Well, now you’ve gone and done it, you evil feminists: you’ve turned 0bvious_Atheist into a Nazi!
We first met the Men’s Rights subreddit regular the other day, when in a fit of ingenuity he blamed the Newtown school shootings on, er, Title IX. Well, his strange political journey has continued, and on his blog, on Boxing Day, the Canadian MRA officially announced his conversion to neo-Nazism. Literally. Let’s let him explain:
I have grown impatient
I have lost my desire for conventional activism. We live in an era where men like Warren Farrell are run off campus by mobs of Femistasi, men like Keenan Midgley get maligned for trying to start Men’s Centres, JohnTheOther gets harassed in the streets and others like him get assaulted, Mr. Heimbach a white students advocate in the United States, is constantly maligned by the media and the intellectual establishment, and Jared Taylor, a meek and mild Yale graduate, is harassed at every turn by the establishment.
Huh. I have to admit I’m not completely up-to-date on all the examples of anti-white, anti-male oppression he lists here, but I would like to point out that Warren Farrell did not, in fact, get run off the University of Toronto campus. A number of students protested his visit, some of them quite rudely, but the police interceded on his behalf, clearing away protesters so he could go ahead and make his speech.
I also looked up that vague reference to “Mr. Heinbach,” and discovered that Matthew Heimbach is a student at Maryland’s Towson University who wants to start a White Student Union there. As part of his campaign for tolerance on behalf of America’s beleaguered white majority, he recently posed in front of Martin Luther King Jr.’s church in Montgomery holding a Confederate flag.
Gosh, how terribly unfair it is that some people might have criticized him for this.
Mr. Atheist continues:
I’m a young man. I don’t have the patience to go around asking for permission to exercise my inalienable, natural right to freedom of association. As Harold Covington said, Whites feel they need a permission slip from quote “the Jews” unquote to advocate for them. I feel the same thing can be said of Men’s Rights Activism. We feel that we need permission from Feminists, the intellectual establishment, and the state to self-advocate. Our entire movement has become a quest for permission from the left to self-advocate.
I’m pretty sure that not even a single molecule of that is even remotely true. What color is the sky in Imaginary Backwards Land?
We want a Men’s Ministry in the government. We want Men’s organizations on campus. We want White student unions. All of those things are politically toxic to the establishment and out of reach, and furthermore, if you look at what the “Men’s Ministries” in the Northern European welfare states have done you will remain unimpressed, and perhaps even alarmed, at how little they have mitigated the total alienation of young men from the respective societies of those countries.
Of course, the young men who are most alienated from society in the Northern (and Southern) European welfare states today are the immigrants who are so despised by Mr. Atheist and his fellow White “Nationalist” racist assholes. And these young male immigrants aren’t feeling alienated because of a lack of White Student Unions or the unimpressive actions of Men’s Ministries; they’re feeling alienated because of racism and a lack of jobs.
With this in mind we must recognize that productive organizations simply are not going to become a reality. If you doubt me, you can go look at what they did to Dr Warren Farrell when he tried to speak at the University of Toronto. I have absolutely no desire to be screamed at, spit on, expelled, fired, ostracized, and made into a pariah for simply asking to exercise my right to freedom of association.
So the fact that a couple of dozen students protested against a speaker on a college campus, delaying his talk for half an hour or so, means that normal political activity on behalf of your ass-backwards faux “civil rights movement” is impossible? Mr. Atheist, do you have any fucking idea what real civil rights advocates went through in order to get the same basic rights as everyone else, like the right to fucking vote? Do you think that feminists weren’t ever “screamed at, spit on, expelled, fired, ostracized, and made into … pariah(s)?”
What sort of strange entitled bubble do you live in that you think political activism should be painless? Or that your political opponents should simply roll over once you express your opinions?
Congratulations intellectual establishment. After around 14 years of politically correct education at politically correct institutions run by politically correct professors you have alienated me, first as a White, and secondly as a male. I have got absolutely no patience for your goddamn processes, your forms, your organizational quotas and quorums required to get approval from the UVSS. I’m fed up, and I’m going elsewhere else to self-advocate.
If you’re really serious about going “elsewhere else,” might I suggest another planet?
As market Anarchists and Libertarians constantly must remind you crypto-Marxists, if you ban something the buyer will go elsewhere in the market to get it. That’s exactly what I plan to do. Rather than grovelling at the feet of professors, academics, pseudo-intellectual social justice warriors, and Femistasi, I’m just going to go join the Western Front, a quasi-Neo-Nazi, semi-illegal White Nationalist political organization that accepts me for what I am and understands my problems. You have driven a relatively well off, intelligent, middle class, White male, who used to vote NDP, into the arms of the very people you taught me to despise for the totality of my formative years.
Great. I guess the one upside of all this is that Mr. Atheist won’t be calling feminists “feminazis” from now on. Not that “femistasi” is much of an improvement.
Oh, and in case anyone needs visual evidence of how much of a racist fuck 0bvious_Atheist really is — not that there’s much doubt — here’s a link to a cartoon he stuck onto the end of one of his recent YouTube videos. But first, a TRIGGER WARNING for really really racist rape imagery. Link.
(Note: There doesn’t seem to be any information online about a neo-Nazi group called Western Front, at least not in Canada. There was evidently one by that name in Los Angeles at one point. Does this group, like the anti-white-male oppression he talks about, exist only in 0bvious_Atheist’s head? EDITED TO ADD: There is a group called Northwest Front; presumably that’s what he meant.)
Also, “don’t walk alone at night or accept the consequences” translates to “women walking alone at night are fair game” so it encourages rapists.
“Don’t date ‘bad boys’ or accept the consequences” translates to “she’s chosen to date me therefore I can treat her as badly as I want to”.
See how that kind of thinking can be used as reasons to abuse people, and encourages abuse/rape culture?
Didn’t the MRAs throw a collective hissy-fit when the SLPC put them on the same list as the Klan and Neo-Nazi groups?
“Didn’t the MRAs throw a collective hissy-fit when the SLPC put them on the same list as the Klan and Neo-Nazi groups?”
Yep, they’re supposedly a non-violent civil rights movement. Thus the SLPC were a bunch of vile misandrist feminists for listing them as a hate group (Steele speak intentional)
This guy would probably deny that his neo-nazi group is a hate group.
He probably thinks Adolf was slandered because he was justifiably upset over Kraft calling their new Vegemite-and-cheese spread iSnack2.0.
I have been a pretty big fan of this website for a while now–a little over a year actually. I mostly lurk. I only post like once in a blue moon.
I find that lately…the comments section is not very welcoming of newcomers…
I don’t think Melissa is a troll. I think she was just unfamiliar with the concept of rape culture…Just two years ago I had the same pattern of thinking as Melissa. Not out of maliciousness–but only because the ideas behind rape culture were never presented to me before. I simply hadn’t realized I was blaming the victim with that line of thinking. Every newcomer unfamiliar with certain concepts of Feminism is not a troll.
I used to really enjoy reading the comments here and the friendly community–but lately, I’m kinda becoming more uncomfortable… >_>
Welcome, Brooklyn G!
It took me a while of lurking to work up nerve to comment, too – not because I was too worried about being seen as a troll, but because most of the regulars here are formidably educated and I wasn’t too sure I could contribute. However, while there are kitten videos, I think I’ll be okay. 😉
Melissa may well be sincere, but she was following in the footsteps of a lot of abuse/rape apologists (who you’ll have seen, I would guess) on the site, so it does set people’s troll alarms going. There’s also the matter of others here having been victims of such abuse, and really not needing to see the apologetics all over again. Worse, when people did engage and debate, she doubled down, and then said she didn’t expect an argument.
Thing is, this isn’t a Feminism 101 site. It’s to mock the extremes of misogyny. There are places on the net one can go for the basics, or reading lists, or so on.
I’m glad you’ve commented, and I hope you don’t get scared off. You’re not the only one here who’s moving out of the whole misogynist, rape culture thing – some members grew up in extremely misogynistic households, or are former MRAs themselves. It’s not a bar to commenting.
Some of us actually are trying to help her, albeit in a tough love sort of way. The magical thinking that she’s currently indulging in isn’t any more helpful to her in the long run than it is to anyone else.
BrooklynG: I’m not a fan of being hard on newcomers> I’m pretty tolerant of idiots, even after they’ve proven to be idiots (see Diogenes, varpole, John Anderson, et alia).
Mellissa didn’t come in politely. She came in saying, “I speak the truth” and the concomitant, even if unstated, corollary to that is, “and you people need to hear it.”. That’s hostile. That she followed it with abuse apology, and was both aggressive, and whiney, telling us she couldn’t keep up; that we were being too mean to her, that we were refusing to admit to the truth of her positions, that no one engaged with her actual arguments, etc. isn’t the sort of thing which leads to more gentle treatment and explanation.
Yes, she has gotten a but of rough handing, out of the gate, but she’s not been a shrinking violet either.
I’m pretty sure that if Melissa reacted in a different way to us telling her she’s victim blaming, like apologizing and wanting to learn more, we would like her better.
I’m not really sure that this comment section is unwelcoming to newcomers. I’ve read this site for 2ish years, and only started commenting this fall. I’ve never felt unwelcome. But maybe that’s because I didn’t show up and start making excuses for rapists and abusers.
I definitely sympathize with people wanting to jump in and be welcomed with open arms. I don’t really think that means that the commentariat on every website needs to tolerate things that are against its stated message or that a commenter is owned an in-depth explanation of why their opinion is problematic. This is a rough comments section in a lot of ways. You can see that reflected in how comments are posted – that we can’t edit our old comments, for instance. There’s discussion of some pretty foul misogyny. There are trolls here to defend that misogyny and people arguing against them. People here are sharp. There’s naturally quite a lot going on that makes this a challenging place to comment. The onus is on people to say what they mean and be able to reconsider, defend and amend their argument. If Melissa spent more than a second reading over the comments on this site, that’s something she would have known.
Anyway, I hope you don’t feel unwelcome, BrooklynG.
Reginaldgriswold, I misread that as “I’ve read this site for 21ish years” and thought, Whoa!
Then I turned my brain back on. 😛
This blog is older than some of its readers!
LOL!
I don’t think rough is the right word.
In the first place, I don’t like comments that can be edited (and I say this as someone who would love to be able to correct hasty typing, and thoughts I thought I’d managed to close/complete). One has to own one’s words.
I do think this is a place where one has to be an adult. If you choose to stake a claim, be prepared to defend it. Accept that, carefully as you may think you have thought out a position, you may be wrong. No, being wrong is never what one wants to be, and sometimes it hurts to face/admit.
One also has to expect that when one chooses to hang one’s ass in the wind, there will quite possibly be people who are moderately (or even quite) expert in the subject. Doesn’t mean they are going to be right, but you’d better have something more than, “I am sure it’s so,” to back your position.
I just had a case of that with Bee. I misread an aspect of law. I was wrong; because the language of law is parallel to english, but not the same. That I am fairly expert in some law (The Third Article of the Geneva Conventions of 1948 and 1972) doesn’t mean I am expert in all aspects; even those (like RICO) that I try to keep up with.
There will be times when one has to accept that issues one holds dear, are not issues everyone else accepts.
And there will be pushback to some ideas. If one persists, there will be more pushback. if one is an asshole about that persistence it comes with a cost. Cope.
That’s what I mean by being an adult. Support your fact claims with evidence. Look at contrary opinions with an open mind. Deal with people who don’t accept your opinion claims. Assume that people are acting in good faith (until/unless they prove otherwise).
Own your words.
Brooklyn G — I want to second what everyone else said, and welcome you, because we really are nice to people who don’t start by posting about how they know than us and must be right. Doubling down is like going all or nothing in a situation where you can’t win — you’ll end up with nothing, in this case that means little sympathy.
But here, have a mini pig —
Precunium,
“melissa: You say no one engaged you.”
“Ok, well I think I did, here http://manboobz.com/2012/12/28/2012-year-of-triumphs-for-the-mens-rights-movement/comment-page-2/#comment-236334 and later.”
What you say in that comment is not really addressing the core issue. Your just accusing me of being misogynistic etc..
“That you bailed doesn’t mean no one engaged you. It means you quit, and now you are blaming us for your not going back to follow up before you came to this thread.”
Firstly, my time zone is CONSIDERABLY earlier than the USA. “You bailed” actually means that I stepped away from my computer and got some sleep, at like 1AM or there abouts. HOW UNREASONABLE OF ME! I (partially) explained why I had not gone back. I did complain somewhat about the levels of animosity I was getting, but this does not mean I blame other people for my decision not to got back. Is a decision to walk away from a heated and unpleasant discussion something that carries blame anyway? Can’t I legitimately just decide to get on why my life instead?
“I’ve never felt unwelcome. But maybe that’s because I didn’t show up and start making excuses for rapists and abusers.”
That’s lovely for you, but I have also seen people jumped-upon because their sarcasm was read straight, or their initial comments just outright misinterpreted. I can understand why commenters here would be prone to react like that, since here there most definitely be a hideous variety of monsters, and there are invariably apologies once it’s established that a new commenter isn’t a troll, but I’ve been lurking here from the start and never really felt equal to commenting. It doesn’t help that any trollish comment about people being ugly, unlovable failures tends to be met with a flurry of responses about regulars’ epic achievements in life, love and ability to nitpick grammar. Having underachieved hilariously as a result of horrible mental health, and being generally inclined to take criticism to heart and self-loathe about it for stupid lengths of time, I think it’s fair to say that there are reasons for being unnerved by the prospect of commenting here that have nothing to do with latest victim-blaming tendencies. (Although as a finely-honed negative-thought machine I’m pretty sure that I have exaggerated the danger of being pointed at and mocked for being boring and smelling of wee, and am just remembering isolated incidents that bolster my general sense of dread.)
That said, there was a bookbinding pun recently and I can forgive a lot for that.
Before I got to that comment, I was originally going to say that the phrase “a loving relationship with a woman who earns it” is horrible in a way that the more extreme foamings on here just don’t manage. It gets straight under my skin because of all the alarm bells it doesn’t ring in the minds of all the many well-meaning basically okay people who would think I was being oversensitive if I commented on it.
I think that instead of spending time earning man points I shall have a cup of tea and a sandwich and force a man to sit on a hard chair and polish my femistasi uniform boots. Which are made for slutwalkin’.
“Latent”. Bollocks. How did I manage that one?
Melissa What you say in that comment is not really addressing the core issue. Your just accusing me of being misogynistic etc..
Poppycock. The core issue is that you are blaming the victim. I’d also like to see where, in that comment, I said you were being misogynist. I said: “the avoidable consequence of choices” is blaming the victim. You are saying women who get beaten are suffering the consequence of going out with abusers; and that it’s avoidable.
Which is addressing the core issue (see above).
I said you bailed because you couldn’t be arsed to go and read the comments which were made to you. You said it there, “I didn’t have the time to read them, I skimmed them”. I didn’t say you bailed because there was a gap. This isn’t a real time conversation. I said you were free to take all the time you needed.
You have all the time in the world. If you take an extra hour… if you take an extra day to actually know what the fuck you are talking about that’s to the good. (that, btw, is substantive engagement. Engagement which gives you liberty to take your time; which doesn’t condemn you at all).
When you complain that no one engages with you, and simultaneously admit you didn’t check to see if they had… you are admitting to arguing in bad faith.
If what you want is, “to get on with your own life” you would do that. Instead you quit one conversation, and joined another as if you hadn’t left the first unfinished.
That’s rude. To complain that people are being mean to you, by holding you to the logical conclusions of your arguments; when you have admitted to not giving them the courtesy of reading what they wrote… not cricket.
In my next comment to you I also didn’t call you a misogynist. I said you were a victim blamer.
I also addressed your specific words/arguments. That’s called substantive response. I’m sorry you didn’t like my arguments, nor my conclusion, but I did engage with your arguments; and I didn’t just accuse you of being misogynistic.
Honestly, I don’t think you limit your victim blaming to women, so I don’t think misogynist is a fair claim… it’s too narrow a descriptor.
Totally agree with that, The Omega Woman! That statement made my sin crawl.
As to your comment about trollish comments being met with regulars’ epic achievements – most of the troll comments have come from complete jerks who are also transparently lying about their own achievements. Pell, NWOslave, Steele and Diogenes all come to mind. They set themselves up as multi-talented geniuses, they are full of ill-will, and they just come to troll. Do you think they deserve any better?
Yes, it is easy to misinterpret sarcasm in print, when it’s someone you don’t know, there’s no indicators like /snark or the comment is just posted on its own. It’s the old problem of no body language and no voice tone, the things that make up so much of our face-to-face communication. BUT I can say I’ve also seen plenty of apologies when someone has jumped, and the original commenter, or someone else, says “Hey, I was being sarcastic.”
Speaking of hard chairs, did you see Katz’s latest Pierre cartoon? The adventures of Tom Martin at Ikea. Priceless. 🙂
@Melissa – not everyone else here is posting from the US, ya know. The time zones are all over the place.
The subtle sexism like “a loving relationship with a woman who earns it” is far more insidious and therefore far more dangerous than, say, Meller’s fantasies about transforming all women into a cross between Hello Kitty and a Madame Alexander doll. The idea that it’s possible to “earn” a relationship is pretty fucked up regardless of which gender/s it’s being aimed at, actually.
“Do you think they deserve any better?”
No, but it does sometimes feel as though meeting “I am obviously right because I synthesised the lost works of Sapho INSIDE MY MANMIND purely with my brilliance then translated them then erased them again because they were sentimental crap written by a woman, so ha!” with “no you didn’t because you can’t even spell her and my Literae Humaniores Double First tramples on your trollish lies!” is playing into a framework that shouldn’t be there in the first place. But then I’m pretty sensitive to anything along those lines because my depression spends a lot of time telling me that I have FAILED because I am STUPID and being STUPID is BAD and means I have no value as a human, so I tend to prefer to ignore the self-aggrandising lies. I’d probably feel differently about it if I actually had any achievements to flourish.
“The idea that it’s possible to “earn” a relationship is pretty fucked up regardless of which gender/s it’s being aimed at, actually.”
It really is. I was wondering how gendered that idea is, and the other idea that sprang to mind was the idea of a man “winning” a woman’s love, which is more like a measuring of himself against a standard of manliness, with the woman awarded as a prize for sufficient conformity to the relevant standard of masculinity. I feel as though the “earn” thing skews slightly to women earning men’s acceptance by some form of Patient-Griselda-plus-Brazilian-waxing process, but that may well be my own filtering of it.
I think it goes both ways. I don’t know if you were around for Mr Al, but that was one of his sticking points, the idea that a man was supposed to be able to earn sex or love by doing…whatever he thought it was that earned those things. I’ve seen men, particularly young men, get very attached to that idea. It’s one of the planks on which the Nice Guy idea is built.
I actually agree that we should try not to respond to “lol you’re fat and ugly and men don’t want you” arguments with “actually I am super hot and loved by many!” because it is playing into the idea that people who aren’t hot/married/whatever are worthless. I can see where the temptation to hit back with exactly the sort of blow that was aimed at you comes from, though.
Kim,
Melissa: “and I’m possibly much more intuitive, and better at reading people than most are. It generally is obvious to me who is messed up and should be avoided”
Kim: “This right here is the root of your problem. You’re assuming that avoiding abusers is easy so that anyone who doesn’t has ignored the signs or made a concious decision to date a ‘bad boy’.”
You have taken what I said WAY out of context. Here’s the whole sentence, and the one after it: “It generally is obvious to me who is messed up and should be avoided, but I was wrong to extrapolate that ability to others. I’m sorry.”
Then you argue against the view that I JUST RETRACTED and apologised for, as if I was still articulating that position.
Pillowinhell,
“Don’t walk late at night Mellitroll?”
“Well, you payin my rent when I have to quit my job cause the only hours I get are late nights at the local fast food joint?”
I said that MY decision to walk in a particular place at a particular time was stupid. I did not generalise that to other women, or other places. I also reused a hypothetical statement from Kittehs (“you shouldn’t walk alone at night”) but look at the context and the comment I am responding to. I saying that potential victims of might listen to that because, unlike rapists, they are the ones who want rape to stop happening. It’s not my statement, nor is it a statement I endorse or ever have endorsed. Hence my use of QUOTE MARKS. My point in that bit of the discussion was that that rapists don’t want to change the situation – presumably they LIKE rape. They don’t think they even care. Responding as if I had said “you shouldn’t walk alone at night” is totally missing the point.
Several times now I have felt that people are taking an interpretation of my statements that goes beyond what I intended and beyond what I actually said. But I’m gonna stop there because I want to just respond to the criticism of what I have said without provoking more (haha if that’s possible).
“Also, most rapes are committed by people who are at the very least friends with the victim, not strangers.”
My experiences of sexual assault, and the people who attempted to initiate sex with me in very frightening and threatening situations were all carried out by people I did not know. The sexual assaults were carried out by a group that I had flirted with a few times, but we did not know each other. But basically they were all strangers. My own experiences may have coloured my perceptions. But thinking about it, I will accept that my experiences are not representative of what is typical. I apologize again. Then my friends have told me about times when they were raped it was generally been carried out by people they knew fairly well. Sorry for being stupid there.