Apparently Davis Aurini is capable of sometimes telling the truth.
As you may recall, the bald, semi-Nazi stain on humanity released his version of The Sarkeesian Effect (that was officially not his version of The Sarkeesian Effect) last week to something less than universal acclaim, with one critic describing the “film” as “worse than a dead squirrel in your wall.”
Ok, that was me.
Weirdly, it turns out that Aurini actually agrees with some of my criticisms. While still maintaining that his not-version of The Sarkeesian Effect is a “damn good film,” he admitted on a livestream last night that the section of his film critiquing Anita Sarkeesian’s alleged lies was “crap.”
He then suggested it would have been much better … if he’d actually watched Sarkeesian’s videos.
Yep. He spent a year — and tens of thousands of dollars of other people’s money — ostensibly making a film about Sarkeesian. But somehow he never got around to watching any of her videos.
ETHICS!
You can hear the whole segment on “Bechtloff’s Saturday Night Livestream: Secret Crisis of the Infinity Hour” on Youtube here. (The link should take you to the relevant portion of the livestrean, which starts just short of an hour and twenty minutes in.)
Here are the highlights.
In this first clip, Aurini responds to someone with a question about his attacks on Sarkeesian’s alleged dishonesty.
This clip ends a bit abruptly because Aurini was cut off by Bechtloff before finishing his sentence. Luckily, he went on to elaborate on his point. And threw in in a racial slur while he was at it, because why not?
And here he admits he didn’t bother to watch Sarkeesian’s videos.
It’s about ethics in making an entire film about someone without actually knowing anything about them.
EDITED TO ADD:
We Hunted the Mammoth has obtained this footage of Davis Aurini as a child.
H/T — Thanks to the alert reader who pointed me to the relevant section of the livestream.
This can be really tough – I’ve been in that situation before – and honestly I can’t say I know the best way to deal with it. I tried to avoid any sort of judgment, positive or negative, both about her body and her opinions of it. Basically avoid assigning any qualitative statements to weight or body size. My thinking is that women have their bodies judged all day every day for every source – at the very least I could be an exception to that.
I know I’m late to the party and Galt has been banned, but I had time to sit down and finish writing so I wanted to still say my piece:
Capitalists figured out that it incentivizing workers with the constant threat of hunger and homelessness is much cheaper than incentivizing with fair compensation. Then these workers are told they should be grateful to be allowed to serve. AKA, “We might be asking you to work yourself to the bone and maybe even risk your life for almost nothing in return, but we’re giving you a JOB.”
Think of Gina Rinehart, the richest woman in the world telling the Australian workers in her mines that they should be grateful because Africans were poor enough to accept less pay and complaining she couldn’t afford to pay them a living wage.
This is key, that this kind of capitalism of amassing obscene personal wealth essentially requires a bottomless pool of cheap, disposable labor desperate enough to do the worst jobs that need to be done for scraps. In other words, they in fact require poverty. It is advantageous business tactics that the labor force is in no position to be choosy or negotiate. When companies go overseas workers and unions are blamed for not being “competitive” with sweatshops and slave labor, basically for not going lowest-bidder on human dignity.
People don’t get ahead through working hard, they become rich by getting others to work hard for them. In Randian philosophy, the working poor are beasts of burden, the idea that economic class is an indicator of worth is like a Neo-Calvinist caste system.
The creators and providers are actually the lowest paid people in the economy, the ones who grow and harvest our food, sew the clothes on our backs and put the roofs over our heads, educate our children. In fact it seems the more we need these goods or services the more we mistreat and subjugate those who provide it.
But when workers protest their pay and working conditions and try to strike they are punished severely for disrupting the supply. We’ve recently seen how the riot police crack down on labor protests with extreme prejudice. They might be using non-lethal crowd suppression methods now, but in the past labor protests became massacres where people were mowed down and burned alive in their homes. When they tried to leave the captivity of the company towns all pretense of the voluntary nature of their work was dropped.
This is what I believe what laissez-faire capitalism and privatization will return to. They want to be the only game in town, for everyone to rely on their jobs, their products and their scrip. And when the “keepers of the peace” are on their payroll, the people will be in no position to argue.
Like I said before, Libertarians are not concerned with the consequences. If pursuing profit leads to environmental collapse, so what? If people die because they can’t afford healthcare, so what? If communities are poisoned, so what? If corruption runs rampant, so what? Interfering with the social Darwinism would be a far greater crime.
Capitalism is already rife with theft through coercion and outright violence, Libertarianism handing over control to powers that act purely in their own interest would result in widespread suffering and outright servitude.
Margaret Sanger also illustrated how reproductive control was also a key issue in the labour rights movement. Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but I believe this is actually one of the central motivations behind the far right attacks on reproductive rights and abortion. When the population decreases the cost of labour rises and individual workers increase in value. Uncontrolled reproduction makes the working populace needy, cheap and dispensable, which is right where they want us.
No- guys, guys. How are we not all still laughing at CREAT THE JIBS?
CREAT THE JIBS??!
It’s like they got so angry they forgot how to talk.
I propose renaming this website to “We CREATD THE JIBS”.
Years ago I read a great book called ‘Smoke and Mirrors’, about the creation of the ‘war on drugs’ in the 1970s. The thing I remember about it was the conscious strategy to combine ‘hard’ drugs like PCP and pot into one single word, ‘drugs’–PCP was dangerous, but rare; pot was not dangerous, but common; if you combine them both into ‘drugs’ you could say the ‘drug epidemic’ was both dangerous and common.
I think the same thing happened with ‘obesity’, formerly referred to as ‘overweight or obesity’. Cases where people are so fat they literally can’t move are life-threatening but rare, while being 10-20 pounds ‘overweight’ is not life-threatening (some studies show ‘overweight’ people are healthier than ‘normal weight’ people) but common; if we lump them together as ‘overweight and obesity’ we now have a ‘problem’ that’s both life-threatening and common.
Which, again, is not to deny that capitalist incentives have pretty much destroyed the foods we all depend on for our lives. I can’t remember the book–only heard about it on a podcast, haven’t read it–but I recently came to understand something I hadn’t put together before–we all know manufacturers are carefully crafting ‘junk’ food to be exactly what people want to taste, and we all know produce and meat are being bred for factors other than taste and nutrition…but I hadn’t put together the fact that ‘artificial’ food is becoming more and more attractive at the very same time taste and nutrition is being sucked away from ‘natural’ food. It’s all very well to think ‘we just need to put down the potato chips and eat an apple’…but the potato chips are carefully crafted to make you want to eat them, and the apple isn’t the same one you’d have got at the store 100 or even 5 years ago.
@ guest
The book you’re thinking of is The End of Overeating , by David Kessler.
Thanks Dalillama–I’m not entirely convinced that was it, as the thing that struck me about the interview I heard was not so much that artificial foods are designed and marketed to create addiction but rather that at the same time the foods that we consider better–produce and meat–are actually becoming less healthy. I was aware of both of these things already; what was striking to me was realising they were both happening at the same time, and just thinking or saying ‘well just stop eating artificial foods and eat only ‘natural’ and ‘healthy’ foods’ is no longer a sufficient answer.
Wow. So… wow.
Okay. so I may have been less professional and more personal in the last post I made; it’s mainly because this has become more or less a personal issue, for various reasons. I should have gone deeper into the various theories of macroeconomics and their application in real life and, of course, into the political ramifications of a capitalist system, but my English skills were not on my side that day. Thanks, Dalillama and katz, for expertly summarizing the major points I would have spent, let’s not kid ourselves, thirty-odd paragraphs writing.
The discussion has moved on. Let’s keep it that way, and put the whole incident behind us. I’ll just show myself out. *Incomprehensible sputtering while walking out the door*
The Atlantic had an article about how the disgusting Red Delicious apple became so ubiquitous.
Thanks for that Katz. Why would anyone want to eat something like that, when they could have some carefully crafted amazingly tasty ‘food-product’ instead? It’s a fair question.
@ guest
A tip that I like and adopted was “Never eat anything your gran wouldn’t have recognised as food”
I do find that works better if you imagine your gran did a lot of travelling in Asia and The Carribean though.
@Alan
My grandparents at Spam, Jello aspics and poorly cleaned game food. I don’t think they knew what food was.
@ pandapool
Ha, yeah. I’m probably showing my age differential a bit there too.
(Also, adding Spam to ever growing list of things I miss having gone veggie)
Well see that was the scary part–we’re aware Doritos or whatever are completely artificial, but what the person I was listening to was pointing out is that most meat and produce we get through the industrial capitalist food system (though I think here in the UK we’re a little better off, it’s easier for us to buy fresh and local) is just as manipulated. I remember in the ’80s reading case studies about tomato breeding:
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/28/137371975/how-industrial-farming-destroyed-the-tasty-tomato
It’s hard to convince ourselves, let alone anyone else, that it’s better to eat ‘food your gran would recognise’ than food she wouldn’t, if the former is not only sprayed with pesticides or pumped full of antibiotics, but also tastes bland at best and nasty at worst.
@Guest
You can basically have tomatoes (and many other types of fruit) that are uniform in size, regular in shape, and have a long shelf life or ones that are flavorful and nutrient-rich; you can’t have both at once. Thing is, you the consumer only benefits a tiny amount from the long shelf life (the other two qualities in the first list are a marketing thing) because the damn things are shipped all over hell and beyond before they get to you, and all the shelf life gets used up in transit, so they don’t last any longer in the fridge than fresh stuff from the market (assuming you’re fortunate enough to have a market nearby.)
@ guest
Tomatoes are a good example of food being produced for considerations other than taste. It’s all about shelf life and not making catering sandwiches soggy now, but they’re so bland. The best tasting ones are the squishy mis-sharpen ones I tend to find.
That’s the problem when it’s all about aesthetics. Good news for me though. Some supermarkets are selling the odd looking fruit and veg for fuck all. I was also delighted to find that horse carrots cost three quid for a big sack and are just the same as people carrots (wish horses ate biscuits). Oh, and I can report that dog muesli is exactly the same as the expensive posh stuff you get in supermarkets (it probably comes off the same production line).
ETA: Ninja’d by a llama
Well exactly–this is what I was saying about the person I was hearing on the radio a while back. I was already aware, as two separate pieces of information, that a) businesses are throwing lots of money and effort into making artificial foods nearly irresistible, and b) businesses are throwing lots of money and effort into turning things humans have eaten for millennia into unrecognisable versions of themselves, in order to make selling them more profitable…but what completely struck me for the first time is that the simplistic answer of ‘just don’t eat fake food, eat real food’ just isn’t a viable way of thinking any more. There is no real food, unless you’re lucky, rich and privileged enough to make the effort to get it. There’s no point in telling your kid ‘stop eating Doritos and eat your vegetables’ when your vegetables are almost as artificial. Why should anyone eat a bland, un-nutritious tomato, apple, or whatever, when something absolutely delicious is sitting in a bag right next to it? It’s an impossible sell.
@ guest
Yeah, it is a huge problem. If you’re lucky enough to live in the countryside or even have transport to get to a farmer’s market (and the funds to buy stuff) then it’s not so bad.
If you’re stuck on an estate with no transport and just the local mini-mart then your choices are limited.
It does seem ridiculous though that you can by a processed shepherds pie for less than the cost of the ingredients to make it yourself, notwithstanding the poor quality ingredients the factories use.
Ugh, I remember when I was in school a single bowl of those nasty, mangy apples was the only remotely naturally derived food option offered for a school of over 4,000 students. The cafeteria was a perfect example of what was described in Fast Food Nation, right down to the state prison grade burgers that could hammer a nail and were full of sharp little bone fragments. Students weren’t allowed to leave campus for food, and if they brought food from home, more often than not it was those tv-dinner style Lunchables, plastic tube yogurt or some shit like that.
Another book I highly recommend is “Last Child in the Woods”, which discusses how our culture has phased out and all but illegalized unsupervised and unstructured outdoor play for children, so now they spend all their time containerized in artificial environments and have an increasingly vague concept of nature, and consequently, what real food is and where it comes from. Since kids pretty much have to eat whatever they’re given, a lifetime of poor eating is often a choice that’s been made for them.
I really hope that the urban farming and edible schoolyard movements shift our culture away from this course.
From what I’ve read, a lot of schools don’t allow kids to walk there anymore. Even parents can’t pick them up by foot. It’s either the school bus or parents can drive them to designated drop points.
Isn’t that fucked up? I used to walk to and from school all the time with my friend /neighbor as long as the weather was good. It didn’t take any longer than the bus, we got exercise and we got to avoid the mean kids. What could possibly be the problem?
It may be a little conspiracy theory of me to think this, but I believe we don’t account for every second of kid’s lives for safety reasons. I think we’re grooming them to be compliant wage slaves.
Also, I can’t wait until the tomatoes come in. Garden tomatoes are so much better than store tomatoes.
I think my dad will grow jalapeños and cucumbers too. If so, maybe I’ll learn how to make pickles this summer.
Guest
The thing with the food is that most munipulation, not counting pestisides, can be done naturally it just takes longer. There’s nothing wrong with breeding food to last longer before it goes bad. If you have a specific question beyond shelf life I’d be glad to address it, I’m get ongoing close to my bio degree now :p.
And wwth
It’s more to do with how responsible the school is for the children after they get out, if you want schools to have less strict rules then you have to.make it so they can’t be sued if a child gets in a fight or gets kidnapped. Which in some districts they can.
Although I do need specific points, breeding for shelf life isn’t new or weird.
Breeding for shelf life isn’t bad, new or weird. But, as Dalillama points out above, breeding for shelf life is not breeding for taste or nutrition. And, as I point out above, ‘real’ food that doesn’t taste good isn’t a satisfying alternative to ‘fake’ food that does, and ‘real’ food that isn’t nutritious isn’t a meaningful alternative.
You should be careful with the term fake food. Most people use it for no gmos or anything that sounds like a chemical arguments and I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here.
The thing is even if it’s not the most tasty or nutresist those are still things being bread for, and you food is probably better for you then something eaten hundreds of years ago. But since the green revolution food and land quality has gone down. The green revolution as in the feed the whole world not the energy one.
I should back that up a bit. In the last few decades there was a push to give the world modern farming techniques to end hunger. And it kind of worked, we now produce enough food to feed everyone on earth, although it doesn’t always get there. The side effect was that foods became universally the same so they could all use the same fertilizers, and it’s only fairly recently that people have been looking into the impact that has on the envioremnt (I’m an environmental biologist so sorry if this seems off track, it all connects in my head) in doing this we opened a lot of foods to being easily killed by desieases, and yes we lost some of the tasty foods. But the foods were chosen for nutrition, even if it didn’t work. (Pssst, it didn’t)
So no I wouldn’t say the foods you eat today are nutritional, they are as nutritional as they can be and still have the exact same food grown everywhere.
And that’s bad but for different reasons.
If your looking for newer trends in agriculture though it is getting better. Golden rice is the poster child for gmos, although it also underlies the controversy with them (released before testing was really done, maybe to conduct human test, although the makers say it was to help people as soon as possible)
And in more traditional agriculture research is being done on ways to raise livestock more like pastoralist, which would in prove their quality and help the land from desertfiying.
other things being done are findin plants appropriate to an envioremnt, instead of the will grow anywhere versions that are in all out supermarkets today.
So while some of these things are troublesome a lot don’t come from a big corporation trying to make moeny, a lot of them actually come from attempts to end world hunger or carry familiar foods to where ever your moving.