Irony alert! The level of irony in this post is so extreme it might actually harm your computer.
So a couple of days ago, MGTOWer extraordinaire MarkyMark, continuing on with his post-retirement posting binge, shared with us an email he got from a fella who had skipped the country in order to avoid paying child support for his three kids.
I’m a deadbeat dad!!! (light your torches – gasoline in 89, 91, and 95 octane is available in your choice of containers). Yep, I’ve got three kids and I’m behind on my child kidnapping payments by probably 10 grand at present and considerably more behind on alimony and her lawyer fees. I skipped the country rather than be jailed for all of the above compounding my crimes. A runaway slave is the worst kind of slave – one that absolutely refuses to serve his massa.
Yep, that’s right. He compared the legal requirement that he provide financial assistance to his own children to … slavery.
In the rest of his letter, he encouraged other “slaves” to follow in his path.
My favorite bit is the quote I used as the headline:
Women from around the world look better than anything back in the states, cost less unless you’re totally stupid, and are much more easily disposed of.
Ooh. That last bit is rather unfortunately worded – unless he really is suggesting that outside the US it is easier to get rid of the bodies of murdered girlfriends and wives.
So anyway, MarkyMark’s post got linked to on the Men’s Rights subreddit. And this little discussion ensued. You may wish to activate your irony shields now.
Take note of the upvotes and downvotes for these three comments.
I don’t know if the impulse to blame everything on women is any different to the impulse to blame everything on immigrants/gay people/whatever, but the level of paranoia in the MRM does seem unusually high to me even compared to other right-wing movements. Though as I said, it’s hard to separate out what they really believe from the self-justifying bullshit.
Like for example Antz – does he actually believe the stuff he writes about mothers seeing children as nothing but a way to drain money from men? I honestly can’t tell, but if he really does think that there’s something odd going on with the way he thinks.
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That is an example of what I’m what I’m talking about. People tend to call patterns of thoughts they don’t understand (or odd as you put it) “crazy” or “insane”.
So you’re saying that you think his thought patterns aren’t unusual?
In this specific case I honestly think you’re reaching a bit.
The association of “crazy” or “insane” with violence has an especially nasty history as well. It is pretty commonly used to discriminate and violate the human rights of people with mental illness on the grounds that they are a danger.
@ Cassandra, I have “something odd going on” with the way I think-to clinical levels. I also have a history of PTSD symptoms and occasional mood issues and paranoia that are due to other health conditions. I know what it is like to walk into a random room and just feel that they are conspiring to get you, not really think it, feel it, while all the time knowing that it was not true and there was no good reason to think it might be.
When you dismiss someone’s politics and beliefs merely because they have mental illness, psychological symptoms, etc., you tacitly do it to all of us. I’ve had my experiences, analysis, opinions, politics, sexuality, gender, etc. dismissed on similar grounds.
AntZ is odd, yeah, but I don’t think we have any particular reason to believe he has any sort of mental illness. Oddness doesn’t mean that he isn’t mentally typical; having crappy critical reasoning skills or believing a conspiracy theory doesn’t make you mentally ill. There might be “something odd going on with they way he thinks” but as far as I can tell, it’s a rather mundane sort of odd. And his beliefs, like pretty much all other MRAs, are totally dismissible on their own merits, i.e. that they don’t make any sense when you examine them critically. Even if he does have a mental illness of some sort, we ought to judge his arguments the same way we would otherwise, by looking at whether they are well reasoned or not.
There are sometimes ethical issues surrounding whether or not one ought to mock or distribute somebody’s material online given that they are mentally ill– for example, if someone had a mental illness that caused them to have certain kinds of delusions and their writing/videos/etc.reflected that directly. There are definitely better ways of doing it than others, and many people find it ok to mock the material so long as you stick to the content and it doesn’t become a zoo exhibition about how “nuts” the person is. Even in these cases though you ought to end up dismissing the person’s claims based on the claims themselves: that they’re directly incoherent, make reference to imaginary or invented entities, make impossibly grandiose statements, etc. For example, I have no idea what NWOSlave’s psychological status is, but I don’t ignore what he says because he sounds “insane”; I ignore him because he has a history of making statements that are wildly factually inaccurate. I don’t give a crap about what Meller says because his politics as well as his weird fantasies about women’s roles are completely repellant. So on and so forth.
As DSC said, if you write off somebody’s beliefs due to their psychological status, you make it an ok strategy to use on anyone; the point is that it’s not an ok strategy to use at all. There are plenty of reasons to criticize/mock the MRM and associates that have nothing to do with the mental health of its participants. Use those instead.
My current favourite MRA to watch is John the Other.
The man is frickin’ hilarious, he’s started to wear glasses and have a little facial hair – just like another MRA prominenti… His embarrassing, quasi-academic writing style, reminiscent of a sophmore student’s first essay, is also familiar to anyone who’s read Paul Elam’s murder of metaphors.
Not all of you will agree with me on this, but MRAs, I think, are informed by their massive lack of emotional and sexual attention. They are embarrassed at this and view it as rejection. They see the best form of defense as attack and so take to their keyboards to invent a political movement. It’s very amusing.
The heavy focus on bodily functions is also quite telling but I’m sure what this indicates… Anyone got a psychology major?
I really appreciated this discussion and particularly the assertion that using ableist slurs allows people to not engage with the substance of someone’s thought. I’ve seen that a lot in MSM coverage of Ron Paul. Now, I completely disagree with him on almost every issue, but when pundits just dismiss him as ‘crazy’ they never actually have to discuss what is problematic about his views. I’d rather analysts why his positions are often repulsive (to me) than armchair diagnose or dismiss with a slur.
I don’t get why we’re assuming “Sick” absent extremely powerful evidence. MRAL is more or less in the same parallel universe as NWO, and depression is just not that strong.
“How much older? Because we’re talking about everybody involved being a teen right? or do women mature at 12 and men mature at 40? ”
I didn’t grow facial hair until I was 25. Most teenage girls are taller than boys and we know from research that females are sexually repulsed by men shorter than they are. We got along fine for centuries with men having sex with mature females but now feminism says that women aren’t allowed to choose. You’re not pro-choice.
Bostonian: 16 is too old for him. He wants 14 year olds (and fucking a 14 year old usually does lead to getting arrested, at least if one is more than about 15)
I don’t use, “insane” by itself (though I will use it as a modifier, e.g. “insanely fond of turkish delight”).
I will use, on occasion, “crazy”. It’s problematic, and I try not to use it in written works, because tone, and context, are easier to lose. I tend to use it as a way to express mania, frenetic action, etc.
“That was a crazy thing to do”, feels different to me from saying, “that man is crazy”. I happen to have grown up with, “batshit crazy” as a term which was used to mean irrational, but not persistent, behavior, as in the example above, it tended to be attached to specific things, not a blanket state of mind.
I think, insofar as such distinctions of usage are useful, that’s the delicate line that we are walking when we try to make comments about actions which seem irrational: How to make it the action/decision, not the person.
And I try to never use it in connection with a belief system. I don’t use it for actual mental disorders at all, unless I slip from being old, and having acquired some habits of thought in my youth.
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There is a lot of other word choices beside the usual ableist ones that can convey the word “irrational”. Picking and choosing which ones to use really doesn’t make you more accepting. The words you seem to think are ok are still problematic, they aren’t really any better than “crazy or “insane”. I guess you could say that it describes irrational behavior but it still has its roots in fear against the mentally ill. Words like “retarded” and “gay” seem to mean stupid and dumb in modern culture but just because it is used in that way doesn’t make it ok.
jumbofish: if you don’t mind my asking, do you have a few examples? (other than the very obvious and descriptive like ‘irrational’) I’d like to expand my limited English vocabulary in an appropriate and tolerant way.