Category: Serious

Posted on

Sacha Baron Cohen’s Descent Into Sarah Silverman

On Thursday night, Sacha Baron Cohen, known for his movie roles Ali G, Borat, and that French guy from Talladega Nights delivered a speech at the Anti-Defamation League summit. The speech was essentially about keeping hate, bigotry, and intolerance off social media. A noble cause indeed, but also an extremely dangerous one, as it teeters on that increasingly thin line between social justice, and authoritarian censorship.

In this speech he speaks of the dangers of unregulated free speech on social media, even going so far as to make the hyperbolic statement: “all this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.” He goes on to specifically point the finger at the fact that Alex Jones and Breitbart are allowed to have a platform as proof of this “propaganda”. Never mind the fact that Alex Jones has literally been banned off every major social media platform, including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Let’s not let inconvenient facts get in the way of our virtuous speech about banning things.

He somewhat predictably never mentions any sources of propaganda, outside of the two common low-hanging fruits of the right-wing, which somewhat hurts the sincerity of his message. It’s not terribly hard to find examples of propaganda on both sides of the aisle, unless of course you’re of the delusional mindset that propaganda only exists on the “other side”, which might in fact be the case with Mr Baron Cohen.

For example, It was a mere 4 days ago that the United Nations released a report claiming that the US currently has 100,000 kids in detention centers. As it turns out, this figure was actually from 2015, and that number is much lower currently. The UN is an absolute clown car of incompetency, so this gaffe shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. This is the same UN that recently gave Venezuela a seat on their Human Rights Council. The very same Venezuela whose government is currently involved in the routine torture and execution of its own citizens via death squads. Good job, the United Nations.

Regardless, numerous news agencies decided to parrot this statistic from a traditionally dubious source, including Reuters, NPR, APF News, NBC, Al Jezeera, the New York Times, and the Associated Press. Once it was revealed that this statistic wasn’t an indictment of [current President], and was in fact bad P.R. for [last President], the walk back of the articles began. We’re not talking about simply correcting the articles, and changing the year in question from 2019 to 2015, but the articles were outright deleted. Why else would these articles be deleted if the information in them was factual, save for a date being off? These are important statistics, regardless of what year they happened in. This is a form of propaganda in action. It’s doesn’t serve to merely inform, but serves to push a particular point of view.

Here’s a slightly more blatant example of this:

This was tweeted out by an affiliate account of “The Democrats”( who retweeted it), an account that has 1.7 million followers. It implies that the 100,000 number from 2015 is the result of Trump, and policies enacted via white supremacy. As you can probably guess, it was quickly deleted after the inconvenient revelation that a Democrat was President during this time. This isn’t the type of messaging a platform merely looking to inform engages in. It’s propaganda.

But hey, publishing and/or erasing articles that potentially serve to rewrite history and push a partisan narrative is definitely not as bad as a guy who peddles conspiracy theories about inter-dimensional lizard people who isn’t even on any mainstream platform.

Sacha goes on make the argument that social media companies should meticulously curate what information ends up on their platforms. This is an exceptionally stupid idea. The arbiter of what is considered fit to publish will always be whomever is at the top of the chain of command. Jack Dorsey has ultimate say over what ends up on Twitter, and Mark Zuckerberg decides what ends up on Facebook.

If Jack Dorsey wants Kamala Harris to win the presidency, surely it would be in his personal best interest to block any news that might be either beneficial to other candidates, or detrimental to Kamala. This is why it’s important that everyone have a platform to have their say, free of any biased curation. This concept goes out the window when you allow (or force) companies to decide what information they allow on their platforms and what information they do not, completely independent of their terms of service. As a matter of fact, Google is currently involved in a lawsuit regarding their unethical promotion/supression of individual candidates during this election cycle. The very same Google whose motto used to be “don’t be evil”.

Mr Baron Cohen, numerous times throughout this speech, brings up the Holocaust and Holocaust deniers. It seems his not-so-subtle beef with Facebook in particular is that they aren’t doing enough to police anti-Semitic content on their platform. The arbiters of what is fit to be published aren’t making the right judgements, i.e. those that Sacha believes in. So if these platforms aren’t policing their content correctly, who exactly does Mr Baron Cohen feel should be the arbiter? The government? What could possibly go wrong there? Should Sacha Baron Cohen himself get to decide what information is allowed on social media and what isn’t?

He goes on to make the king of disingenuous, bad-faith arguments. He states: “Mark Zuckerberg asked where do you draw the line… but here’s what he’s really saying: Removing more of these lies and conspiracies is just too expensive.”

Asking “where do you draw the line” is an honest and valid question. One that doesn’t have a simple, clear-cut answer. For example, Twitter has a notorious reputation for banning satirical accounts. Does Twitter have a problem with satire? No. These accounts don’t violate its terms of service. But people who feel slighted and entitled have a habit of mass flagging accounts that poke fun of “their side” or engage in humor that hits too close to home. These satirical accounts get banned because of the mass flagging, and then the owner of the account has to contact Twitter to get said account reinstated.

Is anyone making the argument that satire should be banned? The people who engage in this mass-flagging obviously believe so. If something offends a bunch of thin-skinned weenies, should it not be allowed to exist? Does society give up it’s freedom of speech because twelve people on Twitter got offended? Surely Sacha Baron Cohen would say no, but here he is, claiming there is no line and that money is somehow the only roadblock here.

All of this is ironic given that Sacha Baron Cohen made his fame off making jokes that were rooted in the topics of hatred, and bigotry. They are obviously jokes, and shouldn’t be treated as anything other than humor, but there was a line of decency that he had to walk with his comedy. Why should it be ok for him to make a career off jokes rooted in bigotry, but not other people?

Well, he essentially qualifies himself to make these kinds of jokes by explaining that he marched against fascism as a teenager, and wrote a thesis about the civil rights movement in college. He also makes it clear that the point of his comedy is to call out the hate, bigotry and intolerance that his characters espoused. He’s doing this to separate himself from those other “bad people” who might engage in jokes involving hate and bigotry, who don’t have the same virtuous background that he does.

He goes on to explain how his “Throw The Jew Down the Well” song he sang as Borat is a joke that works because “the audience shared the fact that the depiction of Jews as miserly, is a conspiracy theory originating in the middle ages.” This is of course, completely preposterous and delusional.

It’s doubtful that many people laughed at that Borat segment because of their extensive historical knowledge of antisemitism. That bit was funny because a) jokes involving stereotypes can be funny, b) people in the crowd actually start singing along to this wildly inappropriate song, and c) the song itself is actually funny and catchy in a juvenile way. No historical knowledge is needed to find this bit funny. The average kid seeing this segment in the early 2000’s, myself included, were laughing for completely different reasons than the one Baron Cohen gives. He’s trying to intellectualize away the reason most people found this bit to be funny.

But once again, it’s fine for him to joke about these things, but not others. He’s essentially gate-keeping here. The young kid on social media attempting to make a joke about something taboo will be banned or blocked, while Sacha Baron Cohen is free to continue doing his thing because he has the privilege of power and fame on his side.

Sarah Silverman did the exact same thing. She made her name off making jokes dealing with stereotypes, and racial-tinged humor, only to turn around and disavow that very humor once she was sitting comfortably in her gated community. It’s one thing to simply state you’ve grown out of the type of humor you used to do, but to speak out against others employing that same type of humor is outright entitled. It’s essentially taking advantage of a loophole to get ahead, then fighting to close that very loophole once you’re done taking advantage of it. When people do this in business or politics, it’s rightly called it. It should be called out in entertainment too.

To be fair, I think the problem with both Sarah and Sacha is that they existed as individuals at one point in their careers, only to become part of a collectivist monolith once they “made it” in Hollywood. When you exist as an individual, you answer only to yourself, whereas when you’re part of a collective, you answer to the monolith. If a person is surround by a group who all think in a uniform manner, that person is more likely to adopt those group views for fear of standing out or not being accepted within that group. It’s similar to how a cult operates, except in these cases, the individual is willingly conforming out of some need to fit in.

The ADL video is 24 minutes long, and not terribly profound. He pretty much makes the argument that social media should be heavily regulated to police harmful wrong-think. As is to be expected, the video was praised by some of the more authoritarian-minded, big-government types on twitter, and criticized by most of the free speech crowd. In a final act of complete irony, the comments are disabled under the YouTube video. Wouldn’t want anyone to voice a dissenting opinions about censorship, now would we? How very China-esque.

He also says this near the end as his pièce de résistance (How fancy):

“Maybe it’s time to tell Mark Zuckerberg and the CEOs of these companies, you already allowed one foreign power to interfere in our elections, you already facilitated one genocide in Myanmar. Do it again and you go to jail.”

Let’s use government force to imprison owners of social media companies for not removing things I personally disagree with, is a hell of a stance to take. Especially for somebody who starred in a movie about a satirical dictator.

He makes a few salient points here however. Kind of.

The “interference” he’s talking about here was essentially Russia creating accounts and running ads to create division within the U.S. These ads and accounts were all over the political spectrum ranging from pro and anti-Trump, to pro and anti-Clinton, to Black LivesMatter and various religious groups. This activity had apparently been going on as far back as 2014.

This meddling is not to be confused with the “Russian collusion” conspiracy theory that tried to prove Trump collaborated with Russia to swing the election. The same conspiracy theory that is also to blame for every leftist boomer on social media now calling anyone they disagree with online a “bot”, and the current delightful boomer trend of referring to Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard as “Russian assets”.

I’m not completely sure how Facebook could have known Russians were buying these ads, as opposed to US citizens, but if there was in fact a way for them to tell, they definitely should be held accountable. I also view this interference as a scapegoat for people’s political disappointments however. Americans have a tendency to be pathetically tribalist with their views to begin with, and this division existed without any sort of meddling to begin with. It’s like complaining that someone threw a lit match into your house that was already engulfed in flames. I’m not sure how much effect these ads even had to begin with. They seemed to merely be background noise, and not the existential threat to Democracy they’re being propped up as.

As far as the Myanmar statement goes, he has a somewhat stronger point. The Myanmar government had military personnel who were tasked with spreading anti-Rohingya muslim propaganda on Facebook. This was accomplished via posts from fake accounts under fake names, often on innocuous pages about entertainment. Many of these posts were aimed at swaying public opinion of the minority group, allowing the government to get away with atrocities against that group. This is something that seemingly would have violated Facebook’s T.O.S., and these accounts should have been deleted far earlier than they ultimately were.

To summarize, the actual decent points Sacha makes all involve Facebook’s incompetence in running their platform. Facebook should be held accountable for the poor management of their platform. However, this does not mean we need an online version of the TSA policing every corner of the internet, deleting everything that could be perceived as wrong-think. This is precisely the type of thing that commonly exists in all those human-rights violating countries. You don’t install government-backed powers that get to decide what is allowed to be said, and what isn’t. The inevitable result of this is government suppression of anything critical of that very government.

Virtue-based censorship is still censorship, and it’s dangerous. “We need to start limiting society’s freedom of speech because some infinitesimal percent are using that freedom to say bad things” is not a great argument. A company has the right to decide what is allowed on their platforms and what isn’t. A company is allowed to engage in this type of censorship. The government isn’t. The first amendment prevents this. You can hold individual companies accountable, without endowing the government with even more oppressive means of enacting censorship.

The pink areas on this map represent countries with governments who engage in censorship of press, i.e. the written (or typed) word. The United States, you’ll notice, is green. Sacha Baron Cohen would like it to be pink. Don’t be a Sacha Baron Cohen.

Posted on

Buybacks And Loaded Language

There’s an ever-shrinking line between the modern journalist and the modern activist. Journalists are supposed to be objective messengers who relay factual information, while activists are biased campaigners who seek to enact change. In the twitter era, it’s become increasingly difficult to find journalists who aren’t activists first and foremost. There are countless examples to highlight this fact, but I’ll be focusing on just one in this writing: gun buybacks.

Gun buyback talk has been all the rage as of late due to back-to-back shootings that occurred on August 3rd and 4th in the U.S. As is consistently the case, whenever a shooting occurs that provides a beneficial political narrative, the gun legislation talk ramps back up. We know this to be the case, because shootings that can’t be used for political posturing never elicit the same heated response.

For example, there have been 25 mass shootings in Chicago this year as of this writing (gunviolencearchive.org). None of these shootings had trending hashtags on twitter or rampant calls for changes in gun legislation. Journalists weren’t tripping over themselves to write countless articles about this particular epidemic of gun violence. In Chicago, this violence is largely poor people killing other poor people. This isn’t a narrative that journalist activists can use to effectively demonize those on the other side of the political aisle, and whip latte-drinking, middle-class white people into a fervor, clamoring for government intervention. The victims themselves ultimately don’t matter to these people; feeding political outrage culture does.

This is where the loaded language comes into play. Loaded language is rhetoric attempting to influence by appealing to emotion or stereotypes. Take for example the very term “buyback”. This term is deceptive by very nature of how it is used.

If a government has not sold guns to its own citizens, that government cannot possibly have a gun “buyback” by very definition of the word. Governments do sell guns to other countries however, with the U.S. being responsible for 33% of worldwide gun exports. To the best of my knowledge, the U.S. doesn’t actually buy back guns it has sold to other countries; an act that would actually constitute a legitimate gun buyback.

Next, let’s look at another term often used for purposes of rhetoric:

“Returned” sure seems like an innocuous enough term at face value. Within the context of this subject however, it represents blatant loaded language. Returned implies that something was initially either borrowed or taken, i.e. the government in question owned these objects which are now being returned. This is obviously not the case, and any journalist writing an article on this subject would be well aware of this fact.

“Returned” is being used in these articles to imply that the gun owners who sold their belongings to the government were somehow in the wrong to begin with by owning them. It’s very subtle, but is completely intentional. You immediately know these journalist’s opinions on guns by the fact that the term “returned” was used. You’ll never see a Second Amendment advocate or absolutist using this term within the context of a government buyback, let alone an impartial journalist.

Finally, we have a rhetorical term that really doesn’t even try to hide it’s intentions:

This term is so loaded that it should be illegal to possess within a school zone.

There’s no alternate definition for this term that somehow implies anything other than what these publications are explicitly trying to get across. The people who owned these guns (legally) were somehow criminals for owning them (legally), and have consequently “submitted to the authorities”. Nice.

Maybe the casuals who read these types of publications are somehow under the impression that only the “bad guys” are turning their weapons in. This isn’t even remotely close to reality though. The guns that get turned in are usually inherited guns that people have no personal use for, or guns that gun owners no longer want in their arsenals. Criminals are the absolute last demographic who are going to willingly show up around police with a gun in their possession. The guns turned in to these buyback programs are guns that statistically would have never been used for illegal reasons.

Practically every last individual selling a gun at one of these events is a law-abiding citizen, yet the term “surrendered” seems to imply otherwise. It implies criminality. A bank robber or a hostage taker surrenders to authorities, not someone selling an object they legally own but no longer want. Publications who use a word like “surrender” are associating gun ownership with criminality, full-stop. If guns are only owned by criminals, then obviously we should strip everyone of their guns. It’s all very dishonest, yet completely intentional. It’s activism, not journalism.

The point here isn’t to take a side on New Zealand’s lawmaking decisions. New Zealand can do whatever they feel fit to as a country. The point is to show how journalist’s activist tendencies show through in their writings, and how easy it is to see through these biases by something as simple as assessing how a headline was written. This doesn’t just apply to topics like buybacks, and it doesn’t just apply to one side of the debate on any hot-button issue. It does serve to pull the curtain back and distinguish the objective journalists from the activist ones however.

Posted on

The Legality of Echo Chambers

A few days ago Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a lawsuit filed against her by Joey Saladino. Mr. Saladino is of course better known as “Joey Salads” of staged youtube pranks fame. He’s produced such hits as: “PUNCHING FRIENDS FOR MONEY *prank*”, “N-WORD PRANK (GONE WRONG), and perennial favorite “ABDUCTING CHILD IN FRONT OF DAD (Social Experiment)”.

The lawsuit was filed due to Mr. Saladino being blocked by Ocasio-Cortez on twitter. I can’t find exactly what it is he tweeted that resulted in his block, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, as Ocasio-Cortez is legally in the wrong here regardless. She could have used twitter’s mute function, but blocking other users from seeing her tweets is currently illegal, as per the recent ruling against Donald Trump.

From a New York times article dated July 9th, 2019: The First Amendment prohibits an official who uses a social media account for government purposes from excluding people from an “otherwise open online dialogue” because they say things that the official finds objectionable, Judge Parker wrote.

What this means, is that since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez uses her @AOC account to discuss government matters, she cannot block people from that account. She also has an account (@RepAOC) that seems to serve as more of an “official account”, yet that one has a mere 45 tweets posted as of this writing, whereas her primary account has tweeted 8510 times. Perhaps she figured that only her “official” account was beholden to these rules, but Trump also has a primary account and an official account (@realDonaldTrump and @POTUS), and the ruling barred him from blocking people on either.

I think part of the bigger problem here is that the U.S. is electing a few too many insecure narcissists, who end up treating their government positions more as beneficial social-media venues than an actual jobs. They’re more interested in amassing likes and engaging in “clap-backs” than actually accomplishing anything of substance with the positions they were elected into.

This narcissism tends to involve getting rid of anyone who might criticize them in a public forum, potentially making them look bad. If you’ve effectively blocked everyone who disagrees with you, and only keep the people around who shower you with praise, you develop this erroneous delusion that everything you say is “right” and that everyone agrees with you. This is effectively what happens in communist regimes and dictatorships. If you send everyone to the gulags who opposes you, soon enough you’re left surrounded by only people who agree with you and “adore” you. This is why we have the First Amendment in the U.S. No government official or leader should be above criticism.

Another part of the problem is that prior to social media, government officials tended to just mind their business, and actually do their jobs. It was rare for the populace to know much about members of the House or Senate, other than those who represented their own state or region. Now, every member is trying to become a social media star, and with that, we are now privy to the less savory sides of these people. Politicians getting into pointless arguments, saying generally stupid things, and supporting terrible causes for social brownie points have all become the norm.

Trump and Ocasio-Cortez are two of the worst on twitter, so it comes as no surprise that they receive the most blow-back and end up blocking people in fits of thin-skinned rage. Between Trump’s constant name-calling and mud-slinging at people he dislikes, and Ocasio-Cortez’s incessant back-and-forths with people who so much as question the inaccuracies she regularly spews, it’s quite the shit-show. I have a folder on my computer that I screenshot and save dumb tweets to, and Trump and Ocasio-Cortez are by far the MVPs of said folder. They should star in a buddy cop film together.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this lawsuit and all the copycat lawsuits that inevitably happen in its wake. There’s quite a few other members of Congress who are guilty of having a heavy ban finger on social media. Politicians are probably going to have to start learning how to use that mute button.

Posted on

Louis CK And Progressive Puritanism

Louis CK is in the news again, and no, it doesn’t involve his penis. He performed a set, which an audience member at the club recorded and uploaded to Youtube, which is great news to those with a sense of humor, and even better news to the disingenuous, pearl-clutching opportunists within modern progressive circles who don’t seem to understand how jokes work.

The 50 minute set consisted of exactly what you’d expect if you were even remotely familiar with Louis CK’s comedy. It’s bitter, pessimistic, edgy, and “inappropriate”. It’s also quite hilarious at times, at least to those who aren’t in the perpetually-offended camp.

As to be expected though, the journalist activists of the world saw a perfect opportunity to showboat just how righteous and virtuous they are, while managing to come across as even more puritan than the conservative Christians who picket Marilyn Manson concerts.

As of writing this, the following articles have been expediently vomited out for clicks:

Slate: Louis The Reactionary (originally titled: Leaked Louis Ck Comedy Act is Not Even Funny)
Slate: It’s Like Louis CK Is Not Even Trying To Win Back His Audience (originally titled Louis CK’s New Stand Up Material Is Angry and Bigoted)
Boston Globe: Louis CK’s Spectacular Return to Unfunny
CNN: Louis CK’s Parkland Joke Is What Happens When Comedy Fails. (hot take alert)
Out Magazine: Louis CK Is Just Fully Doing Transphobic Comedy Now
Harpers Bazaar: Why Can’t Men Like Louis CK Accept Their Ideas Are Outdated

What’s the running theme between all these articles? All of them were written by people who aren’t fans of Louis CK’s comedy who also can’t seem to comprehend that they aren’t entitled to personal apologies for things that didn’t involve them, or jokes catered to their personal sensibilities.

These people aren’t Louis CK’s target demographic. Their opinions hold absolutely no weight with anyone who actually is a fan, and looking for a nuanced critique. It’s like caring what an 87-year-old white guy from Tennessee thinks about Hip Hop music. These activist types like applause-break comedy. Their brand of comedy is someone making a joke about how orange Donald Trump is, to which a crowd obediently claps and hoots in unison. They like jokes that appeal to Boomers who drive Priuses with Obama bumper stickers, and there’s absolutely nothing edgy about anyone driving a Prius with an Obama bumper sticker. Louis CK obviously isn’t going to appeal to these types. This shouldn’t come as a surprise.

So who was coming out in defense of Louis CK’s jokes? Actual comedians. The ones who write jokes for a living and understand that comedy is subjective. The ones who understand that you can make a joke about pronouns without it being “transphobic” (see Out Magazine article). The ones who realize you can make jokes about race without it being “bigoted” (see most of the above articles). The ones who aren’t in the business of writing disingenuous, agenda-driven articles to further their own pathetic careers.

The fact of the matter is that there’s a bit of a problem currently with progressive types who feel entitled to destroying and silencing people because they disagree with them in some manner. Most of the publications that publish these types of articles are largely staffed by, and cater to people who fit this definition. Activists who fancy themselves journalists, who write for people incapable of thinking for themselves, prone to mob-like behavior.

The inconvenient truth is that the people who become incensed by jokes are a very vocal minority, despite the fact that they feel they speak for all of society. The leaked Louis set already has over a million views in a few days, and the guy will literally be able to sell out venues when he has a new act ready. That is, unless the outrage mobs are successful in deplatforming him. You can not like the guy, and not find him funny, but that doesn’t change the fact that plenty of people do like his comedy.

The perpetually offended will merely find a new target to direct their ire at. They always do. They operate on the same level as goldfish. The second anyone else in the public eye slips up and does something the cult deems wrong-think, there will be a new batch of hastily written articles for easy clicks and ad-revenue, as they completely forget what and who they were angry about previously. The cycle will continue in perpetuity.

These types of people tend to exhibit an almost comedic level of denial about their own implicit authoritarian tendencies. They feel that people should be banned for saying things, wearing things, thinking things, enjoying things, even joking about things they don’t agree with. They are more than happy to make appeals to authority to meet their goals of ridding the world of things they don’t personally agree with, all the while making pathetic excuses to justify their shitty behavior. You see this a lot with job lynch mobs and collective efforts to de-platform people. Joke policing is just another branch of this authoritarianism.

The argument you’ll likely receive upon calling out these authoritarian tendencies it something like “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences”. Ok. What consequences are we talking about here? Your being angry and voicing your dislike of a comedian is perfectly fine. You are entitled to an opinion. Your engaging in concerted efforts to prevent someone from performing or having a platform isn’t protected by a Constitutional amendment however. It’s just douche bag behavior.

“What are you talking about. *drool* Nobody is preventing anyone from performing. *fart* Don’t be crazy.”

In response to this all too common trite response, I would probably bring up the following case. In December, Nimesh Patel was prevented from performing at Columbia University. Prevented, as in his performance was literally stopped, and he was asked to leave the stage because certain children in the crowd felt offended by the content of his jokes. In this case, people’s opinions weren’t merely expressed in response to his content, but he was prevented from doing his job due to a repressive appeal to authority. Should we even bother postulating on the political leanings of the guilty parties?

Colleges have become the canaries in the coalmine for society’s continued downward trajectory towards censorious authoritarianism. Comedians regularly have to deal with deciding to either sign “behavioral agreements” (actual things) , which dictate exactly what topics they are allowed to cover, or merely decide to not play campuses. Most comedians tend to opt for the latter, and have stopped performing at college campuses altogether.

As Chris Rock put it:

“…I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative. Not in their political views — not like they’re voting Republican — but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of “We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.” Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”

Unfortunately, the kids raised in these safe space environments grow up to be safe space adults who then write articles language policing everybody. Hence the 2 dozen articles chastising Louis CK for topics he chose to make jokes about, or arguing whether he’s allowed to make jokes at all. Every single one of these authors could have just as easily not listened to his set and gone about their lives. They all had that choice. But obviously, they wouldn’t have then had the opportunity to write self-righteous stink pieces.

We also need to address the issue of why Louis CK in particular is the target of these people’s ire.

Louis CK had a habit of masturbating in front of women. He did so consensually despite what all the hit pieces desperately trying to paint him as Bill Cosby 2.0 would like you to believe. Because consensual masturbation and outright rape are the exact same thing if we employ the brilliant logic of current year brains. Keep in mind, Sarah Silverman actually came out and said Louis masturbated in front of her and that she liked it, which she was then pressured into apologizing for because it tainted the victimization/predatory narrative that was being pushed.

The general consensus was then adopted that the acts were still inappropriate because Louis CK was in a position power, and ladies would have been less likely to say no since he was the guy who wrote and directed the Oscar award winning film Pootie Tang.

Regardless, he eventually apologized for his actions in a written statement, and had apparently already apologized in the past to the other people involved. Predictably, this hasn’t stopped the disingenuous types from continuing to paint Louis CK in the same light as a Harvey Weinstein. Never let a false equivalency get in the way of one’s activism.

These disingenuous comparisons are necessary however. They allow these self-righteous types to completely ignore the fact that Louis had already apologized to those he needed to make amends with. As touched upon earlier, these types of people feel entitled to personal atonement. They can’t grasp that if person A wrongs person B, person C, who was not part of the equation, is not entitled to any sort of apology. Louis CK hasn’t groveled to them personally and been granted their forgiveness, therefore he is still a sinner in their eyes. If the Church of Progressive Activism, hasn’t pardoned him, he still has to do time. It’s all very ideologically driven.

You start to realize this when you actually engage individuals who think this way. People had a problem with his return to stage in late August of last year. “He hasn’t taken enough time off” was a common refrain. Because an arbitrary passage of time obviously changes things. We already established that he had both apologized publicly, and to those he had apparently wronged. So what is the problem here? Why are these people still upset? Once again, they feel entitled to a personal apology for transgressions that didn’t even involve them. Grovel at the feet of the God of Entitlement for forgiveness.

If you don’t find a comedians brand of humor funny, fine. Move on. I find Michelle Wolf about as funny as childhood cancer, but it’s never crossed my mind to write an entire article chock full of butt-hurt over her. I’m also not an entitled 23 year-old recent college graduate writing articles for click-bait trash media, so maybe I’m just out of touch.

It’s painfully obviously that many of these articles ultimately aren’t about the jokes. They’re very thinly-veiled attempts at trying to ruin someone whom the authors feel needs to be destroyed. People deeply invested in the #MeToo movement (most of these articles were written by left-leaning millennial women) see Louis CK’s inappropriate jokes as the perfect scapegoat to try to convince society that’s he’s an evil force who needs to be excommunicated. The jokes are just a convenient red herring for writing an article condemning him as a person and to attack his character.

“[These kids] are just boring. Fucking telling us ‘you shouldn’t say that’. What are you, an old lady? What the fuck are you doing? ‘That’s not appropriate.’ Fuck you, you’re a child. Why aren’t you finger fucking each other and doing jello shots?”

If Patton Oswalt had gotten on stage at a comedy club and delivered a joke of this type, there wouldn’t be countless articles written condemning him, and attempts to de-platform him. Perhaps a few angry tweets would have been penned before people moved on. Patton Oswalt also hasn’t had a #MeToo moment (yet). This is about activism, not jokes.

Keep in mind that this type of joke isn’t new for Louis CK. He’s been delivering material in this vein for the last decade. None of these people saw fit to write articles about his content until after he became a pariah. There is a very clear line in the sand between the pre-MeToo and post-MeToo eras, and the existence of articles seemingly taking issue with the content of his material.

If you’re writing disingenuous hit pieces calling out his comedy because you have an ulterior motive, at least be honest about your intentions. Be honest about that fact that you don’t feel he should have a platform any more, regardless of what topics he chooses to cover in his comedy. Because it’s obvious this whole concerted media effort isn’t really about his making a few edgy jokes about school shootings.

Whether Louis CK gets blacklisted from comedy clubs or not due to this mob mentality isn’t the biggest issue here. The dishonest focus on the content of his jokes as a means to de-platform him for completely different reasons just serves to usher in further authoritarianism. Now, the next comic who gets up on stage is beholden to this over-reaching joke policing. Clubs will be less likely to let any “edgy” comics perform, because they don’t want to deal with the inevitable wave of puritan mobs. We’ll be living in a world of knock-knock jokes before we know it. Vomit.

The great irony here is that Authoritarianism is illiberal by definition, meaning the liberals so prone to authoritarianism aren’t liberal by definition, despite the fact that they continue to view and label themselves as liberal. They are essentially puritans without those pesky religious beliefs.

puritan (noun): someone who has strict moral or religious principles, and does not approve of pleasure, for example in sexual activity, entertainment, or eating and drinking.

They justify this puritanism with weak morality arguments. It’s “not nice” to joke about this, “it’s inappropriate” to joke about that. Comedy should always be squeaky clean and “appropriate” to a puritan. They then make the assertion that all of society is in tune with their personal views and tastes to justify said puritanism, like this micro-brain:

Translation: I’m fine with deplatforming this individual because they don’t think like I do. They don’t have the same sense of humor I do. This person’s beliefs are not “universal”, i.e. they don’t believe the same things I personally believe, therefore fuck ’em, they shouldn’t have the same rights.

MY, HOW LIBERAL.

liberal (adjective): open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values.

These delusional junior authoritarians are unfortunately a dime a dozen on twitter. Roughly half the non-ironic #Resistance crowd (the above account included) are cut from this cloth. Because #Resisting evidently entails constantly accusing others of being authoritarian and controlling, all the while attempting to exert your own authoritarianism and control over people. How enlightened, rational, and not ironic in the least bit.

Exactly how entitled does a human being have to be to feel that only things that either a) represent their only sensibilities, or b) they personally find funny/entertaining have a right to exist. Very entitled is the correct answer. Astonishingly entitled.

As a final point, you can’t use your own personal morality as an argument as to whether something should be allowed. Keep in mind that whatever you personally believe, there is someone out there who believes the exact opposite. Neither one of you thinks you’re wrong and the other one is right. You’re in an eternal morality stalemate. To use a Stefan Molyneux meme: morality is “not an argument”.

People who are against gays use morality arguments. People who think marijuana should be illegal employ morality arguments. People who engaged in genocides used morality arguments to justify those acts. A morality argument can be made for anything, regardless of how heinous, including deplatforming people. If your whole argument is predicated on your morality being more moral than someone else’s morality, you don’t really have much of an argument, do you?

Stop trying to deplatform people over jokes, you dipshits.

Posted on

Terrible Politicians Birth Terrible Bills.

A bill was recently proposed in New York that is so stupid, that even people well aware with how stupid New York’s government officials are might do a double take. This is the very same state that just elected a woman to the House of Representatives who literally doesn’t know what the 3 branches of government are or how unemployment rates work. I give it about 3 more decades before New York actually turns into a John Carpenter movie.

The dumb bill in question (because there are many) proposes that anyone looking to buy a new gun, or renew their current permit, must legally allow the government to snoop through three years (I’m sure we can trust them to stop at just three) of their personal online data. This includes things like social media accounts and online histories. Holy absolutely unconstitutional authoritarian overreach, Batman.

What are our benevolent overlords in the government going to be looking for? Threats to the safety of others, intentions to commit terrorism, profane slurs, or biased language pertaining to race, color, origin, gender, religion, age, disabilities, or sexual orientation.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

Jokingly call your friend a retard on facebook? The New York Gestapo might see this as “biased language” disparaging the handy-capable. No guns for you.

What about if you threatened to kill another person on twitter in jest. You know, like Kathy Griffin and countless other blue checkmarks have done to President Trump and members of his family. Sorry folks, but no gun rights for you any more.

How about if you voice sentiments critical of Israel on your myspace page? Well that could be (and quite often is) misconstrued as antisemitic speech. Congratulations! You’re possibly guilty of biased language pertaining to matters of race, origin, and religion. That’s a three-hit wrong-think combo. The second Amendment no longer exists for you.

The fact that there are actually people who think a proposal like this is a good idea is beyond depressing. This is ironically similar to the stop-and-frisk policies (also a New York staple) that liberals absolutely hate and conservatives foolishly justify by saying “well, if you don’t do anything wrong you have nothing to worry about”. Except now it’ll be the conservatives complaining about government overreach, and liberals taking the brilliant “don’t say something wrong, you have nothing to worry about” stance.

It’s also quite ironic that the people so vehemently outspoken against George W Bush’s NSA overreach (though most remain pro-Obama, even though he was a far worse violator of privacy rights(irony²)) seem to be the ones backing this gross violation, because what even is moral consistency?

The bill currently violates the first (freedom of speech), second (right to bear arms), fourth (unreasonable search and seizure), fifth (due process), and fourteenth (forbids states from passing unconstitutional laws) amendments. That has to be some sort of new record for legislative incompetence. Good job, Kevin Parker, you simple human being.

This bill is a problem for the same reason no-fly lists being a factor in firearm eligibility is a problem. It would be great if we lived in a utopian world full of rainbows and unicorns, wherein some magic list existed that provides the easily-digestible answers to every issue. This is far from the reality we live in though. In reality, the U.S. government tends to be far from efficient, and not very capable of balancing a budget, let alone maintaining any kind of valid list.

As it turns out, people have ended up on no-fly lists before, with no way of knowing why they were on said list, or how to get off of it. It’s like some twisted Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment mixed with a dash of complete bureaucratic incompetency.

People have ended up on no-fly lists due to name mix-ups, random human errors, mere speculation, and outright political discrimination. When you combine this with a complete lack of due process, you end up with people being unfairly screwed over, and prevented from flying due to no fault of their own. To further start stripping these people of their constitutional rights on top of that is a recipe for disaster. The ACLU, for all their numerous faults, have actually rightly protested these no-fly lists.

Allowing the government to root through people’s personal data takes the terrible idea inherent in no-fly lists to the next level. Who exactly is going to be the final arbiter of what’s intended as a joke, and what’s serious? Is the government going to ask you whether you said something in jest, or do they simply get to assume the context behind a statement regardless of the intent? This opens the door for rampant abuse of power.

Keep in mind, a man (Mark Meechan) was prosecuted in Scotland for uploading a video in which he taught his pug to do a Nazi salute. At the beginning of the video, he mentions that he is doing so as a joke, and that he was going to “turn [the dog] into the least cute thing I could think of, which is a Nazi.”

Yet somehow, the fact that the video was intended as a joke was outright disregarded, as the government decided that they, and not Mr. Meechan, would get to be the ones to determine the intent of the video. The government ultimately decided that he intended the video to be pro-Nazi propaganda, and not the joke it was in fact created to be.

The person who made the joke didn’t get to decide his intent, the government did. That is dystopian, and that is what an absolutely idiotic bill like S9191 would be ushering in within the U.S. judicial system.

A bill like this is just another shiny object created by the government to distract everyone from that fact that most high profile shootings could be prevented if our government was simply less incompetent. Law enforcement and the FBI fail time and time again to enforce laws that exist, and properly conduct investigations pertaining to those laws. Look into practically any mass shooting, from Nikolas Cruz, to San Bernardino, to The Pulse Night Club, and you’ll see that just about every one of them could have been prevented if the local police or FBI had done their jobs correctly.

Either the authorities were notified about the individual numerous times and never followed the proper course of action, or the FBI investigated, but never took the necessary steps to prevent the shooter from making a legal gun purchase. All three of the above shootings involved people the FBI had already been investigating, but for whatever reason never followed through on, ultimately allowing 80 deaths to occur.

But hey, lets just strip people of their constitutional rights, instead of holding people whose salaries we pay to any kind of standard as far as actually doing their jobs. That’s the far better alternative, obviously.

 

Wall Street Journal article on bureaucratic incompetency:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-parkland-fail-1519255068

Posted on

Trump, Koi Fish, and the Agenda Driven Media

November 5th was a day like any other day. The sun rose in the morning. Birds started to chirp. McDonald’s opened at 5AM and started serving sub-par breakfast. Media outlets and blue check-marks threw integrity to the wind, logged into twitter, and greeted the day with their daily doses of lies and dishonesty.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump was in Japan meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. While there, he took part in traditional Japanese pastimes, like playing golf, and eating hamburgers.

Then he fed some koi fish, and the hysterical man-children and women-children of the media were given the opportunity to prove they could be every bit as childish as Trump.

Both Trump and Abe were enjoying a staged photo-op, feeding koi fish from wooden boxes, flinging spoonfuls of feed down to the fishy maws below. Then PM Abe tossed the remainder of his box into the water, and President Trump followed suit.

Precisely 27 seconds later, twitter erupted with countless tweets and links to incompetently-penned click-bait articles by millennials with over-valued Communications degrees.

The basic gist of most of these tweets was: “Trump is moron. Other guy feed fish, but he dump fish food out like moron!!1!”.

Or course, this was in fact not the case, but journalism has changed a lot in the last few decades, and now D+ students are the gatekeepers of news. People who are unable to be objective and deliver a story without a blatantly partisan bias have become a rare breed within the modern media. Hence the increased volume of outright propaganda that gets passed off as actual journalism these days.

Any “journalist” very easily could have looked at the source material, done a little research, and very easily debunked the narrative that was being pushed. The simple act of watching a 30 seconds video that was readily available could have prevented dozens of goofs from posting tweets or writing articles that were so easily debunked.

Trump_IndependentThen what happened, The Independent (blue_checkmark.jpg)? Trump showed his “usual bluntness” by copying the actions of the Prime Minister of a foreign country he was visiting? The same thing all visiting Presidents do? Did Shinzo Abe, the actual Prime Minister of Japan, not know the “ritual for visiting dignitaries”, but you arrogant mouth-breathers do?

Trump_MetroTrump got impatient, did he, Metro (blue_checkmark.jpg)? He got impatient by calmly parroting the Japanese Prime Ministers actions? How do you know what Trump was told? Were you there, Metro (blue_checkmark.jpg)? You weren’t, were you? So essentially, you’re just creating an alternate narrative to push an agenda? This seems out of character for such a dependable, credible media outlet such as yourself.

Trump_Guardian“Trump dump”. That sure is a creative headline, The Guardian (blue_checkmark.jpg). Did someone with a writing degree from a college come up with that? I can’t help but notice you’re running the same false narrative as all the other outlets writing stories about this non-event. It’s good to know that British “news” organizations are just as unreliable and dishonest as their U.S. counterparts. Keep up the good work.

Trump_JezebelOn the other end of the (autism?) spectrum, we have the childish bastion of anti-intellectual, non-content known as Jezebel (blue_checkmark.jpg). This site not only posted a factually-inaccurate story (practically their business model), but refused to change it after finding out it was wrong. It’s almost as if facts and truth don’t matter at Jezebel (blue_checkmark.jpg). Sounds like an intelligent choice of places to go to get your news from.

Countless other sites posted lazy, copy-and-paste articles about this topic as well. CNN posted doctored footage, conveniently cropping out PM Shinzo Abe dumping his container first, which shouldn’t surprise anybody familiar with CNN’s level of journalistic integrity. HuffPo wrote some 5th-grade level, emotionally-based drivel that 50-year-old women with 8 cats no doubt ate up. There were many more, but I think you get the point.

The grand irony here, is that these articles represent the very #FakeNews that Trump has become known for railing against on his twitter account and at press conferences. Keep in mind, this wasn’t an incident that was easy to get wrong. These outlets either A) didn’t actually watch the footage before deciding to write and post these articles, or B) saw the footage, and still decided to write what amounts to slander. Can someone please explain to me again why trust in the media is at an all-time low?

This wouldn’t be a problem if it were merely an isolated incident, but it isn’t. Most of these sites seem to exist solely as politically-motivated propaganda machines dedicated to writing hit-pieces on a daily basis. If a politician legitimately messes up, journalists should write about it. If that person doesn’t mess up, journalists obviously shouldn’t then alter reality in order to write a negative piece about him or her. This seems like common sense to me. The fact that people still read this type of stuff and don’t question it, is quite disturbing. It’s almost like society is intellectually regressing back to the medieval era.

People are willing to believe absolutely idiotic things as long as it confirms a bias that they already hold. Hence, we’ll continue to get misleading or outright fabricated articles over the next 3 (potentially 7) years, to fuel the partisan dementia that infests social media, and provides a lucrative business model for increasingly dishonest media outlets.

Hopefully we get a Democrat in office next so that we can get back to reading all those cult of personality based fluff articles instead. It’ll be nice to be back in an era where the media outright buries and refuses to cover human right’s violations, corruption, and unconstitutional acts from politicians they share a political affiliation with. After all, that’s truly what journalistic integrity is all about.

Posted on

Google: Visual Diversity vs Intellectual Diversity

Recently, a Google™ employee by the name of James Damore released a memo essentially criticizing the company’s idea of diversity, and attempting to explain what actual diversity was, via things like common sense and published studies. Not surprisingly, the cult of left-leaning media got together, and decided to push the narrative of “anti-diversity” in describing the memo, which they also took to calling a “manifesto”. You know… like those things lone wolf killers release after massacring a building full of people. Propaganda much?

When I read this memo on Gizmodo™, or one of those other BuzzFeed-esque bastions of idiocy, I initially thought the contents of the memo was actually the response of Google’s™ brand spanking new VP of Diversity, Integrity, and Governance (Who pulled that job position out of their ass?). You see, this memo that every pearl-clutcher on social media was complaining about, was supposed to be this dangerous, hateful screed demonizing minorities, women, and family pets. As you can imagine, I was expecting the actual memo to be irrational, and the person with the pretentious title’s response to be the rational part.

The memo I read however, was very calm, collected, analytical, and actually argued in favor of diversity in the work place. As someone who actually reads, and enjoys things like facts and science (And not just faux-science facebook pages), I didn’t see much stated in the memo that I wasn’t already aware of. It did contain “hate-facts”, like arguing that men and women are different, motivated by different things, and have different strengths and weaknesses. The type of facts anyone who has ever been in an adult relationship with the opposite sex, or at very least doesn’t live in a cave should probably already be aware of.

Ironically, the memo also argued that silicon valley is overwhelmingly Democrat-voting, and tends to be a hostile, noninclusive environment to anybody of any other political affiliation or background. The irony being that there is now one less non-leftist in silicon valley (Damore is evidently Libertarian), because someone dared to hold an opinion and state factual data that didn’t fit the narrative of his employer and employees. Those in the echo chamber of silicon valley felt threatened and unsafe by differing opinions (i.e. diversity), and felt the need to purge that which was different.

Which brings me to the title of this article.

When a company like Google touts it’s diversity, it isn’t referring to it’s wide breadth of ideologies and backgrounds. In an environment like Google, there is an entirely different type of diversity being paraded about. In this instance, diversity is a visual concept, usually only signifying minor surface-deep differences between two people. The existence of two individuals who hold exactly the same beliefs, but have different levels of melanin, represent diversity here. It is “diversity” to have a woman and man present who are essentially carbon copies of each other, save for their chromosomes. This type of diversity is merely a matter of visual differences, and rarely anything deeper.

The definition of diversity outside of these progressive circles tends to imply a difference of ideas, or world view, regardless of skin color, gender, or anything else pertaining to identity politics. This is often referred to as intellectual diversity. Two individuals could have completely different world views for example, and both be black women. You would need to actually listen to the ideas of these two people to gauge whether any actual intellectual diversity was present however. If you’re only interested in racial diversity though, these women then become completely interchangeable. They serve the same end merely by virtue of their skin color. This just so happens to be tokenism.

You literally don’t even need to converse with a group of people to determine whether that group is diverse, via this shallow, skin-deep definition of diversity. You could look through a stack of photographs of potential employees, select an assortment of different-looking folks, make sure you’ve created a nice “diverse” team, then call it a day. Unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more common for large companies to engage in practices of this sort due to social pressures to hire merely for visual diversity. This seemingly amounts to little more than a P.R. move used to give the illusion of something existing, which is rarely actually present within these environments. Diversity is our strength! That one guy is tall, and that other guy is short. We are diverse!

How exactly does hiring a bunch of ideologically similar people, who happen to be different colors create strength though?  Visual diversity (race, gender, etc.) is a thing that obviously exists, and has it’s merits, but it isn’t the same as intellectual diversity, and the two shouldn’t be confused or conflated. If a meteor was headed for Earth, you would probably want an intellectually diverse group of people solving the issue, rather than a visually diverse group of people. A group who looks varied, but thinks similarly isn’t likely to provide a wide range of solutions to a particular problem.

Racial and gender diversity existing independent of intellectual and ideological diversity does have it’s place though. That place being visual mediums.

If a country is composed of many different races, all those races should probably be represented in a realistic portrayal of that country in a visual medium. Formats like television, movies, advertisements, etc. America is a diverse place, so a visual medium should represent this. China is not a very diverse place, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that their visual mediums aren’t very diverse. The intellectual component of diversity doesn’t have to come into play in matters of visual representation.

If a product is being advertised, the company selling that product wants to project racial and gender diversity if that product is intended for everybody. This makes sense from a business standpoint. If you’re marketing only to a single demographic, it gives off the impression that your product is solely meant for that particular demographic, and not everybody. Your sales might be hurt by this. If a product is intended for a single demographic, then obviously the advertisements would reflect that. The intellectual component of diversity isn’t usually necessary in marketing.

Both visual and intellectual diversity can be present at the same time within a company. The main issue here is that only visual diversity is being focused on by the detractors of this memo, and seemingly, Google itself. Intellectual diversity is all but ignored, as if it has absolutely no use to a society.

Once again, these are two different types of diversity, and they are not interchangeable.

Claiming intellectual diversity merely from differences in skin color requires a huge degree of assumption. You know nothing about another person until you actually converse with them, and you never have the opportunity to converse with someone different than yourself, when you live in an echo-chamber. Google, like many tech companies, seems to be an echo chamber. Everyone is a neat little ideological carbon copy of everybody else. So when someone voices an opinion that is different from the flock, people in these environments don’t know how to handle it like well-developed grown-ups.

When you are surrounded solely by people who think exactly like you, you start to share a lot with the average cult member. People in cults are intentionally cut off from the outside world, to prevent them from coming across differing options. Differing opinions that might change their world view and cause them to potentially leave that very cult. Differing opinions that might cause them to question the validity of the beliefs they hold. Beliefs they generally possess merely by virtue of being surrounded by, and indoctrinated into those convictions.

You see this played out a lot on social media. People willingly surround themselves with people who think exactly as they do (i.e. an echo-chamber), only to have their beliefs reinforced by never having a differing opinion around to challenge them on those beliefs (i.e. confirmation bias). These beliefs could be nonsensical, to downright idiotic, but if they are never challenged, the person will never grow out of them.

It’s extremely rare to see anybody on facebook™ actually engaging in any kind of intellectual debate. The platform seemingly exists for people to grandstand on certain topics, only to have others who already share the same opinion dole out empty validation through clicking a “thumbs up” button. “My opinions must be intelligent and correct, because all these people whom I’m friends with, because we think alike, agree with me.”

In the rare instance wherein a conflict of ideas actually results on facebook™, a nuanced exchange of ideas hardly ever results. More often than not, this is because the one broadcasting their half-baked ideas and opinions hasn’t actually mulled over the issue enough to actually have a cogent debate on the topic. They certainly haven’t looked at the issue from both sides, or done much in the way of critical thinking on the subject. None of this is necessary however, when you live in an echo-chamber, and your views will conveniently never be challenged.

This is illustrated by the sheer amount of people who seem to have an opinion on a relatively short memo they obviously didn’t bother to read. How can you justify spewing your opinion out into the public realm on something it’s painfully obvious you never even applied the minimum amount of effort to look into? These types of people are the kids in school who wrote book reports on novels they didn’t even read. Unfortunately these types are getting hired into the click-bait junk media that has replaced legit platforms of journalism in the last 5-10 years.

These kinds of sites aren’t “fake news”. They aren’t even news at this point. They’re poorly written and researched bias, that serves no purpose but to get clicks and sell ad revenue.

Anyhow… now that this article is already 3 chapters long, lets actually delve into that dangerous thought-crime manifesto, shall we? Below are a few excerpts from that memo:

  • Women on average, have more openness directed toward feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things relative to men. These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.

That’s totally racist, yo! I mean Islamophobic… I mean… what’s that term I throw around when I haven’t read something, and/or don’t understand the material presented, proceed to get hysterical and defensive, and throw around accusations?

That’s sexist! That’s the term I was searching for. Implying that women “on average” have different traits and interests then men in sexist. I also ate paint chips as a child, and have a room temperature IQ, but that’s most definitely racist. I mean, sexist.

  • Women on average, have more extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness. This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support.

Oh my god! Can you believe this? I totally can’t even right now… I have no idea what half those words even mean, but I’m certainly not going to actually look them up. I’m just going to assume that all that stuff is bad, and homophobic… I mean sexist, and go about my day. My favorite color is potato.

  • We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life. Status is the primary metric that men are judged on, pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths.

There’s literally nothing in that statement that I can reasonably dispute using any kind of logic, but my feels are telling me that it’s wrong, so therefore I’m just going to call it sexist. I’m sure it’s also transphobic and ableist in some way, but as we’ve already established, throwing around these words requires no intellectual processing, and therefore, I’m not even going to bother backing up my claims. Next!

  • The male gender role is currently inflexible. Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more “feminine,” then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles.

Not to break character, but I legitimately can’t see how anybody could possibly view this as “sexist” or “anti-diversity” in any capacity. This is essentially a sentiment one would find on any feminist blog deconstructing gender roles and espousing the harms of the patriarchy™. This guy would get lambasted for being a SJW for stating this view in any other capacity. This is by no means the only instance in the “manifesto” wherein this gentlemen makes a statement like this either.

  • I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more.

Not according to all those hit pieces written about you, my dude. How can you possibly claim to be in favor of something, when other people are insisting so adamantly that you are against it? If you insist that your favorite color is blue, but a bunch of “D+” students who got jobs working at sites like Gizmodo and Vox claim that you hate the color blue, who are you to argue? You racist.

  • We all have biases and use motivated reasoning to dismiss ideas that run counter to our internal values. Just as some on the Right deny science that runs counter to the “God > humans > environment” hierarchy the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people

Not to break character again, but this is perhaps the most categorically true statement in this memo. I mean… (cue spooky music) “manifesto”. I’ve got an article on this very topic laying around my wordpress somewhere that I need to finish. It’s about people’s tendency to gleefully parade out science that conforms to their partisan agendas, while being just as quick to reject science that contradicts those same agendas. Let’s continue, however.

  • I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).

That’s a pretty damning statement there, buddy. Lemme get this straight. Diversity isn’t bad, society isn’t fair, we should try to fix bias, minorities have it bad sometimes, we shouldn’t reinforce gender roles, and people should be treated as individuals?

Can you believe the nerve of this man? What an absolute piece of garbage! Who in their right mind could state these hateful things?

Yes folks. These are the ideas that the imbeciles of the internet are touting as sexist, racist, and anti-diversity, among other words people who don’t possess enough intellect to fabricate actual arguments sling around.

I’m going to stop here. Mainly because the entire memo is relatively mundane, as is to be expected, since it’s essentially comprised of data taken from numerous scholarly sources. It’s basically an aggregate of fairly common, widely-held, heavily-researched principals that a certain group of people (see science deniers above) refuse to acknowledge, because they went into debt to pay for an education that somehow left them dumber in the long run.

I’m a fairly accepting individual, but to be frank, I have a really hard time trying to justify viewing anyone as remotely intelligent, who upon actually reading this “manifesto”, has no problem slandering it as a whole. The vast majority of this thing was so common-sense that it was hardly worthy of any of the fuss it created. The parts that actually were opinions, were extremely liberal, and surprisingly inclusive in nature. I’m having difficulty seeing any of the articles written about this as being anything other than quite obvious agenda-driven propaganda at this point.

But then again, we currently exist in a peak satire-as-reality world. The place wherein people exist who say shit like “There’s no differences between the sexes!” and then turn around, and in the same breath, say something like “It’s time for change. Let’s elect a woman president!”, all without a hint of irony.

So to sum up: sexes = not different, yet somehow: different sex = different outcome.

Gotcha. Enjoy those paint chips.

 

Posted on

The Paris Climate Deal is Complete Bullshit

The U.S. recently left the Paris Climate Deal™ and the internet ain’t having it.

That’s what the title of this article would have been it had been written for BuzzFeed™. It also would have been arbitrarily structured as a top ten list, because the easily-amused love a good list. There would have been a lot of pictures too, because journalism these days apparently involves including a photo for every two to three sentences written.

All this is beside the point though. The point is that the Paris Climate Deal™ is a complete joke, and it doesn’t matter that the U.S. isn’t a part of it. This agreement is strictly a circle-jerk and a P.R. move. Any actual research or rumination on the topic makes this quite evident.

To begin with, every country on the planet signed this agreement, except three. Those three being Syria, Nicaragua, and of course, the United States. Well isn’t it bad that everyone’s in on this union except these three? If everyone else is doing something, we need to be doing it too, right? Fitting in and conforming is what all good lemmings people should strive for after all.

“Wrong.” -Trump 2016 A.D.

Take a second and realize who else is signed on to this nonsense.

North Korea. The country ruled by a dictator. The country that might be the worst offender of human rights in the world today. The country that exists as a military state, with the ultimate goal of nuclear domination of its enemies. The country that seems to value human life less than another other country on Earth.

Does anybody actually believe that North Korea is concerned about the environment in any capacity? Well, they’re part of the Paris Climate Deal™, so they obviously must care about carbon footprints, right? There can’t possibly be any other explanation, like perhaps the fact that being a part of this is a nice P.R. move for “good guy points” on the world stage.

Saudi Arabia is part of the Paris Climate Deal™. The country with the worst air pollution on the entire planet, who also happens to be its largest exporter of crude oil to boot. Does anyone reading this seriously think Saudi Arabia gives a single shit about carbon footprints and climate change? Is anyone caught up in this “save the planet” narrative actually this gullible?

I can go around telling everyone that I’m against child labor, but if i keep going out and buying clothes and products made with child labor, was I ever truly against child labor? Perhaps I was merely virtue signalling to the world that I’m a great person and care about important issues. Virtue signalling and legitimate action are not one and the same.

How about those 17 countries where people literally throw garbage into rivers and lakes that they then proceed to bathe and poop in. Are these countries doing their part to save the planet? All of them are a part of this important and worthwhile Paris Climate Deal™, so one can only assume that they care about the environment. The fact that they are actively ruining the environment as we speak should be of no consequence.

It’s almost as if there is no actual criteria that needs to be met in order to be a part of this deal. It’s almost as if the whole thing is a completely empty, meaningless gesture.

I can’t say it’s of much surprise that some of the less rational types out there are getting so worked up over something of so little substance though.

When this doomsday narrative of imminent planetary destruction gets forced down people’s throats on a regular basis, they start to believe it without question. They start to believe that flushing their toilet one less time a day is somehow going to ensure their kids a brighter future.

The fact of the matter is that very little you do as an individual will have any noticeable effect on global warming or saving the planet.

To put things into perspective, the 16 largest ships in the world create the same amount of pollution as every car on Earth. Danish shipping line Maersk’s eight largest ships in their fleet each produce the pollutants of 50 million cars (info from NewAtlas.com). You deciding to not own a car to combat global warming is about as effective as you deciding to lose weight by eating one less grain of rice a day. The consequences of these actions are borderline negligible.

People have a tendency to overstate their own relevancy in the grand scheme of things, though. People love to believe that the minor actions they take are resulting in some great difference in the world. Give a quarter to that homeless person on the corner. You’re really making a difference out there. That guy definitely isn’t just going to turn around and spend that money on drugs and/or alcohol that are merely contributing to his demise. It doesn’t matter how it gets spend though, because you are a great person for having “helped out”.

I highly doubt many of these “I’m saving the planet” types are going to give up their imported goods that are responsible for the vast majority of the world’s pollution. Ironically, keeping manufacturing in the U.S., or just North America in general, is going to do more to prevent pollution than practically anything else, but most of these greenies have been sold on the idea that being against globalism is “racist” or “fascist”, or some other infantile buzzword. Either choose globalism, or choose a pollution-free planet. You can’t have it both ways.

As more goods are shipped internationally, more barges are needed, and as more barges are put into use, the amount of pollution created will continue to increase exponentially. No amount of recycling you do is going to divert us from this path we are headed down. Learn to accept this, and move on.

“Going green” is about as futile a venture as one can undertake. You are but a drop in the ocean, and your impact on the planet is no more relevant.

The people who actually buy into this trend, tend to be the same people who will praise a jackass like Leonardo DiCaprio for speaking out against global warming, while ignoring the fact that he has the carbon footprint of a small city. When you praise someone for being an environmentalist, but their actions and lifestyle are the antithesis of this ideology, you don’t come across as particularly intelligent or informed. Celebrity worship tends to trump ideological consistency among slacktivists though, as the idolatry over Hollywood elites with rudimentary political views has proven time and time again.

Unfortunately, people love to be sold virtue, and are all too quick to buy.

The Paris Climate Deal™ is just another pet rock or fidget spinner. Keep buying in, until you get bored, find something else to preoccupy you, then throw it out with the other garbage.