So apparently domestic violence laws are a crime against nature. Who knew?
Well, the repellent “game” guru and all-around human stain Roosh Valizadeh knows, or thinks he knows, and he devoted a long and strange post yesterday to explaining just why. Oh, and why laws forbidding bees from attacking ants are a bad thing.
We’re going to skip the bugs — they’re the main characters in a bizarre fable Roosh uses to start off his post — and move right on to the part of Roosh’s post that deals directly with human beings.
Here is his thesis, baldly (and badly) stated:
Creating laws to prop up the weak is like playing a game of musical chairs. … Domestic violence laws are a great example of this phenomenon. Assault and battery is already outlawed, but by creating a new class of laws that create privilege for a specific group, a new immunity is formed. The ecosystem is damaged, unprepared to take on the unintended consequences of misguided intervention.
Of course, by this logic, you could argue that pretty much all laws interfere with the “ecosystem.” Interesting that he only applies this argument to female victims of domestic abuse. (He seems unaware that male DV victims even exist.)
In Ukraine, I witnessed a man slap his girlfriend on a crowded pedestrian street. Over 20 men must have witnessed the event, but no one rushed to her aid. She also did nothing, not screaming or running away. With primitive (i.e. rarely prosecuted) domestic violence laws in Ukraine, you’d think that this sort of thing would happen all the time, but it was the first time I had seen it in a country that I had spent 6 months in. Men show surprising restraint when it comes to violence against their women, something that may be a shock to people living in countries with advanced domestic violence laws.
So … a guy hitting his girlfriend in public is proof of the restraint of Ukrainian men?
In the USA, with nearly two decades of such laws on the books, what do you see? Women hitting men and women attacking men they don’t even know. I’m sure you’ve seen many such videos on Youtube and LiveLeak, which make it seem like women are warriors, completely fearless of men.
Really? Argumentum ad YouTube? On YouTube, you can find videos of dudes farting on other dudes’ heads, dudes shooting bottlerockets out of their own asses, women climbing into plastic bags for no reason, and, well, these ingenious masochists.
I’m really not sure you can attribute any of these activities to specific pieces of legislation.
With their elevation as a special victim in need of state protection, there is usually no punishment for hitting men, even if the man hits back only to defend himself. Girl hits man, man pushes girl away, girl calls cops, man goes to jail.
The idea that a mere accusation from a “girl” will send a man to jail is simply not true. Yesterday, George Zimmerman’s estranged wife accused him of threatening her and others with a gun, and punching his father-in-law in the nose. He did not go to jail.
If she’s married, she gets an additional bonus of monthly cash payments once the divorce is settled. Encouraging a man to fight has become financially beneficial for women.
She may get awarded child support, which she’ll be lucky to collect. Very few women get alimony.
Like the ants, women know that the laws give them a pass. They are taking full advantage of it, predictably conforming to their environment. Men are demoted to second class citizens and live in fear of going to jail while women have impunity to act in any way they want. The result? Less marriage, more violent marriages, unhappy relationships, and more single parent households.
Yes, that’s right. Roosh is seriously arguing that domestic violence laws lead to “more violent marriages.” Never mind that, in fact, domestic violence has fallen dramatically in the US in the last two decades, in part because of laws like the Violence Against Women Act (which also protects male DV victims). According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “the overall rate of intimate partner violence in the United States declined by 64%” from 1994 through 2010.
But Roosh doesn’t let things like facts get in the way of his rant.
Nature, while not perfect, has spend hundreds of thousands of years optimizing sex roles through trial and error to facilitate human reproduction. … Recent utopian schemes to “protect” women have ushered in policies that have no proven effectiveness, whether increasing the happiness of women, protecting the family unit, or advancing society in any form. They might as well have been pulled out of a top hat, an experiment done on the masses by those in power.
Yeah, “no proven effectiveness” — aside from the fact that they actually seem to have cut DV in half in less than 20 years.
Progressives, through their tinkering, are introducing disincentives that destroy even basic relationships instead of stabilizing them. Their policies have helped create men such as myself, who see absolutely no incentive to pursue a relationship in a country where I can go to jail and be robbed blind from a failed relationship or from a woman lying about how I treat her.
I don’t know what creates men such as yourself, but I’m pretty sure it’s not feminism.
Roosh goes on to note that in Ukraine, the kids he sees walking around with their parents “seem quite happy.” Oh, the kids you observe at a distance and know nothing about “seem happy?” That settles it! Top notch social science research work, dude!
Moreover, he adds,
In a place where women are not considered protected, some may even be surprised to never see women with bruises and black eyes, or see them getting beat up every day, screaming for help.
Yep, that’s right, so long as women aren’t walking around with visible bruises and/or getting beaten up in public, all is well and we can assume that domestic violence is not a problem at all.
In fact, as even a quick visit to useful web site known as “Google” will reveal, domestic violence is in fact a huge problem in Ukraine. Indeed, according to one 2009 survey cited here, a staggering 44% of Ukrainians have been victims of DV; 75% of them never sought help for it — not altogether surprising, for while the country does in fact have laws against it, they are generally fairly ineffective.
As Amnesty International noted in a recent report on the subject,
Perpetrators of domestic violence in Ukraine act with impunity. The Law on the Prevention of Violence in the Family does not provide adequate protection to victims of violence and perpetuates the myth that women are to blame for the violence that is perpetrated against them. Police often fail to take action when women report domestic violence and sometimes react inappropriately. Women who attempt to take the perpetrators to court are hampered by widespread corruption or find that the punishments imposed are inadequate.
And while DV in the US is down, government officials in Ukraine warn that DV rates there may be rising.
Roosh, if he knows any of this, doesn’t really give a shit.
There will always be an unfortunate level of violence between man and woman, but any attempt to fix it through random laws and policies, as has been done in America, will only make it worse. Nature, in spite of its flaws, is more often right than wrong.
Forgive me, but I really hope that Roosh is eaten by a bear.
Man, I just got back from that Pharyngula thread. The defenders show up in force, denying what’s plainly written. Some of it gets absurd.
“The defenders show up in force, denying what’s plainly written. Some of it gets absurd.”
Some people are such blind followers for such free thinkers . . .
“Cosmetic violence.” Aargh, proofread fail!
Michael Sondberg Olsen: No need to apologize, I am not offended in the slightest. I feel good when I can bring some laughter into the world, even when my goofs are unintentional. Some of this madness in the world, it’s either laugh or go crazy, it seems to me.
Hoards of devouring worms. Only a problem when you live in a pineapple under the sea.
(Hope this actually works; I don’t Internet a lot)
And the link disappears! Only me. Oh well, there was this episode of Spongebob where the nematodes devoured his home. That’s what I was trying to reference.
I think I was slightly immunized by never believing in the first place. Some people drop one thing only to pick up the opposite… with zeal.
“Some of this madness in the world, it’s either laugh or go crazy, it seems to me.”
Right there with you.
Speaking of atheists saying questionable things, does anyone have any opinions about Brian Flemming and his documentary The God Who Wasn’t There? I’ve just run across something very ethically questionable from him that I’m planning to blog about. (It actually has nothing to do with misogyny, I just thought it was striking enough that I thought it worth mentioning.)
Never heard of him, David. sorry. But now I might go digging.
But if you want evil idiocy from atheists, just read Sam Harris.
Sorry, but Harris really is beyond shit. Shit, at least, can be used as fertilizer
“Mild pedophilia.” There are just…some phrases you should never say.
Fucking shit, Dawkins. I was just telling people some of the awesome stuff I learned from you about bees – in the books you wrote back when you were a respectable science writer and not the Grand High Douchebag you seem to have willfully metamorphosed into.
Is it just me, or has he made the jump from “Everything religion does is wrong” to “Everything is okay as long as it’s not religion doing it”?
“Some of this madness in the world, it’s either laugh or go crazy, it seems to me.”
Thirding that, though I’m actually commenting to say that nematodes are nasty little things, you’re pretty much guaranteed to kill your bio-filter trying to kill them (and they’re parasitic, so ignoring them isn’t much an option)
Sam Harris is a torture apologist. I don’t like that the prominent atheists that believers see are scumbags like Harris and Dawkins.
Give me Ken Miller over Richard Dawkins any day of the week.
WHY DID IT REFUSE TO POST MY COMMENT!!! GRRRR.
This is an argument I see from MRA all the time. Even when you prove to them it isn’t true (one example being how many rapists actually see jail time) they say your source is biased. I’ve been told that the census, WHO and the CDC are controlled by women by MRAs………………….The sources the MRAs frequently site are other MRAs. Which apparently are NOT biased. Pretty much the only sources MRAs seem to trust are the ones that already agree with what they have to say. Talk about confirmation bias!
I’ll admit that The God Delusion is what made me more secure in my secularism when I was younger. A lot of what was in there resonated to me as someone from a highly religious area who also couldn’t stand living there, most especially due to the hypocrisy of such believers.
Since then? Everything Dawkins does is increasingly inane or bewildering to where I just can’t stand him anymore. Other than hopping on the Islamophobia train, dismissing sexism and misogyny in the first world, and now acting as if a school instructor inappropriately touching students is no big deal.
What makes it all worse is that this is the same guy whose condemned Islam for it’s attitudes towards women and enraged at the scandal involving children being molested by priests. Then again, I shouldn’t be surprised after the likes of comicbook creator Frank Miller – whose easily written some of the most sexist works out there – seems to only care about the mistreatment of women when it comes to Muslims. It indicates a lack of self-awareness on their part as well as their condemnation being based on an ulterior motive than anything apparently noble.
If they actually gave a shit about these things – they’d dislike it no matter where it came from. Picking and choosing based on arbitrary criteria just makes you an asshole.
Oh yeah, and don’t get me fucking started on Sam “Torture Is Totally Okay When It Happens to Brown People” Harris. It’s irritating when hearing followers of his get defensive about it – acting as if his “logic” makes any sense despite the facts (i.e. it wasn’t a reliable tool to extract information, the excuse often used, and much of it was done out of spite anyway). Funny thing is, these same people are horrified by the Viet Cong having done so to American soldiers in Vietnam. It’s the same thing when it comes to invasion and occupation of a country: it’s somehow okay when the U.S. does so to another nation, yet absolutely unforgivable if another country were to do so to the U.S.
Ugh.
RD’s latest hoof-in-mouth is just… GAH!
Dawkins, it’s great–and I mean this in all sincerity–that you, yourself, were not traumatized by the sexual abuse that happened when you were a kid. That you’ve been able to process it in a way that leaves you intact and whole is a wonderful thing.
But you bloody fucking idiot, you have no right to make a fucking generalization from that, either about the other victims of that particular offender, nor about the harm of… I can barely bring myself to repeat it… ‘mild pedophilia’.
Please feel free to fuck off with all the fucks.
****
I’m posting this because it’s a ‘lighter’ example of fuckheadery:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/09/10/pastor-refuses-to-marry-couple-an-hour-before-ceremony-because-brides-dress-is-too-sexy/
Title pretty much says it all–slut-shaming asshattery, but honestly, I’d rather deal with fifty puritanical pastors than one victim-blaming Dawkins.
Dawkins has no moral high ground when it comes to criticizing sexist religious leaders. He should shut his mouth or go back to biology and stay secreted away from polite society.
Well, I guess I won’t write about Flemming after all. I thought he had used a quote on his web site in a dishonest way but when I emailed him about it it appeared he had done so addientally, and he removed the quote. I’m used to people digging in their heels, so I was actually a little shocked.
Isn’t Dawkins the one who said that religion was like child abuse when the Catholic child molestation scandal was happening? But apparently child molestation isn’t that bad now?
REligion is child abuse, but apparently child abuse isn’t child abuse.
Did anyone see this? Guess Roosh is making a habit of harrassing women via twitter. I can’t even…
http://www.rooshvforum.com/thread-27956.html
Alice, can you recap? I don’t want to give that hemorrhoid any traffic.
I’m sorry to derail but I am just appalled at how the manosphere sees free speech. Freedom of speech is intended to protect a person from facing CRIMINAL prosecution from the state. It is not intended as an umbrella meant to prevent a person from losing their job, or facing public ridicule or scorn because they spew hate speech on the internet. Getting fired from your job for saying offensive things is not the same as being arrested and imprisoned by the police for saying offensive things.
frilledshark — yes
(Lots of trigger warnings on that, being raised Catholic is worse than “mild child abuse”)