Our old friend over at the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog is angry again. This time he’s mad at a legitimate target: National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre. But not because LaPierre is the head of an organization that has stood athwart every attempt at sensible gun control, making tragedies like the one in Newtown an all-too-predictable side effect of the easy availability of semiautomatic weaponry.
No, Mr. Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Tech is made at LaPierre because he thinks the NRA big gun has turned into a feminist. No, really. Noting that in the wake of the Newtown shootings LaPierre launched a transparently opportunistic attack on violent video games, Mr. PMAFT accuses him of doing the work of the grand feminist conspiracy against men and manhood:
The most important reason why LaPierre is wrong is because what he is doing is feminist. Video games are an activity predominately enjoyed by men. So are guns. Both activities are under attack from feminists (just like other predominately male activities like science fiction are) because men are interested in them and women are mostly not interested in them. LaPierre is shooting himself in the foot (pun intended) by alienating allies among the video game community and helping out feminists in their war on male activities.
Never mind that nearly half – 47% — of those playing video games these days are girls and women, according to the Entertainment Software Association. (I await the inevitable comment from a troll telling us all that whatever games these women are playing just don’t count because blah and blah.)
What LaPierre should have done is form an alliance with the video game community. While the Newtown shootings are being used against gun owners right now, the next target will be video games and other mostly male interests and activities. Both the video game community and the gun community are fighting the same enemy, feminism. They should be working together to point out facts like how the Newtown shooter was raised by a single mother and how homes where the father is kicked out lead to more violence.
Never mind that the shooter — like virtually all mass shooters — was a dude; a woman is always to blame.
The NRA is in a position of weakness now because they are attacking video games and not the real causes of the Newtown tragedy, single motherhood and feminism. The NRA is in the same boat as the Republican Party where it needs to become an explicitly anti-feminist and pro-mens rights organization to survive. (Lots of conservative and right wing organizations are in this situation.) Guns aren’t the problem here, but neither are video games. The NRA needs to realize this and realize that its only way forward is by fighting feminism. Anything else leads the NRA to irrelevance.
So one of the most powerful lobbies in American politics needs to team up with a Men’s Rights “movement” that can’t organize a single event that draws a crowd bigger than 8 people, or else it will fade into irrelevance?
I dearly hope the NRA fades into obscurity, and I am hopeful that public opinion about guns is beginning finally to shift in the right direction, but I’m not sure the NRA needs any pointers from MRAs on political relevance.
Historophilia, what name to you use at CA, if you’re okay telling? There are 300 comments there now!
But Argenti, there is special WordPress HTML that he does not know. By the way, how to you show the code without implementing it?
And what did I tell you guys? Pell self-identifies. And, apparently, always by saying “ask for Dr. Pell.”
“You fucking idiots. ANECDOTES do not make FACTS. There are some female gamers, but your personal stories don’t substitute for larger patterns. I have a graduate degree in statistics. I look at these things logically.”
Says ze who just used an anecdote to attempt to prove that there are no female gamers. XD
Historophilia — “Why have I never discovered Emilie Autumn before?” — idk but you’re welcome 🙂 try anything off Enchant, iirc that’s Whataboutthemoonz’s favorite.
“They use different parts of there brain then men, so they can’t do that stuff as well.”
You learn that while getting your MD? Which parts exactly? fMRI studies of occipital lobe function perhaps?
There…your…*dies*
(Slowly catching up! Nice Pell Incident btw guys)
Ah, that was fun. We haven’t had any entertaining trolls for a while.
Historophilia – never mind, I found your CA comment. 🙂
“By the way, how to you show the code without implementing it?”
& lt ; code & gt ;
Without the spaces, basically just envoking the Unicode instead of using the characters.
Kitteh, are yes I should have said I used the same username, it’s much easier keeping the same name for all my online doings. There isn’t anything I’d say in any one place that I would be ashamed of being pulled up elsewhere, online or in real life.
I used to have more sites I commented on but it’s pretty much only Manboobz now, everything else requires too much time.
Much the same here. The site I used to spend all my time on is a writing site, which I essentially used as a blog, under a different name and with a private account. It’s a bit … thin compared with ManBoobz, though, and heavily populated with people who know jack shit about anything outside their hometown, which is pretty off-putting. These days I’m The Kittehs’ etc everywhere (CA, Feministe, Hoyden About Town), and I *cough* sometimes *cough* do my own blog, but Manboobz gets the bulk of my time.
It’s always interesting to hear how people organise themselves online, how they do passwords, all the rest of it. You get to pick how to present yourself a lot more online then you would in meatspace – a group of people like the commenters here, as much as we all like each other, probably wouldn’t exist in meatspace outside of perhaps a religious/church setting.
I go with bits of Finnegans Wake and cassowary icons (always lowquacks for Man Boobz and the ring of vaguely affiliated sites) everywhere, which is consistent but doesn’t allow for cross-site stalking verymuch. Then I have another name I use for annoying sites that require signing up where I’m not going to socialise.
“lowquacks” is from one of the sillier parts of the Wake – I’d lurked for ages and didn’t really comment on anything online, but realised that once I got going here I’d become, well…
Wish I’d know about Lowtax of Something Awful fame at the time though – part of why I ask for my nym written in lowercase.
The cassowary’s cry can be best described as “low quacks”, too!
@ AJ, since you’re really smart and logical, maybe you can explain something to my inferior girly brain. You see, I’m just having a really hard time figuring out which types of games ‘count’ and which ‘don’t count’. Could you give me a rundown of which kinds ‘count’ and why?
And while you’re at it, can you explain what parameters you use for judging whether or not any particular person is a ‘casual’ gamer or a ‘real’ gamer?
At a guess: games AJ likes count, games he doesn’t like don’t. Women and men AJ doesn’t like are casual gamers, other men who know anything about video games at all are real gamers.
AJ’s Pell, so everything he likes is Super Important and Manly and You Get To Do Degrees In It. Anything women like either doesn’t exist because MENZ or is just stupid girly stuff that our inferior brains can handle.
Someone remind me, how did Pell get himself banned in the first place?
Pell/AJ has been (re-)banned by David. I think the original banning was just after he had his first meltdown, which took a lot longer than this one.
I have a boring username. I have thought up so many more interesting ones since (mostly based on Carter Family songs), but now you know me as cloudiah.
But now I’ve changed my gravatar to a more interesting kitty.
The kitty gravatars here always fool me – I read those tiny mouths as noses, and it looks weird when I see them big enough to see the fangs. 😀
Pell’s first trollplosion must have been quite an event.
<3 !
Does The Pellster seem to usually show up around 3:30-4:00 central us time? Could he be trolling Manboobz when he doesn’t have anything to do after school? I once frequented a message board that would get hit by a troll at the same time in the middle of the night and we’d wake up to find a bunch of long flameouts when no one was on. We finally figured out he was a school kid in India and was getting on in the late afternoon, his time.
I have one last comment for Pell:
What the hell are regionals?
Let’s try that again.
You could argue that Mother Maybelle Carter’s the Ada Lovelace of the 20th-century-and-beyond guitar world and an oft-overlooked ur-influence. For all the talk of Robert Johnson (who was, admittedly, a very cool player) and Charlie Christian from that period, there’s probably more Mother Maybelle in a good deal of rhythm playing.
See also: Delia Derbyshire and electronic music.
I like the Maybelle Carter/Ada Lovelace analogy.
Oh, I see your new gravatar, cloudiah! 🙂
I have no doubt that Pell is a school kid. Never too young for raging misogyny I guess.