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April 1, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
23:44
This Week in Stupid (01⧸04⧸2018)
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Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 1st of April 2018.
I will not be doing any April Fools nonsense, I'm afraid, and I say that I'm not going to be doing any April Fool stuff because I want you to understand that the things I'm about to show you are real.
Real articles, real stories, real events in the world that have made the news.
I don't want you thinking, well, that's clearly made up, because as far as I can tell, none of the following have been made up, although all of them should have been.
Let's start in Scotland.
You know, that place of boundless, militaristic tolerance, where someone, this week, was arrested over an offensive comment that was left on a fucking napkin.
This is the entire article that the BBC have given us.
Police have said that a 22-year-old man has been arrested as part of a hate crime investigation in Dumfries.
The inquiry began after racially offensive comments were found scrawled on the napkin in a local Chinese restaurant.
Well thank god they've at least caught someone.
I would hate to think that someone who scrawled a racially offensive comment on a napkin was left at large.
I mean that's a real danger to the public, don't you think?
The discovery was made by a member of staff at the Hong Kong Star and the Fryers Vennel, but they don't tell us whether that member of staff survived or not.
And I'm really disappointed at the BBC's reporting or lack thereof, because I just don't know how many people were injured by these racially offensive napkin comments.
This one actually nothing to do with hate crime laws, but it was just so good I couldn't pass it up.
Message that was too rude for one policeman from the Huddersfield Daily Examiner.
So a woman whose rear car window contains a rude message has claimed a police officer has told her to take it down.
The sticker on the window of her vauxhall courser reads, Go on small dick, pass me.
But the cheeky message, which has been causing amusement and red faces on social media, has not gone down well with one male police officer.
She said, he turned up last night sometime between 8 and 10pm and told me he was personally offended by it.
He was really intimidating, and I was absolutely fuming.
He said he would be passing my house three to four times next week and would be issuing me with a public order ticket if I hadn't taken it down.
He said it was personal.
Well I guess we found out who has the small dick around here haven't we buddy?
The irony is the sticker is an in-joke between her and her partner Richard Buckley known as Dick and she made it to give him a chuckle if he was ever driving behind her.
This was one of the most requested stories of this week and I couldn't not cover it.
Outrage over official brochure with child marriage tips for migrants.
Sweden has withdrawn a leaflet giving immigrants who are married to children tips and advice on how to settle in the country and it's been withdrawn following a public outcry.
Well, at least there was a public outcry.
Even if nobody in these organisations has any idea with how to deal with child marriage in Sweden, at least the public at large still have some sense in their heads.
So the brochure is called Information for Those Married to a Child and it caused a storm over its unacceptably soft tone.
It included an explanation that marrying an under 18 year old is forbidden in the country and continuing to live with them was inappropriate and it explained that a child bride would be treated as a lone youngster who did not have their parent or guardian.
Well come on that's unfair isn't it Sweden?
They're married to them.
One line read since children under the age of 15 have an absolute right to protection from sexual acts it is improper for you to live together if the child is under 15.
I don't speak Swedish but I spoke to a man who does and he pointed out that in this brochure there was nothing to suggest that actually being married to a child was wrong.
Just that it was a bit of a social faux pas.
Because ultimately, you really wouldn't want to offend those men who are married to children, would you?
I mean, that would be really awful to offend the feelings of a minority group just because you think that 30-something-year-old men shouldn't be having sex with 14-year-olds.
But the really progressive thing to do is treat it as if it's just a lifestyle choice, which is precisely what this leaflet was about.
Tobias Billstrom, leader of the moderates, blasted the leaflet.
He said, The biggest failing is that the word prison isn't present, but rather it gives a bit of advice and tips on how to respond if you have a relationship our marriage laws forbid.
And liberal leader Jan Borklund tweeted, facepalm, unacceptably flat.
The brochure has to be withdrawn without delay.
Child marriage should be completely forbidden.
Well, fucking done, Sweden.
Holy shit, you've actually found something on which you can form a moral platform against the fucking backwards nature of the immigrants you're letting into your country.
Well done.
You've actually realized there is something about your country that is superior to theirs.
Good fucking job.
Maybe you can start this as a platform.
Maybe next thing you go for are women's rights.
Maybe the next thing you can speak out about is a woman's right not to be raped just because that harlot is showing her hair.
Even Sweden's Minister for Children, the Elderly and Gender Equality, Lena Helgar, whatever, said she had misgivings about the leaflet.
She said, There should never be any doubt over which laws and values apply in Sweden.
Really?
There seems to be deliberate doubt and confusion about which laws and values apply in Sweden.
But she said, it is not permitted to enter into child marriage.
That cannot be compromised, and that and the information on it must be crystal clear.
Wow, this is fucking great.
I love hearing Westerners standing up for their own values.
Even if after every time they've violated our moral values, we've just gone, okay, well, you know, who are we to say no?
Who are we to say no?
Finally, it gets to the point of fucking children, and they can actually say, you know what, I think we might need to take a moral stand here.
And I tell you, I just thank fuck.
Because honestly, I didn't know if these guys were ever going to stop at any point ever.
I honestly thought they were just going to carry on and carry on and carry on.
And I thought we would hear things like, you know, no, it's fine.
All cultures are equal.
Fucking children is exactly the moral equivalent of not fucking children.
I honestly am just amazed that they haven't come out with this.
But I guess even they have standards, just really fucking low ones.
Coming back to Britain briefly to talk about the teaching union that's criticizing Osted Chief over the hijab ban for young girls.
And Spielman's comments on young Muslim girls wearing the headscarf could increase race attacks, says the NEU.
Now before we go on, isn't that just the most hysterical connection you can imagine making between them?
Like, hey, should young Muslim girls, I mean, we're talking really young, like children, like single-digit age children, should they be wearing the headscarf?
Oh, I don't know if you even talk about this, that could increase race attacks.
So the country's largest teaching union has criticized the head of Ofsted, accusing her of pressuring schools into banning the hijab worn by young girls, amid the claim that the watchdog's position could lead to increased physical and verbal attacks on Muslim girls.
You mean, we don't have a fucking argument.
So we're going to reach up into our own assholes, really get in deep, right up to the elbow, grab anything that we can, yank it out, and fling it at you.
Kevin Courtney, the Joint Secretary General of the NEU, criticized Spielman's recommendation that teachers adopt a muscular liberalism to override the wishes of their local communities.
Well, I'll tell you what, I am absolutely with Spielman at this point.
We absolutely do need a form of muscular liberalism that will sit there and say no to the barbaric and illiberal practices of people from, say, the Middle East, or from sub-Saharan Africa, or from East Asia, or from wherever in the fucking world.
It just genuinely doesn't matter to me where these people come from.
I think it is a problem that Amanda Spielman, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools, speaks out in this way, which I think is frankly very political.
Well, fucking duh.
People feeling so much pressure from Ofsted, our worry is that instead of consultation, we'll find schools saying, we are going to ban the hijab.
Okay.
And I'll tell you why that's okay, right?
It's weird that young children, single-digit pre-pubescent age children, are wearing the hijab.
Because to the Muslim community, the hijab is very much like wearing large amounts of makeup.
It is inappropriate in Islam for girls who have not yet hit puberty to wear the hijab.
Because the hijab is a sign of modesty for women of sexual breeding age.
That's why it exists.
That's why tiny children in the Muslim community, little girls, don't have to wear them.
Because they're not available for men to breed with.
That's the point of it.
It's literally like a young girl being slapped up with all this makeup, putting on high heels and a mini skirt and going to school and people going, oh, that's inappropriate.
Well, that's going to increase hate crimes against our young sluts, isn't it?
I think it would be very damaging to community relations.
It's not a sensible place to go.
So our guidance will be about how you have a dialogue, a respectful dialogue, a dialogue based on love for one another, a dialogue based on sexualizing underage girls to Muslim men, which is exactly the dialogue these fucking idiots are having.
But they don't know anything about these fucking communities, apparently.
And just in case you think that I'm making this up, I'm not.
Last year, Spielman announced that Ofsted inspectors have been told to question Muslim primary school pupils wearing a hijab, with Spielman later saying that expecting girls to wear the headscarf could be interpreted as sexualization of young girls.
That Ofsted inspectors would ask individual Muslim girls why they were wearing the hijab and then imply they were wearing the hijab because they'd been sexualized indicates someone who isn't in touch with Muslim communities at all.
No, that's exactly what the Muslim communities themselves will say.
For example, here is a Muslim woman talking about this from February this year.
I didn't want to wear my hijab and I don't believe very young girls should wear them today.
She doesn't think that it's right for girls under eight years old to wear the hijab.
I think that eight's too bloody young myself, but you have to understand what it is for.
But do you know what's really interesting is that the main point of contention in this article is that the talk of British values was divisive.
So her parents made her wear the hijab at school and she says, I do understand why my parents put me and my siblings through that though.
They were trying to instill an idea of our identity in us so we'd meet other young Muslims as part of a wide community.
I frequently draw on things that I learned at Islamic school and also there that I learned that Muslim girls don't actually have to wear the hijab at least until not until puberty.
I've written in defense of the hijab in the Burke and I stand by everything I've said.
The policing of Muslim women's clothes is used to attack minority communities already at risk of being alienated by the mainstream.
Amazing double think there isn't it.
You sit there and your parents instill into you a separate and foreign identity, one deliberately designed to be foreign to the British identity.
And then you sit there and go, well, I'm at risk of being alienated.
Well, I guess you are.
I suppose we're going to have to stop this, aren't we?
If you are literally being indoctrinated by your parents to think of yourself as Muslim rather than British, to think of yourself as different to the rest of the people in this country, then we have a problem.
That is just unacceptable.
And when you sit there and go, well, I mean, this woman came in talking about British values.
I found that alienating.
It seems that the damage has been done.
I'm sorry if your Muslim identity prevents you from having a British identity and it makes you object to British values, but I don't know how to tell you this, but this is a country called Britain.
The people in it regard themselves as British and various sub-denominations of, and we have a national agreement, a social contract, that the government will enforce these British values at the expense of the values of foreign nations, because they are often very different and, frankly, unacceptable when compared with our own.
But naturally, the attempt at banning the hijab for underage girls is racism dressed up as liberalism, a teachers' conference was told.
So the motion accused Spielman of going beyond her remit as chief inspector of schools in her recent comments linking the wearing of the hijab to the sexualization of young girls, which it is, and her call for muscular liberalism to promote British values in schools, which we need.
And this is an entirely appropriate agenda for agents of the British state to be pursuing.
Britain, the home of liberalism, promoting British values in its own schools?
Well, I mean, I'm going to have to agree with Latifa Abuchara here, a teacher from Ealing, who told the conference that such language was just another term for racism and Islamophobia.
There we go.
There we fucking have it.
British values are racist and Islamophobic.
Well, I am sorry, Latifa.
Perhaps one day we will open the borders and allow you to leave for a country that is less racist and Islamophobic.
One day.
But until then, you're all trapped in here with us.
Oh, that's not how it is.
You can leave at any time.
Man, weird how you would live in a country that you think is racist and Islamophobic.
You know what?
I wouldn't move to a country that I considered to be anglophobic.
Abu Chakra has some great opinions here too.
She says how she was called a terrorist while leading a secondary school class trip to Hampton Court, which I'm sure is completely true.
But she says, Ofsted's stance has other ramifications.
It signals to the British public that women are oppressed by Islam.
Wow, that's woke.
Yeah, I agree.
I think almost everyone in the British public agrees that women are being oppressed by Islam.
You know, when they see you walking around in your black bags, with a tiny, tiny letterbox cut out for your eyes, they're not thinking, that's a free woman.
Nobody's looking at that and thinking, wow, I can't imagine being that free.
It definitely looks like they're being oppressed.
But to be fair with you, it looks like men are oppressed by Islam as well.
You have to spend your time policing her behavior, keeping her in line, making sure that she does exactly as you think she is supposed to do.
Seems a lot of hassle.
I think that women can look after themselves.
I think women should have the choice of being free.
I'm just an old dinosaur that way.
I'm a massive Islamophobe that way, I guess.
But honestly, if you have to pray five times a day, you can't eat pork or drink alcohol, and you have to do all of these things by Islamic regulation, I would find that to be an oppressive force that I wanted removed from my life.
So if that's how I would feel looking at how Muslim men are, I can only imagine how it must be to be a Muslim woman.
But it emboldens groups such as the EDL and the BNP and other racist groups.
I don't care.
I don't care.
I'm not a part of the EDL.
I'm not a part of the BNP or other racist groups.
And in my opinion, these are tiny fringe movements that appears everyone hates.
I don't even know where you bring them up.
Because nobody outside of these groups is going to bring them up because nobody outside of these groups gives a fuck.
Mirren Begg, a teacher from Croydon, said that Ofsted's position was unwarranted and draconian.
It is wholly inappropriate for Ofsted inspectors to question primary age Muslim girls on their choice of dress.
Do you even fucking hear yourself?
Do you think they have a choice of dress?
Primary age girls are usually dressed by their fucking parents.
I'm not sure I agree if they have the choice of how they dress, but if they do, sexualizing themselves at a pre-teen age is inappropriate.
However you want to slice it.
This is an act of intimidation by a powerful adult on a young child.
And it has no place in our education at horseshit.
Horse shit.
Pete Smith, a delegate from Swindon, Pete, you're a fucking idiot, accused Ofsted of aiding a hostile climate for Muslims, calling its policy on hijabs as racism dressed up as liberalism.
Amazing.
So Pete Smith, a delegate from Swindon, is pro-sexualizing pre-pubescent girls.
Pete, you haven't thought this one through, have you buddy?
But here's the crusade.
Let's tell Ofsted, let's tell the DFE, we are not prepared to stand up for their racism.
We will face them down.
We will push that racism back by any means necessary.
Okay, listen, Pete, right?
They're going to have to change.
And when I say they, I mean the Muslims.
They're going to have to change.
They're going to have to realize that the Muslim identity cannot be their paramount identity in Britain if it conflicts with the values that we built our country upon.
We absolutely need to pursue these values.
And sexualizing children is not one of our values.
In fact, just like in Sweden, where that was the last stand of Swedish values, where they could actually say, you know what?
Fucking a kid isn't okay.
I think, Pete, that we can do that too.
I think we can do this, Pete.
I think we can find the moral fortitude within ourselves to say, you know what?
We're not going to sexualize children, Pete.
Do you think you can say it with me?
Come on, Pete.
Come on.
Do you think you can do it too, Pete?
Come on.
Come on, Pete.
We can do this.
It's not fucking racist to tell brown people that they shouldn't sexualize children, Pete.
Come on, buddy.
Come on.
You can get behind this.
You can say, you know what?
It is wrong to sexualize children.
No matter who's doing it.
No matter how brown they are.
It's just wrong to sexualize children, Pete.
After the motion passed on Sunday morning, the NEU section president, Kiri Tunks, said, it sends a really important message to the Muslim community that we will stand with you through these against these attacks.
No, they're going to change.
They're going to change.
I know that sucks.
But you can't make them not sexualize children.
It's like, actually, we can.
This is that muscular liberalism and British values you didn't like so much.
Not sexualizing children is deeply, deeply at the core of these.
Trust me.
Goes to go and do a poll, go walk around the street, just ask any British person and someone who actually considers themselves British.
They don't have to be white though.
By the way, you can go to a Sikh community, you go to a Hindu community, you can find any of the black immigrant communities and say, hey, do you think it's right to sexualize young girls?
You know, the pre-pubescent young girls.
Do you think that's right?
Do you think that maybe, just maybe, we can find every single different kind of race and creed and religion and political ideology in this country apart from Islam and see if we can get them in a coalition with one another to say, you know what, we shouldn't sexualize young girls.
You know, I feel like it's been ages since I've covered anything in the US, so I went to campus reform and I looked at the front page today, and this is what I found.
Dartmouth Library Guide extols feminist geography.
The Dartmouth College Library, I don't even know if Dartmouth is in the US actually.
I didn't check.
Recently published a new guide for students explaining how scholars use feminism to contravene masculinist practices in geography research.
Feminist geography refers to the application of feminist theories and methodology to understanding human geography.
The goal is to investigate, reveal, challenge, and change gendered divisions in society.
Viewing geography through a feminist lens is crucial since gender inequalities often manifest themselves as spatial divisions with men and women having different patterns of spatial activity, behavior and experiences of place, the guide adds.
So you mean men and women tend to be interested in doing different things, and doing different things involves them being in separate places.
Though the field arose in the late 1970s as a fringe topic in feminist theory, it's made its way to the mainstream.
The guide explains that the researchers in the field now study issues like patriarchy, identity, embodiment, spatial subjectivities, and emotional geographies.
Is there anyone listening who requires geography in their professional life?
Because this is the sound of your discipline becoming corrupted.
The guide also touts feminist geographers as key players in the fight to challenge the masculinist formation of science as objective, gender-neutral, and value-free through their deployment of feminist knowledge and research methods.
So what they're saying is they want to make this subjective, feminine, and feminist.
That's it.
They want to change the objective, gender-neutral, and non-partisan nature of scientific research, at least ideally, and make it all of those things, which would otherwise be known as a corruption of science.
And it's not just science.
NYC College are offering feminist economics courses.
Feminist economics is a small seminar currently taught by Shibi Tejani, an assistant professor of international affairs at the New School, whose research agenda focuses on how various international economic policies impact women and men differently.
Students are learning about the gender wage gap, how women and men tend to pursue different career paths, the impact of globalization on women, and social reproduction of wealth and other economic topics according to the description.
Rather than simply explaining how economic forces might hurt women, the description explains that feminist economics is a way of radically reconceptualizing and reorienting the study of economics in ways that are more transformative for women.
They mean communism.
To do this, the students are exploring feminist scholarship on epistemology, methodology, and economic theory, and learning about how the assumption that everyone has a free choice and rationality is in fact gendered, which is a fucking hell of a thing to write, isn't it?
Because what they're saying is that men have free choice and rationality.
Women are biologically determined, I guess.
Who fucking knows?
Though a syllabus is not available, the course description does indicate that students will debate the 1979 essay The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, which was written by the current president of the Institute for Women's Policy Research.
That essay, which is foundational to the field of feminist economics, argues in favor of a movement that blends feminist approaches to gender with a socialist critique of the economic order, all in hopes of creating a more liberated society.
Well, yeah, that's bound to happen, because if there's one thing that goes hand in hand, synonymously with the term socialism, it's liberation, isn't it?
I mean, holy shit, nobody's ever been oppressed by a socialist world order.
As feminist socialists, we must organize a practice which addresses both the struggle against patriarchy and the struggle against capitalism.
You mean the struggle against reality.
That's really what this is, isn't it?
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