By David Futrelle
As you may have heard, YouTube shitlord Carl Benjamin — known as Sargon of Akkad, though he’s actually from Swindon — recently made his debut as a candidate for the European Parliament running on the racist UK Independence Party (UKIP) ticket. And it went alt-great, by which I mean the opposite of great.
First “Sargon” — a genuinely terrible person who originally found internet fame as a #Gamergater — got into a bit of trouble when confronted about an old tweet of his suggesting that he “wouldn’t even rape” a certain female Parliament Member; instead of apologizing he responded to questions by calling the MP a “bitch.”
Meanwhile, freelance internet archivists have been digging up recordings of some of the terrible things he’s said over the years on Youtube, like this froth-mouthed rant blaming feminism for Elliot Rodger’s misogyny-fueled murder spree.
And this creepy defense of pedophilia “on a case by case basis.”
Oh, and Buzzfeed News reported that Mr. Akkad has been sending supporters who want to join his campaign online to a Nazi-infested Discord server.
It’s hard to imagine any of this winning over the voting public, but Sargon’s “bitch” comments are certainly playing well with the internet shitposter crowd.
On Gab, his fans are even less restrained.
And YouTube of course continues to be a cesspool. These are comments on a Sargon video defending his defense of his rape tweet and calling the press “dirty smear merchants” — a phrase many of his fans took to be a reference to Jews.
While Sargon of UKIP seems to be a big hit with the shitlords overall, ‘s still on the outs with a lot of alt-righists — at one point he started a feud of sorts with the more overtly Nazi types that involved him sending interracial gay porn to them — and so there are probably more posts out there describing him as a “cuck” than there are calling him a “chad.”
But hey, the campaign is still young, and he could well win over a portion of his neo-Nazi critics with some new unhinged rant.
Too bad for him — but good for the rest of us — that most of his online fans live outside the UK and can’t vote for him.
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@RedSparrows
They got over 12% of the vote in 2015, and 0.2% of the seats in parliament. It could reasonably be argued that they deserved a lot more, given how much of the electorate voted for them, but FPTP giveth and FPTP taketh away. I had a quick peek of some maps showing areas where people were strongly in favor of UKIP, and other maps where people were strongly against the alternate vote referendum in 2011 and there’s a good overlap. They deserved power and representation in 2015, but their own ignorance and shortsightedness kept it from them.
@rv97
A quick look at wikipedia suggests that the greens have the same number of EU seats as ukip (3), the same number of seats in the house of lords (1) and 1 MP vs ukip’s 0. Would you say that ukip have no influence in mainstream politics?
I’m with you on the pirates though; they have no influence. They also seem to be a a bunch of single-issue techbros with some obligatory old white dudes, so I don’t think they’re a great loss.
I’m glad my long comment finally went up, I’ll just link to it here for those who missed it above!
I spent a lot of time writing said comment and even more time trying to get it through, so I hope at least someone might find it worth reading and I just want to know that I’m not losing my mind for being the only one seeing this.
@Scanisaurus
Urgh, so much sympathies. What you describe there disturbs me as a Jew even more than as a woman TBH.
And yeah, IDK what things are like in Sweden but stuff like this is why I stopped watching television a while ago. Ever since Battlestar Galactica, everything seems to be a graphic rapefest, and even before that I was getting very tired of plot-token women and invincible male bodies.
Das Boot though… gods, portraying Nazis more sympathetically than Resistance leaders is special. What a disgusting show.
@Pie at least the greens have more than one seat. Also, I’ll take anyone these days in terms of opposition to Article 17 as long as they’re not corporate scum
Important video, quite related:
@Scanisaurus
UGH!
Seriously, that’s the point where fetish porn sites tell you to tone it down. Seriously, I thought Star Trek Discovery went too far when they try to redeem the cannibalistic tyrant and genocidal monster, just because she looks like the lead’s dead mentor. But this goes beyond being grim for grimness sake.
It’s a sobering thought that the fairest outcome of the 2015 general election would have been a Tory-UKIP coalition.
Although that needs taking with a pinch of salt, as if the UK had a more proportional voting system, election results would most likely be very different, as tactical voting is practised so widely in British elections. For instance, I’ve very rarely voted for my own personal first-choice candidate because I think it’s more important to get the incumbent out of office, so I vote for whoever’s polling strongest against him (it’s always been him).
In fact, I’ll also most likely be practising a form of tactical voting in the European elections, even though they’re under a more proportional system, by voting for whichever of the Liberal Democrats, Greens or Change UK ends up polling strongest in my area – since the whole election is pretty much shaping up to be Brexit referendum v.2, I’m not that fussed about party loyalty.
@Cyborgette
@TheKND
The scary part was that this series is currently going on SVT1 in Sweden, and SVT1 is a publicly funded channel meant to be public service, it’s Sweden’s oldest TV-channel and for decades, Sweden’s only channel, and as such it’s meant to be a more responsible and higher quality alternative to commercial TV. The last few decades they have taken in your typical Reality-TV fare and trendy TV-series to compete with other channels, and they have sent some rawer stuff like Game of Thrones and The Handmaid’s tale, but they have never been deliberately sending vile and offensive material for the sake of shock value, and the fact that they thought 2018 Das boot was suitable to send baffled me.
But while those I’ve described it to have agreed with me, everyone else I’ve seen online whom claim to have actually seen it seems to either sing it’s praises (even here in this forum a user said it was worth checking out) or they complained that it was ruined by political correctness! Like, I feel like Roddy Piper in They Live! , that I’m the only one who saw all the misogyny and antisemitism in that series.
The thing is that the series make the Jews shoot themselves, and they do show a Nazi gestapo officer to be evil (by having him graphically torture a woman and try to rape the heroine of course), so they can give themselves some plausible deniability by saying that “hey, we did show the gestapo was evil, and it totally wasn’t the submarine crew’s fault that some pirates had already made a woman a sex slave or starved the life-force out of the Jews when they found them!“
@Scanisaurus
I don’t see Shadowplay singing its praises in that comment. In fact, he calls it “not superb” but “worth a glance at.” If you’re going to take issue with other commenters recommending a show you dislike, at least don’t mischaracterize them.
@Kupo
I apologize if I misread his comment.
If Shadowplay is reading this, I’m sorry if I misread your statement on the show, but I want to ask, did you get to that episode I was talking about in my comments above? What’s your take on it? Do you still think it’s worth a glance at?
And I’d like to add that while I hate when movies featuring WW2 germans as protagonists glosses over the war-crimes of the Nazis, a submarine crew are one of the few groups of the german war-effort where you can safely say that most of them didn’t rape or execute civilians in the line of duty, but the series went out of it’s way to add women and Jews only to have them raped and murdered, and not even to show that the crewmen who did the raping or let the Jews kill themselves were evil Nazis, it’s just brushed over when they do it, but even then, people rail that the women who were only there to be raped or show boobs and the lesbian resistance leader depicted as a drug-addled maniac betrayed by her lover were token characters forced in by feminists and the PC mafia!
They really do blame everything bad on feminists, don’t they?
If there is just one positive side to the whole misogynistic mess, it’s that it got me the idea to coin a test to see weather a movie or series can depict women without reducing them to sex objects, rape victims or just leave them out altogether:
– No woman is raped, threatened with rape or forced to sleep with a guy to achieve her goals
– No women have any nude or topless scenes unless there is an equal amount of men showing their privates
– a female character is does something affecting the plot
I hope this, similarly to the Bechdel test, might at least start a discussion on the ubiquity of this stuff in modern TV series, and especially period piece stuff. Any idea what I should call this test?
@Scanisaurus
Round about the time IMDb were bought by Amazon they killed off all their own social features like the forums and messaging because, despite all the good content in there, the forums were toxic and unmanageable. As far I’m aware, all that’s left is the ability to comment on lists using Facebook and get help through GetSatisfaction.
So you should be fine as long as you don’t give clues that people can backtrack to your main accounts. It does sound like it’d be worth adding a review because there are people out there, like me, who liked the original and might have got around to watching it, but not any more.
@Onager
That sounds good, does that mean that no one can comment or reply to my review if I post one? If so I might consider trying to write one tomorrow.
Yeah, I hope spreading the word will keep people to avoid repeating my mistake, and hopefully bring awareness to the extreme misogyny and how messed up the sene with Jewish refugees was.
My idea with the test I mentioned in my comment above was that hopefully, people shouldn’t have to have lengthy discussions guessing weather a movie or series has nasty scenes like that beforehand, they can just ask weather the movie/series pass the test. I’ll admit it’s not a perfect idea by any means, but I thought that at least it could be a starting point?
@Scanisaurus – Yeah, that series sounds like exploitative WTF-ery. It reminds me of the time when I picked up a mystery book called Sara(h)bande, and it started off with the gruesome, sexualized murder of a 13-year-old girl who fits all these East Asian stereotypes. I stopped reading it there, even though I was looking forward to the Quebec French buddy-cop dynamic.
I also remember my one issue with an endearingly silly adventure-romance, Taming the Scotsman (not as kinky as that might sound, it’s just that Scotsmen are naturally wild, see). 99% percent of it was cheesy cheesiness; the author seemed aware of it and had fun. Sexy people had sexy sex, feuding people had feudy feuds, etc. But at one point the heroine gets threatened with rape before the guy rescues her; the whole situation gave off this icky pseudo-Darwinist “strongest man gets the woman” vibe.
On the positive side, here’s a thread on Twitter you might like: someone asked people to recommend books that were
https://twitter.com/ellle_em/status/1078381148458418177
ETA: what is with all my semicolons and adjectives today?? anyway.
epitome of incomprehensibility: Thanks for the link, if someone needs some new stuff to read, that gives a lot of ideas. (And some of the stuff mentioned here is fantastic)
The Goblin Emperor would fit that, too, I think (There is mistreadment of a child in the backstory thought)
re Scanisaurus list:
– No woman is raped, threatened with rape or forced to sleep with a guy to achieve her goals
– No women have any nude or topless scenes unless there is an equal amount of men showing their privates
– a female character is does something affecting the plot
2 is probably killing most of the shows today.
Orphan Black (ended) should fit the criteria. (I am not sure if another show I thought of doesn’t get the treaten part)
Lot of older shows like The West Wing probably have it easier to fit the criterias than todays shows.
@Who?
The West Wing had its really icky “white knight trying to “save” the escort from her job” plot in the first season, though. And sure, he didn’t manage to and the show did repeatedly point out that he was wrong, but to my mind it never really pointed out how wrong he was, because he was for some reason one of the heroes, which somehow makes it even skeevier.
@Who?
I must admit, I never quite understood why everyone raved about TGE. I enjoyed the worldbuilding, and Maia is an unusually likeable protagonist, but ultimately it just struck me as competent, rather than the must-read that I’d been led to believe. But that’s probably my fault, and I should give it a second reading.
Moggie, the thing I liked most about TGE was that there wasn’t a Big Bad for the sympathetic protagonist to defeat. Maia was up against a system, not an individual. The soft tyranny of ‘we’ve always done it this way and it mostly works’ is something most of us have encountered ourselves but rarely see in speculative fiction.
Also, as a fourth son, I was able to identify with him about that.
So I finally posted a review on IMDb, and hopefully you’ll be able to see it tomorrow if you look at the user review page for the series, look for the one titled “A horrible travesty that should never have been greenlit”, because that’s how I’d sum it up, although it is still massively disconcerting that nearly all other reviews either praise it or blame the SJW’s.
Seriously, I wish everyone, filmmakers, writers, producers, reviewers, internet edgelords, and all the rest would stop thinking that stuff with gratuitous rape is feminist, because it’s not, it’s the opposite, because 9 times out of 10 it’s not a sincere exploration of trauma, it’s fulfilling someone’s gross idea of “dark and gritty” at the expense of a huge chunk of the female audience.
Anyway, anyone have any good ideas as to what I should call my test? I got the idea to draw a short comic strip about it and I’m not sure that “Scanisaurus list” has a good ring to it, nor weather having my name or username attached to it would be a good idea… :-\
Sargon has published a video of him apologising for the “I wouldn’t even rape you” tweet.
But not apologising to the woman he tweeted it to, Jess Phillips MP.
To some woman who, apparently, represents feminism.
Yes, that’s right: ALL feminists everywhere in the world have a voice at last, and it’s her!
She rejects his apology, and he posted the video as proof that he should never apologise because no apology would ever be accepted. At least, not by the woman who he has somehow persuaded or paid to participate in the name of all.
It’s quite brilliant.
Meanwhile his chums are still defending him, and claiming that I should not condemn his justification of adults raping under-11s without considering the “context”.
Nobody will tell me what context would make that acceptable.