A Voice for Men, one of the most influential and popular Men’s Rights websites, is now offering a $1000 “bounty” for anyone able to track down the personal information of several Swedish women involved in a tasteless video advertising a theater production based on Valarie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto. As the anonymous poster calling himself John the Other – the second-in-command at AVfM – put it in a posting yesterday (emphasis in original):
We are asking for the full legal names, home addresses, places of employment, email addresses and contact phone numbers of the women and man who produced and starred in the video described above. We will pay 1000 dollars to any individual who provides and confirms this information, to be paid either directly to themselves or to a charity of their choice.
John explains that this information will be posted on the AVfM-affiliated site Register-Her.com, an “offenders database” that is being used to vilify individual feminists and “Fuck Their Shit Up,” as AVfM head honcho Paul Elam likes to put it. John notes that Regsiter-Her.com also intends to post the “government identification numbers [and] drivers licences” of the women they are able to identify.
John admits plainly that posting such information may put the physical safety of these women at risk from vigilante violence. As he puts it (emphasis mine):
Some individuals may criticize the intent to publish not only names, but also addresses, phone numbers, employers and other personal information – on the grounds that such exposure create a risk of retributive violence against individuals who openly advocate murder based on sex. It is the considered position of the editorial board of AVfM that any such risks are out-weighed by the ongoing hazard to the public of these individuals continuing to operate in anonymity.
The comments posted on the article at AVfM suggest that such “retributive” violence is a real possibility. Indeed, here’s the very first comment (which currently has 17 upvotes from readers of the site):
A commenter called Xnomolos, in another upvoted comment, adds:
i would love to hunt down these women myself.
JinnBottle responds to this comment by advising “all men to start carrying guns.”
The commenters on AVfM have already uncovered the identities of all of the women involved in the video. The blogger Fidelbogen has been the most active internet detective so far.
There is no question that the video itself is offensive, and designed to provoke. You can see it here; I’m not going to embed it on this site. If you don’t want to watch it: it depicts a young woman shooting a man in the head for no reason. Afterwards the woman and her gleeful, giggling accomplices do a victory dance, then lick the blood from the dead man’s head. A message at the end urges viewers to “Do Your Part.”
Every feminist I know who has seen the video has been appalled by it. I’m appalled by it. It’s hateful, and it’s wrong.
But John the Other, and the other commenters on AVfM, claim that it is more than this: that that the video of the staged murder, intended to provide publicity for a theater production based on Solanas’ notorious SCUM manifesto, is quite literally an open call for the murder of men. As John the Other puts it:
Open advocation of murder cannot be allowed in a civil society, without that society devolving into a culture of brutal violence.
Evidently he has no problem with, or has somehow not noticed, the comments on AVfM fantasizing about shooting and killing the women involved in the video.
Is the video a literal call to murder? Is it, as one AVfM commenter puts it, evidence of a “conspiracy to commit mass murder?” No. Violence and murder have been dramatized in the theater since its beginnings. No one accuses Sophocles of advocating fratricide and incest, though both are dealt with in his play Oedipus Rex. No one accuses Shakespeare of advocating mass murder, though many of his most famous plays have body counts that put many horror films to shame.
Does the tag line at the end of the video – “do your part” – transform the video from a depiction of murder into an open call for it? No. The “threat,” such as it is, is vague; it’s not aimed at any specific individuals. It might be seen as akin to someone wearing a t-shirt that says “kill ‘em all, let God sort them out” – tasteless and offensive, but not a literal threat. “Kill ‘Em All” is actually the name of Metallica’s first album. While a lot of people see James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich et al as pompous idiots, they have not been jailed for conspiracy to commit mass murder. That would be ridiculous.
Someone claiming to have been involved in the SCUM-inspired theatrical production in question has posted several detailed comments on AVfM, explaining that those involved in the production are “not out to get you” and that the video itself was “meant as a viral “wtf?!” to give attention to both the questions that it raises and the play itself.”
By contrast, AVfM is targeting specific individuals, and intends to offer information that would allow anyone intent on doing them harm to quite literally track them to their homes and workplaces. Those fantasizing about killing these woman are not simply making a joke along the lines of “women, can’t live with ‘em; can’t kill ‘em.” They are fantasizing about killing real people, and providing would-be evil-doers maps to their doors.
AVfM is an American site, in English; these specific women live in Sweden. While it is a real possibility, it seems unlikely that anyone reading the site will literally find and murder any of those involved in the SCUM production. At least I hope that this does not come to pass.
I don’t believe that either Paul Elam or John the Other literally wants any feminist to be killed. The real intent behind AVfM’s publishing people’s personal information, it seems clear, is to intimidate feminist writers and activists into shutting up, to make clear that if they post something that offends the internet vigilantes at AVfM they will face the possibility of some deranged individual quite literally showing up at their door intent on doing them harm.
Paul Elam and John the Other claim that they’re not advocating violence. But they are playing a dangerous game here. If some deranged individual, inspired by the hyperbolic anti-feminist rhetoric on AVfM, and armed with information provided by “Register-Her.com,” murders or otherwise harms a feminist blogger or activist or video maker, Elam and his enablers will have blood on their hands. As will those MRAs who continue to publicly support and/or link to AVfM and/or Register-Her.com.
This is not the way a legitimate rights group deals with those who disagree with them. This is what hate groups do.
I mean, yes, MRAs and trolls vastly overestimate the safety of the home front. But we shouldn’t be underestimating it either.
Rutee: Off the absolute top of my head, the Irish coming off the boats in the USA got some of their best deals in the Union Army. No one else was hiring them, and this gave the immigrants clothes and a pay at all. Not a unique state of affairs either.
Not really analagous, and not the universal example you seemed to be making in the comment about draftees getting all sorts of good things. It’s also a case that they weren’t getting other job offers. The draft riots were a direct result of the ways in which that was playing out.
Honestly, the only army I can think of (which wasn’t the embodiment of the ruling class, e.g. the Mamelukes) to get really good treatment was the Roman legionaries, who were outside the normal run of law, and given things like land grants at retirement.
But press-ganged sailors, Wellington’s.”scum of the earth” and US draftees weren’t seen as all that respectable, and not paid as well as equivalent jobs in the civilian sector. Some, in fact, finished their entire service and weren’t paid much at all, I can’t recall the ship now, but there was a British vessel, which at the end of a five year period saw the men who had served on the cruise paid not a schilling.
Oh, and military service as a last resort is most of my family who either entered or just barely didn’t enter the military. It’s not just a ‘cultural trope’. It is indeed a thing that happens.
Yes, it is. It’s also something that happens in variable rates, depending on the economy, and the existence of a draft.
I will note one thing about civilian deaths vs. military deaths. The military is usually a minority of the population at large. Although modern war means more civilians die, as an absolute number, I don’t think the difference is *usually* so high that any given civilian is more likely to die. Reasonably certain that in Afghanistan, the difference is in fact so high that civilian is the more dangerous job, though.
I did restrict it some (to civilians in the combat zone). It’s an interesting thing, being a soldier has (until very recently) had a 50/50 rate of casualty for those in combat. The rates are harder to measure, because the ways in which soldiers have been exposed to hostile action have changed.
For recent conflicts, being a civilian in the combat area has been much more dangerous, and the lehality/injury rates, are skewed so that being a civlian is more often fatal than being a soldier.
But, the odds of any given soldier becoming a casualty are much higher, even in places like Iraq, than any given civilian.
It’s a really complicated question, and the problems of time span/exposure/ability to leave the area of threat, etc. make it really hard to quantify non-military risk at an individual level, even when one can assign a theoretical one to the population at large.
And now, it being three in the morning, I am going to bed.
One lats thing I mean, yes, MRAs and trolls vastly overestimate the safety of the home front. But we shouldn’t be underestimating it either.
I think the “home front” is different from being a civlian in the combat area. Folks in London in 1942 were at more risk than people in Glasgow, just as people in Marseille were safer than those in Paris in 1940.
But people in Interior Russia, or the Cotswolds, or Kansas weren’t at risk from collateral damage. And that, IMO, is the difference between being “on the home front” and being in the combat area. People in London in 1815 were safe as houses, People in Quatre Bras fled, or died.
For all they screwed the Ottoman Empire in the long run, even before the Janissary Corps had subverted the rule of the empire they got excellent treatment. Discarding warriors when they are the ruling class is to more or less grant the MRA claims of men being ‘disposable’ without a question; sometimes having to go off to war was directly and legitimately correlated with the potential gains of war, as well as substantial benefits in peace time (And it’s not just the ruling class; the Kshatriya were the second-in-command, as it were, major caste grouping in India, f’rex. They had substantial rights and bennies in comparison to everyone but the Brahmin).
It’s true that soldiers don’t always get the better end of the deal. Some realms made it such immeasurable suck that it’s difficult to imagine (Tsarist Russia sending men to the trenches armed with clubs and poorly supplied with food comes to mind rather immediately). But to say that soldierdom always sucked, or is obvious proof of disposability? No, not really at all.
Interesting, and somewhat less than surprising.
True enough. Even now the risks are rather… disproportionately weighted against the brown people we still insist on conquering, what with the fighting taking place there.
rutee: I have no idea what you are saying anymore. The Mamelukes weren’t draftees, in any rational sense of the word, and that’s what we were talking about (to be a citizen in Mameluke Egypt was to be barred from being a Mameluke. So there was no way for a person who was a subject to enter the miliary. That’s the antithesis of a “draft”).
Speaking, as a soldier, soldiers are (with a very few exceptions, such as Canada, and maybe Israel) disposable. It’s part of the job. That’s not conceding the MRA position on men in general. Actually, given the way they marginalise women who serve (see Whatever’s discounting all the females who aren’t killed outright), but it’s a fact. Beiruit, 1981, 253 Marines died because it was deemed politically unsuitable to have the guards on the barracks issued ammunition.
Simply, to be a solider, in anyplace where the soldiery was drawn from the populace at large instead of being seen as a ruling class; with very limited entrée) was to be a lesser member of society. treated harshly (punished; even to death, for what would be minor, or non, transgressions; even in places like the US) paid poorly, when paid at all the pay was substantially less than non-military labor (those Irish you mentioned before. US Army pay for a Private in the US Civil War was $13 a month. A farm laborer was averaging $26. A bricklayer was getting 46: US Diplomatic Mission to Germany The Average Wage for the the US in 1860 was about $600 a year, privates were getting, in theory, $156).
They weren’t (unless they were officers) respected. They were seen as theives and ruffians, ne’er to wells and despoilers of women. No suitable husband, and not possessed of a trade.
True enough. Even now the risks are rather… disproportionately weighted against the brown people we still insist on conquering, what with the fighting taking place there.
Which is a problem, and one that is a function of the change in power politics for those places with the twin prongs of gov’ts which are answerable to the people, and nuclear weapons have pretty much made inevitable.
The “power players” on the world scene aren’t willing to forgo force as a last resort, but the citizenry aren’t eager to have a conventional war in their living rooms, so the “limited wars” of the 1650-1798 period are being revivedm, with the difference being that they are fought, not in smaller parts of Europe, but in places where the non-soldiers of a country aren’t going to suffer.
And the rationales for the fighting are worse than the “affairs of state” that kings were using in the past.
….
You’re talking about a completely different empire, dude. I was referring to the Ottoman Empire, not the Mameluke Dynasty. Also, what in the flying hell? Yes, draftees are citizens; that kind of implies more rights than Mamluks had, as they were slaves. A slave isn’t technically a draftee, but why is it supposed to be better somehow? Why would you separate draftees from slaves in any meaningful analysis of people forced to fight? Especially if you’re going to ignore the slaves who could be said to have benefited from it (Seeing as you’re talking about a different country and org chart from what I mentioned entirely)?
But it isn’t just draftees and other conscripts. The claim is more or less structured to attack women for ‘not fighting’, while men go off to do it because they have to, and don’t they get the short end of the stick for it? And ain’t that always the way of things? Well, not when ‘war’ includes “Serious rights conferred, and not just during war”. To only talk about war as if it’s an enterprise carried out solely by peasants, then ask how one can legitimately say there are benefits to being a warrior, is to beg the question.
Irish. In the 1860s. White People weren’t always one race. There’s a reason I specified them, and not the other Union soldiers.
Except when they were civilizers, or doing God’s work, or…
Rutee: .
You’re talking about a completely different empire, dude. I was referring to the Ottoman Empire, not the Mameluke Dynasty.
Yes, and I brought them into the conversation. The reason I mentioned them was that they were the ruling class, and they weren’t a class “the people” could enter. The slavery of the mamelukes was odd. They were, “freed” when they became skilled enough to be entered into the ranks. It was an oddity, and a quirk of them usurping the extant power structure, while not being part of the greater polity. It was an extreme form of “robbing the paymaster”.
So the social status they gained of being a soldier wasn’t available to the subjects of their rule. That puts them outside your argument that becoming a soldier allows one who takes up the profession to gain status rights, because it wasn’t something the citizenry was barred from doing. There wasn’t even the social mobility which was available in late feudal Europe (which was a warrior culture, albiet not a soldiering culture).
Also, what in the flying hell? Yes, draftees are citizens; that kind of implies more rights than Mamluks had, as they were slaves. A slave isn’t technically a draftee,
And Mameluke “slaves” weren’t in the same category as other slaves, but they do, as do draftees, enter the military not of their own free will, which situation is what started this conversation.
Yes, but you were arguing that being a soldier got one, even when drafted, good pay and social status.
Which is what I was talking about, and which you reiterate when you say: ““Serious rights conferred, and not just during war”. To only talk about war as if it’s an enterprise carried out solely by peasants, then ask how one can legitimately say there are benefits to being a warrior, is to beg the question.
I am not saying there are no rights to being a warrior. But then Warriors are different from soldiers. Soldiers are in it for the money. Warriors are in it for the glory.
Which is an important distinction, and one which, for all the conflation of the words in modern parlance, we still seem to subconciously make.
“Serious rights conferred, and not just during war”. To only talk about war as if it’s an enterprise carried out solely by peasants, then ask how one can legitimately say there are benefits to being a warrior, is to beg the question.
Show me where I (the one defending the idea that to be even an infantry soldier requires one to be intelligent, skilled, etc.: not to mention that you are making a classist assumption with the comment of peasants, and that you said people in your family ever joined as an aspect of the “poverty draft”), said war is fought only by “peasants”.
Also, please show me the, “serious rights conferred” to soldiers. Really. Because for most of history to be a soldier (as opposed to a ruling military class) was to be cannon fodder, called up, and away, at the whim of a lord, or signed up to an indenture for years (in the case of the British, twenty years), in which time one was stripped of certain rights, and subject to much more stringent laws of conduct, with harsher regimes of punishment; while foregoing most of the civilians libterties.
So please give me a list of those serious rights conferred. The advantages and social advantage that came of being a soldier.
Except when they were civilizers, or doing God’s work, or…
Nope, that’s a trick of gov’ts. That’s the entire point of Kipling’s “Tommy”, and his, “Last of The Light Brigade”. Soldiers are praised when it’s dramatic,but when the “need” isn’t there they are scum, and villians and the like, and there is scant reward (other than pretty words about, “Defenders of Freedom, and, “The Thin Red Line”, etc. which actually accrues to those who do the dirty work, when it’s actually needed. When it’s just a move of empire one gets even less).
Viscaria said:
“Yeah, I always facepalm when I see people talking about the women and children “safe at home” in WWI and WWII. Safe here in North America, sure (though I don’t mean to discount the many contributions those at home made to the war effort). Safe where the fighting was actually taking place? Not so much. How deeply self-centered to only consider how war affected people from your own country.”
I agree. When war is at the end of your street, or dropping bombs on you at night, or you’re preparing for invasion and trying to decide if it’s kinder to kill yourself and children so you and they don’t fall into enemy hands, I suspect being “safe at home” sounds like a cruel joke. It’s one of the reasons why I get so angry at MRAs who rabbit on about how women have it easy during wartime and are just nagging men to bring home goodies for them. It’s bullshit. If your country is at war and it’s being fought at home the whole complexion changes. These people need to read about the bombing of London, Coventry, Liverpool, Dresden, Berlin and Hamburg and then maybe they’ll get a vague idea of how it must have been for the civilians “left behind”.
Yeah, man, the homefront is all comfy couches and bonbons during a war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_of_the_Fireflies
(One of the best war movies ever made, by the way, and not a battleground in sight. It will make you weep like a baby.)
True, it’s definitely one of the best. I cry each time I watch it. The Japanese civilians had such a horrific time and that story happened over and over and over again. Yeah, they really were just “kicking back and pretending to grieve” as a certain MRA of my acquaintance once put it.
I remember my mother talking about the preparations that English families made for a possible invasion and her telling me of her mother showing her where the pistol was, how to load it and how to fire it so as to give her siblings and herself a quick, painless death if her mother wasn’t around to do it for them. She was thirteen at the time.
Or you could read about what happened to the civilian women when the Russian army rolled into Germany at the end of the war. Or about all the people who starved in Stalingrad.
Once again MRAs prove themselves to be completely ignorant of history, reality, and pretty much everything else that lies beyond the tips of their own noses.
Is that what you were doing? Because you sounded like you were trying to deny that what I said about the Janissaries was true because it wasn’t true of Mamelukes. You can’t blame me for talking about ‘non-draftees’ if you’re the one bringing them into the conversation (Unless you are trying to exist on a planet where Devshirme is somehow not essentially the same thing, but worse).
That’s true; if they served they became free, after service, in the Egyptian dynasty they ruled. I was thinking of Mamluks elsewhere, for some reason.
Yeah, this is a pretty BS distinction in modern day language; 700 years ago, absolutely not, but now? Warrior more connotes an inferior organizational structure and a lack of technology than it does some sort of higher purpose. Unless one is propagandizing, I suppose, but then soldier takes on a higher purpose there too.
land ownership, status, reasonably good pay, depending on orgchart position (What you call Feudal Europe), the right to collect taxes (Warring States Japan), rulership outright (numerous), eventually citizenship (Roman empire; and they weren’t even the ruling class there)…
Seriously, in the context of fighters as the ruling caste, you’re going to ask me this? Really?
Uh, you continually try to skate past the fact that the ruling class is frequently comprised of people who fight. In point of fact, you specifically tried to remove them from the conversation; that is kind of presupposing that it is only the lower status classes that fight, and therefore nobody benefits from it (And ignore all the people who benefited directly from the fighting, like swedish mercenaries…)
And
That’s pretty directly ignoring ruling classes as soldiers.
That may be; I probably should have just said “the lower status classes”.
Not just governments, dude. Also, if you want to stick to the conscripts, a ‘time of need’ would appear to be rather relevant to discussing their respect. But it’s not just conscripts.
Or the Korean “comfort women”.
Or the dropping of nuclear weapons on civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The list goes on and on.
The siege of Stalingrad is the stuff of nightmares, but then that’s true of just about anything we’ve mentioned.
I think it’s even more than that because with a lot of this stuff it’s really hard to be ignorant about it, if you live in the real world. They choose to ignore it and believe their own little mythologies instead. It’s willful blindness. Like holocaust denying.
It’s never surprised me at all that there’s some crossover between the MRM and Holocaust denial circles, actually.
Someone ought to respond in kind, and discover the AVfM members’ names, and report them to the authorities. (Note I say “report,” not “murder,” like they’re advocating.)
There seems to be quite a bit of crossover between some of the MRM and the extreme right wing, some tend to call themselves libertarian but as far as I can see they’re libertarian for men but women had better shut up, sit down and be content with “serving” men. The idea that women might have their own ideas about how they’d like to spend their lives, or that they should have the right to live as they choose seems to be entirely beyond them. I have real trouble believing that anyone can be so blinkered that they can’t see another person as fully human because they happen to be female and yet this seems to be the case. Or maybe they do realize it and simply don’t care and all their crowing about rights and justice is just a smokescreen to hide the fact that they just want women back under their control like it was in the “good old days”. The playing field is starting to even out and controlling women is getting more and more difficult.
I really think MRAs wouldn’t care about this. When else have they cared about rape? Clearly they ewre just trying to ensnare some alpha asshole cock/poor beta.
A lot of Americans seem to forget this one, to be honest. I remember when the Tsunami hit, a frightening number of comments were about how that was ‘revenge for pearl harbor’, as if Hiroshima and Nagasaki just… didn’t happen.
As to holocaust denial… that’s the one conspiracy theory I just. Don’t. Get. I don’t understand it at any point in time and just. Agh.
Rutee: Yeah, this is a pretty BS distinction in modern day language; 700 years ago, absolutely not, but now? Warrior more connotes an inferior organizational structure and a lack of technology than it does some sort of higher purpose. Unless one is propagandizing, I suppose, but then soldier takes on a higher purpose there too.
No, it’s not. This is one of those things which matters, when one is actually doing the job. John Wayne/Rambo, etc. are warriors. I wasn’t. I was a soldier. I was there to get a specific job done. It involved killing people, but there wasn’t any mystical sense of glory to it. The attempt to infuse soldiering with warriors is propagandistic, meant to turn professional killers into noble paladins. The distinction still matters. Part of the reason for that organisational difference is the psychology of warriors/soldiers being different. The soldier kills, the warrior fights.
It’s hard to explain, but in an army (I’ve served with lots, my career put me into a lot of international excercises), doesn’t like “warriors”. There is some insult (John Wayne/Rambo, in the US), which connotes a stupid willingness to fight for the sake of fighting/glory, and that this is stupid. Which is reasonable. The “warrior” gets people killed. He (when in command) throws more troops into a losing battle. When just a troop in the line he either gets kiled in short order (the best outcome in a fight), or ends up exposing his fellows to risk to bail him out of his problems.
But, having seen this from the inside, in a large army, such as the US, the folks who aren’t at the sharp end are seen as needing to feel special. They aren’t getting paid as well as they might on the outisde (the number of people I saw who had jobs that were portable, who left… large. The most intriguing were those who left, without leaving. I knew guys in Korea who moved from an E-4 slot (about 1,100 a month), to private contractor. They did the same job, eight our days, with overtime,, and were on a base salary of $90,000. They could also tell asshole sergeants, and officers, to put a sock in it.
So there is a lot of drivel about “warriors”, meant to inspire them to the idea that soldiering is some sort of higher calling. Mostly because, to respect yourself; in a world where life is less cheap than it used to be, there has to be some reason for a job which is about killing people. So we have people propagandising that soldiers are warriors. There is a difference, and blurring it makes it easier (IMO) for a democracy to keep its army fighting unjustifiable wars.
Seriously, in the context of fighters as the ruling caste, you’re going to ask me this? Really?
Yes. Because you were the one to introduce the idea of soldiers as a draftee class getting those benefits. You were the one who made blanket statements about soldiers. Who said that they, as an entire class, gain legal, and social advantages, even when they are but draftees.
I was asking where the conscripts got social advantage for being a soldier? Where the pay was as good as civilian labor? Where they got respect, as class; for being soldiers: not officers, not lords, not commanders, but the rank and file. That class which anyone could join.
The one you were talking about, when you said that being a soldier was good for the soldiers, what with all the respect, and perks and all.
Thats sort of like saying navvies were well respected, because the Carnegies, and Morgans and Stanfords and Huntingtons became landowners and governors and philanthropists.
It may be military service slang I never heard. It is not, by any stretch, common parlance.
Wayne was an actor. Rambo is a fictional character.
The distinction between violence as noble and violence as killing does still matter; but it isn’t encapsulated by “Warrior” and “Soldier”, and you can’t classify the people who did violence, and ruled because of it, as warriors as a sort of special pleading when the fact that fighting wasn’t always a bad place to be in society becomes inconvenient.
I said fighting was often a good place to be, and that being the people who march off to war has had substantial benefits historically; further, to protect the benefits you received by being a soldier, you did generally have to fight, and couldn’t generally just… stop once a draftee might be needed. I mean, I *have* mentioned draftees who benefited for it greatly, to the extent that one can call any system prior to about the 18th century a draft, but the draft itself, as it is commonly understood, came a bit late in the game for this. Of course, you seem ready to discard everything that isn’t a modern day draft, given what you’ve said about Mamluks (Which was *not* just a Mamluk Egypt thing), which seems rather… senseless. Why don’t you define ‘draftee’ as a class, hm? Because if you’re just going to go with the modern day draft, you’re not talking about a very wide period in history to begin with, and I’d primarily agree. (As 1800-1950 would be most of the modern day draft)
Either you read your bullshit linguistic difference into my words, or you are ignoring what I just said.
You do realize that in what you would probably call feudal europe, farmers would join the army if they needed extra money for a season, right? That the middle ages’ professional soldiers were richer than most, and formed the basis for the nobility? I probably shouldn’t have to explain where the benefit was, relatively speaking, for the various mongolian descendant groups. Then there’s India…
You have continually named an empire that you *know* was ruled by the soldiers; what part of this is not a perk of soldier-dom? And *you’re* the one who brought up the Roman Empire, which was a not-inconsiderable slice of history for Europe by itself. Shit, you haven’t even named what I’m pretty sure is the one place on the planet that can consistently claim “It sucks to be a soldier”, China. Seriously, I’m not saying it’s the best place in the world, but soldiering usually beats farming for benefits, and that means it was a step up for most people in most of history.
Those commenters disgusted me. I mean, didn’t we already fight that war? We fought in the Pacific, put Japanese Americans in internment camps, bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is that not enough ‘revenge’?
“Does the tag line at the end of the video – “do your part” – transform the video from a depiction of murder into an open call for it? No. The “threat,” such as it is, is vague; it’s not aimed at any specific individuals. It might be seen as akin to someone wearing a t-shirt that says “kill ‘em all, let God sort them out” – tasteless and offensive, but not a literal threat. “Kill ‘Em All” is actually the name of Metallica’s first album. While a lot of people see James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich et al as pompous idiots, they have not been jailed for conspiracy to commit mass murder. That would be ridiculous.”
What on earth do you think the video’s message IS then – be kind to strangers except if they are men???
You need to smell the coffee and see the obvious!
That it’s an ad for a play that isn’t at all what you think it is?
Rutee [email protected]:
“Or the Korean “comfort women”.
“I really think MRAs wouldn’t care about this. When else have they cared about rape? Clearly they ewre just trying to ensnare some alpha asshole cock/poor beta.”
Yes *sigh* you’re probably right. The fact that they were dragged off to be raped in military brothels wouldn’t bother the MRAs at all. After all they were just fulfilling their feminine role and “serving” men.
“Or the dropping of nuclear weapons on civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
“A lot of Americans seem to forget this one, to be honest. I remember when the Tsunami hit, a frightening number of comments were about how that was ‘revenge for pearl harbor’, as if Hiroshima and Nagasaki just… didn’t happen.”
I saw a lot of that too. I can’t make up my mind if they were trolling or they really believed it. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were more than enough “payback” if you’re into that kind of punitive thinking, but a terrible, unpredictable act of nature? No, just…no.
Did you also see the idiots that considered that God sent the tsunami to punish the Japanese for Pearl Harbour (obviously God works very slowly and is a very blunt instrument). Almost the same arguement with an added side of America being God’s chosen people and he’ll punish anyone who messes with them. I found that one even more appalling.
“As to holocaust denial… that’s the one conspiracy theory I just. Don’t. Get. I don’t understand it at any point in time and just. Agh.”
No, how they can deny it when they have the NAZI’s own records (and I find I have to admire how meticulous they were about documenting their own crimes, it made things so much easier when they came to trial) to say nothing of eyewitnesses, photos and newsreels beats me.