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April 3, 2022 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
50:57
Responding to Internet Comment Etiquette with Erik
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Time Text
Oh, I think I'm live.
How's it going, folks?
That's right.
Another late night stream.
Give me a minute.
I've got to sort things out on the back end, as usual.
Hope you're all well.
Again, give me two seconds.
I have to sort some stuff out.
Because this is normally when I do these streams, it's just things that are on my mind and rambling stream of consciousness, as certain people have recently discovered.
But not this one.
This one's going to be a little bit more focused due to popular demand, in fact.
And so I thought we'd go through a few things.
But first, man, I've got...
You should be following my Instagram.
Not that you're going to be able to find it because I'm shadowband.
But I've got a battle report on my Instagram.
How awesome is this, right?
So my son is tired of repeatingly thrashing me.
He's seven, by the way, at Warhammer with his Necron army, which is disgustingly overpowered, in my opinion, but that's only because I keep losing to it.
And so he was like, oh, can I play Pete, who's one of the web admins at work?
And Pete's just getting into Warhammer.
He's just got himself like a thousand-point Chaos Army.
It's not a bad army at all.
And he was like, yeah, I'd love to.
And so Pete came over on Saturday and Daniel thrashed him with his fucking necrons.
It's very, very fun.
And I'm really, I'm so chuffed with this terrain, right?
Look, you can tell which terrain I didn't make, obviously, and I just painted up because you can see it's proper terrain.
But this, I just got the just a couple of sheets of plywood, glue gun, done it, sprayed it up a bit.
I'm really chuffed with this one because these ramps are actually, you can actually place the models on them and creates an interesting battle space.
But anyway, yeah, so basically, Daniel lost the, he went second, got a couple of wounds on the destroyer, flew this night wing thing, night scythe over, right?
He'd loaded it with his entire command section, and it got destroyed in the first turn.
And I was like, oh, God.
But it turns out they just get out.
And so that left Pete with like this Scorpec Lord, you know, monstrous amount of stuff.
Pete eventually kills off.
But while he's doing that, Daniel is chewing up his wings.
And so by the time that, and he's advancing the squad into like, you know, firing line.
And so by the end of it, it literally just came down to Daniel having completely surrounded what was left of Pete's army and knocking it off completely.
But, you know, they shook hands like gentlemen.
And it was very, very nice.
Very, very nice.
It was good fun.
Very good fun.
But anyway, so that's probably enough time for the stream to have reached the internet.
And so yeah, let's talk.
Let's talk.
So I wasn't really going to respond to Eric because he didn't say anything.
Like, I know that there are a lot of people who think he did, but he really didn't.
And so I was just going to be like, okay, well, who cares, right?
But so many people from his side of the eye, well, a bunch of them like directly messaged me saying really amusing things that I thought, okay, fine.
Okay, I will respond to Eric.
He's a challenge.
Go on.
Are you going to accept his challenge?
It's like, okay.
Why not?
And so, but the thing is, without doing an edited video, Eric, spoiler, I don't do that on this channel.
I'm not scripting anything.
This is how I do things.
If you don't like it, that's too bad.
Without having to do that, it meant that basically I had to do a bit of preparation.
So I went through his video, response to me, clipped out the bits that I want to respond to that he's making the points in.
And then I put them together in like a six-minute compilation just with timestamps basically to show which one to break it up in sections.
It's not going to be like an exact, accurate, faithful response because it's not the format for it.
So I assume you'd want to go and watch his first, but if not, I don't think you'd be missing much.
Anyway, yeah, so where to begin?
The first thing, I think, is that a lot of people said it was satire.
Eric himself, if I recall correctly, did not say, oh, everything I say is satire.
Therefore, you don't need to take any of it seriously.
But basically, the Jon Stewart defense was the one most given by his subscribers.
And so it was really like, okay, if you want.
But the thing is, satire is a word that has a meaning.
And the meaning of satire is that it is a form of argument.
And so you can't just be like, yeah, well, we were mindlessly cackling and nothing that we say means anything.
Nothing Eric says means anything.
And I mean, maybe Eric has that position.
I mean, he uses character in a dramatic sense and a very layered sense of irony.
Callum, I'm sorry I'm doing this.
I know you're going to hear it, but I've just thought it would be fun.
So it's in a point hard to discern what he is being serious about.
But I think that you can, because of the framing of everything that he does, identify what his arguments actually are.
But I'm not saying that he's like deeply invested in any of this.
I don't think that he is.
And I mean, he just, honestly, he doesn't seem like a terrible chap.
He seems, you know, he seems like he's a love.
His video is quite funny.
But he didn't address anything that I'd said, except for the points that he conceded, which never mind.
But the point is, Eric is making lots of arguments.
They're just not particularly good ones.
And he seems to have rather missed the arguments I'm making.
I will try to be less verbose, I suppose.
I'll try to be less high-handed about it.
I'll try and lower myself and use single-syllable words.
I'm joking.
I'm not trying to be a dick about this, actually.
It's just, like, it's a remarkable series of complaints that I've never had before.
And I mean, if these were the only complaints I'd ever had, that would have made my life a lot easier.
Anyway, right.
So, like I said, I've compiled the clips.
This is a six-minute clip video.
And so the first section is Eric repeatedly saying, I didn't call you racist.
Take it away, Eric.
No, he's right.
I did say in that voice that if you don't like the new Lord of the Rings, then you're racist.
I absolutely, I drew a line in the sand and I said that if you're against this new Lord of the Rings movie show or whatever it is that I don't give a shit about, then you must hate black people.
And I, that's on me.
That's my bad.
I shouldn't have said that.
What I should do is go back and delete that line from the video.
And if I do go back and I can't find that line anywhere in the video, then that must mean I never said that shit and this guy's just putting words in my mouth.
So Sargon of Akkad made some perfectly reasonable points here.
And I myself have gotten upset about shitty adaptations in movies and TV shows.
Most recently, that Dark Tower movie, that was a piece of shit, and it had nothing to do with the black guy playing the canonically white main character.
In fact, that actor was the best part of the whole movie.
But if I had said that this movie looks like shit on one of those YouTube trailers back in the day, would I have been called racist?
Sargon, you are making me think, brother.
Okay, I see what he's saying.
The reasoning behind Amazon's decision to make a beardless black dwarf means that Lord of the Rings fans just can't expect any kind of faithful adaptation just in general.
So it'll probably be disappointing.
It's not about the black dwarf, guys.
It's about what the black dwarf with no beard represents.
It's got nothing to do with race.
I get you now, Sargon of a car.
You'll be like, oh, you just hate black people.
Oh, brilliant take, Eric.
Brilliant.
What the fuck did I do?
You're going to put that on me?
All that?
When did I call that man a racist?
I don't recall saying anything of the type.
All I did was play his video.
And then I left a comment about getting cancelled for making babies fight each other.
So if you can point out where in the video I call that man a racist, well, then you got me.
So what I love about this is the sort of childish smile on his face.
It's the same one that my son does when he thinks he's being clever and legalistic.
The answer, Eric, is that you don't actually need to directly say something in order to say something.
This is what we call framing and implication.
You can frame something in such a way, as these clips show, that implies that the only legitimate response could be that it's about the black dwarf.
And that's the thing.
It's not about the black dwarf, but you are being played by the people who put the black dwarf in front of your face to think that it's about the black dwarf.
I mean, we could use this hypothetical for anything else.
Let's take Legolas the elf, right?
Legolas is a very athletic, acrobatic, superhuman character.
He's an elf, right?
He's playing an elf in Lord of the Rings.
I know you don't care about Long Rings.
It's fine.
It's just for the hypothetical.
What if he weighed 400 pounds?
What if they chose an actor who weighed 400 pounds?
Would it be because I just hate fat people?
I wouldn't believe that Legolas the Elf could run up that giant elephant, dance around, shoot all of those guys, and then land sliding off the edge of its trunk or whatever.
Would that be, it would just be that I hate fat people.
It's not that there's something about the verisimilitude of the work that makes me think that's not how things work.
Now, dwarves, as I understand it, are a race that live in the Lord of the Rings world underground.
Well, melanin actually has a function.
Melanin is there to protect your skin.
And this is why Caucasians who live in California, it's one of the many reasons they have red faces.
Although in your case, it's probably the amount of alcohol and drugs you do, right?
But this is, this is, it's functional.
It has a function.
That's it.
That's all about it.
And so if you are going to, it's just one of the many things.
Again, if the dwarf had been tall, imagine they'd chosen a six foot five guy to play the dwarf and not artificially made it so the dwarf appears short.
Because the guy who played Gimli is actually really tall.
And so obviously they had to use force perspective, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So imagine if they just left him tall.
Like, I'd be like, well, it's like you don't think I care that the dwarf has a particular look and a particular aesthetic.
It's like I should like, what am I heightist?
I'm a fat phobe.
I'm all of these things because I just want the thing to look how it was portrayed with the author's original intent.
That's it.
But you are implying through your framing, through your jokes.
In fact, none of your jokes would make sense if the implication wasn't that the person you're caricaturing is a racist.
None of it would make sense.
And you know that.
And so it makes your attempt at legalistically reading your exact words out of context.
Oh, I didn't say those exact words.
Therefore, I wasn't implying anything.
It makes it weirdly dishonest.
And it's embarrassingly dishonest.
Everyone can see you're being dishonest.
And as I'll show later through some of the messages your people have sent me, like, they know that they're doing this.
Like, where they don't explicitly do it, they also imply it.
So it's just like, I don't know why you would think that you could try and play that kind of shell game.
Everyone can see what you're doing.
It's kind of embarrassing, frankly.
I like your virtue signal, though.
Oh, I didn't think Idris Elba was a bad gunslinger.
I thought he was the best part of the film, actually.
No, the best part of the film was actually the man in black for the Dark Tower.
I happen to be a big fan of the Dark Tower.
I've read the books multiple times.
And so when the film was coming out, oh, it's like film was coming out.
I was just like, oh, God, it's no.
And when they cast Idris Elbert, I was like, look, okay.
I know.
And I did a video about this at the time.
I know you're not going to like it.
But canonically, he actually can't be black.
And if he is black, then you know that they have literally thrown out the fucking cannon.
It's like the Lord of the Rings fans complaining that they're compressing a thousand years of history into one film with continuous characters.
I mean, some of those characters are human, like the Elven characters.
Okay, fair enough.
They lived like 5,000 years or 10,000 years or whatever.
But some of the characters are human, and yet they're going to be there in multiple ages.
So it's just like, okay, if you care about the consistency and like integrity of the story, because it is the nature of the integrity of the story that actually maps onto the fictional reality that is being presented to you and makes it make sense and makes you love it, then yeah.
But again, like with the Dark Tower, I completely agree with you, by the way, that they totally fucking butchered that movie.
But one of the reasons they totally butchered that movie is because they ruined the relationship between Odetta slash Detta and Susanna, at different points in the book, and Roland, because part of their interaction was based on American racism.
And so if you make Idris Elba black, how do you have that relationship?
How is it even vaguely the same?
But you hear Virtue signaling, oh, well, it wasn't because they made him black.
Idris Elba, yeah, perfectly fine actor, blah, blah, blah.
But he's not the right guy for that plot because the plot demands that the gunslinger look like Clint Eastwood.
Stephen King is explicit that the Gunslinger should look like Clint Eastwood and yet they cast someone who doesn't look like Clint Eastwood ruining one and there's such a core moral lecture that's contained within the racial dynamic between Odetta, Detta and...
I mean, but the alternate personality doesn't make any fucking sense if Roland is not actually a white man.
So, like, you going, yeah, oh, they ruined that.
But the fact that Roland was black doesn't matter.
It's like, well, unfortunately, it does to that story.
So what was it about the thing that you hated?
Like, you know, what is the problem with it?
If not that, like, what did they do to the story?
Because otherwise, the story wasn't terrible.
It was just, again, totally compressed.
But again, they're used to doing that sort of thing.
But yeah, so it's not about the black dwarf.
Your perspective on the dark tower, I think, is weird.
You're lying and you know you're lying on this.
You are calling people racist.
And I'm not really that bothered.
It doesn't matter when you call something racist.
It's surprising that you and yours were like, oh, we're not calling you racist.
We're not calling you racist.
Dude, this isn't like 2013.
Everything is called racist now.
Like everything.
Your entire civilization has been pathologized by left-wing activists, which means the Democrat Party, like the media, Hollywood, like all of the major cultural institutions, video games, comic books.
And you can listen to the people who write these things call your country racist.
Your entire civilization is racist.
Your entire civilization is a white supremacist project.
The very nature of the American Republic is a white supremacist project.
And you're like, we can call you racist.
Dude, I don't give a fuck.
Like, everyone calls everything racist nowadays.
Do you understand?
It's not something I care about.
I'm not racist, but like, I'm not going to spend my time defending myself against allegations of racism from someone like you.
Come on.
Like, anyway, let's carry on.
You got me real good.
But until then, you're just putting words in my mouth, and I know that's called something.
Oh, don't honestly, you just put words in my mouth.
No, I'm describing the framing of your entire joke.
The shtick you're doing is predicated on the idea that everyone has presupposed that this is a person who's racist, and therefore they're only complaining about the black dwarf in particular, or the black elf, in fact.
Let's not even get into the hair on the elves.
Not cropped, by the way.
I don't know if it can't be curly or not, but definitely not cropped.
But anyway, the point is, it's not about race.
It's about lack of fidelity.
Anyway, the second complaint was that the video was too long.
And man, were there a lot of people complaining about this?
Eric, of course, himself makes this complaint.
Jesus Christ, how long is this video?
Oh my God.
So anyway.
That's just how it's going to work.
Oh, and Sargon, next time you make a response to one of these, let's tighten it up.
That was way too long.
Just tighten it up, man.
Tighten it the fuck up.
Learn to write this shit beforehand.
Oh, you love words so much.
Well, then tighten it the fuck up.
Maybe watch the whole video.
So, I did watch the whole video.
Why would I do that?
Like, that sounds very much like a you problem, not a me problem.
I'm really not bothered if it's too much for you to watch this video.
Now, it does say on the screen, Eric, that you're responding to, streamed on the 19th of November 2022.
This isn't a video.
This is a live stream.
I'm sure you know the difference.
I don't know why you keep referring to this as a video, but I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to do the things that I want to do in the way that I want to do them.
And if you don't like it, that's just too bad.
I'm just not bothered about whether you watch this or not.
I'm not bothered that you don't have the attention span to be able to pay attention to what I'm saying.
Because I'm not actually like wasting words here.
I'm not actually drifting from the topic.
I'm actually staying on point.
If you're having trouble paying attention for an extended period of time, I mean, you look like you're in your 30s.
So, if you've reached your 30s and you can't actually focus on just a single topic for 45 minutes, maybe you should just go back to watching TikTok videos, whatever it is you do with your time.
Like, maybe, again, that just seems very much like a you problem, and it's not something I care about.
I'm not going to spend any time scripting or editing this, although I did spend a bit of time for this, just putting these clips together.
So, I suppose there's that hands up.
You got me to do some work for you.
But I'm not going to bother.
I'm just not going to bother.
This is just what I do on this channel.
If you don't like it, that's fine.
You don't have to.
Anyway, moving on to the next bit.
So, this is, I think, where Eric, like, this sort of part of the video where I start explaining things to him is where you can see it just goes completely over his head.
And he repeatedly makes mistakes.
And again, I said, I thought I was surprised at the vitriol of his fans, like as if I was being cruel to him or something like that by putting concepts in front of him that they didn't expect him to be able to understand or something.
And a lot of this clearly went over his head, right?
And I'm not expecting him to know all of this stuff.
But the thing is, if he was able to pay attention and his audience was able to pay attention, then they would have just heard me explaining the concept before.
Like, I didn't think it was that difficult to understand.
And I didn't think I was being excessively verbose and explaining these things.
But maybe I was.
I'm not going to say that I wasn't.
I'm not trying to sound like a dick about it.
But like, after loads of people have been screaming in front of my face, we literally don't have the attention span to understand what you're saying.
It's like, well, then go away.
Like, what do you want me to say to you?
Like, script it for us in a way that you can.
No, I'm not going to do any of that.
If you can't understand what I'm saying in a 45-minute live stream that I'm just doing off the cuff, that's just not my concern.
And so we have to get to the point about aesthetics that he didn't understand.
Okay, I think what he's trying to say here is whatever makes the source material so classic, if you just slap its name on something made by a bunch of random people, it's never going to capture that same classic feeling that went into the source material.
Wow.
You're such a free thinker, Sargon, of a guy.
No, that's not what I said.
For example, J.R. Tolkien, is it J.R. Tolkien?
Probably is.
It's late.
Tolkien is not the same person as Peter Jackson, and yet Peter Jackson did an excellent job capturing the spirit of Tolkien's work.
Therefore, it is not necessarily that it is the same person.
What it is, is about intent that underlies it.
And I think that this was being made in response to the point about the intent of the aesthetic of the thing and saying that, look, you can see where there is intent and you can see where there aren't intent.
I mean, I don't know how else to explain it, that there is obviously an ill intent underpinning the Lord of the Rings remake.
And also the Dark Tower remake, right?
You can see when people deliberately make choices that go against the most obvious parts of the scenario, the world building that you are talking about, then they have to have an outside intention there.
They have to have a reason that is either incompetence or malice.
Now, it could be incompetence, right?
It really could.
But the point about Shang-Chi, which I'm sure I've got a clip for in a minute, is that we know that they're actually not that incompetent.
They're not so stupid and absent-minded as to not understand that they should be trying to faithfully portray something that has already been written.
I mean, if this was just an original film, who would care, right?
No one would care.
But this isn't just an original film.
These are adaptations of something that people already love in order to try and get their money and slide a political agenda in with it.
And so it's just like, okay, but why would I play along and pretend this isn't happening?
Yep, you lost me with that metaphor.
All right, yeah, thanks for clearing that up.
If you had an agenda, it's okay to not understand, but I don't think this is actually very complicated.
And I actually, you don't seem like an idiot.
That's the thing.
You genuinely don't come across like a giant moron.
But when a large part of your commentary is, I didn't understand that.
I don't get it.
What am I supposed to do?
All right.
I think he's using the Shang-Chi thing to make a point about how we would never cast a black person for that character.
But it's like he's skipping words or something.
Like, he can't get the whole thing out.
Okay.
Skipping words?
I'm skipping entire paragraphs, apparently.
Okay, so it isn't that there is, it is merely that this is the case, right?
The Shang-Chi example, for example.
It is not that it is merely the case.
There was a deliberate intempt to try and represent that property faithfully.
Right?
But that intent is either absent or inverted.
There is a deliberate attempt to portray the property unfaithfully.
That's it.
There's not some big secret.
And I know you can be like, yeah, well, that black, black, black, black, black.
No, no, just don't worry about what it is.
it doesn't matter what the particular thing is.
Again, you could, if I was a particular lore hound and I'd read the Silmarillion, which I haven't by the way, I have read Lord of the Rings, the three books though, but I haven't read the Silmarillion.
Then I would be bothered too about them compressing these characters.
But the thing is, I've never read The Silmarillion.
As I understand it, it's like essentially like a pseudo-historical tome talking about events rather than an actual story.
So I'm not really that interested in it.
Although, you know, I'd read a real history book.
But I don't know what else I'm supposed to say.
You know?
Okay, you don't understand.
Okay.
Okay, I think what he's trying to say is that we should be telling more minority-focused stories instead of having boardroom meetings about the minimum amount of minorities that we can legally have in our existing stories.
No.
Again, that I'm calling that a perspective of white supremacy, right?
I'm not saying you need to do these things.
I mean, it would be nice, I think, if you cared about black people in America and you wanted to portray something culturally authentic.
You've got lots of options of just having stories set in America, right?
That's perfectly feasible.
There are lots of films already like that, and that's totally normal.
And again, like what I love about this is the assumption that, oh, if there are no black people in Lord of the Rings, then black people just won't be represented on television.
It's like, are you fucking mad?
Like, have you seen your films for the last 40, 50 years?
There's plenty of black people.
What the fuck are you on about?
Like, this is, like, there's no reason to do this.
Because you've got a vast library of films with black people in that makes sense and isn't condescending, right?
But sitting there going, well, what are legal requirements for racial diversity in Lord of the Rings?
Do you even hear yourself think?
Like, what the fuck kind of thought is that to have?
That's not an artistic thought, right?
That's not about artistic quality.
And this, I think, is one of the reasons why Hollywood is dying.
I mean, who in Hollywood now would you call an artist?
Like, a genuine artist?
Like, I can't think of any.
But anyway, sorry, Karen, Eric.
Did I do that right, Sargon of Akkad?
No.
Anyway, let's move on.
Because I don't want to spend too much of your time, Eric.
So number four is he didn't understand the point about Harry Potter.
I mean, you used Wikipedia for other things, Eric.
Why not just look up what the word aesthetics means on Wikipedia to understand the point about Harry Potter?
And if I hadn't explained it prior to you cutting in and being like, yeah, but here's something that doesn't address what you've just said, then I guess I wouldn't find this so amusing.
This is about a two-minute clip, but unfortunately, you have to hear me talking, I'm afraid.
Sorry about this.
It's going to be weird.
It's going to be inception-esque.
But let's watch.
The point about aesthetics, right?
So aesthetics, the aesthetic experience of a piece of work comes from our interaction with it, right?
It's how we feel about the work.
The work itself is non-aesthetic, right?
It doesn't have a magical property that is aesthetic.
But the non-aesthetic properties in some way that seems to be philosophically indeterminate at this point combine in our minds to produce a particular kind of experience.
And these are not necessary experiences.
These seem to be contingent on many different things.
And there's no formula that you can say, well, this is the thing.
But there are certain predictabilities.
For example, a really good example of this is Harry Potter, right?
J.K. Rowling, when I remember years ago, and I didn't understand at the time why this was significant, but apparently when they were casting for Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling was just like, no Americans.
I found that really funny.
But why?
Right, right, right.
The first two Harry Potter movies were directed by an American from Pennsylvania.
What she is trying to do is preserve the aesthetic of a British public school, which is actually a private school for Americans.
Don't know why we call them public schools, to be honest.
But the point is she's trying to portray a posh school, a posh English school.
And so she has credentialed English actors or British actors.
And these people give a certain sense to the thing because they come from a particular place.
They exist in a particular time.
And if you take them and replace them with someone else, like Americans, who also come from a particular place and exist in a particular time and have a different culture, a noticeably different culture, you get a different aesthetic experience.
And that's something she was concerned about because she wanted to craft a particular illusion.
Or it was the American director who directed the movie who set the aesthetic.
Yeah, no, totally.
Except all but one of the Harry Potter movies were written by Steve Cloves, an American born in Austin, Texas.
And the one that he didn't write was written by a Jewish guy from New York.
Okay, Eric, like, I'm not trying to be a dick about this.
We'll go back to Steve Cloves because he'll come back into this in a second, right?
So I'm not trying to be a dick about this, Eric.
But you simply don't understand what the word aesthetics means if this is your rebuttal to my point.
Like, and this is a weird hill to die on as well.
Because I also know you didn't just simply Google it to see if I was correct or not.
Like, it's really weird, right?
The reason I played the sort of like minute, one half, two-minute clip of me talking to explain what aesthetics was is because I was telling you explicitly that aesthetics happens between the media and you.
It is your interpretation of the media.
Things that are not contained in the media explicitly, the non-aesthetic features, the colors on the screen, the actors themselves, the sounds that you're hearing.
If it's not in that, then you're not drawing a particular aesthetic experience from that.
It's not, you referring to the writer and the director expressly misses this point.
And I saw people in your own comment section pointing this out.
Like, you know, I don't like Sargon, but he has missed that point.
And it's like, yes, you have.
And the thing is, a weird hill to die on as well.
Because like I said, you could literally have just Googled this.
And 20 years later, they're still talking about this.
I thought I was going to have to get an ancient article because J.K. Rowling went on some chat show and explained her reasoning on this.
But this is what I found from January 2022.
This is still a point being made.
It's so weird that, like, this is just, you just didn't bother.
You accused me of, like, oh, you're not going to watch the video.
You're not going to do any work.
Okay, but, like, you have done none either, and you don't seem to understand the points being made, right?
So, look, just to be clear, it wasn't, it was J.K. Rowling, not as you from ignorance argue, that it was the director making this point that it should be British people because then it presents a British aesthetic.
It doesn't matter that it's written by an American New York Jew or that some other American guy directed it because they're not in front of the fucking camera, you dunce.
Sorry, I'm so sorry to be insulting to you, Eric, but this is really stupid.
And you totally misunderstood this, right?
So J.K. Rowling may have been largely absent from the reunion, but fans can thank her for maintaining the book's on-screen integrity.
So they go through, right?
And Rowling basically, with Jonathan Ross, this interview was with.
She was like, I didn't want to give him control of the rest of the story and make sure that she was totally in control of everything, right?
And so she plays down her creative control, but all of the people involved, all of the people involved, right?
And we'll cite close particularly, right?
So that she thought he thought she was the greatest asset because she was basically doing making all of the artistic decisions, right?
It wasn't the director.
He says it was her.
Everyone else says it was her, but apart from her, incidentally.
But was it other, you know, here we go.
Rowling has more control than I think possible, possibly most other people have ever had, said her agent, right?
She insisted that the cast was British or Irish and the film was made in Britain.
Harry Potter is something that's weirdly about us.
It's culturally British, says the head of the British Film Commission.
The thought it was going to be made anywhere but here sent shudders down everyone's spine.
It's like taking Catcher in the Rye and try to make it in Liverpool.
Why would he say that?
Oh, because he's a racist, right?
Or is it that there is actually something important about the concept of aesthetics when making a piece of art and portraying it faithfully delivers a certain kind of message.
Portraying it unfaithfully delivers a different kind of message.
And if you're aiming for something in particular, for example, a faithful recreation of something British, then you have to do it in a certain way.
This goes on and on.
You mean Google this for yourself.
But the point, Eric, on this is just you're so totally wrong.
You're just so out of your element here.
And you didn't even look it up.
And yet you're acting as if you know.
You don't know.
You don't know anything about this.
You don't understand the subject.
All of these points seem to have gone over your head.
And you're going to play the Jon Stewart defense.
It's just a joke, bro.
I'm just a comedian, bro.
Okay.
Then what?
Nothing you say matters?
I mean, you called Arch a fascist, apparently.
Was that just a joke?
Is that funny?
Anyway, moving on.
Eric and born in Austin, Texas.
And the one that he didn't write was written by a Jewish guy from New York.
I like the way you've kind of ascribed to them, like, the creation of Harry Potter now as well.
Like, they wrote the screenplay.
So they read the book and then translated it into a screenplay for a film.
I'm no expert on how these things work, but I'm pretty sure that's what's going to have happened.
Anyway, the fifth point, and this is just a small thing, but I think it speaks to the entire problem that I have with this skin suit of left-wing American politics, right?
And I apologize to any Americans who feel I'm overgeneralizing when I say Americans.
I know.
I know the Republicans don't are not beholden to racial politics in this way.
Now, the left-wing activists who believe in these kind of racial politics absolutely will say they are.
They will say that this is white identity politics.
It's not, which is why so many foreigners, non-white people, try to buy into it.
But the point, really, is that it's covert.
That's deception, right?
If you're going to talk politics with someone, you should be overt about it.
So they know that you're being on the level, that you're not operating from some, again, sinister intent.
You're not trying to frame things or persuade them in a way that they're unprepared for.
Because when you're watching a movie, you let your guard down.
You're not sat there.
Most people, I would say, aren't sat there being hyper-critical of every political message.
And that's one of the reasons that, in fact, left-wing film critics are so fucking insufferable.
Like, who can stand to watch them?
They're like, yeah, there were hardly any black people.
And it's like, yeah, I don't care.
Just tell me whether it was a good film or not.
It's like, yeah, but by my standards, it was a bad film.
Okay, your standards are shit.
Your standards are crap.
I don't care.
Like, I didn't watch fucking, oh, I don't know, Boys in the Hood or something.
And I was like, wow, not enough white representation in this.
Who cares?
It's not a film about that.
It doesn't have to be like these things in everything.
It's so weird.
I can't even envisage giving a shit about that sort of thing.
Whenever I'm playing a video game or something, and the representation argument is made in video games all the time, constantly, by insufferable left-wing activists.
And I just sit there and think, fuck me, man.
Whenever I'm playing a video game, I tend to choose the alien factions.
Like, the things that aren't representative of humans, I find more fun to play just because being a human is my everyday experience.
I'd like to experience something new and different.
But what do I know?
But the point is, anyway, as we'll see here, politics should be overt.
And then trying to get you to conform to their politics.
Yeah, says the guy who ran for parliament.
Get the fuck out of here, Sargon of akad.
All right.
So that was his entire video.
Right.
So that was just a small point.
But like, again, there's nothing wrong with running for political office, Eric.
There is something wrong with using subterfuge to put political messaging, what you believe to be political messaging, into a piece of media.
That it becomes revealed because it ends up destroying the internal consistency of that media.
And then, like, there's no comparison here.
Like, me being overtly political.
And you know, when you sit down to my channel, you're going to be having a political conversation, right?
I am a political YouTuber.
This is not, like, new or secret.
I'm not, like, hiding something from you.
You can get in the right frame of mind.
You can be critical.
You can be analytical.
You can sit there and go, right, okay, I'm going to have to fact check that.
I'm going to have to, you know, go and read something to consider that.
There is nothing subversive about what I'm doing.
I'm being as blunt as possible.
And the same when I ran for parliament.
It was the European Parliament, but, you know, whatever.
So it's not that there's anything wrong with being political, Eric.
That's not the problem.
The problem is subversion.
To try and sneak politics in is the problem, not the concept of politics.
Anyway, Carl.
This is his entire video.
All I left out were like awkward pauses and him repeating himself.
So look, I'll be honest.
I think if I had covered Woke Lord of the Rings and included some jokes that were about the dwarf women not having beards and other shit they're not including from the lore, well, then maybe Sargon of Akkad wouldn't have woken up in the middle of the night to film himself putting words in my mouth for 43 minutes straight.
Oh yeah.
I didn't wake up in the middle of the night.
I wake up in the morning because I have a job and a family and things to do.
I'm not putting words in your mouth.
I'm characterizing the kind of content you've made.
The kind of content you've made frames the question around who is a racist here.
And the answer is people opposing woke politics.
You can be dishonest about it if you want, but that's what it'll be.
This was not the most important thing I've had to do in the last couple of weeks, which is why it's taken so long for me to get around to doing this.
And there's a reason I have to do this late at night, Eric.
It's because I've got things to do during the day.
I've got obligations and responsibilities.
And the thing is, you strike me as a man to whom nobody depends, right?
You get drunk in the middle of the afternoon.
You smoke weed all day.
This is why you've got an excessively red face when you're only in your 30s, right?
No one particularly relies on you for anything, but things people do rely on me for things.
Just saying.
Anyway, let's continue.
All right, well, bad news, guys.
Sargon of Akkad left this video about 30 seconds in so he could start recording his own response based on what he thinks I was about to say.
Man, like, you must be online a lot.
You must be online an awful lot if you think that, like, the first thing I did when, like, your people started sending me messages was, like, oh, God, I have to go and respond to Eric.
I mean, don't be wrong, right?
You seem like a nice enough guy and everything.
And, like, you know, your video seems fun.
Like, it is funny.
I'm not criticizing your comedic chops.
You're just wrong about all of this stuff.
I don't know how else I can put it.
I feel like I'm just repeating myself because that's it, basically.
But that's okay.
None of this was actually for me anyway.
It was for the people who watch me.
Really?
Videos are for the people who watch us.
Yeah, so the next thing was apparently at the end of his video.
He's like, I'm not even sure if he means this, but he wants to have a debate on something.
I guess we'll find out.
By big money, you're so Sargon.
I'm looking at you, brother.
Let's finish this revolutionary war once and for all.
You know what they say, Tomato Tomato, get in the ring.
Where are you?
A coward.
Well, I've been called many things over my life.
Coward.
But I've never been called a coward.
And I think that you can't call me a coward legitimately anyway.
If you want to talk, Eric, I don't mind.
It's going to have to be about this sort of time in the evening.
So sometime about 10 o'clock British time.
So if you can put off being drunk until about, what is it?
10 a.m. in Californian time, then that would be cool.
I don't really want to talk to someone who's intoxicated.
It would be pointless.
But anyway, so that seems fun.
If you want to do that, you can email me.
My email's public.
So send me an email.
We can have some good old internet blood sports.
It'll be good fun.
So anyway, I thought I'd treat you to some of the comments your fans have been sending me because I'm sure you're going to be very proud of them.
So this one, I've had to cut off the names because YouTube would otherwise say, well, this is an invasion of privacy.
And they've messaged me.
And so I've got to make sure that nobody knows who that was.
Otherwise, it's an invasion of privacy, blah, blah, blah.
But this one was just, this is just brilliant.
I mean, I was genuinely impressed at the level of scholarship involved.
Yo, you are so dumb.
You literally don't understand Eric at all.
And you have never lived through the kind of racism that people in the United States have.
You are the one who is ignorant about racial issues.
Black people literally have it so bad over here and always have.
Oh.
Just black people.
Oprah Winfrey is there crying into her billions.
You sound like the dumbest person I've ever heard speak in my life.
Lamau.
And I promise I gave you a fair chance listening to him.
I feel.
I feel like you gave me a fair chance here.
But now, you're a legit dumbass with a stick up your ass.
Keep your British accent in the UK and don't show your little crybaby.
No-it old face on our side of the internet again.
I love that he thinks I uploaded the video to Eric's channel.
I did.
What am I supposed to say to this stupidity?
On your side of the.
I didn't put the video up on Eric's channel, buddy.
You didn't click on my channel and get offended and then each send me an angry message.
You did all of the.
He did this to you, not me.
There's a reason Eric has more followers than you.
Oh, oh, that's the standard, is it?
Christ.
That's a scary standard.
There's a lot of dumb shit out there and millions of people follow it.
He's literally so much more clever than you will ever be.
Now, these aren't words that this guy's putting to Eric's mouth.
Eric is not saying this.
This guy's saying this about Eric.
You just tried to act smart because you are literally so dumb.
That's what dumb people do.
It's try to act smart.
Leave Big Homie alone and speak your proper English to people who want to hear that nasty sound shit.
Well, I thought that's what I was doing by uploading the video to my channel.
Well, just streaming the stream to my channel.
Like, I thought that's what that was.
I thought people self-selected for either to watch my channel or to not watch my channel.
But it's when Eric puts me in front of this guy, this guy's like, I've got to show this Sargon of Acad who's fucking boss.
Okay, but I love, it's the end of this that just, mwah.
Perfect.
And damn, you named yourself Saigon of Akkad.
I didn't.
I named my YouTube channel Sargon of Akkad.
And if you want to know the origin, just I enjoyed the historical character's life when I read about it when I was younger.
I used to use the name when I was playing video games because it was fun.
And all my friends, we used to use like Mesopotamian Imperial, you know, like conquerors.
Like, it was just fun.
It was just, you know, it was different.
So we didn't have the same name as everyone else.
You know, it was just fun.
I didn't think about it when I was creating a YouTube channel because I created the YouTube channel like three or four years before I ever thought about making a video.
And so, and I didn't think anything was going to go anywhere with any of it.
So, like, you know, I would have chosen my name too.
Okay.
I would have probably chosen internet comment etiquette with Carl instead.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
But I love this.
How hard do you suck your own pseudo-intellectual dick?
Ah, he thinks he's a philosopher.
Spoiler alert, buddy.
And you could have googled this yourself.
Sargon of a cad was not a philosopher.
You must love the smell of your own facts.
Ha ha ha ha.
Laughy face.
Hmm.
I don't feel very dunked on by this comment.
I've got to say, like, I feel that this guy was slightly dunked on by his own spell check.
Anyway, that was only one comment.
The next one was by this chap.
And again, the attitude.
I thought that Eric took all of this in quite good spirits, really, right?
I thought that Eric took all of this with quite good humor.
Like, he didn't seem like totally moulding about it.
Like, he was really, really upset.
I can't believe he's damaged my ego.
He seems to have taken it fairly well.
And so, why?
And, like, these are just a couple of the most recent ones.
Like, why some of his subscribers acted like I just walked in on me, face fucking his girlfriend?
I have no idea.
I have no idea why they're literally acting like I publicly spun in his mum's face.
Like, what is wrong with these people?
Like, what are you so upset about?
But look at this.
What a dumb fuck video you made about the Eric Dude as a live stream, but don't worry.
He didn't once say people like yourself were racist.
I watched it twice.
Okay, but you are about to call me a racist, aren't you?
At least make up good, believable lies if you're going to try and smear someone.
Fucking lies.
What am I lying about?
Usually I get a laugh out of your videos, but just out of pity, but Christ, this one was embarrassing.
Fucking cuck.
What the fuck is a pity laugh?
Like, why would you pitifully laugh on your own in your room at someone's YouTube video?
What are you fucking talking about, right?
But this message didn't end there.
He kept going.
I'm still trying to process what you even said.
Oh, there we go.
I thought it would be something like that.
In the old world, we ate apples, which led to the extinction of racism.
What the fuck, you even talking about?
Do people actually eat this garbage up?
Who's putting words into whose mouth now?
I didn't say that.
no wonder you're having such a hard time understanding the points i'm trying to make if you've made up a script of your own inserted it into your i mean eric didn't make me say this Like, Eric didn't imply that I was saying this either.
Like, what are you fucking talking about?
Anyway, it keeps going.
It's not about race.
I'm mad about a black man being in the show.
But you don't even believe that, lol, and neither do your chud followers.
Your comment section always gives you guys away.
Oh, there we go.
They're not calling you a racist, but you are a racist.
Come on.
You are calling people racist.
Just own it.
Like, it's not high crime.
If people are getting fucking banned for calling people racist, then half the internet will be fucking banned at this point, more than half.
You know, come on.
It's just, I don't take your allegation seriously because I know what I am and what I am not.
Like, I don't need, like, your, your attempt to divine my intentions.
Ooh, hmm.
If I just sit there and study the body language and the use of this and that and the other, maybe, ah, I can calculate.
Yes.
And so by this formula, yes, you are a racist.
That's not how racism works.
Shut up.
It's about intent.
I don't think that people are inferior or superior based on the color of their skin.
So stop making this allegation.
I just don't care.
Also, Harry Potter was directed by Americans.
Lol.
Well, the first few fucking doll.
Oh, big brain.
This is your fault, Eric.
It's your fault.
This fucking moron has taken that talking point and then messaged me angrily about it.
Because it was stupid when you said it.
And it's even more stupid when he repeats it.
Now, stop Mickey by dishonest videos.
Didn't make a video.
Where you claim people say things they don't and be a fucking man, I assume he means.
I didn't.
Debate Eric.
Let's see that hat hanger of yours in action.
Well, Eric, it seems that your own subscribers have taken your challenge to me seriously.
And so I am more than happy to have a conversation with you.
I would like it to be in good faith, he says optimistically, as if that's a possible thing that we could do.
But if it's not and it just turns into a shit show, well, it wouldn't be the first internet shit show I've been involved in, would it?
But like I said, it's going to have to be about 10 p.m. British time.
Feel free to email me.
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