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Sept. 25, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
37:06
This Week in Stupid (24⧸09⧸2017)
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Hello everyone and welcome to This Week in Stupid for the 24th of September 2017.
I'm Jeff Holiday filling in for Sargon of Akhan.
Sargon, as he kind of hinted last week, is currently undercover with the communists in Berkeley.
This week, we have quite a few stupid, stupid articles.
The first one up is from The Independent, and you can always count on The Independent for the pinnacle of journalism.
Here we have, are man caves sexist?
When suicide kills more young men than anything else, we should encourage them to open up, not express themselves behind closed doors.
By Kashmira Gander.
And right off the bat, I have to be wondering, are we going to be femmesplain too about male suicide?
Let's find out.
Mangrenade alternatives to bath bombs, bros wine, and man-sized tissues.
There are plenty of things that prove masculinity is oh so fragile.
But teetering at the top of this pile of useless gendered nonsense is the man cave.
Yes, the man cave is deeply, deeply problematic.
To have a man cave is to truly live in the 1950s, when women ruled the roost and men were Neanderthals who needed to hide their belongings away in a room where they can cast aside the burden of being civilized.
Yes.
That's exactly what we're doing.
We go into our man caves and we start scooping out our feces and throwing it all over the place and hooting and hollering.
They are painted as havens where men can fart and drink beer really fast and swear and do whatever else it is that men stereotypically do.
Sure, men and women don't have to and almost certainly shouldn't hang out all the time.
But isn't an entire cave in which to assert your masculinity a little much?
Even men's magazines like GQ have rejected the archaic idea.
This is absolutely ridiculous.
Is every man cave always built to the same specifications?
Do you have somebody who comes in the man cave inspector to make sure, well, you know, the air quality here is a little low, so I'm going to need you to start farting some more.
You're a little short on your sports memorabilia.
And we need some girls in skimpy bikinis somewhere in here, somewhere in here.
You're way below code, guy.
Way below code.
Besides, what exactly is a man cave anyway?
Thank you.
Man caves have no real definition as they have sort of come to life in popular media and popular imagination, says Tristan Bridges, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Of course it would be a California professor.
Who has studied and visited numerous man caves?
Oh well, bravo, bravo.
I applaud, I applaud your anthropology.
I think most people think of man caves as sports dens, rooms with leather sofas, billiard tables, and in-home bars, but I found the term is used much more widely to talk about home spaces that are culturally masculinized in one way or another.
Sometimes this is in obvious ways that you or I might describe as masculine at a glance.
But other times this has distinct meanings for the couples whose homes have gendered spaces, like puzzle rooms, tinkering dens, or black rooms dedicated to developing photography.
And what exactly would be wrong with that?
It's really strange to me, too, this basic idea of how a man cave could be problematic.
By and large, lots of times, man caves are simply a place where a guy can go to specifically have the things that otherwise his wife doesn't really want in the general part of the house.
If that's a problem for you, maybe you should stop paying so much attention to what other people do.
Nobody is forcing you to have a man cave.
Nobody is forcing any wives to have to marry a man that has to have a man cave.
This is such a non-issue.
It's amazing.
Tristan agrees that man caves support gender inequality in the home.
These spaces often play on the cultural notion that men can't really be themselves when women are around.
That's not what it is at all.
That doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
It's very, very simple.
If you want to have one specific space dedicated to your hobbies, then it's nice to have that space dedicated to your hobbies.
That doesn't mean that the guy doesn't necessarily like the rest of his house.
It means that's where he has his specific special little place that he gets to do whatever he wants.
How in the world is that a problem for you?
Or for anyone?
But maybe we're being a little harsh.
Why shouldn't men have their own space to potter about and relax in the home?
Author of the man cave book, Mike Yost, sees these hideaways as a force for good.
Asked whether they are sexist, he says he's heard this accusation a lot, but says it's a misconception.
Every spouse I've talked to is fully on board with the concept.
As you know, if the spouse doesn't approve of a man cave, it just doesn't happen.
Exactly.
Why?
Why in the world should anybody else be worried about the makeup of anybody else's house?
It's their own private business.
Leave them alone.
But when the pressures of masculinity is literally killing men, suicide takes the lives of more men aged 20 to 49 than road accidents or heart disease in the UK.
Perhaps it's wrong to dismiss the idea that they need unique ways to express themselves and share their emotions.
It seems that what men need is the opposite of a man cave.
I see.
So this writer believes that man caves help to compartmentalize men's emotions so that they don't actually speak about how they feel and thus are encouraging male suicide.
That is a fascinating claim.
Enter the men's sheds movement.
Notice the removal of the degrading term cave.
Started in Australia, these are spaces where men come together to take part in traditionally masculine activities, including woodwork, metalwork, repairing, and restoring.
Women who like these things can come along too.
They are growing at a rate of 8 per month in the UK.
Men's sheds.
It's amazing.
It's not uncommon to hear from men who hadn't spoken to another human in weeks before finding a shed or who had lost their wife, their only companion, and had lost the will to live themselves, says Victoria Little, the director of services in the UK's Men's Sheds Association.
Well, this sounds like a fine idea, but how exactly does this do we need to take away the man cave and implement, I guess, the state-mandated men's sheds?
Aw, it seems like you're a little depressed.
We're gonna have to dismantle your man cave and instead we're gonna move you to the man's shed.
Many men, though, of course, not all, find it much more difficult to socialize than women do, and the activities put on by organizations for people in later life with the aim of social engagement are taken up by far more women, including social dining and lunch clubs, book clubs, knit and natter, with less provision to engage older men.
That's why men's sheds are such a breakthrough.
Well, the idea sounds fine, again, but how in the world does that take away from the man cave?
The man cave is just a man cave, the man's shed is the men's shed.
This basically, this seems like this person has a problem with man caves because they believe that the man cave is a place of suffering, whereas the man cave usually by and large is used as a place of expression and freedom for a guy.
Next up, we have some entertainment news.
Trump-trolling Emmys serve up evening of low lights.
The award show was predictably ruined by Hollywood's single-minded obsession with the president.
No one deserves a bigger gratitude than the first responders, Emmys host Stephen Colbert said during his opening monologue, thanking emergency personnel for working tirelessly following the disasters in Texas and Florida.
And we have to thank also the friends who showed up with the flood, the neighbors with boats, the nuns of chainsaws, complete strangers who stepped up to help rebuild.
That set in motion an evening of national pride and unity as award winner after award winner praised American grit, resourcefulness, and courage during the recent disasters.
Just kidding, after that opening salute to first responders, it was pretty much non-stop pot shots at President Trump for the rest of the evening.
Yet, once again, Hollywood's aim proved faulty as it took out its own big toe.
Colbert had Sean Spicer on stage to promise the largest audience to witness an Emmys, period, both in person and around the world.
The joke would have worked better if it hadn't been part of a show drawing a rating 10% lower in the 18 to 49 demographic than the previous low.
Or to put it in an even crueler way, at any given time last night, 96% of Americans weren't watching the Emmys.
And honestly, at this point, living in America, I have to say, I think most people are kind of burned out on awards shows.
It's always very ham-fisted when they start bringing politics into it.
Sometimes the message is good and sometimes it's important, but to say that it's a unifying thing for us to just worship at the feet of celebrities more, nah, I think Americans are getting a little tired of it.
They're not really that fun anymore.
In the process of tossing many barbed jokes Trump's way, including one suggesting the president had committed treason, Colbert also invited or begged Trump to tweet angrily in response, but the chief executive has so far declined.
The co-edependent relationship of celebrities to Trump is like that of two bitter drunken spouses who hurl abuse at each other before they start making out.
You wish they would just forget about each other and go their separate ways, but you know they need each other too much.
Maybe it's that filthy centrism inside of me, but honestly, when I look at these types of situations, I can't really cheer for either side.
I've never been a very big fan of the president having a Twitter account that he shitposts on pretty constantly, but seeing celebrities trying to go after him as well, it's not like taking pot shots of the president is especially clever or edgy.
We've been doing it for decades, decades and decades.
It just so happens it's a lot easier with Trump.
Several of the winners made snarky anti-Trump remarks.
We did have a whole storyline about impeachment, but we abandoned that because we were worried that someone else might get to it first, said Veep star Julia Louise Dreyfus, who also appeared in the opening musical number in which she's saying, Imagine if your president was not beloved by Nazis.
That song dropped in references to global warming in the Middle East and even made a plea for transgendered individuals to serve in the military.
Lily Tomlin, appearing with her 9-5 co-stars Jane Vonda and Dolly Parton, said, in 2017, we still refuse to be controlled by a sexist, egotist, lying, hypocritical bigot.
Is it any wonder why the ratings are so low on this show?
These shows are part of escapism.
That's part of what television and movies are.
Of course you can have a message.
Of course you can try and push out something that's allegorical or even sometimes just flat out in your face a message.
And that's fine.
But award shows are supposed to be fun.
They're supposed to be fun.
They're not supposed to be activist shows.
People want to have fun.
It was, surprisingly, left to the one Emmy winner most strongly identified with mocking Trump to provide a vital moment of perspective.
Alec Baldwin, who won Best Supporting Actor, Comedy for his Saturday Night Live Impression of Trump, offered this reflection.
When you die, you don't remember a bill that Congress passed or a decision the Supreme Court made or an address made by the president.
You remember a song.
You remember a line from a movie.
You remember a play.
You remember a book, a painting, a poem.
And that's exactly it.
Maybe you should keep your award shows to the awards, to the fun, to the glitz, to the glamour, to the celebrities, and leave your activism for another time.
Switching gears, let's go and look over at The Guardian.
Ban social media trolls from voting, Election Watchdog suggests.
Electoral Commission says bans could be considered in an attempt to reduce the amount of abuse faced by politicians.
Banning social media trolls from the voting could help reduce the amount of abuse faced by politicians, the Election Watchdog has said.
The Electoral Commission says legislation around elections should be reviewed and new offenses could be introduced.
In the Commission's submission to a Committee on Standards and Public Life inquiry into the intimidation of political candidates, officials say many offenses under electoral law date back to the 1800s or earlier.
Offenses dating back to the 1800s or earlier.
Are you serious?
Then how does this have anything to do with social media trolls?
They say some electoral offenses can result in the offender being disqualified from voting or from registering to vote.
Such deterrence could be considered to stop abuse of people, the submission says.
In some instances, electoral law does specify offenses in respect of behavior that could also amount to an offense under the general criminal law.
Well, I'm sorry, but being a public figure means that you're going to receive abuse.
It happens to everyone, regardless of if they're a politician or not.
And again, I have to say, just because you're a politician does not mean that you're any more free or should be more protected from online harassment and abuse than an average citizen.
And of course, if these are actual real direct threats of harm that are criminally prosecutable, it should be.
Absolutely.
But not in any other way different than how an average citizen's abuse and harassment is going to be punished.
Why should politicians get special consideration because that?
That effectively makes them a different class of citizen than everyone else.
That doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
Alright, let's go from mildly stupid to incredibly stupid.
Here in the Daily Mail, there's an article.
Labor youth officer 18 causes outrage after expressing solidarity with North Korea and claiming they only have nuclear weapons to keep themselves safe.
Sarah Kundi is a chair of Canterbury Momentum, which supports Jeremy Corbyn.
Of course she does.
She caused outrage because she had a North Korean flag on her Twitter profile.
The 18-year-old is mortified and apologized if she caused anyone any offense.
Well, I hate to tell you this, dear, but you did.
You absolutely did.
Maybe waving around a flag of a brutal, brutal dictator who abuses his own citizenry is fashionable where you come from, but to most normal people, that's not a good idea.
The youth officer of the Canterbury constituency Labor Party also displayed the flags of Venezuela, Cuba, and Palestine on her profile.
Charming.
It comes as North Korea and its supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, have faced international condemnation for missiles tests and nuclear weapons programs.
I also think we should probably mention that they did fire a tactical weapon over an allied nation.
You know, that might be kind of an interesting thing to put in there, but, you know, this is just for defense, you know.
She posted online, the flags in my bio represent countries I have solidarity with.
Well, maybe you should move there.
I have solidarity with countries willing to stand up to imperialism.
The DPRK, or the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, have weapons to keep themselves and their populations safe from invasion.
They don't want to end up like Libya.
I do not endorse their strikes over Japan, but 3 million Korean people were killed in the Korean War by America.
Well, it wasn't just by Americans.
I'd rather have solidarity with DPRK than the USA.
Well, that's fine.
That's perfectly fine.
We can do without your solidarity.
Miss Kundi from Canterbury, Kent, faced a backlash online with Twitter users questioning her stance on North Korea.
Critics on the social media site accused her of being a friend of dictatorship, and that's honestly a little hard to counter there.
Emma Wasp wrote, happy to see you aligned with communist dictatorship, which aspires to kill 51 million in a nuclear war.
There is that inconvenient fact that they have been promising to, well, wipe out America.
Miss Kundi, who was educated at the Simon Langton Girls Grammar School, was mortified and apologized if she offended anyone.
She told Mail Online, I really regret my comments and apologize if I've caused anyone any offense.
As somebody who believes strongly in democracy, I'm not supportive of oppressive regimes, and the flag was intended in support of the citizens.
I would also ask people to remember some of the silly things they said and did when they were 18 and regard my comments in the same light.
And in this way, I can actually have some compassion for this young lady because I too said some pretty dumb things when I was 18.
This is quite a gaffe though.
And if it wasn't for the fact that she was working in politics, I don't think anyone would have cared.
But that is part of your responsibility.
If you are working in politics, you need to be paying attention to everything in your public profile.
How the public views you is incredibly important.
A Momentum spokesperson added, What she has said isn't in line with Momentum's view and is not representative of the views of Momentum's membership.
While she regrets her comments, we are currently investigating these comments and will take appropriate action based on her code of ethics and constitution, which they should.
They absolutely should.
And honestly, a word of warning to anybody who does want to get into politics: start scrubbing your social media profiles right now, right now, because if there's anything, they will find it.
That's their job.
The media, your political opponents, doesn't matter who it is.
That's exactly what they will do.
So, next up, we have straight black men are the white people of black people.
Oh my god.
Oh my god.
Sargon sent me this list of articles to read.
And I, to be honest, I'm breaking the format here for a moment, but I was really hoping that he wasn't going to make me read this one.
But here we go.
It feels counterintuitive to suggest that straight black men as a whole possess any sort of privilege, particularly the type of privilege created for and protected by whiteness.
I forget that there is this oppressive whiteness field that surrounds everyone who is a cave beast like me.
Our arrest and incarceration rates, our likelihood of dying a violent death, our likelihood of graduating high school and attending college, our employment rates, our average net worth, our likelihood of surviving past 70.
I could continue, but the point is clear.
But assessing our privilege, or lack thereof, on these facts considers only our relationship with whiteness and with America.
Intra-racially, however, our relationship to and with black women is not unlike whiteness's relationship to us.
In fact, it's eerily similar.
Oh my god.
Sargon?
We're the ones for whom the first black president created an entire initiative to assist and uplift.
We're the ones whose beatings and deaths at the hands of the police galvanize the community in a way that the beatings and sexual assaults and deaths that those same police inflict upon black women do not.
Oh boy.
It's not.
And it's not because there are more black men who are killed by the police than women.
It must just be a gendered thing, right?
That's why there's so much attention put on black men being shot by the police.
It's not because there's more of them.
It's because black men are the white people of blackness.
God.
We're the ones whose mistreatment inspired a boycott of the NFL despite the NFL's long history of mishandling and outright ignoring far worse crimes against black women.
We are the ones who get the biggest seat at the table and the biggest piece of chicken at the table despite making the smallest contribution to the meal.
How in the world can you write these things and be serious?
Who wrote this?
Let's see, it's Damon Young, editor-in-chief of VSB and Columnist for GQ.
I just wanted to look really quick, and he's got such hard-hitting titles for articles like, Piers Morgan is allowed to say nigga if we're allowed to smack the pumpkin spice out of him when he does.
Hard-hitting journalism there.
And nowhere is this more evident than when we're considering the collective danger we pose to black women and our collective lack of willingness to accept and make amends for that truth.
Well, I guess you guys better start staying away from black women.
And don't worry.
I'll pick up the slack.
Ladies.
It's a damning and depressing paradox.
When speaking about race and racism, we want our concerns and our worries and our fears to be acknowledged.
We want white people to at least make an effort to understand that our reality is different from theirs and that white supremacy is a vital and inextricable part of America's foundation.
And we grow frustrated when they refuse to acknowledge their role historically and presently in propagating it.
This on the surface level of this, it wouldn't be necessarily that bad as a statement, but you're effectively having to make a collectivist statement of all black people and how all black people feel and how all black people perceive white people.
And honestly, making broad sweeping assumptions about someone based upon their race, even if it is your race, is kind of racist.
Although we recognize that not all white people are actively racist, well, thank you very much.
That's very charitable of you.
We want them to accept that all benefit from racism.
And we become annoyed when individual whites take personal exception and center themselves in any conversation about race, claiming to be one of the good ones and wishing for us to stop and acknowledge their goodness.
And, you know, that's fine.
I mean, I personally, I know that I do benefit from racism.
I get a check once a month.
It's my white check.
Unfortunately, every time I try and cash it, it just doesn't accept it.
They always look at me very strange.
But I do get the checks.
Oh, yeah, they're.
But when black women share that we pose the same existential and literal danger to them that whiteness does to us, when black women ask us to give them the benefit of the doubt about street harassment and sexual assault and other forms of harassment and violence we might not personally witness, and when black women tell us that allowing our cousins and brothers and co-workers.
And when black women admit how scary it can be to get followed and approved.
And when black women articulate how hurtful it is for our reactions to our reactions to domestic words are met with resistance and outright pushback.
When?
How?
Is this an automatic, like this has to happen?
Is this like the physics of the interactions of black people?
Because this is so insulting.
This is so insulting to every black man to basically be saying, hey, I don't actually know you personally, but I know that you do this because I do this.
Does this, does this author actually do this?
Because I don't believe that he does.
I feel like he's built up a straw man about his own race and his own gender specifically to try and push something.
Shame, maybe?
Is this like Ouroboros?
Are they, is this social justice eating itself because it got tired of just trying to chew on one type of meal, so now it sees its own tail and it's taken a little taste?
This is so bizarre.
This is so demeaning to himself.
Wow.
Ah, Sargon, I'm never going to forgive you for this.
Making things worse is that black women and girls are also black people in America.
Oh man.
A fact we seem to forget whenever possessing a bad memory is convenient.
The effects of racism, metaphysical and literal, metaphysical and literal.
Oh boy.
And the existential dread and dangers felt when existing while black are not exclusive to black men and boys.
Well, of course it's not.
And however you want to quantify those things and how much each individual person experiences them or it affects them, what their tolerance for these types of situations are.
It's not like we're going to be charitable in any of this.
It's just a broad sweeping.
They face the same racism as we do and the same doubts from whites about whether the racism actually exists that we do.
And then they're forced to attempt to convince their brothers and partners and friends and fathers and cousins and lovers of the dangers of existing as black women.
And they're met with the same doubts, the same resistance, the same questions.
They are not believed in the predominantly white world or in their predominantly black communities.
Is this a make-believe article?
This is so amazing.
This is so incredible.
I am.
This is the caviar of cancer articles.
Wow.
It's very rare these days because everything's very complicated and confusing.
But when you have an article like this, it's so incredible because there is a constant argument that overblown and radical social justice harms the very people that it's purporting to defend or support.
And my God, this is the best example I've seen in a very, very long time.
Alright, now running away from that article as fast as possible.
Let's go back to The Guardian here and let's get topical, especially because Sargon is currently in Berkeley.
There's no crisis of free speech.
Milo's Campus Crusade is Rank Hypocrisy by David Shariat Madari.
If you're curious as to what a basket of deplorables looks like in real life, perhaps you should head over to Berkeley next week where Steve Bennon, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Coulter and friends will gather for a festival of free expression at the University of California campus.
Maybe they'll oblige by arriving in a hot air balloon to render the metaphor entirely literal.
To be honest with you, if they did show up in a hot air balloon, that would be pretty awesome.
That would be a great, great self-aware joke.
Unfortunately, I think that's probably a little bit more expensive than they can afford.
The fact is, they may not arrive at all.
Yiannopoulos, who is helping stage the series of events, has made a point of selecting everyone who has been prevented from speaking at Berkeley in the last 12 months.
But prevented should be taken with a pinch of salt, really.
Okay, let's see how you frame this one.
Anti-immigrant firebrand Coulter, for example, decided of her own accord to cancel an appearance in April after the authorities allocated her a time slot designated to minimize the likelihood of a disturbance.
It's a sad day for free speech, she lamented, apparently without irony.
We know it's fascinating that you say that.
So yes, she did of her own accord cancel her speech, but there's a very good reason.
You see, even when she decided that she wasn't going to show up, that it wasn't going to take place, Antifod themselves still protested.
The event that they were going to protest didn't even happen, yet still they came and broke a bunch of stuff.
This time around, the university administration has complained that deadlines for booking venues have been missed and fees remain unpaid.
Yiannopoulos calls it a coordinated bureaucratic mission to silence conservative voices.
Is it possible that the organizers would like nothing more than for Berkeley to insist on reasonable measures to ensure order before flouncing off and crying censorship?
Surely not.
Now, is there any way to tell if this is just a convenient excuse for them to censor Milo or whether or not this was something that was not done, which will actually prevent it from going on?
No, there's no real way to tell.
I haven't found any evidence one way or the other.
It's just one side saying one or the other.
So, it's true that some faculty have called for classes to be canceled so that students and staff who want to stay away from the campus will not be penalized if they do so.
Yes, because an effeminate gay man is so triggering that people need to go home to their hug boxes.
Alright.
But is this censorship or opposition?
There is a difference.
At the moment, the two are being conflated by those who want to shift the spotlight from the resurgence of the far right to the left's reaction.
Bannon, Coulter, and their cohorts face opposition wherever they go because they advocate policies such as deportation and discrimination based on religion that do harm to hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who have millions of friends prepared to shout about it.
And that's fine.
Freedom of expression.
Be able to protest, yell, yammer, make any kind of noise that you want.
But a lot of people don't want to just make noise.
They want to shut talks down.
These are, there are people, there are groups, with their stated intention is to shut down talks.
And what's even more fascinating is this comes only a few months after the FBI identified an ISIS sympathizer, a graduate of Berkeley High, who was planning to set off bombs all around the Berkeley campus.
Yet there is more of a fear and more of a focus on right-wing conservative voices speaking.
And because they are wanting to address things like what that young man wanted to do, that would have resulted in death.
It's fine to take issue with some of the methods of opposition.
Just don't call this a crisis of free speech.
None of these individuals have any difficulty at all in getting their views across.
Is that a fact?
Okay.
Steve Bannon was a chief strategist of the most powerful leader in the world.
Yeah, but he got fired.
Every Coulter book has been a bestseller.
Yiannopoulos, despite recently inflicting on himself the kind of scandal that would have buried most careers, enjoys the continuing support of more than 2 million followers on Facebook.
And that's true, but he also was kicked off of Twitter, and he lost many, many followers in that.
Now, you can make the argument that that was because he broke the terms of service.
Maybe.
But to say that they have not faced any opposition or setbacks, that would be wrong.
And yet they weep and gnash their teeth.
Students and administrators use Nazi tactics to silence Coulter, she claims.
They don't want free speech.
They want to win.
It is a fascistic view.
And I would have to agree with her.
Some of the methods of intimidation, I wouldn't say, I would say Nazi tactics.
That's very hyperbolic.
But it is very reminiscent of how fascist regimes have tried to oppress their people.
Absolutely.
The greatest risk to the American Republic is from the unprecedented assault on free speech in Tonesy Yiannopoulos.
But in the US and Britain, where spurious complaints about censorship have also surfaced, free speech has never been so secure.
Well, it's kind of interesting that you say that because we just read an article today that was saying basically trolling and harassment, however you want to define what trolling and harassment are supposed to be, towards UK politicians could come with specific punishments.
That doesn't sound like very good free speech to me.
That sounds like people are questioning and chipping away at the very foundation and understanding of what free speech is supposed to be.
So I would have to say no, I think you're wrong.
What is falsely being painted as a row over censorship is in fact one about values.
The future to acknowledge this leads to some rank hypocrisy.
In the accusations flung at the left, that is a poe-faced and intolerant that it wants to end a centuries-old tradition of debate in the service of identity politics.
There is an extraordinary blindness to the restrictions placed on freedom of expression by the right.
Really.
To take one example, for years prominent Republicans, including the current president pro tempore of the Senate, have been trying to make it illegal to carry out a political attack on a piece of fabric, the stars and stripes.
Yeah, but they haven't succeeded.
In Britain, defacing the union flag would see you denounced from the front pages of the Sun and the Daily Mail.
And there are things the right would rather you didn't say as well.
Try criticizing service members of the armed forces, for instance.
These days, even drawing attention to the downsides of Brexit can earn you a rebuke from the leader of the commons.
But doing these things does not in any way lead to jailing.
You might get yelled at, you might get people really mad at you.
Say if you, I don't know, do something stupid like post the flag of North Korea to your profile.
Yes, people will say something.
They will absolutely be very vocal in how they feel, but are they being censored in any way?
No, it's a natural public response to a public statement.
This is not hard, and it is not the same thing as somebody shutting down a talk.
I'm sorry.
No way.
No, the nurturing of taboos is not the preserve of the left.
Indeed, the patriotism and the prudery that regulated society for much of the 20th century were mostly enforced and defended by conservatives.
Perhaps the loosening of some of these strictures from the 1960s onward allowed us to imagine that we could achieve a world free from any kind of taboo.
And that was always a fantasy, one without precedent in human history.
There are necessarily limits to what we can say and do.
A society without taboos would be a rapacious and dangerous one.
The question, the battle, is about what we decide to disparage and what we decide to raise up.
And I imagine you, the author of this article, have a very long list of things that you think should be raised up.
Say progressivism.
And things that you want to throw into the trash can, like right-leaning conservative speakers.
Western civilization is undergoing a transition from one set of moors to another.
Just as a shifting of tectonic plates, the process is slow and subject to much rumbling.
Over the past several decades, homosexuality, divorce, and sex outside of marriage have all become more socially acceptable.
Overt racism and sexism, far less so.
And isn't that a good thing?
More recently, prejudice against people whose gender expression falls outside the norm is also becoming taboo.
That's a really, wait.
You just had a paragraph in the very beginning of the paragraph.
You were saying that homosexuality, divorce, sex outside of marriage is more socially acceptable.
Racism and sexism is less acceptable.
But now you're saying also becoming taboo.
Like non-binary gender expression is also becoming taboo.
The things that you were talking about before are not becoming taboo.
They're becoming less taboo.
Racism and sexism is more taboo.
This is, that's a very, very, that's a very sneaky way to try and frame that.
As far as I can see, the direction of travel is not towards a greater number of limits on behavior, but simply to different ones.
And though there is certainly much to argue about in the detail, these limits seem in general to be more enlightened, less about controlling people, and more about protecting them than those of the past.
The reactionary right paints this shift as a kind of tyranny.
A policing of thought, an attempt to curtail hitherto unfettered freedom.
But they would do, wouldn't they?
Because it is their moral code that is gradually being dismantled.
This is such a garbage way to frame this.
This is absolutely wrong.
Look, it's very, very simple.
We have followed very progressive ideals for a long time in this country.
The problem isn't with the idea of progressivism at its core.
The problem is with progressivism getting way out of hand, way, way out of hand.
It's one thing to say men and women should be equal.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, obviously.
They should be equal.
And we should shame men for their penises.
Well, hey, that's not very cool.
Or you could say, hey, we need to have a path to citizenship.
Okay, but then say, also, we need to take in 20,000 refugees from a war-torn area full of terrorism.
Well, hey, now, hang on a second.
That's the problem.
This one or the other sort of situation is a fantasy.
It is not indicative of how things actually are.
No, no, no.
Yiannopoulos et al.'s appeal to free speech is politically astute because it frames a struggle over values as a one-way street, with conservatives merely rushing to the defense of a noble tradition.
That can be very persuasive, convincing people across a political spectrum.
Well, and who's to say that they're not being sincere?
Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's former labor secretary, took the right-wing depiction of Coulter's cancellation at face value, calling it a grave mistake.
Free speech is what universities are all about, he said.
If universities don't do everything possible to foster and protect it, they aren't universities, they're playpens.
That's a good point.
If academic freedom and students' exposure to a range of opinions really were imperiled by opposition to a contentious political figure, Reich's warning would make sense, but they aren't.
Oh, yes, they are.
Oh, they absolutely are.
They absolutely are.
Has it been so long that you've forgotten some of the stuff that was happening in Mizzou or Evergreen, where people are specifically shouted down and disallowed from speaking, not only just because of whether or not they're a controversial figure, but because of the color of their skin or their gender.
These are things that are happening to just regular people, not even just speakers or celebrities, or it doesn't even matter.
A lot of times, this will even happen to liberals who just happen to not simply fit in with the one very narrow perspective of what people believe should be allowed to speak.
This is happening all over the place.
All over the place constantly.
The crisis of free speech is a myth that gives cover to those that are either blind to their own attempts at social control or want to shield them from critique.
Don't fall for it.
You know, honestly, David, here, your attempt at social control is extremely overt.
And I applaud your brazenness in that regard.
Anyway, that's going to be it for this week in Stupid.
I have been Jeff Holiday filling in for Sargon of Akkad.
Sargon Buddy, I hope you're staying safe out there hanging out with all those commies in Berkeley.
Whoo boy.
Take care, everyone.
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