Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the regulars are discussing the case of a Japanese man who set himself and his nine-year-old son on fire on a playground in an attempted murder-suicide; the man died, but his son, while severely burned, managed to survive.
The discussion amongst the Men’s Rightsers is actually less awful than one might expect, with only a few commenters making excuses for the man, or blaming his ex-wife. Many of the regulars are actually condemning his actions straightforwardly.
And then there’s TyphonBlue, the highly inventive female Men’s Rights activist who is one of A Voice for Men’s self-proclaimed “Honey Badgers.” She thinks the fact that the man tried to kill himself along with his son is a point in his favor and, more than that, a sign that men are better than women.
No, really. She blames “pedestalization” for it all.
![typhonblue -12 points 1 day ago (18|30) He didn't kill his son. Unlike mothers, fathers don't scrimp on the suicide part of the suicide-murder. permalink source parent save give gold hide child comments [–]osbe 11 points 22 hours ago (15|4) He didn't kill his son What the fuck are you trying to say? The son didn't die (yet) so this is not "as bad" as what women do? permalink source save parent give gold [–]typhonblue -1 points 8 hours ago (2|3) Little more time today. Am I puncturing your vision of women as the "more moral gender"? How about this, when you give a group of people an automatic "more moral than thou" card, they become worse human beings. The pedestal creates the monster.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/typhonmurdersuicide.png?resize=496%2C407&ssl=1)
You see, if you didn’t put women on a pedestal, they’d kill themselves along with their kids, and all would be well in the world. I guess? I really don’t see why this would be better.
Later in the thread, TB tries to explain her peculiar logic further:
I think it’s time to pull out the old Don Draper “what?!” gif again.
I will grant her one point: she’s correct that, while fathers and mothers are roughly equally likely to kill their children, men are much more likely to kill themselves as well. Why this would be a sign of moral superiority I don’t know.
I should also note that this doesn’t mean that the men and women kill children equally: while 57 percent of those who kill children under 5 are parents, the non-parents who kill children are mostly men.
In any case, “pedestalization” has pretty much nothing to do with it — unless you’re talking about the tendency of fathers who kill themseves and their children to overrate their own indispensablility.
So why do parents kill their children? Not surprisingly, mothers and fathers tend to have wildly different motivations. In Slate, Dahlia Lithwick summarizes what we know:
Researchers, building on the work of Phillip Resnick, have shown that women tend to kill their own offspring for one of several reasons: because the child is unwanted; out of mercy; as a result of some mental illness in the mother; in retaliation against a spouse; as a result of abuse.
It may be hard to understand how a mother can come to believe that killing her children would be an act of mercy, but that’s what postpartum psychosis can do to your brain.
The motivations for fathers tend to be rather different:
Most frequently … they kill because they feel they have lost control over their finances, or their families, or the relationship, or out of revenge for a perceived slight or infidelity. … more often than not, men kill their children to get back at a woman—to take away what she most cherishes.
As Charles Patrick Ewing, a University of Buffalo law professor and psychologist, told Elizabeth Fernandez of the San Francisco Chronicle
“These are narcissistic, self-centered guys who see themselves as the glue of the family. They feel they have to take their own life, but first, they have to kill the children. To them, it seems rational. They think they can’t manage and the family can’t manage without them.”
It’s also worth pointing out that when you look at murder-suicide in general — and not just when children are among the victims — it is almost exclusively (roughly 90%) a male crime, with the victims almost always female, generally the man’s wife, girlfriend, or ex. Not surprisingly, disproportionate number of those responsible for murder-suicides involving intimate partners were also domestic abusers. (As was, reportedly, the Japanese man who set himself and his son ablaze.)
The only heartening thing here is that TyphonBlue actually got downvoted in the Men’s Rights subreddit for spouting her toxic nonsense.
EDITED TO ADD, 12/30/13: The son, who had been in critical condition since the incident, has now died.
I find it kinda amusing that he wants to burn down Harvard because he doesn’t like the way it looks.
Ok, Brz barely warrants a response, but he insulted my beloved Latin. Hey Frenchie, I know French is only technically Latin based, dear gods do I know (your language hurts my head, whereas the rest of the Romance languages I can sorta stumble through), but come on man, you know full well what the word postpartum means. And don’t even attempt to say that delusions are suddenly not psychotic just because we’re talking about a new mother.
Would “psychotic symptoms appearing after giving birth” make you happier? Cuz the very literal meaning would be psychosis following pregnancy. That’s all ivory tower is it?
Brz is just pulling a more elaborate version of the race card card.
Academia is tainted by social justice which is just an excuse to immunize minorities from all responsibility (I say so, it must be true), and we need “critical thinking” (to Just Ask Questions and expect them to be taken seriously) and “open-mindedness” (to accept my pet hatreds).
Brz is trying to fob off an anti-intellectual argument as a new and better, purer kind of intellectualism, based in aesthetics and such.
That’s so cute.
It’s true that a MRA crank with zero academic or cultural standing presumably has less influence than people invited to lecture at Ivy League universities. It’s also true that a MRA crank can have hypocrite ethics, a lack of elegance, ugly narcissism, entitlement and intellectual laziness. You don’t need to go to Harvard for that.
OT, but I gotta ask: Is this thread acting weird for anyone besides me? It’s displaying very…differently from usual. Maybe a server hiccup? All my other tabbed pages look normal…
Hasn’t for me, Bina.
OT but more interesting than any troll: scroll down Ravelry’s front page a bit and there are pictures of kitties on knitting!
http://www.ravelry.com/
“Let’s burn down Harvard because I hate feminists!”
Yeah, that isn’t a violently anti-intellectual non-sequitur.
Leave Santa out of this!
Don’t make us send Buddy the Elf round to be cheerful at you.
Okay, who overfed the trolls again?
I’m seeing Buddy the Elf looking like a younger version of Albert in his elf outfit when Death was filling in for the Hogfather.
Buddy the elf.
These stories about murder suicides are so awful I can’t but then the IRL account of Tb’s bullshittery gave me life. What a sad sack and even sadder that she’s “that girl” who puts down other women for the approval of men who obviously don’t give a shit about her and would throw her under the bus in a heartbeat. I sympathize with her if this is, in part, a reaction to trauma and a culture that taught her to take responsibility for her own victimization but unfortunately I can’t excuse a coping mechanism that directly harms other people.
The femras and women who hate other women almost always seem to be projecting their own issues onto other women while holding themselves above them. They never stop to think that maybe it’s not that women are all a bunch of catty bitches who can’t be trusted, but that they are the actual common denominator in the failed relationships with women, and that they’re nit picking incredibly petty flaws. Meanwhile a man can come along a treat them like dirt and they’ll say, “Oh no, that’s just Joe, you don’t know him like I do.”
And finally, how is it MORE noble to kill yourself after killing your children? In the event that you don’t believe in the afterlife, and you aren’t acting under a severe mental illness, isn’t that just taking the easy way out? It seems “more noble” if you could EVER even try to use that word to describe the situation, to own up and face the consequences of your actions.
IMHO, it’s more noble (assuming you are not acting under a severe mental illness) not to kill children. Not yours nor anyone else’s. Having broken that rule, whether you kill yourself or not is just an irrelevant detail.
Yeah.
I always take my debate partners seriously when they start claiming that a lack of pleasing dress is reason enough for a burning, or that a crass attitude warrants a death warrant by fire.
… sigh.
I’m just boggled by the troll’s circular logic. It seems to apply to all MRAs. When they have an opinion, ‘citing’ some other dudebro’s blog who has the same opinion, or misquoting vague or poorly done research counts as VALID SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE.
When an actual peer reviewed scientific research paper supports feminist (or just not MRAs) views? Then it must be THE FEMINAZI CONSPIRACY GUYZ! OMG THEY’VE GOTTEN TO THE SCIENTISTS!
Lately, I’ve been feeling this odd, detached, and utterly inadequate sense of mild frustration while watching news about public violence (and hasn’t there just been a spree of school shootings lately?), when the perpetrator is either killed or kills himself at the end of the shooting. (So far, it’s always been a he.) So the talking heads are left with guesses about motives, and there is some stupid talk about how to deal with mental illness, and the NRA comes out and waves their collective ass around.
I felt the same when the Enron guy died of a heart attack before he could be sentenced. Like, oh, good, you wreaked havoc and destroyed countless lives, and now you’re escaping the consequences. Fuck you.
You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Given the MRM’s history of politicizing murder-by-jilted-father, I suspect TyphonBlue is reading the men who also kill themselves as being willing to die for what they believe in, or at least willing to punish themselves, whereas women half-ass it and make Big Daddy Government punish them. IDK, this is bizarre even for MRA thinking.
MRAs, as with many anti-intellectuals, like to think that one example of biased or erroneous conclusions casts doubt on the whole peer review process. But as most people here are aware (and I’d expect someone who attends Harvard would also be aware of this), peer review does not mean the research and/or conclusions are infallible. All it means is that someone looked over your methodology and didn’t find any glaring errors. The confirming or disproving comes later, when others either repeat the research or read your study more closely or come up with counter-examples. When I asked BRZ for peer review, it wasn’t because it would prove him right or wrong, it was because I wanted to know if his “research” was real research or just assdata.
Which he either knows and ignored for the sake of trolling, or didn’t get because he’s actually as sharp as a sack of wet mice. I suspect it’s a combination of both.
@gillyrosebee
“Only once the Europeans came to conquer and claim territory did you get widespread ‘total’ war to enslave, annihilate or utterly remove a particular nation from its range.”
I admit my knowledge on the subject is limited, but do we actually know that for a fact? We don’t have any written records for how much or how little violence there was in North America before Europeans showed up, and that was right after smallpox and other diseases spread north from the Spanish conquests in central america and killed about 50-90% of the population. What I have read is that in 1491 most North Americans were settled farmers not “primitive” hunter-gatherers so that would suggest the death tolls changed their way of life considerably.
I’m not saying pre-columbus North America was a giant bloodbath or anything, but I don’t see how we can be certain about how much violence there was either way.
As for TyphonBlue, I noticed while writing this that her initials are TB, which also stands for the Tuberculosis bacillus. I would make some attempt at a witty comparison but that would be an insult to hard working bacteria everywhere.
God, I hate this attitude so fucking much. So many people I went to my small (but super religious), liberal arts college with had the attitude that they couldn’t possibly learn anything from any of our liberal professors because duh, they were liberal and totally just wanted to brainwash them and weren’t “open” to their (shitty conservative) views. They were all “I thought we came to college to have our minds expanded, not get slammed down with liberal loving theory”. My response often was either A) “You came to college to have your mind expanded and are angry when a tenured professor with x many letters after zir name doesn’t confirm your (shitty) worldview?” or B) “This is a tenured professor with x many letters after zir name, do you really think zie professor hasn’t heard your tired ass argument approximately a zillion times before from all the other privileged, know-it-all shitheads who came before you?”
It’s not even that I don’t think there are problems with academia, there definitely are, but they aren’t that there’s “too much feminism” and the problems that do exist aren’t helped by anti-intellectualism whiners who are just pissed that their first professor didn’t wipe their ass for them.
Sorry, rant over. *seethes inwardly*
Also very ignorant on the subject here, but from what I understand, lifestyles varied greatly, depending on the nation and where they lived. I don’t think you can really make an accurate statement about “most” north americans.
For example, the natives in the area where I grew up were mostly family groups, and didn’t elect chiefs until the government forced them to, in order to have someone to sign treaties on their behalf. Contrast this with a freaking empire in south america, or the very hierarchical societies in the east.
Returning to the OP: the 9-year-old son who was burned in this incident has died:
http://japandailypress.com/9-year-old-boy-burned-alive-by-father-in-murder-suicide-dies-in-hospital-3041650/
🙁 🙁 🙁
🙁 🙁 🙁 I’m so sorry for the child’s family.