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.
Bionicmommy:
Definitely way too soon for 90’s rock to be lumped in with my mom’s stuff! Not only is it totally different music, but it makes me feel old…waaahhh!
Bionicmommy:
Holy crap, that gives me flashbacks to certain agricultural science student parties. I wasn’t nearly drunk enough to watch it.
I’d rather have a farm with a stripping theme.
As for 90’s music, when I think “classic rock” I think of music so good it never goes out of style (‘good’ being subjective, of course), so fine with me if they play it along with 60’s 70’s 80’s stuff. I still won’t listen to any of it, because I’ve found Greta Christina’s case against nostalgia to be very useful advice.
Eh. I’m not sold on the GC piece. Listen to/read/watch what makes you happy.
Her point is every bit as bad as the “cranks” she’s railing against.
Yeah, Greta Christina’s case against nostalgia rubs me the wrong way. I get where she is coming from – I’m one of those “cranks” who perfer to listen/read/watch stuff from the past (Sir Briz revels in the few times I’ll watch a movie in color). However I don’t constantly whine about the low quality of contemporary entertainment – I even make a point to go out of my way to consume new music and movies so I can keep up with current pop culture trends. This is where she falls flat – yes “cranks” shouldn’t complain about the good ‘ol days*, but dealing with that phenomina shouldn’t be to just quit listening to/reading/watching that stuff altogether.
Also, this:
…ignores how history tends to erase ALOT of people. The “good stuff” doesn’t naturally flow to the top, instead it is filtered to highlight mostly strait white men, and the occasional strait woman. This leaves a very unbalanced perception of history. Take for example the Baroque Italian artist Artemisia Genileschi – she wasn’t discovered and recognized as an artist until feminist scholoars in the 1970s discovered most of the famous paitings attributed to her father were actually created by her.
Whoops, forgot address the *
*Believe me, I’ve encountered plenty of these types in the classic film world. They’re arguable more tedious than the trolls we have here.
the GC piece leaves me cold. It’s got a nugget of truth in it (you shouldn’t let yourself be mired in the past), but it’s buried in a tone of self-righteous superiority (right down to listing “crap” from the seventies, and praising, “great music” which is terribly prosaic in it’s selection).
But the real problem with it is that the overall message My rule is this: I don’t let myself just listen to music that was recorded when I was in college and my early twenties (or earlier).
So… Nat King Cole, right out. The Beatles, enh. She shoots her argument in the foot when she cites Ted Sturgeon:
So 90 percent of that, “hip, with it,” modern music is… crap. And 90 percent of the music of my, “youth” was crap. But I know what I like. I know what I tell Pandora to skip/give a down thumb to. But of the stuff I listen to from the past, I’m listening to what I like, which is fine(because there is no objective standard, and the “bubble reputation” can blind in both directions. Salieri was a pretty good composer, so was Frederick the Great… “too many notes” is a base calumny).
Do I refuse to listen to modern music? No. But the more recent stuff I tend to let other people filter for me. Not only is 90 percent of it crap, but it’s music of a style I don’t much care for (just as I don’t care much for the Romantics in the genre known as “Classical”). I don’t see why I need to listen to stuff I don’t care for much, to get to the little gems which are decent; and the rare gems which are brilliant.
Time will do that for me.
I also think the argument that we like the “oldies” because we long to racapture who were were is glib, and facile. She marries it to a reactionary slamming of those who don’t, “keep up with the times”.
I agree. And implying that liking Jackson Browne,and the Eagles, and the Hollies, and Hank Williams,and Fats Domino, and The Beatles, and the Doors, and The Loving Spoonful, and Barry Macguire (who is still touring), and the Kingston Trio, and… means that I’m not in tune with all that, is offensive.
I get that there is a message of, “don’t let the past choke out the present,” but that’s buried pretty deep in the overarching tone of, “I’m better than people who listen to ‘old’ music.”
Yeah, I’ve heard them play Beck, Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, and Smashing Pumpkins on the classic rock station. Don’t get me wrong. I really like all these bands and the whole grunge rock of the 90’s, but I don’t think enough time has passed yet for it be called “classic”. I figure at least 30 years has to pass before it can be called “classic”, and yes, I just pulled that number out of my ass.
I am probably guilty of the nostalgia GC wrote about. I got too lazy to care or keep up with music past the year 2000. I don’t go around ranting about how “music nowadays is crap, and everything from my teenage years was better!” I also don’t want to embarrass my kids by trying to keep up with what’s new. My dad wore a Nine Inch Nails shirt in the 90’s, though, and people thought it was bad ass to see a middle aged engineer wearing something like that. They didn’t know that to him, nine inch nails is probably some kind of carpentry term and Trent Reznor is probably some guy in Congress.
Oh, and a teenager recently informed me and my cousins that the phrase “had a blast” is an “old person saying”. Oh, and she said that grunge and alternative music were “scary” and “too edgy”. Too edgy? That’s a thing? Kids nowadays.
@Arctic Ape,
Nobody parties like ag students, except for maybe the accounting majors.
re: sexy farms and stripping on a farm
There is a god awful song called “Brown Chicken Brown Cow” by Trace Adkins, and it has that sexy farm theme. If you ever have 3 minutes of your life you want to waste, then watch that video. Actually, don’t do it, because the song is atrocious but you’ll still get it caught in your head afterwards.
I was thinking more of Spinal Tap’s “Working on a Sex Farm.”
GC’s advice is useful to people like me who have a hard time staying in the here and now. I can see how it would be redundant to people who don’t have that problem.
GC did kind of come across as a bit of a music snob in her rant against music snobs. I listen to a lot of stuff that other people hate, like Garth Brooks, Celine Dion, Chicago, and the Wallflowers. If it sounds good to me, I’ll listen to it, and not worry what genre it is from or what year it was produced.
I think people are really misreading GC’s piece, here.
A pertinent quote (emphasis mine):
So maybe her specific examples didn’t work for you, but that’s a different situation.
And the folks who are saying, “I don’t complain about modern music”? Um… I’d just suggest that Greta wasn’t writing about you, then. She was writing about people who DO say that everything in the modern era is garbage, and none of it’s as good as the stuff in their time. And it’s a comment I hear a LOT. It’s almost like the pop-culture equivalent of anti-progressive movements, though it’s obviously less harmful.
Moving away from music, I’ve seen, for instance, fantasy/sci-fi fans who insist that today’s stuff can’t hold a candle to the older classics. Well, most of it can’t. Twilight, as an easy target, is crap, on almost any metric you care to name. But the whole point of Sturgeon’s Law is that most of the stuff that was written back then couldn’t hold a candle to Fahrenheit 451 or anything penned by Asimov, either–and yet, they frequently sold just as well as those books. It took time to weed out the garbage.
Thebionicmommy: 21 years seems to be the number radio has pulled out of it’s ass as far as when it considers things classic.
That blog post is really, really scattered. She moves from “listen to contemporary music” to “don’t listen to classic music” to “I guess it’s OK to just listen to classic music if that’s what you like, but just don’t wank about how everything was better when you were a kid.” Most of her points are in support of the third one, so she’s really just saying “The way to not be a crank is…to not be a crank.”
And she leaves out the important case of music that’s actually before your time and thus has no inherent nostalgia value. The Who isn’t my favorite band because they were popular when I was a kid; I didn’t even discover them until college. They were just as new to me then as The Postal Service.
Right, Katz, she doesn’t seem to realize that discovery works both ways.
Dude, music from my high school days means Backstreet Boys and Nsync. No way in hell is that better than everything produced now.
But it doesn’t belong on classic rock stations or grocery store selections either…maybe we can just forget that it ever happened?
My biggest issue with current music is it seems like none of the good stuff really gets the publicizity that radio play gives, say, Beiber. Shall I state my love for Emilie Autumn again? No? How about some Abney Park?
Fuck, my mother knows the words to enough songs by both of them to ask me what the title to [thing she has stuck in her head] is. That’s only, oh, 30~ years past her teen days. I should try some Cruxshadows out on her…because now I’m giving y’all a sampling!
This is my anti-troll brain bleach btw —
Katz — like how White Rabbit only has nostalgia value to me because I first heard it while it was, um, relevant.
Argenti:
I don’t care how many drugs a classic rock program director did, BSB & Nsynch would NEVER show up on that format.
As to why it shows up on grocery store channels… well, they are going for the lowest common denominator, and have an incredible demographic range they have to consider.
.
Elitists will do what elitists will do
this is the one thing I think will always be true
They’ll boo and they’ll hiss and they’ll say it’s amiss
that this book or that book is getting attention in the ‘bizz
and the patient lines outside the store
Will always be full of people screaming for more
and those people, down back, will wager it’s a bore
that nothing today holds a candle to what was produced old yore
therefore:
It behoves to remember: that the human race
is not a degenerate waste of space
you’ll find that most of creation
at any one time is far from sublime
and it’ll take quite a bit to figure out the hit
… so maybe just like what you like.
(QFT)
I realize I’m a little late to the party here, but after perusing the thread I’d just like to point out to Joe (who by the way, deserves an Academy Award nomination for his dramatic performance) that the nefarious Secret Kangaroo Family Court decisions that would award custody to an abusive mother are often handed down by a judge (often male) who overwhelmingly presumes that mothers are responsible for child-rearing, and this often works against the women as well. In divorce/custody proceedings, mothers who work outside the home have their dedication as parents called into question, just as men who are primary caretakers rather than “providers” have their motives questioned. When I took family law, we saw cases where working mothers lost custody to a crappy dad because the judge wagged his finger at a mother not giving 100% of her time to her children.
Surprise…gender roles being policed on both sides of the coin.
or anything penned by Asimov,
See, I happen to think a lot of Asimov’s fiction is part of the crap side of the equation.
Asimov did come up with the Three Laws of Robotics, though. In my opinion, that makes him one of the most important thinkers for the 21st century.
How about GC minds her own business on people’s musical tastes? I don’t like the sound of music I hear now, simple as that. I have a range of music I like, be it medieval through early Baroque, 60s and 70s stuff, or things like George Winston or Loreena McKennit or Irish and Scottish music. So boo bloody hoo, none of it fits her “listen to stuff being produced now” dictum.
But I can’t recall reading anything of GC’s that didn’t rub me the wrong way, so nothing new there!
@pecunium – yeah, the little I’ve read of Asimov left me cold, too. Dry-as-dust boys’ toys stuff was how it came across.
*shrug* All I can say is, it works for me. I think nostalgia is a lot like gambling; harmless pastime for some, dangerous addiction for others. I’m in the latter category.
And I’ve come to hate classic rock stations for ruining the music of my childhood and adolescence, burying pleasant memories under endless repetition until it’s completely meaningless. That, and there seems to be some kind of law that every time it rains in Los Angeles, the classic rock stations must play Riders on the Storm. Either that or Gimme Shelter, but the Doors were an L.A. band.
I still have my old music collection, of course, but now I only listen to older stuff when I specifically want to, I don’t keep it playing as background noise. That’s what the new stuff is for.
They don’t play either of those songs around here anymore. Any song related to storms don’t get played very often, like Carrie Underwood’s “Blown Away” or “Won’t let go” by Rascal Flatts. It’s become taboo, which sucks in my opinion, because I think music is a good way to deal with the past.
bionicmommy: Asimov did come up with the Three Laws of Robotics, though. In my opinion, that makes him one of the most important thinkers for the 21st century.
For all that those stories are readable, the Laws are impossible. They can’t work.