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A little over a week ago, a Florida man in the midst of a divorce hearing, apparently upset that he would have to pay child support, reportedly snapped and brutally attacked his wife, leaving her, as one account of the incident notes, “with two black eyes, broken facial bones and split lips.” (You can see the extent of her injuries here.) He’s now being held on felony battery charges. The woman had previously tried to get a restraining order against her husband, but apparently couldn’t convince the court he was dangerous enough to warrant it.
On The Spearhead, sadly but unsurprisingly, it’s the alleged attacker, Paul Gonzalez, who is getting the sympathy. W.F. Price, the site’s head honcho, weighed in on the subject yesterday. In his mind, apparently, the demand that Gonzalez actually provide some financial support for his two children was a provocation of sorts, which led him, as a Marine veteran, to “react … as warriors sometimes do in response to provocation — violently.”
At this point, we know very few details about the case. But that didn’t stop Price from opining confidently on what he imagines are injustices perpetrated against the poor alleged attacker:
What likely happened in that courtroom is that Gonzalez, representing himself, got the shaft. … We don’t know what the child support order was, but it was probably pretty hefty (as usual), and the visitation quite meager. Add to that the fact that his wife was already living with another man, despite having so recently given birth to Mr. Gonzalez’s daughter, and the situation must have seemed absolutely upside-down to the former marine. It was upside down. His wife is obviously a little tramp who has no problem swinging from one dick to another even while raising two babies, and there she was about to get rewarded with an upgrade in lifestyle while the chump father loses his kids and wallet. That’s why Mr. Gonzalez lost it.
Price does acknowledge, in a cursory way, that “beating your wife is always a bad idea” — though he seems less bothered by the beating than by the fact that in this case the divorcing wife “gets to go on camera making herself out to be a poor, innocent little victim. I highly doubt this woman is innocent.”
The commenters to Price’s article rallied around the alleged attacker. In a comment that got three times as many upvotes as downvotes from Spearhead readers, Greyghost celebrated Gonzalez as something of a hero:
I need to send that guy a prison christmas package. He was getting screwed and struck out. To bad he never heard of the spearhead. If about 10 to 15 percent of crapped on fathers did this kind of thing with some murders mixed in there the talk about fathers would sound a lot like the talk when the subject is islam.
Piercedhead offered this take:
Gonzalez may well have been overwhelmed by the realization that being innocent of all his wife’s false accusations made little difference to this fate – he still got treated as if he was worthless. In that case, might as well match the penalty with the appropriate deed…If the courts won’t dispense justice, someone else will – it’s a law of nature.
That’s right: bashing a woman’s face in is a kind of “justice.” Naturally enough, this being The Spearhead, this comment garnered (at last count) 56 upvotes from readers, and only 2 downvotes.
Mananon, meanwhile, suggested that the alleged attack had:
something to do with a warrior’s instinct for dignified self-reliance. … Strip a man of his dignity and what else is there left?
DCM, even more bluntly, described Gonzalez as:
a brave man and a hero.There will be more and more of these incidents and it will be a long time before women are seen as responsible for them — which they are. …It will be men who can’t take it any more who will ignite change.
took it a step further, saying that:
the only bit I feel sorry about is that he did not arrange to have someone else kill her such that his chances of being caught were minimal. By doing this in the middle of the court he will be put in a cage for a long, long time. And he does not deserve to be there. HE is the VICTIM.
Every one of these quotes, with the exception of Nolan’s, garnered at least a dozen upvotes from Spearhead readers. (Nolan’s comment so far has gotten no upvotes or downvotes.)
What sort of comment on this case will get you downvoted by the Spearheaders? One like this:
Wow! Nothing justifies violence. I wonder who will care for the baby while the mother recovers. Or doesn’t that matter?
What a coward. Mad at the judge, goes after a woman.
Actually advocating murder, no sweat. Suggesting that violence is wrong and worrying about the welfare of the children, outrageous!
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>Ami, you are a lot more civil toward THASF than I would be, and you've made some good points. Good job.Back on topic: Oh, The Spearhead, home of shrill, insecure misogynists since…I dunno, forever? Looks like forever to me.
>Wow, this is very…different.THASF, I sympathize with your having problems, but that doesn't mean we and this blog are here to help you deal with them. You need to find a more appropriate venue for that and restrict your posts here to things that are actually relevant.And, lest you are unaware, there is nothing particularly smart or compelling about your philosophical views. Materialist utilitarianism just screams "most obviously intuitive views in my high school philosophy class." You're welcome to believe it to your heart's content, but you're not going to impress, or even interest, very many people.
>Jesus Fuckin' Christ, THASF, what in the fuck of shit is WRONG WITH YOU?! Shut the fuck up already. Christ, you were told twenty comments and about twenty thousand selfish, self-indulgent, victim-blaming words ago to shut up and stick to the goddamned topic, which is the fact that MRAs see beating a woman as the appropriate response to anything tht's not servile obedience. And you just want to whine about yourself. Get your own fucking blog already. I have an acquaintance like this, who, when he does something wrong, mysteriously manages to change the subject to how bad he feels and how you—the person harmed by his character flaws and arrogance—should make him feel better and not mention restitution. I suspect he has done this to many, many people, but his status as a white guy enables him to get away with it. I see something of this in MRAs ability–indeed, obsession—with making everything about them. When they hit women, they probably complain that the bitch bruised their hand, and deserves to be arrested and punished for it. Also, Blogger sucks MRA balls, because it keeps telling me it can't comply with my fucking request, then I hit the back button and find out I've been signed in and can now post a comment. Which luckily I saved. Suck my tampon, Blogger or WordPress or whatever the hell this is.
>All right, after reading this thread I'm definitely going to 4chan.
>"You're welcome to believe it to your heart's content, but you're not going to impress, or even interest, very many people."Oh, so you're saying that humans are doomed to be emotional beings rather than rational ones by virtue of our biology? That we will forever be prone to the violent, childish outbursts like the one Mr. Gonzalez had?God, I hope that's not true.As far as high school philosophy goes, you give me too much credit. I'm a home-schooled kid who basically self-studied after the tenth grade. All my philosophical musings, no matter how trite (the school of Kantianism pretty much covered everything I just discussed) are derived from simple observation and integration of facts, like the way an old-school autodidact would do it. I was never exposed to the peer pressure or socialization forces present in a public school setting, so it's only a given that my perspective would seem totally alien to someone who has.I mean, knowledge has to come from somewhere, doesn't it? If you think about it, we may have schools and universities and the like now, but what about during Aristotle's time? Or before that? Who was the first teacher, and who did they learn from? The first teacher was necessarily an autodidact, because there was nobody around to teach them.I basically read some encyclopedias, observed how people interacted with each other, and started making my case in the hopes that I could provoke an intelligent debate on the matter. I'm sorry if I have trouble expressing my views in a way that doesn't come across as distasteful or pessimistic. You see, I'm not interested in getting people to believe what I'm saying and take it as an incontrovertible fact, but the exact opposite. By making these outlandish and controversial statements, I hope to incite others to question their own beliefs. To question everything they see. To exercise the power of skepticism frequently and heartily in all things. That's all I really want.
>Jesus, and THASF just proved me right by appropriating his sister's pain to be about him.
>THASF, you're not even trying. Now you're just actively being insulting.
>"Jesus Fuckin' Christ, THASF, what in the fuck of shit is WRONG WITH YOU?! Shut the fuck up already. Christ, you were told twenty comments and about twenty thousand selfish, self-indulgent, victim-blaming words ago to shut up and stick to the goddamned topic, which is the fact that MRAs see beating a woman as the appropriate response to anything tht's not servile obedience. And you just want to whine about yourself. Get your own fucking blog already."I'm not a victim-blamer. Under my utilitarian theories, the whole concept of victimization doesn't exist; only a loss of utility for the whole. By striking his ex, that man reduced not only her utility, but his own as well. Actually, he reduced the utility of the entire species. By inviting retaliation from the authorities, some – like those sneering philistines over at the Spearhead – might argue that he victimized only himself, using profoundly perverse, mutated versions of the same rules of classical, objective morality that most people subscribe to.Do you now see why I am disgusted with the current system of ethics that our species operates on? You may not realize it, but I'm essentially on the same page that you are. I believe that "men" like Mr. Gonzalez don't DESERVE to be treated like victims."Also, Blogger sucks MRA balls, because it keeps telling me it can't comply with my fucking request, then I hit the back button and find out I've been signed in and can now post a comment. Which luckily I saved. Suck my tampon, Blogger or WordPress or whatever the hell this is."Do you have your browser set up to clear cookies or keep them? When you post with an account selected from the drop-down, it wants to go through a little gateway where it gives an error while simultaneously baking a cookie/session for the browser to use. I've never really seen any site that does this other than Blogger. Just to be sure, I copy everything I write into the clipboard before posting it.
>Oh for god's sake. You aren't shocking us. You aren't making us question our beliefs. We've encountered homeschooled people before. You aren't an alien being. I was a bookworm, aspie, and autodidact myself. Hell, I've read a lot of Iain Banks. None of this stuff is really that out there. It's not that you come off as distasteful or pessimistic. It's that you're frequently off topic, bizarrely personal, and ridiculously psuedo-intellectual. Look, I'm done here. Please go to the forums I linked above to discuss transhumanism, ethics, philosophy, and politics with people who have similar interests. You won't get the satisfaction of being the only person talking about these things while everybody else goes on about trivialities, but you will learn some things about topics that interest you, and maybe, heaven forfend, make some friends. Now get out of here. I'm going to 4chan with Captain Bathrobe…
>On the moral question: Causing harm to another human being is wrong. It is wrong to use violence to harm people. I don't get why people are condemning this woman for having a boyfriend and looking for child support at the same time. If she did not seek child support, then she'd be a vicious leech forcing her boyfriend to pay for another man's children. There's just no way for her to win, is there? And I think that, as messed up as the kids might be from the divorce, having a dad this violent and unpredictable and with such poor judgment would screw them up more in the long run.
>"Jesus, and THASF just proved me right by appropriating his sister's pain to be about him."Appropriating my sister's pain to be about me? Oh, so you're acting like she's some kind of saint, and I'm some kind of crippled, defective little monster who lived in her shadow? How typical.My sister was gifted, but she wasn't always nice. Hell, one time when I was six and banging on pots and pans with spoons for the fun of it, she got pissed at the racket I was making and threw a spoon at me. It hit me right in the face and gave me a black eye. When I was a little older, she was a super-puritan about EVERYTHING. If I picked up a video game magazine in a bookstore, she'd pluck it from my fingers and screen it for violent or sexual content before allowing me to read it. She would even sit behind me during movies and make animal-like shrieks to drown out curse words. She was very good at making animal noises. Her impression of a velociraptor from Jurassic Park was spot-on. I would sometimes joke that she reminded me of one. I don't think you have a right to say that I "appropriated my sister's pain". Her pain is my pain. We were siblings. We didn't always get along, but we were very close. Now, all that's left is the regret. Heck, I hardly even remember the good times anymore.Everywhere I look, it's just shit, shit, shit.Sheesh, the way people talk, you'd think I was insane or needed therapy or something. My counter to that would be a simple one; how is it POSSIBLE for someone to remain sane when they're surrounded by assholes on all sides? When even the little guy on the street – either through ignorance or malevolence – aids and abets wars and corporate excesses? How is it possible for someone to stay sane when they realize that George Orwell's worst nightmares are a reality in China, where men and women work their fucking fingers to the bone for pennies an hour? Where female infants are murdered because they won't pass on the family name? Where they had to install suicide nets around the company dorms at a Foxconn plant to keep workers from escaping this fucked-up world? Where political dissidents get killed and have their organs harvested and sold to westerners who need a transplant after fucking up their livers by overindulging in expensive liquor that the poor, young Chinese man or woman whose liver they're stealing would never be able to afford?All to supply America with mountains of CHEAP. PLASTIC. CRAP.How can anyone call themselves sane in an insane world? The way I see it, YOU'RE the selfish, indulgent, and pretentious ones if you can't see how fucked-up everything is!
>"Look, I'm done here. Please go to the forums I linked above to discuss transhumanism, ethics, philosophy, and politics with people who have similar interests. You won't get the satisfaction of being the only person talking about these things while everybody else goes on about trivialities, but you will learn some things about topics that interest you, and maybe, heaven forfend, make some friends."Thanks for the link, I'll check it out. Also, thanks for being polite and understanding how difficult it is to have a brain that's as fucked-up as mine is. A brain that makes me do and say self-centered crap. Trust me, I'm not someone to be envied. I'm so deep in my own fantasies about how the world works that I don't even have a fucking clue. I can't even frame a debate without putting myself and my own experiences on a pedestal, because I don't personally know about anyone else and their own traumatic experiences.Some people say I have a big head like I have a big ego or something, but my head actually is PHYSICALLY huge. 24 and a half inches in circumference. I wonder if I have hydrocephaly or something? I also have a jaw that clicks due to some kind of TMJ-like disorder. When I was younger, I had perpetual throbbing pain in my temples due to pinched nerves in my jaw. I had my wisdom teeth out recently because they were causing me pain and my jaw just wasn't big enough. Plus, I'm a massive hypochondriac who's stressed out about my mental and physical condition all the frickin' time, even if I'm probably fine and it's all in my damn fool head. I don't need enemies. I'm my own worst enemy, believe me. I just wish I had some friends, sometimes. Just someone to talk to. That's all.Been fun, guys. I'm out.
>@THASF…Dude.You're using real life examples of messed up stuff, and then concluding that the entire world just as messed up in order to make yourself look better. That's not being intelligent or enlightened, that's being insanely pessimistic. Seeing and recognizing fucked up events/subjects is one thing, crowing self-righteously about how one is above it all is another. If you see the fucked up things that occur in this planet, you could do more than play "armchair philosopher", you could ACTUALLY WORK TO PROMOTE SOME POSITIVE CAUSES. Donate to an organization, open the door for someone when they're about to walk into a store/cafe, do some volunteer work, write a letter and send it to a magazine or something.Digital Soapboxes do not a difference make. It's easy to philosophize, it's harder to take action, but you know what? The latter is rewarding, the latter is puffery.
>Opps, I meant, "The latter is rewarding, the former is puffery." Being angry and staying up late at night does that to one's grammar.
>God, you're disgusting, THASF. And you sure do want to whine about how mean people are to you when you're not even close to getting their meaning. Not to mention the fact that it's not about you. David, I'd say leave everything he's written so far up, but delete everything after this point. He refuses to listen, or change, or do anything but whine about how we just don't grasp what a truly special snowflake he really is.
>I know I said I'd quit, but I have to respond to these points:"Donate to an organization,"Ever hear of a thing called corruption? What guarantee would I have that my money wouldn't end up in the hands of an African warlord and be used to further their campaigns of rape and genocide?Check this out:Ethiopia: Donors Should Investigate Misuse of Aid MoneyAfrican corruption is a crime against humanityWhy Foreign Aid Is Hurting AfricaSee what I mean? It's stuff like this that makes me want to headdesk so hard that I turn my Unicomp-made copy of an IBM Model M into a pile of rubble."open the door for someone when they're about to walk into a store/cafe,"I always hold the door for people."do some volunteer work,"I would, but my mother wouldn't approve of such a thing. She was always going on about how "Good Samaritans are always the first ones to get killed," and other such brilliant Aesop's fables.In case you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic.Honestly, I remember a few years back when I was riding in the car with her, and I pointed out all the trash alongside the highway and said "hey, maybe we should get a few trash bags some road flares and some traffic vests and clean that up? Make things a little prettier around here."You know what she said? She said that "there are other people who do that, you don't need to put yourself out like that. You'd probably get arrested anyway". Christ almighty. If everyone thought like that, then nothing would get done!"write a letter and send it to a magazine or something."What magazine? Reader's Digest, or something? I'd probably get some smart-ass, dismissive response from the editors for expressing my views. That is, if they printed them at all, which I sincerely doubt.
>THASF, best of luck finding a better forum to talk about what you want to talk about, and getting some help for your issues. I mean that. But we're moving on here. Please, everyone, don't post or reply to off-topic stuff; I'll delete it if/when I see it, but at this point responding to it doesn't help either.
>THASF really has trouble with simple instructions, doesn't he? How many times did we tell him "Stop telling us stories about your personal life" and how many stories about his personal life did he keep piling on?Oh, so you're saying that humans are doomed to be emotional beings rather than rational ones by virtue of our biology? That we will forever be prone to the violent, childish outbursts like the one Mr. Gonzalez had?God, I hope that's not true.Does anyone have any idea where this came from? I said I wasn't impressed that he was a materialist utilitarian, and he replied with…this? He thinks that if you're not a materialist utilitarian, you're, I guess, some kind of biological-determinist nihilist? Seriously, I'm looking for any kind of clue here.It's a dead giveaway that he's spouting philosophical terminologies without understanding what he or anyone else is saying.
>derived from simple observation and integration of facts, like the way an old-school autodidact would do it. I was never exposed to the peer pressure or socialization forces present in a public school setting, so it's only a given that my perspective would seem totally alien to someone who has.No. Just no. You don't seem alien. You seem puerile and simplistic. Want to know why we don't learn like old-school autodidacts anymore? Because actual old-school autodidacts already thought of everything you'll ever come up with on your own. Same reason we have math books instead of expecting everyone to derive calculus (pun!) from first principles. Everything you've said has been picked apart ad nauseam for hundreds of years.At best, you're going to trumpet well-known ideas as though they were brilliant innovations. At worst, you're going to cling to obviously fallacious and debunked ideas because you don't know any better.
>Oh–sorry, David. I was composing this post and hadn't refreshed the page. (I won't post the last bit, where I pointed out that nothing he's said resembles Kant even a little bit. Please don't delete my previous posts, though. I spent time on those.)BTW, your blog really does eat long posts.
>By "covered", I meant Kantianism criticizedutilitarianism… ahh, never mind. Forget I said any of that crap. Back on topic, then.The Gonzalez family is just one broken family out of many. Both the MRAs and the anti-MRAs have their scopes set a little too narrow; I think we all need to look at the bigger picture, here. This problem is the result of feelings of personal entitlement that men and women equally share. Neither this man nor his ex seem to understand the concept of self-sacrifice for the sake of the greater good. That's just my humble opinion.Hell, I'm sounding like one of WH40K's Tau, aren't I? FOR THE GREATER GOOD, and all that.
>OK, that was actually on topic. Good for you.Except you're still equating what the two of them did as though it was equal. How is the woman being entitled for wanting the father to help support her children? And how does the woman not getting child support help anyone? It gives more money to someone abusive and irresponsible, and leaves her kids without support. By sheer numbers, that's three people getting hurt and only one gaining anything.And no. You sound like Hot Fuzz.
>As far as the photo goes, I find it kind of interesting that everyone's focusing on the (admittedly horrific) extent of her injuries. But what about him? Upon close inspection of his facial features, I can't help but notice how remarkably similar he looks to me. Similar eyes, similar head shape, similar jaw, similar mouth. The dead stare. The cyanosis of the lips. Similar everything. Trust me, this isn't some kind of narcissism thing, because I don't see that degree of similarity very often.I mean, look at his crooked jaw. Maybe he had temporomandibular joint-related headaches growing up? Maybe his anger-management issues are a result of pinched nerves and perpetual stress as a result of these genetic/growth defects?If true, that's pitiful. Honestly, I think a lot of folks – men and women alike – are wandering around out there with latent, undiagnosed systemic illnesses that negatively affect their quality of life and turn them into abusive, hateful fucks when they grow older. Kind of sets up an argument for the virtues of eugenics, huh? Like, maybe we shouldn't be breeding people who are going to grow up to be mentally, physically and emotionally-defective?It's still no excuse for violence.
>"Except you're still equating what the two of them did as though it was equal. How is the woman being entitled for wanting the father to help support her children? And how does the woman not getting child support help anyone? It gives more money to someone abusive and irresponsible, and leaves her kids without support. By sheer numbers, that's three people getting hurt and only one gaining anything."Well, there are multiple stages to this problem. First off, these two individuals – Paul and Catherine – decided to marry. Second, they decided to have kids. Third, one or both of them decided to divorce. Fourth, she arrived at the Broward County courthouse for a divorce hearing, and he flew off the handle and beat the crap out of her in the judge's chambers. In this, he was totally out of line; this we can all agree on.Those are the only stages we can identify. There may be more. Is it not rational to say that – during any of the aforementioned stages – both parties could have, at varying times, shown degrees of self-interest that were detrimental to their marriage and neglectful of the well-being of their children?
>I'm not saying that he shouldn't have to pay child support. He should. It's the law, and it's what's best for the kids in this circumstance.What I'm saying is that they both showed poor judgment when they chose to put their own personal comfort ahead of raising their kids properly. Though, in retrospect, who would want those kids to be raised by an abusive fuck like this? Here's hoping her new man isn't such a dick, but I'm not getting my hopes up.