By David Futrelle
Racist YouTube “philosopher” and self-described Men’s Rights Activist Stefan Molyneux is saying the quiet part loud again. I guess that’s kind of his thing now.
Here are two tweets he posted last night:
The implication is pretty clear: Only white men, as a group, are smart enough to support “free speech.”
As it turns out, Stefan has rather a lot of thoughts about white males and how much better they are than everyone else.
(Dude, you realize that half of the men who died in the Civil War died fighting FOR slavery, right?)
But alas these heroic white males aren’t properly appreciated — except for their money, which of course they all earned fair and square and didn’t inherit from their parents or gain from exploiting people of color or after benefiting from better connections and educational opportunities or anything.
But Stefan isn’t fond of all white males. He worries a little that insufficiently racist white men will “rage” the entire group into slavery.
This is sort of a weird worry for Stefan, since he also thinks slavery was a pretty good deal for the slaves.
Oddly, despite his white male genius, Stefan can’t quite seem to keep track of the exact percentage of the world’s awesomeness that white guys are responsible for.
Jeez, Stefan, get it together and settle on a percentage! You’re embarrassing your race and gender.
H/T — @TakedownMRAs, who highlighted Stefan’s “free speech” tweets in a tweet of his own.
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It’s their way of extending their trademark on their intellectual properties and preventing them from entering public domain.
@Catalpa
Steamboat Willie is supposed to enter the public domain in a couple of years, barring changes to existing copyright law. Won’t that be an interesting minefield.
What Catalpa said. They’re probably also still lobbying Congress to extend copyright and trademark up to the heat death of the universe…
@Rabid Rabbit: in addition to what Catalpa said apparently the contracts most of the writers of the original scripts / songs signed means they can remake the films without paying them properly so they are cheaper than original films. Plus considered low risk.
OT but good news. Alabama took a step back from Gilead. Charges against the woman who was shot and lost her baby as a result have been dropped.
@ nequam
Well, if they use their usual IP legal team, that will be “plus 70 years”
Hello.
Hmm, American Civil War is not taught in detail here, but simple researches, like on this site, show that conscription was forbidden to persons of color until July 1862. And i doubt it was an act to ‘protect’ those persons. And after the suppression of this prohibition, those who join do it on their free will, not because of conscription.
And let us not forget about the natives who were also employed by the army.
By the way, how long Molnyeux had served in the Army, do you reckon ?
Have a nice day.
Free speech absolutists, like “centrists”, always come down on the side of the far right. You’ll never hear them defending liberals.
Whenever they say “free speech”, what they mean is “conservative white men should get unrestricted platforms to say whatever they like, and no one is allowed to boo or criticize them.”
Surely Molyneux’s extremely high-IQ followers are smart enough not to fall for the fallacy of the undistributed middle here. “Intelligent people do X” does not imply that if you do X, you’re one of the intelligent people. (It also doesn’t imply that X is a thing that should be done. Smart people were behind the Holocaust.)
And that’s before you even get into the problems with the study. As Deoridhe noted, the questions are slanted and mainly measure fear/dislike of certain groups, not support for free speech as a principle. The examples aren’t even that controversial (in 2019, few people would object to restricting the speech of gay people simply because they’re gay). If you were to add more extreme speakers and targets across the political spectrum, say a Muslim cleric who preaches hatred of America, or a radical lesbian separatist calling for violence against men, you would see support for free speech drop like a rock among those “high IQ” subjects. The study is flawed and doesn’t measure what it says it’s measuring.
Actually, they might not even pay them at all. Those contracts generally say that the screenwriters/musicians get royalties if there is a profit… which there never is because the studios have ways of making it look like even movies that are widely viewed don’t make any money.
Spinal Tap, for example, is still really popular, but the guys have only been paid something like $98 from it.
@ Rabid Rabbit
I saw that yesterday just before leaving work and my first thought was, “Whatever the over/under is on assholes whining that Ariel has to be white, I’ll take the under”
It’s going to be fascinating to watch
Yutolia:
Algebra was written by aryans, duh.
(Maybe not the aryans Molybeux thinks are aryans, but hey.)
@Catalpa, Tovius:
Some of the old Mickey Mouse newspaper comics actually did enter public domain. Back in 1989, Eternity Comics published two issues of The Uncensored Mouse which reprinted a lot of the first strips. They were careful to avoid any trademark issues by not having a picture on the front cover and by making sure ‘Mickey’ didn’t appear on the cover either.
Disney still tried to sue them into oblivion, of course, pretty much explicitly stating that it didn’t matter if they won, they were going to press the suit until Eternity Comics was bankrupt. (That was part of why Eternity ended up being bought by Malibu Comics.)
Honestly, in this case Disney was probably less concerned about copyrights than they were about the fact that many of those early newspaper strips were incredibly racist. Casual 1930s stuff like pygmies with bones through their noses. Not the sort of thing they wanted showing up in modern times.
Can anyone out there explain to me how in the world White males, living in countries with much more access to education, with allegedly “genetically higher IQs”, manage to come up with almost the entirety of ridiculous beliefs and conspiracy theories such as:
– Anti-vaccination
– Flat Earth
– White genocide
– Global warming denialism
– Pizzagate
– Crisis actors
“Master Race” indeed…
Evidence would suggest they are rather stupid.
Only an alt-right chucklehead could go to a library, see no white dudes, and blame it on everyone except white dudes. Maybe go tell your pallid brethren to get their asses in the library and study, Stefan?
”
@Yutolia the Green Hash Pronoun Boner
That’s one I’ve never heard before. Where did you find out that nugget of information?
Free speech absolutism is an intellectually lazy ideology and gets on my nerves. “Free speech”, like “freedom” in general, is sort of an abstract platonic ideal. It could never be perfectly realized because we depend on others for many freedoms but, in return, we’re also limited by other people, both physically and psychologically.
In order to believe a “free marketplace of ideas” could actually exist, you would have to assume that all speech occurs in a vacuum and never effects events in the real world, something almost no one believes. If rampant hate speech is tolerated, people will simply censor themselves to avoid it. So, then, it’s not the best ideas that come out on top but the ideas with the most abusive and belligerent proponents. (Speech can also inspire violence, which limits its victims freedom obviously.)
Then people say, well, don’t go online then, but the truth is humans are just hardwired to not wanted to be verbally abused 24/7. So because you refuse to ban a few bad actors, you end up with a cesspool that is alienating to most normal people, like 4chan.
I find free speech absolutism nearly as unbearable Randian libertarianism. Like, what a fascinating, principled ideology…in an alternate universe where humans and society operate completely differently than reality!!!
…and everything Molyneux says just makes it worse.
@Rabid Rabbit
Besides the reasons already cited, the remakes have been very profitable, and some of them have even gotten good reviews.
One hot take posted by at least two different Twitterers: Ariel can’t be black since she lives deep in the ocean, which would prevent her from getting sufficient melanin. Therefore, the remake won’t have the raw realism of the original animated musical, in which magic exists and both merpeople and anthropomorphic sea creatures can talk underwater. Mermaid science!
P.S. Usually I have no problem with people overthinking fantasy worlds and trying to apply real world logic to them–hell, I do it as much as anyone–but we all know what these people are really objecting to.
Those jackasses have never heard of orcas? Whales? Seals? There’s a ton of dark-skinned sea mammals. *(Also, melanin doesn’t work that way)
*Yes, merpeople are mammals. They have hair, mammary glands, and transverse flukes. The scales are presumably akin to those of a pangolin.
@Diego Duarte
Cause only they’ve got the brains to pierce the thick cloud of conspiracy and WORK OUT THE TROOF, obvs. Only dummies remain sheeple, dontcha know.
@ personalpest, @Dalillama
Pretty sure I’ve seen more than one person in the past make the argument that if you’re going to do “realistic” mermaids, they should be fat and have two-tone, counter-shaded skin.
@LightCastle:
Google Chinese naval exploration. You’ll find lots of information.
@Dalillama
I’m absolutely loving the controversy and salt gifts brought over by Ariel’s widows. Interestingly enough, they were complaining and comparing this to the Netflix adaptation of Death Note, which casted “L” as a Black character.
I mean, the adaptation is horrible, but for fifty thousand different reasons, of which the least is the casting of “L”. They were arguing for “respect for the original story” so I brought up the fact that Ariel dies in the original story. Then they said “but it’s adapted for children”, as if Disney didn’t have an entire tradition of displaying violent, traumatizing deaths in their films.
The bad guy in the Princess and the Frog straight up gets dragged down to Hell.
Frollo falls to his death and burns. He also has an entire solo song on how he wants to fuck Esmeralda. And not just fuck her, but rape her, because there is an explicit threat of “she will be mine or she will burn”.
These rubes will always find an “Article 5°, sub-section c), numeral 24.5” for why casting a White person in the role of a POC is okay, but the opposite is not.
@Tim Gueguen
I agree this guy’s an asshat. But conflating him with one of my favorite musicians just pains my heart.
@Yutolia
Thanks for sharing that trivia! I had not heard of that before either. Totally cool fun fact that.
@personalpest:
Heck, I consider the live action Disney version of the Jungle Book to be significantly better than the original cartoon. And for all that some of the voice actors were ‘stunt casting’, I think the people they picked did quite well for those roles. (Let’s be honest, Bill Murray was a near-perfect Baloo. And well, Scarlett Johansson was a much more menacing Kaa than Sterling Holloway. Not that it was much of a feat.)
As for black mermaids… I think I posted here a while back about a Kickstarter that went on for party supplies with black children pictured on them, and the original design involved a black mermaid. Ahh, here we are:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/craftmyoccasion/party-supplies-celebrating-children-of-color
Really, the fact that someone turned to Kickstarter to set up a small business involving party supplies because she couldn’t find any good ones for her own daughter says something.
@Moon_custafer:
True, that’s the sort of colour pattern you see on orcas and many other animals: dark on the top and light on the bottom, as better camouflage.
@Diego Duarte:
Good lord, Frollo’s villain song. If that song wasn’t just the absolute distillation of the aggrieved entitlement of a man who had almost everything he wanted, and was pissed off at someone who reminded him of the one thing he refused to admit that he actually still wanted as well.