Boys’ night out
Oh gee, mark your calendars. “Sargon of Akkad” aka Carl Benjamin is doing a star appearance at Conway Hall (of all places) next month.
Sargon of Akkad presents:
“This Week in Stupid Live” – An Evening with Sargon of Akkad
Friday 15th December @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
A snip at £10.
Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin is a popular independent Vlogger with over 700,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Carl critiques ideological arguments and his channel is dedicated to rational arguments backed by evidence. Sometimes a polemicist, at other times soft spoken, Sargon of Akkad has created a considerable amount of content regarding skeptical thought. The evening will be spent discussing politics, philosophy and the endless idiocy of the extremes of each political wing.
That’s not his real claim to fame though, is it. His real claim to fame is bullying women on social media, especially Twitter.
In May 2016, in response to Labour Party politician Jess Phillips‘ statement that rape threats are commonplace for her, Benjamin said “I wouldn’t even rape you” in a YouTube video and repeated this on Twitter.[2][5][8][13] Benjamin declined to apologise for the comments.[13]
Twitter suspended him.
Conway Hall isn’t just a building, it isn’t just a generic hall that hosts anything and everything.
The Conway Hall Ethical Society, formerly the South Place Ethical Society, based in London at Conway Hall, is thought to be the oldest surviving freethought organisation in the world, and is the only remaining ethical society in the United Kingdom. It now advocates secular humanism and is a member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union.
Secular humanism. Ethical society. Not a good fit for aggressively rude men who bully women.
Conway Hall must not have been paying attention.
Again, depressing but totally expected.
So, his making an occasional comment you find offensive overrides the thousands of hours of truth he’s spoken about a variety of topics, does it?
Disappointing.
Rob @ 2 (who is a new commenter, signing in with a self-proclaimed fake email address, not to be confused with regular commenter Rob) asks an interesting question. If someone spends thousands of hours saying true things, does that render any “offensive” (aka misogynist, bullying, harassing, abusive, etc) comments harmless, or if not harmless then worth the price?
No, it doesn’t. Here’s why: we can get people saying true things without misogyny, bullying, harassment, abuse.
Also, frankly, anyone can put in a lot of hours saying true things. It’s not that difficult or special. Not all true things are significant or interesting or worth saying, let alone worth £10 and two hours sitting in a hall to listen to. I don’t think Carl Benjamin is so wise or insightful or interesting that he’s worth sitting down to watch in a hall, let alone ignoring his misogynist abusive tweet habit.
Nice try Ophelia but you just strawmaned that question. The question was “So, his making an occasional comment you find offensive overrides the thousands of hours of truth he’s spoken about a variety of topics, does it?” NOT “If someone spends thousands of hours saying true things, does that render any “offensive” comments harmless, or if not harmless then worth the price?” which is essentially the opposite of the original question asked.
You can try to be as smug as you want while arguing your own little strawman but you have proven nothing.
Aw hi “Ian” – you’re “Rob” too, aren’t you.
You’re confused. Analysing a question is not “strawmanning” it. We can all see what the original wording of your question was, and I’m allowed to use my own wording to clarify the question.
“his making an occasional comment you find offensive overrides the thousands of hours of truth he’s spoken about a variety of topics, does it?”=he has spoken thousands of hours of truth, so you should ignore or excuse or justify or otherwise refrain from objecting to an occasional abusive comment.
I change your “comment you find offensive” to “abusive comment” because of course I disagree that it’s just a matter of eccentric individuals “finding” comments offensive.
This has been the standard defense from the abusers all along – oh it’s just jokes, it’s just bants, it’s just awesome super-rational provocation designed to get those crazy feminists to shut up.
So no, I’m not going to take your dismissive “an occasional comment you find offensive” as holy writ.
Your super cute thinking I’m Rob… You just can’t believe that more than one person has this line of thinking… And yes it is a strawman. I’ll explain because you obviously can’t on your own.
Rob is asking how you can deny all the truthful things someone says because occasionally they say things you may find deeply offensive, and rightfully so because he is trolling you. But you instead decide to argue that Rob is saying that because Sargon has said countless truthful things, that renders the the offensive comments harmless.Again this is a strawman because you are changing his question to fit your narrative.
Oh no, I know lots of people have this line of thinking, but they don’t all turn up here for the first time within hours of each other.
Your re-wording of what “Rob” said is far from precise. “his making an occasional comment you find offensive overrides the thousands of hours of truth he’s spoken” is not the same as “asking how you can deny all the truthful things someone says because occasionally they say things you may find deeply offensive.” “Override” does not translate to “deny.” I take the point of “Rob”‘s question to be that the thousands of hours of truth make the abusive comments trivial in comparison. It’s not strawmanning to say that; it’s not a distortion of what “Rob” said.
It always raises my hackles when polemical argument is referred to as “the truth.” Argument has its place — I’m rather fond of it, myself — but when you start confusing it with objective facts, you’re heading down a dangerous road.
And that goes triple when it’s someone like Carl Benjamin. He’s a YouTube personality, not a thinker.
Wow.. Someone is incapable of explaining, but it ain’t Ophelia.
If I may be permitted to thrown in my two cents (if it’s worth that much). I would say that, from what I’ve seen, it is more than “occasional comments that you find offensive”. This seems to be a major theme with him, not just occasional comments. And he is burnishing it with the polish of what he thinks is gold (scientific “fact”), but it is really just pyrite (his own opinion dressed up to look like scientific “fact” supported by culling convenient little bits from whatever scientific study he can find that says what he agrees with).
Based on that analysis of how he establishes his scientific “fact”, I think that does in fact call his whole work into perspective, because it gives us a glimpse of how he develops his skeptical worldview. And that is not skepticism, that is a buffet form of skepticism where he picks and chooses what he likes to support positions he already holds.
And while I don’t dismiss the entire body of a person’s work based on a single issue worldview that I find offensive (for instance, dismiss all Darwin’s work because he was sexist and racist, albeit abolitionist), some things aren’t necessary to buy into. Darwin did something unique and changed the way science operated; Sargon is not doing anything anyone else has not done. And many of those people have lots of followers, as well, who don’t follow them because they spend a lot of time dishing out crap to women.
In short, I think “Rob” is the one strawmanning, since he has stated an argument in an unbelievably simplistic way – occasional offensive comments vs. thousands of hours of truth – and then is burning it down (or thinks he is).
Ophelia, thanks for so promptly differentiating me from “Rob”. I have to say, the instant I read their comment in the RSS feed my first thought was ‘disclaimer’.
Ian – if that is your real name – when accusing someone of being smug and straw manning, you really need to be having some alone time in front of a mirror.
In any case, from what I’ve seen of Carl Benjamin’s work, it’s a shallow mash-up of disconnected bits pulled together in a way that looks like a coherent piece of work, but isn’t. As the Rational community has grown, it has gone from having a high proportion of deep, rigorous and intellectual thinkers – people who asked hard questions and who accepted hard answers – to having a high proportion of self-promotors who ask questions that are actually just rhetorical devices and who propose answers that simply fit with their pre-conceived notion of the world. It’s actually intellectually sloppy, uninteresting and, yes, offensive more often than not. Offensive not least because of the abuse of rationality, enquiry and scientific method used to select and justify the supposed answer or position proposed.
In my opinion, Benjamin not only has a high output of that sort, but he crosses the line from offensive speech to abusive speech so often as to disqualify him from any consideration as a serious thinker and commentator. He’s just a very naughty boy who has the other lads behind the bike shed sniggering.
But of course, Rob. I’m not having people being confused that way! I commented right after approving neo-Rob’s comment, so there was little or no time for the confusion to take hold.
Hey “Rob/Ian”
They wouldn’t slap a health warning on a bakery that had sold thousands of turnovers just because one of them was full of shit would they?
So much this. It’s now “cool” to be in the freethought community, and thumb your nose at the religious, but the level of thought and rigor that goes into it often leaves a lot to be desired. I often refer people to Robert Ingersoll and Bertrand Russell, not to mention Voltaire and Hume, because they were actually thinkers.
Also, there seems to be a high percentage of people who really did become atheists just because “they didn’t want to have any rules” and felt that somehow being an atheist automatically leaves you free to be an asshole. I’ve never identified as a humanist, but I am starting to veer that direction (though I would probably call myself more of an Eco-Humanist; I refuse to think that humans are some sort of gloriously special species that deserves all the goodies to themselves. Since most humanists I know also feel that way, I can feel comfortable around them).
@ 7 Ian
Dude, seriously – you’re out of your depth. This isn’t Opheilia’s first time at the rodeo, she’s a veteran. It’s like watching a cat toy with a mouse. She’s written books on skepticism. You’re a fanboy of a reactionary simple-minded YouTube show-pony. Grow up, jettison the idiotic “cultural marxism” fantasy, and learn something about how social progress always attracts attacks by thoughtless suggestible numpties invested in the status quo.