Posted to my Fetlife Blog two hours ago. Finally, I've (sort of) caught up.
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This is not going to be a well written post, because most of it will be a repost of a comment I just made on Youtube. Take this one as a warning. There is a user there calling himself "Sargon of Akkad" who would have you think that he is a man of reason, a skeptic and a "liberal" (in the British sense) who is opposed to Hate and bigotry of all sorts. But having followed him for a while, I am left with real doubts that this is so, and no doubts that many of us would do well to stay far away from the community that has built up around him.
In the comments for a video with the title "what do far left activists want"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqN76kaTLxU
Oliver Young writes
"When are you going to get around to debunking those white nationalists and the claim that hitler was not evil?"
My response follows. I think it will tell you a little something about the Sargon of Akkad experience:
"My prediction: Sargon will never get around to doing that, because he doesn't want to.
Have you ever been in one of his live streams? I don't think there were as many Nazis on Kristallnacht as there are in one of those chats. Speaking as a Jew who was stuck in Klan country at one point at his life, the Ku Klux Klan was far more pleasant to talk with than those people in Chat and Sargon, the moderator, seemed OK with that. It got genuinely toxic yesterday in the way you'd expect - random, bigoted accusations and calls for us all to be killed. People who think like that subscribe to Sargon in large numbers, and he doesn't want to see his subscriber base shrink, I guess. He just can't seem to figure out that this is exactly what is happening, because the people who the neo-Nazis will drive off far outnumber the neo-Nazis.
The crowning moment of absurdity came as somebody, having claimed (based on no evidence) that 90% of the Nazis in chat weren't real Nazis, but were just trying to be "Edgy" (I think his name was "ron"). As I said something like "How charming. Well, instead of being bothered with that, I think I'll go out and enjoy the nice day we're having in Chicago and leave the edgelords to entertain each other", ron went on the attack, bitterly complaining about how mean I was being. To the poor Nazis. By saying "eh, this is boring, I'm going to go out and enjoy the 70 degrees and sunshine.", I guess I provoked ron (lower case lettering of his name being his) into responding to that mildly toned reply by telling me to calm down and stop being so harsh, before diving in with some personal abuse of his own. I mentioned an old synagogue of mine being firebombed and the police refusing to do anything about that domestic terrorist incident, the fact that violent anti-Semitism was very much a thing in the US, making the "joke" of pretending to be a neo-Nazi as one posts anti-Semitic remarks about as funny as telling rape jokes to a rape survivor. ron's response was to smugly ask why the edgelords should care, and to call me a "snowflake" for daring to suggest that I, a mere Jew, had as much of a right to be treated like a human being as anybody else, while doubling down on his insane position that I had horribly mistreated the poor Nazis by saying that I was going to go out for some fresh air. Which I soon did. Where, one might ask, was G-d to save the would-be Gestapo members from the horror of realizing that a Jew had gone off to sit in a park. I'd have mentioned that I was bringing some reading material, some iced mint tea, and a small picnic basket and that, worst of all, there would be lots of pretty girls in that park, but the nightmares I was inflicting on the poor, poor Nazis who would have to think about the nice day I would soon be having were bad enough already, I was sure. This is where I roll my eyes, as if I shouldn't have done so much sooner.
This was not an isolated incident. It was one that I've found typical of the crowd Karl Benjamin has chosen to build up around him, while pretending to be against racism. But one might note that he's also openly against speaking out against racism, referring to any attempt on the part of a member of a marginalized group to get any sort of support when abused as being an exercise in "identity politics." In Karl's world, it's OK to be a Jew or member of some other abused group, just as long as one politely chooses to stay invisible, hiding underground. Which would only make marginalized people even more marginalized and I think that's the idea.
If Sargon was the nice guy he sometimes pretends to be, he'd care enough about the hostile environment that the edgelords / Nazis were creating for people who had, themselves, been victims of hate crimes in the past to eject said Nazis from the chat, but he's not. He's a troll, himself, one who can be heard elsewhere talking about how trolling (the deliberate and cowardly inflicting of abuse from behind the safe anonymity of a computer screen) used to be "an art form." He is what he is, another edgelord, just one who is more subtle than most. He'll sound very reasonable in his videos for a while, which is why he can still count non-trolls and non-bigots among his subscribers, but eventually, one has to have the sense to judge him by the company he keeps and see that Anita Sarkeesian wasn't completely wrong when she called him a "garbage human being."
That should tell you what to expect from him in the future: a lot of disingenuousness and not much else. Debunk the alt-right? Not going to happen. He wouldn't do that to his friends."
Short form: Stay far away from Karl Benjamin / Sargon of Akkad and probably his whole "skeptic community" as well. Not that I think that there's anything wrong with skepticism (far from it), but what you'll get from these people won't be skepticism. What it will be is trolling of anybody who is even remotely progressive. In their struggle against the SJWs, these people have become just another kind of SJW, at least as bad as the people they set out to oppose, if not far worse. Shielding those arguing in support of the commission of genocide and the practice of racial abuse and harassment, not just from criticism, but from so much as the horror of seeing others get up and walk away from them? Even Antifa has never been this crazy. At least not yet.
The craziness might stay well hidden (for a while), but it's there.
One happy thought: If a fake man of reason like Sargon / Benjamin can make over $50,000 per year just by posting videos, how well could a real man of reason do on that same site? Maybe I've found a route out of destitution?
Note to any caretakers reading this: No, I did not "out" or "doxx" Karl Benjamin. His real name is a matter of public record. Kindly refrain from taking any actions which would in no way be warranted by the terms of service, and would leave you on record as having fought to censor a Jew after he reported the treatment he received by the apologist for a group of neo-Nazis, during a racial incident. As usual, I'll be crossposting this to Blogger, so if you delete my account in response to a meritless complaint, as you did to a number of people I know, and then try to lie about the contents of the post, neither you nor the company will end up looking very good.
Kindly rethink the habits you've developed, that force your own users to view you with so little trust that they have to post warnings like this in their posts.
