Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - I Wouldn't Even Apologise To You #Mythcon

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Oct. 18, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

28:12

I Wouldn't Even Apologise To You #Mythcon

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	So you told a female MP Jess Phillips.
	Everyone should know this by now.
	I just want to make absolutely.
	It's in the newspapers, so you probably do know.
	Someone who was herself a victim of sexual assault, all because she wanted to start a campaign to rid online bullying, to when you say, oh, it's a creative online bullying, that sounds really neutral.
	But what it is, is unjustifiable control of the money.
	Let me finish the quote, and then you can.
	I will, by all means, give you a chance to have your second.
	So this is someone who's a woman, a sexual assault survivor.
	Someone, we all know, like she was public about that.
	It's in the news.
	And it's in response to a campaign to try to fight online harassment.
	And you saw fit to tweet at her, to say to her, I wouldn't even rape you.
	Yep.
	And do you understand?
	Do you understand why your moral outrage about that is something I just don't care about?
	Because you're awful.
	Yeah, I do.
	Now that's it.
	You're awful.
	Exactly.
	That is an unacceptable thing to say to somebody.
	To tell a rape victim, a sexual assault victim, I wouldn't even rape you, is disgusting.
	Why?
	That's behavior that should be beyond the pale.
	Why?
	And everybody cheering, everybody who is a part of inviting you.
	You have signaled to the women in the movement, you do not give a shit about using rape as a threat to bully somebody.
	That's what you have signaled.
	It's not a threat.
	It's the antithesis of a threat.
	That's the point.
	And the whole point of it was to demonstrate that I would say, I won't do something, and you will say, that's a threat.
	Oh, it's just a coincidence that you said rape.
	It's a deliberate coincidence.
	You didn't say I won't murder her.
	I won't find your name.
	I won't do any of these.
	Go through all the crimes.
	Ours, larson, I want to.
	It's a coincidence.
	It's entirely deliberate, but the thing is because she's a victim of sexual You don't know anything about her.
	You know that you can use her previous trauma as a cudgel to know.
	There's nothing to do with her trauma.
	And you know it, and she knows it, right?
	She was parading around saying, look, I think I get all these rape threats and therefore I want to control the internet.
	And she's an MP, so it's not like she's powerless, right?
	And I said, right, look, the point I was making is regardless of what she says, she's going to do it anyway.
	So if she gets something that isn't a rape threat, you're just going to claim it is anyway, because that's the point.
	It's all an ideological mission, and I object to it.
	So this is going to be the precursor to a larger piece I'm going to do on this subject.
	But Thomas Smith, I wouldn't even apologize to you.
	There was a female member of parliament who started a campaign, was part of, I think, three, to start a campaign to try to end online bullying.
	So for that crime in Sargon's eyes, for the crime of wanting to try to end online bullying, Sargon tweeted at her to her, about, not to the world, to her, I wouldn't even rape you.
	That is a horrible thing to say.
	It's an unacceptable thing to say.
	I don't know why I need to be saying this.
	Frankly, I would think that should be obvious.
	Oh, and she was very public that she was a victim of sexual assault.
	So a victim of sexual assault, female MP, tries to start an online bullying campaign to end online bullying or to fight online bullying.
	And for that, that's what Sargon's response was.
	As with everything in your narrative, this is entirely one-sided and leaves out half the story.
	I'm going to use a write-up from Grimmer Chu, a Twitter user who saw this happening at the time, and this is his opinion.
	He says, The I wouldn't even rape you tweet comment and comment was, in my opinion, a brilliant trap, laid for Jess Phillips, giving her enough room to hang herself and expose her as a dishonest actor.
	She gleefully threw herself into the trap and metaphorically snapped her own neck rather than dangling around and dancing the Tyburn jig for a while.
	Background.
	Phillips is a nasty piece of work.
	As well as having been involved in various censorship campaigns of which she was engaged in at the time, she has laughed and attempted to block discussion of issues such as male suicide rate in Parliament several times.
	She also compared Cologne's mass sexual assaults with a regular night out in Birmingham, her own constituency.
	The incident in context.
	Phillips was, again, engaged in a round of social media attention grabbing and attempting to push more internet censorship off the back of what anyone with any internet experience at all will know are spurious online threats and trolling, not to be taken seriously.
	Phillips, however, selectively takes such spurious threats seriously, then uses them to back her censorship agenda as many have.
	Further, she likes to pretend that this is a misogyny problem, even though men get more online abuse.
	We'll tackle that later.
	The incident in question then unfolds like this.
	Phillips is pushing more online censorship and control on the basis of trolling and spurious online threats she gets, though she emphasizes women.
	This is hyperbole and is clearly absurd to any internet veterans who know that these threats are about as genuine as a three-bob nose.
	Sargon and others take issue with internet censorship.
	Sargon crafts a trap message that he wouldn't rape her as an anti-threat in order to demonstrate her dishonesty, that she will take the opposite of a threat and turn it into a threat, that she will attempt to use that to further her agenda and that a largely complicit media will go along with it, despite it obviously being the opposite of a threat.
	Phillips willingly hurls herself into the trap and it goes off exactly as intended.
	She's exposed as a blowhard, a liar and a hypocrite, as are many media organisations that go along with it.
	God knows I disagree with Sargon on a lot, but like Kekistan's exposure of the absurdity of ID politics and the dishonesty of groups like the SPLC, this was a masterstroke.
	To add a little spice on top, Phillips herself has made spurious threats, but seems capable of understanding them meaningless when she does it.
	Quote, Phillips told Owen Jones in 2015 that she had told Corbyn and his staff to their faces, the day that you're hurting us more than you're helping us, I won't knife you in the back, I'll knife you in the front.
	If it looked as though he was damaging Labour's chances of winning the next general election, responding to criticism about her use of language, Phillips said on Twitter, I am no more going to actually knife Jeremy Corbyn than I am actually a breath of fresh air or a pain in the ass.
	This makes the hypocrisy and dishonesty even more plain.
	And what a lovely person you are white-knighting for, Thomas.
	Implying, by the way, I wouldn't even rape you implies that, you know, maybe if she were a little better looking, then that would reach the level where Sargon would rape her.
	This is why it's disgusting.
	Frankly, I don't know why I'm wasting my time with this, but just because so many of his supporters keep trying to give the line of, no, it wasn't a rape threat.
	It was the point was to make to say it was not a rape threat and that her campaign was going to censor even very safe, you know, wholesome things like I wouldn't even rape.
	Yeah, but Thomas, you yourself know that it wasn't a threat, and you deliberately have to decontextualize it to try and make it something other than what it actually was.
	It was a stratagem.
	It was a tactic.
	Deliberately chosen, intricately planned, and executed via Twitter, and you are acting as if it's not that.
	Whereas we can all see that it is.
	You can go back to the original video where I'm talking about Jess Phillips.
	You can see all of this step by step laid out.
	And when he tweeted that what he did, he was doing that.
	He was him.
	He was on his phone or his computer.
	He had his hand on a device.
	It went straight to her.
	She saw it as a person.
	Actually, she had me blocked, as I demonstrated in the video I was tweeting at her with that tweet.
	But again, it doesn't really matter because you are not looking at this through the lens of someone who is just dispassionate.
	You are looking at this through the lens of a feminist ideologue.
	You don't care about the actual details of the situation.
	It's the words themselves that you have a preset trigger for.
	That's the defense.
	It wasn't a rape threat.
	First of all, first off, I've not referred to it as a rape threat.
	Actually, yes, you have.
	You do not give a shit about using rape as a threat to bully somebody.
	That's you referring to the tweet as a threat.
	And some people are, and I actually think that's that's wrong.
	It is sexual harassment.
	Holy shit, no, it's not, Thomas.
	Which is why I wasn't suspended from Twitter.
	You are applying your feminist lens to this, where the word rape overrides literally every other word in the sentence.
	Using rape as a tool, it is using her sexual trauma as a tool to beat her down.
	That's rather ironic, as she was using her sexual trauma as a tool to censor the internet.
	Maybe if she didn't want her sexual trauma, as you put it, to be the focus of her activism, she shouldn't have made it the focus of her activism.
	She shouldn't be the one constantly saying I'm getting rape threats all the time, even when she is not getting rape threats.
	You have to understand, Thomas, your interpretation of this comes from your feminist lens.
	Because, and this has been a great demonstration of this, the feminist lens tends to make people hate men.
	You could have been talking about someone on an island where it's just two people, a man and a woman.
	And the woman is saying, I'm afraid because you're a man and I am a woman.
	And the man says, don't worry, I won't even rape you, even though you're the only woman here.
	But don't worry, yes, I put the even in after much deliberation, not because I cared about Jess Phillips, but because I knew it would offend someone like you.
	Because all of this is built off of the select offense of a group of feminists, as you will now demonstrate.
	My plan was, and I want to emphasize this: my plan was to read the quote and give him a chance to explain.
	To give him a chance, maybe he would apologize.
	Maybe he would say, okay, well, here's the, that's, maybe he would give me the bullshit about that's out of context.
	Here's what it really meant.
	Maybe he would, that, I wanted to give him that chance.
	Do you understand what you're doing here?
	You are asking me to apologize for a tweet that the person who it was tweeted to didn't even see and as we will see shortly, didn't even care about.
	Have you contacted the police?
	I haven't on this incident.
	I mean, obviously, it all sort of happened yesterday.
	It was a bank holiday.
	I was actually, whilst these people think that I'm sitting around playing the victim, I was playing games in the garden with my children most of the day.
	So I don't let it bother me.
	I don't let it bother me.
	That's how she feels about it, Thomas.
	She is not a broken up victim who has been crushed under the offense taken from a tweet she did not see.
	So you are asking for an apology on behalf of someone who is not offended.
	You describe them as idiots.
	We are, Thomas.
	You're the one making a bigger deal out of this than it need be.
	It's a tweet.
	Get over it.
	But what I find really interesting about this is how much this was a focus of your preparation.
	Keep a pin in this.
	I had this ready for the debate.
	I was ready to talk about Jess Phillips.
	I was ready to talk about the justification.
	This was going to be the very first thing I challenged him on because it is important to me to make clear how unacceptable this is.
	That was what I thought.
	I thought, you know, I need to make sure these people know what he is.
	So you felt you had to play Inquisitor.
	That was what you were doing.
	I mean, for me, I am baffled that this to you is a discussion on sociopolitics.
	This to me looks like you being offended and insistent and demanding an apology.
	And I'm not going to give you an apology for a tweet I sent to someone else on which they did not take offense.
	That's not going to happen, Thomas.
	For what he said, because what he has said is horrible.
	If you don't know it by now, this was the most egregious example I saw of something that he said.
	It by no means is exhaustive.
	There's plenty of horrible things he said.
	And maybe there are worse things, but this was what had stuck out to me as particularly egregious.
	All this is purity testing, Thomas.
	And I'm afraid I hate to tell you this, but that's not an argument, which makes it all the more ironic that you would then say this.
	You get an audience that does not care about intellectual arguments.
	They did not care.
	The whole idea that, oh, battle of ideas, this will be a good discussion.
	Isn't it amazing that you think your moral outrage is an intellectual argument?
	You think that's part of the battle of ideas.
	You think extracting an apology from me is the first thing that has to happen.
	And do remember that this is despite the fact I don't owe you an apology, Thomas.
	And this is what the crowd was cheering for.
	The fact that when you demanded an apology that you are not entitled to, I didn't back down.
	Because you use this moral outrage as a weapon.
	This is what you are describing.
	You intended to hit me with, you're a bad person.
	Well, I don't give a fuck if you think I'm a bad person, Thomas.
	I'm not the one who had to apologize for my behavior at MythCom.
	There were some people who tried to talk to me, who introduced themselves before the event, and I was not very friendly and I apologize.
	I just couldn't, it was, I hope you'll understand where I was coming from.
	I did a Facebook post about it.
	It seems as though I was a little rude to some people.
	And I really, from the bottom of my heart, I'm sorry, I don't, my goal was not to be rude.
	I'm really sorry.
	It just was so hard to know who I was going to be talking to.
	I don't know anyone by sight.
	I know when you come up to me, you know you, but I don't know you.
	That's a really sad thing to have to say.
	Why wouldn't you just assume the best about people?
	Might turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
	You might make a bad person good.
	You might actually do something to improve the world around you, which I think is something if we all decided to do, we would at least perceive a better world.
	Because wherever we were, the world would be slightly better.
	But anyway, I'm not interested in morality policing.
	And it's honestly quite a good thing that you did what you did, because it allows me to make the point on a bigger scale.
	This is what progressive politics is now.
	All of it, the white guilt, the blaming men.
	It's all about trying to extract fealty through moral compliance of people who don't owe an apology.
	And so no, you can't have one because you don't deserve one.
	And the thing is, Thomas, when you find yourself thinking of things in terms of class, thinking of things collectively, you will find yourself unfortunately defending some really awful people, such as Jess Phillips.
	One, they say, oh, Jess Phillips, she laughed about male suicide.
	She laughed at it.
	This comes from a video in which in a hearing she was in, she was, there was actually another, I think, member of parliament was testifying that they need an international men's day because there's all these men's problems.
	During that, he happened to say that it's something like to the effect you can look up the video of, you know, men get to have a say.
	She chuckled at the idea that men hadn't had a say in a committee in which she is the only woman.
	Thomas, men are failing in society, despite the fact society is, as you would say, controlled by men.
	And women are succeeding more than ever before, more than than men, by the numbers.
	That should tell you something about whether women's issues or men's issues are being represented.
	Because of course, not only do we have International Women's Day, we also have women and equality questions every month in the chamber, which we don't have for men.
	So the opportunity for men to raise issues that are important to them is very limited.
	And just to give you a flavour, Mr. Chairman, of the type of things that may come up and which will be part of International Men's Day, I'm not entirely sure why it's so humorous, but to discuss issues such as men's shorter life expectancy, wider male health issues, many of which go unreportedly through embarrassment of men to sort of go along and talk about these things, the high suicide rate amongst men,
	the propensity for violence against men.
	There's many male victims of domestic violence, again, as something that goes very much unreported because of lots of embarrassment about it.
	The underachievement of boys in education compared to girls.
	The issues around father-child relationships and often the way that fathers sometimes feel they don't get a fair crack of the whip in terms of custody of their children and things like that.
	She chuckled at that.
	It's true.
	She chuckled.
	What kind of humanist laughs when they hear about the suffering and depredation of a certain demographic in society, Thomas?
	And what kind of humanist defends it?
	But oh, did I tweet something offensive?
	After the hearing, when it was her turn, not even after the hearing, after he was done testifying, she made clear, she said, I want to clarify, I was chuckling at the idea that a man hadn't had the chance, that men haven't had the chance to have their say.
	I take these issues seriously.
	I care about men's issues.
	There are multiple women's advocacy groups in the British Parliament and one person advocating to talk about men's issues and one of the leaders of one of these women's advocacy groups laughs in his face when he tries.
	That's how much power these people have.
	They can prevent these issues from being discussed.
	And I quote you Jess Phillips' words.
	When I've got parity, when women in these buildings have parity, you can have your debate.
	And that will take an awfully long time.
	Question from Matt Dillahunty.
	What kind of humanist says I won't help you with the problems you have until you fulfill my agenda?
	Been, I don't want to stop yet.
	Let's keep looking at the person you are defending, Thomas.
	You were saying it was laughable.
	Do you regret saying that now?
	Was that the right reaction to burst out laughing?
	The thing that I said was laughable.
	I stand by, you know, the idea that men can't raise issues in parliament and male parliamentarians don't have enough opportunities is obviously ridiculous when so many more men are in parliament.
	I think that what never gets played in this clip over the weekend is the bit where I ask for a point of order to explicitly state that I do care about the issues that men face.
	See that, Thomas.
	She was acting like such a phenomenal bitch that she had to literally stop and say, no, no, look, I actually, I do care because it looked to everyone that she didn't, Thomas.
	And that's if we take her at her word and assume she's not just lying to cover her ass.
	Right.
	I mean, don't you have enough opportunity, Philip Davis?
	I mean, you only have to look at the numbers.
	Jess Phillips said there she was the only woman on that committee.
	Well, there's a difference between how many men there are in Parliament and the debate about men's issues, which aren't just of interest to men.
	Lots of women are concerned by men's issues, as Jess just indicated.
	Hey, Thomas, does it look like she's telling the truth, or does it look like she's lying for political gain?
	Because, I mean, come on, let's be honest.
	If you weren't live political game, why would you be grinning like such an insufferable smug?
	And if you think of the issues that I raised about the high suicide rate amongst men, the lower achievement of boys in schools, the health problems that don't get reported, like testicular cancer, the under-reporting of male domestic violence, the problem many fathers have in getting access to the children.
	They're going to DWP questions to raise people in suicide through sanctions largely then.
	Hold on, just today, there's an opportunity.
	Jess, you've had your say.
	I didn't interrupt you in what you had to say.
	Interrupting's rude, isn't it, Thomas?
	I do recall you saying that sometime.
	All of those things, if you actually look in Parliament, they very, very rarely get debated and they are real issues.
	Now, if Jess is saying that these issues can be debated at other times and raised at other times, exactly the same thing applies to issues around International Women's Day, that we have monthly questions of women inequality questions in Parliament, which we don't have for men.
	So if Jess is going to say to people who come next year to say, actually, we want to debate on International Women's Day, and if she's going to say, well, you don't need one because there's plenty of other opportunities to raise these issues, then that would be entirely consistent.
	Right.
	But what it wouldn't be is if she should support International Women's Day debate, but deprive one for International Men's Day.
	If you actually believe in equality, Thomas, there is no argument against this.
	Of course, feminists do not actually believe in equality.
	They want it all one way and none of the other.
	Which is precisely what Jess Phillips has been arguing for the whole time.
	And I'm assuming you do too.
	Jess Phillips, what do you say?
	What I say is that I didn't deprive Philip Davis or the men in Parliament of this debate.
	Mr. Davis failed to fill in the form correctly.
	And it may well still get through to the committees tomorrow.
	And you'd support it, would you?
	I can't say that I think there is a need for International Men's Day debate.
	Amazingly, she can't support that.
	What a surprise.
	Now, this is the problem, Thomas.
	This is the problem.
	Jess Phillips is legitimately using her power to get this stopped.
	It's something she has gone on record against and is opposing.
	And there is a legitimate need.
	And I'm just thinking, wow, as a humanist, I can't help but side with Philip Davies there.
	Especially as Philip Davies has been a consistent campaigner for these issues over the years.
	And Jess Phillips is a fucking charlatan.
	What does International Women's Day, Jess, actually achieve?
	Well, International Women's Day is, you know, sort of a long-held day.
	I've never been in Parliament when it was International Women's Day, so I have absolutely no idea what happens.
	Do you want me to play that again, Thomas?
	Do you want me to play that in slow fucking motion?
	She hasn't even been there on International Women's Day.
	She's probably not going to be there on International Men's Day then, is she?
	She's doing this for control.
	She's not doing it because she's advocating for an issue.
	She's not doing it because she's actually trying to fix things.
	She's doing it for her own personal benefit.
	She is hollow, Thomas.
	And she's a total bitch.
	She's one of these bitchy playground types who never grew up.
	And there's another one of those types.
	That's why I recognize what she is so clearly, Thomas.
	She's not an honest actor.
	And you are defending this.
	You are defending this, Thomas.
	In the debate in Parliament.
	Right.
	But International Women's Day is about recognising that women internationally face terrible inequalities.
	Is that good reasoning for why there shouldn't be a debate over why boys in UK schools are falling so far behind?
	Because women are suffering in Saudi Arabia.
	Thomas, have you even thought about who you are defending?
	This is nonsense.
	It's all horseshit.
	It's all ideology.
	It's all virtue signalling.
	But when you get down to it, Jess Phillips actually does nothing.
	She doesn't turn up to the debates.
	She doesn't turn up and advocate.
	She uses it for her own personal advantage.
	I mean, issues like, you know, the awful rapes that we've seen publicized in India, the issues around the fact that in Africa, the average age of a woman to get married is 14 in some countries.
	Do I need to keep bludgeoning this into your head, Thomas?
	There are people in the UK with problems who are not female.
	And Jess Phillips blocks attempts to help those people and not because it would damage her own activism.
	She doesn't do any.
	Do you see why I do not trust this person to have censorious power over the internet yet?
	These are issues that, you know, we want to stand as sisters shoulder to shoulder with, you know, across the world and say that we don't accept it.
	And that's what you want for men, is it, Philip Davies?
	An exact replica of that debate about men around the world.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	There are issues that affect women, and I've taken part in debates on International Women's Day before, and I've said I granted them.
	Look at her face, Thomas.
	Philip Davies has actually turned up on International Women's Day and taken part in the debates.
	He's actually done the work.
	And he is in favour of women's rights, obviously.
	And she hasn't.
	And she's acting like she has the high ground here.
	She is holding the whip hand.
	She is the one preventing his debate from going through.
	Holy shit, I can't believe you'd side with this.
	I've granted them when I was on the backbench before.
	Thank you for your surroundings.
	All I ask, all I ask, is that we actually have real equality.
	And I don't know what Jess is so worried about in allowing these men's issues to be debated to be aware of the people who are going to be able to do that.
	Well, I look forward to seeing both of you.
	I look forward to seeing both of you in that debate when it happens.
	Ask your gal, Thomas.
	Such a lovely, polite, tolerable person.
	So considerate and thoughtful of others.
	Oh, but the nasty man on the internet tweeted at her.
	Oh, it wasn't even a threat.
	Oh, I demand an apology.
	Get fucked, Thomas.
	You are disgusting, as is your movement.
	The idea that you demand an apology on behalf of this person is amazing to me.
	That you have the temerity to ask for an apology on behalf of Jess Phillips after A, she acted like this, B doesn't even care, and C, it wasn't even directed at you.
	And D, you thought you'd use it as a gatekeeping mechanism.
	As if, no, you're not gonna, you're not allowed past the threshold until I, Thomas Smith, have judged you accordingly.
	Sorry, Thomas.
	What do you think your position in the world is?
	I just, I don't understand it, but no, get fucked.
	I'm not apologizing to you ever for this, ever.
	Not one person, not even Jess Phillips, will get an apology for this.
	This will be, you can put this on my fucking tombstone.
	I do not care.
	It can follow me for all time as a symbol of defiance against a systematic group of moral busybodies and bullies who go around ruining the lives of people who won't bend the knee.
	This is why people cheered when I defied your outrage.
	And this is why people donated to MythCon's fundraiser and funded it within a day.
	Because they wouldn't back down to your outrage.
	Your faux outrage that everyone can see.
	Because they won't allow you to use their moral standards against them and bully them with them.
	No, it stops.
	This is the end of it.
	This is how social justice is eventually defeated.
	And you know it, which is why you can't bear to have me speak.
	The number of tweets and then the retweets and those people piling in, dogpiling as you call it, mean there have been something like 5,000 tweets pretty much referring to raping you or not raping you.
	Yeah, I mean their level of discourse is that they're saying that they don't want to rape me as if raping is something to do that they did to someone they liked.

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