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.
[cue “Friendly” AI debate]
Yeah, the shit (and it is shit) that came out when I was in HS has no place on any “classic rock” station. I guess the grocery store almost makes sense, I keep forgetting that the current “market to new parents” generation is my generation. (Which is weird in a completely different sense.)
They do have some flaws, that’s true. But at least they’re a starting point for the challenge of how to program artificial intelligence to serve humanity and not have it backfire.
But the worst is when the radio stations play a song and they have to censor every other word. Don’t bother playing Buckcherry songs if you have to make every word into a beep. I either want to hear it the way it was made or not at all.
@Argenti- DON’T YOU DARE HATE ON *N SYNC! (I kid, I kid)
Seriously though, I think that there’s a certain time in our lives, when our emotions are really high, and we will always have an absurd attachment to that music even if we recognize that the music is of dubious quality. Like, I love love love the Spice Girls, but it’s mostly because it brings back great memories of my childhood (especially preparing for school musicals) in a really visceral way.
Especially since, when attempting to write interesting situations involving the Laws, he comes up with stuff like “2 = 3 for extremely large values of 2 and extremely small values of 3.” Dude, who wrote your algorithm?
I don’t have the info handy, but I believe there have been studies showing that we never achieve the same emotional openness that we had in our teens and early twenties, which is why people tend to bond so heavily with their own generation’s music. I’ll see if I can dig up the article.
See, I would also put Asimov in the “mostly crap” category, which is why although I agree with the 90% of everything is crap theory, I don’t think that what survives is necessarily representative of what was the best stuff in any given genre.
Basically I think the Christina piece fails because of a combination of smugness (ie assuming that since her taste is of course better than anyone else’s she must be right about what’s listened to for nostalgia rather than because people genuinely love it) and failing to take into account the fact that a lot of people fixate on old stuff that was either before or after their high school/college years. Like, I love the first wave of punk bands, and while I was alive when most of them were active, I was also about 5 years old, so I didn’t discover most of those bands till much later – no nostalgia to be had because no memories of listening to that stuff while it was popular.
I can see how for someone who does what she’s talking about it might be an interesting piece, but writing as if that’s the norm makes her sound just as cranky and unreasonable as the people she’s complaining about.
Also, relevant side note! Just because I don’t like Asimov doesn’t mean that his work shouldn’t have survived, or that other people didn’t read him. Taste is subjective.
Shouldn’t, not didn’t. Allergies are fucking with my brain.
“failing to take into account the fact that a lot of people fixate on old stuff that was either before or after their high school/college years.”
Bingo, just what I was about to write. The music that gets me most viscerally is mid-late 60s stuff, when I was only three to six or so. I don’t have conscious memories attached to it and it certainly wasn’t played at home. I’m guessing it was still on the radio when I was old enough to listen to it for myself, in my teens, but I’ve no particular memories associated with it.
Oh, I thought of one thing GC does that doesn’t irritate me: she writes about her kitties. 🙂
Oh, there’s a laugh. Just checked my blog for comments and there’s one in the spam queue that reads like a real messages except for the bit “you could do with some pictures to drive the message home.”
Um, what? Lacka pics on that blog? Half the posts are just pics!
::rolls eyes::
Kitty lovers, check out my logo design for our rescue.
Cute!
Sweet design, katz – in the “awww” sense and in the artistic sense. It’s such a clean, clever drawing.
I genuinely like some of Asimov’s stuff, while a lot of it is “can read it for lazy entertainment but not actually good” and some is “terribly sexist in an offensive way”. (The latter is interesting since there’s at least one story with a feminist leaning as well, the one about the “female” robot Jane – perhaps he had lots of sexist prejudices but tended towards a more feminist way of looking at things if he explicitly thought about gender. If that’s the case, he’d hardly be the first.)
Regarding the laws he’s not completely consistent on how they work. For instance, there’s a short story where it says that the laws worked in outer space, where robots didn’t interact with more than a few people, but on Earth it became all messy, so the laws were changed to become more flexible. Like, instead of obeying anything a human says as long as it doesn’t conflict with saving lives it was obey orders from people you yourself judge to be intelligent, virtuous and so on enough to know what they’re talking about. And then two robots conversing came to the conclusion that they’d rather obey themselves, since they were both more intelligent and more virtuous than human beings.
ANYWAY, seems to me that the laws COULD work (which is not the same as saying it would be a good idea programming robots this way, just that it seems to me that it’s logically possible) if a) the laws only pertain to actions, not omissions, and b) if they’re strictly lexical. Or possibly a) is an insurmountable difficulty, since you’d have to give the robot a definition of action vs omission, and philosophers who’ve tried generally stumble on that and fall back on pure intuition.
“And then two robots conversing came to the conclusion that they’d rather obey themselves, since they were both more intelligent and more virtuous than human beings. ”
Kinda comes down to the same question human groups ask themselves, doesn’t it – “Why on earth do Group A think they’ve the right to lord it over Groups B, C and D? WFT makes them so special?”
Yep, Kitten. I personally think that it would be impossible to program robots that combined human-level flexible and intelligent decision-making with perfect obedience to humans. You probably can’t have the former without the ability to start thinking independently about ethics as well, and then the question “Why ought I obey humans all the time?” will come up.
Not to mention that creating a robot – a being, surely – like that and expecting it to be a slave or even servant would be unethical in itself.
Agreed, Kitten!
Random but I think I may have found what sent Joe into rant mode earlier in the week.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/06/sexual-abuse-in-white-community
Should i keep reading. Sure, all with sperm must provide dna for global fathering database. Every man must pay for this database and for all the testing and then all the children. Etc. Or just leave the test criteria the way it is, a case by case basis. When i got pregnant with an unplanned baby i was told to get rid of it by the donor. The state insisted that i have my baby tested. You ever watched your precious baby get a needle shoved into his arm cuz some selfish spoiled irresponsible prick doesn’t want to own up to fathering a child that looks just like him? Cuz owing responsibility means everybody else sees what an asshole you really are after all the trouble you took to look so wonderful will be for nothing?
David Futrelle
By the way, I told Skepchick about this post of yours and they linked it, on their website.
http://skepchick.org/2013/05/skepchick-quickies-5-8-2/
Keep up the good work fighting these bigots.
I don’t know why you would create a sapient robot.
A Jezebel staff writer DID write on at least two occasions that women are frequently violent to their male significant other, and that that’s okay (even funny) because the men were probably deserving of it and beside since women are smaller it might not have hurt THAT much, etc etc.
So at least two of their writers do in fact think that way.
This is why necromancy is forbidden: old threads should be allowed to stay dead.
How is this relevant to being fooled by a fake article? Are you trying to excuse the Reddit MRAs from fact checking?