Hello everyone, welcome to This Week in Stupid for the 10th of June 2018.
If you had tickets to my Scarborough Spa event by British Identity, I'm sorry to say that it's been cancelled by the venue.
They say cancelled Sargon of a CAD this week in Stupid.
In consultation with relevant agencies in the borough, and after risk assessing the event, we have taken the decision to cancel Sargon of Akad.
The box office will be contacting all customers who have booked tickets.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
Scarborough Spa posted this to Facebook and Twitter with this picture with cancelled written across it.
They didn't contact me or the lady who organises these things for me, and neither of us have managed to get the venue to actually explain why this is.
But it's weird, this picture seems kind of virtue signally, doesn't it?
Sargon cancelled across it, as if they're trying to advertise it to a certain demographic of, I don't know, socially aware activists, should we call them?
So this appears to have been the work of a far-left activist group called Stand Up to Racism.
Scarborough Spa urged to cancel far-right mouthpiece, because that is just the most apt description of what I do on this channel.
Stand Up to Racism Scarborough has urged Sheffield International Venues, the subsidiary of Labour-controlled Sheffield City Council that manages Scarborough Spa, to cancel the Sargon of Akad Carl Benjamin show scheduled for June 16th.
Using his stage name, Benjamin recently shared a platform with incarcerated former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson and Anne-Marie Waters, a person deemed too right-wing for the UK Independence Party.
I don't really know much about Anne-Marie Waters, but I know a little bit about Tommy Robinson, and I just want to stress that Tommy Robinson is right about everything he said regarding Islam.
Whether it's radicalisation in mosques, radicalisation in jail, the grooming gang scandals, and the gangs of Muslims who beat up non-Muslim people in their local areas.
Tommy has been right on all of these points and they seem to be fueled by religious identitarianism.
So yes, I have shared a platform with Tommy Robinson and I would happily do so again in the future.
Kim Hunter of Scarborough SUTR said, It's unacceptable that Benjamin should be allowed to host a show at a family venue owned by the people of multicultural Scarborough, which recently owns its opened its arms to families fleeing war in Syria.
Peter Haig, chairman of Grimforp Colliery Band, who also appears at the spa this summer, said he was concerned Benjamin's appearance would attract fascists and members of the far right to town.
He said speaking in a personal capacity, we don't want people of this nature appearing in a family-run venue like this.
It's weird because I have a track record of speaking out against the far right and fascism, and I don't think that Tommy Robinson is actually particularly far-right himself.
Sargon spoke on the same platform as Tommy Robinson at the supposed free speech rally in Whitehall, called by Robinson on Sunday the 6th of May.
He claims to be against extremism, but speeches at that rally demonized Islam while the audience shouted for Muslims to be expelled.
It was a far-right event with a significant fascist element.
Okay, well, I don't agree with that characterisation at all, and that doesn't make me any less liberal.
It was billed as a free speech rally, and I did come there to warn people about the far left and their totalitarian tendencies, and this is actually a great example of what I was speaking about.
Benjamin himself is a regular mouthpiece for the far right, booked to speak at events such as the Patriots Day rally in Boston.
Oh yeah, yeah, full of Nazis, that was.
Organized by the Proud Boys.
A so-called Western chauvinist fraternity, recently named a hate group by the American anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center, whose opinion means absolutely fucking nothing.
But again, the Proud Boys are constitutionalists.
They're not Nazis, you lunatics.
Scarborough Stand Up to Racism is urgently awaiting a response to its request from Scarborough Stand Up to Racism is urgently awaiting a response to its request to Scarborough Spa and managers at SIV.
If Benjamin is not cancelled, the group will protest against the show.
Well, that was enough for Scarborough Spa to tuck their tail between their legs, scurry off to Twitter and say, yes, we've cancelled this with just a week to go.
Oh, we're so sorry we ever thought we could host a free speech activist.
That would have been terrible.
Seriously though, if you're among the hundreds of people who had already booked tickets and hotel rooms and things like that to come and see me, I'm really sorry.
There's nothing I can do about this, and I really wish there was.
I guess this is part of the risk that we take when we're standing up to established power structures.
They're going to do everything they can to shut us down, and this is an example of that.
In the future, I think what I'll do is probably do some kind of guerrilla booking where I'll book an event and about a week before the event is due to go live, I'll then announce the tickets and present it to you.
So you might have to book at relatively short notice, but at least it I think it will probably mean we'll get to do the event.
Since we're on the subject, who exactly are Stand Up to Racism?
They are, of course, a far-left pressure group who are basically intersectional socialists.
The president of Stand Up to Racism is Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary of the Labour Party.
So you can imagine how easy it was for them to get the labour-run Scarborough Spa to pull my event.
But as I said, I'm really sorry, and I'm not going to let this kind of censorship and defamation hold things back.
I'm going to keep going with these live events, and we're just going to have to power through this together.
I don't know what else to do.
If anyone's got any suggestions, I'm all ears.
Speaking of fighting the power, the Free Tommy Robinson protests in Trafalgar happened yesterday, and it was absolutely enormous.
As you can see from this clip of Geert Wilders speaking, the crowd just goes on and on and on.
I don't know how big that crowd was, but the number I see being said is around 20,000 people.
And given the size of the crowd that I'm seeing from the media there, I could believe it.
And you can hear it in the crowd chanting Tommy's name.
It sounds like a stadium full of people chanting.
Free Tommy Robinson protest in London.
Hundreds descend on Trafalgar Square after right-wing activists is jailed.
Oh yeah, just hundreds.
At least according to the Evening Standard.
But this is from the Google cache of the Evening Standard article because they then updated it without telling people that they'd updated it.
To remove the estimated number of people listed.
Because I guess it was embarrassing seeing all of the video and photos on social media demonstrably showing thousands and thousands of people.
Eventually they have to get their reporting in line with reality.
Police officers were injured and five people were arrested as scuffles broke out at a free Tommy Robinson protest in central London.
Thousands of protesters descended on Trafalgar Square for the protest before marching to Whitehall after the right-wing activist was jailed for breaking contempt of court laws.
Footage posted on social media shows a large group of men surrounding police and hurling objects while shouting, We want Tommy out.
Five officers were hurt at the protest on Saturday, none seriously, Scotland Yard said.
Given the scale of the protest, that's a really small number, especially given how high emotions are running at the moment.
The Met Police confirmed that five arrests have been made, including two for assaulting a police officer.
One was arrested for possession of a flare while another was detained for possession of an offensive weapon.
I guess someone forgot to leave their potato peeler at home.
So out of 20,000 people, only two people were actually arrested for fighting with the police.
That's actually really amazing.
And I just want to stress, anyone who's looking at this and thinking, well, this is completely unacceptable, I agree with you, but the voice of the working class is always going to be coarse.
And I think it's worth bearing in mind that these people are suffering.
It's difficult to get the working class out onto the streets in any significant number.
You know, they'd rather be watching football or east enders and drinking beer down the pub.
To get this many people out on the streets for a single reason is genuinely shocking.
And the powers that be must be looking at the sheer volume of the crowd at Vilda's speech and getting genuinely worried.
This is something that is growing, it's not shrinking.
And I say this because I think these people are desperate.
I think they've got to the point where they feel that their country is being Islamicized and they don't want to let it continue and they want something to be done because they have nowhere else to go.
Put simply, this is not something that can be ignored.
It's not going to go away.
It's going to keep getting worse.
We need to start addressing the root cause of the problems.
Regardless of how uncomfortable a conversation that's going to be and how hurt people's feelings are going to be.
Personally, this doesn't look like a far-right rally to me, but it's people like this that really put a bad name on it for the rest of them.
Even if that guy was just trolling Antifa, and it's entirely possible that he was, this is a really fucking bad idea, because that gets videoed, taken out of context, spread around by people like stand up to racism and it smears the entire march as being full of Nazis.
That's bloody stupid and bloody irresponsible in my opinion and does nothing other than set your movement back in the public eye.
Remember that you might be surrounded by thousands of people who agree with you, but hundreds of thousands of people are watching this online and they don't know you.
And you're trying to persuade them that you're not a piece of shit.
And they're trying to do everything in their power to persuade them that you are.
I don't like to be big on optics, but one thing that I think people really should not do under any circumstances are Nazi salutes.
And again, I have to stress that injuring police officers, no matter how annoyed you are with the police, is not going to be an appropriate thing to do.
It's something that's going to garner universal condemnation from the chattering middle classes, who are ultimately the people you need to get on side.
And if you're one of the people saying, well, there's absolutely no excuse for violence, ask yourself how much of the crowd these people who are fighting with the cops actually represent.
If Islamists and terrorists don't represent all Muslims, do these represent all of Tommy Robinson's supporters?
And if you think they do, then you've just legitimized their arguments against the Muslims, haven't you?
So moving on to tyranny in the EU, copyright law could put an end to net memes.
I fucking told you the EU is a tyrannical organization run by jumped-up tyrants who will use their sweeping powers to fuck you, didn't I?
Memes, remixes, and other user-generated content could disappear online if the EU's proposed rules on copyright become law warn experts.
Digital rights groups are campaigning against the Copyright Directive, which the European Parliament will vote on later this month.
The legislation aims to protect rights holders in the internet age, but critics say it misunderstands the way people engage with web content and risks excessive censorship.
The copyright directive is an attempt to reshape copyright for the internet, in particular rebalancing the relationship between copyright holders and online platforms.
Article 13 states that platform providers should take measure to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rights holders for the use of their works.
Critics say that this will, in effect, require all internet platforms to filter all content put online by users, which many believe would be an excessive restriction on free speech.
There is also a concern that the proposals will rely on algorithms that will be programmed to play safe and delete anything that creates a risk to the platform.
So put simply, this is going to eradicate fair use within the European Union.
Absolutely everything about anything you upload to the internet will have to be 100% your own content.
You will not be allowed to creatively remix or reuse anyone else's content, which means the internet as we know it is going to be fucked.
It is literally going to create a black market for memes that won't be allowed to be posted on places like Facebook and Twitter because the EU will fuck Facebook and Twitter if they allow them up.
To give you an example, this would not be allowed.
This meme, the distracted boyfriend photo was taken from Antonio Guillerum and used as a meme.
The way it's being used there is completely in line with fair use laws, but under Article 13, that will be prohibited.
And various platforms on the internet will be required to have some kind of processing feature like on YouTube that automatically analyzes the videos that you put up and flags them for copyrighted content.
That's going to have to happen absolutely everywhere.
Jill Kinnock, executive director of the UK's open rights group, told the BBC, Article 13 will create a robo-copyright regime where machines zap anything they identify as breaking copyright rules despite legal bans on laws that require general monitoring of users to protect their privacy.
Unfortunately, while machines can spot duplicate uploads of Beyoncé songs, they can't spot parodies, understand memes that use copyrighted images, or make any kind of cultural judgment about what creative people are doing.
We see this all too often on YouTube already.
And to add to that, the EU wants to apply the RoboCop approach to extremism, hate speech and anything else they think they can get away with once they put it in place for copyright.
This would be disastrous.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and 56 other rights organisations sent an open letter to European lawmakers in October outlining their concerns about Article 13, saying Article 13 appears to provoke such legal uncertainty that online services will have no other option than to monitor, filter and block EU citizens' communications if they have any chance of staying in business.
Now not only is this a massive overreach of the EU's powers, but it also is going to create a significant barrier to any small social media platforms that are looking to get into the market.
Once again the European Union has demonstrated it is wildly unfavourable to small businesses because of its extremely stringent and overreaching regulations.
And this is such a far-reaching and damaging law that even a far-left site like Boing Boing are willing to bury the hatchet with the far right, the racist, the Nazis, and put out an article saying on June the 20th an EU committee will vote on an apocalyptically stupid internet destroying copyright proposal that'll censor everything from Tinder profiles to Wikipedia.
They say this affects all politics and all movements.
The whole point of this exercise was to make Google pay German newspapers royalties for linking to newspapers and you can bet Google and Facebook and other big tech companies will figure out how to comply with it.
But as those companies increasingly block and filter speech at the behest of governments, the ability of Black Lives Matter or the movement to stop the new Heathrow Runway will also have to come up with $60 million if they get kicked off the big platforms for not colouring in the lines.
I'll leave a link to changecopyright.org's website in the description.
I'll pin it in the comments.
This will allow you to contact your member of the European Parliament and make a complaint to them about Article 13.
This is just one more step towards the road to a totalitarian European Union.
Top-down government control of the entire fucking internet run by Mama Merkel.
It's easy to think that someone else will do it for you, but if you're in the EU, please, please register a complaint with your MEP.
So now that we've got the serious stuff out of the way, we can get to the fun stuff.
Germany to consider educational, state-funded, feminist pornography to combat sexist stereotypes.
This is the kind of thing that you can show to people to demonstrate the overwhelming power of feminism.
What other movement could do this?
Germany is considering making state-funded feminist porn and broadcasting it to the public to combat sexist stereotypes.
The material which would include fat, skinny, young, and old people, will be available on the websites of public broadcasters ARD and ZDF if the idea goes ahead.
That is so fucking far outside of the realm of almost every other political group.
It's just mind-blowing.
Imagine what the flat earthers would have to do to get flat earth porn funded and broadcast on public TV.
The proposal was voted on by Angela Merkel's Social Democratic Coalition Partners at a General Assembly in Berlin.
The delegates accepted a proposal from their youth wing to adopt the idea of government-funded feminist pornography for educational purposes as part of a party program.
Okay, first off, pornography is not for educational uses.
That's not going to be used for educational purposes anyway, and I'm pretty sure that these genres of pornography already exist.
So the SPD are a junior coalition partner of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, and they say, mainstream porn generally shows sexist and racist stereotypes in which consent is not a theme and certain optimal body types are made a standard.
Isn't it interesting how this is entirely ideological?
Pornography isn't promoting feminist ideology.
So what are we going to get the German government to do?
Pay for fucking pornography that does and broadcast it their fucking selves.
It's almost unreal to think that this is something that's actually being thought about, let alone actually might come to fruition.
But Germans, enjoy where your tax money's going.
I hope you like the feminist pornography, because you're going to be fucking paying for it.
The idea might have been inspired by Sweden.
Oh, imagine my fucking shock.
Where in 2009, the State Film Institute spent almost £50,000 financing Dirty Diaries, a series of short porn films produced by female film artists.
The reason I find this so outlandish is that feminism is not even trying to veil its hatred of men at this point.
For example, this article from the Washington Post, Why Can't We Hate Men?
With a picture of Harvey fucking Weinstein.
As if Harvey Weinstein is a representative of men in general.
It could just easily have been titled, Why Can't We Hate Jews?
And this is by a man-hater called Susanna Danuta-Walters, a professor of sociology and director of the Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies program at Northeastern University, who is the editor for the gender studies journal Signs.
It's not that Eric Schneiderman, the now former New York Attorney General accused of abuse by multiple women, pushed me over the edge.
My edge has been crossed for a long time, before President Trump, before Harvey Weinstein, before mansplaining and incels, before live streaming sexual assaults and red pill men's groups and rape camps as a tool of war and the deadening banality of the male prerogative.
Seriously, Susannah, imagine taking this kind of bigotry and applying it to any other group and you as a left-wing feminist professor would freak the fuck out.
Seen in this indisputably true context, okay, well I care to dispute that, thank you.
This is not a representation of men as a whole.
What you're doing is cherry-picking bad things some men and groups of men are doing and saying, well, this is something that represents all men.
Do you know where we're not allowed to do that?
That's right.
Islamism and terrorism.
We're not allowed to say, oh, this is just a representation of Muslims because that would be, according to you, bigoted.
So why are you doing it to men?
But in this indisputably true context, it seems logical to hate men.
I can't lie.
I've always had a soft spot for the radical feminist SmackDown for naming the problem in no uncertain terms.
Holy shit!
Why is it wrong when the alt-right names the Jew?
Or when the Islamists name the Jew?
Why is that wrong?
If every time they can point to a series of examples of Jewish people doing things and say, well, there we go, it's Jewish people, you are using exactly the same logic.
And just to be clear, I'm not in favour of that, which is why I'm critiquing this article.
She says, I've rankled at the, but we don't hate men protestations of generations of would-be feminists.
Of course you fucking have, because you hate men.
You are actually one of those rabid man-haters.
And amazingly, the Washington Post is giving you a platform for your hatred.
But she's found the men are not the problem.
The system is obfuscation to be too precious by half.
But of course, the criticisms of this blanket condemnation of men, from transnational feminists who decry such glib universalism to US women of colour who demand an intersectional perspective, are mostly on the mark.
Oh, well, it's just fine for us to blanket condemn entire groups of people because of the actions of certain parts of the group.
What you are doing here, Suzanne, is literally what you would call hate speech.
These critics rightly insist on an analysis of male power as institutional, not narrowly personal or individual or biologically based in male bodies.
Okay, well let's talk about male power.
Let's see, in Britain we have a female head of state, the Queen, we have a female prime minister, female head of the Welsh Assembly, and a female head of the Scottish Parliament.
Where is the male institutional power in Britain?
Growing movements to challenge a masculinity built on domination and violence and to engage boys and men in feminism are both gratifying and necessary.
Please continue.
Okay folks, ask yourselves this.
Do you want self-avowed man-haters engaging your sons?
Do you think that anything that comes from such an engagement will result in those boys feeling better or worse about themselves for the way that they were born?
Pretty much everywhere in the world this is true.
Women experience sexual violence.
So do men.
And the threat of that violence permeates our choices big and small.
So do men.
In addition, male violence is not restricted to intimate partner attacks or sexual assault but plagues us in the form of terrorism and mass gun violence.
Are men not afflicted by terrorism and mass gun violence?
So in this moment, here in the land of legislatively legitimated toxic masculinity, is it really so illogical to hate men?
No, you go ahead love.
Maybe you'll be able to get a job as a columnist at the Washington Post, posting your diatribes against men in general for the whole world to see.
I'm sure you're going to get a great reputation from this.
The world has little place for feminist anger.
Women are supposed to support, not condemn.
Offer succour, not dismissal.
We're supposed to feel more empathy for your fear of being called a harasser than we are for the women being harassed.
Yeah, but you're talking about an innocent person being accused of something they didn't do because some other woman is harassed by someone like Harvey fucking Weinstein.
If he really were with us, wouldn't he reckon that one good way to change structural violence and inequality would be to refuse the power that comes with it?
And this is exactly where they're going with this.
So men, if you are really with us and you would like us to not hate you for all the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this.
Lean out so we can actually stand up without being beaten down.
That's right.
Don't out-compete them.
Pledge to vote for feminist women only.
Don't run for office.
Don't be in charge of anything.
Step away from the power.
We got this.
That's right.
Give power to feminist man-haters because they just happen to hate every man who has ever existed since the dawn of fucking time.
What could possibly go wrong?
And please know your crocodile tears won't be wiped away by us anymore.
We have every right to hate you.
That's right.
We hate you and we deserve the power that you have because you have done us wrong.
Hashtag because patriarchy.
It's long past time to play hard for team feminism and win.
And it should come as no fucking surprise that man-hating feminists are more willing to sacrifice men.
A recent study suggests that self-identified feminists are much more likely than other women to sacrifice men in a hypothetical moral choice dilemma task.
Participants were exposed to subliminal stereotypes and then presented with scenarios asking them to sacrifice either a man or a woman in order to save several individuals of an unspecified gender.
Researchers speculate that the feminist students were trying to resist gender norms by attempting to counteract subliminal stereotypes in their responses.
Well, what a fucking surprise.
I mean, it's always been women and children first.
That's the women come before the children.
But really, we've got to ask ourselves, has feminism gone too far?
As a teenager is found guilty of the first all-female UK terror plot?
I mean, they're sticking it to the patriarchy and then there's sticking it to the patriarchy.
Safar Bula had been trying to reach Syria in order to marry an ISIS fighter, but when her attempt was foiled by police, she turned to plotting a suicide bomb and gun attack on the British Museum.
Her older sister, Riz Lane, 22, and her mother, Mina Diesh, pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to taking over the plot and planning their own attack after she was arrested by police in April last year.
Austria is demonstrating themselves to be wildly Islamophobic, shutting seven political mosques and expelling about 60 Imams.
Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said the move was a crackdown on political Islam.
Some mosques were suspected of having links to Turkish nationalists.
In April images merged with children in Turkish army uniforms enacting the World War I Battle of Gallipoli.
The Turkish president's office called Austria's move Islamophobic, racist and discriminatory.
Yes, but you're radicalizing people in the fucking mosques.
The Austrian government says that 60 of the 260 Imams in the country are being investigated.
That's a huge fucking percentage.
40 of these belong to ATIB, an Islamic organization in Austria close to the Turkish government.
Parallel societies, political Islam and radicalization tendencies have no place in our country, said Chancellor Kurz.
Well, can anyone tell me that he's wrong?
In what way is he not doing exactly the right thing here?
Oh, it's Islamophobic.
Oh, well, hang on.
Are these real Muslims?
Are they?
Real radical Muslims who are planning, I don't dread to even think what they're fucking planning, and they're doing it in their mosque.