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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.

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Yaz
Yaz
13 years ago

‘An ad hominem (Latin: “to the man”), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attempt to link the truth of a claim to a negative characteristic or belief of the person advocating it.’

wikipedia

‘An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim’
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html

So there you are. Insulting a moron, like yourself, is not ad hominem. Using that insult to discredit an argument is.

This is a fallacy = Everything Bucky says is wrong because he’s a moron, is ad hominem.

NOT a fallacy = Bucky’s argument is wrong because of the following reasons [insert reasons], what a moron he is.

Double Fail again. Be proud.

Schala
Schala
13 years ago

@kirby

My non-identifying as feminist and my supporting of men’s rights is often, very often on feminist blogs, seen as basically “my being an asshole who wants to rollback women’s rights”.

So yeah, if you interpret everyone who doesn’t agree with everything feminist as an extreme misogynist, you won’t ever find moderates – you define them out of existence.

Pecunium
13 years ago

Bucky-boy… I wasn’t arguing about Amanda Marcotte’s opinions. I was arguing with your contention that you had proven what they are. The difference is subtle, but important.

If you want me to believe you, then support your claims. Contrary to what you think, telling people that there is lots to find which supports you, isn’t argument.

As to your bigotry, it wasn’t an attempt at argument. It wasn’t an attempt at argument… any more than your declarations of what your bigotries are was argument. It is, howevever, enjoyable to point out that you have declared cognitive biases. Those aren’t argument, but they are relevant to the honesty of your behavior. You have declared you think less of women’s aruments; not because of their merit, but because of the speaker.

That’s bigotry, self-admitted, and relevant to any argument you claim to make about the validity of an argument made by a woman. I am not trying to shame you (you flatter yourself, the self-declared intellectual blinkering you have inflicted on yourself is only of concern to me in direct relation to how many people might be persuaded by your words. I don’t think anything is going to shame you. Your sense of victimization is your problem)

Pointing out that bigotry isn’t shaming, it’s what you aren’t doing with your accusations about Marcotte: showing what you have publically said.

I guess we both agree that men have done pretty much everything. Great!

A misrepresentation, ans a lie. What Yaz said was that women were prevented from doing things they were capable of. You have said men, “did everything but have babies” because having babies was all women were capable of doing.

Not only is this provably false from historically obvious figures (Queen Elisabeth,Melisande, Molly Pitcher), but the actual research data on stone-age societies in the modern world (the best examples being in Highland New Guinea) show that men, in practical terms, lazed about and killed each other, while women did most of the food generation. Cultural transmission was about 50/50. Had there been nothing but, “babies” from the women, the men would have starved, been living without roofs, etc.

Ad you really need to look up some simple terms, Argument, ad hominem, shame… they don’t mean what you think they mean.

re Women owning 65 percent of the wealth in the US… I’ve seen that figure numerious times in various articles, etc. Then you should have no problem citing it.

Pretty simple… you type {a =href(url)} “text” {/a}. Just replace the curly brackets with angle brackets. So simple a child can do it, so it ought not be a problem for a man of your amazing intellectual gifts. I mean really, citations… I see women doing them all the time, so I am sure you must be able to.

And since you are trying to convince women… whom we know are a little dense; and who are being foolishly resistant to the truth (just becuase they don’t like you) a little smackdown with actual facts would be just the thing to put them in their place.

Come on, you can do it.

Pecunium
13 years ago

duncan mcleod: yaz i read the original sources, i wouldnt have posted them otherwise, so you read the Marylin French novel, and understand that the quotation you cited (and in such a way as to make it seem it was said more than once) is that of a fictional person in a work of fiction.

What did you think of the story by the way?

Or, perhaps you didn’t read the actual source; but rather some online link to a story about the novel, which attributed a fictional character’s opinions as those of the author, much as people try to say Heinlein thought blacks were white-hating cannibals because of the plot points in “Farham’s Freehold” or that Elizabeth Bear believes Christopher Marlowe sold his soul to the devil because of the Promethean Age books.

speedlines
speedlines
13 years ago

Hey, did you know William Shakespeare advocated killing all lawyers?

ithiliana
13 years ago

Molly: Oh, sorry, my mistake about Woolf and PLath: it wasn’t their own writing that stated that, but some of the readers/fans/academics writing about them. They are very much canonical writers (within the Anglo American feminist canon), and in the classes I had and the scholarship I read, the biographical approaches to their writing and the writing itself was read in ways that….over time began to seem disturbing. I’m not see that as much anymore, although that may be a function of me doing other scholarship!

I love Woolf’s work, and admire, cautiously, Plath’s — it was how some feminist literary critics were reading them that disturbed me.

Pecunium
13 years ago

Bucky-boy: Time to go back to school.

Logical Fallacies (see how easy that was?)

An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically, this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made (or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting)

Because it’s a category, there are several types of ad hominem fallacy. I’d list them all, but I don’t think you will actually read them.

That, btw, wasn’t an ad hominem, it was a rhetorical device… insult. Insult isn’t wrong, per se, though it’s methodological use is one which requires care. duncan mcleod engaged in it, with ahis parenthetical aside that Amanda Marcotte was doing more ham than good to feminism; which he didn’t support, and which his later comments that disagreeing with him = discounting him for disagreeing, rather than being wrong; which calls his entire line of argument into question as coming from someone who isn’t arguing from an honest position, but rather one which has received truths, much as with you and the discounting of women’s arguments, because they are from women – which is a different fallacy.

But you can go to the link, and look up the various forms of ad hominem. Perhaps you will even decide to learn what they mean, rather than just throw them around as a way to avoid arguing and merely stop debate.

ithiliana
13 years ago

Voip: If you want to know what the future will look like, imagine a teenager..slamming the bedroom door..FOREVER

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH!

*wipes tears of laughter from eyes*

**Hands you the Orwellian Parody Reference Internets Award**

ithiliana
13 years ago

Buck Swamp: Women could always own property in the US

Bullshit. Black women and men could not own property while they were property. American Indians and property rights has a long complicated history which you can google if you wish. Women from the various immigrant groups were not treated the same. White women could not in fact always own property–and it probably differed from state to state which is why the whole state’s rights things if fucking crap. Women could not even KEEP their own ages legally some places until it changed: from wikipedia: In New York, Indiana, Maine, Missouri, and Ohio, women’s property rights had expanded to allow married women to keep their own wages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_United_States

Property rights

During the 19th century women in the United States and Britain began to challenge laws that denied them the right to their property once they married. Under the common law doctrine of coverture husbands gained control of their wives’ real estate and wages. Beginning in the 1840s, state legislatures in the United States[45] and the British Parliament[46] began passing statutes that protected women’s property from their husbands and their husbands’ creditors. These laws were known as the Married Women’s Property Acts.[47] Courts in the 19th-century United States also continued to require privy examinations of married women who sold their property. A privy examination was a practice in which a married woman who wished to sell her property had to be separately examined by a judge or justice of the peace outside of the presence of her husband and asked if her husband was pressuring her into signing the document.[48]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_rights#Property_rights

So what you say is total fucking bullshit in this case, and in other cases as well. You know nothing, and are too arrogant to admit you know nothing, that you’ve just been sucking up propaganda.

Plymouth
Plymouth
13 years ago

his seems to be a “your either a feminist or a mysoginst” style of page

I don’t identify as a feminist and I don’t believe I’ve been accused of being a misogynist. At least not here. Sometime in the history of forever it may have happened once or twice 🙂 (also, sometime in the history of me I may have actually been one. When I first figured out that gender doesn’t work for me I had a LOT of hate and I threw it around rather haphazardly. Teenagers can be like that. I’ve mellowed.)

kirbywarp
kirbywarp
13 years ago

@Schala:

“My non-identifying as feminist and my supporting of men’s rights is often, very often on feminist blogs, seen as basically “my being an asshole who wants to rollback women’s rights”.”

This I do not believe, honestly. If you show up to a blog and say “I’m an MRA,” the worst you should get is a “that’s nice.” If, on the otherhand, you show up to a conversation about women and rape and say “I think we’re all missing the real issue here, what about the huge quantity of guys that are raped every day?” then yeah, you’re gonna be labeled as an asshole. If you aren’t talking to a particularly out-there person, in my experience you will be called out for your actions, not your identification.

Also, for this particular blog, Plymouth is a good example of how “not feminist” does not equal “misogynist” or “asshole.”

Buck Swamp
Buck Swamp
13 years ago

Whew! There sure is a lot of hatred on this site. OK, I give up. People with vaginas are really, really smart! Vaginas are magical, too. And men suck! OK, I get it.

Yaz
Yaz
13 years ago

‘Whew! There sure is a lot of hatred on this site. OK, I give up. People with vaginas are really, really smart! Vaginas are magical, too. And men suck! OK, I get it.’ Bucky McSwampthing

You get called out for being oh-so-wrong and rather than admit it and move on, you engage sarcasm overdrive, accuse everyone of hate, and flounce? How very cute.

speedlines
speedlines
13 years ago

It’s only cute when NWOSub does it. Everybody else is a poor imitation of the original.

hellkell
hellkell
13 years ago

Too bad he can’t stick the flounce. He’ll be back.

Bee
Bee
13 years ago

Toysoldier:

Marcotte does not state that Ball might have or appeared to or perhaps or seemingly — opinion indicators — killed himself over something

Well, except that she does. Listen, I’ve already quoted Amanda’s words to you twice. You seem set on mischaracterizing them and misreading her. What part of “suggested” and “might” do you think don’t indicate opinion?

The rest of what you have to say seems to rest on the theory that you, alone, out of everyone here (Amanda included, although she’s actually not here) have the luxury of giving meaning to words. “Family” can’t include Ball’s daughter or his children’s mother. Ball’s narrative, in which he sets out a story that starts with his daughter licking him, lingers on his ex-wife’s willfully ignorant role in his arrest, and concludes with the malicious actions of his ex-wife’s lawyer bringing him to the brink — and contains not one word about how his actions may have played a part in the resulting outcome — can’t be read as placing blame on anyone. Fine. If the rules we’re using here say that Toysoldier is the only person who is allowed construe a set of words to mean anything, obviously I can’t add anything to that. I think that your reading is wrong, obviously — laughably so in places — but whatevs. Clearly, “family” cannot be read to include someone’s daughter or her mom.

Magical Laura
13 years ago

“If demonstrating that men invented almost everything useful and women almost nothing does not constitute proof of male superiority, I doubt if there is anything I could say to convince you.”

You never ‘demonstrated’ anything, you just said it. Why are we talking only about inventions? Why do you think it was illegal for a woman to patent anything? Which things are men better at than women, according to which evidence?

I admit it, I am too magical to think myself crippled from birth by my vag. Prove I am.

“I’ve seen that figure numerious times in various article”

Yeah, well I read a book once that said men are all rapists so I guess it must be true!* Link to your source,

*I don’t think all men are rapists. For the slow.

Pecunium
13 years ago

Bucky-boy: Whew! There sure is a lot of hatred on this site.

Since you decided not to cite the “hatred” let me help you out (one man to another)…, that was an argument by dismissal, just in case you ever want to call someone else out for doing it to you.

Buck Swamp
Buck Swamp
13 years ago

Magical Laura,

OK Laura, the fun’s over. I get it. In this war every inch of ground will be fought over. Nothing will ever be stipulated. No quarter will ever be given.

Were most inventions created by men? Hell no! Prove it! Did Amanda Marcotte say what she said? We deny it! Prove it!

I get it. It’s radical feminism or Hell, and nothing in between. It’s hatred and more hatred forever. I finally get it.

Yaz
Yaz
13 years ago

@hellkell ‘Too bad he can’t stick the flounce. He’ll be back.’

Well, you called that one right. 😀

Pecunium
13 years ago

unreal man: Repeating yourself doesn’t change anything. The grammatical content of what you said is what I responded to. If you want me to respond to something, you have to say it.

You didn’t say it, so I couldn’t respond to it. It may be what you meant to say.. but it isn’t what you did say.

If you want to go into the details… here is the relevant comment from me,

Citation needed. You want to say that nowhere in the Ball’s writing is any of the things Marcotte is inferring directly said, then you either have to show specfic statements which are textualy, “bigotry, sexism and perverse satisfaction over someone’s suicide.” Otherwise you are a demonstrable hypocrite.

It’s demanding toysoldier hold himself to the same standard he’s trying to hold Marcotte to.

toysoldier said, in response:

In his suicide note Ball stated that his ex-wife made a decision to protect their children from the state which in turn punished him. Unless you consider telling his version of what occurred as implying blame, there is nothing in his comments that blames his daughter or ex-wife.

Which I said was keeping two standards. He can’t show where Marcotte said any of the things he’s saying are in her message. He admits it:

I see it in the willingness to grossly misrepresent Ball’s reasons for committing suicide. I also see it in the willingness to use that misrepresentation to attack those who agree with Ball’s opinions regarding family courts. It is not just that people have done it, but that they smugly do it and seem to genuinely enjoy minimizing a man’s suicide to support their own views.

He says she (and unnamed others) enjoy minimizing a man’s suicide to support their own views. When challenged to back this up with a quotation he says,

My statement was, “She never states that she is expressing her opinion. Rather she presents her opinion as fact while mocking Ball for killing himself and making fact-free assumptions.

So, he admits she doesn’t say it… he just sees it. But we aren’t allowed to “see it” in Ball’s suicide manifesto, not even when he lays it out. To infer his meaning/intent, is verboten; but to declare as fact hers, is.

And that (go back and look at what you said, not what you meant to say… it’s all there; diagrammed and everything) is what you told me I wasn’t allowed to do.

English, it has rules. If you want to be understood, you need to follow them.

ithiliana
13 years ago

Buck Flounce: I thought you left before my comment was posted — but look here, refutation of “women could always own property in the US”:

http://manboobz.com/2011/06/27/amanda-marcotte-on-the-thomas-ball-suicide-and-mra-haters/comment-page-5/#comment-34993

My ability to google is not linked to my vagina, btw, nor is knowledge of a subject (in this case, women’s history) necessarily related to intelligence (depending on how you define that very slippery term).

You were wrong. Man up and live with it.

Pecunium
13 years ago

Magical Laura: I think we can award you The Palm

Thank goodness the fun isn’t over.

Schala
Schala
13 years ago

“This I do not believe, honestly. If you show up to a blog and say “I’m an MRA,” the worst you should get is a “that’s nice.” If, on the otherhand, you show up to a conversation about women and rape and say “I think we’re all missing the real issue here, what about the huge quantity of guys that are raped every day?” then yeah, you’re gonna be labeled as an asshole. If you aren’t talking to a particularly out-there person, in my experience you will be called out for your actions, not your identification.”

I went on feminist posts that says that female on male domestic violence was a minor problem not needing funding, and disagreed.

I never even identified as MRA – I’m not, either. I’m also not a feminist. I abhor this tribalism of us vs them. And sorry, but Finally Feminist 101 has told me that sexism against men cannot exist by definition – so I can’t support that.

Schala
Schala
13 years ago

I also generally reply to comments, even if they are a derail – much like threads on this blog at time. So it might not be the post itself.

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