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.
Conchubar, do you have links to those quotes? I’m not surprised to hear it, but I need to see that for real to believe someone could be so heartless and evil.
@ Ami:
I completely agree. My point was that there were a lot of people openly celebrating bin Laden’s death, and another large group of people who hated bin Laden and what he did, but were still turned off by the idea of celebrating death. And then a bunch of people in between – like, who wanted to celebrate justice being done without actually celebrating the death of a human being. It was a pretty complicated question handled by the media, and the conversation between Fuck MRA & others made me think of it. I hoped we could all at least agree that it’s something to be mourned that something went terribly wrong in Ball’s life to turn him into what he was.
@ swgmigraines
Here ya go for Afor. Its under the post ‘How do you fight” #17: http://wimminz.wordpress.com/
I’ll be right back for PAN, I have to go find it.
So I’m a mole AND an ass… Can I be a lizard, too? I always wanted to be able to climb walls.
Fuck MRA, even if you don’t hate MEN plural and just hate this one MAN singular, you’re being an asshole, and your “kindling” comment was way out of line. I’m going to leave it up, since people have already responded and I don’t like censoring anyway, but if you keep that sort of shit up I may put you on moderation.
@Victoria:
That’s a really good summation of the situation actually, and honestly its a good thing we don’t necessarily have to decide upon an answer for how to handle these sorts of situations right now. I’d be in the camp of not wanting to celebrate death, but then again you can’t tell victims of abuse how to feel once the abuser is gone. Its a really frustrating thing, and I hate to accidentally step into black-or-white positions like I did..
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.
What he did–slapping her a drawing blood–constitutes child abuse. It sounds like the authorities intervened, and the courts gave him a path to reunification, which he declined to take. In his note, he equated slapping in the face and drawing blood with spanking, but there’s a difference. Non-injurious corporal punishment is legal in most states, I believe. Causing injury to a child is not.
re Thomas Ball: He did get something of a raw deal. I read his manifesto (it wasn’t, contra the MRAs a “Last Will and Testament”). He was charged under the wrong statute, and that made things worse (he was charged with DV, not child abuse; that made dealing with the problem of his child-rearing harder, because he was enjoined from contacting his wife.
He said he basically ignored everything for six-months, which is when she served him for divorce.
Apparently (though I don’t have the court records, merely the manifesto), she was upset about the split lip (and I would say rightly so) and called someone. That someone was a clinical worker of some sort, and had a duty to report it. At that point the wife called.
Then he gets lost in stats, and interpreting them etc.
Then, even though he was keeping up with the support payments, he was adjudged an increase, which he didn’t have the cash on hand for, and was facing a civil contempt charge. He equated that to a prison term (civil contempt doesn’t count as a conviction for a crime, it’s not a crime) and decided that it was all too unjust.
I suspect he was, from the actual injustices, and the perceived injustices, in a depressive cycle. That he has, in the manifesto, so many MRA tropes, makes me think they had some catalytic factor to how that depression played out.
I have seen (because I went looking for pieces on it) a lot of “calls to action” [AVM in particular comes to mind]. A large number of those calls are because this hasn’t gotten national airplay, and play it’s gotten is about how he must have been disturbed to set himself on fire, not that the “women’s court system” drove him to a justifiable protest.
@Fuck MRAs:
No, you can’t. I’m a lizard, and I have the t-shirt to prove it. 😛
Pervocracy – “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.”
No actually, lawyers and Judges also report false allegations of abuse are a common enough tactic in divorce and custody cases. False allegations are not uncommon at all.
Just look how quick you were to stereotype the whole mens movement as controlling abusers, false allegations of abuse just roll of the tongue these days.
Conchubar, some MRAs celebrate Marc Lepine; I have seen only a small handful of comments by MRAs that do.
But given the sort of stuff I talk about in the OP here, MRAs may be getting more violent-minded; I can only hope that they stick just to talking about it on the internet.
@Holly It’s the “well they started it!” playground attitude some ppl have : the idea that any assault justifies any response regardless of context cuz it’s “self defense” :
Yeah, way to spin it as the victim abusing the abuser. So repeated licking = deserved to be smacked around, hmm?
It doesn’t merit being smacked around. On the other hand, my son went through a licking phase (at about the same age as this girl), and it was cute for about 30 seconds, after which it became extremely annoying. Some sort of limit setting was probably called for, but slapping her in the face was definitely not it.
Middle of the road – Can we agree that some allegations of abuse are true? And in Ball’s case, he didn’t even contest that he’d hit a four-year-old hard enough to draw blood; he only said he was justified, because, you know, the licking. The vicious licking.
I don’t think the whole men’s movement is controlling abusers. (For one thing, a good proportion of them can’t get close enough to a woman to abuse her.) I think that someone who has been accused of abuse and is not just an MRA but a violence-advocating MRA, is more likely to be a controlling abuser.
David, I will follow whatever rules you ask me to follow because this is your blog. I have no problem with that whatsoever. I would, however, be very interested in knowing just where the line is because if my comment crossed it, then surely the vast majority of what MRAs post here does as well.
To everyone else, I just want to point out that I didn’t come on here and call any of you names, altough some certainly reacted as though I had and sent some my way. I actually like most of you. Even though I don’t post much, I do read daily. And now I’ll go back to just doing that.
@ swgmigraines
Here is the PAN quote when he was going under the moniker, Globalman. It’s the 7th post down: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mmQC3qLSqwIJ:www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php%3Fp%3D1059050853+%22would+feel+nothing+at+seeing+my+former+daughters+head+blown+clean+off.+The+world+would+be+a+better+place+for+her+not+being+in+it.%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au
There is also a website that is completely dedicated to PAN and his rants. Here it is if you are interested: http://peternolanpsychopath.blogspot.com/
Question: is middle of the road … Eoghan?
I say: Yes; he’s using that same “false allegations” line.
What do the rest of you think?
As for Fuck MRAs, I think real, not mole.
No actually, lawyers and Judges also report false allegations of abuse are a common enough tactic in divorce and custody cases. False allegations are not uncommon at all.
False allegations, from both sides, are indeed not uncommon in divorce cases. In this case, however, it looks as though there was a well-substantiated injury to the child–even Ball admitted as much.
Trigger warnings…I am a bit peeved
Why is it that the comment section here seems to be able to tolerate anger coming from MRAs, but not from from people who hate MRAs? What I said isn’t even a millionth as offensive as the stuff I see MRAs comment with here on a DAILY BASIS. Not to mention that what I said was about a specific abuser, not men in general.
Because it’s no more right when someone who agrees with us says it than not.
Because saying the only thing someone is good for is kindling… is repulsive.
I would say no offense, but it wouldn’t be honest. What you said (and said past that, about not giving a fuck about our opinions, that he deserved it, that he was a monster, that because it was targeted, not aimed at all men; which somehow excuses it), it’s not acceptable. It’s loathsome, and vile and right up there with the people being mocked.
What makes you special? Why do you get to pull the equivalent of saying, ‘the slut deserved it” when someone gets raped?
I confess, this is a bit personal for me. I’ve seen charred limbs and faces. I’ve smelled the sickening stench of diesel, flesh, hair and bone, mingled together and soaked into the surrounding space in a way that doesn’t go away.
You want to be happy he’s dead, fine. But don’t expect me to 1: like it, or 2: let you get away with it, any more than a rape apologist, or an abuse apologist. He may have been a bad person, but he was still a person.
Tom Ball admitted to slapping his 4-year old daughter in the face hard enough to split her lip. Ignoring the entirely speculative assertion that his daughter “wasn’t afraid of him,” even if this was a single, isolated incident the court mandated counseling was an appropriate response. His refusal to cooperate with the court doesn’t indicate a selfless love for his children. Minimally, it indicates a man so completely intractable that he couldn’t put the needs of his family first.
The problem with the MRM, specifically in its current format, is that the hyperbole feeds the persecution complexes of some already genuinely disturbed individuals. There’s no way to prevent this and future acts of terrorism are pretty much guaranteed. Are there any organizations helping to provide counseling services, independent of the court system, for men dealing with divorce and family court?
@Middle of the Road:
Here’s some results form the American Bar Association’s comission on domestic violence:
1. 25-50% of disputed custody cases involve domestic violence.
2. Child sexual abuse allegations in custody cases are rare (about 6%), and the majority of allegations are substantiated (2/3). Meaning that about 2% of all cases involve unsubstantiated sexual abuse claims.
3. Among false allegations, fathers are far more likely than mothers to make intentionally false accusations (21% compared to 1.3%)
More on this here: source
http://i749.photobucket.com/albums/xx134/ami_angelwings/Magyc%20Cards/EoghanHeroofManyNames.jpg
Conchubar:
That is really scary, and really sad =/
I can understand being upset with one’s spouse for initiating a divorce (to a reasonable extent), but directing such hostility toward one’s own children is messed up.
FUCK MRAs: I read what you wrote. I read that you were GLAD, he killed himself. I read that you were glad he was dead. I read that you were glad he realised all he was good for was kindling.
And I read you defend it as being not as bad as what MRAs say here on a regular basis.
And… you are wrong. It was as bad. It was as bad as anything Meller has said. Why?
Because for all of Meller’s sick and twisted fantasies, that’s all they are. He’s imagining a future where women get killed. You are actually happy that someone is dead.
That’s a difference with a big distinction. I don’t care that you don’t like my opinion. I do care that you have yours, and that it’s twisted, and sick and monstrous.
Kirby – I’m still amused that someone would use self-reported statistics on false allegations and not see the problem there.
Nobinayamu – This: The problem with the MRM, specifically in its current format, is that the hyperbole feeds the persecution complexes of some already genuinely disturbed individuals.
I agree and it scares me. There’s nothing more dangerous than a movement that says “hurting? a particular, vulnerable, easy-to-identify group in your society is to blame for your pain!”