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Feb. 25, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
24:16
This Week in Stupid (25⧸02⧸2018)
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Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 25th of February 2018.
This week I'm going to start with one of the dumbest things I've ever heard and then I'm going to work my way down.
Students in Louisiana thought this math symbol looked like a gun.
Police were called.
I know what you're thinking.
That's a square root symbol.
I saw one about 20 years ago when I was in school.
What possible connection to firearms could this possibly have?
Well, a discussion among students at Oberlin High School about a mathematical symbol led to a police investigation and a search of one of the students' homes.
At least according to the sheriff's office.
On the afternoon of February the 20th, detectives investigated a report of terroristic threats at the school, where they learned that a student had been completing a math problem that required the drawing of a square root sign.
Students in the group began commenting that the symbol, which represents a number that when multiplied itself equals another number, looked like a gun.
After several students made comments along those lines, another student said something the sheriff's office said could have sounded like a threat out of context.
Police then searched the student's home where they found no guns or any evidence that he had access to guns.
Authorities also wrote that there was no evidence that the student had any intent to commit harm.
The student used extremely poor judgment in making the comment, but in light of the actual circumstances and there was clearly no evidence to support criminal charges.
What fucking criminal charges?
What did they say?
Why aren't we being told what the out-of-context statement was?
But the school board had been contacted to determine any disciplinary action for the student.
Well, what did they fucking say about the square root symbol that led the police to need to search their fucking house?
And it seems that this has been the product of mass hysteria in the US regarding guns.
The investigation came a week after a high school shooting killing 17 people and wounding more.
The mass shooting sparked a wave of reported threats against other schools across the country.
Threats that are still coming in by the day and have set local parents, students and emergency officials on high alert.
In the Miami area alone, school threats jumped from one a week to as many as 50 a day.
Look, I appreciate that there is a problem in the United States regarding guns.
And I don't just mean that there are guns.
I mean that there is a very important conversation happening at the moment that seems unable to be resolved.
And regardless of your position on that issue, cooler heads must prevail.
This kind of hypersensitive nonsense is not adding anything to the conversation.
There was absolutely no reason for police to get involved with this at all.
There was no reason for the school board to get involved.
There was no reason for anyone to get their house searched.
And there was no reason to write this article.
Calm the fuck down.
But I'll tell you what, language has just become entirely problematic at this point.
Purdue Writing Guide.
Words with man should be avoided.
A widely used online writing and grammar resource published by Purdue University encourages college students to avoid the generic use of man and other words with masculine markers.
And while the guide acknowledges that man originally conveyed a dual meaning, either referring to adult males or humans in general, it says that the terminology is now considered offensive.
So that's why we came here today to ask you to also look into the policies that religious charitable organizations have in our legislation so that it can also be changed because maternal love is the love that's going to change the future of mankind.
So we'd like you to look at the- We like to say people-kind, not necessarily mankind.
There we go, exactly.
Yes, thank you.
We can all learn from each other.
The handout says that biased language frequently occurs based on gender but can also offend groups of people based on sexual orientation, ethnicity, political interest, or race.
Writing in a non-sexist, non-biased way is both ethically sound and effective.
Non-sexist writing is necessary for most audiences.
If you write in a sexist manner and alienate much of your audience from your discussion, your writing will be less effective.
Imagine being offended because someone used the word mankind to refer to humankind and you're such a fucking snowflake that you're just there yelling at the page, no, it's people kind!
I just can't connect with this.
Oh, Jesus Christ actually says that.
Instead of writing mankind, write humanity, people, or human beings.
What's wrong with the term mankind?
Again, it's not about male kind.
You've just said here.
The guide provides examples for the generic use of non-sexist language, noting although man is in its original sense carried the dual meaning of adult human and adult male, the guide naturally takes issue with the word man-made, saying it should be replaced with people-made, no synthetic, manufactured, or machine-made.
Again, absolutely needless though.
What's the point of this?
Who's actually offended?
Who's actually reading this book and going, well, I was gonna get my education, but fuck this hetero-patriarchal bullshit.
Since we're on the subject, let's talk about Justin Trudeau and how his progressive virtue signalling, his public peacocking of his progressive values, is starting to come back and bite him in the ass.
So Trudeau had been visiting India, and there was news that Jasper Atwal, a Sikh extremist convicted of attempted murder, had been invited to a dinner with Trudeau in India, is really just the story that broke the dam for this international deluge of criticism the PM is currently in the midst of.
Before the Atwal story had come out, both Canadians and international observers were already scratching their heads about how Indian Prime Minister Modi had clearly snubbed Trudeau, how excessive his family photos were and how silly their garments were, trying to dress more stereotypically Indian than the actual Indian people they met, which you might think Trudeau would have been on guard for under the fear of committing cultural appropriation.
There does not seem to be any purpose for or proper planning to his visit, said a University of Toronto professor.
And the Daily Mail said that Trudeau never misses an opportunity to don traditional attire, which is true, as it seemed to be a million photos of Trudeau dressing like anything other than a Westerner.
But the Atwal story then kicked off this international attention into high gear, with Indian and other media struggling to figure out how such a screw-up was possible.
Most scathing of all was a comment in the Washington Post by Barker Dutt, a prominent Indian journalist who boasts a social media following of over 6 million.
She says, I confess from afar, I used to be a Trudeau fangirl, but after this trip, I've changed my mind.
Trudeau has come across as flighty and facetious.
His orchestrated dance moves and multiple costume changes in heavily embroidered kirtas and shiwanis make him look more like an actor on a movie set or a guest at a wedding than a politician who is here to talk business.
Suddenly all that charisma and cuteness seem constructed, manufactured, and above all, not serious.
And that is, in my opinion, the damning indictment of the progressive corporatist.
They stand for absolutely nothing but their own self-aggrandizement.
They're never absent when there is a juicy photo opportunity, but they're never around when something actually needs to be done.
The article details Trudeau's various follies as he's gone along, and then gets to the motherload, the point of no return, the people kind comment.
It was too much for even the wackiest of leftists.
Well, we've just watched it and we've just watched a response from the immediate audience.
It seems that they were cheering and applauding him for saying we should use people kind.
But it turns out there's only so progressive one can get without becoming ridiculous.
Which is why they say that Trudeau had to write it out alone without his usual phalanx of defenders, as the world weighed in and the likes of Piers Morgan issued a scathing takedown.
If you're getting dunked on by Piers Morgan, you're doing something wrong.
Speaking of doing something wrong, if you're at the University of York, be careful, because they are now policing memes.
You're going to be found guilty of sharing humour online.
You're a convicted memer, sir, and you are about to be chucked out of your university for such frivolous activity.
And I'm not joking.
At 1am on a Saturday morning, a private Facebook chat of University of York politics students, of which this author is a member, was overrun by two members sending memes.
This sort of back and forth isn't anything particularly unusual, but this time the memes got under people's skin.
One of them was a 1-10 scale, accompanied by the question, using the scale provided, rate how much you like kids.
At one was a picture of Kate and Jerry McCann, and at 10 was a picture of Jimmy Saville.
Another was a picture of Katie Price's disabled son with the caption, What's Black and Screams?
Harvey Price answering an iron.
Okay, these are pretty spicy memes, I'm not gonna lie.
Hitler was also another common thread, with one meme bearing a picture of his face with the text, I burned 6 million calories in 4 years.
Another was a picture of Gordon Ramsey shouting at Hitler with the caption, put them back in the oven, they're so undercooked they're writing fucking diaries.
Elsewhere, one of the two meme posters referred to Hitler as a rational consumer, with the other hitting back with utility maximizer.
Everyone in the chat would have known this is a reference to the lecture on bureaucrats, yes it was as dry as it sounds, earlier that week.
The two were promptly removed from the private group chat.
Next, like when a schoolchild runs off to tell a teacher when someone calls him a nasty name, one student decided to report them to the university.
Rather than telling everyone to calm down and just leave us to it, the university made a public statement, reminding the students that the university has a zero-tolerance policy towards racist, sexist, and bigoted behaviour, and anyone in breach of it would face disciplinary measures.
Anything from a £250 fine to a permanent expulsion.
To some, with some being the majority of the general public, this might seem like an overreaction.
Oh no, not at all.
Not at all.
This is exactly the reaction I expect from universities these days.
After all, these were a few silly, albeit gallows humour jokes shared in a private group chat that very few people had access to.
These people were hardly walking around campus wearing swastika armbands and chanting Heil Hitler, but this sort of common sense is lost on the University of York, which often tells us to watch our language.
Yeah, I bet they bloody do.
At Freshers, we were given a list of examples of sexual violence, which included telling a joke that might make someone feel uncomfortable.
With all this, university officials are sending a very clear message.
Yeah, that they haven't got a fucking sense of humour.
That humour has to be stamped out at the University of York.
They have decided on the acceptable parameters of humour and will punish anyone who dares step outside of them.
Instead of letting us make our own mistakes, our own shitty jokes, the university administration has effectively threatened a couple of people with punishment for sending the wrong sort of memes to the wrong group of people.
You don't have to think those memes were funny to think this is quite censorious.
Well, it's absolutely censorious.
That's exactly the point of this.
The point is to enforce the hegemonic sensibilities of the bourgeois progressives.
Did they find this offensive?
Yes, well then something needs to be done.
But hey, at least you guys didn't get the cops called on you for this.
I think this might be the best headline I've ever seen.
White men need to decide if they want to share this country with the rest of us.
The far left and black communities in America are currently celebrating a huge win with the idea of a black-only ethnostate.
Left-wing politics has become identity politics against white men, which seems to be their entire fucking platform.
But it's the white men who need to decide whether they're going to share the rest of the country or whether they're just going to get the fuck out.
So naturally, the article begins with the eternal victim narrative.
America has never been shared.
It's big enough for everyone to play together nicely, but white men have been playing with it for 242 years, rarely, if ever, letting anyone else play with them.
White men are a minority at only 36% of the US population, but account for 68% of police officers, 70% of Congress, 91% of Fortune 500 CEOs, and 98% of all US presidents.
That's not sharing.
The idea that there is some sort of top-down conspiracy among white men to elect only white men is ridiculous.
By the statement that the author just made, white men are a minority in a democracy.
They must be achieving these things for some other reason than an internal ethnic and gendered conspiracy against the non-white non-men in the country.
There must be a reason that non-white non-men people in the United States are voting for white men.
It must be that there is something about them or what they're running or standing for that means that they can speak to people who are not just white men.
Otherwise people wouldn't fucking vote for them.
But the author says, I imagine most white men who either don't want to share the country or are indifferent simply believe they would be worse off in an equal society.
Well it depends how this equalist society is arrived at, doesn't it?
If non-white people are going to stay in school, get jobs and integrate into society and become the change that they want to see, no one's going to complain.
But if it can't be achieved in a meritorious way and you want to radically change the system to simply give people privileges based on their skin colour and genitalia, then yeah, I think that there are going to be people who openly complain about this, especially when you have to target white men to achieve your equality.
While non-wealthy white men might benefit from the racial hierarchy that conservative politicians uphold, fucking hell.
The idea that you think that the United States is a racial hierarchy is madness to me.
I mean, it's like you think they live in India.
You are being crushed financially just like the rest of us.
Instead of thinking your piece of the pie will shrink if women and minorities get their fair share, you're getting your fair share.
You're not being paid less because you're a woman or you're a minority.
That means you are getting your fair share.
What you're saying is you don't actually want your fair share.
You want more than that.
You want what someone else worked to achieve, don't you?
You think you're entitled to someone else's labor.
In reality, everyone's piece of the pie grows as the wealth stops flowing almost exclusively to the top 1% and we're able to build a stronger middle class.
We are stronger together regardless of race or gender.
If that were the case, why would you be writing articles that were based specifically on dividing people because of their race and gender?
You remember you're attacking white men in this article, don't you?
And no, there will not be a continual amount of growing wealth if you arbitrarily take wealth from some people and give it to others.
You will not build a stronger middle class.
You will not prevent the 1% from being wealthy.
All you will do is impoverish people who do not deserve to be impoverished, who have done nothing wrong, who have done nothing to hurt you, and there is nowhere in the world where this kind of direct, predatory wealth redistribution has ever fucking worked.
We know that this is what causes nations to fail.
So finally we get to the end.
The sooner the white men decide whether or not they want to share the country, the sooner we can come to a resolution about our inequality.
Well, if the answer is no, does that mean you're all going to leave?
I mean, where do you plan on going?
There are lots of places in Africa where they're very concerned about making things equal, but you never fucking go there, do you?
You sit there from your little parochial ethnic communities in the United States and go, well, this is a problem because there's not an ethnic community dominating the United States that looks like me.
It's like, okay, then find a country that does.
If that's your concern, you can do something about this.
Rather than just demonstrating publicly that you hate white men, you can actually just go off and join a country that doesn't have any.
There are fucking loads of them!
If enough decide they don't want to share, then I guess we can go to war and decide who stays and who goes.
So you want a race war with the white men?
That's this black author and his fucking opinion.
If he can't just simply have exactly what he wants as he demands it from someone else, then race war.
I mean, of course, my preferred path is that white men simply realize that we're all better off when we share this country as equals.
But the current path we're on where one side doesn't want to share, the other does, and the ton of folks in the middle just standing around doing nothing where politicians fleece every last one of us isn't working.
So it's gonna have to be a race war.
The thing is though, you don't have a right to something someone else has fucking made.
This guy's acting like wealth has just dropped out of the sky onto white men.
Like white men, especially those from the lower and middle classes, don't work their fucking asses off to have the little that they actually have.
And when they are successful and when they are prosperous, you don't get to just look at them and say, wow, I really want some of that.
Get a fucking job.
You know what?
I take what I said about the previous headline back.
This is actually the most ridiculous headline I've ever seen.
The patriarchal race to colonize Mars is just another example of male entitlement.
The presumed right to use and abuse something, then walk away to conquer something new, is a hallmark of colonialism.
Yeah, okay, I'm pro-colonialism when it comes to Mars.
I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon, but if people want to try and colonize Mars, I say fucking go for it.
Naturally, this whole article is a dig at Elon Musk.
We want a new space race, he said in a press conference, shortly after launching the company's Falcon Heavy rocket and his Tesla Roadster into space earlier in February.
Like a child, he gleefully continued, space races are exciting.
Well, they are exciting, aren't they?
And Musk isn't the only billionaire looking to enter the space race.
Amazon's Jeff Bezos has his private aerospace company Blue Origin, while Virgin's Richard Branson, a prominent adventurer, created Virgin Galactic back in 2004.
Well, what's wrong with that?
Why can't the free market end up taking us to Mars?
It looks like they're all kind of going that way.
What's the fucking problem?
Oh right, it's patriarchal, of course.
It's male entitlement.
It's imperialist.
It's colonization of an empty planet millions of miles away.
These men, particularly Musk, are not only heavily invested in who can get their rocket into space first, but in colonizing Mars.
The desire to colonize, to have unquestioned, unchallenged, and automatic access to something, to any type of body, and to use it at will, is a patriarchal one.
It's a red rock that is devoid of life, to the best of my knowledge, floating in space around a star.
And near to it happens to be a planet with sentient beings, the only one of which we are aware.
Where is the fucking harm in human beings going to Mars?
Who is hurt by this?
Other than the human beings who undertake the fucking voyage?
Nobody!
There is no victim on the other side of human beings colonizing Mars, you fucking reactionaries.
Indeed, there is no ethical consideration among these billionaires whether this should be done.
Rather, the conversation is when it will be done.
Because in the eyes of these intrepid explorers, it's the only way to save humanity.
Well, I think it might actually be sensible for us to have off-world bases, just in case something actually did happen to the Earth.
If the entire human race is located only on the Earth, and the Earth, I don't know, gets smashed by a giant meteorite or something, then for the survival of our species, it's a good thing to do this.
And like I just said, there's no victim there.
There's no one on Mars that we're going to be displacing.
There aren't going to be native Martians who we're going to put on reservations or anything.
It is the same instinctual and cultural force that teaches men that everything and everyone in their line of vision is theirs for the taking.
Who thinks that?
Who is that a representation of?
Find me a man that thinks like walking up to a woman and grabbing her by the pussy is done because it's there and you grab it because you can.
I mean, if that were the case, why would we even have laws against it?
Why would it be a social taboo?
It would be totally normal and totally expected by every man and every woman everywhere if that was actually what people thought.
I want to be clear, I think we should be a multi-planet species, not a single planet species on another planet, Musk said in 2015.
What kind of future do you want to have?
Do you want to have a future where we are forever confined to one planet or one where we are on many planets?
This Columbusing attitude, the strident business acumen laced with an imperialist ethos fucking hell.
There is no one there for us to be imperialist over.
You are defending an empty planet.
Musk doesn't just want to colonize Mars to satisfy his ego.
No, he wants to colonize Mars to help his fellow humans.
Yeah, but what if he really believes that?
I mean, I think that there is a very strong case to say that humans probably should leave the Earth for the posterity of the entire species.
And do you not think that this is, again, like striving towards excellence?
Actually improving our level of technology, branching out, actually making something of the human race, rather than to forever be categorized along with our race and gender in the dystopian prison that would be the progressive United States of America.
You guys really hate the idea of us growing, don't you?
You hate the idea of us actually achieving things.
You want to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator.
The impulse to colonize, to colonize lands, to colonize peoples, and now that we may soon be technologically capable of doing so, colonizing space, has its origins in gendered power structures, entitlement to power control, domination and ownership, the presumed right to use and abuse something, then walk away to conquer and colonize something new.
There is no one there to be colonized.
It's going to be humans living in barren areas of the universe, where there is no other life form to be intruded upon.
There will be no injustice done by the human colonization of Mars, but the thing is, it just gets more outlandish.
The Friday before SpaceX's launch, legendary astronaut Buzz Aldrin reiterated to me over lunch that it is imperative that we talk about space exploration in terms of migration rather than using words like colonize or settle when talking about going to Mars.
Because the far left are hypersensitive about such words and that has to be taken into account.
Because otherwise they sit there and think that what you want is some sort of native Martian genocide.
Right now there is a robot dummy propped up in the driver's seat of a red Tesla convertible flying through space away from the man-made garbage fires devouring the Earth.
Houston, we have a problem, and it's the patriarchy.
I tell you, I'm watching the hysterical nonsense from both sides of this discussion, and it really is amazing to me how radicalized both groups are becoming.
There is nothing in here that could connect to the average person.
They would just read this and see it as incomprehensible gibberish.
This is just extreme rhetoric.
Nothing about this really accurately represents what's going on in the world at all.
All they want to do is push far-left nonsense at you.
And I just want to stress the reason I'm covering this, it's on NBC News.
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