Category Archives: threats
Quotations from Chairman Alcuin
Dude, you should totally read this shit!
Like Chairman Mao, the MRA blogger Alcuin is a massive douchebag with intellectual pretensions far outstripping his limited brainpower. Also like Mao, Alcuin is perhaps best appreciated in tiny doses. Most of his posts are rambling, pretentious messes; yet many of them contain wonderful little nuggets of anti-wisdom that I feel compelled to share with you all.
Mao had his Little Red Book. Here’s part one of Alcuin’s Little Red-Faced Book. Click on the titles for the full posts.
[A] woman only thinks of her next meal, and which man can provide the best one for her. … Allow them to run organizations and society, and they will destroy everything. … Women are too emotional and self-centered to build civilization.
All Feminists are Doctor’s Daughters:
Feminism, the domain of doctor’s daughters, is for snobs. Men with dirty fingernails are haughtily ignored and dismissed. … Ironic, ain’t it, that feminists can be both perpetual victims and upper-class snobs at the same time, with the same remark and arrogant flick of the hair, as she puts her nose in the air and walks past. … Uppity cunts.
Dare to Struggle, Dare to Backlash:
Because feminism has attacked humans so viciously, injecting its hate-filled venom so deeply into both men and women, the “reaction” will not be a mere rainstorm. Deep, psychotic imbalance such as the type wrought by feminism and by liberals in general will necessitate a fucking shitstorm the likes of which we’ve hardly seen.
Constant rape accusations are ridiculous, given the sexless marriage epidemic. How many bored, asexual women stuck in a sexless marriage would love to be taken?
Modern miseduated western women fear their femininity, fear their natural beauty, and run away from it. … The hags we currently see in western countries resemble a clear-cut, eroded mountain. A contemporary western woman reminds one of the landscape created by the orcs in The Lord of the Rings, ugly and unnatural, a place of evil and sadness.
More to come; Alcuin’s idiocy is a renewable resource.
New Men’s Rights subreddit moderator thinks violence against women is just hilarious
Recently Kloo2yoo, the founder and longtime moderator of Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit, stepped down. The remaining moderator, IgnatiusLoyola, has just announced his successor, a long-time commenter in the subreddit who calls himself AnnArchist. (Despite the female-sounding name, he’s a guy.)
This is an, er, interesting choice, as AnnArchist is a misogynist asshole who thinks that violence against women is hilarious. Indeed, he’s posted in the BeatingWomen subreddit, a thoroughly vile little forum devoted to posting pictures and videos of women being violently assaulted. He says he enjoys this particular subreddit because “I have a sense of humor so I can laugh at it.” Here’s one recent post of his, and another. I don’t know exactly what was in either video, since they’ve both been removed my YouTube, the first for violating the site’s rules against hate speech, the second for its “shocking and disgusting content.” If you look through the comments on these submissions, you may also note that the r/beatingwomen regulars, in addition to being misogynist assholes, are also racist as fuck.
“Welcome AnnArchist,” the_real_misogynist wrote in response to one of these postings, “with posts like that you’ll fit right in here.”
Needless to say, AnnArchist doesn’t find violence by women against men quite so risible.
AnnArchist has also advocated murder (many, many, many times), endorsed vigilantism against a specific young woman, and suggested that false rape accusers should be stoned and/or jailed with the word “liar” tattooed on their faces.
He refers to women as “whores” and “cum dumpsters.” He’s boasted about “persuading” girls to have sex with him after they’ve said “no.” (Meanwhile, he’s said that if he woke up next to a trans woman after being drunkenly “tricked” into sex he would violently assault her.)
Oh, and there’s this bit of wisdom:
If you hyphenate your child’s last name, well its just pathetic. It means the mother was an uncompromising shrew.
I’m sure there are many other vile comments in AnnArchist’s past; these are simply the ones I uncovered with a couple of Reddit searches and by going through his most controversial comments. Indeed, as he himself acknowledges, “there is no limit to the amount of screwed up shit that I’ve posted.”
So why exactly was he picked as a moderator? Is he truly the best that r/mensrights can offer?
Apparently a lot of the r/mensrights regulars think so; most of those who’ve commented so far have praised IgnatiusLoyola’s choice, and have dismissed the critics as “trolls.” (EDITED TO ADD: The tide seems to have turned; there are now more comments up critical of AnnArchist’s promotion to mod, and posts defending Iggy’s decision aee getting some downvotes.)
EDITED TO ADD: Just wanted to highlight one of his comments on the false accuser he was targeting:
I hope she was harassed. Fuck I hope her house was firebombed. Lets be clear, I really will applaud anyone who does anything to her, be it slash her tires or slash her throat.
Here’s the full quote in context. (EDIT: AnnArchist has edited this comment to remove the violent bits. Luckily, someone got a screenshot.)
And here is a comment of his on a specific female judge:
I hope someone kills her.
This means war! Also, cats.
Cats: Also at war with men.
It’s time for another random creepy comment with dozens of upvotes from The Spearhead! This time the commenter is a fella named Rebel, envisioning an epic future battle between the ladies and the dudes.
Women are engaged in a “holy crusade” against the male gender.
If men rise up, they will face an enemy who is willing to die, rather than give an inch. Women are possessed, their brains are anything but human.
They are lost to us.
I read that the universe is trying to acquire consciousness through us humans.
Some force is holding us back in darkness and we know what that force is.
Darth Vader? The CIA? The IRS? Cats? Oh, wait, ladies. Right?
If men revolt, the ensuing fight will come to epic proportions.
What’s at stake: nothing less than civilization.
But there’s a surprise ending! If you’re a dude, and want to avoid this epic battle, you can just move south of the border:
Is there an escape?
I think there is.
It’s called South America.
At least for now.
Hmm. South America didn’t work out so well for (SPOILER ALERT!) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
But I guess Rebel knows this, because he ends with:
But if men are not prepared to fight an unnatural war, they will be reduced to slavery (at least those lucky enough to avoid elimination).
Yipes.
On a completely unrelated note, my cat has taken to drinking out of cups. Putting her whole head in them to do so. It’s the cutest damn thing.
I guess that’s not a completely unrelated note, as she’s been waging an unnatural war against me (and everyone else) since I first took her in as an overgrown kitten, barefoot and pregnant, more than a decade ago. Thankfully I am much larger than she is, otherwise I’d be dead.
More violent talk, more excuses for terrorism, this time from the inaptly named Happy Bachelors Forum
Try pointing the finger at yourself, for once.
On the ironically named Happy Bachelors forum, the regular poster who calls himself khankrumthebulgar – and whose real name is Randall Joseph Shake — has been complaining about those of us who’ve pointed out that much MRA and MGTOW rhetoric sounds all too similar to the rhetoric of Norwegian terrorist murderer Anders Breivik. In response to Hugo Schwyzer’s post on the topic at the Good Men Project, he wrote:
This smacks to me of extreme desperation. As they are trying to draw us into a response. They should hear Crickets chirping. … they are in need of traffic, controversy some off the wall unhinged response. When they receive none, it simply means we will not waste the oxygen to answer these absurd and insane accusations. No evidence exists that the MRA or MRM is in any way connected to the Norwegian gunman. IF we were there would be dozens of dead Feminists by now. There is none, hence this is a weak and pathetic attempt to incite violence and is irresponsible on their part. …
If such violence were to happen. After such outrageous accusations, it is Hugo Schwyzer and the Good Menz Project who is financially liable for stoking and promoting extremism in the hopes of generating a violent response. The blood will be on their hands not ours.
You will notice that this argument is identical to that of Angry Harry: if an extremist commits an act of terrorism or violence, don’t blame him or his extremist ideology; blame the people who pissed him off. Taken to its logical extreme, this specious argument would mean blaming the Jews for the Holocaust; after all, they’re the ones who got Hitler so worked up in the first place.
It seems to me that if you don’t want people to associate you with terrorists, you should probably stop talking like terrorists, referring casually to “dozens of dead feminists” and trying to blame the enemy in advance for any violence that comes from your side.
Also, you should probably stop making comments like the following, which were posted in response to Amanda Marcotte’s recent post on Misogyny and Terrorism. The first one, from spocksdisciple, a board moderator, fantasized about a violent backlash that would put women in general and feminists in particular in their supposed place:
[T]he backlash against feminism and it’s misandry will be both awe inspiring and terrifying at the same time.
Modern radical feminism is doomed, any woman sprouting these kinds of statements after the backlash won’t last very long, people and especially men are growing angrier everyday and all these whining losers in the feminist movement is doing to kicking a sleeping bear even harder.
Feminism is so done that women will be lucky if any man bothers to even look at them other then as a piece of meat, the days of the 19th century are going to come back where women either know their place or they’ll suffer the consequences of their actions and arrogance, big daddy gov’t isn’t going to be around to protect the rights of women to act like bitches.
And you probably shouldn’t talk about burning down buildings with people inside them, as khankrumthebulgar (that is, Randall Joseph Shake) does in this comment:
Feminists will be treated like the French Nobility was during the French Revolution. There will be a payback to these Evil Bitches. … As to the Good Mangina Project, they are our enemies. Burn the building to the ground with them in it.
Is he literally talking about burning down a building, or is he speaking metaphorically? In the wake of a tragedy that involved a man literally gunning down the children of his leftist and feminist enemies, khankrumthebulgar’s comments are indefensible either way.
Let me reiterate: these are posts from men who are angry that people have linked them in any way to the Norwegian terrorist. Are they really this lacking in self-awareness, or are they so used to talking in an environment where violent comments about feminists are so common and accepted that they don’t even realize the irony?
I don’t know, and I don’t care. I just wish that those in the MRA and MGTOW movements who are bothered by this kind of talk – and I know there are some who are – would actually step up and declare this sort of shit out of bounds. I’m not holding my breath.
Note: The Happy Bachelors forum is members-only, so the links to the forum won’t work if you’re not a member. Here are screen shots of all the forum comments mentioned in this post, in order. Click to see the full-sized image. I edited several of the comments, but indicated all removed material with ellipses. As you will see the edits did not change the meaning of what was said.
khankrumthebulgar gives his real name
khankrumthebulgar on Hugo Schwyzer (just the portion of the comment that is from him; the rest quotes Schwyzer’s post).
spocksdisciple comment
khankrumthebulgar’s “burn the building” comment
Angry Harry: Violence is justified, but don’t blame us for it.
Anyone who has spent much time at all on MRA message boards knows that they tend to be littered with vague and ominous “predictions” of an inevitable violent backlash of men driven to fury by our supposed feminist overlords; some of these predictions are delivered with such obvious relish that they seem little more than justifications in advance for future murderous rampages on the part of people not too far distant in their ideology from Anders Breivik.
Of course, most of those making such predictions-cum-threats don’t want to actually face any culpability when their bullshit gets real. Fear not, MRA prognosticators, for one prominent British MRA has come up with what he sees as a brilliant way for MRAs to avoid getting implicated in future terrorists attacks. According to longtime MRA blogger Angry Harry we shouldn’t blame violence on the beliefs of right-wing terrorists – we should instead blame it on the people they’re mad at.
Angry Harry uses this bit of sophistry to explain away any culpability the right seems to have in the Norway massacre:
The recent massacre by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway is being portrayed by the left-wing media (such as the BBC) as being motivated by extreme right-wing groups – the idea, as ever, being to demonise and, hence, to intimidate, as much as possible, anybody who does not support their malicious self-serving agenda.
But if you look more closely at the evidence, it is quite clear that, if anything, it was the various machinations and rhetoric engaged in by the deceitful LEFT that infuriated this man. …
Quite simply, it is the Left, not the Right, who are the more to blame for this incident.
Ingenious. Of course, this logic only really works if you agree with the extremist ideology of the terrorist or murderer in question. Let’s apply Angry Harry’s approach to a historical example that also involved extremism and murder on a large scale:
Hitler hated Jews. Hitler killed Jews. Therefore, according to Angry Harry’s logic, we should blame the Jews for getting him so mad in the first place.
Is that unfair? Given that Breivik is a mass murderer with many ideas strikingly similar to those of Hitler, I think not. The logic is the same, whatever the body count.
Apparently Harry thinks his bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand will absolve MRAs when, not if, the violence comes:
MRAs need to get to grips with this type of situation because it won’t be long before they are being blamed for something or other – perhaps a family court judge being murdered.
Why might this be a particularly sensitive issue for Harry? Perhaps because in another posting of his, he offered a justification for doing just that — murdering family court justices and those involved in enforcing their decisions.
In a post with the blunt title “Why Violence Is Often Justified,” Harry put it this way:
[A]nybody who takes away a man’s children and/or his home deserves little sympathy if they suffer significant retribution.
I suppose that for some men, arguing their case in court is a reasonable option, but for many men – particularly the less intelligent, the less wealthy, the less articulate and/or the less able they are to deal with officialdom – such an option is going to get them nowhere. And so, in my view, violence is not only understandable and predictable, but also morally quite justifiable.
To put it bluntly: If someone is taking away your home and your children then I think that you are quite justified in behaving violently towards them.
In his recent posting on Breivik, Harry offered an obligatory comment suggesting that, if course, he wasn’t actually justifying the Norwegian’s actions – oh, no! – even though the logic of his argument seems designed to do just that. Then he went on to make some predictions about what the future holds for his leftist and feminist enemies:
I think that it is fairly obvious to my most excellent readers that the war against the Left is hotting up. …
In fact, what I can never seem to understand is why it is taking so long for people – particularly for men – to rise up against the Left, given its appalling attitude and behaviour over the past two decades.
In combination with the feminists, the leftists have done their very best – with much success over here in Europe – to break up our countries, our cultures and our families, while at the same time heaping hatred upon hatred on to their very own people!
I just cannot understand how they have gotten away with this for so long.
You cannot go round continuing to display rigid intolerance and horrendous injustice against millions of men in your very own country and not expect some kind of violent backlash from them.
And matters are definitely going to get much worse.
He ends with a weasel-worded half-endorsement of this “violent backlash.”
The war against the Left will just continue escalating and, at some stage, with any luck, the leftists and the feminists will be defeated without too much carnage.
Well, that’s reassuring. Harry doesn’t want there to be “too much carnage.”
Which naturally leads to the question: just what does Harry regard as the right amount of carnage?
I hope we never have to find out.
MRA Peter Nolan on Anders Breivik: “In different times … he would be called a hero.”
The work of a "hero?"
Some in the manosphere have been quick to label mass murderer Anders Breivik a “madman,” trying their best to pretend that his noxious misogynist ideology bears no resemblance to their own. Others, while endorsing at least some of his ideas, have distanced themselves from his actions.
As for MRA loose cannon Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c), well, I’ll just let him explain himself. In a comment on The Spearhead, which naturally earned him multiple upvotes from the assembled mob, the man with the strangely punctuated name offered this take [LINK FIXED] on the killer:
Anders Breivik sees himself as a soldier who is fighting for a worthy cause. That cause being his country. Women and leftists then make him out to be “insane” and are looking for “who is to blame”. Well they might start looking in the mirror. The most pervasive element of western civilization today is its hatred of men and all things male. There is a particularly strong hatred of fathers and husbands. I know. I used to be a father and a husband. I have never experienced hatred in my life as vehement as by women in divorce.
And then the justifications began:
It is only natural and normal that some men decide to take matters into their own hands at all the hatred spewed at them and their marginalization. Men often see that some things are worth fighting for. Men often then take action to fight for what they believe in.
Anders Breivik is not crazy. He’s as rational as the next man. He sees that his country is being destroyed. He sees that the people responsible for that destruction are the left of politics. And he would be correct. He took action to stop what he believes is the destruction of his country.
Followed by a smug told-you-so:
I have been telling women for three years now that hatred of men in general and fathers in particular is going to see men killing a lot of women and children. Well? We just saw 76.
Of course, when Nolan refers to “telling women” that angry men will erupt in violence, what he means is “offering guys on The Spearhead specific tips on how exactly to kill innocent people.”
I’m not going to repost the vile suggestions he set forth in a now notorious Spearhead comment some months back, but I will note that they included handy tips on how to efficiently kill police officers, as well as specific advice on the best ways to take out large numbers of people in “malls … girls schools, police stations, guvment buildings. Full of women and manginas.” He ended the comment with a not-terribly-convincing attempt at plausible deniability:
Do any of you here realise just how easy it is to ANY of these things? I am not recommending them or even condining them. But if a man got into the frame of mind of Sodini and was actually SMART about it. There are PLENTY of ways he could attack women and manginas and their cop protectors with NO CHANCE AT ALL OF BEING CAUGHT as long as he kept his mouth shut.
Naturally, this comment got dozens of upvotes from the Spearhead regulars.
In a followup comment on The Spearhead last night, Nolan mocked another commenter for offering words of sympathy to the “innocent victims.” That last phrase seemed to send him into a fury:
Those who were killed were not “innocent victims” in the main. Anders Breivik is as sane as the next man. …
This was an act of war and he considers himself a soldier. In different times, as in WW II, he would be called a hero.
The people he killed were the children of those who had betrayed him and his fellow norwegians. I would put forward the opinion that the political leaders are responsible for the war on men and the destruction of the families of men. What could be more “an eye for an eye” than to kill the children of those who were so willing to destroy mens families and destroy the homeland of men?
In killing children of those who are betraying men? He is sending a very clear message.
“You may think you are protected by your police and your security…..but we can find your children…and you can not protect them except by locking them into a secure area.”
He then went on to make what I think can only be called a veiled threat towards Predident Obama’s daughters; I won’t repeat it here.
Then back to the “innocent children” remark:
These “innocent victims” of whom you speak are the children of those who are criminals. And since Anders Breivik could not get to the REAL criminals he went after the children. Is that such a bad idea? Are they not legitimate targets if the primary targets can not be reached?
This also received multiple upvotes from The Spearhead crowd, and a much smaller number of downvotes. [UPDATE: The post has now started attracting downvotes, but the upvotes still outnumber them considerably.]
Yes, it is truly strange that anyone could possibly associate the MRM with violence in any way.
Breaking News: Men’s Rights mod on Reddit is kind of a dick
So, funny story.
Earlier today, some guy on the Men’s Rights subreddit made a not-so-vaguely threatening remark about me. I sent the mod a message about it, and, well, this was his response:
Yeah. Pretty sure that’s not exactly the way Reddit wants its mods to behave.
Two atheists get in an elevator
So here’s a hilarious atheist joke for you all:
Two atheists at a conference get into an elevator at 4 AM. The dude atheist, apropos of nothing, invites the chick atheist to go to his room with him. The chick atheist, who’s never even spoken to the dude before, is creeped out by this. (She says no.) She mentions the incident in a YouTube video. A shitstorm erupts in the atheist-o-sphere because, like, how could she possibly call an atheist dude a creep and aren’t women treated worse in Islamist Theocracies?
Then Richard Dawkins says,
Dear Muslima
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .
And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.
Richard
In a followup comment, Dawkins tops that bit of hilarity with this:
Rebecca’s feeling that the man’s proposition was ‘creepy’ was her own interpretation of his behaviour, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum. But he does me no physical damage and I simply grin and bear it until either I or he gets out of the elevator. It would be different if he physically attacked me.
Damn. That joke didn’t turn out to be really very hilarious at all. Maybe I told it wrong?
In any case, as you might already know (or have gathered), this whole thing actually happened over the past weekend. The atheist chick in question is Rebecca Watson, a popular blogger who calls herself Skepchick. The conference in question was the Center for Inquiry’s Student Leadership Conference. The part of Richard Dawkins was played by, well, Richard Dawkins. (You can find both of his comments quoted here.)
The incident has been hashed and rehashed endlessly in the atheist-o-sphere (and even out of it), but I think it deserves a tiny bit more re-rehashing. Mainly because it illustrates that some really creepy, backwards attitudes can lurk deep in the hearts of dudes who think of themselves as enlightened, rational dudes fighting the evils of superstition and, yes, religious misogyny.
The strangest thing about the whole incident is how supremely mild Watson’s comments on the creepy elevator dude were. Here is literally all she said about him, in passing, in her video (transcribed here):
So I walk to the elevator, and a man got on the elevator with me and said, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?’
Um, just a word to wise here, guys, uh, don’t do that. You know, I don’t really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4:00 am, in a hotel elevator, with you, just you, and–don’t invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You would think that most guys would be well aware that accosting a woman you’ve never met before in an elevator at 4 AM is, you know, kind of a no-no. But, no, Watson’s comments suddenly became an attack on male sexuality and men in general. One critic put up a video lambasting Watson, ending it with the question:
What effect do you think it has on men to be constantly told how sexist and destructive they are?
Never mind that she didn’t, you know, actually do that at all. Nor did she even remotely suggest, despite Dawkins’ weird screed, that creepy dudes on elevators were somehow equivalent to genital mutilation or the general denial of women’s rights in Islamist theocracies. She merely suggested that guys might want to think twice before hitting on women who are alone with them in an elevator at four in the morning. Pointing out the creepy behavior of one particular dude is not the same as calling all men creepy.
Now, the atheist movement tends to be a bit of a sausagefest, pervaded by some fairly backwards notions about women. (Prominent atheist pontificator Christopher Hitchens, you may recall, seems to sincerely believe that women just aren’t funny. Not that he’s exactly a barrel of monkeys himself.) But some of the most vociferous critics of Watson have been other atheist women – including the one I quoted above.
Watson responded to this in the first of several posts she wrote about the whole weird controversy:
I hear a lot of misogyny from skeptics and atheists, but when ancient anti-woman rhetoric like the above is repeated verbatim by a young woman online, it validates that misogyny in a way that goes above and beyond the validation those men get from one another. It also negatively affects the women who are nervous about being in similar situations. Some of them have been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted, and some just don’t want to be put in that position. And they read these posts and watch these videos and they think, “If something were to happen to me and these women won’t stand up for me, who will?”
In a followup post, she noted:
When I started this site, I didn’t call myself a feminist. I had a hazy idea that feminism was a good thing, but it was something that other people worried about, not me. I was living in a time and culture that had transcended the need for feminism, because in my world we were all rational atheists who had thrown off our religious indoctrination so that I could freely make rape jokes without fear of hurting someone who had been raped.
And then I would make a comment about how there could really be more women in the community, and the responses from my fellow skeptics and atheists ranged from “No, they’re not logical like us,” to “Yes, so we can fuck them!” That seemed weird.
Watson began hearing from other women in the skeptic/atheist community who’d met far too many of that second sort of male atheist.
They told me about how they were hit on constantly and it drove them away. I didn’t fully get it at the time, because I didn’t mind getting hit on. But I acknowledged their right to feel that way and I started suggesting to the men that maybe they relax a little and not try to get in the pants of every woman who walks through the door.
And then, as her blog garnered more attention, she faced a virtual invasion of creepy dudes being creepy:
I’ve had more and more messages from men who tell me what they’d like to do to me, sexually. More and more men touching me without permission at conferences. More and more threats of rape from those who don’t agree with me, even from those who consider themselves skeptics and atheists. More and more people telling me to shut up and go back to talking about Bigfoot and other topics that really matter.
She didn’t shut up.
So here we are today. I am a feminist, because skeptics and atheists made me one. Every time I mention, however delicately, a possible issue of misogyny or objectification in our community, the response I get shows me that the problem is much worse than I thought, and so I grow angrier. I knew that eventually I would reach a sort of feminist singularity where I would explode and in my place would rise some kind of Captain Planet-type superhero but for feminists. I believe that day has nearly arrived.
Go read the rest of her post. Despite the creepy dudes and the misogyny and Richard Fucking Dawkins’ patronizing little screed – which led Watson to a moment of despair much like that of virtually every movie hero(ine) at the end of act two in the story arc – Watson ends it fairly hopeful. It’s kind of inspiring, really.
Amanda Marcotte on the Thomas Ball suicide, and MRA haters
Amanda Marcotte, feminist blogger and Friend of Man Boobz, has been taking a lot of shit from MRAs – and I mean a LOT of shit – for a comment she made here on the Thomas Ball suicide.
As you may already know, Ball burned himself to death outside a New Hampshire courthouse. In a lengthy manifesto he wrote shortly before killing himself, he portrayed his suicide as a protest against a corrupt family court system, and went on to argue that MRAs should quite literally assemble some Molotov cocktails and “start burning down police stations and courthouses.” (You can read the whole manifesto here.) Despite his calls for violence many MRAs have hailed him as an MRA martyr.
Marcotte, in her comment here, suggested that there might have been other, more personal reasons for his suicide – namely, the desire to hurt his ex-wife:
I’ll point out that setting yourself on fire is an extremely effective tool if your goal is to make your ex-wife’s life a living hell, and if your anger at losing control over her overwhelms all other desires. Which is common enough with abusers, who will ruin their own lives and their own shit and turn their children against them in an effort to hurt the woman they’ve fixated on.
One MR blogger declared this comment “pure feminist evil”; a conservative blogger compared Marcotte to the Beast of Babylon. Still other MRAs resorted to assorted variations on the c-word.
Marcotte has now responded to this, er, “criticism” with an excellent post on Pandagon. As she points out, correctly,
suicide and threats of suicide are common tactics used by abusers to hurt their victims. Abusers dramatically self-destruct all the time in their desperation to control and hurt the objects of their obsession. There was just recently a big story about this, in fact: Jason Valdez of Utah, who had a long criminal record that included domestic violence, held a woman hostage in a hotel room for 16 hours and kept updates about the situation on Facebook. He eventually committed suicide.
The notion that suicide can be a hostile, aggressive act designed to hurt other people is hardly a controversial one, whether the person committing suicide is male or female. Threats of suicide are often used to manipulate other people; suicide itself can be an act of revenge.
Marcotte goes on:
Apparently, I’m supposed to pretend that suicide isn’t a disruptive, selfish act in many cases (especially when the suicide victim commits it in a public and destructive way), and that people who do it, while yes victims of their own mental health problems, are also thinking that they’re going to make everyone pay for not indulging them. In fact, not only is this true in Ball’s case, but he spelled it out in his suicide note. The “make the bastards suffer” theme of his note is the reason that wingnuts are supporting him.
But you don’t have to take her word for it. Read Ball’s entire manifesto, to the end, and ask yourself if this man is an appropriate “martyr” for any political movement.
Arms and the Men’s Rights Movement
Democracy is not a First-Person Shooter
Good news, ladies and manginas: Apparently some MRAs don’t think it’s time to go out and start shooting people. At least not quite yet.
Some background: In recent days numerous MRAs have taken up the cause of a man named Thomas Ball – who burned himself to death outside a courthouse in Keane, New Hampshire in a protest against what he saw as unfair treatment in family court. Ferdinand Bardamu of In Male Fide has declared him “a martyr for the cause of men’s rights, a casualty of feminism’s stripping one half of the population of their humanity.”
Before killing himself, Ball wrote a long manifesto outlining his grievances and suggesting that the time had come for men “to start burning down police stations and courthouses,” describing the inhabitants of such buildings as “[c]ollaborators who are no different than the Vichy of France or the Quislings of Norway during the Second World War … So burn them out. “ (He offered specific advice on how best to do this, including tips on how to select the proper bottles to use for Molotov cocktails.)
All this has inspired some in the MRA to start talking ominously about violence. On The Spearhead, W.F. Price has responded to this talk with a piece suggesting that the time isn’t quite right for the MRAs of the world to take up armed struggle. Not just yet, anyway. As he puts it:
It is never a good idea to pick up a gun and start shooting to address some vaguely defined injustice — that is savagery. Before the American Revolution, for example, patriots took pains to spell out a long list of grievances that justified rebellion. …
We have to make our own lists, air our grievances, and give the state the opportunity to redress them. … Before anyone resorts to the same methods the state uses against us, we must put every reasonable effort into working with the law and the political system we have. Because this effort is still in its infancy, any calls for armed resistance are entirely premature and counterproductive, and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Obviously, the flip side of this argument for delay is a justification for killing people if these “grievances” aren’t dealt with in the way that those in the MRA would like. Price’s reference to the American Revolution is an interesting one, because of course the central issue of that struggle was, you know, taxation without representation. The colonists couldn’t vote out the king if they didn’t like his policies. In case anyone has forgotten: we actually do have the vote now, which was kind of the whole point in the first place.
Of course, many of Price’s readers are a bit more impatient than he is. In a comment that drew (last I checked) more than 40 upvotes and only two dissenting downvote, Taqman took issue with Price’s call to delay the armed struggle:
Tell that to men who are facing imminent imprisonment for failure to pay child support.
They don’t have the luxury of time and can’t wait a couple of decades for the manginas of the world to wake up and decide that a gentlemanly form of armed resistance is now acceptable.
The ironically named Firepower, meanwhile, took a little swipe at Ball’s own actions, but didn’t challenge his advice for the rest of the men of the world:
What IS crazy is having to point out that setting YOURSELF on fire is a ridiculous way to “win” anything.
Set your enemies on fire. To even have to remind this questions the long term chances of victory for such a pathetic lot.
Jean Valjean suggested that political action was pointless — due to all those damned women who vote:
No amount of “stoic logic” will make politicians see our point of view.
Politicians are in the business of getting re-elected rather than the business of good governance. So long as women are the majority there will only be tyranny of the majority.
Peter-Andrew:Nolan(c) — you knew we were getting to him, right? — expressed his profound disappointment that more Spearheaders weren’t willing to embrace a violent solution:
Gee you guys are whimps and tiptoe around the ‘use of force’ like freaking ballet dancers. Are you so scared to speak about this when it is CLEAR the guvment LOVES using force against you and lots of other people too?
And he made the argument personal, explicitly denouncing, by name, the judge he claimed had “criminally abused” him with his rulings:
Judge [name redacted’s] life is now in my hands. He lives by my consent and my consent alone. …
And, like Ball, he declared judges to be essentially treasonous:
These judges pretended to be your servants. They are evil, evil people who deserve the kind of treatment reserved for those who commit treason.
There is more to Nolan’s comment(s) than that, but to get into it would require going down the rabbit-hole into his particular brand of crackpottery, which seems to involve him setting up his own courts to try judges he doesn’t like. (I frankly don’t understand his belief system and don’t care to.)
Now, it should be noted that a few Spearheaders actually objected to Nolan’s violent talk. But the last I checked, the comment I just quoted had more upvotes than downvotes. W.F. Price took more flak for suggesting men wait a little longer before taking up arms than Nolan did for, well, you saw what he wrote. That tells you a lot about The Spearhead, I think.
EDIT: Added quote from Ferdinand Bardamu; removed similar quote from The Spearhead.
