Today, in the Men’s Rights subreddit, we find Demonspawn, a long-time fixture in Reddit’s MRA circles, getting dozens of upvotes for a comment in which he advocates murdering family court judges and other government officials:
Demonspawn is responding to a post from Robert Franklin on Fathers and Families about Dan Brewington, “[a]n Indiana man fac[ing] five years in prison because he criticized the judge and the custody evaluator in his divorce and custody case.”
Or at least that’s how Franklin wants to frame the issue. While conceding that Brewington “often used intemperate language” on his blog, Franklin downplays what seems to have been a relentless four-year harassment campaign from the troubled father. According to a report on the case on the Eagle Country Online website:
[P]rosecutors argued that Brewington took his postings beyond being critical of the court system. They became personal against anybody who became involved with his case.
“This was sick revenge dragging my wife and kids into the matter,” Humphrey said during his testimony. “I don’t know of many cases where a subject has more clearly expressed his intent to do harm.” …
Brewington … called [custody evaluator Edward] Connor a child molester and prostitute in his “Internet rampage,” contacted the Children’s Home of Northern Kentucky where Conner is involved as a board member, and sending mass e-mails to Connor’s colleagues and legal professional around the area. …
Connor’s wife, Dr. Sara Jones-Connor, reaffirmed what her husband shared with the judge.
“For over four years we have dealt with his attacks on a daily basis,” Jones-Conner said.
And Franklin leaves out the most serious of the accusations against Brewington: that he threatened to murder the judge.
Brewington’s cellmate at the Dearborn County Law Enforcement Center for two-and-a-half months, Joseph McCaleb, had sent a letter to jail officials on September 25 after being concerned with what he heard from Brewington.
“He talked about following (Judge Humphrey) home, shooting him, and dumping him in the river,” McCaleb said of Brewington’s alleged “detailed and thought out” plan.
I should note that after testifying that Brewington’s threats seemed serious, McCaleb later concluded that they weren’t; and Judge Brian Hill did not take his testimony into consideration when sentencing Brewington.
Was Brewington’s sentence fair? I don’t know. But Franklin’s posting was misleading, to say the least, if not dishonest. And while a few people raised questions about it, no one on the Men’s Rights subreddit bothered to spend the two minutes on Google that would have turned up the story I’ve been quoting from, instead relying entirely on Franklin’s, er, incomplete account.
Whether or not Brewington’s threats were sincere, Franklin’s post had Demonspawn and many others on the Men’s Rights subreddit thinking violent thoughts themselves. Here are some more selections from the discussion there. Note that every single violent comment I quote below got upvotes from the regulars.
Here, Boss_Money invokes the memory of Tom Ball, who killed himself in hopes that his dramatic suicide would encourage other MRAs to start firebombing courthouses and police stations:
Later in that same thread, coldacid suggests that suicide is a much less effective strategy than murder:
Anxdiety, meanwhile, shares his fantasies of violent “retribution.”
Boss_Monkey returns with a miniature manifesto for armed revolution:
And whats_up_doc suggests that violence may be the only solution:
The Men’s Rights subreddit is by and large the most “moderate” of all the major Men’s Rights forums online. But this is the language, and the thinking, of a hate movement. Anyone who really cares about improving life for men needs to call this kind of thing out, and make clear that it is completely unacceptable in any rights movement worthy of the name.
I went to take pictures of duckies in the park and Steele came back and added a whole new page to the comment thread.
HOW COULD I EVER KEEP UP WITH A MAN THIS EFFICIENT?!
And he has a high IQ.
@Morkaischosen
” “Like @Cliff Pervocracy said, men are actually raped, why not deal with that? (something tells me b/c then they don’t get to hate on women about it).”
Except the times when men get raped by women.”
True that. It was stupid for me to have said what I did. I definitely did not chose my words carefully and ended up saying something that ignored the terrible experiences of an entire group of people. Thanks for pointing it out. It was not what I intended, but really, I should know better.
I apologize for what I said and what it insinuated.
@ Not Cloudiah, please have several internets on me.
I think we need some Butt Trumpet Severus Snape up in here!
Freitag:
It makes perfect sense if you assume the children are a possession — and, moreover, her possession (and if she has sole custody it’s not a large leap from the former to the latter) so that killing them hurts the ex but not the killer.
SCRABBLEEXPLOSIONMRA:
But can an MRA put sugar on his porridge?
Gametime:
Well, seeing as how he thinks everyone who’s not him is part of some special privileged class, probably.
Rutee:
Well, I was amused.
kirby:
I think we have to get him to say “eloprav”.
“Excuse me? I am a wealthy urban professional and educated individual. I take Boobzland to task in some of my spare time. I assure you, it’s not difficult or time consuming.”
Oh look, it’s one of our intellectual and physical superiors, come down from the lofty heights to tell all us nerds and losers how much we suck and will never be as cool as he is. How terribly original.
@Steele
“And with that, I’m off. Gotta get some work done. Then I have a date with my signficant other, who is grateful as heck to have snagged someone like me.”
Pics or it didn’t happen.
@Steelehole
“And this is all on the clock.”
So you’re fucking off at work, then? Color me suprised.
Can we stop with the “men have to support women” bullcrap? If a man doesn’t want to financially support a woman, then he doesn’t have to. I have a friend whose parents split everything down the middle 50/50, from housing, to food, to items for their child. They even have separate savings accounts. If you don’t want to support a woman, don’t get married. Don’t pay for dates. You may not get a lot of second dates, but tough shit, at least you have your money. Or how about don’t marry a woman that doesn’t have a career? PUAs (like Roosh) always go on saying that men don’t care about a woman’s career, only her youth and beauty. Well, young beautiful women tend to not make lots of money, unless they’re actresses or models. If you want a hot young woman who is going to cook and clean for you, you’re going to have to pay the rent, jackass! These MRAs want to have their cake and eat it too. They want a hot young twenty year old who is entirely self sufficient, and when the relationship is over she will walk away with nothing and never bother you again. HA! And the fact that these women aren’t lining up to be with these homely middle aged assholes is misandry. Women are such whores (sarcasm)
Now now, perhaps the evil feminist teacher ho made him unable to see things written by men prevented him from ever learning the difference between “off” and “on”,
“I wanted to hone my rhetoric skills against some easy targets.”
You could start by replacing “rhetoric” with “rhetorical”, thus demonstrating that you’ve actually learned something from all your trolling. If anything your “skills” seem to be getting less impressive over time.
No, you didn’t develop the skills because you’re lazy, and found it easier to blame one single teacher. How pathetic is that?
We’ve all had bad teachers. I still remember the sinking feeling in my stomach when I found out that I was getting a particularly poor English teacher for a second year. But while doing his tedious grammar exercises and jumping through his various unimaginative hoops, I practically took root in the local library, read voraciously and wrote obsessively.
Because that’s how you achieve anything in life: you motivate yourself, and you put the hours in. No-one else is going to make you. Few are even going to encourage you, especially when you’re notching up Malcolm Gladwell’s famous 10,000 hours.
At school, we were trained to read and write intelligently and get through the relevant exams. Even though English was my one consistently straight-A subject, I was never steered towards writing as a career – and yet that’s how I ended up earning a living.
That’s because I wanted it badly enough to go through the humiliation of repeated rejection (I started out in the pre-Web era, when trying to break into freelance writing involved endless fruitless phone calls and knocking on doors), to work for nothing on countless occasions just to get a foot in the door, to live with the constant insecurity that comes with having no contract of employment. If I miss a printer’s deadline or produce glaringly sub-par work, that hard-won regular writing gig will pop like the flimsiest soap bubble. If one of my editors moves elsewhere, I have to start schmoozing his or her successor and hope that they’re not proposing a scorched-earth policy with their current writing stable to establish their own identity.
I suspect, deep down, that you realise all this, and know that your “misandrist” teacher is merely a handy excuse. If she hadn’t existed, you’d have come up with another.
I’m curious: What, exactly, do you mean by “become a writer,” and what about it is something you cannot do now?
Because here’s the thing. I ditched a law career to become a freelance writer, after nearly 30 years of being told it was impossible to write for a living, that nobody could do it without also having a day job, that I was throwing away all my intelligence and talents for *not* going to law school or practicing law, and that dying in the gutter from rabies a la Edgar Allan Poe is not romantic.* I started with an Internet connection and a copy of The Writers’ Market. (See also: http://www.writersdigest.com/) In my first year, I worked 15-20 hours as week and spent less than $100 on business expenses, mostly postage.
It’s taken me three years to make a living at this, during which I have never once put in a 40-hour week on writing alone. Yet the writing alone now makes me more per year than being a lawyer did. And it’s not even legal writing – I didn’t need the J.D. to do what I do now. (Law schools don’t teach legal writing for crap anyway; you learn it on the job or you never learn it at all. It’s amazing how many lawyers never learn it at all.)
So what I guess I don’t understand, Steele, is what about that you can’t do now, in your spare time, if “becoming a writer” means so very much to you? Not only do you not have to quit your day job to get paid to write, your day job will be considered an asset for anything you want to write that’s even tangentially related to it. And if you want to write fiction or poetry, you don’t even need that – all you need is some paper, a pen, and to sit down and DO IT.
If someone in your past told you you couldn’t be a writer, prove them wrong. Write.
*Actually, that last one is true.
PS: From someone who used to do honed rhetoric for a living – you don’t “hone” it against easy targets. You “hone” it against people whom you are genuinely terrified to argue with because they’re markedly better at arguing than you are. …So either you’re genuinely terrified of the Manboobz braintrust, or you are being inefficient here.
PPS: If you have time to do crunches and/or comment endlessly on Manboobz while “on the clock,” you have time to write. DO IT.
PPPS: If you are interested in writing satire, see Clovis Asstrumpet’s comment, above, for a solid example.
PPPPS: You may not want to start with satire; it requires a certain ability to take everything lightly, especially yourself.
The other thing that makes Torvus Buttvarpole’s protestations so feeble is that it’s never, ever been easier, in the whole of human history, to publish and get yourself an instant worldwide audience.
He obviously has the spare time – we’ve had ample evidence of that over the past week! – so what on earth is stopping him?
Admittedly, actually earning a living is a fair bit harder (when I went freelance, I was cushioned at first by the payoff from a voluntary redundancy deal), but that’s where the work and the painstaking reputation-building comes in.
The real problem is that in order to make it as a writer you need to develop a hide that would make a rhinoceros look on in helpless envy. If mild criticism from a teacher decades ago is enough to put you off a writing career, and exposure as a sockpuppet is enough to kill off your blog, you really aren’t cut out for it, regardless of how much undeveloped talent you might feel you possessed.
Oh yeah, and you also need to be ruthlessly and laceratingly self-critical.
I know when I’m writing below par because I have to out of professional necessity – sometimes I have to submit something I’m not happy with because I’m up against the dreaded deadline cosh, but I’m fully aware of this when I press ‘send’.
Now I don’t know whether Steele Varpolehorn is genuinely kidding himself when he claims to be running rhetorical rings around the rest of us or whether he’s just adopting a cockily self-confident pose – but the evidence speaks for itself. And if he really can’t see where he’s been going wrong, he’s equally not cut out for a writing career.
It’s true. Heck, you don’t even need to send eleventybillion queries in order to get a manuscript published or reviewed anymore. The Booksluts just posted about how to do it, even.
Touche. Also, before Steele McVarpoleson claims the reason he’s so thin-skinned is that one writing teacher once upon a time: Dude, grow up, get your own spine, and WRITE SOME STUFF ALREADY.
yall realize your talking about a dude who gave up his blog after two months because he didnt immediately get what he wanted, right?
Aw, how cute. MikeySteelePoleButthoirn has an imaginary girlfriend.
He’s right to call the MRM a movement. It’s very much like a bowel movement.
Now there’s a happy coincidence – I’ve just had a piece turned down.
To be honest, I wasn’t surprised: I took a big stylistic risk and while my editor made it clear that he personally loved it, he said that it wasn’t right for the magazine. So could I do a complete rewrite within the hour, as he still had that pesky printers’ deadline to contend with?
This is what being a professional writer is all about: it’s not just responding well to criticism but responding quickly. I didn’t have time to get all butthurt about the fruit of my labour being summarily rejected, even though I’d spent the better part of a weekend composing it. My editor commissioned it, and if he didn’t like it, then tough: if I couldn’t knock out a replacement he’d get someone else to do it. And if that someone else turned out to be better… well, that’s my problem too.
I can just imagine Torvus Buttsteele’s reaction if his behaviour here is anything to go by: he’d fire off endless emails quibbling about exactly what “turned down” meant, would miss the deadline in the process, lose the job altogether and then whine about MISANDRY if the editor was female.
I’m guessing that the very existence of female editors makes Mikey’s blood boil.
Hey Dani Alexis, that link doesn’t work.
I don’t think we need to assume the girlfriend’s nonexistent, and frankly it seems a bit petty- we have much better targets to aim at, after all. 😉
@morkais
it’s just that the ‘i dont have time for you losers (who ive been posting at nonstop for days), im gonna go do awesome stuff with my hot girlfriend’ thing is as trite as internet cop-out retreats get