Nov. 12, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
21:56
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| Hello everyone, welcome to This Week in Stupid for the 12th of November 2017. | |
| So I can finally announce that I'm doing a live show in London on Friday the 15th of December. | |
| It says between 7pm and 9pm, but we have the haul until 11pm, so I'm not just going to run off the stage at 9pm or anything. | |
| I'll probably just get a beer and shoot the shit with you guys after I've talked about things I want to talk about. | |
| It's called This Week in Stupid Live, so I'll be talking about things that are happening and things that I've found and things that I want to comment on. | |
| And I hope it'll be a lot of fun. | |
| I think it should be. | |
| It's a fairly small venue. | |
| I think it's only about a few hundred. | |
| So it won't be a massive event, but it'll be nice and hopefully, you know, intimate and fun, and we can have a laugh at what's going on. | |
| And I imagine I want to talk about a lot of stuff I've been reading and other things that have happened, maybe a bit of drama, who knows. | |
| And yes, I did rip off the description from the Mythsist Milwaukee website. | |
| I can't write about myself. | |
| I feel really cringy doing it. | |
| It just feels awful. | |
| But it's right in the middle of central London, so it should be fairly easy for people to get to, relatively simple via the underground or whatnot. | |
| And the tickets are available now, so I'll leave a link in the description if you would like to get a ticket. | |
| And if you do, thank you, because I don't really want to be there on my own. | |
| Because I actually had to hire the venue in advance, because apparently that's how these things are done. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I'm not an expert. | |
| And the tickets are £15 each. | |
| So if you would like to come, the links will be in the description, and I'll see you there. | |
| But getting on to the fun things that have happened this week, Erdogan rejects moderate Islam as a Western tool to weaken Muslims. | |
| Well, this is just amazing. | |
| This is a fantastic observation by Erdogan. | |
| Because let's be honest, that's exactly what Western moderate Islam is. | |
| And this is something I've spoken about in the past. | |
| I'm genuinely interested to see what the effect of progressive Islam will have, the moderate Islam, will have on the Islamic world, because there's going to be an amount of cultural back and forth. | |
| And in, you know, 100 years' time, it could be that the progressive form of Islam has really begun to intellectually dominate the Middle East, and frankly, defanged Islam itself. | |
| And this seems to be something that Erdogan personally actually thinks is something that's going to happen. | |
| Erdogan understands that Islam is a powerful ideological motivation. | |
| It's a force. | |
| It can make things happen. | |
| And moderate Islam could well be a way of completely defanging it. | |
| The idea of moderate Islam is invented by the West and is being used to weaken the ancient religion. | |
| He said in reference to Saudi Arabia's reforms while also lashing out of the EU's discrimination of Muslims. | |
| Last month, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salam, Salman vowed to restore moderate Islam to the kingdom considered to be the home of the religion. | |
| Now I actually know something about Saudi Arabia's history, and there is no point in the history of the Saudi kingdom that you can reasonably say that it was moderate, unless you're talking about the brief period of time before the founding of the kingdom, while Ibn al-Saud was not in a political alliance with al-Wahhab. | |
| That's a very small period of time, and it was essentially the kingdom was conquered in the same way that ISIS have been taking over Iraq. | |
| So I honestly don't know what the Saudi prince is talking about. | |
| I think that he's more clever than he's letting on. | |
| And what he's actually saying here is we're going to give you a modern, progressive, packaged version of Islam. | |
| A way of kind of making it a more moderated force so it's more acceptable in a globalized society. | |
| Because it's very easy for people to say, look, I just don't want Muslims around me. | |
| Because frankly, Muslims seem to be a problem wherever they go. | |
| And let's be honest, it is because of the ideological force of Islam that that's the case. | |
| This is what Erdogan is complaining about, because Erdogan is using Islam as a political tool. | |
| The Gulf monarchy follows a Salafist or Wahhabi version of Islam. | |
| They're actually not mutually incompatible. | |
| Wahhabiism is a variant of Salafism. | |
| version of Islam that is often described as being ultra-conservative, and that's being generous, and administered through Islamic Sharia law, which is not generous. | |
| In what appears to be a direct reference to Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Erdogan denounced a moderate interpretation of Islam in a speech delivered at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Women's Advisory Council on Monday. | |
| The term moderate Islam is being lathered up again. | |
| The patent of moderate Islam belongs to the West. | |
| There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. | |
| Islam is one. | |
| The aim of using such terms is to weaken Islam. | |
| Perhaps the person voicing this concept thinks it belongs to him. | |
| No, it does not belong to you. | |
| Recalling that he was asked about moderate Islam in meetings in the European Parliament many years ago. | |
| So it's nice to see that Erdogan is relatively woke on Islam, and he's not afraid to say it. | |
| No, no, there is no moderate Islam. | |
| There's just Islam. | |
| Allahu Akbar. | |
| The thrust of Prince Mohammed bin Salman's vision 2030 is to socially transform the Wahhabi brand of Sunni Islam, which bans gender mix in concerts and cinemas, and many other things. | |
| Starting in the summer of next year, women in Saudi Arabia will be permitted to drive. | |
| So progressive. | |
| In the new year, women will also be allowed to attend sporting events as the monarchy continues to usher in its liberalization reforms. | |
| Wow, this is just so progressive. | |
| Women can, not only are they allowed to drive, but they're going to be allowed to attend sporting events. | |
| Can they leave the house without a male guardian? | |
| Whoa, slow down. | |
| Can't, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. | |
| One step at a time, sunshine. | |
| They say we will return to moderate Islam, but they still don't give women the right to drive. | |
| Is there such a thing in Islam? | |
| I guess they will give this right when they turn to the moderate one, Erdogan noted Friday. | |
| The Turkish president also lashed out against the EU for approving a series of so-called burqa bans in recent years, calling it discrimination against Muslim women, which I suppose you could reasonably call it that, because it's really only Muslim women who wear burqas. | |
| And I have to say, I don't agree with Burka ban, not only because it's illiberal, but because it doesn't solve any problems. | |
| All it does is give people like Erdogan the opportunity to legitimately point at you and saying, look, they're attacking Muslim women. | |
| I totally understand why European countries are doing it, but I just think it's a waste of time. | |
| I don't think it's going to solve any problems. | |
| I don't think it helps the situation at all. | |
| I think it's just inflammatory. | |
| So this was an absolutely fantastic find. | |
| I can't remember who sent it to me, but thank you very much. | |
| Shortlisted Little Horton candidate and former respect activist Nazreen Khan says remarks she made five years ago were unacceptable. | |
| Well, what were those remarks? | |
| Bradford Labour Party has found itself embroiled in another anti-Semitism row. | |
| Oh really? | |
| After shortlisting for political office a woman who faced criticism for a series of controversial posts about the Jews. | |
| Former respect activist Nazarene Khan issued an apology after making a series of posts on Juzma on Facebook about five years ago. | |
| Now, I don't like digging up things from people's past like this, but it's just so amusing that these things come back to bite them. | |
| It's just so amusing that there are just... | |
| The left is full of absolute bigots, and I'm not saying the right isn't. | |
| I'm absolutely sure there is. | |
| But at least on the right, they have the common decency to do it in private, rather than publicly proclaiming it, for example, on Facebook. | |
| In 2012, she posted, it's such a shame that the history teachers in our school never taught us this, but they're the first to start brainwashing us now children into thinking the bad guy was Hitler. | |
| What have Jews done good in this world? | |
| I love, love how both the far left and the far right both hate the Jews. | |
| It's the funniest thing in the world to me. | |
| When questioned about the comments, she added, no, I'm not a Nazi. | |
| I just think Hitler did nothing wrong, and that the Jews are the problem. | |
| I'm an ordinary, but your opinion was really racist, and kind of insinuated that you would think eradicating the Jews is not a negative thing. | |
| We have worse people than Hitler in this world now. | |
| Yes, yes, we do. | |
| And many of them are standing for the Bradford Labour Party, apparently. | |
| But, you know, I agree. | |
| It is for the many, not the echo quotes, few. | |
| And facing further criticism, she said, stop beating a dead horse. | |
| The Jews have reaped the rewards of playing victims. | |
| Enough is enough. | |
| Wow, I love how she's doubling down on this. | |
| The remarks made headlines at the time prompting a spokesman for respect to say Miss Khan had made the comments before joining the party and now deeply regrets and repudiates that posting. | |
| I bet she does. | |
| You can just look at the Wikipedia page for Jewish Nobel laureates if you'd like to see what the Jews have ever done. | |
| As of 2017, Nobel Prizes had been awarded to 892 individuals, of whom 201 were Jews. | |
| Since we're collectivising it, let's compare that to the list of Muslim Nobel laureates. | |
| As of 2015, 12 Nobel Prize laureates had been Muslims. | |
| Let's just assume that 2016 and 2017 also went to Muslims, so now you have 14 Nobel Prize laureates. | |
| But Muslims make up 23% of the world's population, whereas Jews make up 0.2% of the world's population. | |
| These numbers do make it rather ironic when a Muslim says, what have the Jews ever done for the world? | |
| Well, we know. | |
| They've won 201 Nobel Prizes, whereas Muslims have won 12. | |
| So maybe, just maybe, you should stop blaming all of your problems on the Jews, far left and far right, and look to yourselves as the source of your problems. | |
| Switching gears somewhat, I really do like that Donald Trump is very strong against communism and socialism. | |
| Trump's National Day for the Victims of Communism has one major problem, say salon.com, if you can hear them over all of the autistic screeching. | |
| The White House speaks of the horrors of communism with more gusto than the horrors of the Holocaust. | |
| Well, isn't Donald Trump's daughter a Jew? | |
| Doesn't he have Jews in his family? | |
| And if he feels the need to speak more against communism than, say, Nazism, maybe that's a reflection of the times. | |
| Maybe it's because there are communists fucking everywhere these days. | |
| Maybe it's because McCarthy did nothing wrong. | |
| The White House commemorated Tuesday to the victims of communism an abrupt homage from the Trump administration. | |
| In a statement, the White House identified November the 7th as the 100-year anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which gave rise to communism in Russia. | |
| Well, it wasn't real communism, was it? | |
| Today, the National Day for the Victims of Communism marks 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Russia, the statement said. | |
| The Bolshevik Revolution gave rise to the Soviet Union and its dark decades of oppressive communism, a political philosophy incompatible with liberty, prosperity, and the dignity of human life. | |
| I would love for the British government to come out and say something like that. | |
| I would love for the European Union to come out and say something like that. | |
| This is a statement that should be echoed by every liberal democracy in the world, because communism is the antithesis of that, and they actively want to overthrow it. | |
| So yes, we should absolutely resist communism. | |
| The Trump White House said it would remember those who fought to spread the light of liberty for all who yearn for a brighter, freer future. | |
| Well, that's good. | |
| That's at least, you know, a statement of principle there. | |
| At least I can agree with that. | |
| The complaint, of course, is that the rhetoric in the statement was a stark departure from the language used in January when Trump honoured International Holocaust Remembrance Day. | |
| The Trump White House's statement at the time omitted a reference to the Jewish people who were targeted and killed by the Nazi regime. | |
| Maybe he was in agreement with Naz Khan and thought that they'd been playing the victim for far too long. | |
| But this is the statement. | |
| It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honour the victims, survivors, and heroes of the Holocaust. | |
| It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror. | |
| Oh yeah. | |
| Yeah, yeah, that's just so sympathetic to the Nazis. | |
| I'm sorry, but I really think that his treatment of communism was far lighter than his treatment of the Nazis here. | |
| I mean, it's impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror is a pretty strong statement. | |
| The Trump White House also failed to mention the political ideology that burst Nazism. | |
| On Tuesday for the National Days of Victims of Communism, the Trump White House specifically called out communism, asserting it was incompatible with life and liberty. | |
| The same language did not appear in the Holocaust Remembrance Day statement, which did not even mention fascism. | |
| Well, you don't even want to get into that debate. | |
| Were the Nazis fascists or were fascists something different? | |
| But let's just assume they were basically the same thing. | |
| I mean, he did say that it was Nazi terror doing it. | |
| And let's be honest, is that really necessary? | |
| Is there anyone who actually thinks Nazism was a good thing, right? | |
| I called Richard Spencer a Nazi once, and he DM'd me on Twitter to ask for an apology. | |
| Even Richard Spencer doesn't want to be called a Nazi. | |
| But there are lots of people running around going, I'm a revolutionary communist. | |
| And I know because I met these people and they're fucking insufferable. | |
| But they are certainly the sort of people who would quite happily send off their political enemies to a gulag. | |
| The Trump White House's eagerness to condemn communism will likely police his base. | |
| Far-right politicians, especially in Hungary, frequently celebrate a day remembering the victims of communism. | |
| Maybe it's because the victims of communism in Hungary are from Hungary. | |
| And let's be honest, anyone who's not a communist should be quite happy to condemn communism. | |
| I mean, there should be liberals saying, yes, we completely agree. | |
| Communism is absolutely oppressive, and we completely oppose it. | |
| It's fundamentally incompatible with human rights, as the Trump White House is saying. | |
| And you're sat there going, yeah, but the far-right politicians will like it. | |
| I don't give a shit what far-right politicians like. | |
| I give a shit that I, as a liberal, like the fact that the Trump White House is condemning communism publicly, as he did with Antifa and as he did with socialism. | |
| For some reason, Trump is one of the only major politicians who will actually come out and openly denounce these backwards totalitarian ideologies. | |
| Why can't more people do this? | |
| I know exactly why. | |
| It's because so many goddamn people have so many goddamn sympathies with communism and socialism. | |
| Because for some reason, despite the phenomenal death counts, the largest of any ideology in history, communism has great PR. | |
| So I think this might be my favourite story of the entire year because it's so fucking ridiculous. | |
| I really want to know the thought process that went into this becoming a project. | |
| Facebook asks users for naked photos to combat revenge porn. | |
| Oh, fucking really. | |
| I don't even know where to begin with this. | |
| Just, there are so many things that are going to go phenomenally wrong with this, and I can't even imagine how Facebook, I mean, how would their lawyers, like, what, you want people to send you nudes? | |
| But what if your own staff start leaking these nudes? | |
| What if you get hacked? | |
| I don't even know where to begin with this, but I honestly am amazed that Facebook's own lawyers are okay with this, given the phenomenal number of ways that this is probably going to explode in their face. | |
| Facebook is teaming up with four countries to test a preemptive system to detect and defend against revenge porn. | |
| Users are being asked to upload nude photos of themselves to Messenger. | |
| Who's actually done this? | |
| Like, what? | |
| Oh, Facebook wants my nudes. | |
| Oh, I better go take some nudes then. | |
| Here you go, Facebook. | |
| Please don't share these around. | |
| The Australian Office of the eSafety Commissioner announced that they were partnering with the social media giant last week on a pilot scheme that will allow anyone to report sensitive images being shared online without their permission. | |
| The eSafety Office, which works primarily to prevent the online abuse of minors, so are you suggesting that there may well be nude photos of children, or at least under 16s, sent to Facebook for them to monitor? | |
| That's really fucking creepy, Zuckerberg. | |
| Anyway, they asked any Australian who fears that intimate images of themselves may be online to send a nude photo of themselves via messenger. | |
| They will then notify Facebook who will use image matching technology to stop those images from being uploaded to Facebook message groups and Instagram. | |
| That's wildly optimistic, in my opinion. | |
| I can't imagine who trusts Facebook enough to do this. | |
| So a recent study found that one in five Australians have been the victims of revenge porn. | |
| Both men and women were found to be victims, but those in marginalised groups were found to be at greatest risk. | |
| This lets the victim take control and be proactive in their own safety, when so often the burden is on the victim to report multiple platforms and trace where the image has been. | |
| Our vision is that these images could be taken down from every website simultaneously. | |
| Yeah, and all we need are naked photos of you. | |
| Inman Grant said that sharing your news with Facebook is safe. | |
| Users are told to get in contact with the eSafety Commissioner, who will tell them to send the images to themselves via messenger. | |
| Once the image is sent, Facebook will hash it, creating a digital fingerprint which is used to prevent the image from being uploaded in the future. | |
| The user is then told to delete the image from their Facebook messenger. | |
| So they say they're not storing the image, they're storing the link and using artificial intelligence and other photo matching technologies. | |
| If somebody tried to upload that same image, which would have the same digital footprint or hash value, it would be prevented from being uploaded. | |
| We swear, we promise, that there isn't going to end up being a database of names, faces, and nude photos. | |
| Which is honestly something I would be expecting to see in about six months when this thing has been fucking hacked. | |
| However, it has been demonstrated that machine vision systems can be easily tricked by slight changes that would be virtually indistinguishable to the human eye. | |
| So this might not even work. | |
| A team of Google researchers showed how making small changes to the pixels of an image would cause a neural network to no longer classify that image correctly. | |
| Oh, what's that, Skippy? | |
| Facebook to allow staff to look through people's nude photos and attempt to stop revenge porn? | |
| I thought it was just going to be AI driven! | |
| Holy shit! | |
| You can't trust these people! | |
| The site has made it clear the images will only be seen by specially trained representatives, and they will be deleted as quickly as they can be. | |
| Oh, I fucking bet they will. | |
| In a post aimed at clarifying the facts around the new initiative, Facebook makes it clear that those images will seen only be seen by a specially trained representative from our community operations team. | |
| But it does confirm that all of the images will be looked at by its own staff. | |
| That's so trustworthy. | |
| So what you're saying is you're basically going to have a bunch of low-T male feminists looking at nude photos of women and trusting them not to do anything with those nude photos of women. | |
| It then goes on to lay out the details of the plan to stop the sharing of non-consensual intimate images, many of which were reported in the press. | |
| The article titled The Facts appears to be an attempt to address some of the misconceptions around the story, but does in fact confirm many of its most controversial details. | |
| Most of the process is automated. | |
| Once photos are verified, it will be converted into a numerical representation called a hash read by computers, not humans, and any picture that is uploaded will be checked against these hashes to ensure it's not on the list of banned pictures. | |
| But the site will only allow that to happen if someone sends a photo to Facebook first, at which point it will be checked over by one of the site's own staff. | |
| So they will be looking at your pictures, they will have access to them, and there will be creepy, beta, lefty male feminists who will have access to these pictures. | |
| These are not people you can trust. | |
| Do not trust Facebook with your fucking nudes. | |
| Switching gears slightly from revenge porn to the damage Facebook is doing to children. | |
| Former Facebook president Sean Parker, God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains. | |
| Facebook has been attacked by one of its founding members for exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology and putting children's mental health at risk. | |
| Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook who joined Mark Zuckerberg's company in the first few months, said the company's founders intentionally built the site to consume as much human attention as possible. | |
| Parker, who has made billions as an early shareholder in the social network, also criticized Facebook's effect on children. | |
| It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other. | |
| It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. | |
| God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains. | |
| Honestly, this is kind of how I feel about Twitter. | |
| It really did affect my own productivity. | |
| I don't spend nearly as much time on Facebook as I did on Twitter, and I feel better for it, to be honest. | |
| I do honestly think that there are certain social networks that are far less useful than others. | |
| The inventors, creators, understood this consciously and we did it anyway. | |
| Parker was a former hacker who founded file-sharing website Nabster and said he became a conscientious objector to the social networking site. | |
| His stint at Facebook was short-lived, resigning from the site in 2005 after a cocaine scandal. | |
| So I quite like this guy's edge, but isn't that interesting? | |
| How they knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. | |
| And so I think that the danger of the nudes is something that they're fully aware of, and yet they're doing it anyway. | |
| And honestly, I bet, I bet, at some point in the future, if this goes ahead and people actually do this, that there will be a big dump of people's names and their nude photos that are put on 4chan or something like that. | |
| And my god, people are going to be angry, and I'm just going to be sat here going, I fucking told you so. | |
| But it is going to bother you because you're human, and I was human. | |
| I am human still. | |
| But I was just referring to myself in the past. |
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