Many Men’s Rights Redditors see themselves as fighting a noble fight against genuinely evil, misandrist radical feminists on the internet. One of their most powerful weapons: the deadly downvote.
Reading through one old thread on Men’s Rights last night, I noticed how some Men’s Rights Redditors had deftly deployed their downvotes to fight off the evil feminist misandry lurking in this comment:
Outrageous! A statement that could have been ripped straight from Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto!
Kudos to the brave Redditors who saw this vile misandry for what it was.
Elsewhere in the same thread, I happily noticed, Men’s Rights Redditors were helpfully upvoting the reasonable and uplifting sentiments of decent fellows, like the Men’s Rights Redditor who goes by the name theboners, who offered a sensibly critical take on the always controversial question of whether or not it was a good idea for men to give in to “pussy privilege” and let ladies have the vote:
Oh you irresponsible women! Why do we let you do anything?
I mean, aside from letting GirlWritesWhat make YouTube videos; that’s ok.
–
It might be time for that blinking
gif to remind possibly literal-minded readers that I do not actually agree with theboners or think SweetieKat is a reincarnation of Valerie Solanas.
hellkell: Reports say it’s outside the US. Timestamps seem to be consistent to the general area of the reported IP.
LBT: He’s not engaging with anyone, actually. He sees an argument, and makes tangential points in reply.
Then he whines about how mean we are to assail him with facts when all he is doing is spouting opinions, and drawing conclusions which any “reasonable” person would have to agree with.
Since we don’t agree (and are so cruel as to quote him) we must be meaner than the meanest meany who ever meaned.
Oh hey, we’re talking about women in the military again! That means it’s badass Soviet lady o’clock!
It varies wildly. And I love to talk about this stuff!
In the US it’s all ground-up stuff, at the municipal level. Stats say that volunteers make up 70% or more of the service, with larger paid departments still relying on volunteers in most jurisdictions.
Outside the US, as you can imagine, there’s quite a few places that actually fund and organize from a top-down level, making for a very different experience. But I don’t have any experience out there.
So I’m on call 24/7, but it’s been about a month since the pager went off. Which happens, sometimes. And then we’ll get a deluge. It always seems to come in spurts. We can go a whole year without a real fire, and then get two on the same day. But we’ve been averaging about 70 calls a year, which include auto accidents, fires, medical emergencies. (it’s a very small town–less than a thousand residents)
I train two or three times a month, one administrative meeting a month, and one truck check. So at least four hours a week, assuming no calls. And if the calls start, well, I’ve done more than one all-day fire call. And then you get done and have to go home and clean all the gear and re-pack the trucks so they’re ready to go out again.
This makes my department something of an outlier, training more than most departments near us. (a lot of them are starting to catch up, having noticed the huge compentency this creates…)
Since becoming an officer it’s taken even more of my time.
And don’t even get me started on the administrative side of it and having to beg the townspeople for every red cent we get, and grants and what-not…
RE: pecunium
You’re right, and I’m not surprised. He doesn’t seem to really want to think about anything except the stuff that panders to his delicate alpha ego.
RE: Howard Bannister
Wow, that sounds really intense, but also really rewarding. I doubt I’d have the stamina required for it, but it’s still pretty cool. Thanks for telling me about it!
Oh, and the reasons I was asking, Howard, was that my health seems to have gotten pretty stable lately! As a result, I’m considering poking my head up and looking for volunteer gigs to give me something to do and meet other people in my town.
My father did volunteer firefighting (and deputy sheriff, in Knoxville, I need to talk to him about the choking incident), so I could ask him to talk about how they did it.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, there’s quite a few other volunteering gigs that are less intense and still desperately need help. The firefighter’s auxiliary, ambulance drivers (my brother did that for a good long while), and others. And being on a fire department has actually been really good for my general cynicism–there’s nothing quite so nice as being in a room full of people who regularly go to the ends of the earth for people they don’t know and have never met. 🙂
RE: Howard Bannisters
Do ambulance drivers require special licenses?
Holy shit, this badass is awesome!
Even though my grandfathers were soldiers (neither one fought) on the other side of that war, I gotta salute this badass. That is some serious fucking badassery right there.
RE: Bina
I’m just trying to imagine the sales pitch for when she got up to the tank to buy it.
“The T-34, because revenge is best served with a 76.2 mm cannon.”
LBT, it depends on the ambulance. There are three classes: Vannish, on a truck, and a semi-type. The semi type requires a commercial drivers license, the others just require a valid drivers license.
Services generally have a department requirement and certification process, but those vary from organization to organization.
Thanks contrapangloss!
Correction: Three major types.I think there might also be a fourth, but we never see them around here.
Right now, I’m only clear to drive the ‘van-bulance’.
katz, that woman needs her own summer blockbuster. Seriously, Hollywood, it’s got a revenge plot, Nazi fighting and explosions galore! What more do you want?
Anybody got suggestions on who should play Mariya?
I really just want a Ripley-era Sigourney Weaver.
I’ve been in a T-34. It’s sobering. They were one of the best tanks in the war (probably only bested; all in all, by the German Panzer; which was a direct response to the T-34.
It was ahead of the curve in some ways (the sloped armor on the turret, the Christie suspension), and woefully behind in others (the sights, the inadequate main gun in the first iterations).
Once the Panther and Tiger came on line the needed odds were about eight to one (i.e. the Russians needed to have at least an 8:1 ratio to have better than even odds of victory) but the T-34 was simple enough to build they could actually field 10:1 odds.
Which is part of why being a tanker on the Eastern Front was pretty fucking lethal; on both sides.
This reminds me of the efforts I’ve seen online to correct the typical American misperceptions of WWII. Many of us were taught, more or less explicitly, that the USA won both World Wars more or less single-handedly. France bled itself white in the first one (fighting on your own territory can do that), and the USSR did the same twenty five years later. They remember, even if we don’t.
You do realise that it’s incredibly easy to get into the tech field? It’s just (quelle fucking surprise) women choose other careers.
Because we have a choice.
Now, please stop patronising women, David Futrelle. It’s kind of annoying.
Why do anti-feminists love to throw around false accusations? Why do trolls who like to necro old threads never READ those threads and actually respond to their content? Why did it take 92redrevolver nearly 4 full months to come up with that completely inaccurate and irrelevant “retort”? Why do trolls so rarely realize they’re on a blog that mocks misogyny, in spite of the many clues that abound?
I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS!
I love how they always say “But women choose other jobs!” and then assume that they don’t need to think about why those women would make such choices.
STFU 92.
The fact is that there is a massive pushback from men in the STEM fields toward women who try to enter them. My eldest signed up for a coding class this year and the tech teacher specifically said to her, “I think you can handle the boys. It’s alot for some of the girls.” So the reason most girls don’t take or stay in the class is not lack of interest, but the treatment they relieve at the hands of their male classmates. The same is true in AV classes. Girls not only have to be proficient students. They also have to deal with harassment and sexism.
Ally,
Right? Women just love to do all of societies butt wiping and floor scrubbing.
I’m just wondering how all my techie friends would react to the idea that it’s “incredibly easy” to get into the field. Especially my techie friends who have spent long periods unemployed.