This was posted to the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day, with the headline: “Saw this today and I suppose that’s where we’re headed.” It’s gotten 556 upvotes, last I checked. (Those are net upvotes: it got 848 upvotes, 292 downvotes.) This is the world that a lot of MRAs, and Redditors in general, think they live in.
A handful of Redditors, like this one, objected to the hysteria:
Notice the downvotes.
Amazingly, one of the few voices of reason to emerge in the whole discussion (besides that downvoted commenter and serveral others) turned out to be none other than Pierce Harlan of the False Rape Society (now called Community of the Wrongly Accused). While not averse to spreading misinformation about rape and false rape accusations himself, he argued in a comment (and in a similarly worded blog post) that this kind of raving hysteria wasn’t helpful, concluding:
The delicate balance that commands us to punish rapists while not punishing the innocent is extremely serious business. We need more sober, more adult, more serious voices to be part of the public discourse. The last thing we need is more Chicken Little hysteria, no matter which side it’s coming from.
I’m guessing the upvotes he got for his comment must have come from visitors from his blog, because up until he posted that comment the few dissenters were mostly being dismissed.
The Men’s Rights subreddit: Waxing hysterical about imaginary oppressions since March 2008.
GingerSnaps, it’s not that it’s inherently bad, it’s that America still has a serious issue lingering after the Cold War about “red commies” and people fear it without understanding it.
Dracula, oh no, I didn’t think you were contradicting me. Just clarifying what I was thinking, cause I know I’m not very articulate.
Argenti, exactly. And socialized medicine is bad because it’s SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. And liberals are bad because they’re liberals. You just can’t have a rational conversation with people who stubbornly stick to irrational ideas.
Okay, cool.
And yeah, there could be a basis in reality for his ideas having been “stolen”. If anything it’s probably a case of having been a part of various design teams and giving himself far more credit than he deserves.
Neither honesty nor humility are his strong suits, after all.
Unimaginative, I generally resort to a good reducio ad absurdum with that type, but that seems lost on NWO and MRAs in general. They seem to prefer the idea of letting people die of treatable conditions though.
The idea of opposing socialized medicine is one of those things that makes me realise I’m a foreigner to USian ways. I cannot get my head around why it could be bad. It’s like opposing the idea that puppies are cute.
nix that “though” at the end, not sure where that came from >.<
Slavey is also a great example of crank magnetism. Between he and Meller they seem to believe in every crackpot idea ever to hit the internet.
Dracula, I’m really thinking of an anecdote about my brother with the ‘stolen’ ideas. So I’m a bit biased on that. 🙂
Your (and others) view is probably more accurate.
I think you’ve got it backwards. Sexism (along with all the horrible biases NWO has against everyone who isn’t a straight, Christian, white male) is the refuge OF stupid people.
Cassandra, it’s very tempting to find other cranky things and feed them to him, isn’t it?
Has he seen Timecube? Maybe we could throw it at him to distract him next time he gets annoying.
Magpie, it’s a lot of prejudices rolled up into one package. How to make this simple…?
We’ve not only never had anything of the sort, but have slowly been dismantling the rest of the safety net as well — some people have issue with the idea of paying for something someone else is receiving, it’s seen as receiving a gov’n handout. And particularly in the case of health care where it makes very little sense to most people, they prefer it just be taken from their pay check and to not have to really think about it much.
Also, we’re fundamentally a Christian country in practice, despite what the first amendment says — which means a lot of people see it as something that charities should handle, not the gov’n. (It here can really mean any part of the safety net, from healthcare to food banks)
Crumbelievable — in some cases, for sure. In others it seems more like they’ve been so thoroughly entrenched in prejudiced shit that they never really looked outside their little corner of the world. NWO’s stupid may well have come first, I’m just thinking this is probably a bidirectional factor in most cases.
We could also just make up random paranoid theories to mess with him.
Jogging causes brain damage. The Illuminati who run the feminazi media don’t want you to know this, but it’s true. In fact, even running to catch a bus puts you in danger of your IQ immediately dropping by 50 points. This is why women say that they like men who’re fit, TRUE FACTS.
Argenti – “something someone else is receiving” – do you think they realise that they receive it too? That rich as well as poor can get free treatment?
Also, humor kills. This is why women say that they like men who’re funny – we’re trying to get them to unintentionally off themselves, just for the fun of it.
You know those annoying ads on sites like weather.com that are all “Local Mom angers doctors by finding secret cure for ageing”? I think NWO, Meller, etc are the people who actually click on that shit, thus making it worthwhile for companies to run those ads.
There is a species of possum that lives in rivers. They can detect and manipulate electrical currents with their fingers. Some of them have discovered the phone lines, and hack into the internet. TRUE FACTS
Conspiracy Theories R Us: rense.com
You’re …welcome?
And yes, my blood pressure spikes whenever I see people frothing at the mouth, insisting that it’s better for people to die, or be financially ruined, than to provide universal health care. God forbid that anything slow down the economic growth of the for-profit medical/insurance industry.
I used to work with a person from Denmark, who would rant at great length about how much better Denmark’s health care system was than Canada’s. He said that the Danish government figured out at one point that it cost more to track and charge back the costs of ambulance rides than it did to just provide them to people who needed them.
Magpie — they don’t care because they can already afford it, I think? Not to sound too much like NWO, but our media isn’t nearly as free as it could be, but it’s controlled by old money families, not some feminist conspiracy. Nonetheless places like Fox News will twist the “you already have health care” message such that people who risk going broke if they have a health crisis don’t seem to realize how shitty their health care is.
The 1% that the Occupy Wall Street protests are highlighting do basically control our media though, and they sure as shit don’t need free health care. Unfortunately it seems like large swathes of the middle classes have bought into the idea that their health care is good enough already *and* that universal health care would um…suck as much as the NHS. (Which is it’s own set of “but you’re just wrong!” issues)
There is a lot of stupid wrapped up here in other words >.<
And they’re electric eels not possums, the possums are just trying to snack on the eels.
The Haggis is an actual animal that wanders the Scottish countryside. Its cry sounds a lot like bagpipes and was in fact the inspiration for them. If you are foolish enough to eat The Haggis, it puts out spores that burrow into your brain and turn you into a socialist.
True facts.
Oh and the point of feeding aborted fetuses to fish is to make them want human meat, they’ll rise from the water and feast on man-flesh soon…
(that was one of NWO’s right?)
2 metres long and 600 volts! Remind me never to go swimming anywhere in South America.
I was thinking of Platypus electrolocation, but didn’t think I could convince him there were any near his place. (Then again, why not go for the big lie?)
Lol, *sensing* electricity is common enough in fish that there probably are fish near him that can do that. Platypuses I’d be more worried about that DEATH SPIKE!! Hm…I guess that means I’m only afraid of the males and thus misandrist?