There needs to be a Manboobz Addendum to Godwin’s Law to cover those who compare their lack of dating success to, you know, genocide. You may recall the charming Tumblr dude who equated dateless “nice guys” with persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany.
And now we have “white and nerdy,” the blogger behind Omega Virgin Revolt taking the datelessness=genocide thing a step or two further. As you might guess from the title of his blog, WAN doesn’t exactly have women beating a path to his door. Not even golddiggers, even though he is, he says, “a widly successful owner of my own business.” Women don’t even want to use him for his money? Why is that? Because he is not a — wait for it – “alpha” man.
Yep, it’s the same old dopey logic we’ve seen so, so many times before: Women won’t date me => therefore I’m not an alpha => therefore women won’t date anyone but alphas. WAN has added one more step to this illogical logic chaim: this makes them the equivalent of genocidal monstere:
The ideology that women act on is the ideology of Pol Pot, of the Killing Fields. Women want non-alpha men purged and intelligence is considered by women to be a lack of alphaness in a man. This is similar to the ideology that led to the killing fields. Many of the millions who were murdered by the Khmer Rouge in the Killing Fields were murdered for showing signs of intelligence. That included everything from education to the possesion of wristwatches and/or glasses. If modern geeky hobbies had existed in Cambodia in the 70s, I’m sure that would have been included along with wristwatches and glasses as evidence of intelligence, and anyone interested in geeky hobbies would have been murdered too.
He’s making a could-not-possibly-be-more-strained reference to the whole Alyssa Bereznak/Jon Finkel kerfuffle. Bereznak, as most of you probably already know, wrote a sort of snarky, sort of stupid piece for Gizmodo about her date with Finkel, a champion Magic the Gathering player, and said some mean things about him and his geeky hobby. Pol Pot engineered the deaths of roughly 2 million people, many of them urban dwellers and intellectuals forced to relocate to collective farms in the countryside. Many died of starvation; others were shot – or beaten to death, in order to save on bullets.
So, yeah, Bereznak and Pol Pot are pretty much identical.
WAN continues:
[T] ideology of what women are doing now and what Pol Pot did are very similar. The Killing Fields needed to be opposed for both moral and practical reasons and so must what women are doing now. Rebel at The Spearhead said that women are engaged in a “holy crusade” against men. … The Khmer Rouge was also on a “holy crusade”. As Rebel also said what is at stake is nothing less than civilization itself and your existence and freedom just as it was with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
In an earlier post pretty much making the identical, er, “argument,” WAN takes aim at comedian Julie Klausner, who recently published a memoir called I Don’t Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Faux Sensitive Hipsters, Felons and Others. In her book, and in some interviews about the book, Klausner made some unflattering comments about “beta males” and “immature” men. This sends WAN into a rage:
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot would be proud of this cunt. She all but calls for concentration camps for her “useless beta inferior men” who secretly run the world. …
Ah, classic weasel words: “All but calls for.” In other words, she doesn’t actually call for concentration camps, or even rock ‘n’ roll fantasy camps, for men in any way shape or form. Never mind. WAN continues:
Somehow these “straight angry nerds” who are “useless and inferior” took over the world when no one was looking and this cunt says “something needs to be done” about this “epidemic”.
This type of thinking is widespread among women. …
[I]t’s no surprise that a lot of men are saying they think they would be better off with the Taliban running things. While I’m not sure that isn’t just trading one set of problems for another … I understand what these men are thinking. Anything has got to be better than this.
So: Nerdy men are “oppressed” by women who won’t date them. The solution to this imaginary oppression: oppress women for real.
I couldn’t make this shit up.
Surely as a good feminist you should know that women who like men are ‘gender traitors’. A good feminist should be a lesbian, and not because she likes women, but because she hates men. In order for feminists to get their anti-mail agenda’s realized, they need enough man-haters to support them. According to feminists, women who like men are just to stupid to realize how oppressed they are. In doing so, feminists actually are the greatest misogynists of them all.
How do you determine who speaks for Feminism? o_O
How come you don’t quote from Holly’s blog, or my blog, or Ozy’s blog? xD
So one feminist blog overrides all other feminist blogs? 😀
Feminisms biggest problem at the moment is that most women actually like men.
Yup! 😀 Including most feminists! 😀
(unless you’re implying something else o_O what exactly do you believe feminism is, wants, and does? :3 )
What motive is that?
luke123: good try, but not quite.
What she is arguing is that structural consent is constrained.
I’ll use driving a car as an analogy.
If one chooses to drive, one accepts the rules of the road. If one should choose to drive in excess of the speed limit, or pull a rolling stop one is acting inside the accepted paradigms of behavior, but one may be pulled over by a cop.
If the cop pulls you over and writes you up, you have an option. You can sign the ticket, and promise to appear at a later date, or you may refuse.
If you refuse, then the cop will arrest you.
You have “free will”. Anyone may refuse to promise to appear, but the consequences are also in mind. Your will is constrained.
Twisty (who is seen by many feminists as a bit extreme, but I digress) is arguing that in the same way one’s freely given consent is constrained. If you want to fuck, you (as she sees it) pretty much agree the guy gets to have an orgasm.
That’s what she means when she says completely consensual sex isn’t possible. If the woman decides she’s had enough, trying to enforce her will at that point isn’t really possible, which means that her consent isn’t quite free, it’s conditioned on the precept the man gets to have his fun, no matter what she thinks about it.
The evidence for that is the hostility to the idea of withdrawn consent = rape (which, in some jurisdictions is the law… if she says yes, and they start fucking, he doesn’t have to stop if she decides she no longer wants to continue).
Oh, luke, my logic teacher would rip you up one side and down the other for that travesty. With a charming Irish accent and many tales of debauchery whilst teaching English in foreign lands, because he’s kinda awesome that way. And I would point and laugh.
“It the logical conclusion.”
FAIL.
This will end poorly… For luke.
/readies spatula to scrape luke’s logic off the pavement.
Feminists are against getting mail? When did this happen? Is it in an update to the Feminist Agenda I never got (probably lost in the mail…)?
@kathleenb
clearly youve never read that class feminist tract ‘the crying of lot 49’
clearly youve never read that class feminist tract ‘the crying of lot 49′
class should be classic, obviously
Sharculese: Now I’m confused. Well, more than usual. The description of Lot 49 on wiki makes no sense whatsoever – is the book supposed to?
depends on what you mean by sense. pynchon likes to withhold information and give lots of irrelevant observation, but he also leaves it up to you to decide what is and isnt relevant, and his novels all end pretty ambiguously.
im looking at the wiki description now and trying to put all the elements of the plot into chronological order doesnt really make sense, especially considering its a mystery story about a mult-century conspiracy.
but the basic plot is a woman gets sucked into what may or may not be a conspiracy to subvert the postal system.
Oh, okay. My tastes don’t generally run to that kind of mindfuckery – got enough of that during my brief cyberpunk phase.
…Email?
I had to read that book for my 20th century American literature class. I hated it so much.
I’m no huge fan of the post office, and I’m not entirely sure my carrier can read, but I wouldn’t say I have an agenda against them.
OK, so. If you care, here’s the thing.
I’m not going to say that it’s prima facie impossible for feminists to want to commit mass murder. A lot of things can develop into a hate group. It would be a Hail Mary Pass, but assuming a radical fringe (somehow? it’s unlikely) gains control of the feminist movement, and assuming the feminist movement, with these radicals as their hard core, take control of the US (how? are there any plans in place to do this, like the tea Party’s strategy of electing Congresspeople?) and assuming a number of the factors are in place that would force this fringe to become even more radical, it’s possible. Because mass murder is always possible.
But this is already extremely unlikely just on a factual level, and Rutee answered this question pretty well (“No, because the US doesn’t work that way, men are still the majority, and have you eaten your own brain”) but I’d like to go into some background about what dangerous groups look like, as well as what’s necessary for progressive radicalization to occur.
PART ONE:
A lot of hate groups share similar patterns of thought.
I’m not going to use the historical/sociological terms for these things, because I don’t care right now and eventually I will need to get off the Internet so I’m rushing. ALSO: this remains a guide, not a blueprint. Stalinism, for instance, was kinda different, but my focus is Nazism.
–> Identification not only with a particular group but with a particular region or country (“Germany” as opposed to “the Nordic race”–although this varied; Himmler was much more interested in race to the exclusion of nationalism than Hitler was, for instance)
–> A veneration of that place’s idealized past in general (such as ancient Cambodia–the flag of the Khmer Rouge has Ankgor Wat on it), often paired with a veneration of the concept of farming in particular. This sounds random, but farmers are closer to the soil that is venerated and the pure values of the past. To farm the land is to possess it in a way that sticking a factory somewhere isn’t.
–> A framing of current developments from that idealized past as “decline” and a desire to “get back to” the hypothetical ideal through a process of purification. The ideal isn’t just the past but something that would take the best elements of the past and catapult them into an ideal future, full of awesome technology and shit. To explain the seeming disconnect, Jeffrey Hersh said that Nazis were “reactionary modernists,” but the purest example of this line of thought remains the Khmer Rouge, for which “Year Zero” was both the return to the pristine past and the beginning of utopia.
ALSO ACCEPTABLE: a desire to “reform” a “backward” country through “heroic measures.” See: Stalin, Mao, the Young Turks.
–> This involves hostility toward the people deemed responsible for why things suck right now: Jews, “reactionaries,” black people after civil rights, “corruption” in general.
–>At the same time, before the group takes power, its desires still look pretty vague: they expect coming to power will being about a perfect society, but actually have no idea how that’s going to happen. This will be important later.
–> Whether or not the group does violence, a veneration of violence in the abstract, as well as violent rhetoric, should be present. Everything is presented as an apocalyptic showdown, in the service of which all means are necessary. There’s been a lot of discussion about whether or not Glenn Beck was ‘proto-Fascist” because, among other factors, of how violent his rhetoric is.
–> Totalization as an ideal; the desire to control every aspect of the lives of the group’s adherents. One’s zeal should be more like religious fervor than patriotism. Lenin said a revolutionary is a revolutionary even in his sleep.
–> Dehumanization of the enemy. This is made easier when the customs, language, etc, of the target group are already really different from the hate group’s. The first Jews killed during the Holocaust lived in Polish shtetels, spoke Yiddish, and dressed in a distinctive manner.
Does feminism look like this?
Not most feminism, and not really. Where is the vanished past full of people who knew how to behave? Where is the keen desire, not for gradual betterment, but for perfection? Violent fringe groups hate legislation, party politics, compromise. Assuming the country they’re infecting is democratic, they will prefer to hijack the system and disrupt it (like the Nazis) or work outside the system altogether (like The Order, who raised money for what they thought would be their eventual takeover of part of the Pacific Northwest through crime).
PART TWO:
Once you have a hate group, it’s still pretty unlikely that you’ll get mass murder. Most people are actually not OK with doing violence against other people, especially non-combatants. What you get isn’t like flipping the “genocide” switch, it’s
A process of cumulative radicalization. What this involves is:
–> The perception of threat. Often. the region involved is at war, or surrounded by hostile forces. Revolutionary France, Turkey during the Armenian Genocide, Stalinist Russia (not actually at war during the purges, but surrounded by ideological enemies), Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Yugoslavia. This makes the people involved paranoid, and leads them to conclude that the group that they’ve already targeted is in league with their enemies, or is even more able to hurt them during this difficult time. In the case of Turkey, Armenians actually were trying to fight against the Turks; one of the groups that the Khmer Rouge targeted were Cambodians of Vietnamese descent.
–> The belief that “all bets are off.” Historians call this the “state of exception,” borrowing a term from a German political scientist (who also sympathized with the Nazis) named Carl Schmitt: when you believe that your life is threatened, laws become unimportant. Things that you might not otherwise have been OK with are justified as “extraordinary measures.” During the Second World War, the Nazis conceptualized the entire Eastern Front as a “place of exception,” a “barbarous place” where terrible things just happened and the normal rules of war were suspended.
–> Escalation: The pattern is best represented by Nazi Germany, which went from exclusion of Jews to bigoted laws to violence to murder.
The interesting thing here is that the first murders, in occupied Poland and on the Eastern Front, take place not in Germany itself but in a region already conceptualized as an “exception,” and many scholars now think that the violence began when soldiers on this periphery started killing Jews on their own initiative in Poland. Only after that do you get the Einsatzgruppen (huge mobile death-squads who followed the German army into Russia), and only after that do you get people wondering what to do with the Jews who are left, then collecting them in ghettos, then killing the inhabitants of those ghettos and, to speed up an already-developing process, building death camps.
This leads to a process of
–> Mentally backing into it: People become OK with what they are doing not all at once but through a gradual series of accommodations. Almost nobody starts life thinking that it would be cool to herd a randomly-selected group of people who represent your enemies into an old church and set it on fire. This is only possible after a long chain of mental developments as well as the necessary exigent circumstances.
–> Breakdown: A lot of the most terrible atrocities from a development like this are, in fact, accidents. This is why what I said earlier was important: these hate groups have no idea how to accomplish their goals in any sort of concrete, logistically-realistic way. It’s one thing to desire that all the Jews in a place die, it’s another to kill thousands of them during a day. How do you kill them quickly? Where do you put the bodies? I’m not going to tell you the worst thing I know, but here’s a thing: when the Romanians were told to start killing Jews, one thing that happened was that they piled them into cattle trains which drove around the country at random, with no destination, crammed windowless full of the dying and the dead. When Himmler learned about this he was appalled, but the fact is that the Romanians had no idea what to do with them all.
Is stuff like this likely to happen to various current-day hate movements?
Only if they get into power and attempt to start implementing their goals; even then it’s not inevitable. Franco’s Spain normalized itself into just an oppressive dictatorship after the Civil Wars; it sucked, but there wasn’t any mass murder. I think you need the perception of threat.
Even the most hateful hate movement is only potentially genocidal. Hypothetical Mary Daly would have to back into nefarious deeds, as would the people who carried out her orders.
Even then, the targeted group needs to be isolatable: note, for instance, that the Nazis backed off on killing Jewish men who were married to non-Jewish women when their wives protested. Like Ruttee said, men still are 50% of the US population, and they hold most of the wealth and most of the influence.
@bagelsan
lol, this was a bit before e-mails time…
@lauralot
yeah, im not gonna deny that pynchon is a very, um, particular taste
Holy shit, did Bill just transition from “you people are treating WAN like a subhuman” to “you people lynched somebody”?
Pace yourself, big guy. You’re going to leave yourself with nowhere to go from there.
Disagreeing with someone is not treating him like he’s subhuman. Equating a woman with history’s greatest mass murderers because she didn’t have sex with you is wrong–so wrong that it’s flirting with mental illness–and no accusation Bill tosses out at the people who point that out is going to make it right somehow. Even if everyone here stopped pointing out how wildly irrational that behavior is, it wouldn’t somehow become rational.
“and Rutee answered this question pretty well (“No, because the US doesn’t work that way, men are still the majority, and have you eaten your own brain”)”
I’m now kicking myself for not coming up with this exact formulation.
To be fair, these daly-like feminists would require magic to take power in the first place. Like, actual miracle-making magic. And once you have that, you presumably aren’t actually constrained by the things that prevent genocide and turn the proposition of doing it into political suicide (Dictatorship or no). So you know, they could use that same magic to do the genocide.
But then, that just illustrates how counterfactual the entire scenario is.
Before email? I don’t understand.
(Also: VoiP, you are so fucking hardcore! :D)
OK, one more thing: the genocidal group in question, if it isn’t already in power by the time it gets murderous (Turkey, Stalinist Russia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda), probably needs a charismatic leader or other focus to really get shit done. Because you need a certain number of people acting as one: no matter how murderous someone’s ideas are, small disparate groups are not a threat on a national level: look at McVeigh or The Order. They were terrorists and what they did sucked for the people they killed and hurt, but the US easily stomped on them.
Germany just before the First World War, and even more between the wars, was jam-packed full of funky little groups, but who among us remembers the Artamanen? Hitler had style and knew how to speak in public. In contrast, since George Lincoln Rockwell died, there has been no single focus for the racist right wing in the US. The rise of the Internet has made it easier to get exposed to racist right-wing ideas, but despite this, and despite the movement/s it/themselves referring to their scattered presence on the internet as a “lone wolf strategy,” a thousand loners are exactly that, a thousand loners.
Even if Zombie Mary Daly wanted to kill all the men, she would still have to make people listen to her. And that’s unlikely.
Bagelsan:
thanks.
Luke-at-me, if Twisty ‘had her way’, society would have changed so that consent WAS possible. You horrible hairy hedgehog’s hamwallet!
So, as a female nerd who has run a panel called “Otaku Charm School” at an anime convention, let me tell you this: there are nerds who are some of the rudest people I have ever met. No, seriously. That’s why I run the panel, to tell you how to behave in front of the convention’s celebrity guests/hotel staff/other nerds. But every year, there are people who don’t listen to the panel who end up inviting Neil Cicierega to an orgy room in front of his girlfriend.
And you read it right, there are orgy rooms. At a nerd convention. So guess what? Someone not getting laid has nothing to do with the fact that they are nerdy and everything to do with the fact that they don’t listen to other people.
kariface: I’ve met some of the most entitled jackoffs ever at conventions and across gaming tables. The guys at conventions just looked at me like i was some sort of unicorn – a girl? at a convention? but.. but… The guys at gaming tables can become downright abusive if they’re running a game or completely derail one they’re playing in. And a lot of the time, part of that entitlement was the idea that they were somehow owed female attention simply because they possessed a dick.