This just in: Men’s Rights Activists are some of the most gullible nincompoops in the history of ever.
The latest evidence of this? The regulars on the Men’s Rights subreddit were fooled by an obviously fake “screenshot” of an article from Jezebel that had been altered to make it look like a Jezebel staff writer thinks that paternity fraud is justifiable as a way to fight patriarchy.
No, seriously, the Reddit MRAs actually thought that Anna North of Jezebel had written that “the ability to lie about your children’s parentage is one way to break the rule of fathers.”
Here’s the “screenshot.” And here’s the original thread, which has been deleted from the Men’s Rights subreddit but which is still up, just not reachable from the subreddit.
The irony in many of the comments is off the charts. “It’s Jezebel, of course they think this way,” writes Riesea. “Wow,” says actorsspace. “If Jezebel had a sense of humor, I would suspect them of trolling.”
Blueoak9 — what happened to the original eight? — is stunned that even the evil feminists would sink so low:
There are, of course, a few teensy clues that North’s supposed quote about “break[ing] the rule of fathers” is a big fat fake (as are some of the others in that “screenshot”).
One is that nobody at Jezebel writes or thinks like that.
And second, there’s the tiny fact THAT THE REAL ARTICLE IS UP ON JEZEBEL AND IT DOESN’T SAY ANY OF THAT SHIT AND ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS GO READ IT FOR FUCK’S SAKE IT’S RIGHT HERE.
In fact, Anna North, the author of the Jezebel article, makes an argument that’s the exact opposite of the one attributed to her in the “screenshot.” Challenging a writer in the London Times who had argued that “the ability to pass a child off on a man was a potent female weapon,” North countered that such a stance was not only morally questionable but also pretty antifeminist:
I’d rather “make male claims to omnipotence absurd” by, say, being economically and politically equal to men — not by making them raise babies that aren’t theirs.
Now, you might wonder why exactly the Men’s Rights crowd on Reddit was reading a screenshot of a Jezebel article and not an actual Jezebel article. Well, that’s because the Men’s Rights subreddit has banned all direct links to Jezebel and other Gawker media sites because the MRAs are still mad about that Violentacrez thing.
Yes, the subreddit that links in its sidebar to a site — A Voice for Men — that not only has offered thousand dollar bounties for the personal information of its feminist enemies but that also carries an open call to firebomb courthouses and police stations in its “activism section” is still pig-biting mad about Gawker’s “doxing” of the man who helped to ruin the lives of countless teenage girls by founding and protecting Reddit’s Jailbait subreddit and dozens of other noxious subreddits.
And so someone was able to use this fact to exploit MRA ignorance and paranoia about feminism and make the inhabitants of the Men’s Rights subreddit look like fools.
Again.
Or some MRA with zero ethics wanted to make feminists look bad and failed utterly. I think this is less likely, but with MRAs, anything is possible.
When you’re done reading the original discussion of the fake article on the Men’s Rights subreddit, you can read the discussion there about how they were trolled. Including the comments from this person who thinks that “even if it’s a troll… so what? It’s still presenting an opinion that many a feminist has held.” Straw feminism is REAL! And this person (with dozens of upvotes) who thinks they should just ban all links to all feminist blogs because, hey, what’s the point in knowing anything at all about something you talk about constantly?
EDIT: Thanks to the AgainstMensRights subreddit, I was able to find the link to the original banned post, and so I’ve put the link (and some comments from the discussion) into the post above.
hellkell, your mother has MfuckinS and they turned her down for disability???
… I don’t even …
“*waves hands* sorry, return to your regularly scheduled programming. Any math for me to be doing?”
Um, calculate the result of one man, ten cats, nine dogs and bacon?
Yes, the overwhelming majority of people agree that murder is a bad thing. The overwhelming majority of people also agree that mandatory DNA testing of everyone so that if they happen to be a murderer they will be caught, is a bad thing and a violation of civil rights.
You’ll notice how us manboobzers think that rape is a horrible thing that mostly affects women, and yet we’re not clamouring for mandatory DNA testing of all men to catch the rapists.
See how we manage to be internally consistent? You might want to try it some time.
At least one injured dog, nine pissed off cats, a befuddled man, a cat licking itself like nothing just happened, and the house a wreck after the fight over the bacon.
Thanks, argenti and kittehs. Yes, mom has documentation up the wazoo from doctors, but they denied her. Jerks.
hellkell, that sucks. I got so lucky with my VA hearing.
hellkell – mind-boggling. Well, not, I guess, because shitbags, but my brain still goes “WTF why?”
“At least one injured dog, nine pissed off cats, a befuddled man, a cat licking itself like nothing just happened, and the house a wreck after the fight over the bacon.”
BWAHAHAHAHA
Louis just said, “Has zie been looking at our house?”
I think he was joking …
Tell Louis not to worry, I’m not spying on you guys. Just experienced in cats around meat (oh gods that bengal!) and cats versus dogs.
Hey, but if you want to come visit, do! 🙂
I’m trying to figure out if the cat that got the bacon would be Katie or Magnus. The sitting washing bit sounds very Katieish.
QFT, Kim.
Wow, I go away for less than a day and come back to find that we’ve sprouted multiple Pells?
First it was cell division, now it’s pell division!
I’m picturing a pair of middle school kids who live next door to each other who’ve convinced themselves that they are the smartest, most insightful people ever. They will fix feminism, which only they understand how to do right! And they will do this by fighting with feminists on the internet!
Or, you know, a pair of kids who thought that tandem trolling would be the funniest thing ever. It’s the “knock on the door and then run away” of the 21st century.
As a woman who’s likely to need IVF to have a child, I don’t have a stake in the paternity test arena. Unless the clinic makes a big mistake, we will absolutely know the child is biologically ours.
However, as a woman who may need a donor egg to conceive, I couldn’t care less if the child that I give birth to is biologically mine. If we end up adopting, that child is mine, regardless of DNA.
And, just imagine the poor child, in a case where a man abandons and sues after finding out that the child isn’t his. “Hey little one! Remember all of those times that we played catch? The bedtime stories I read you? How I took care of you when you were sick? Now that I know that we don’t share DNA, those lovely moments of parent child bonding were a waste of my time that I now need to be compensated for. Sorry to shit on your cherished childhood memories.”
While I can completely understand the hurt and outrage, I would sincerely hope that the best interests of the child, who did nothing wrong, would be considered before the tabulations of how much parenting time is worth and how much has been spent on said child.
So, having finally gotten through Joe’s various comments, here’s what I’m getting. He knows that men who have doubts about the parentage of their children are able to access paternity testing now, but feels that this isn’t good enough because some of those men might not take advantage of the tests available to them out of worry that it might offend their partner and cause a breakdown in the relationship. There’s some other stuff in there too, but that’s the point he keeps circling back to.
Joe, here’s the thing – if you suspect your partner of cheating on you and they didn’t then yes, they’re probably going to be offended. It isn’t the job of the government to step in and stop that from happening. If a man has those doubts there are ways for him to find an answer without saying anything to the mother (once the kid has hair, at least, if for some reason he’s unable to take a cheek swab before that). If that first test showed a problem then it might make sense to that guy to insist on a test that would be legally admissible in court. Yes, that would cause relationship drama, but the thing is, at that point, if you consider this a huge betrayal, why would you want to stay with the partner who you think betrayed you anyway?
This is obviously an emotional subject for you, and you want the government to step in and make it less messy and complicated, but that’s really not a feasible solution, for all the reasons already explained by others. If a particular guy has doubts then he can go the initial home test route and then proceed from there if it shows his suspicions to be correct. He does have options. There’s no need to impose a massive government program on the majority of fathers who don’t feel the same way you do about this.
Holy shit this thread exploded. It jumped up a couple of pages and I put off reading them all then ta daa! 11 pages! So yeah, surprise surprise our newest not-MRA turns out to be blatantly bad faith. Though his sock was slightly more of an arsehole. O_o
Sorry about the “twat” thing, whoever pointed that out. Don’t even use that word much usually, just came out when I got really worked up. :/
_>
Well, most excellent fail there. Just sending some +1 and love to LBT’s comment where my reply got eaten in preparation for a real hash of quote tags. 🙁
At least you know the blockquote monster had a good meal tonight! 😉
Seconding you on never wanting to have children and aborting should I be pregnant – not because of dysmorphia issues, I’m just not a child-oriented person and never have been (preferred sayings to confuse busybodies: “I’d rather have kittens” or “the child I bear will be the next king of France or I’m not having it”). But the idea of someone raising a child, presumably loving that child, and then turning around and effectively acting as if it’s the child’s fault they’re not biologicallly related – WTF are these two-and-a-half MRAs on about? I can’t imagine reacting like that. They seem to direct all this “I wuz robbed” rage at much as the child they freely talk about abandoning and asking for a refund for as they do at the child’s mother. Their denials don’t ring true at all, because they keep coming back to this, and talking as if taking the child (would they really get custody in that case?) was more about property and revenge than anything else.
I wonder if Joe and the moldytwins watched that long-ago episode of ER where Peter Benton found his son wasn’t biologically his and he had to contest custody (the boy’s mother having died) with the boy’s biological father. He won the case, iirc. Sounds like the script for all the MRA obsessing going on here.
I read that in the standard MRA way–the woman got raped? Totally a crime against the man. It’s HIS rapist, not hers, dontyaknow.
It reads icky and awful and everything I expect from Joe.
Howard – it’s right up there with the Assyrian “punishment” for rape being that the victim’s husband, if she were married, got to rape the rapist’s wife. Property damage.
(That’s the ancient Assyrians, of course.)
hrovotnir: I think Breadmold was the sock. catwoman has a, minor history here (and the dig, infra, at hellkell was a tell; revealed later when catwoman came out to play as being correctly called).
So Catwoman knows she’s not going to get a good reception for her breeders are pigs, and women need to be kept in check shit (as well as all the other misogynist crap she seems to believe), and sets up the sock (see the more reasonable [but still a bit problematic, i.e. the 20 percentwhich was fine] description of the video of Warrell’s talk).
Then a bit of back and forth before moving into, “All births need a paternity test because feminism!”. And that was not going at all well.
So, bring in the reienforcements. At which point the speed of things makes it hard to manage, esp. after the ra-ra session (I think set up to explain the supporting views, which failed because it put a spotlight on how catwoman/moldy were interacting; and the nature of things).
Bring in a lack of originality (they both understood patriarchy, and what, “real feminism” was, and devolved into stereophonically saying we were more MRM than the MRM, etc.).
As I said, neither clever, nor smart; but with a small bit of native guile and cunning. Alternate persona are hard to maintain; and almost impossible to keep up when switching back and forth over the course of minutes.
Or (as might be the case) they are roomates/lovers/relatives/co-workers/etc. and were calling back and forth across the room. In which case the cunning and guile are less than they were, because that should have gone better.
Imagine any two of me/Cassandra/Argenti/hellkell/fibninachi engaging in a tag team, in the same room. It wouldn’t look anything like that mess.
I would pay good money to see a socking session from some of you guys. It sounds hilarious.
Um. And that would be …wrong?
😛
It’s possible and I like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but then why not just say so? In fact, why not say so even if you are roommates?
Sorry, that should be “even if you are socking?”