When Miriam Carey died in a hail of bullets after leading Capitol police on a car chase from the White House to the Capitol last Thursday, the incident seemed to make no sense. Why had Carey done what she did? She had no weapons on her. She seemed to have no political motive. There seemed to be no real plan to her “attack” on the White House security perimeter. There was a baby in the car with her.
As reporters began to look into her story they discovered that Carey had been suffering from serious mental illness and that her ill-fated trip to Washington DC may have been driven by delusions about Obama. One of her sisters told ABC News that Carey had been diagnosed with “postpartum depression with psychosis” after the birth of her child about a year ago.
Her delusions seem to have centered around Obama. According to CBS:
Law enforcement sources confirmed to Orr Friday that Miriam Carey, 34, a licensed dental hygienist of Stamford, Conn., told police in December that she was a prophet, that President Obama would place the city of Stamford under a “lockdown” and that he had her and her residence under electronic surveillance.
While the details of Carey’s illness or illnesses remain unclear, what was clear,and quickly, was that Carey had been a deeply troubled woman who may have had only a tenuous grip on reality during the frenzied car chase that ended with her death.
But Men’s Rights videoblogger Stefan Molyneux isn’t having any of it. His explanation for the events in Washington last Thursday? A spontaneous outburst of “rank female evil.”
In a video titled “No Excuses for Female Evil!” Molyneux complains that the media “rushed in to defend, to explain and to strip the woman’s body of any moral responsibility for dragging a child into basically a suicidal death-by-cop situation.”
So, in other words, a woman, for no reason other than pure “female evil,” decided to attack the White House with her car and put her child in jeopardy in the subsequent car chase. As he puts it:
It may be hard for you to process just how evil this is because there’s so much propaganda shielding women from actually having any moral responsiblity.
Molyneux then compares her to James Holmes, the young man who marched into a movie theater in Aurora Colorado, armed to the teeth and wearing body armor, and deliberately murdered 12 people in cold blood before being taken down by police. Molyneaux asks us to imagine if Holmes had gone into the theater with “a baby in a little backpack. … would we not find that even more appalling?”
He asks a similar question about Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.
So I guess the implication is that she was somehow worse than these two monsters?
Molyneux handwaves away the talk of postpartum depression — he somehow fails to notice that Carey was apparently diagnosed with the rarer and more severe condition of postpartum psychosis — as a “hormones made me do it” excuse.
“What happened to women being morally responsible for what they do?” he asks incredulously.
It seems a strange question to ask about a woman who in fact died in a hail of bullets at the hands of the police who were chasing her. Clearly, they considered her responsible for her actions, and she was confronted, and chased, and killed because of them.
When someone commits a crime, we judge them in part based on what they do, but we also judge them in part on their state of mind at the time.
Carey is being treated differently than Holmes and McVeigh in the media not because of her gender but because her actions, her motivations, and her state of mind all seem to have been dramatically different from the two male mass killers.
Holmes and McVeigh committed crimes that were carefully and methodically planned; both intended to kill as many innocent victims as possible. While McVeigh was obviously troubled, he doesn’t seem to have been seriously out of touch with reality. And while Holmes’ lawyers argue that he was in the midst of a psychotic episode at the time, it’s hard to reconcile this argument with the months of planning and preparation that seem to have preceded the shooting rampage.
Carey, by contrast, didn’t kill anyone and didn’t have any weapons. There’s no evidence that she planned anything in advance, or that she had much of a plan at all; she seems to have simply driven down to Washington and up to the entrance of the White House. All of this is consistent with someone in the midst of a psychotic break.
It’s not an issue of gender. Clearly someone who is not in touch with reality is not morally culpable for their actions in the same way the rest of us are.
But Molyneux isn’t really interested in making fine moral distinctions. He is more interested in using Carey’s case as an excuse to rant about the evil that is woman.
The evil that women are capable of and the evil that women do — not all women — but the evil that women do is generally invisible to society which is why there’s so much violence in society.
Uh, come again?
Molyneux then trots out the standard Men’s Rights argument that women are responsible for adult male violence because women commit more child abuse than men. Of course, this is because women are more likely to be the ones taking care of the children and thus in a position to abuse the children. Men who are never around children are not likely to abuse them, just as people who don’t live in France are unlikely to commit a lot of crimes in France.
Molyneux purports to be flabbergasted by this sort of argument, and suggests that it’s similar to arguing that men beat up their wives “because wives are so innately annoying, of course they’re going to beat them up, because they spend time around them, and so it’s the wives’ fault for being annoying.”
Never mind that no one is suggesting that children are to blame for being abused, simply that people who are not in physical proximity to children aren’t able to abuse them.
At this point Molyneux seems to be overwhelmed by his feelings about all of this, and collapses in a heap of mixed metaphors:
See, men have moral responsibility but we have to build these little shimmering cathedrals around the sensitivities of these little dandilions called women who just float around without any responsibility just being pushed and buffeted around by hormones and society and patriarchy and oh my God.
I stopped taking notes at this point as he babbled on and on.
Here’s his terrible video, in case you want to watch the whole thing:
It blew my mind when I noticed that none of the cheap syrup at the store actually says “maple.” It just says “syrup” or “pancake syrup.”
Now I want pancakes. 🙁
@Shaun DarthBatman Day
Teh menz, they were oppressed all throughout history. And the feminazis edit history to deny it ever happened. That Wikipedia, or femipedia, didn’t even mention how it was all the ebil womenz fault- cause women have so much control over the Catholic Church. Poor, poor dead menz.
I bet male zombies are oppressed too. The female zombies make the menz go in front of them, get shot until the living are out of bullets, then make the menz turn the brains into bon bon sized pieces and hand them over to the females.
Is there such a thing as a pancake burger?
@katz
yes.
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/3c/32/6e/3c326e5fd78dc606cefab9014d740331.jpg
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/23/cc/9a/23cc9a46cff17fcab6d32697ce20d38a.jpg
Never had one. I just look shit up.
How do you actually eat the pancake burger? This is similar to the donut burger in “no thank you, great things that won’t taste great together are not for me” stakes, but that at least looked like you’d be able to pick it up.
That actually looks good to me, but I like pancakes and I don’t make them too sweet.
The only thing I prefer knockoff syrup on instead of real maple syrup is Eggos. I dunno why but maple syrup always tastes weird on Eggos for me. I do adore maple syrup though, amber, not medium, (slightly darker but not too dark) is best.
I need to make pancake stuff soon, I just bought a waffle iron and I have a ton of fruit in my fridge I need to get rid of.
She’s dead. Don’t you think she’s been punished enough? Should we keep shooting her?
And here I thought that katz’s earlier suggestion might be overkill even for MRAs.
Who the fuck is using the term “acceptable” here, you idiot? How is explaining that she had a mental illness making an “excuse?” Do you not understand why people treat criminals (of any gender) differently when they have a mental illness?
I realize the Capitol Police are basically a military force that simply reacts without taking much time to asses genuine threats from non-genuine ones, but this woman was basically murdered by the cops for being mentally ill, and the idea that she was the one who put her child in danger is bullshit. The police put her child in danger. The sole thing she was guilty of, besides having delusions she couldn’t control (allegedly), was driving up to NOT the White House, but up to a barricade in the area of the White House, and then driving away.
Comparing her to a man with delusions who also shouldn’t be held responsible for his actions, ie, James Holmes, is moot, because she got the death penalty for driving around Washington DC, and if there is real justice, he won’t get the death penalty for walking into a crowded movie theater armed to the teeth and blowing people away– there’s no comparison between these people for a LOT of reasons, not in the least because he actually committed what would be a heinous crime if he was not insane, and she didn’t, but mainly because um, hey, for some reason the police in Colorado decided to apprehend him instead of blowing him away.
And incidentally, there is zero evidence Timothy McVeigh was disturbed mentally.
People who think mental illness is something a person has any control over whatsoever are clearly incapable of either basic comprehension, or empathy.
I’ve had post partum psychosis – I’m not sure it was preventable as it was triggered in part by PTSD due to the birth – and it really is almost impossible to describe it to anyone who does not understand mental illness. I was incapable of making rational decisions because I literally heard things and thought things that had no place in my normal framework. Reality had become different. I knew I was badly physically ill, but I had no idea what was mentally going on because an integral part of the psychosis was that it altered my ability to comprehend the world so vastly. It wasn’t that things I saw became suspect – it was that there was no clue for me as to whether they were present or not. Hallucinations were utterly real.
I did, however, know that killing my child would save her from pain and torment – the torture that my day to day existence was. I also didn’t actually perceive her as a person – I thought ‘it’ was something analogous to a machine. This idea wasn’t ammenable to outside commentary because reality had shifted in a way that beforehand I’d never known was possible – the past I could recall had changed. You make moral and ethical decisions based on your background – if that shifts too far, you start to become incapable of them. During a good day I realised that maybe she was a she and not a thing, so I decided to kill myself instead because mothers were supposed to be all loving and perfect, and because I wasn’t, I needed to die.
Fortunately, I got _given_ help, but a lot of people don’t. ‘You shouldn’t put your kid in danger’ requires a rational judgement people with psychosis are incapable of making. That’s why it’s a severe mental illness.
“People who think mental illness is something a person has any control over whatsoever are clearly incapable of either basic comprehension, or empathy.”
Arglebargle. Halfway there? Cuz yeah, we nutters do have at least some degree of control. I mean, can I control whether I want to hurt myself? Not exactly. Can I control whether I do? Arguable but irrelevant. Can I control whether I use that desire to manipulate people, as an ex did? Most certainly.
So I’ll agree if we change “any control” to “complete control” because otherwise that statement is both a get out of asshole free card for MRAs and the like (I push people away when I’m depressed so of course I say horrible things! No, you’re still an asshole [been there! done that! learned the hard way]). That, and, uh, kinda infantizing to say we have no control over our actions — I can’t choose whether I’m going to be all bipolar irritable, I can choose to remove myself from situations where that might cause me to make an ass of myself. (Or, for an actual, this weekend, example, I can’t choose not to be jumpy at whatever kitchen impliments pecunium was making loud noises with, I can choose to go smoke outside until after he’s done instead of sitting there and getting more tense and jumpy)
I’m rambling, sorry, it’s just that I get annoyed when people say that my mental illness means I’m not responsible for my own actions, which is what logically follows from your statement. Idk on psychosis though, there I could possibly see an argument that if one doesn’t recognize their delusions and/or hallucinations as such, then one cannot really control actions ya ken because of them.
Now, as for our little drive-by gem there, someone missed how our OP is blaming her for being an evil woman. And then goes off about how evil women are the cause of violence in society. Which had fuck all to do with whether depressed people are responsible for their actions.
As someone actually from Aurora, fuck Molyneux.
tophergonzalez | October 8, 2013 at 5:45 pm
I think he managed to make it sound that way all on his own, kiddo.
neuroticbeagle, how did you know about the zombie plans?
*burns folder containing Plan 9*
Plan 9 is doomed by the lack of funding anyways.
“Depression or psychosis doesn’t make one’s actions acceptable, whether you’re a woman or a man. She shouldn’t have put her kid in danger and you people don’t do your side any favors by making excuses for her rather than simply agreeing with the parts Stefan got right. Sure, she’s not the same as James Holmes and probably didn’t deserve to get shot but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to blame her for.”
No one ever has the “right” to place anyone else in danger, but are you really going to ignore the fact that she did not have the capacity to realise that what she was doing was endangerment? Seriously, look up “psychosis”, then type. Psychosis isn’t an “excuse” (you might want to look that word up too), it is an illness, a disease, and an impediment to rational thought. Rational thought allows one to understand consequences, something she was clearly unable to understand. Want this to not happen? Start paying attention to mental illness, stop stigmatising it, and work *with* mentally ill people and their care providers to make them, and the people around them, safe and healthy. This is not excusing her behaviour in any way, it is an indictment of how mental illness is ignored by our society. This is an example of the way the results of that neglect harm everyone. Be part of the fucking solution, or STFU.
Argenti, really? No brain bons?
That’s it, I am not going to be a part of the zombie apocalypse anymore.
Also my favourite way to have maple syrup is to cook medium with blueberry puree and grapefruit juice and serve hot over waffles. I also add grapefruit zest at the end. So. Good.
@Goldenblack so sorry & glad you got help. Thank you for sharing your experience.
Argenti: You raise some excellent points about control and mental illness. I think it’d be fair to say that some sufferers have less control than others, though, even when dealing with the same general condition.
Freemage — yeah, Shaun said what I was trying to, but better. Depending how well rational thought is working (and rational isn’t quite the right word here, it’s utterly rational within the framework your brain is operating under) depends how well controlling your actions works.
And yeah, not stigmatizing mental illness so people do get help and at least find less maladaptive ways of dealing with things = good. And frankly, the same physical action can be different, ethically, depending how you…frame?…it. Like, that ex straight up blamed me for his self-injury, versus when I alerted pharm student not to be surprised to find fresh cuts when I underdressed that evening — I’d have kept it to myself but a heads up that I was good now, no worries, seemed polite. Physical action wise though? Same mentally ill induced act.
Utterly tangentially, thank you for reminding me to ask my personal pharm student how the singes vaccine works, cuz it makes no sense to me!
lel. You’ve got no idea wtf you’re talking about. Maybe you should stfu.