Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - This Week in Stupid (14⧸01⧸2018)

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Jan. 14, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

24:15

This Week in Stupid (14⧸01⧸2018)

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	Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 14th of January 2018.
	This week, the far left has decided that they've gone too far and they realise that they fucked up.
	So what they'd like to do is simply perform the old switcheroo on you and try and make it that you're the one who's advocating for their positions.
	I'll show you what I mean in a minute.
	Because first, we're going to talk about James DeMore and his class action lawsuit against Google, saying it discriminates against white male conservatives, which I think we can probably agree that it does.
	So naturally we begin with a misrepresentation of DeMore and his memo.
	So Damore was a former Google engineer who was fired in August after posting a memo to an internal Google message board arguing that women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering.
	I've read the memo and it doesn't in any way say or even imply that.
	This is not an accurate representation of DeMore's memo, but if you're watching this video you probably already know that.
	So Damore claims that Google unfairly discriminates against white men whose political views are unpopular with its executives.
	He's joined by another former Google engineer named David Goodman who spent three years at Google working on a query engine.
	According to Goodman's LinkedIn profile he left the company in December 2016 and has been self-employed ever since.
	The lawsuit filed by Dylan Law Group says it aims to represent all employees of Google who've been discriminated against due to their perceived conservative political views by Google, due to their male gender by Google and due to their Caucasian race by Google.
	Good luck weaseling out of this one, Google, given how much we know that you have been complaining about white men.
	More specifically, it accuses Google of singling out, mistreating and systematically punishing and terminating employees who expressed views deviating from the majority view at Google on political subjects raised in the workplace and relevant to Google's employment policies and its businesses, such as diversity hiring policies, biosensitivity or social justice.
	Again, good luck weaseling out of this one Google, because the only reason anyone knows who the fuck James Damore is is because you did exactly this!
	Damore isn't holding back any punches here and nor fucking should he.
	According to his filing, Google employs illegal hiring quotas to fill its desired percentages of women and favoured minority candidates and openly shames managers of business units who failed to meet their quotas in the process openly denigrating male and Caucasian employees as less favoured than others.
	You know, I can't prove Google does this, but my personal opinion is that I would be fucking amazed if they didn't do this.
	The suit also claims that the numerical presence of women celebrated at Google was based solely due to their gender, while the presence of Caucasians and males was mocked with booze during company-wide weekly meetings.
	Again, I can't prove that that's true either.
	But I bet it fucking was.
	But Google thankfully have been rather outspoken about the numerical presence of women based solely due to their gender.
	So at least we know that part of it is categoric.
	The lawsuit adds that Damore and Goodman and other class members were ostracized, belittled and punished for their heterodox political views for the added sin of their birth circumstances of being Caucasians and or males.
	I can completely believe that that would be true too.
	Damore's firing last summer became the talk of the nation, with many in Silicon Valley outraged that Google didn't act even more swiftly to terminate him.
	Elsewhere, many wondered whether the firing would have a chilling effect on employees' ability to openly discuss their viewpoints.
	I have no doubt that it has.
	I wonder how many people at Google who are sat there thinking, good god, I'm an evil straight white male too, and I don't think people should be hired on their gender either.
	My head's on the fucking chopping block.
	I'm standing in the firing line.
	I am actually in an active fucking minefield here.
	And the funny thing is, this suit isn't the only one Google is, as they say, having to defend itself against.
	In September, three former Google employees filed a lawsuit against the company, saying that it pays women at all levels of the company less than men, as well as assigns them lower job tiers with less opportunity for upward mobility.
	And what is Google's answer against this?
	There is no far left argument against the gender pay gap.
	It is a far left argument.
	And it is the only one on the far left, incidentally.
	But Google say they haven't found a pay gap in their own analysis, which, I mean, I really hope you're not doing this on a case-by-case, person-by-person basis, Google, because that's not how the fucking pay gap works.
	And so let's have the far left explain to us exactly why black is white and up is down.
	Let's begin with, women are the stronger sex, and here's the scientific proof.
	Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark trawl through historic data looking at death rates for men and women who suffered famine and epidemics or were sold into slavery.
	In virtually every case, they found that women survived their ordeals far longer, often outliving their male counterparts by years, even when the conditions were equally dire.
	That doesn't make them stronger, that makes them tougher.
	Why did you deliberately misrepresent the content of this article in the title?
	I love the Orwellian use of language.
	It's like, well, we're just gonna fuck it.
	For example, before the Irish potato famine, which devastated the country between 1845 and 1849, both men and women lived until they were 38 on average.
	Wow, that is a really low life expectancy on average.
	That was only 150 years ago as well.
	But at the height of the crisis, although life expectancy dropped to 18.17 for men, it only fell to 22.4 for women.
	I'm just saying that kind of implies our societies are a bit more gynocentric.
	It might not be that women are the quote-unquote stronger sex.
	It might be that women are more valued by societies.
	Just a thought.
	This same pattern was seen during the Swedish famine of 1772 to 1773 and Ukraine harvest failures of 1933.
	I have done absolutely no research into this whatsoever.
	But I'm genuinely curious as to whether this has anything to do with the fact that women consume less calories per day than men.
	That would seem to be an advantage during a fucking famine.
	Women also lived longer during the two 19th century Icelandic measles outbreaks, with females lasting up to two years longer than men.
	Females and men.
	Why say it like that?
	Why not males?
	Lead author Dr. Virginia Zaruli, assistant professor of epidemiology, writing in the general PNAS, said, The conditions experienced by the people in the analysed populations were horrific.
	Even though the crises reduced the female survival advantage in life expectancy, women still survived better than men.
	You mean females still survived better than males because there are no infant women or infant men.
	And I say that because you say most of the female advantage was due to differences in mortality among infants.
	It's striking that during epidemics and famines as harsh as those analysed here, newborn girls survived better than newborn boys.
	Well, why is that striking?
	That seems to be evolutionarily consistent.
	Why would you have an excess of males and a deficit of females if females are the baby carrying sex?
	Now that they've got it into their heads that this is somehow making women look good, and I just want to stress, I don't think it's a competition.
	I don't think there is any competition in like physical prowess or ability between men and women.
	I don't see the point.
	I think it would be childish and infantile to do so, but that's how this is being framed.
	Researchers said that the results suggest that women are fundamentally biologically hardier than men.
	Why put stronger in the title?
	Telegraph, just out of interest.
	Which may be due to differences in sex hormones.
	Oh, now there are biological differences between men and women.
	Now biology matters.
	Now you can't just say, oh, I'm just going to change my gender willy-nilly because there is actually a biological fucking distinction.
	Estrogen is known as an anti-inflammatory, which also protects the vascular system.
	While testosterone is a risk factor for many fatal diseases, the male sex woman may also harm the immune system.
	Evolutionary scientists believe that women may have boosted immune systems because they need to survive for at least nine months to give birth, whereas a man's input into reproduction is transitory.
	Great!
	I'm glad we agree that biology matters, and this is clearly a case of the early biological necessities of the human species being played out because it's never needed to actually change.
	I love Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford's interpretation here.
	This is great.
	I think the answer possibly lies in the fact that males are more fragile.
	Oh, okay.
	Go ahead, Robin.
	Women are just more determined.
	Men give up quicker when the going gets tough.
	Women find it much harder to die when in the final stages and often hang on in there well past the point at which males have given up and gone.
	There is an iconic event in American folklore when a wagon train of pioneers got stranded in the Rockies during the winter on its way to California.
	The young men died like flies and the old grannies stuck it out to survive until they were rescued the following spring.
	Could it be any difference in biology that caused that, Robin?
	Just out of it, it was just men are just like, you know what, fuck it, I'm just gonna die.
	And I love that this is kind of being portrayed as some sort of deficit in men.
	Yeah, you know, guys, you don't have to live for these people.
	You can just die if you want.
	What a bunch of selfish fucks you are just dying like that.
	How dare you?
	Cultural and social difference between men and women could also be behind some of the difference.
	The high preponderance of risk-taking behaviours among men contributes substantially to the sex gap in life expectancy.
	Men consume alcohol, tobacco, and psychoactive substances in greater quantities, drive less safely, and eat less salubriously than women do.
	This results in elevated risks of cardiovascular diseases, lung cancer, liver cirrhosis, and accident fatalities.
	Yeah, okay, right, okay.
	So in the middle of the potato famine or the Ukrainian famine or wherever, men were like, you know what, I'm just going to eat more.
	I'm going to eat so much, I'm going to get a cardiovascular disease.
	However, although behaviours are important factors, they cannot fully explain the sex difference in survival.
	In almost all human populations, women live longer than men.
	Yeah, and I'm going to start calling this one aspect of female privilege.
	Our results add another piece to the puzzle of gender differences in survival.
	They suggest that female advantage stems from fundamental biological roots.
	know I shouldn't I shouldn't mock what they're saying here because hey I mean I don't know any different It's just funny the inconsistencies of what they're saying.
	But more importantly, it really puts the wind up the social constructivists.
	There are biological differences between males and females, which accounts for the conditions under which these people find themselves.
	Professor Max Headley, professor of physiology at the University of Bristol, added, It's well known that women tend to have more subcutaneous fat and lower the metabolic rate, so their stores of energy are likely to last longer under conditions of famine.
	And I'd like to thank the good professor for proving my point.
	But really, I am actually really happy with this article because ultimately, anything that blows the social constructivists out of the water gets my seal of approval.
	Next up, the GDP is sexist.
	I don't understand that sentence.
	The combined economic value of the country is not discriminatory.
	Worth has traditionally been regarded as a measure of financial value.
	Well, only monetary worth.
	I mean, if you're talking about some other kind of value or worth, then no.
	And more often than not, women are perceived as having less of it.
	It's less about perception and more about the reality of the numbers on the pieces of paper in which we all end up being paid.
	And if it was just down to perception, then I'm sure feminists would have absolutely no fucking argument.
	From an economic standpoint, most conversations about women inequality have to do with issues of the glass ceiling and wages.
	This is because modern society is still male-biased in our institutions, including the dismal science of economics.
	Oh great, now we're just going to shit on economics because women don't do as many hours in the workplace as men and choose different jobs.
	Is this what we're doing?
	These chaps who are literally, they don't care about male or female, they care about where the numbers are, now we're just going to take a giant fucking dump on their entire careers.
	Okay, society has repeatedly made the choice to reinforce the biased philosophy of how women should be valued, and this is why the largest societal issue to tackle is not about overall wages, but overall worth.
	The world's main measuring stick when it comes to wealth and worth is gross domestic product.
	Listen, wealth is not the same as worth.
	Please stop conflating these things in the same sentence.
	There are loads of wealthy people who have absolutely zero worth.
	Most of them live in Hollywood, my friend.
	When the GDP was developed in the early 20th century, caregiving and raising children were considered women's work.
	Objection, no one considers raising children to be work.
	You are not entitled to money because you manage to have sex and produce a child.
	You are not manufacturing a product, you are raising a human being.
	And they complain that this was not worthy of inclusion in the metrics comprising the score.
	That's because it's not fucking jobmate.
	You don't get paid for doing this.
	You don't produce anything of value.
	You're not selling anything on the fucking market.
	You can't sell off your children, I'm afraid.
	As Rianne Eisler, president of the Center for Partnership Studies and author of The Real Wealth of Nations, Creating a Caring Economics notes, studies show that if caregiving were included, it would constitute between 30 and 50% of the reported GDP.
	Except it won't be, because it's not an economically productive activity.
	You are not making any money.
	You aren't producing anything.
	There is no transaction when you're looking after yourself or your family.
	This household or non-market product, which beyond caregiving activities includes cooking, gardening, and housework, fucking pay me for my cooking!
	Pay me for taking care of my garden!
	Who is supposed to do that?
	I tidied my living room, therefore I want to get paid.
	Wow, I'm having flashbacks to like 2014.
	I'm finding this legitimately infuriating.
	A 2012 report is not only economically significant, but if measured, could improve women's lives or the men who do equivalent tasks, or it could just not pay people for doing their own housework.
	That's my view.
	That's my advice.
	Were the GDP to be updated in 2018 to recognize that women globally provide these essential undervalued services, yeah, because men don't do any cleaning or tidying or anything like that, metrics would likely change to incorporate the fundamental activities that underpin traditional economic measures.
	No, there is no facility to try and monetize cooking your own dinner or digging your own garden or tidying your own house.
	You can't do it.
	It's not a transaction.
	No one wants to give you money for it because it's your fucking problem.
	And I tell you what, the fucking entitlement of it.
	Are you not?
	I'm doing all this labor in my own house.
	I'm cooking my own food.
	I'm digging my own garden.
	I'm cleaning my own living room.
	I can't believe I'm not being paid for this.
	Why fucking should you?
	But society has chosen not to update this outdated metric.
	As a result, the GDP is sexist.
	Plain and simple.
	It's time to upgrade the system to galvanize household production and the women who provide the majority of it as something worthy of measure.
	You are producing nothing!
	Fucking nothing, you fucking parasite!
	This is actually annoying the fuck out of me Do you know what annoys me the most about this?
	This is made by a man.
	Listen, bitch, if you want to just give your money to mothers who are just working in their homes, you can do that.
	There is nothing preventing you from just giving women money for cleaning their own households.
	They're not even cleaning your house.
	That's the fucking thing.
	And the thing is, none of this was a problem when people had, oh, I don't know, say, two parent families.
	Notice this has only been a problem in the rise of the welfare state and the single parent family.
	Oh, now I've got to do all this tidying and no one's out earning money.
	I feel like I should be paid for tidying.
	Maybe you should just get fucking married.
	Maybe your husband can earn money.
	You can get money off him.
	And then you can feel like you're being paid for household production.
	Fucking hell.
	The GDP is sexist because it adopts a framework of value creation and productivity that is traditionally anchored on individualistic, male-dominated activities.
	Says someone with an Italian name I'm not even trying to pronounce.
	A professor of political economy at the University of Praetoria and author of World After GDP.
	It relegates all activities that have to do with care, nurturing, and community sport, which are traditionally performed by women, to the margins of economic value creation.
	How do you suggest we monetize these?
	How do you suggest that we do this?
	If you have, say, oh, I don't know, your child, and you say, child, I am going to care and nurture you for the next eight hours of the day.
	Then I'm going to cook your dinner.
	Then I'm going to put you to bed.
	Who pays you for this?
	The child has no money.
	No one else has obligations to give you money because of your child, even though in many cases we're generous to set up state subsidies and welfare programs that will.
	Why should anyone do this?
	And the fact that nobody's making a fucking argument as to why we're doing it kind of implies that the professors that are talking about this know that there is no good reason.
	People may appreciate the fact that women or men, just women or men are caregivers, but we're going to talk about women because the GDP is fucking sexist.
	And they don't value those activities at the same level as the other economic factors measured in the GDP because they're not economic factors.
	One can understand empirically that caregiving and raising children is important, but in terms of economic measures, awareness alone won't evolve issues of women's rights.
	How is this a women's rights issue?
	I thought men were also caregivers.
	How is this a rights issue at all?
	No one's rights are even involved in the conversation.
	How about this?
	Why social justice warriors are the true defenders of free speech and open debate?
	Don't make me fucking laugh, Professor Sears.
	Do universities still educate their students or does political correctness hinder genuine intellectual development?
	Okay, I'm just gonna cut you to the chase here because this is actually my specialist subject.
	Yes, they do hinder genuine intellectual development, but not only that, they hinder emotional development as well.
	I mean, we saw at Yale with Nicholas Christakis being chewed out by a teenager for not making this a home, for trying to make it an intellectual space because that's not what they were there for.
	We saw it at Mizzou with Melissa Click censoring a student journalist and bullying Mark Schreierbecker outside of their line of demarcation.
	We've seen it numerous times to the point where Berkeley had to spend $600,000 on security just so Ben Shapiro could give one speech.
	Yes, you are the ones who are responsible for censorship on campuses.
	Any questions?
	The political polarization that has divided the nation escalated last year on many campuses.
	Evergreen State in Washington witnessed a virtual campus takeover by left-wing student activists, which Brett Weinstein, who was present, described as quote anarchy, leading to the departure of two prominent professors.
	MYU's Jonathan Haidt argues that the leftist turn on campus, especially as expressed in the social justice orientation of the humanities and social sciences, poses as great a danger to society as the hyper-partisan politics of Fox News.
	And I think he's exactly right.
	In fact, at this point, Fox News is looking like something of a defender of freedom.
	Which, again, if you'd asked me this 10-15 years ago, I would have had a completely different answer for you.
	But it is funny how times change, isn't it?
	The author of this article goes over the Lindsay Shepherd debacle, kind of whitewashing the fact that she was subjected to a social justice inquisition in which nothing was justified and she did nothing wrong.
	But our author is not so sure.
	He says, in fact, in important ways, the social justice approach, which emphasizes the dynamics of power and oppression, that many fear has taken over the humanities and social sciences at its best is actually an improvement over the disinterested pursuit of truth and more in line with the Socratic method.
	That's right.
	Shut the fuck up, you white male, is better than the disinterested pursuit of truth and is in fact more like what Socrates himself would have said.
	In fact, rather than constituting an attack on knowledge, the social justice lens reflects new ideas generated by academic disciplines and experts within them and generally encourages expanding our knowledge and opening up subjects to new perspectives, much like Socrates advocated.
	The Socratic method was far more than simply debate.
	Philosophers call Socrates' habit of challenging assumptions dialectic, which is best understood as cross-examination.
	Kind of.
	Like a good lawyer, Socrates picked apart the positions of his conversation partners with careful questions until the most self-evident propositions were shown to be based on nothing and his interlocutors were left scratching their heads.
	Oh, that's just like the social justice warriors.
	That's exactly what they do.
	They say, right, okay, give me a platform with this person so I can interrogate their ideas.
	Because I'm certain that together, and with smart, intelligent, and adroit questioning, we can get to the bottom of where they've gone wrong.
	They don't stand outside chanting, everyone's a fucking racist and pulling fire alarms or anything.
	They don't run around smashing shit up or anything.
	The Socratic dialectic, then, as practiced by Socrates and those who followed him, is a form of debate in which new ideas can emerge only after the very best ideas of the very best thinkers have been considered and taken seriously.
	Okay, so the total opposite of what social justice wants to do.
	The complete polar opposite.
	You could not find a better description of what social justice warriors don't do.
	Have you considered that Socrates was in fact a white male and doesn't even need to be given a fucking platform?
	He's probably a right-winger.
	Hell, he's probably fucking inches away from being a Nazi.
	But the very point of social justice is to not interrogate other ideas.
	I mean, we've just been over a bunch where they say, oh, well, GDP is male-focused.
	Socratic dialectic does not, however, give all ideas and opinions equal weight.
	Well, that's good because no one's suggesting that anyone should give any ideas any weight at all.
	But the people presenting these ideas, when offered a platform, have the rights to engage on that platform.
	And social justice warriors do not have the rights to come along in a mob and try to actively de-platform them with threats or violence, which is what has happened.
	Ask Charles Murray!
	Rather, it encourages experts to debate with one another and new ideas and perspectives to emerge from their learned disagreements and debates.
	Yeah, okay, that's the opposite of what SJWs want as well.
	Socrates did not believe in a disinterested pursuit of truth, and neither should we.
	Are you serious?
	What do you think Socrates was looking for?
	He started from the position that I don't know anything.
	And the most important thing to note is that no one else really does either.
	What would be the point of the Socratic method if not the disinterested pursuit of truth?
	Professors should not just serve as referees in classroom debates about topics like gender-neutral pronouns.
	Rather, as experts in their fields, they should provide students with the best tools available to engage in debate.
	But they shouldn't be performing the SJW Inquisition when someone has a thought that goes outside of the bounds of what they believe.
	Because what they believe is demonstrably false.
	the reason that they have to do this, to try and whip people in line, to try and make them afraid of objecting and speaking out and standing up, is because if someone does, the fiction that they have been buying into crumbles.

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