When a college feminist decided, one cold night in 2014, to burn her personal copy of pseudofeminist Christina Hoff Sommers’ book The War Against Boys, the internet’s antifeminists responded as if Hitler himself had risen from the grave.
“Universities bring book-burning back, one page at a time,” declared a blogger at TheRebelMedia. After an extended comparison with the infamous book burning campaigns of the literal Nazis, he declared that “[t]he burning of Hoff Sommers’ book is a striking visual synecdoche for the malaise afflicting free expression across not only North American college campuses.” In a featured article, A Voice for Men described the burning as a “disturbing” example of “misandry in academia.”
On the Men’s Rights subreddit, meanwhile, one angry dude declared that
If you’re burning a book, you’re basically admitting to being not just a bigot, but one who doesn’t even have enough confidence in the strength of their own views to believe that they can stand up for themselves without needing to silence and censor those that oppose them.
If we set aside the fact that, unlike the Nazis, who confiscated the books they burned, a person burning their own copy of a book that is readily available to others is not actually censoring anything, he’s got a point.
So it’s interesting to see how many of the Internet’s antifeminsts and Anti-Social-Justice-Warrior-Warriors are embracing a proposal from one of their own to literally censor all academics who teach stuff they don’t like.
On Change.org, professional feminism-hater Carl Benjamin, known on YouTube as Sargon of Akkad, has started a petition demanding that “UNIVERSITIES” — presumably, every single one of them — immediately “Suspend Social Justice Courses” because he thinks that “social justice” professors are up to no good.
In vague but melodramatic language Benjamin proclaims that
Social justice has become scientifically illiterate, logically unsound, deeply bigoted and openly supremacist.
He doesn’t specify exactly what kind of supremacism he’s complaining about here; presumably not white.
Nor does he ever define exactly what courses count as “social justice courses.” There aren’t any departments of Social Justice that I’m aware of. [EDIT: Oops! Turns out there are.] Does Benjamin mean a tiny handful of, say, women’s studies courses taught by radical feminists? Or does he hope (at least in his wildest dreams) to take down the humanities and social sciences as a whole?
Social justice professors are indoctrinating young people into a pseudoscientific cult behind closed doors that is doing damage to their health, education and future.
Well, technically, I guess, virtually all college courses are taught “behind closed doors,” since the doors of lecture halls generally do get closed before class begins. Technically, I’m writing this post behind closed doors, because I don’t leave the doors of my apartment wide open. (People might wander in; the cats might wander out.) I suspect that Benjamin himself wrote up his petition behind closed doors!
Benjamin goes on to declare that
[s]ocial justice … has become another ideology fit only to pave the road to Hell, so it is time to turn around and choose another path that is concerned with reason, science and improving the lives of every human.
If only some evil Social Justice English professor has indoctrinated Benjamin in the devilish art of writing without resorting to hackneyed cliches.
But that’s pretty much all there is to Benjamin’s petition. Somehow, thought, the vagueness of Benjamin’s plan hasn’t stopped 9,878 people — so far — from signing the petition.
It is, however, possible that some of the signers are a little bit confused as to what exactly they’re signing.
Indeed, the top two most-liked comments on the petition, for example, were written by people who seem to think that Benjamin’s proposal to peremptorily censor all college courses that he thinks are excessively social-justicey is, somehow, a defense of free speech?
Benjamin has posted a video in which he explains his crusade in a little more detail. It’s possible that somewhere in it he answers the question of how exactly his plan to drive all professors he doesn’t like from all the college campuses in the world is actually a crusade for free speech.
Here’s the video in question:
Oops! Wrong video. Let me try again:
Huh. I don’t think that was it either.
No, that’s clearly not it.
Ok, ok. I found the real one here.
But it’s 40 minutes long. I sampled the first 2 seconds, and that was about all I could bring myself to watch. So I guess I’ll just have to resign myself to a life of servitude under the jackboots of the Social Justice warlords. Still, that’s a far better option than actually watching a Sargon of Akkad video all the way through.
Ah, MRAs support freedom of speech by curtailing the freedom of speech of others. Why am I not surprised.
I too wonder how they’re defining social justice courses. I took a European history class in college and we covered the witch trials. Is it too anti-white and anti-Christian to talk about that injustice? Or is it okay because it happened long ago?
Was it too SJW for my professor who taught biopsych, cognitive neuroscience, and developmental psychology to oppose the Bush administration (which was current at the time) because Bush put restrictions on stem cell research? Or is that one okay because it’s pro-science?
And not to Godwin, but are professors allowed to talk about all the factors that made scapegoating Jewish really easy and led to the holocaust? You really can’t talk about WWII history without discussing this.
The profound pretentiousness of many MRAs never ceases to amuse me — “Sargon of Akkad” indeed. (It reminds me of the political pundit pseudonyms in Ender’s Game, which itself was written by a right-wing wanker).
Prince just died.
Edit: Sorry. I’m sure it’s already been mentioned in the other comment threads.
That’s not just an opinion, it’s an unscientific non-fact.
Prince just died, so I have less patience than usual for these asshats.
Hahahahaha what
Like, this is just… such poor reasoning. Verging on not even wrong. I can’t even start to address this because my internal monologue just keeps laughing.
eta: Prince? Fuck. Damnit.
Uh. What’s the point of this petition? All I see is a gob of run-of-the-mill arglebargle assertions about teh big bad ess jay dubyas that targets no one in particular, explains nothing, and proposes no specific action. Literally nothing can result from this except to say “lookit how many other shitwits agree with me that social justice sucks rawrrwargh!”
I can’t believe Prince is dead. So sad.
I’ve observed in the right, but especially in the alt-right a tendency towards what I’d call “cargo cult argumentation”.
They see an argument leveled in context and immediately assume that it was the form, and not the function and context of the argument that made it effective to the speaker.
So they go and declare skeletons “supremacist” because they’ve noted how concerned people are that they, themselves are white supremacists. There’s no context to that argument, they just think it works.
You’ll see them act the same way with logical fallacies. “You called me an idiot by virtue of how unbearably stupid the argument I’m making is, thus my argument must be right” kinda stuff. They don’t understand the function of logical fallacies, just see them as magic wands to wave in arguments.
THANK YOU. That’s a point that gets missed by even well meaning people.
People like Sargon are the cancer that Youtube and a good deal of the rest of the internet suffers from.
WAIT. WHAT!? Prince died!? Fuuuuuuucccckkkkk!!!!!
As a Minnesotan, that’s particularly affecting.
Bowie, Rickman, and Prince all in one year and the year isn’t even half over. The fuck?
And Chyna died too. Not a pro-wrestling fan so I don’t know much about her, but she was only 45. Very sad.
I shall memorialize him the only way I know how. Giving a reaction gif of him to Sargon’s foolery
Prince is dead and MRAs continue to spew their hatred. This is not a good day.
I majored in Social Justice at Social Justice University.
I just put up an open thread for Prince talk.
:C
Rest in peace, Prince. Style all over the pearly gates.
re: Sargon;
Ugh, I loathe him more than most. You can listen to Thunderf00t or Angry Atheist or whatnot and you can tell they’re douchebags, but Sargon has a pleasant voice – it’s a travesty that he uses it to propagate that sort of filth.
@WWTH I live in Nodak, and I’ve always thought his choosing to remain in his hometown – even with all of his enormous talent and opportunities – was cool and kind of awesome and rebellious.
Everyone always wants to get out of the so-called “flyover” states, but he chose to stay here.
And apparently he was a helluva basketball player, too.
In my roadie days I got to work for Prince. He was a great guy and what he didn’t know about music wasn’t worth knowing. When his band were playing we could call out any soul or R&B song, no matter how obscure. They’d all nod at each other and go straight into that song without missing a beat.
A great loss to great music. 🙁
There’s burning out of fear and quashing of ideas, then there’s symbolic burning out of “fuck you and your absurdly fallacious bullshit.”
Edit: R.I.P. Prince :'<
Scildfreja
Really? I find his voice equally annoying. And to think I didn’t think he’d ever top the level of stupidity of (Paraphrased) “you can’t hold gamergate responsible for the harassment, because it’s made up of individuals! Each individual is responsible for their own actions… Not gamergate” But I was wrong. Burning your own copy of a book as an act of expression equals the goverment taking people’s books and burning them. Brilliant!
It’s about ethics in scholarship, guys. Like how we should all strive for “objective” video game reviews to preserve ethical journalism.
See, you can talk about literature, but you can’t have classes called “Post-Colonial Literature”. That’s censoring people who don’t buy that colonialism is a thing (or at least, don’t buy that it’s such a bad thing). Much like you can only review a game based on its technical aspects (and maybe mention at the end that the female props were objectively hawt), in these classes you can talk about how many words a book has and the plot in general terms. However, any attempt to insert social justice by means of analysing historical context of the work, allegory within the work, or even acknowledging race, gender or other scary things that the characters encounter, is censorship. I mean, deconstruction is by definition Marxism and critical theory is by definition anti-white-straight-cis-male.
Therefore, literature is just meaningless stories. To imply otherwise is unethical. And since it’s just stories, there’s no point in studying it.
Checkmate.
Dammit. WWE women’s champion Chyna as well.
STOP EATING PEOPLE 2016!!!
He does actually propose an action. “Fire every teacher I don’t personally agree with because they want to censor my freeze peaches!”
It’s not a rational action, and it certainly does ring of absolute hypocrisy, but he does want something to be done.
I’ve never really been a Prince fan, so while I am sad for that, it’s out of respect for him and his fans, but Chyna hits REALLY hard for me.
She was amazing in the ring, and she was taken from us way too soon. I remember watching her as a kid and being absolutely amazed by her standing toe-to-toe with the guys. She was the only woman competitor to ever hold the Intercontinental Championship too. She’s one of the reasons I became a lifelong WWE fan, and the reason I lamented the downgrade to the “Diva’s Division” and the recent restoration of the “Women’s Division”. An absolute force to be reckoned with.
There’s literal tears in my eyes right now.
I did hear that drug overdose is speculated to be the cause, though I kind of hope that isn’t the case.
I think if we give him time I reckon he might rebuild the Akkadian empire or something in some kind of bizarre New Vegas-esque turn of events.