Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - This Week in Stupid (20⧸05⧸2018)

All Episodes

Previous Next

May 20, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

17:44

This Week in Stupid (20⧸05⧸2018)

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hello everyone, welcome to this week in Stupid for the 20th of May 2018.
	There are about two weeks left before my Manhattan talk about the ideological collapse of the left.
	I know it's an expensive one, but I'm going to make it a particularly thorough deconstruction of social justice arguments on their own terms, using contemporary examples of reality demolishing their positions on things like victimhood culture, gamergates, emotional manipulation, and the desperate attempts to backpedal now that everyone can see the results of their ideas and has agreed that censorship and anti-nationalism are in fact bad things.
	Afterwards I'll be doing a panel QA with some interesting guests and after that I'll be hanging out with you guys for drinks.
	So if that sounds like a fun evening to you, the link will be in the description.
	I'm afraid this is going to be a very Britain-centric week as my country has been in the news for all the wrong reasons.
	I wouldn't normally comment on something like the royal wedding in the same way that I wouldn't normally comment on the football.
	I consider this to be a boring, normy thing to do, and it's part of a mainstream culture that I'm not really interested in.
	However, I found the Guardian's woke commentary and the reaction to a provocative tweet by Katie Hopkins particularly interesting.
	The Guardian, as one might expect, published articles like this.
	Meghan Markle's wedding was a rousing celebration of blackness.
	And the thing is, the author isn't actually wrong.
	It seems that black royalty, as in black celebrities, were invited to attend the wedding just because they're black.
	Which is how we do things in Britain in the current year.
	A black reverend preaching to British royalty about the resilience of faith during slavery is 10 million percent not what I thought I was waking up for.
	The royal wedding is good, said one BuzzFeed Canada social media editor in a viral tweet, making everyone outside of the progressive bubble cringe.
	The American identitarians on the left have made this the diversity wedding and adopted it as their own.
	The marriage between a mixed race woman and a ginger.
	American princess Meghan Markle is cause for celebration among some in the black and biracial communities.
	What?
	What's the biracial community?
	How could that be a thing?
	Are there biracial people dating websites?
	But an even stranger thing to say is, while many rejoice at the most diverse royal wedding in British history, I don't know whether they recall that royalty always used to have to marry foreigners for political reasons.
	So using the term diverse here means that they really do see the term diversity to mean brown.
	But this was apparently the most diverse royal wedding ceremony in British history, which was also roundly applauded on social media, with many describing the ceremony with the phrase black excellence.
	I thought she was biracial and part of the biracial community and not black.
	Are black people part of the biracial community?
	Is this the black identitarians equivalent of the are Italians white question?
	Seriously though, this whole article is just insane to me.
	It's like the apex of Brazilian genetic imperialism.
	There's a painting called the Regenção de Cã.
	And the painting portrays the actual story of Brazil.
	So you have a picture of the dark black-skinned grandmother.
	She has her hands in the air.
	Next to her, seated, is her mulata daughter.
	She obviously had a relationship with a white man.
	So her daughter is progressively lighter-skinned.
	Next to the mulata daughter is the Portuguese immigrant.
	He's white.
	And in the mulata daughter's arms is the white son.
	Meghan Markle's black genes have managed to attain princess status.
	And her child will be one-quarter Kang of England when he finally ascends the throne.
	And in the mulata.
	and she has ended up believing or someone whoincerection.
	I don't know.
	And I just don't care.
	Had a proper cry this morning while reading coverage of the royal wedding.
	It symbolises where I'd hoped humanity would be in 2018, said RuPaul.
	Because Harry married a half-black woman.
	That's RuPaul's hope for humanity in the current year.
	What a set of priorities.
	Absolutely barking.
	A number of biracial Americans have also spoken out about what the wedding means to them in terms of biracial representation.
	I'm fucking biracial.
	Where's my interview about the representation of the mixed race master race?
	I hope Meghan Markle inspires new discussion about mixed race identity, wrote biracial social psychologist Sarah E. Gaither in a piece of Vox.
	We need to be open to accepting people for all of their identities, rather than simply categorising them into one fixed box.
	Sarah, why are you talking to me about you and your identity?
	Do we know each other?
	As a mixed race person myself, I don't give a damn about your miscegenation status and I don't give a damn about your personal identity.
	Shut up and go away.
	I'm not interested in negotiating a new racial identity with a bunch of racial identitarians.
	You'll just have to talk to me about Game of Thrones or something instead.
	And of course, on the other side of the spectrum, Katie Hopkins was trying to encourage people to keep up appearances.
	She tweeted out a picture of Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton with the comment, no competition, you can't buy class.
	This caused a great deal of confusion, and it seems that this confusion arose from a difference in culture between British people and Americans, with people assuming that Hopkins was being racist, which she wasn't, or not being able to distinguish which person had more class.
	I think I can explain this to Americans through the magic of memes.
	Behold, the Virgin American Princess versus the Chad English Rose.
	While both young ladies are of course the product of privilege, Kate Middleton is the product of an upper class of a very class conscious society, and it shows in everything about her.
	Where the Virgin American princess slinks and slumps around with a nervous smile on her face as if she was an imposter, the Chad English Rose stands tall and confident, with her shoulders back, open-faced with a broad smile showing teeth and radiating with confidence, holding her flowers in a composed manner.
	That's what Katie Hopkins is talking about, and it's interesting that American commentators can't really see it.
	I suppose that while I'm talking about normie subjects like the royal wedding, I may as well comment on the football, at least the nationalistic aspect of it, because the World Cup is next month, and it's expected that 10,000 England fans are going to travel to Moscow.
	And I guess since this makes the England team's fanbase abroad to be roughly the size of William the Conqueror's army when he conquered England, perhaps the government are getting a little paranoid and are seeing flying the English flag as imperialistic and antagonistic.
	Given their history, I think the Russians can take a little English imperialism in Moscow.
	I'm sure it's not going to break their spirit or anything.
	The head of football policing said the flags have become a trophy of choice for hooligans from rival countries.
	And the deputy chief constable of the National Police Chiefs Council said that he was acutely aware of the worsening diplomatic situation after Russia was accused of carrying out the Salisbury poisoning.
	Honestly, I would have higher expectations on Putin than to think the actions of football hooligans at the World Cup somehow was a reflection on British foreign policy.
	And if anything, I think that he'd see the authorities' attempt to prevent people from taking English flags as a sign of weakness.
	Frankly, it just looked like another example in the consistent pattern from the bureaucratic class of this country to stigmatise the English flag in England because shock and surprise, racists who are English also like to fly the English flag.
	Of course they do, but I don't measure myself by what the racists do and I'm not going to give them that kind of power over my behaviour.
	It's my national flag.
	I'm not going to let them just have it.
	So recently I've had a few complaints from progressive types that I'm not doing much against the authoritarianism of the right, and that's true, and it's not like there isn't an authoritarian streak on the right either.
	And instead of please think of the women, we're back to the Helen Lovejoy argument.
	Oh!
	Won't somebody please think of the children?
	In 2014, the Conservative government banned a list of sex acts between consenting adults from being filmed in the UK for adult movies for being, quote, harmful to minors, somehow.
	It's a weirdly specific thing because the films containing said sexual acts that were filmed outside of the UK are still legal.
	In July last year, we were warned that, in April 2018, they'd be rolling out compulsory ID checks for online porn with the justification of protecting under 18s.
	The details were not specified then, but this week we found out how this was going to work.
	Yes, you are basically going to have to buy a license to see those titties, mate.
	High street news agents are to sell so-called porn passes that will allow adults to visit over 18 websites anonymously.
	The 16 digit cards will allow browsers to avoid giving personal details online when asked to prove their age.
	Instead, they would show shopkeepers a passport or driving license when buying the pass.
	Literally, a fucking wanking permit.
	Fuck.
	I bet capitalism did this.
	And I say that because now we're going to talk about communism, or at least socialism, as yet another communist slash socialist talking point has been utterly debunked this week.
	It turns out the entrenched rich, the capitalist class, doesn't really exist, and Britain is a land of self-made millionaires.
	The Sunday Times released its annual rich list last week and it turns out that Britain's self-made billionaires and millionaires make up more than 90% of the list and it is a growing class of people with the number of billionaires going up by 11 in the past year to 145.
	And they're not just staying in the 1% either.
	According to Time magazine in 2015, over the course of two generations, 70% of rich families lose their wealth and that number rises to 90% by the third generation.
	This is the system broadly working as intended, with a great deal of creative destruction, and it's making the entire world bourgeois, turning parts of Africa fat and making the world a better place.
	And it's not all bad people doing the decision making.
	Britain has a plethora of relatively well-liked individuals who have a rags to riches story in our evil capitalist class.
	These are plucky young men and women who start off small and make it big.
	As in, it's something that can and does happen because we're actually living in the closest thing humanity has ever seen to an actual meritocracy and it's making the world a phenomenal place.
	Better than it has been in all of history, especially compared to the horrors of the 20th century.
	The socialist fiction of a permanent, eternally exploiting capitalist class is wrong.
	The socialist meme of Porky as the stereotype of a capitalist from the 19th century no longer exists.
	Instead, it's people like J.K. Rowling or Mark Zuckerberg.
	And this really is a great thing, and it is probably unprecedented.
	Usually, the upper classes did maintain their positions of power and privilege by exploiting serfs, slaves, and peasants.
	But now they're actually not.
	It's people who have earned their wealth through achievement, and their kids are going to piss it all away.
	Speaking of pissing it all away, I'll probably have to start doing a This Week in Venezuela segment.
	Chavez strode the world.
	Inspiration to all of us.
	Fighting back against austerity and neoliberal economics in Europe showed us there is a different and a better way of doing things.
	It's called socialism, it's called social justice, and it's something that Venezuela has made a big step toward.
	It's getting pretty damn annoying watching people pretend like socialism had nothing to do with the Venezuelan collapse.
	Yes, Venezuela is going through an insane political crisis right now, but it's not clear that that crisis has anything to do with their socialist policies.
	And since that would take another 10 minutes to break down, instead, we threw a couple of links to articles below for you to read.
	Yes, read.
	So Franny here tells us to read this article.
	So I did.
	There is a claim made from the New York Times that Venezuela's economic crisis, triggered by a drop in oil prices after a decade of excessive government spending, borrowing corruption, has led to a shortage of medicine, food and other goods.
	Meanwhile, President Nicolas Maduro has militarized cities in response to the crisis, is fighting a push for a recall referendum.
	Let's look at this.
	The oil prices have recovered, but Venezuela's own oil output is at an all-time low because the oil industry was packed with Maduro partisans who don't know how to run it.
	This is literally the inevitable corruption of socialism, destroying the country's one source of wealth in front of our eyes, and we know the reasons why.
	And nobody is doing anything as the entire country starves.
	And yet, left-wingers in the West working for Middle Eastern dictatorships will say, But it's not clear that that crisis has anything to do with their socialist policies.
	Venezuela is not getting any better.
	This week, American cereal manufacturer Kellogg pulled out of Venezuela because of the worsening economic situation.
	So Maduro's government proved the company's point by seizing their factory and handing it to the workers to continue production, while Maduro cried out in pain, the US is waging economic war on us.
	While he engages in an economic war on businesses who operate in Venezuela, adding, we've begun judicial proceedings against the business leaders of Kellogg's because their exit is unconstitutional.
	Kelloggs, an American company, leaving a country is against that country's constitution?
	What?
	Also, Venezuelans do not believe they live in a functioning democracy.
	Because despite the ruin and tyranny the Socialist Party has brought Venezuela, Maduro is apparently more electable than Jesus.
	This Guardian article is actually quite amazing, as it's actually critical of the Socialist Party and supportive of Henry Falcon, which I'm sure I'm pronouncing terribly, who has decided to engage in what we will generously call the democratic process, because there is even less to be gained from abstaining.
	Most electoral officials are Maduro loyalists, who in past elections have turned a blind eye to vote tampering and the last-minute relocation of polling places in opposition strongholds.
	The government controls most TV and radio stations which transmit a constant stream of pro-Maduro propaganda.
	It's also fomenting the notion that the ballot is not secret and that people who vote for the opposition will lose government jobs, public housing and vital food handouts.
	Maduro put it this way.
	The fatherland protects you and gives you everything.
	And you must give the fatherland political power.
	Woo lad.
	Looks like Maduro will be campaigning on a platform of a kind of nationalistic socialism.
	And how about Cuba?
	Has socialism failed there?
	Cuba is not a democracy, for sure.
	Which explains why his reign has resembled European fascism of the 20th century and why, of course, it's not real socialism, according to members of our Labour Party.
	Is it now your job, the overthrow of capitalism, rather than your economy?
	Yes, it is.
	transforming our economy because I think we've got at the moment there's a difference between transforming the economy and overthrowing capital I don't think it is.
	I don't think it is, because I think at the end of the day, I want a socialist society.
	You've been a great supporter of the economic experiment in Venezuela, and it's in the news because of the elections this week.
	That's now a country that's plagued by hyperinflation, chronic shortages of food, medicine, poverty.
	You know this.
	That's an example of a failed socialist economy.
	It went wrong.
	No, I don't think it was a socialist country.
	I think what happened was Chavez were developing policies which I think would first of all tackle the tragedy of the poverty that was in that country, raising literacy rates and then investing in the economy, using their oil wealth to do that.
	I think it took a wrong turn when Chavez went.
	And I think, unfortunately, since then, I don't think they've been following the socialist policies that Chavez was developing.
	Literally every fucking time socialism fails or turns into a dictatorship, suddenly it's no longer real socialism.
	Can we please stop talking to these economic snake oil salesmen?
	They do not have answers.
	They do not have ideas.
	And I don't give a fuck about the literacy rates.
	We have good literacy rates in capitalism.
	We have this.
	We are fixing the world.

▲