Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - This Week in Stupid (08⧸04⧸2018)

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April 8, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

23:54

This Week in Stupid (08⧸04⧸2018)

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	Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 8th of April 2018.
	Let's start this week with an article from salon.com because I hadn't been there in a while and I wondered what they were saying.
	And it's almost wall to wall whining about Donald Trump.
	But this was the most interesting thing I found.
	What Madeline Albright can't or won't say, Trump fascism and democracy.
	What I love about the discussion surrounding Donald Trump and the word fascism is that it's actually really not appropriate to call Donald Trump a fascist.
	If anything, he's a capitalist.
	So they have to say things like, former Secretary of State sees storm clouds of fascism.
	So the former Secretary of State has written a book about fascism, but it's not out yet.
	So obviously neither myself nor the author has read it.
	So our author says that Albright sees an emerging tendency in the world around her that carries far too many echoes of 20th century fascism of her childhood, and she's certainly not alone in that.
	And to be honest with you, they're not wrong.
	But the thing is, it's not the solution of fascism that is the echo of fascism.
	It's the problems that are currently being caused.
	And the problems that are currently being caused are going to have a kind of nationalist solution because the problems that we are facing are globalist in nature.
	And when I say globalist, I mean anti-border, pro-immigration.
	These are causing a great deal of fundamental problems in our world.
	And so naturally, a nationalist solution is going to be something that many people look to.
	And it's not just the open borders globalist types who are promoting mass immigration and have been letting in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new immigrants into every country.
	I think it's actually a little deeper than that.
	I think there's a great deal of philosophical backing towards a kind of deconstructionist attitude towards national identity, which is a real shame because national identities are a powerful thing.
	But that's why they had to attack national identity in the first place.
	I also read Albright's New York Times article, and the author is right when he says, Albright does not explain exactly what she means by fascism except in the negative.
	It's something that's not democracy and undermines the shared desire of most people in most countries to live freely and in peace.
	I'm personally not going to allow her to define any kind of nationalistic sentiments as fascism.
	Just because you are a nativist or a nationalist does not make you a fascist.
	It means that you are concerned with your own nation state and your own nation state may not be a fascist state.
	Because fascism has definitive characteristics, I don't know why Albright can't simply define it as autocratic, centralized, without a free market, without a free press.
	Just because one is somewhat nationalist in their outlook or concerned with the problems of the native population, more specifically the poor segments of the native population, that doesn't make one a fascist and it's ridiculous to suggest that it does.
	And I suspect it's because fascism has definitive characteristics that Albright, at least in her article, fails to fully examine, that she kind of wants to imply indirectly that the people who are at the bottom and who are looking for a national identity, a national solidarity with them and their government, instead of their government having solidarity with people outside of the nation, that these people are enablers of fascism.
	And I find that really inappropriate.
	And I really suspect it's this kind of sleight of hand that leads Albright to fail to actually define fascism, at least in her New York Times article.
	If the people who in the 30s did turn to fascism turned to fascism because it was the only nativist alternative, then you can hardly blame them.
	What options did they have?
	They had problems, they needed solutions for these problems.
	And this is not different to the working class problems that we are seeing now.
	These people do have problems, and many of these problems are caused by the globalist policies of Western countries.
	So it's no wonder that they're going to be aiming at something that is a nativist movement to reassert national identity, national borders, and national laws.
	And I say that because I live in a country where there is actually a parallel legal system operating in at least 80 unofficial but de facto parallel courts.
	The only solution for working class natives of these countries is to look for a nativist party.
	But like I said, this does not mean a fascist party, it means a nationalist party.
	But really, every party should be a nationalist party because the terms of the social contract between the government of a liberal democracy and the citizens within it are in and of themselves fundamentally nationalist.
	What we describe as liberal democracies are nation states.
	This is how they are defined, this is how they operate.
	So to have a ruling class that operates in the best interests of themselves and people elsewhere at the expense of segments of the working population within the nation is a betrayal.
	It would be baffling if the native population didn't want to return to some kind of nativist status quo.
	And by not defining fascism, this allows Albright to kind of imply that any kind of patriotism is, in and of itself, some facet of fascism.
	I agree with the author that she is eminently qualified to describe what fascism is and isn't, at least on paper, and they say we can assume that in her book Fascism a Warning that she does so.
	But this author has only seen a few brief excerpts, but in one of these she writes that a fascist is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group and is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others and is willing to use violence whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.
	That's actually a terrible definition of what a fascist actually is, because that describes socialists and Islamists by equal measure.
	That's not a definition of the word fascist, that's a definition of the word collectivist, a subset of which is fascist.
	But the thing is, that doesn't really describe Donald Trump.
	Trump is doubtless well aware at this point that he does not represent the entire United States.
	There is a large and eminently vocal movement using hashtag resist, saying, not my president, you don't speak for me.
	Donald Trump is obviously well aware of these people's existence.
	He spends half of his time on Twitter BTFOing them.
	He's well aware that he speaks for the white working class of America.
	This is not him claiming to speak for the entire nation or group, at least any more than any other elected prime minister or president of a liberal democracy.
	He actually isn't utterly unconcerned with the rights of others because he has actually worked within the framework that has been handed down to him from Obama.
	And back in around May 2017, there were a slew of articles comparing Obama's actions to Trump's actions.
	And if you ignore the surrounding rhetoric around them, Obama's being very ameliorating and Trump's being very inflammatory, the conclusion was that Trump was on the whole less authoritarian than Obama.
	It's not that he's not concerned with the rights of others.
	He's concerned with the problems that are affecting middle America.
	And rightly so, these people have been unrepresented in politics for quite some time.
	It was inevitable that someone like Donald Trump would come along, and to say that he's willing to use violence or whatever other means are necessary to achieve his goals is clearly not true.
	That's actually more representative of Obama, who actually conducted extrajudicial drone strikes against US citizens and ramped up the use of executive orders to bypass the legislative process in the United States.
	This is why it's all the more cringe when our author says, does it describe Donald Trump the proximate target of her times op-ed?
	Pretty well.
	Not really.
	Although we might have to fudge a little on willing to use violence.
	Yeah, he's willing to use violence against America's enemies, but has he ever said that he's going to end up shooting the protesters who arrive at every one of his rallies?
	Can we say instead, would like to use violence, fantasizes about using violence in a juvenile and upsetting fashion?
	Alright, okay, so you're talking about the time when he said, if people like this came in back in my day, we'd punch them.
	Is that an accurate representation of what you're trying to get across there?
	Because my goodness, I really don't think he's the one that started this kind of juvenile and upsetting use of middle school playground violence.
	There's also this interesting bit here.
	She says, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and the honour roll of elected governments swelled not only in Central Europe, but also in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
	Almost everywhere it seemed dictators were out and Democrats were in.
	Freedom was ascendant.
	To which our author says, okay, then, quite a bit is missing between freedom's ascendancy in 1989 and the Democratic banner struggling to remain aloft in 2018, wouldn't you say?
	I find that really ironic, given how there's nothing anti-democratic about Donald Trump.
	I mean, okay, admittedly, he did say that he would like to extend the term limits for US presidents, but as I understand it, that's actually a sort of informal tradition started by George Washington and not actually a hard and fast rule.
	But even then, okay, that's I'm happy to talk that up to the most autocratic and dictatorial thing that Donald Trump has said, and it was a passing comment in which he said that it would be convenient for him.
	But to answer our author's question, yes, indeed, a lot has happened in that time.
	But I don't agree that the problem is that freedom is under threat.
	The problem is that certain segments of society have been mistreated and ignored for such a long time that they are now using their freedom to restore what they believe is in their best interests.
	And really, who can blame them?
	Everyone saw the viral video of Sinclair Media's almost 200 local news anchors parroting the same words.
	This is dangerous to our democracy.
	Well, I agree with you.
	It is dangerous to their democracy.
	Because in a way, it is their democracy.
	Because they are using this kind of coordinated media message in order to control how the democracy works.
	But the problem is the rise of Trump using social media and his millions of activists all over the internet are changing the way democracy is going to work.
	No longer will narrative power be centralized in the hands of a small group of people who will say this is our democracy.
	Now it's going to become everyone's democracy.
	And when you have millions of disenfranchised people who want to use democracy in order to solve the problems they personally are having, rather than pandering to the benefits of the media moguls, then yes, it's going to look to the media moguls like democracy is under threat.
	But none of these people are in any way trying to usurp the democratic systems of our country.
	The problem that you're having is that the world is changing.
	The internet is changing the world in the same way as the printing press.
	This is an old paradigm that they are speaking to, and it's not one that's going to carry on indefinitely.
	Eventually, you're going to have to understand that even the lowliest and least educated and most racist Trump supporter is a citizen.
	And being a citizen comes with certain benefits.
	It comes with a shard of power known as a vote.
	And they can all use this vote, and using social media, they can bypass you and talk to one another to influence how other citizens use their shard of power over the state.
	And you end up with someone like Donald Trump in charge.
	Now, whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on your own point of view and your own circumstances, where you fall in this hierarchy.
	But at the end of the day, this is what's happening, whether you like it or not.
	So rather than appealing to Francis Fukuyama's infamous end of history, what I think we're actually starting to look at is the end of media hegemony.
	I don't believe that it's going to be a small number of people controlling the narrative now.
	Information can go viral from any source.
	The problem with a sort of centralized, narrative-driven information economy is that these narratives necessarily are subjective.
	What is chosen to be included in the narrative depends specifically on the concerns and interests.
	And this doesn't even have to be a malicious choice.
	This is often, I think, just a case of people being within their own bubbles and the fact that people are fallible.
	But these narratives are going to find themselves added upon and added upon and added upon until essentially you have a narrative that is compiled from various different segments of society.
	Essentially what I'm trying to say with this, and this got a lot more deep than I expected it to go.
	Essentially what I'm saying is we're moving into a new information order and we should adjust our expectations accordingly.
	We should stop trying to deny certain aspects of reality just because they do not favour us or serve us.
	These things will not go away.
	The internet will not let them go away.
	So we really should be prepared to deal with this accordingly.
	I found this article from Newsweek.
	Russia's antifar is being tortured and detained by Putin's shadowy security service.
	At least allegedly.
	Which really emphasizes the differences between Russia and the West, doesn't it?
	Ilya Kapustin, a 27-year-old industrial climber in St. Petersburg, Russia, I don't even know what an industrial climber is, says he's not sure if he was arrested or kidnapped one night in January when he was thrown into a minibus while on his way home.
	It was around 9.30pm and Kapustin was walking from driving school when he claims he was snatched off the street a block from his house and thrown into the bus.
	In the vehicle, he said that he was confronted by five men who joked that they were the special service officers of the minivan.
	Kasputin suspects they were members of the Russian Federal Security Service known as the FSB.
	During the following three and a half hours, Kapustin claims the men tortured him with electrical cattle prod while questioning him about an acquaintance from work.
	I was thrown into the minibus, put on the floor and handcuffed with my arms behind my back.
	Kapustin described to Newsweek from the safety of neighbouring Finland where he's now living.
	The car then started, the entire time the car was moving I was tortured with an electric shocker.
	They demanded answers to their questions while one of them stood on my feet pressing them to the floor and the second man used the electrical shocker on my abdomen, hips and groin.
	After torturing him, Kapustin claims his captors brought him to the FSB's office for questioning and then later to his house, which police searched.
	He didn't see the faces of the men who tortured him, but he said the men who beat him and electrocuted him in the van were the same people who questioned him at the police station.
	In the FSB's office, the officers threatened to break his legs and kill him, but he was released soon after without being charged.
	Kapustin said he was tortured because of his friendship with young anti-fascist anarchists in Russia and because of his own history of activism.
	Throughout the years, he participated in environmental protection projects, distributed food to the needy and joined anti-war protests.
	And absolutely nothing else, presumably.
	He had plans to move south to start an agricultural cooperative, but those plans were cut short after his experience with the FSB.
	Today he says he is too afraid to return to Russia where a handful of young left-wing activists are still being held in prison and are accusing the FSB of torture.
	They are being charged with participation in a terrorist group.
	I would have to see the evidence against them to know if the charges are true, but given the quite credible torture allegations, it's likely the government doesn't have sufficient evidence against them.
	Says Tanya Lukshina, a Russia-based researcher with Human Rights Watch who has been following the case.
	Torture is quite common in Russia, and so it generally happens in those cases where they don't have sufficient evidence.
	So torture is used to force an individual to incriminate themselves and provide evidence about others.
	Isn't this interesting?
	Because in Russia and in the United States, Antifar are considered a terrorist group.
	And naturally, I do not recommend that the authorities deal with antifar in the United States or in Western Europe in the same way that Russia are dealing with their Antifar.
	But it's interesting how they have this common point of agreement.
	And really, this should demonstrate to Western Antifar just how privileged that they are.
	That but for the grace of God, they could be tortured by the Russian government.
	Assuming these allegations are true, but let's be real, they probably are.
	But I really think this serves to highlight just how softly Western authorities deal with Antifar, despite the fact that we have a mountain of video evidence demonstrating how Antifar are acting as a terrorist group, instigating political violence against non-violent people with whom they disagree.
	And it goes to show how unbelievably soft and forgiving the West is on that.
	But like I said, I don't want these people tortured, but I do want their terrorism stopped.
	Another interesting thing that happened this week is that the Metropolitan Police, for all their failings, have ditched the practice of simply believing all victims.
	Now, where is the practice of believing all victims come from, you ask?
	It has, of course, come from the progressive left.
	Christida Dick, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said she had told officers that they must have an open mind when an allegation is made, and that their role was to investigate, not blindly believe.
	You start with a completely open mind, absolutely.
	It is very important to victims to feel that they are going to be believed.
	Our default position is, we are, of course, likely to believe you, but we are investigators and have to investigate.
	And the problem I have with this is the language that they are using to describe the situation itself.
	It's very important to victims to feel they're going to be believed.
	However, you do not know that you are dealing with a victim.
	And the reason that you're going to abandon the practice of believing all victims is because defining the people making allegations as victims, whether they are or aren't, gives cover to those people who aren't victims And are we going to take advantage of your system?
	The issue has become one of the most fraught for the police service since the national policy instructed officers to believe alleged victims automatically.
	It was aimed at encouraging people to come forward with the confidence that they would be taken seriously, particularly in sexual abuse cases.
	The guidelines were put into place after revelations in 2011 that police failed to properly investigate abuse allegations, including by victims of former BBC presenter Jimmy Saville, who was revealed after his death to have been Britain's most prolific paedophile.
	However, Met was later severely criticized after its detectives placed their faith in a man known only as Nick, declaring that his uncorroborated claims of a Westminster abuse ring were credible and true, and the Crown Prosecution Service was considering whether Nick will be charged with perverting the course of justice after his claims were shown to be false.
	Now, I didn't know that his claims were shown to be false.
	The Westminster paedophile dossier was lost on the train or in a taxi or something like that.
	So I'm interested to see where they were shown to be false, but there is no link here, there's no further evidence given, and so we're just encouraged to take their word for it.
	But a retired judge called Sir Richard Henriks advised that the instruction to believe a victim's account should be withdrawn.
	It undermined the principle of suspects being innocent until proven guilty, he said in 2016.
	As well, it does.
	We do have to protect the innocent people who will be falsely accused, and the only way to do that is to presume that everyone who is accused is innocent until they have been convicted of the crime.
	And of course, this is still going on in Canada, with Bill C-51 almost but not quite law, and the pendulum is continuing to swing in the direction that the feminists want it to swing.
	And as Christy Blanchford says here, what seems so elementary that the first job of police isn't to support victims or anyone else, but rather to investigate complaints, got lost in 2014 when notional acceptance of victims as inherently being truthful went to a flat-out recommendation that the presumption that a victim should always be believed should be institutionalized.
	People wonder why I go hard on feminism.
	Or, well, not that often these days, but I still go quite hard on feminism.
	And people wonder why.
	They think, well, feminism is just a silly thing that happens on the internet.
	Absolutely not.
	Feminist ideals and principles have been institutionalized all across my country.
	And thank God for this new commissioner who said, no, we're actually going to return to the original liberal principle of believing people are innocent until proven guilty, because we have numerous examples of how this hurts innocent people when we don't.
	This is one of the fundamental problems with feminism.
	It's not a movement for justice.
	And if it ever was a movement for justice, it has been severely co-opted and perverted for people who simply want to hurt others.
	But in Canada, the pendulum continues to swing the other way.
	Despite huge pushback from defence lawyers and legal organisations, Bill C-51 is almost but not quite law, having passed in the House and is on his way to a second reading of the Senate.
	It's this bill, colloquially known as the new Gameshi Rules.
	If anyone remembers the case of Jan Gameshi, he was accused of sexual abuse because of his aggressive sexual fetishes, but it seems that he was always doing this with willing partners, and because he's a celebrity in Canada, once he'd moved on to his next sexual interest, the spurned ex-partners had a way of getting back at him.
	In Gameshi's case, the messages showed that all three in the case of all three complainants, despite their testimony in the court, that after the alleged attacks, they were so traumatised and wary they never saw Gameshi again except in public, they had all either tried to, and in one instance actually done so.
	For example, the complainant forgot to disclose to police or prosecutors that she'd had dinner post-alleged attack with Gameshi, taken him home in a cab and given him a handjob.
	In the other, the complainant actively courted him for about a year after the purported assault, once telling him she wanted to fuck hit your brains out on the very night of the alleged assault.
	In other words, the messages revealed that there were great gaps between what the complainants told the judge and before him the police and prosecutors and their private messages to Gameshi.
	Despite what feminism would have you believe, women are people too.
	They are not sainted angels who come down from on high and speak nothing but truth with goodness and honesty in their hearts.
	Women are people too, and that means that some of them are bad people.
	I could probably go on even more about this, but really it just needs to be summed up with the laws need to be impartial to both the accuser and the accused.
	Until the legal process has been completed we do not know who is in the right and who is in the wrong.
	And deliberately weighting that process in favour of one person or another necessarily causes injustices as a result.

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