So our old friend Fidelbogen the Counter-Feminist Agent of Male Renaissance has gotten on the Twitter. And even though he hasn’t yet figured out how to replace his generic egg avatar, and has managed to amass only 44 followers (one of them me), he’s been tweeting up a storm in the last couple of days.
Indeed, he’s so proud of his recent tweets that he screenshotted a bunch of them and put them on his blog under the title Casting Your Breadcrumbs Upon the Water. (Huh. I thought the expression was “Cast your bread upon the waters.” Maybe Fidelbogen is hoping to recruit some ducks?)
Anyway, I thought I’d give his timely tweety wisdom a somewhat wider audience. I hope he won’t mind.
Can you all suggest some more Fidelbogenisms for him to post?
Actually the ‘stache dates him to sometime in the 70s in my mind, so I’m thinking more Buck Rogers.
America, with it’s idea that we are all equal has a strange sense of class. Most people (something like 70-80 percent, think of themselves as middle class. We don’t connect it to jobs, we don’t really connect it to income.
We attach it to an amorphous idea of being, “just folks”. If you don’t keep servants, and there is food on the table, you tend to think of your self as middle class. Lots of people in politics see themselves as, “middle class (Michelle Bachman and Nancy Pelosi, Marc Rubio and Ted Cruz).
Then you get Joe Scarborough, one time member of the House, making millions of dollars a year, who thinks of himself as, “a middle-class blue collar sort of guy”.
Class in america is really hard to talk about because we don’t do it with money; but money is a huge aspect of how we express it. We do a lot of it with clothing, and some of it with social circles (did your kid go to Andover?, or Midland Prep? Were you admitted to Harvard on Merit?, or did you get a Legacy Admission?). Because we don’t talk about it, we don’t have good definitions of it, which leaves us in Potter Stewart’s Position, “we know it when we see it”, but we don’t tend to see it.
Here is an interesting paper on how class works in the US.
http://milescorak.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/income-inequality-equality-of-opportunity-and-intergenerational-mobility.pdf
I’m interneting through a migraine again, but I’ll give this a shot.
“Feminists have destroyed the heart of this country and that is why we can no longer summon Captain Planet. #can’ttakepolutiondowntozero”
@hellkell – and in reality, when you become an expert on something, frequently you feel less knowledgeable, because you start to realize how much you don’t know, how much other knowledge is out there that you don’t possess compared to what you do know about this one tiny thing you are an expert in. It’s humbling, but probably very good for the ego (and likely leads to a lot of the imposter syndrome in academia I would guess).
This is what the present looks like.
Here’s a breakdown of the paper I linked to.
http://milescorak.com/2013/06/18/income-inequality-equality-of-opportunity-and-intergenerational-mobility/
It’s because we associate middle class = good. Lower class = lazy; upper class = elitist. So everyone calls themselves middle class. Politicians and pundits know perfectly damn well that they’re not middle-class, but they have to pose as such to pander to the electorate so that they don’t appear out-of-touch like Mitt Romney.
I ended up in a brief conversation with him on WBB’s new blog:
Words mean exactly what Fidelbogen wants them to mean, neither more nor less. I don’t think he and reality are very well acquainted.
“The many brands of feminism may SEEM to contradict each other, but share a unity of purpose — to increase the power of women.”
Many props for grasping the obvious, fella. Allow me to suggest some variations on the theme:
1. “The many ways in which kittehs clean themselves up may SEEM to contradict each other, some kittehs starting at the head, others at the feet, others in between. But they share a unity of purpose, which is to set the cat to rights.”
2. “The many ways in which doggies cavort in the rain may SEEM to contradict each other, some doggies choosing to roll in one thing, some in another, while some bounce and jump from ditch to ditch. But they share a unity of purpose, which is to get the dog wet.”
3. “The many ways in which toddlers poke spoons into their faces may SEEM to contradict each other, some toddlers hitting the nose while other toddlers smack the eyes or the chin. But they share a unity of purpose, because the toddlers are operating on the theory that sooner or later they’ll be able to poke the spoon into their mouths.”
4. “The many ways in which people climb into their pants in the morning may SEEM to contradict each other, some people starting with the right leg and others with the left, with optional amounts of tugging and jumping added or not added. But they share a unity of purpose, because ultimately they all allow people to hitch their pants up.”
Insightfulness along these lines could grow practically infinite. Fidelbogen may have invented a new department of thought, though (speaking for myself) I’ve got doubts that it’s one that’s fit to weather the onslaughts of the ages.
That seems to be a defining feature of MRAs, to be honest. Every time I see an on-line conversation where somebody starts using a word incorrectly, and then insists on assigning some archaic, obscure, or just plan wrong definition to it, and doubling down when people point out why that is misleading, it’s not very many more comments before they’re complaining about females/feminists and linking back to their MRA blogs.
I swear, if you took the average MRA’s rantings and replaced “feminists” with “the Illuminati” or “the Reptilians”, it’d look just like every other wacky conspiracy theory ever. I wonder if some people really need to believe that someone is purposely keeping them down, and whether they fixate on aliens or teh gub’mit or feminism is just a matter of which one they find first.
That is … that’s a new fallacy Fidelbogen just invented, isn’t it? Some sort of reverse-No-True-Scotsman, where:
1. Feminists want to oppress men.
2. This feminist wants men to be equal to women.
3. But No True Feminist would want equality!
We may be underestimating Fidelbogen’s genius . . . not everyone can create their own fallacies.
One of my exes used to wake me at odd hours of the night (usually between 3-5am) to have very urgent, philosophical conversations about things like “the eye atop the pyramid on the back of the American dollar bill.” She was also totally convinced that every American president (including Barack, who was just running for prez at the time) had been specially bred from members of a race of reptilian humanoids who lived in a vast underground lair that had outlets to the White House, the basement of The Pentagon, and the sewers of Washington D.C. She believed the Freemasons and Eastern Stars were carrying out human sacrifice, witchcraft, and espionage; that the religious concept of “angels from on high” was actually proof of alien invasions early in recorded human history; and a whole host of other strange things there isn’t even space to print.
But at least she had an excuse (extreme trauma-induced mental illness), and at least her weird theories all made internally consistent sense. And she was absolutely against rape and never posed a danger to others, so that alone puts her far above MRAs.
I think Fidelbogen’s divorce from reality was finalized quite a while ago.
Classwise: I come from a poor farming/working-class family (my grandfather set type and did janitorial/cleaning work for fifty years), had a struggling single mother, and have also been physically disabled for over half of my adult life to date (so do not make income and could not finish, much less pay to finish, college) — but I finished high school. (I’d wanted to get an engineering or architectural design degree and was going to need a lot of competitive scholarship money.)
I still know how to write, how to research and fact-check things, and how to not abuse others on the internet.
It’s not that MRAs are lower class. It’s just that they’re assholes.
(That would make a snappy closing line, but I really want to end with: it struck me slightly odd that wherever the survey framework originally came from had lumped “little or no income” and “on welfare” in with “did not finish high school”; the two often go together, but not always. You can be one but not the other — take Snowden, who only had a GED and was still raking in $200k plus before he gave up his job.)
And by “do not make income” I should clarify: “have a mostly unpaid freelance writing/press gig, receive disability assistance, and still make a whopping three figures per month.” Compare and contrast. Clearly evidence of my vast female privilege causing honestly-gained male wealth to flow to me like neverceasing waves on the ocean of misandry as I lay on my couch eating bonbons in the glow of my scented fucking candles.
guffaw-ferrets — I used the average of three US sociologist definitions. And yeah, it’s supposed to be that your class is the closest to your situation. That is, I have most of a degree, but have never made much above poverty line. Am currently on welfare and oh yeah, that $200~ a month goes SO FAR! (At least I’m not paying rent, of course that comes with a side of bigotry)
Defining class for myself as a student is weird; depending on if I’m living off my loans or visiting my parents I vacillate wildly between pretty poor and comfortably upper-middle class. Defining it by education level makes a little more sense in my case; both my parents have Ph.D.s and I’m currently getting a Master’s, so it would seem dishonest to identify as anything lower than middle class at the least.
Well, looks like the class one is going to be the biggest mess of the bunch >.<
Can we, um, keep the survey stuff in the survey thread maybe? For one, derailing, for two, my brain is jello and will have an easier time keeping track if I only need to watch that thread. Thanks guys!
No problem! And it’s not your fault, Argenti: as pecunium said, class is very complicated in America (if not everywhere else).
And a disclaimer that if my tone ever sounds bitter on here, it’s bitter at the situation (or at asshole rape apologists), not at other good-faith commenters.
I do not understand anything.
Yeah, class is ass. I just figure it’s a manic merry-go-round that sent me flying off about a year ago. Went to grad school, raised in an upper-middle-class family, then lost family on coming out, had a nervous breakdown which led to losing my job, and now I live on about $200 a month and housing is constantly up in the air. C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!
Some folks keep reassuring me that no worries, one day my brain will be saner and I can jump right back on the middle-class horse, as it were. I have a nagging suspicion, though, that I’m going to be living in spare rooms and storage closets for the rest of my life.
As long as it has four walls, insulation, power, water (and none of Biff’s no hot water shit), heat, a frikken window, are spare rooms so bad? I ask because I got a good 3 years in Pittsburgh staying in them and would rather be back in a spare room than here.
And yeah, my psych is all optimistic and I’m like “you’ve known me a few months, I’ve known me nearly 28 years, I’m not getting saner” (quite the opposite really)
Also, what happens once Bob and Grey flee to India? Why’d they have to flee? I need MOAR! (I love it in other words!)
RE: Argenti
Trivia: Biff’s apartment is actually a conglomeration of the absolute worst living spaces that I either lived in or looked at between the years of 2008-2010. The day I realized that I was living in a place even HE would consider beneath him was a very sad day indeed.
Also, what happens once Bob and Grey flee to India?
I… don’t actually know. I have IDEAS, but their story ends there, so far.
Why’d they have to flee?
That was a question intended to be answered YEARS ago, only to get sidelined when the IS canon became too outdated. The long answer is full of spoilers everywhere, so I’ll give you the short answer: the PIN has a lousy retirement policy, Grey loses his poster boy status, and M.D. ruins everything she touches. (Because oh yes, she and Grey do cross paths. Just not in any of the works online yet.)