose-in-the-air opinions about themselves and looking down the nose opinions about people who aren't like them.
	She then focuses on the role of hunting and gun ownership for men.
	I'm not going to go through the exact details of it.
	You can read it for yourself.
	I love this.
	It's finally come to acceptance.
	Look, I wish masculinity worked differently, but whether you're poor or privileged, being a man is something that was to be earned over and over again.
	Working class men's relationship to guns is similar to attitudes in the supposedly enlightened Silicon Valley, where work is a masculinity contest and harassing women is just one way of keeping score.
	I don't think that alliance is forthcoming.
	Too often, critics of manliness deride blue-collar men but are silent about educated men's chosen ways of enacting masculinity.
	The problem is that you hate masculinity.
	Okay?
	That's the problem.
	Guys don't hate masculinity.
	Guys embrace it.
	It's actually good for them.
	They like it.
	Masculinity isn't just about harassing women, though, believe it or not.
	No one gets their way all the time.
	That's called a coalition.
	And it's coalitions that win, folks.
	If you want purity, become a priest.
	Politics is for people not afraid of the messy business of living peaceably with people whose most fundamental truths clash with your own.
	And this is very interesting because finally, fucking finally, when the looming threat of civil war is on the horizon, they're like, actually, maybe we could work together.
	Maybe.
	Maria, that, you know, it was a pipe dream that Donald Trump is not going anywhere.
	People are saying impeachment.
	He's going to be there for four years.
	But he has given oxygen to racists.
	He hasn't really said anything, denounced the alt-right.
	He talked about the KKK and whatever.
	He hasn't really done that.
	He is clearly trying to ignite a civil war in this country.
	He has not tamped down race.
	And I'm just going to say, I mean, if he was on my team in this newsroom and said those things, he would be escorted out of the building by- Shut the fuck up, Don.
	Just shut the fuck up.
	Holy shit.
	You are actually comparing working as some fucking intern at CNN with the presidency.
	He doesn't have to worry about what he says.
	He was fucking elected.
	You can't remove him because he is saying things that are dickish.
	Deal with it.
	You are beholden to different standards.
	And I noticed that these days you're not going on about the Russia conspiracy.
	Why is that?
	Oh, because now you've realized that isn't an angle that will get him unseated from the presidency, which is what you have been trying to do from the fucking start.
	You were just basically the Clinton News Network.
	That's what people call you because it's true.
	You're incredibly biased.
	You are, exactly as Stephen Miller says, mired in your fucking cosmopolitan bias.
	And now you're saying that he's the one that's trying to start a civil war.

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