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.
I believe she identified herself as a radfem earlier… that may or may not be relevant. >_>;;
Was he still abusing his child or was he already separated at this point from the kid?
@Fuck MRAs:
How about this then? I’ll reiterate what I said before, feel free to feel all the disgust you want. But like Holly keeps saying, it comes across as celebrating a person’s suicide, which is just a foul thing to do. Hell, if you had used different language, just a simple “Well, he was an evil person, and I’m glad he’s dead,” you probably wouldn’t get the same reaction. “This is not the place to be celebrating the violent deaths of one’s opponents.”
So… Are we going to turn this into a “tone” argument now? Cause I don’t think I have time for that today, those threads get EPIC
I’m staying out of this, b/c suicide and depression is something rly personal to me, but also my dad’s death (car accident, b4 nebody’s imaginations are inflamed >_> ) spared my mom and my family continuing vicious abuse that we were trapped in (esp for my mom 🙁 )… : so I dun think I have any clear feelings on this at all except lots and lots of sadness, grief and upset :
Fuck MRAs – I hope you die by drowning in rotten sewage, but slowly, so you inhale a little air and then a little more sewage and die over the course of hours from the shit rotting in your lungs.
(I don’t really. This is illustrative. All I actually hope for you is that you get the point.)
Are you willing to take this as a perfectly reasonable and acceptable expression of opposition to your beliefs, or are you just a little put off by my wording? TONE ARGUMENT!
@Fuck MRAs:
I’m desperately trying not to.. Believe me… I hate those arguments as much as you… But, to take an extreme example, there’s a difference between expressing relief that Osama Bin Laden has been shot, and holding a parade burning his image in effigy and re-enacting the sting. Calling the guy kindling smacks of the latter rather than the former.
Don’t get me wrong, I might be coming across as more hard nosed than I want to. It just smacked of an emotional, reactionary comment rather than something made in earnest. I’m personally conflicted on this issue, which is how I went from “not okay” to “a foul thing to do.” So… Ugh..
It was not okay to say. Beyond that, I don’t know.
At this time, abusing a child as this man did is not subject to the death penalty. Nor is having a mental illness. FuckMRA, you are out of line in my opinion and add my voice to those condemning your statements.
Or to phrase that with less rotting sewage: This isn’t tone. This is content.
I am not about to agree to the content of celebrating a suicide.
My “tone argument” post was actually made in jest, but hey… You got to have your little fantasy about drowning me in rotten sewage.
Which, by the way, would be justified if you knew I had abused 4 year olds.
This isn’t a pity party for me, this is just in case nebody wonders why I’m not defending one person or attacking another person, or stating how I feel about it… or etc
@Fuck MRAs I think they are concerned you are trying to put out an “extreme” opinion to get them to agree w/ it, thus proving the trolls right that ppl on this forum are [insert generalization they make here]. :
This seems as though it is a microcosm of the larger question that was circulating a few weeks ago, “Is it okay to feel happy that bin Laden is dead?”
Perhaps we can all agree that it is sad that someone became this twisted?
Okay, another tactic – Ball dying doesn’t actually mean that his ex-wife and daughter “win.” They get nothing out of this. No more child support and probably horrific emotional trauma. He wasn’t doing them a favor–he was murdering himself to get back at them.
Is that something to celebrate?
I think abusing children SHOULD be punishable by the death penalty, as should rape… Or at least, I would if I believed in the ability of the state to successfully carry out justice in these cases, which I do not.
Basically my point is that the law has nothing to do with my own personal morals. Whether something is legal or not and what the legal punishment is really has little meaning for me
Ami: About 10 years passed, I believe, between the abusive incident and Ball’s suicide. I think that the story goes: His 4-year-old daughter licked him, he slapped her several times, causing a split lip, his wife called Family Services and then called the police, the police told him he couldn’t stay in the family home, he pleaded guilty to abusing his daughter and was sentenced to complete therapy, he refused, his wife filed for divorce about 6 months after the incident, he didn’t contest, he paid child support up until about 6 months before his suicide, at which time he lost his job and was unable to pay, and then he killed himself, owing less than $3K in support. After the divorce, I believe he was allowed unsupervised visitation with his son, but his visits with his two daughters (the abuse victim and the witness) had to be supervised. I didn’t read anything about that ever changing over the 10 years.
Fuck MRA’s – There isn’t any evidence the man was a “monster”, all there is is evidence that he lost control once. He was putting the child to be and she was repeatedly licking him when he was asking her to stop. So she wasn’t afraid of him and he doing hands on parenting.
Most child abuse is carried out by mothers, most of us that have been abused as children were abused by our mothers, are they always monsters too?
Amanda Marcotte – man burns himself to death woman victimized? That was an attack on the state feminism, the letter he wrote indicated that he harbored no ill will for his wife and saw her are protecting her child from the state, he blamed the state entirely. .
Pervoracy – “Most men who are not given partial custody or visitation of their children were either abusive or completely absent. The courts do tend to err toward giving primary custody to the mother, but when a man is denied all contact with his children or has it severely limited, it’s usually because he did something to prove himself unworthy of contact”.
I believe that most of that is the females doing, and false allegations, 1 in 10 americans report being falsely accused of some form of abuse.
Pervocracy – “(I suspect, in the case of MRAs, that often that contact has less to do with loving the kids and wanting to play with and teach them, and more to do with the fact that it represents power and ownership.)”
That’s some mass false allegation of abuse there chicky.
I think that men have been remarkably docile about about fathers rights, but I don’t think that it will stay that way, it will reach a point of critical mass, three self immolation in the last year – I expect things to escalate.. expect big parties at Manboobz!
Ami, since I have specifically said that I don’t care if people agree or not, I don’t see how they cuold think that I’m trying to get them to agree. On the internet, as in real life, I am quite used to having the minority opinion on almost all issues. If I tried to get people to agree with me, I would literally have time for nothing else in this world.
“Is that something to celebrate?”
Again… Being glad that a scumbag offed himself, and celebrating, are not the same thing. The situation is sad and if me admitting that will make you feel better then there it is. IT’S FUCKING SAD.
Add me to the list of people who think that celebrating Ball’s death is wrong-headed. It was definitely wrong for him to have hit his daughter, and he deserved to have his kids taken away. But I wish he had complied with court-ordered counseling rather than killing himself. His kids are now left without a father and a traumatic memory of his suicide. Frankly, I think the most selfish, fucked-up thing he did was killing himself. He took the easy way out, and left everyone else to deal with the mess he left behind. So, no, I’m not celebrating this one.
I’m also not buying the MRAs characterization of him as a martyr. There was a way he could have gotten his kids back; he chose not to go that route. Having worked with fathers who have repeatedly jumped through hoops in order to see their kids, I really have no sympathy for the guy.
But I’m not celebrating, either.
1 in 10 americans report being falsely accused of some form of abuse.
Well, sure… 10 out of 10 abusers report being falsely accused of some form of abuse.
You don’t have to consider him a monster if you don’t want to. In my book, a adult, yes a man OR a woman, who claps a 4 year old until she has a bloody lip is a MONSTER.
Have you ever known any 4 year olds who are hit by their caretaker? Have you ever grown up with someone in that situation and seen what it does to them as an adult? Cause *I* have and let me tell you… Monster doesn’t even tell the half of it.
@Victoria when that happened, I was ok w/ ppl being happy and celebrating… not cuz *I* was… but a lot of ppl did take 9/11 rly rly hard (and I dun live in America) and it rly did traumatize many ppl… I think they were happy at what Bin Laden symbolized for them rather than thinking that it rly changed nething (at least the ones I knew who were happy).. as long as this isn’t manifesting in some sort of islamaphobia or rooted in islamaphobia (which I suppose is arguable, but it’s also kinda mind reading, as long as they dun act on it… ) .. I mean it’s like… my mom.. and my family… about stuff like the Chinese government.. or Mao… assuming he was alive… and maybe completely useless and didn’t do nething nemore.. even if he was on the run like Bin Laden… if he was killed, they’d be happy as heck… and even if *I* wuldn’t be jumping up and down I get why they would… :] I mean if they go out and start burning ppl, that’d be bad…. but I mean it’s rly noble to believe that we shouldn’t cheer nebody’s death or be happy (and I try not to, but that’s also my personality.. but then who knows what situations where I might? ) it’s also an emotional and human reaction. It’s different if it turns into more than “I’m happy a bad person is dead” tho and becomes a political ideological thing (“therefore more bad ppl need to die!” “therefore we need to go out and find and kill all ppl I dun like!” “watch out world, this is just the beginning!” ) also if the happiness is directed not at a person who did something but ppl who represent ppl you think who did (like if.. just any death of a guy is great cuz we hate men… or how ppl cheer on the deaths at L’ecole Polytechnique b/c the innocent women there represent ALL women, or represent specific women they hate, etc etc) 😐
Aw hell… This comments section is gonna get ugly..
@Middle of the Road:
You win an award for the most perverted use of a handle ever… Seriously..
“He was putting the child to be and she was repeatedly licking him when he was asking her to stop.”
Yeah, way to spin it as the victim abusing the abuser. So repeated licking = deserved to be smacked around, hmm?
“I believe that most of that is the females doing, and false allegations, 1 in 10 americans report being falsely accused of some form of abuse.” [Citation dreadfully needed]
@Fuck MRAs:
Alright, you don’t care what we think. Fine. No need to make an ass of yourself in the process.
MRAs believe Marc Lepine to be a hero. He killed a bunch of women he didn’t know because he perceived abuse from feminism. A classic example of AWALT. “Get those bitches! Because they are all the same”.
There is also an MRA called Afor, whom you all are probably familiar with, who says he no longer cares what happens to his daughters and hopes they get ‘pumped and dumped’ by PUAs until they rot in hagdom. Peter Nolan has said he wishes his daughter would have her head blown off.
These are seriously sick, sick individuals. How can people be so evil? It really is mind-boggling. I’m not just being facetious here, I really would like to know how men can really believe these things? Is there no redemption for their troubled minds and hearts?
I think there’s a difference between some Americans being happy that Bin Laden died and the ppl who were going all happy about the Japanese Earthquake as some revenge on the Japanese population for Pearl Harbour is what I’m getting at :
Kirby – Also, I can’t be the only one to think… licking him? Really? That’s the best he could come up with? I know little kids do weird stuff, but that’s one of the stranger slapping offenses I’ve heard of.
And I’m going to repeat what I said before the page break:
1 in 10 americans report being falsely accused of some form of abuse.
Coincidentally, 10 out of 10 abusers report being falsely accused of some form of abuse.