Return of Kings contributor “Billy Chubbs,” whose previous contributions to the wisdom of the ages include posts titled Men Should Not Help Sluts, Bangable Women Can Still Be Gross, and Unmarried Older Women Need To Go Away, has outdone himself in the awfulness department with a post this week attacking 17-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai as “A Coward And A Hypocrite.”
Apparently inspired by Chubbs’ bold move, the Sarkeesian-hating, Anton LaVey-looking far-right nitwit Davis Aurini has junped on the bandwagon with his own blog post dissing Malala.
We’ll get to him in a minute. But first, Chubbs.
It’s hardly surprising that a writer for a site that portrays women as emotionally immature, intellectually inferior, and “inherently terrible people” would have a problem with a young woman known around the world for her courageous advocacy on behalf of education for girls.
But Chubbs attempts to portray himself as a true defender of “oppressed girls in crappy countries” and an enemy to “anti-female extremists.” Yes, that’s right: a man who has described young women as “society’s mobile sperm banks” and single women over 30 as “unappealing and repulsive … hoebags” is trying to pretend that he’s better advocate for girls’ and women’s rights than Malala Yousafzai.
His evidence that Malala is a “coward and a hypocrite?” The fact that she has not returned to Pakistan since being literally shot in the face by a Taliban assassin.
The reason the Taliban shot Malala in the head was to send a message that they would attack girls who wanted to get a western-style education. …
Getting shot in the head is pretty extreme, and I could respect Malala if she took it and continued to live in Pakistan. But she ran. She gave up. The extremists won unequivocally …
Malala has done more harm than good to oppressed girls in crappy countries. She says books and education are what we need to change the world, then proved that completely untrue after she ran away when a man with a gun fired a bullet into her.
Yes, what a coward for “running away” after a guy shot her in the face, say Billy Chubbs, a dude who claim to fame in the world is writing clickbait blog posts attacking women, under what I assume is a pseudonym, on a website run by a professional pickup guru who feels resentful that he has to wipe his own ass in order to appeal to women.
Malala has been an activist for education and against the Taliban since the age of 11, when she started writing a blog for the BBC on life in the Swat district of Pakistan, then under the control of the Taliban. A tireless advocate for girls while still a girl herself, she started receiving death threats, some slipped under her door, after her identity was publicly revealed. In 2012 she was shot in the face in an assassination attempt.
And Chubbs — who lives in Canada, and who is unwilling to even post a real picture of himself on the internet — thinks she’s a coward for not returning to Pakistan — where she was shot in the face, and where bookstores won’t even stock her book because of threats from the Taliban.
And he also seems to think that she’s “lucky” for being able to move to England.
Malala was lucky that she was co-opted for an agenda and was given a great place to live in the western world, because while she is touring the globe, advocating girls rights to education, those same girls are the ones forced to continue to live in places where they can be hurt and killed for trying to attend school.
And what were the “lucky” circumstances that led to her relocation to England? Oh yeah, she was shot in the face in a country without the medical infrastructure necessary to treat the injuries she received from being shot in the face.
Chubbs also throws in some old-fashioned imperialist arrogance and racism into the mix:
While Malala was laughing, playing and enjoying the safety of receiving an education in a predominantly white country found upon Christian morals, school girls in Africa were being kidnapped. …
So yes, never fear you ladies of the 2nd and 3rd world. You, too, can brave all those bad men and receive an education: so long as there are prosperous countries founded upon and still more or less exercising European Christian morals that still exist for you to run to (and which you can afford to run off to in the first place), and that you’re willing to be a hollow mascot for the powers that be in those countries.
At one point, Chubbs actually belittles her for … reading books:
Instead of reading text books and trying to fill her head with words, Malala would have been better served to take that textbook and hold it in front of her head to try and stop the bullet.
That doesn’t even make a tiny bit of sense.
Davis Aurini, meanwhile, has weighed in with an equally ridiculous, if not quite as outrageously offensive, attack on Malala for her … alleged unoriginality.
In Aurini’s view, Malala is a mere “youngling,” and a copycat of “Civilized” Western ideas. who doesn’t deserve the Nobel Prize or the money that comes with it.
[F]or the most part, love ‘em or hate ‘em, the past recipients have at least made their mark on history. With few exceptions, they’ve all walked a dangerous path and stayed committed to their cause, and they’ve brought forth intellectual and political blossomings that were unprecedented. They’ve all been inventors.
You cannot say the same for Malala Yousafzai.
Thus far in her life, she’s been little more than a poster child for the prevailing superstitions of our times. Arguing that women should be allowed to read books is not revolutionary when you live in Britain, and while it may be brave for a girl in Pakistan to make such statements, they’re still not creative in nature; she’s merely channelling the culture of the Civilized West, repeating words that were written by others.
This from a guy whose main claim to, er, creativity consists of this “film.”
So brave, dudes. So brave.
Blockquote monster must’ve used all its energy on SittyKitty. 😛
I’ve never read any of those dudes’ books, so can’t comment there. I’m thinking of their online gasbagdouchery.
Michael
Yes. I know that stand between a child and an oncoming car/tiger/whatever feeling.
But I don’t know how she could, first, go along with her group that no one would “admit” to being her. Then in the face of an explicit threat that it was either her alone or all of them would be killed, to stand up and say “It’s me”.
That these armchair heroes can sneer and snicker that she’s cowardly is beyond despicable. It might mean that they have pitifully underdeveloped moral sense, but I feel no pity for them. I’m just sad that people like them _seem_ to exist in far greater numbers than people like Malala.
(Though we have no way of knowing that. The ones like her who are killed long before they’ve had a chance to be noticed by the world. How many of those have there been?)
I make an excellent Xmas fruitcake, from a Canadian recipe. One must really like almonds to like it. I’ve given up putting the half-brandy, half-Amaretto mix in it, so now all 1c of booze is Amaretto. Yum!
I love fruitcake, I consider it to be one of humanity’s best inventions.
And Sam Harris, pfft. Terrorist + ticking clock scenario = torture is always fine so long as it’s “us” doing it to “them”. Great philosopher there.
@Dennis, thanks for the link to the post critiquing Sam Harris. I went into the comments. Lo and behold, what I imagine (from the content of the comments and the nums) to be atheist dudebros are all in there defending Sam, along the lines of “you misrepresented what he said” and “no his arguments are more nuanced”. And then they proceed to not demonstrate the misrepresentations they allege.
Feck, if these are society’s “brights”, we’re all doomed.
When I was in college I gave Sam Harris the honorary title “Wrong About Everything.” It seems to be holding.
My mother makes fruitcake every year. Apparently it’s amazing. I’ve never cared for fruitcake because of the texture differences – I don’t do well when there is different textures in different bites of food; crunchy, soft, chewy, different flavours, MAKE UP YOUR MIND FOOD WHAT AM I EATING??? This applies to veggies on pizza and on sandwiches too.
BWAHAHHHA
Years ago I heard Harris give an interesting talk on PBS. It prompted me to buy his book. May I just say that if you pose a question and then blather on for a few hundred pages and never actually address the effing question you posed that you claimed the effing book would be about you are an asshats sir and I fart in your general direction.
I am so glad I was never tempted to buy any of the Four Horseapples’ books. I really don’t have the bookshelf space to spare for that stuff, and as for lining their pockets – erk no.
For someone who wants to bring science to bear on philosophical questions – and his book The Moral Landscape is a compelling and I think persuasive argument for how to begin in the field of ethics – Harris’ torture argument, while logically valid, is completely logically unsound. Yes, IF there is a bomb about to go off in a major city, and IF torture is an effective and swift means of extracting accurate information from a person, and IF you have the bomb-maker in custody, and IF the only way of getting the information on the bomb’s location in time is in fact to torture this individual, then it logically follows that torture is justified in that scenario. But at least one and probably two of those premises are completely without basis. People will admit to being witches under torture; it’s a piss-poor way to get to the truth. If you build the argument with the conclusion in mind, voila, your conclusion will follow. I’m all for interesting philosophical conundrums leading to counter-intuitive results, but that argument is bad philosophy and bad ethics.
I thought that way too, until Dawkins poisoned that well for me with his, frankly offensive, tweets that also were constructed incorrectly from a formal logic perspective.
Those types of philosophical conundrums seem to be magic just-so stories constructed purposely to lead to a particular conclusion and to show how Dawkins dudebros are the only true rational beings. It’s like the BS about how Hitler was vegetarian, so vegetarians aren’t nice people, or how abortion might get rid of another Mozart.
The issue is the framing of the conundrum, and rational dudebros frame things a particular way in order to lead people down a particular path. It’s not proper logic, and it’s designed to show that they’re smarter than us. Smarts don’t work that way, and it’s amazing that so many rational dudebros who sniff at the social sciences are so concerned with other people knowing just how intelligent they are when intelligence is a social science construct, psychology to be precise.
/gets off hobby horse
::gives hobby horse a nice sugar cube::
As much as I get not wanting to line the pockets of Dawkins, Harris and Hitch, Daniel Dennett is lovely.
I read something on Pharyngula the other day that suggested Dennett is part of the problem, though not as egregiously as those three windbags – now I’m racking my brain trying to remember it and find a citation!
Found it. Dennett defending Dawkins’s loathesome rape tweets.
Source
My boyfriend has the same issue. I thought he was the only one.
@theapostropherroyal
I would actually disagree that torture would be justified if it were effective. That’s a purely consequentialist argument: that the ends justify the means, and if the ends are of sufficient magnitude on the “goodness” scale, then that balances out using really despicable means to get there. I am not a believer in consequentialism – that the ends justify the means, and that good ends of sufficient magnitude can justify practically any means to get there. This is the line of reasoning that leads to human sacrifice. I can’t get behind any moral system that permits human sacrifice.
Even if torture were totally effective, I would still find it morally unacceptable, just like human sacrifice is morally unacceptable to me no matter what benefits it brings to the non-sacrificed persons.
Wat, I got a little redundant there, didn’t I?
Little bit.
Most of us are consequentialists to some degree. It is also useful in other situations, such as cost-benefit analyses which are used because there is only so much taxpayer money and so many things governments can fund.
I wouldn’t entirely toss out consequentialism.
It is definitely used in those situations, but what counts as a cost and what counts as a benefit are decisions, and they are not objective or self-evident. With the government example, the salaries that are paid to employees are generally counted as “costs.” To a business, that definitely is a cost, but the government is not a business and the decision to count costs as though it were a business is, in fact, a decision. There is no objective reason why “we paid 100 people a living wage” is in the “cost” column rather than the “benefit” one; there is reason to argue that a living wage is a public good, so the choice to put that into the “cost” column is not self-evident.
With the torture example, the cost/benefit analysis looks at “at least one person suffered harm” is a “cost” whereas “thousands of lives saved” is a “benefit.” We’re not putting “we committed a monstrous act that has no excuse and can never be forgiven” into the “cost” column. That is a decision, not an inevitability.
I’ve always thought I was the only one. I know some people who have issues with textures like pudding and yoghurt (including me), but never heard of anyone who has the same issue with different textures during different bites!
Re: The Four Horseman. They give atheism a bad name. Most white dudes give atheism a bad name. Mostly because a) they get to feel superior to those “backward religious people” (often including a healthy dose of racism in there for those “backward religious countries” as well) and b) because they’ve lived in a culture where they’ve had to argue about things like logic and reason for so long they find it IMPOSSIBLE that they might be wrong about anything about their worldviews. Plus, that racism is often used to justify their shitty beliefs about misogyny as a red herring just like Dawkin’s muslima letter was so apt to prove.
I also find it laughably ironic that they encourage the nickname given it’s a religious reference about four beings that help bring about the end of the world.
My father-in-law sent us a copy of The End of Faith, knowing that all of us are pretty negative on the subject of religious faith. I’m a pacifist who served 18 months in prison as a Vietnam War draft resister, so naturally when I opened the book randomly — it was to the part where he condemns pacifism. You can probably guess that it didn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy about Mr. Harris.
If I were president and was convinced that I could prevent a major terrorist attack ONLY by torturing someone, I’d do it. If I saw someone about to murder a child and the ONLY way I could stop it was by violently assaulting the assailant in some manner (including potentially deadly force), I’d do it. But these are extremely extreme and artificially-constructed scenarios, and the occasions where violence is commonly used in real life are far more mundane. It’s not very good thinking to argue that because some evil might be necessary in some extreme situation, it is therefore justifiable in ordinary circumstances.
One of the problems I encountered in deciding whether I was a total pacifist was how to deal with the subject of WWII. The thought of Hitler in total possession of Europe with time to develop nuclear weapons is enough to scare the shit out of anyone. So what would I have done? Saying, well, OK, he can’t live forever, things will work out someday isn’t really a viable course. Life does not seem to have been designed to produce easy answers, but more to pose difficult questions. (And that’s MY evidence for Intelligent Design ……….*]
*I had a lot of extra dots to spend on ellipses today.
That’s really it, isn’t it, GrumpyOldMan? They always come up with these neat and tidy little extreme ethical dilemmas where you have to sacrifice your previously stated morals to avert a catastrophe, but they never let you think ‘outside the box’ in offering another solution. I have, personally, never found life to be constructed like a True/False exam.
God I despise that narrative. What the hell stops a terrorist from giving false lead after false lead that eat up time until the bomb goes off? I mean seriously. Or even having several that’re intended to be the dummy, and just keep “confessing” where they are till the important one explodes?
Anyway, I hate bad thought experiments, they’re like my weak point and make me go all “PSYCHOGIST SMASH PUNY PHILOSOPHER!!!”