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Oct. 3, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
27:29
This Week in Stupid (01⧸10⧸2017)
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Hey everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 1st of October 2017.
I'm sorry this one's so late, I was travelling and by the time I got back I was really jet lagged.
But I won't waste your time anymore and let's get on with it.
So first up, the case for shunning the White House.
As amusing as that is, like Charlie the Unicorn amusing, what this is, is a social justice warrior arguing for social justice warriors to de-platform themselves, which is something I totally agree with.
Not forced deplatforming, not coercive deplatforming, I'm talking about them using their freedom of association and fucking off.
On a grey day in late January, four days after President Trump's inauguration and three days after the Women's March, I received a call from the newly constituted Office of Ivanka Trump.
I was invited to the White House to discuss a computer science education initiative she was spearheading.
What a misogynist.
She wanted the organization I founded, Girls Who Code, to join.
Despite my deep personal opposition to many of the positions President Trump had already expressed, I was prepared in the interest of furthering our mission to collaborate with this new administration in the way that we had with the Obama administration.
Three days later, the president signed executive order blah blah blah, which indefinitely barred Syrian refugees from entering the United States and blocked citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries for entry for 90 days, keeping the Muslim ban promise Trump had made on the campaign trail, or at least the best he could do, I guess.
I immediately thought of the many young immigrants, including Syrian refugees who participate in Girls Who Code.
Really?
How many Syrian refugees do you have participating in Girls Who Code?
I'm going to guess it's actually not that many, is it?
Which is dedicated to educating, empowering, and equipping girls with skills and resources to pursue opportunities in technology and engineering.
And you know what?
I actually fully support this.
I do not see a problem with this at all.
I'm completely in favour of groups of private citizens using their resources and ingenuity in any way they see fit.
This is a good initiative.
But let's not lie to ourselves.
You are not full of Syrian girls who are trying to code.
And if you were, I think you'd tell us exactly how many you had.
I thought of the girls wearing hijabs in our after-school clubs, many of them from families with roots in the seven countries Trump had singled out.
So that's you demonstrating these are not Syrian refugees.
These are merely migrants from Muslim countries.
Okay.
I thought of the Islamophobia many of them had faced.
So someone made this argument to me the other day, and it's a rather good one.
A phobia is an irrational fear.
It's not something you can control.
You wouldn't shame someone for being arachnophobic, so why would you shame someone for being Islamophobic?
Unless you know that what we're talking about isn't really an irrational fear of Islam, in which case labeling them as an Islamophobe is simply silly and inaccurate.
What it is, is a reasonable and perfectly rational analysis of Islam that has produced the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, Islam isn't really culturally compatible with Western values.
By putting anti-Muslim stereotypes and bigotry into policy, the president of the United States, I worried, had just painted a target on their backs.
I found that highly ironic coming from the sort of person who would actually put anti-white and anti-male policies into practice.
It's like, well, you're a bigot.
Yes, well, you're a bigot too.
Yeah, but my bigotry's right.
If I agreed to work with this administration, how could I look these girls in the eye?
Because you're helping them.
Believe it or not.
They're actually in the US.
He's not threatening to mass deport Muslims.
He's saying, look, maybe we should just restrict immigration from countries with severely misaligned cultural values to your own.
And that's totally reasonable.
Like I was saying in a chat with V yesterday, you wouldn't import millions of Nazis, would you?
You wouldn't say, right, we need to open the borders.
Million Nazis a year can move into the US.
You'd be absolutely a standing alone, but God knows, because we're going to end up changing the cultural nature and the cultural tapestry of the country.
If you imported millions of Nazis a year, you might find them agitating for a Nazi government.
Is that something that you want to see?
The answer is obviously no.
And if you let in millions of Muslims, let's be honest, eventually, as they are doing in some European countries, such as Sweden and the Netherlands, forming their own Islamist parties and agitating for a theocracy, a right-wing theocratic government in the West that they want to democratically elect like they did with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
This is something we have to worry about.
There is a distinct weakness in democracy, and that is the idea that everyone agrees that democracy is a good idea.
And if they don't, and you let millions of them in, then they can actually vote to overthrow or at least undermine the democratic process.
She declined Mr. Trump's invitation.
So now she has denied her organization access to the funding and connections that will come with working with the White House.
The reason for voluntarily deplatforming oneself is that standing beside the Trump administration on one issue makes it harder to stand up to it and its bigoted agenda.
Many in the private and non-profit sectors have already learned this the hard way.
During the last eight months, business, religious, and non-profit leaders who initially gave the White House the benefit of the doubt, who suppressed their moral outrage and...
This is the problem with moral outrage.
It actually gets in the way of you achieving something and it's not real.
That's the thing.
It's in your head.
It's not outside of you.
It's not something that's actually going to affect the world.
And it's exactly as Stephen Fry says.
You know, okay, you're offended.
So fucking what?
So what?
And numerous comedians have made this point.
And it's a shame that it's only comedians who are making this point.
Your moral outrage is about you.
Get over it.
No one cares.
And so they suppressed their moral outrage and joined advisory councils with the idea that it was important to have a seat at the table, which it is, which is why other people deserve a seat at that same table.
Have resigned and renounced their support for the president and his policies.
What they seem to have discovered is that many of us already knew, that there was never a table in any meaningful sense, nor any seats for them to take.
Well, who do you think is going to take those seats?
It's going to be people you're going to call white supremacists, even though I don't think it's accurate to call these people white supremacists.
Or at least the ones I'm thinking of.
The ones you're thinking of don't actually have the seat.
And I don't think that the Trump administration is going to start, I don't know, donating to the National Policy Institute or something like that.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong, maybe they will.
But there was only a facade of this, a cynical front for this administration's insidious agenda.
It's not insidious at all.
It's incredibly open.
It's brutal and blunt and right in your face.
To be insidious would to suggest that it was somehow hidden behind a veil of pleasant words.
No, no, Trump isn't capable of this.
Trump's a buffoon and he says exactly what he means.
Which is, again, honestly, one of the reasons I kind of like him.
Even if I disagree with him on many things.
He is at least straight talking and forthright.
Trump is honestly, I don't think, capable of being subtle and insidious.
And that's lucky, because we could have had someone who was.
The private and non-profit sectors must not take part in it anymore at any level.
Well, you can choose to not do this, and you can say to other people, hey, maybe you shouldn't do this, but let's be honest, they're going to go where the money and power is.
You're not going to achieve anything, but you should carry on doing this, because what I want is for you to be deprived of money and power voluntarily.
Private sector and non-profit leaders must no longer take the bait.
To work with this administration in any capacity is to normalize it.
He is the president of your country.
He is the leader of the free world.
Do you not think that it has become normal?
Maybe you should accept reality as it is and not how you would like it to be.
With all of the hate and bigotry it represents.
Do tell me about hate and bigotry.
That is the very real danger that we face as the months drag into years, and each successive outrage fades from memory.
Yeah, because you're the ones outraged.
Again, I can't stress to you enough how little I give a fuck about your outrage.
It's just not something I care about.
We will all be tempted by lucrative contracts, federal grants, dollars, or flashy ribbon cuttings to seek a middle ground that does not exist.
At times, it will be easier to give an inch than to stand firm.
You sound like you are a religious person, suggesting that we need to protect ourselves from sin.
Any amount of corruption will mean we'll have to go and confess our sins to the local diversity officer.
Resistance is not futile.
Well, at least we can know that Trump isn't the borg.
Those who have recently taken a knee on a football field showed us by the national attention they drew back to the issue of racialized police violence, which is not, and the value of peaceful protest, which they're not doing either.
Well, I suppose that's not true.
The football players obviously are.
The power of citizens who refuse to cooperate with injustice.
You know, the taking a knee on the football field thing.
I found this really a baffling issue.
If I were Trump, I'd say thank you for taking a knee.
Because where I come from, taking a knee is paying fealty to someone.
I would never bend the knee to Donald Trump.
I wouldn't even bend the knee to you know the queen.
There is literally no one on earth I would bend the knee to because that is to show you are putting them you're putting yourself in their power.
It is a sign of respect to bend the knee to someone.
Why the hell are these guys bending the knee to Donald Trump?
It's so weird.
Any other kind of protest I think would have been more appropriate, but I completely support their freedom of expression in this.
If they want to bend the knee to Donald Trump, okay, you go ahead.
I literally don't care.
I don't see what I don't see the problem with it.
I just don't care.
And I don't think anyone else should care.
You should be like, well, okay, whatever.
Because they're free to do this.
As long as extremists and open bigots inhabit the White House, there is no common ground nor common purpose to be found.
So you would be the same if Hillary Clinton had entered the White House, because she is an extremist and a bigot.
She wanted a common hemispherical open border system.
That's pretty bloody extreme, isn't it?
And of course, she's a complete bigot.
I mean, she called half of the electorate names, deplorables.
She said they were intolerable.
She literally sat there spewing off a bunch of epithets at them.
If that's not bigotry, what is?
We are at war for the soul of our nation, and that's why we must say no on behalf of our fellow Americans who deserve nothing less than equality.
If you mean equality under the law, they have it.
If you mean equality of outcome, they don't have it, and nor should they.
Because equality of outcome is oppression for anyone who is capable of achieving more than the average, or at least more than the minimum, which in reality is what you're going to get.
A good example of equality of opportunity and not equality of outcome is Saudi Arabia finally lifting the ban on women drivers.
Finally, now this is something that has been campaigned for for a long time, and many Western activists, none of whom have been progressives, I might add, have been agitating towards this using hashtags such as stop enslaving Saudi women.
No update as to whether they can leave the house without a man yet, which I'm guessing that they can't, given how no one's mentioned it, but at least this is a step forward.
Maybe one day they'll be able to leave the country without their husband's consent.
Maybe one day they will be allowed to go to the shops without a male guardian.
Maybe one day feminists will give a fuck about the condition of women in Saudi Arabia, but today is not that day.
It's so weird how bizarrely permissive a feminist rag like Jezebel is of Saudi Arabia.
For example, their coverage of this.
Saudi Arabia is going to let women drive now.
It's bizarre that they cover this in such a remarkably objective way.
There is none of the usual and almost inevitable editorializing that you would find in a Jezebel article.
This is owned by Fusion now after Gorka went down, so you shouldn't be too surprised by that.
But you'll notice in this article there is no moral condemnation.
There is simply a statement of fact after a statement of fact, which is in fact how I like my journalism, so I'm not actually complaining about that.
But this is so out of character for Jezebel.com, it really makes you think.
The comments on this are a gold mine, but I'll just read the first one because it's just amazing.
Oh man, does this mean we can finally focus on women's issues in the US without trolls man-splaining or man-bitching about how women are really oppressed in the Middle East and we need to shut up already about demanding equal pay and no cat calling?
Okay, well cat calling is already considered impolite and you already have equal pay.
Get a job, you lazy bitch.
But this is what they're complaining about.
This is, I mean, women still are actually oppressed in the Middle East by any standard, especially in Saudi Arabia.
Just because they can now drive doesn't mean they're free.
But seriously, there is just nothing in this article that is a condemnation, and even the top comment is not a condemnation.
They are entirely permissive of Islam's oppression of women.
Here's a great article from Vice.
It's not your imagination, single women.
There literally aren't enough men out there.
And when we say there aren't enough men out there, what we mean is that it's not possible for you to marry up anymore because more women are going to college and getting degrees than men, which means more men are losing out in society to women.
But women are not happy about this because they still have the impression in their minds that they should be marrying up.
No, ladies, go and find yourself a poor working class toy boy because this is the future you chose.
Or you can go and enjoy your cats.
And I am in no way joking about this.
We all have that friend, the beautiful, intelligent, driven woman who, like Catherine Heigl in every rom-com, can't find a decent date.
Not my problem.
Every guy she goes out with is an arsehole.
She constantly dates below her league because she thinks very highly of herself.
If you wanted to be the husband in the relationship, why are you surprised now that you can't find a husband?
Maybe you should go out looking for a wife.
She's on the verge of giving up on a committed relationship altogether.
Not my problem.
Not long after they turned 30, writer John Berger realised he and his wife knew a lot of women like that.
The couple didn't seem to have a lot of single male friends left.
The couple didn't have a lot of single male friends left.
But many of the single women they knew all seemed to be buyers stuck in a seller's market.
Oh dear.
Turns out supply and demand is a universal value, a universal principle that you have to abide by.
One of those friends, Berger told me, had been dating a guy for a couple of years.
It certainly seemed like they were well on their way to getting married.
She was in her late 30s, he was in his mid-40s.
She really wanted to have kids, get married, the whole thing, and she was amazing in every way.
What was he like?
Oh, he was probably an arsehole.
At lunch one day, Berger casually asked her about a boyfriend.
Her whole expression changed.
They'd just broken up.
They'd been dating for over two years and he just wasn't ready to settle down.
That's because, let's be honest, he could do better than you.
This got Berger, a former economics writer of Fortune and Money, thinking, how could a man of that age be so cavalier about casting aside such an amazing woman?
Because she wasn't that amazing.
Because being amazing is a comparative thing.
If there are better women out there, then she is actually normal.
And he's looking for something better.
And why do we all have similar stories of incredible female friends trapped for years and dating hell?
Why are they so many, why are there so many great single women?
Where are all the great single men?
I love the way that men's problems only come up in relation to women, as in when women have a problem.
But men, I think you'll find, are just finding it unnecessary for them to go out and make incredible pinnacles of excellence out of themselves when it's a lot easier to just drink beer and play Xbox.
Tough shit.
And you know what's really interesting?
They are under absolutely no obligation to women to improve themselves to make them suitable for women's tastes.
Women's tastes are going to have to change.
This is the future you chose.
So the result is Berger's book, and the conclusion is there simply aren't enough college-educated men to go around.
That's what happens when women become the majority of degree holders, I suppose.
You wanted affirmative action, you got it.
You wanted the feminization of colleges.
You got it.
And what did that end up with?
You being lonely and single because you are fucking short-sighted and you didn't care what the result would be for men.
The result, what Berger calls a musical chairs of the heart.
As the men pair off with partners, unpartnered straight women are left with fewer and fewer options and millions of them are eventually left with no options at all except to marry one of those icky working class men who don't have a degree.
I sat down for a long talk with Berger and found out why boys aren't graduating from college, why your best friend is single and why more women should consider moving to Silicon Valley and why nobody else has to give a damn about this.
So where are all the men?
He says, I mean, they exist, they're just not going to college, obviously.
This isn't China or India where they have a man-made gender imbalance because of all sorts of horrendous things.
Men are out there, they're just not going to college.
Last year, about 35% more women than men graduated from college.
Well, you know what that means, don't you?
Affirmative action for men.
This is demanded by progressive ideology.
If you can't put affirmative action in place for men, and I mean, even if you have to justify it for the intent for the benefit of women at the end of the day, if you can't do that, then this is just one more example of how feminism is a supremacy movement.
It is about competition for women over men, and now you've won.
And now you've won, you're finding that you actually didn't like the result.
My goodness, your bigotry knows no bounds, but again, I have no sympathy.
The Department of Education projects that by the class of 2023, there will be 47% more women than men graduating from college.
That's three women for every two men, essentially.
Obviously, none of this would matter if we were all a bit more open-minded about who we were willing to date and marry ladies.
But there have been multiple studies on this, and it turns out Americans have become less likely over the past 50 years to marry and date across educational lines.
So educational intermarriage, I don't know if that's a real term, maybe I just made it up, is at its lowest rate in 50 years.
Because women's priority is to have high-skilled men as their husbands.
But men's priority were not to have high-skilled women as their wives on average.
Again, I have no sympathy for bourgeois female supremacists, and there is absolutely no reason why you should have any sympathy either.
What you should have sympathy for are the men who are feeling that they just shouldn't go to university because of the way they're being treated, because of things like affirmative action and preferential treatment for women.
Needless to say, that this means that there are millions more working-class men who are single to the working-class women, with 9.4 million single men and 7.1 million women.
This is an imbalance that feminism has caused.
Using their deliberate attempts to pull on the heartstrings of people saying, well, don't we need to get girls into education?
We need girls in education.
Fuck the men.
Well, this is the response.
This is the result.
This is what you get.
This is the future you chose.
Deal with it.
Take some goddamn responsibility.
The interviewer then goes on to complain about tech's problem as a very, very male-dominated industry.
To which Berger replies, right, back East, the city with the best gender ratio is probably Columbus, Ohio, which has a real burgeoning tech community there.
I'm making a quantitative argument and not a qualitative argument.
I don't know if these tech guys are good guys or whatever.
I don't know if they can carry on a conversation or not.
And the interviewer says they can't.
So why are more women graduating from college than men?
Obviously, if we'd had this conversation 40 years ago, the conversation would have looked different.
There would have been a lot more college-educated men than women, and a lot higher marriage rates because of it, no doubt.
Once upon a time, colleges were busy discriminating blatantly against female applicants, thinking they only went to college to get their missus degrees.
High schools did a particularly wretched job when it came to teaching girls in maths and sciences.
There was this whole host of reasons why girls underperformed in high school and discriminated against when it came to college applications, but Title IX levelled the playing field.
But I'm reluctant to entirely credit Title IX because women started attending college in other countries too, where there was no Title IX and the games remained around the same.
So the question is, if it's not Title IX, what is it?
Claudia Golden, who's an economist at Harvard, her conclusion is that the birth control pill, her argument is that the driver of big gains in female college enrollment is the expectation of workforce participation.
If you're getting married at 21-22, the payoff of going to college is very small.
If you can plan your life with greater certainty and delay marriage and childbirth, the investment value of college goes up.
So she credits the pill.
That kind of explains how we got 50-50 enrolment, but it doesn't explain how we got to 58-42.
And my argument is that the old discrimination against women obscured a fundamental biological truth.
Girls' brains mature fast at a faster rate than boys' brains mature.
Girls mature faster socially and intellectually.
They're about a year ahead of boys.
When it comes to the actual schoolwork, girls do their homework better and girls are more organized and they're less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.
They don't get put in jail at the same rate.
So I think girls have a developmental advantage when it comes to college preparation.
If that's the case, after Title IX gets rid of discrimination, why was affirmative action necessary?
This is again an excuse.
This is everything to do anything to avoid the real facts of the matter.
There is discrimination against men.
And this is something that has to change.
And in fact is, as he goes and points out here. A lot of elite private colleges are already engaging in quiet de facto under-the-table affirmative action for boys.
I went to Brown, the acceptance rates for boys is 11% and for the girls at 7%.
The worst example is Vasa, where their acceptance rate for boys is 34% and for girls it's 18 or 19%.
Because they know that they shouldn't have such gender imbalance.
They know that this surely is the product of an environment that is controlled by the diversity priesthood.
What are they going to do?
They have to fucking fudge it.
They have to actually engage in gender discrimination in favour of boys because feminism has made things so weighted in favour of women.
And the worst part is, this is what feminists will call equality.
But you can't say any of this.
In fact, the interviewer says, do you think that the attitude of men in the 30s and 40s who don't feel the need to settle down could be chalked up purely to the way the deck is stacked in their favour?
Ironic, isn't it?
That stacking the deck in favour of women in their early 20s has ended up stacking the deck in favour of men in their 30s and 40s.
You should have thought about this, shouldn't you?
It's not like this is the result of a free society.
This is the result of specific social engineering policies.
And now they've come back to bite you in the ass.
I don't care.
I'm in favour of freedom.
I'm not in favour of controlled culture.
I'm not in favour of these sort of policies.
You made your bed, so now you have to lie down in it.
And this question really shows us exactly what the concern is.
Is there any silver lining to this for women?
Can we not talk about the men who are being deliberately ostracized from higher education by feminist or intersectional policies and who are now the subject of covert de facto affirmative action?
I mean, if this was happening to women, you would call this oppression.
And I don't know if it's inappropriate to do so for men.
But he says, there's been some reaction from women who found the book life affirming because they realize it's not them.
No, it fucking is you.
It is absolutely you.
You have a biological imperative to marry up.
This is something people call hypergamy.
If you are making yourself so well educated and you're raising your status to be so high in society that it's difficult to find men above you, you are going to have to defy this natural imperative.
It's not contingent on other people, it's you.
They've been blaming themselves for their lack of success in the dating world, and this was assuring in some kind of way.
Well, it shouldn't be because it is then.
They're going to have to start dating dumb men who are cute in the same way that men dated dumb women who were cute also.
Do you think that who is it?
Hugh Hefner's like 30-year-old wife.
Do you think he sat there going, yes, well, I mean, I didn't want a 30-year-old wife who was insanely hot when I was in my 90s, but the conversation was just so good, I couldn't resist.
The interviewer, it's hugely reassuring, I think.
Why?
Reassuring to know that you've all collectively fucked up and there's no going back.
I don't see how that's reassuring.
How do you comfort your single friends?
Oh, you'll find someone.
When statistically, many of them won't unless they lower their standards.
And again, this is what I love.
And this is about bourgeois women, this is entirely, yeah lower your fucking standards.
If you don't want to be single, lower your standards.
But I've got these standards.
Tough shit.
No one is obliged to meet your standards.
And if there is no one around who does meet your standards, that's your problem.
He says, see, I hate the lower your standards thing because I'm always thinking about my friend who married a janitor.
And I don't view their marriage as lowering your standards.
I'm sure she did.
I view it as making a different kind of choice, yes, against the high standards to which the bourgeoisie hold themselves.
And they do.
There's no getting around this.
But these standards are again artificial.
These are just rules they have made up for themselves because, frankly, they think they're better than everyone else.
And the thing is, I don't think the progressives are winning over women at all.
For example, when Michelle Obama scolds female Trump voters, I can't imagine female Trump voters going, you know what, you're right, I did betray the sisterhood.
Any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice, she said, because she's a gender bigot.
Women can be represented by men.
There are women who are against abortion.
Their voice, and Donald Trump isn't even against abortion, that's just a bad example.
But Donald Trump does represent things that these women want.
Women, Michelle, are not a hive mind.
They're not a monolith.
They have their own opinions.
And most of the white ones didn't agree with you.
And honestly, it's okay.
Let's even assume.
Let's assume that you can only be represented by someone who shares the same innate characteristics as yourself, which is not something I agree with.
But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that people literally can only be represented by people with the same innate characteristics as themselves.
I, as a white man, would still not be able to vote for a white man with Hillary Clinton's track record in politics.
And I would not be surprised if there are other women who are thinking, well, literally, I'd rather vote for a woman, but look at her.
I can't vote for her hawkishness, her corruption.
I can't vote for her elitism.
And I can't vote for the cronyism that she's going to bring into the government.
Obviously, this is not something that is tenable.
And if the only alternative is Donald Trump, then the only alternative is Donald Trump.
You should have put up a better candidate.
Tulsi Gabba 2020.
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