Just a quick update on Eivind Berge: According to this news account, the Norwegian Men’s Rights blogger is considered enough of a threat to police officers that his two-week detention has been extended by four more weeks. According to the prosecutor, the “risk of recurrence of new criminal offenses” makes releasing him dangerous.
See my posts here and here for more on his arrest.
That’s not very funny, Sharculese. I have blonde hair 😉
A man walks into a bar. It’s a hard bar. There’s no punchline, because misandry isn’t funny.
A man signs up to take some classes in college. But he finds that the seats are too hard for his delicate bottom. So he sues them. A judge throws the lawsuit out because it is frivolous, and the man gets stuck paying a £ 37,000 bill. The man retaliates by calling a lot of people wh*res on Twitter. The world laughs at him. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Awh, the slaveman should hang out with my gramma some time. She also agrees that people (namely herself) should be able to drive without a license. She’s really pissed that the DMV wouldn’t renew it after she got into four accidents in as many months.
MISANDRY!!
(Of course, I would never let the slaveman anywhere near my gramma, but you know. I still think he’d be awesome at advocating for the rights of little old ladies to drive headlong into Brink’s trucks.)
Another option if you don’t want to pay insurance- don’t own a car! I know it sounds crazy, but owning a car is not MANDATORY. I know lots of people who live in areas where they can use alternative transportation and telecommuting to keep themselves from having to buy a vehicle. It saves a lot of money.
I mean, what’s next, do you expect FREE GAS just because you don’t think you ought to have to pay for your transportation fuel?
You don’t need a license to have a bicycle, nor do you need one if you vanpool, carpool, ride the bus, or take a trolley/subway. My husband got to 24 years of age before he got his driver’s license because we lived in a city where we had great buses coming every 15 minutes or we could ride bikes.
And if you really want to risk it, you can run around without insurance on your car. But you can get in a lot of trouble if you’re found out.
You do have a CHOICE. It’s just not what you WANT as a choice.
But you can’t have everything you want.
And that is the core of the MRM. Not having the choice you WANT = Oppression/Misandry.
Back when Ashcroft was the most prominent Missourian on the national stage, I tended to make a point of reminding people that the only reason he was available to be the AG was because Missouri preferred a dead guy to him in our Senate race. We may not be great, but at least we have some taste. :-p
“I have bullets and books and words and testosterone. I could be the next Anders Breivik.”
NWO, you’re selling yourself short. You forgot to mention you have the same level of cowardice, the same persecution complex and the same delusions of grandeur as Breivik.
When will these guys learn that showing up with a penis and following the stereotypical male gender roles does not automatically win them the Prize of Everything They Ever Wanted Without Any Hardship or Tribulation To Get It?
And when will they learn that women are not THINGs to be had?
Owly: I don’t have a license because my vision is so bad that even with corrective lenses I can’t pass the eye exam. THIS IS A GOOD THING. Seriously, if I can’t see road signs further than 10 feet away and have so little peripheral vision that I couldn’t see other cars trying to pass, I have no business driving. There is a reason that cars are often considered deadly weapons if someone intentionally tries to hit someone with one. Requiring a license to drive is protecting the general safety and welfare of citizens which has been a recognized role of government for as long as governments have existed and is not a violation of your freedom.
NWOSlave:
And I’ve rarely been happier to be wrong, if “happier” was an appropriate emotion on 22 July last year.
I don’t expect you to understand this, since it requires strange and alien powers like normal human empathy, but if it had been Berge, everyone who commented on his blog, including myself, would have felt partly responsible in some way, because our revulsion and mockery might have been one of the things that finally pushed him over the edge.
Obviously, this isn’t the kind of thing for which we could be arrested and charged as co-conspirators, but you’d have to be truly inhuman not to feel something in this situation.
@ Wetherby:
Don’t let yourself get caught in that trap. When someone makes a conscious choice to go out and murder the defenseless and the unsuspecting like Breivik did, they don’t do it because they were mocked. They do it because they’re vile, cowardly scum who truly believe that those they hate aren’t even human. The only people who would have shared responsibility with Berge would be those who loudly and frequently agree with him, not those who are rightly revolted by him. I refuse to take responsibility for the weakness of someone like Berge.
I don’t feel responsible for the reprehensible actions of others. It’s like the story of the two boys raised by an alcoholic. One grows up to be an alcoholic. The other grows up being very careful about how much they drink and drinks responsibly. Both of them use their alcoholic parent as the reason they made their respective choices.
Each of us has a choice, to do good, evil or to stagnate.
In high school, my husband was called all manner of homophobic slurs, had very few friends, had access to guns, loved heavy metal and Marilyn Manson music, etc. Yet he never went to school and shot other kids. In fact, he internalized a lot of the mocking and almost committed suicide. If I had not met him when I did, he may have gone through with it.
Many people endure horrible torture, sexual abuse, and blatantly unfair life situations. 99% of these people do not go on to perpetrate torture, sexual abuse and murder.
Let’s place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the people who decided to behave in such a manner and then used their experiences as justification.
You can’t make someone murder people.
As I’ll be moving to Bergen from the U.K. in a few weeks I can’t say I’m entirely unhapy about this. I don’t necessarily believe Berge is as dangerous as Breivik, but sure people would rather not take their chances. His views on women (and men and children for that matter) are certainly as reprehensible as Breivik’s, if not more so.
Sorka, as long as you get paid enough for the cost-of-living increase, it will probably be a great experience. Of course, my friends in England are claiming that ANYTHING would be preferable to this latest English summer.
Rationally, of course there’s no reason to blame oneself: my opposition to Berge’s views was total and unshakeable from the moment I first became aware of his existence. But in situations like this, one’s reactions aren’t necessarily rational.
In fact, this has reminded me of a real-life example: when a man was arrested on suspicion of being a serial killer of prostitutes, as soon as I found out that he lived in a council flat in a particular area, I joked “I wonder if [a friend of mine] processed his housing application?”, since he worked in the council’s housing department.
You can guess the punchline, can’t you?
Obviously, there was no reason to taint him by association: the application was completely above board, and he only started murdering prostitutes after he moved in there, at least as far as anyone is aware. But simply because he’d had a face to face conversation with this guy, my friend felt distinctly weird about the whole situation – obviously he didn’t feel responsible in any way (he had no reason to turn down the application, and even if he had done different prostitutes would probably have been murdered elsewhere), but you’d have to be truly inhuman not to feel anything at all.
It was this guy, for the record – with trigger warnings for descriptions of what he did to his victims.
AndersH: What British summer? But yes, it’ll be worth it and it’s only for 5 months initially!
Hah, people always complaining about our summers.. silly. 😛
*Hates the heat, has hayfever, and likes the rain*
Jeez, Shade, I am so jealous right now. I’ve about all I can stand of this ninety degrees, 100% humidity bullshit.
The major upside of this year’s British summer washout is that my nose has barely twitched this year.
Virtually every other year the onset of summer (which begins in April as far as my nose is concerned) brings with it an onslaught of sneezing, itching, dripping, you name it – and the only drugs that seem to work on me are the ones marked “May cause drowsiness”, which translates as “may make even the simplest activity feel as though you’re performing it while immersed in treacle”. And not having to go through that this year has been a massive bonus that’s more than worth putting up with the occasional monsoon-style downpour.
We could do with a few more downpours in the U.S. Got a bit of a drought going on.
We certainly haven’t – it hasn’t rained so far today, but it’s not 11am yet so there’s plenty of time for the clouds to get going.
Well, at least the temperature’s gone down a ways here. But we keep getting these insignificant little sprinklings of rain. Thunderstorms that last all of ten minutes, crap like that.
My plants are suffering. 🙁
We haven’t had a decent thunderstorm here for what seems like years (at least in my part of the country). Which sucks, because I love them. 🙁
At the minute here, it’s just wet and cloudy with only a little rain. But it’s about 18°C, so it’s not cold at all. Only downside is the mud (had to rescue a chicken yesterday because it has a massive lump of hardened mud stuck to its foot which was making it limp around, but some warm water solved that issue), and avoiding the giant lakes in the driveway.
Wait, are we seriously discussing weather? 😛