So the Men’s Rights movement has faced some setbacks in the past. The Southern Poverty Law Center profiling them as a movement filled with hate (if not literally a hate group by the SPLC’s strict definition). Events that literally no one showed up to. Paul Elam.
But MRAs have never faced anything quite like this.
Wil Wheaton — yes, that Wil Wheaton, the one who was on Star Trek TNG — has stated publicly that he thinks they’re a bunch of idiots:
https://twitter.com/wilw/status/348291001481310208
Naturally, this tweet has the fellas in the Men’s Rights subreddit feeling hurt and angry. Well, they always feel hurt and angry, so I guess I mean they feel even more hurt and angry than usual, with a lot of this hurt and anger directed in a Wil-Wheatony direction.
Here are some of their comments. I don’t really have any jokes to make about them because, I mean, just read them. I can’t top this sort of ridiculousness.
Click on the individual comments to see them in context on Reddit. Oh, and note that this comment at the top has MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED UPVOTES.
![giegerwasright 119 points 7 hours ago (150|31) Wil Wheaton has never had to live life as a regular man. He has never been treated by women as a regular man. He is a privileged white male. All those things that feminists say that white men have that we recognize are actually really only reserved for rich white men? Well. He's a rich white male. So. What do you expect? Perspective? LOL. He has media to sell and pussy to pander to for approval, hanglowstankin, and profit. permalink source save give gold hide child comments [–]cfornax 63 points 7 hours ago (82|17) Ironic isn't it. He undermines men to elevate his privileged status in eyes of feminists who wish to undermine his privileged status. permalink source save parent give gold [–]giegerwasright 39 points 7 hours ago (53|17) And that, my dear lad, is how the wealthy mangina maintains his status. Key word being "wealthy", a distinction that the unfortunately unwealthy manginas don't recognize. Always. Follow. The money.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/geiger2.png?resize=580%2C365&ssl=1)
Wait. What is “hanglowstankin?” Oh, never mind.
Also, I would bet a mint-in-box Wesley Crusher action figure that Wheaton didn’t call you guys “idiots” because he wanted to pander to “pussy” but rather because you are the sorts of guys who routinely refer to women as “pussy.”
![ruboos [-2] 10 points 7 hours ago (16|6) Wil Wheaton has always been a self hating misandrist. I've never liked him. And his narration is atrocious. Listen to "Ready Player One" if you don't believe me. The dude is a joke. Thank you for calling him out in public. He has no excuse.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/narration.png?resize=580%2C101&ssl=1)
![AnotherDAM 14 points 7 hours ago (24|10) Just because someone is famous in one context does not make him an expert in any, or every, other context. The man made a decent beer with Stone Brewing, he is incredibly practiced at talking with people so don't expect to win a war of words with him or out "cool" him. Just point out to him that he has had everything handed to him on a silver platter his entire adult life ~ he doesn't need to worry about money or getting girls or an invite to the uber-cool CES ~ does not actually mean his opinion matters to anyone but himself. He will eventually get it when all of his male friends start dying decades before his female admirers. permalink source save give gold hide child comments [–]VortexCortex [+1] 4 points 3 hours ago (5|1) I would merely appeal to his sense of logic: "There's much evidence to the contrary, Wheaton; You have not tried try to refute the null hypothesis before holding your belief." Not that it would actually work -- He's an actor who once played a young scientist -- but many of his viewers practice rationality.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/dyingrational.png?resize=580%2C327&ssl=1)
But Wil had one defender amongst the Men’s Rightsers:
![chocoboat 6 points 5 hours ago (25|19) Wil is still cool. He just got misinformed by some feminists, who in an effort to protect their privilege, smear the name of MRAs and fight against equality when it doesn't serve them. He was taught that MRA = a whiny bitch who wants a return to 1950s gender roles and can't stand women having any power over anything. Of course he thinks that kind of person is an idiot. Don't bash Wil, bash the people who misinformed him. I can virtually guarantee you that he would support the same pro-equality ideas that MRAs do, and that he's against the sexist situations that men sometimes run into (such as being arrested after calling police when your wife attacks you, or being made to change airline seats due to "every man is a pedophile" hysteria). permalink source save give gold hide child comments [–]Zetadood 17 points 4 hours ago (23|4) Nah, no one gets a pass for misinformed ignorance. If he changes his views later on that's different, until then he's a tool.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/wilcool.png?resize=580%2C326&ssl=1)
EDIT: H/T to the AgainstMensRighters for pointing me to this.
Late to the party, Chie, and I also read you’ve already bought the game (Enjoy!). Just wanted to add – Dishonored is nothing like Skyrim or Fallout. It’s not even an open world RPG, and it’s not a really a roleplaying game by Bethesda either (they just had some work done with it).
I bloody well love Dishonored though. It reminded me of Thief and Thief 2 and Thief 3, and those were my favorite games. There’s so many tiny things I can quibble about, and I don’t actually rightly know if it’s “a good game” (I found it got really simplistic way too fast, and that playing even on Hard stealthing around was a joke and and and and and), but it’s a damn beautiful one for sure. The amount of tiny bits of details you can randomly find about Dunwall is just… wonderful and atmospheric and delightful. It takes a lot to make a virtual city seem alive, and a whole lot more to make it seem as if it’s actively dying. I don’t quite think I’ve ever really seen anything capture the sheer desperation of plagues spreading while adding a nice dollop of wry social commentary (Play long enough to get asked to infiltrate a party, see what I mean).
Plus, it has a nice way of grasping a victorian sense of honor and dishonor (hence the name), and picking between murdering everyone and being a ghost seriously changes so many tiny things and and and I’ll stop now q:
Anyway. I’ll just leave this.
Most other commentors have pointed out the obvious flaws with assuming poverty is the The Worst Thing Ever, and they’re right. But sure, to some degree, I agree that people in poverty have it bad, and that it’s a “shitbath” and sucks. Definitively. And in the developed world, you’re right, we’re lucky that we have it very well in most cases. Hurrah for that. But that is not and never has been a reason to dismiss valid concerns and arguments, nor to somehow label something “mere inconvenience”. Sure, other people have it worse.
tell me a single instance in world history when that excuse can not be used
And there’s a great difference between “Poverty” and “class”, and more so between oppression, classism and poverty. Poverty just means a lack of available funds. Endemic poverty is where it gets problematic, and the stigmatization of poverty – coupled with a mild veneration of possessing material and the assumption that more goods = more righteousness – is very problematic… and the assumption of “just” poverty, as if your lot in life and available ressources somehow reflected on your eternal moral character because you are the “wrong kind of mind” is the worst kind of problem. Oh wait, shit, that last one requires acknowledging that poverty is only part of the problem. Dammit.
In a given sense of the word (with the caveat that you’re an ass if you forget perspective) I’m almost cool with calling any particular oppression “transient”, because it relies on context and the enforcement by other people – who may not, after all, be there to constantly badger on about you being down – but if you use that to claim that those forms of oppression are somehow “less meaningful” than poverty? Yeah, you do that and then explain to me why a poor black person is more likely to be shot by the police. Or why a poor transgender person suffers a higher assault risk. Or why a rich, well to do former athlete in the prime of his life can still be shot to death by the police responders to his car crash.
Poverty isn’t worse just because it also affects you. Please grow some perspective.
Ally, I don’t even know that album! 😀 The last one of theirs I bought was Time. I liked it, but didn’t think there was much point in ELO not having the O part of it, with no violin or cello. I’d been very disappointed by Discovery, too, and pretty much lost interest after that. (Hey, all my ELO albums are vinyl … that’s how long ago I bought ’em. 😛 )
I’m not sure one can say the other oppressions are transient, even in a very limited sense. Wouldn’t that mean finding a society where there’s no oppression of your group? First, I doubt there’s such a thing, and second, the person would have to be able to go and live there. Where can a woman (to take one example) live in this world where there isn’t sexism and outright misogyny? Where can LGBT people live where they’re not going to run into some level of danger and discrimination, and have to take those things into account in their daily lives? It seems to me that calling oppressions that relate to one’s innate self – gender, orientation, race, you name it – are far less transient, or less potentially so, than those related to economic status, at least for some. It’s not likely to happen but there are rare cases of people being poor and ending up wealthy, or at least comfortable. The other things are always going to be part of them, and wealth only cushions people from the bigotries, it doesn’t remove them.
Friendly reminder — I use gender neutral pronouns, ze // zir. I seem to have taken up using female ones this week and have missed the memo, odd that. (All cases seem to be simple errors, so I’m not pissed or anything just, you know, try not to do it again)
You can always tell there’s something very wrong with a bunch of fanatics when they can’t take criticism and namecall anyone who disagrees with their prescious belief.
I don’t care about your “attacks”, but don’t pretend your engaging in a dialogue when you’re only bashing SJW straw-men and not addressing the many cogent points people are making here.
As other people have pointed out, understanding economic inequality isn’t just saying being poor sucks and being well-off is way better. There are cultures of poverty throughout America, in urban slums, post-industrial ghost towns and rural communities. Global poverty is an staggering, ongoing crisis.
Part of understanding the complexity of issue is to understand how demographics and social inequalities are part of the dynamic.
Lots of very passionate and intelligent people are studying and combating poverty and economic inequality. Feel free to be one of those people.
Complaining about how the young, internet-focused SJWs on tumblr and blogs don’t address economic inequality is bullshit and doesn’t do a damn thing other than give you a sense of moral superiority that is cheap, meaningless and undeserved. Grow the fuck up. Stop acting like saying that Wil Wheaton, A-gays, upper middle class black people and women with trust funds have it better than you is substantial thought. That’s immature whining, not “activism”.
Dude, fuck you. You don’t know anything about us. I come from a blue collar background. My father was born in a log cabin in the Appalachian mountains and went to a one room school house. His family moved from West Virginia to Wisconsin in the 1950’s. My father filled vending machines for a living, and my mother is a secretary (who is still working long after she should be able to retire, due to economic hardship). He died of a heart attack at the age of 47, leaving my mother alone with two young children. I was the first person in my family to ever go to college, and that was because I worked my ass off to get scholarships and worked two jobs while going to school. I spent years barely scraping by, with $25 left over for food after all my bills were paid each month. Now I can live comfortably enough to pay my bills, buy food, rent an apartment, and keep up a ten year old beater of a car.
And guess what? I still recognize that I have privilege as a white person in our country. This is the last time I’m responding to you, because you are a purposely ignorant fool.
Thanks, Fibinachi! I used to be really bad at any kind of stealth stuff, and tended to play the hack ‘n slash style melee fighter in everything I did. But, I’m playing a sneaky Redguard in Skyrim right now (I like that they have bonuses in both one hand and archery) and I’m having so much fun!! I don’t even have followers anymore. Climbing up onto the rocks near a fort or camp and sniping all of the exterior bandits before they even see me is so fun. And of course it’s easier killing dragons with a bow, because half the time they don’t freaking land. One time, I snuck up to the dragon’s lair and was standing right next to him, and he didn’t see me.
It sounds like the stealth stuff in Dishonored is a completely different beast, though. So I will have to practice and of course will be playing in the easiest mode to get started.
Finally, Martin Luther King talked about economic justice 50 years ago. Pretending that the “social justice types” ignore poverty as it crosses racial lines is flatly ignoring the facts.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/01/20/3177871/martin-luther-king-radicalism/
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/01/20/3184011/statistic-world-2014-outrage-martin-luther-king/
@buttboy
“No. Those are exceptional, traumatic events, and they’re terrible. But people in poverty are in a shit bath 24/7. That’s what actual oppression is like.”
For crying out loud, most poor people are poor, or can’t get out of poverty precisely BECAUSE they’re minorities, and face reduced opportunities or active discrimination in everything they do! You can’t show how important getting people out of poverty is if you keep throwing one of its most important causes under the bus!
And those “exceptional, traumatic events?” They face the threat of these events 24/7. Spoken like someone who never had to clam up about their sexual orientation in order to not get thrown out of home or killed by their own parents. Spoken like someone who never got arrested by stealing their own car. Spoken like someone who was never raped by a close relative. Fuck you.
*for ‘stealing’
Shorter Buttboy: “Why can’t everything be about meeeeeee! As a white, straight, cis-dude everything should be about meeeee! I ignore everyone else’s hardships because I think I’m the center of the universe and my pain is the mostest important pain ever! Cater to meeee! I can’t see past my own privilege, wah, wah, wah!”
Dude, you are playing life on it’s easiest setting. Get a grip on yourself.
At this point I just want to roll up a newspaper and shoo him out for leaving a mess of entitled, callus bullplop in this thread.
That’s nice, dear. Always drop a non sequitur when you’ve nothing else to say.
I like to think that he did that consciously, to show Randy being irrationally critical of the opinions of his girlfriend’s friends, because he had to hang out with them during a time when their relationship was rocky. Like a symptom of their incompatibility.
But that’s kind of a stretch.
…Then again, wasn’t the whole tech-world-privileges-certain-people the entire plot of The Diamond Age (which had its own problems, I know)?
I don’t remember the other part you talked about. Guess it’s time for a rereading!
I’d say something about buttboy but there’s nothing to say other than “haha look at that idiot”
Says the guy who hangs out on r/mr. Do you treat them to the same rants about wealth being the only real privilege, or are you going to pretend “misandry” is a real oppression?
No, wait, I know: access to vaginas is one of the privileges of wealth, because hypergamy, and women not fucking
youless wealthy dudes is misandry. That’s what passes for intersectionality in the MRM, right?Stephenson’s just an author who needs to be approached with a very critical eye. Sometimes he’s brilliant, like in Diamond Age, and sometimes he’s a giant pile of WTF. I think he’s just one of those liberal dude types who thinks he’s smarter than everyone (and probably is smarter than most), so when he’s right, he’s right, but when he’s wrong, it’s difficult for him to be aware of it.
The sad thing about buttboy’s position is that it’s so close to a reasonable one–much closer than he, himself realizes. If he weren’t suffering from rectoencephaly, he might be useful.
I could make a reasonable argument that alleviating class oppression and the trials of poverty on a broad scale would actually be disproportionately beneficial to oppressed groups, because class isn’t only an axis of oppression in its own right, but a tool to enforce oppression along other axes. (As a simple example: Many women are forced to stay in abusive marriages in part by the economic structures that make living on a minimum wage almost impossible. Pass a living wage law, and at least some of those women might be able to escape their situation more easily–a woman who knows she can make a life for herself even just by flipping burgers is going to find it much easier to walk away from an abusive dirtbag.)
But the flip-side of that is that alleviating sexism, homophobia, trans* oppression,racism and all the rest would also permit members of those groups to focus more on fixing the problems with raw capitalism and class-based economics. Women who didn’t need to constantly fight for control of their own bodies could spend more time fighting for income equity. PoCs who weren’t worried about getting shot for wearing a hoodie in the wrong neighborhood could march for single-payer health care. Even if one accepts buttboy’s premise that these are ‘smaller’ matters, winning these smaller fights would still make it easier to deal with the ‘big’ one.
Feminist reasoning:
1) Feminists take a look at politicians.
2) Feminists proceed to separate politicians into discrete categories by nothing other than their genitalia (who cares about policies, right? And that’s totally not sexist of course).
3) Feminists compare numbers on each side and notice more men than women. [applause]
4) Feminists cry “SEXISM! Misogyny, Patriarchy! Men and women are EQUAL. There should be as many women in politics as men and anything else is sexist.
5) Non feminist appears and asks “ok then what about the disparity in, say, lifespan, or prison sentencing or education? If men and women are equal, shouldn’t those be equal too?”
6) Feminist: “Waaaaait a second. Men and women aren’t THAT equal”.
Just in case you were wondering why nobody who isn’t either completely fucked in the head or bullied into submission, takes any of you pitiful cretins seriously.
Really no need to thank me. You’re MORE than welcome 😀
Why, Kitt, is that you?
And, Salicfee, try for a little reading comprehension. It’s just plain embarrassing when you show your ass like that.
Well, that’s quite a straw feminist you got there, salicfee.
Yes, we’ve spent this entire thread counting politicians. It’s all we ever do, really. Hell, I count politicians to get to sleep. Except if my count turns up more women than men, then I keep myself awake yelling “SEXISM!”
I’m wondering whether women’s longer lifespans are supposed to somehow cause there to be more male politicians, or if that’s a complete non sequitur.
Dang you, phone. Lets try it again.
Or maybe it’s because men spend more time in prison.
Ba-da-boom!