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Men’s Rights Redditors take on racism. By which they mean a white dude admitting that white dudes aren’t actually oppressed

Gold Medalist, Oppression Olympics

Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the locals are pig-biting mad about racism. Are they organizing vigils for murdered black teen Trayvon Martin? Are they challenging the Hunger Games fans who are sending out racist tweets complaining about the character “Rue” being played by a black actress?

Nope. They are doing something much, much braver. They are taking on a white dude for mocking other white dudes who are convinced they are the truly oppressed.

Over on the Boston Magazine web site, blogger Barry Nolan sets forth this truly hateful argument:

I have been a white male all my life and to tell you the truth, I have found it to be a pretty sweet deal. … Wherever you look and by almost any metric, any statistic, it works out to be a pretty sweet deal to start out life as a white male. …

So I cannot, for the life of me, understand why so many white men like me can be found whining about how tough it is to be a white man. It’s a mystery to me how they came to feel so beset on every side by feminists, minorities, and “the system.” When in fact, the system is so stacked in our favor, it’s almost embarrassing.

On the Men’s Rights subreddit a post blasting Nolan as a “racist idiot” now boasts 90 upvotes. In the comments, the brave antiracists set poor Nolan straight on a thing or two. To Ellwood78, it’s just a big coincidence that most of the powerful figures in the US happen to be white dudes:

NoNoJCM, meanwhile, reports on his own bitter experience as one of the oppressed:

Irrel_M is apparently a Stephen Colbert fan who isn’t in on the joke:

To paraphrase Sojourner Truth, “ain’t I a white dude?”

Note: This post incorporates some

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LBT
LBT
12 years ago

Goddammit! I wanted to poke MRAL with a stick! And I MISSED IT.

God I’m so depressed.

And dammit, I KNOW bipolar people. I might be living with one in the near future. Somehow, they have managed to NOT be complete asshats; they are actually quite nice people. This leads me to believe that them being bipolar is something unrelated to their level of assholishness.

Xanthë
12 years ago

I missed the meltdown too, after noticing SauronsContactLens along with felixBC! Damn! But at least we (including David, Shaenon, and everyone else) managed to out two sockpuppets for the price of one, which is a rather nice return on investment.

Now, I noticed that in Scooby Doo’s unmasking, he said “When have I ever lied about anything? That’s not true.” and “And I’m not lying about being bipolar… I was recently diagnosed.”

Seeing as MRAL might be reacting to one of my comments back on page 2, I’ll spell it out: as MRAL, you’ve lied to us. When you turned up at Pharyngula, those of us who read that blog as well as this one spotted you lying; we do have critical reading skills, memories, and a reasonable modicum of natural curiosity.

Now as “Sauron” you said a whole-lot of MRAL-ish stuff, but added the diagnosis of being bi-polar (which felix speculated might be a recent development). You weren’t directly accused of lying about that, however, though that must remain a possibility, because unfortunately, you do tend to lie.

As someone with a brother who suffers from bi-polar depression, if the diagnosis is true, please, please, please take it seriously. Do the things that minimise the effects of the depression. Do exercise. Get regular sleep. Look after your diet. Do stress-relief type things. Take the therapy options advised by your counsellors. Take the medicines advised by your physicians, and don’t be afraid to ask to switch to different drugs if you have no measurable improvement in mood, or side-effects, or other bad responses to them. And also stay away from the Internet sites that you get obsessed about, seeing as lurking and sock-puppeting here on MBz doesn’t seem to help you in the slightest.

MollyRen (@MollyRen)
12 years ago

I know MRAL is gone, but I’d like to remind a hilarious lie he one said: he tried to pass as a middle-aged man with a limp and working in a factory. “He” was poor but had been offered a computer by a family member. (I might have mixed up some details, but that’s basically it)

Wait, Mr. Al is actually NWOslave? 😛

Kyrie
Kyrie
12 years ago

Molly: he’s on his way, but not there yet. Come back in twenty years, he might be.

Shaenon
12 years ago

And I did block the site, but I unblocked it recently, because I thought enough time had passed.

What, you thought you’d come back and everyone would have given up on being feminists?

When I was in middle school I was relentlessly picked on by a kid named Israel DePew. He made fun of my very stylish red plastic glasses. You know you’re at the bottom of the social pecking order when the kid named Israel DePew is bullying you.

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