So in my email inbox yesterday, alongside a nagging reminder from my dentist to schedule a checkup and my latest marching orders from the Gynocrat Central Committee, I noticed an email from an unknown correspondent with the intriguing subject line “The Holy War against Feminism.”
Clicking on it, I found an angry little manifesto from someone calling himself Mortago Black. It started off with a bold all-caps claim:
THE MENS REIGHTS REVOLUTION IS AT HAND.
The revolution will not be spellchecked.
But apparently, if Mr. Black has any say over things, it will be “liked” on Facebook: our manifesto-writer followed his bold headline with a link to a Facebook page – which, by the time I got around to looking at his email, had been taken down, probably because it contained stuff like, well, the rest of his manifesto.
Mr. Black continued:
The dawn of men’s rights revolution is fast approaching. We are rising to destroy the evil of modern day feminism. The lies, the bigotry, and the hatred of feminism must be erased from the surface of our earth.
We are sworn to our lives to wage a holy war of men’s rights against feminism.
Huh. You know, before starting this blog, I probably would have dismissed something like this as obvious trollery. But too many Men’s Rightsers talk exactly like this for me to assume it’s not for real. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be a troll, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it was 100% real.
You will see my profile picture is the flag of the men’s rights revolution.
Wait, they have a flag now?
The 3 colors represent the heart and soul of our holy struggle:
You haven’t even specified what the “evil of modern-day feminism” consists of, and you’ve already moved on to the flag-describing stage?
Black: The black represents the darkness that is the evil of feminism. The shadow the oppression of feminist bigotry casts over the land, and the blackening of hearts against that which is good and just.
Ok, black = evil. No points for originality here.
Blue: The blue representatives man as society expects him to be, the role we have written for us, the character society forces us to play.
So, the Blue Pill? The Blue Pill is bad, right? Why are you giving 2/3 of the real estate on your flag to things you don’t like?
Red: The red represents the blood shed by fathers, husbands and sons of the past. It reminds us of the struggle and sacrifice we must be willing to make to destroy feminism.
Oy. Now I’m seeing why Facebook tried to nip your little revolution in the bud.
We shall cast this flag over the United States, and one day, over the world. We shall unshackle ourselves from the chains of feminist hate. We shall cleanse the world of this cancer, of this filth, of this plague, of this DISEASE that is feminism. We shall DESTROY those who seek to hurt us simply by virtue of birth. We shall ERADICATE the hatred and enemies of men.
Dude, hate to break it to you, but when you start talking about “cleansing the world” of the “disease” that is your enemy, you don’t sound much like Thomas Jefferson. You sound a lot more like the guy who wrote this:
[T]he discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! … We shall regain our health only be eliminating the Jew.
Yes, it was indeed Hitler who wrote that. Yes, I just compared you to Hitler. But you can’t call Godwin on me because you are LITERALLY USING A FASCIST TROPE.
If you find yourself, consciously or unconsciously, spouting rhetoric that sounds like you plagiarized it from Mein Kampf, I think you might just have to consider the possibility that, well, you might be the baddies.
Also, would it kill you to proofread your hate manifestos before you send them out?
EDIT: Added a bit more on the question of whether or not this is real or a troll, since I can’t tell.
That’s such a good article, pallygirl! I’ve bookmarked it for if I ever do lacy knits that would benefit from blocking. There was such a difference in those before and after shots!
I liked the bit about not having a spare bed to leave things blocked on for 24 hours or so. One thing she forgot to mention was having room to put things out in a room you can close because we know what would happen otherwise.
BLUE, the color of our ballllls…
Ah, yes, the caterference. I’m now stuck trying to find a blocking board as people have reported issues with using the children’s coloured thick foam play mat interlocking shapes – apparently the colour comes off some of them. Somewhere I read that a person used a yoga mat, I’m wondering if a light grey yoga mat would work okay.
I’m not sure that I need lines for what I do, I just need something to poke the pins into.
Pally girl
“Woody’s back”
http://youtu.be/8of00uEVRRA
LBT
I want to play those Alice games so BADLY! I hope Mcgee will make more sequels and other games.
LOL @fruitloopsie
Would putting an old towel or sheet over the blocking mats work, pallygirl?
Caterference – if it isn’t a word, it should be! 😀
So, if someone calling themselves a feminist (someone no one had ever heard of and was using a pseudonym and not even showing their face) wrote a psychotic manifesto and sent it in to AVFM, would it be fair to take that and paint the entire feminist movement with it?
How do we even know the guy in the op is a real MRA? The silly flag proposal could really be a feminist trying to make MRAs looks like clueless, overdramatic babies. That’s right, it could be a (ahem) false flag operation!
I was a fool to test the power of the blockquote monster.
The first paragraph should have been a quote.
Ba-dum-tish!
The revolution will not be spellchecked…..love that song..
@Falconer
Now to be fair to the 3DO, we had some good times together and I played the crap out of the good games, a lot of Road Rash for instance, but there weren’t a ton of those and I bought the system when it was still pricey.
Well played, sir. Well played.
In unrelated news, guess who just showed up on Rational Wiki to dump a link to Sexual Utopia in Power…
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Fschmidt
I just saw that the Manosphere article listed links as a “List of manosphere webshites” and I fell a little in love with RationalWiki.
@Z
Well it is called “essential reading” by the reddit TeRPers, so there may be a new demand beyond his normal white nationalist fan base. Some reading for the discriminating racist/pedophile on this Forth of July holiday weekend.
Good news about deciding to catch up with laundry and my stories last night: clean shirts, got to watch a few more episodes “Orange Is the New Black” and missed ramendik’s extended grossness on the other thread.
Bad news: I missed yarn talk! 🙁
FWIW, I’ve done blocking on a lot of my knit and crochet projects, and it’s easy. The hardest part is waiting for everything to dry. I usually set mine up on a couple of folded towels, and either use the top of my dresser or a drying rack topped with a piece of cardboard for extra flatness.
And y’all have reminded me, I have some knitting to do. Winter will be here before we know it, and I have sweater yarn just waiting for some action!
Yes! I felt this too!
On the other hand, it would mean they are heartless perverts, which is pretty accurate.
(Also, I’ve been thinking of joining FetLife to see what’s going on there… any sugestions?)
I’m probably way too late here, but I’ve been questioning “console wars I” since I read it… because in my head that’s Activision vs. Atari… With Activision the better system, but losing out due to the stupid plastic inserts for the controllers…
But I’m just a girly girl, what would I know about consoles for the last 40 years?
I feel better for getting that out, it would have haunted me for the rest of the day, sorry for the interruption if the convo has moved on.
@Kate
I’m guessing the “console wars I” that the AVfMer is raving about is the Nintendo-Sega one, in part because the thought that someone in their 40s aggressively bragging about gaming is even more depressing then the thought of someone a few decades younger doing that. I do love how he named dropped Choose Your Own Adventure books to shore up his hardcore Original Gamer rep, that was adorable.
I think you mean Intellivision vs Atari, but there were several more systems that took part in the video market flood and crash of the early 1980s. That was less a war and more a cluster fuck.
::Salutes memory of beloved Vectrex::
@Kate and brooked: Ha, we had a VIC-20 back then. Had to buy a third-party joystick with a stainless steel shaft because Dad kept breaking the cheap plastic ones that Commodore made.
Our family had an Atari 2600 and a Colecovision, but I got the Vectrex for my birthday and got to keep it in my room, which was made the coolest. We had a ton of games, thanks to my video game-loving Dad. No Intellivision however, I played that at a friend’s house.
*which made it the coolest.
Must they all be such terrible writers? Why would you want to cast your flag, which is made symbolically of the things you wish to eradicate, over the United States?? What a self defeating metaphor.
We had the intellivision (thanks for the correction, I knew there was something wrong but couldn’t place it… d’oh!) and my uncle had the Atari, but those were blown away when we got our Apple IIe with a colour monitor and joystick… good times…
@Flying Mouse
“And y’all have reminded me, I have some knitting to do. Winter will be here before we know it, and I have sweater yarn just waiting for some action!”
Wool is in my book the most beautiful word of the English language. It sounds soft and warm. Anyhow, here is my sale pitch 😛 :
Ever tried felting? In my former life as shepherd, that’s where lots of my fleeces were going, to a felt artist. Since part of my flock was Icelandic, there was the added bonus of having naturally colored wool. Crafts is in my opinion, what has maintained a lot of sheep breeds alive as the meat market is moving toward producing more uniform lambs. There is also a rapid increase in popularity of the hair breeds because the wool market is awful and shearing is both labor intensive or expensive if you hire shearers. Its really is a case you spin it, you felt it, you knit or you lose it. Anyhow, I recently bought the cutest felt bag. But its still hard to find beautiful, utilitarian felt objects.
Anyhow, here is a good primer.
http://rosiepink.typepad.co.uk/rosiepink/tutorial-how-to-make-flat-felt-wet-felting.html