Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - This Week in Stupid (10⧸12⧸2017)

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Dec. 10, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

25:52

This Week in Stupid (10⧸12⧸2017)

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	Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 10th of December 2017.
	I apologise in advance if you can hear people playing outside.
	It's snowing here and I have to stay indoors and work.
	But it's okay because we have a very good week ahead of us.
	But I have an announcement to make.
	As many of you are already aware, Patreon this week changed their fee structure, which affects my patrons as they are now getting charged more than they were.
	Before the 5% of the money that Patreon took came out of the money I personally received, which is fine.
	I was very happy with that structure.
	But now Patreon is taking extra money from each person who pledges, and I'm not very happy with that.
	So I've decided I'm going to try out a new Patreon alternative called Maker Support.
	I've only been aware of Maker Support for about a week and I don't know anything about them other than they specifically build themselves as a platform for free speech and they aren't called Hatreon.
	So I'm personally happy to use this platform.
	I'll leave a link in the description.
	So if you're a patron of mine on Patreon and you're not happy with the way the changes have come in from Patreon as well, or you would like to make a political statement and not support the far left and you would like to support a principled alternative, then please do feel free to change your patronage from there to there.
	And I just want to take a moment to say thanks.
	You know, honestly, just thank you.
	With the repeated adpocalypeses and the oh, it seems like it attempts to drive creators into the bloody gutter.
	It's it's Patreon that has kept me from going bald with stress.
	I don't have to worry whether I'm going to be able to pay the rent and it's because of you guys.
	And that's why I've been doing the Patreon only hangouts.
	And I just want to say thank you.
	Honestly, I can't describe to you how reassuring it is that Patreon exists and there are people who believe in what I'm doing enough to want to support me.
	Honestly, I'm genuinely grateful.
	Thank you for everything.
	And I'll leave a link in the description and I will obviously do the maker support only patron streams and I think if it goes well, I'll test it out for a few months.
	And if it is a safe and secure alternative to Patreon, then I'll shut down my Patreon account.
	I don't need to use Patreon if there's a viable alternative available.
	And honestly, and I just want to be clear, all of my interactions personally with Patreon have actually been really positive.
	They've been really polite to me.
	They've been really helpful to me every time I've had a problem.
	And they've always come down on my side whenever the issues have been challenged because of Jack Conte's, how did he describe it?
	The manifest observable behavior, which I think is, it's nice that I've always been in the clear, but I don't know what will happen in the future.
	And I don't find them to be a trustworthy or secure source of revenue going into the next few years.
	I don't know what's going to happen.
	With Twitter eight days away from their great purge, I don't know that Patreon won't do something like this in the future.
	Whereas a platform that bills itself as being dedicated to free speech, I think is a lot less likely to do that.
	So I would much rather find an alternative.
	So for the next few months, I'm going to try this.
	And if it goes well, then I'll end up closing my Patreon account and asking people if they'd like to support me.
	Then please do it on Maker Support.
	Anyway, enough of all this.
	Let's just get on with the stupid.
	Eating red meat promotes toxic masculinity.
	Now, I would have no problem with this, really, if it was an SJW posting this on a Tumblr blog or something.
	It would be exactly what I would expect from them.
	You know, oh, red meat's toxic masculinity.
	Yeah, okay, Snowflake.
	But to see it in an academic journal, an academic journal has published an article by a PhD candidate at Pennsylvania State University that argues eating meat maintains a society where hegemonic masculinity is the norm.
	And Delasso Parson, whose article was published in Gender, Place and Culture, a journal of feminist geography.
	Yeah, that sounds like something worth reading at some point, doesn't it?
	Based her research on Argentina's meat-centric culture.
	I contend that in such a context, we cannot separate the ways people do vegetarianism from how they do gender.
	Oh, that's right.
	Vegetarianism and gender are basically the same thing.
	Doing vegetarianism in interactions drives social change.
	I love the performative action of being a vegetarian.
	Eating a vegetable is a vegetarian act.
	It's contributing to the delinking of meat from gender hegemony.
	Okay.
	Sometimes, when you've been doing this for long enough, sometimes you think that you've heard it all.
	Meat and gender hegemony.
	It's as if as if and revealing the resisting and reworking of gender in food spaces.
	Amazing.
	This is crucial as well to intersectionality, I'm sure.
	Delessio Parsons theorizes that being a vegetarian in the South American nation is a political act that contributes to the destabilization of the gender binary.
	How did you smash the gender binary, Paolo?
	I was a vegetarian.
	I ate an apple.
	And that was it.
	Boom!
	Gender binary smashed.
	Vegetarians defy attempts to hold them accountable for gendered social expectations, she wrote.
	Women, for example, assert authority over their diets.
	The only people not in control of their own diets are children and invalids.
	Adults buy their own food, cook their own food, and eat their own food.
	Men embody rejection of the meat-masculinity nexus by adopting a worldview that also rejects sexism and racism.
	That's right.
	If you stop eating meat, then you're also going to reject sexism and racism.
	I can only assume that they think that by not eating meat, that means you are de facto changing to soy.
	And she said that it was during her time in Argentina that she came to believe that vegetarianism was both a lifestyle choice and a feminist act.
	But the thing is, isn't vegetarianism just a form of pro-meat cookery?
	According to vegans?
	I mean, why are you having any animal products at all?
	Because they have to imprison these poor animals and torture them by taking eggs and milk and anything else.
	Yeah, they have to forcibly impregnate the cows to get milk.
	So surely this is really just someone who hasn't properly embraced the principles of being an intersectional activist who's looking to smash power hierarchies.
	I mean, what right do you have to rape a cow of its milk or a chicken of its eggs?
	The answer is, of course, absolutely none.
	Basically, what I'm saying is vegetarians should feel ashamed of themselves, especially if they're feminists.
	You need to go full vegan, or you're cooking for the meat industry.
	Women, one of the ways they push back against patriarchy, they say, this is my body, you don't get to tell me what comes in and out.
	Oh yeah, that's a pretty bold feminist statement to say that I'm going to eat the food that I want to eat.
	Amazing.
	Feminism just has no more barriers to breach, does it?
	And don't forget to celebrate resistmas this year with these badass women on top of your Christmas tree.
	So you have Serena Williams, which is fine.
	She's a highly accomplished athlete.
	You've got Beyonce, which again is fine.
	She is a highly accomplished singer.
	And then you have Hillary, I'm literally an angel, Clinton.
	Holy fucking God.
	Why not just put a symbol of corruption in America on top of your Christmas tree?
	Goldman Sachs will love you for it.
	These are women worthy of wings, inspirational icons, beacons of hope.
	Are they really?
	Because it seems like Hillary Clinton is a giant fucking loser.
	Hasn't she run for the presidency like three times and lost every time?
	Because let's be honest, everyone hates Hillary Clinton.
	It's only feminists who seem to like her.
	Even during the election, left-wing people who are like, yeah, I'm voting Clinton, generally weren't, I love Hillary Clinton.
	They were generally, I hate Donald Trump.
	And on the subject of Donald Trump, The Intercept published an article by Glenn Greenwald talking about the events of December the 8th, which honestly has been one of the most hilarious things to happen to the media this year.
	Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the US media in quite a long time.
	The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day.
	By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation's largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.
	There is no better example of confirmation bias that I have ever seen.
	Someone claims to find something that proves Donald Trump is secretly in cahoots with Wikileaks and the Russians, and suddenly it's everywhere.
	Except it wasn't true.
	The spectacle began on Friday morning at 11am EST when the most trusted name in news, oh that'd be CNN then, spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that Wikileaks last September had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before they were published on the internet.
	As CNN sneezed the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks, and more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the US intelligence community regards Wikileaks as an arm of Russian intelligence, and therefore, so does the US media.
	This is one of the things I genuinely like about Glenn Greenwald.
	He's great at dealing with the deep state and the media.
	This entire revelation was based on an email which CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its possession.
	The email was sent by someone called Michael J. Erickson, someone nobody had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify, to Donald Trump Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC emails that Wikileaks had uploaded.
	The email was a smoking gun in CNN's extremely excited mind because it was dated September the 4th, 10 days before Wikileaks began promoting access to the emails online, and thus proved the Trump family was being offered special unique access to DNC archive, likely by Wikileaks and the Kremlin.
	There was just one small problem with the story.
	It was fundamentally false in the most embarrassing way possible.
	Hours after CNN broadcast its story and then hyped it up over and over, the Washington Post reported that CNN had got a key fact wrong.
	The email was not stated September the 4th, as CNN and everyone else claimed, but rather September the 14th, which means it was sent after Wikileaks had already published access to the DNC emails online.
	You fucking morons!
	Unfucking believable that so many eyes could go over this and no one saw that it was 14 and not 4.
	I mean, holy fuck, that just speaks to the culture within CNN.
	It must just be a listen and believe culture.
	And not just CNN, the left-wing media establishment.
	They wanted this to be true.
	So much that none of them fucking checked until finally the Washington Post actually thought maybe we should look at this and see if this is exactly what they say it is.
	And it turns out it fucking wasn't.
	I can't think of any other way of describing CNN as an activist publication.
	They are not a news publication.
	They are an activist group.
	They are no better than me.
	That's what I am.
	I'm not a reporter.
	I'm not a news organisation.
	I am an activist who covers certain subjects that I think are important.
	And I give you my opinion on why these things are important and why they shouldn't be happening and what we should do to change them.
	And I try to use as many informed and creditable sources as possible.
	CNN is not one of those sources.
	And I don't know whether you've noticed, but I really go out of my way to not use CNN as a source because they are just not trustworthy.
	In fact, I consider CNN about as trustworthy as I consider Jezebel.com, which is incidentally something I'm going to be using as a source hypocritically in this next story.
	But I'm using them as an example of reporting that probably is false.
	After being cyber-bullied, adult film star August Ames was found dead by suspected suicide.
	23-year-old adult film actress August Ames was found dead on Tuesday morning following an online blow-up over an arguably homophobic tweet.
	According to the blast, she died of asphyxiation by hanging.
	Ames had criticized women who worked with male actors who also did gay porn, tweeting, do agents really not care about who they're representing?
	So I imagine that the fear here is the transmission of HIV.
	And Ames had tweeted, whichever lady performer is replacing me tomorrow for Erotica X News, you're shooting with a guy who has shot gay porn just to let you know.
	BS, all I can say is, do agents really not care about who they're representing?
	LA Direct, I do my homework for my body.
	So she's concerned about contracting a fatal disease.
	And ultimately, it's her choice if she doesn't want to appear with someone who has done gay porn.
	That's not a judgment on people doing gay porn.
	That's her freedom of association.
	You can imagine how this went down with the social justice crowd.
	And the answer is obviously, not fucking well.
	August, the world is waiting for your apology or for you to swallow a cyanide pill.
	Either or will take it.
	Turns out being an uneducated homophobe didn't get you a pat on the head.
	Maybe think next time before you word vomit for attention.
	Holy shit, this is homophobic.
	Guess I'm not a fan anymore.
	You sound fucking dumb.
	Disgusting discriminator.
	Following the outrage, Ames responded with an apology and clarified that she was not homophobic.
	Sorry, it was just my opinion.
	My body, my rules.
	I'm sorry if I offended anyone.
	Plus, I didn't say any names, but I will stop talking so no more damage is done, lol.
	She clarified that she was not homophobic.
	Most girls don't shoot with guys who have shot gay porn for safety.
	That's just how it is with me.
	I'm not putting my body at risk.
	I don't know what they do in their private lives.
	And that's her choice.
	Of course, this didn't stop the hate mob.
	But I think it's important to note that apparently she had a tragic past that was sexual abuse and mental health issues before she committed suicide.
	So two months before her death, she'd appeared on the Holly Randall Unfiltered podcast for a wide-ranging hour-long interview.
	In it, she revealed that she experienced a lot of sexual molestation, but the perpetrator was not her father, and the trauma of the abuse was compounded because she was not believed when she raised the alarm.
	It was just awful.
	It's still recent where I have to keep myself occupied or else I start thinking about all that shit and fall into a depression.
	I tried to do therapy.
	I hate that word.
	I hate therapy.
	Ames added that she was using medication to deal with bipolar disorder, depression, and multiple personality disorder.
	It's so hard when I wasn't on any medication.
	I'd just flip, you know?
	It was crippling.
	Towards the end of the podcast, she said that when she's feeling low and depressed, she goes through her old photos to look for a happy selfie to post on Instagram to her followers.
	So I'm no expert on the subject, but it looks like a young woman who was already dealing with depression was pushed over the edge because of this.
	Now, the police haven't confirmed the reason that she died.
	It's assumed that it's suicide, but I think that's a fairly safe assumption to go with.
	I would speculate that the hate mob was probably the final straw that broke the camel's back.
	And that's not to try and excuse anyone, but I don't think you can hold these people responsible for her actually killing herself.
	It seems that this was because a pre-existing structure of mental instability because of other abuses that she'd suffered in her life.
	That's not to excuse what happened, especially as she did absolutely nothing wrong.
	All of this was an ideological attack.
	Calling her homophobic because she doesn't want to have sex with a man who has had sex with other men is absurd.
	It's as absurd as saying that someone is transphobic for not wanting to have sex with a trans woman who has XY chromosomes.
	It is none of anyone else's business who people choose to have sex with or to not have sex with and the reasons that they choose not to have sex with them.
	There is no excuse for mass shaming someone because they don't want to have sex with someone.
	It's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard and I do not accept at all that any of these people had anything other than hostility, vitriol, and the desire to protect their own ideology and personal beliefs in their hearts when they were persecuting this young woman.
	Her brother believed that his sister's death was due to this bullying.
	And like I said, ultimately the actual tipping over of the scales probably was.
	But it's really sad.
	It's just fucking unacceptable for an SJW mob to go around bullying people because they don't want to fuck someone.
	I mean, just say it out loud to a regular person and ask them what they think of being bullied because you don't want to sleep with someone.
	Normally, feminists would be on the side of the woman in this case.
	And I know it sounds crazy in this day and age that feminists should support a woman's right to choose who she sleeps with, but apparently we are now on the other side of the mirror.
	We are through the looking glass.
	And now this woman was homophobic for refusing to have sex with a certain man.
	So that was quite depressing.
	So I think it's time to move on to something that really isn't.
	Well, actually, I've got to say, this one is kind of sad for me because I used to love crack.com until it became all social justice.
	And now, crack.com is laying off most of its staff because social justice has ruined yet another thing that people used to love.
	So Cracked has laid off most of its main contributors and senior editorial staff after a tumultuous run following its embrace of social justice politics.
	And as someone who used to read Cracked quite avidly, I can tell you that it really did go absolutely down the drain when it started adopting SJW talking points.
	This meme has been going around for a while, but it really does encapsulate all of the problems at cracked.com.
	In 2010, the five most insane improvised weapons that were animals.
	Seven years later, the five shocking realities of being transgender the media ignores.
	Five reasons women will rule the future.
	You get the fucking picture.
	Cracked went full SJW and now they're shutting down.
	Or at least, they're getting rid of almost all of their stuff because they can't afford them because social justice kills businesses.
	That is something that every business owner, anyone who is an entrepreneur in any way, shape or form and relies on the public for their income must remember social justice will kill your business.
	How many times do we have to see this before corporate entities realize that social justice is just unpopular with the public and they will avoid your publication, your product, your outlets, whatever it is.
	I mean look at the look at the comic book industry.
	Marvel literally had to say that people were against women and diversity, which is why they weren't purchasing their comics.
	The same goes with falling sales in every kind of geek hobby that adopts social justice, and this is no different for cracked.
	It is an iron law of social justice that it acts like a vampire on top of what was previously a profitable enterprise.
	Do not, for the love of God, do not adopt social justice if you don't want your business to fail.
	But if you do want to kill your business, go ahead and tell us about how racist Halloween costumes are.
	Whoop whoop, it's the sound of the pon lease because in Hull, an internet troll has been sentenced.
	That's right.
	A troll.
	Not an abuser.
	Not someone sending death threats.
	A fucking troll.
	After being charged in June, Daniel Kilvington 23 of Spring Bank Hull has received his sentence.
	Now, after appearing before the magistrates' court, Daniel has been found guilty of seven offences of sending malicious communications.
	Each of the offences were committed using social media.
	The legal term for this offence is to send by public communication network an offensive, indecent, obscene, menacing message or matter.
	On Monday, the 4th of December, Daniel was sentenced at Hull Magistrates Court to 18 weeks in custody.
	18 weeks for a social media post that was trolling someone.
	He also received an indefinite criminal behavior order which prevents him from harassing people on social media.
	So what is trolling?
	Trolling is the act of posting inflammatory or inappropriate messages or comments on the internet.
	The main purpose of which is to upset the recipient and get a response from them.
	Yes, that is now apparently illegal in the UK.
	To say something provocative or inflammatory is now an offence that you can get 18 weeks in custody for.
	Unfucking believable.
	If anyone wonders if we have free speech in the UK, the answer is no.
	You can't even make fun of someone.
	You can't even piss someone off now.
	Now it's illegal to piss them off.
	I can't even get over this.
	PC Nicola Adamson of the Humberside Police said, we treat trolling as a serious offence which brings serious consequences.
	Well, it's fucking not.
	It's not serious.
	That's the point.
	It's just winding someone up.
	It's not the end of the fucking world.
	And you know what's really interesting?
	I can't find these messages.
	I've searched the internet.
	I've scoured the internet trying to find screenshots or links or something to these messages.
	I have no idea what he sent.
	I went through his Facebook feed all the way back to like April 2017 when he first opened it.
	And most of it is just like lad Bible and dog and cat videos.
	Most of it's just really benign bullshit.
	Kilvington sent malicious messages to four strangers on social media with the sole intention of causing them upset and anger.
	Well, so fucking what?
	They can block him.
	If they don't want to hear from this guy, it's their responsibility to fucking block him.
	It's not, it shouldn't be a crime, to upset or anger someone.
	Imagine fucking legislating for this.
	The victims had su- The victims!
	The victims!
	The victims of being upset and angry!
	You are now a victim!
	I'm a victim of being upset and angry now!
	The victims!
	Fucking hell!
	The victims had suffered personal tragedy and he chose to target them for no discernible reason.
	I'll tell you the reason.
	He's a fucking asshole!
	And you know what?
	I'm just assuming you're telling the truth.
	His actions made his victims life victims.
	What happened?
	I got trolled on the internet.
	His actions made his victims' lives misery and made an already difficult situation worse.
	You know, it might be that he was just genuinely being a malicious cunt.
	But at the end of the day, that's not illegal, or at least, again, it is now.
	It shouldn't be illegal.
	It wasn't illegal as far as I was aware, but apparently, now simply trolling someone on social media is a criminal act in Britain, so be fucking careful.
	Be warned.
	That's all I'm saying.
	Be warned.
	And why is this?
	I hope he is truly disgusted with himself.
	Oh, bourgeois moral norms.
	Okay, well, I'm not committed to bourgeois moral norms.
	I don't care if you think that I should be disgusted by something.
	I think you should be disgusted by putting someone in custody for a fucking social media message.
	That wasn't even direct abuse.
	It was just a troll designed to wind them up.
	This case and sentence should serve as a warning to other people that if they commit such offenses, they face not only arrest, but imprisonment.
	Oh yeah, because this is fucking important.
	This isn't a waste of police time or anything.
	This isn't something that could have been solved with a block button.
	Oh no, this is something that we need to spend taxpayer money imprisoning and putting a criminal record on like a 23-year-old guy who tweeted something or Facebook messaged something that was just trollish.
	I just cannot believe this is Britain in 2017.
	And I love their advice.
	What to do if you were a victim of trolling?
	The best way to stop someone online trying to troll you is to ignore them.
	That's fucking right.
	It's the only way.
	Just block and ignore.
	Block and ignore.
	If there's someone trolling you, you just block them and ignore them and that's it.
	Their main aim is to get a reaction out of you.
	It's not changed since the beginning of the internet.
	Trolling has been around since the beginning, like legit trolling, not sending people death threats.
	And that is literally it.
	They're trying to get a reaction out of you.
	If you receive ongoing harassment from the troll, then try to keep a log of the messages and go to the police.
	Which isn't actually exactly what they say.
	Once you've built up a log of instance, then contact Humberside Police, either through one-on-one or at the station.
	Be sure to show them all the evidence you have.
	Not that we've seen any of the evidence of this guy's trolling.
	I imagine it was really bad, though.
	I mean, I can't think of a better way of confirming that we've lost free speech in this country to moral busy bodies like the Humberside Police.
	I just can't get over it.
	Fucking jailed for a troll.
	Just, okay.

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