Misogyny Theater is back with Episode 4!
If you paid any attention to A Voice for Men’s recent conference in – well, near – Detroit, you probably heard about the guy who was ejected from the conference after reportedly “petting” a reporter and a number of other men. (You can read about him here.)
In this episode of Misogyny Theater, we return to the Man Going His Own Way who calls himself Sandman to hear his highly speculative theories about this gentleman and his activities.
Sandman also warns Men’s Rightsers and MGTOWers that if they get together in large groups, they will inevitably attract opportunistic sex-seekers eager to take advantage of the man surplus for their own perverse ends. Apparently, angry dudes who hate women are like catnip to gay men and straight ladies alike.
The audio for this little cartoon of mine comes from Sandman’s video “Men’s Rights Molester.” I have indicated edits in the audio with little scratchy sounds. And I’ve bleeped out the name of the alleged molester. Otherwise it’s all straight Sandman.
My previous Misogyny Theater episode featuring Sandman can be found here.
Crowd chatter and buzzer sounds from FreeSFX.
Well, the funny thing is…
So, the way welfare is structured right now a certain percentage has to go from welfare to work. It’s outcomes-based. If the welfare workers can’t move a certain percentage the right direction, then…
…no, really, you’ll never guess…
…the money for EVERYBODY gets cut. And everybody suffers.
…
See, this is the problem with trying to put together a better program that helps more people while you’re still trying to appease people who really want everybody on welfare to work or starve. They build “incentives” into the program that are designed to punish people. There are all kinds of punitive measures in our system, which just…
Pointlessly cruel.
BUT ALSO
So, we have this huge prison population, right?
Are you aware that they are stealing paying work away from Americans and doing the same work for pennies?
…
Literal slave labor?
…
Undermining the paid workforce?
…
Hi, so, I work in American social services, and I’m perpetually angry.
I don’t want to pile on you, Nova, we’re all on the same team here. But there’s a lot of stuff driving our current employment situation, and the usual talking points don’t even scratch the surface.
For example, this one:
Some of those companies are hiring overseas workers due to cost, not dearth of qualified U.S. candidates. A big company can get a temporary worker from overseas for a fraction of the salary that a U.S. employee would demand. Mother Jonesand NPR have done some reporting about how this affects the tech industry, and The Atlantic did a short-ish piece that helps to debunk the overall myth of a U.S. STEM shortage.
PS: unemployment is down! We’re now adding jobs at pre-George.W.Bush rates!
But they’re mostly all minimum-wage-paying jobs! Boo!
Hi everyone, longtime lurker, first-time poster here. Re the drug-testing thing, can I ask a question of the couple of you who approve it?
Why do you assume that anyone who comes up positive in a drug test is “an addict” or at least has a “drug problem”? You seem to be taking the position that drug-taking – ANY drug-taking – is bad in and of itself. You are aware, surely, that there are many, many people in the world who have been taking drugs recreationally for years or even decades with no bad effects? Right?
So please explain to me why exactly the government or an employer has the right to stick their nose in and police what these people are doing? Do you really think it’s right that someone should lose their job or their benefits for doing something that causes no harm?*
Makes about as much sense to me as supporting compulsory masturbation testing or compulsory chocolate-use testing.
*I’m aware that the organised crime that’s grown up around drugs does cause a lot of harm, but as that’s the result of making drugs illegal, I don’t think it applies in justifying testing. If we as a society weren’t so hung up about people taking drugs to start with, that side wouldn’t even exist.
Honestly, I prefer that people have the option of being on welfare and do something meaningful with their life than having no choice than accepting soul killing jobs. There, I said it. There is lot of ugliness in a culture that forces people to starve or work for barely living wages flipping burgers or do consumer survey locked in a cubicle for 8 hours straight. Or to sell their souls to a corporation to be able to do research because there is almost no funding left for basic public research. We were not put on the earth to have our humanity boiled down to be consumers or cogs in a machine that serves the interest of the few. If that means that we have a social safety net to make sure that people can opt out and not starve, so be it.
@Isabelle
That would be a guaranteed minimum income, like garvanthemad was talking about.
Canada did a trial run. The results were buried for a long number of years.
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100
Who chooses not to work when they can?
Huh, how about that.
begee:
@WWTH and Lea, it may sound mean, but its not doing drug addicts favors to indiscriminately give them food and money. It’s not about intersectionality (most drug addicts are white, anyway), its about avoiding contributing to someone’s downward spiral.
Um… how to say this…
No.
Riddle me this, how is absolute poverty, abject and total; nary a penny to your name, nor a roof above your head helping? Because that’s what social safety nets do, prevent that.*
And drug testing is pretty accurate. Most people have to be drug tested at their jobs, after all.§
I see, the merit of a system isn’t how it’s used, or what the effect is, but rather whether or not the testing mechanism is mechanically accurate. How silly of me to think the effect it has on society, people’s sense of worth, independence or privacy are.
Got it. I am so glad you set me straight on those things.
*I am also questioning your use of the word “indiscriminately”, as it implies either you think (or wish others to think) gov’t just hands out wads of cash, rather than hemming it in with conditions and restrictions. But, as to your parent claim Best method of helping the poor… give them money That study was done with “The hardcore poor”, long term homeless, the boogymen of The Right. Or you could listen to OxFam: Cash, not food – Giving poor people choices
§Not actually true. Many companies which pay low wages (e.g. Walmart) require such a test as a condition of hiring; very few (the Military being one notable exception) have any requirement for ongoing tests. It might be worth noting that Walmart is not only the largest employer in the US, but also has one of the highest rates of employees in need of using the social safety nets.
So… about those strings on the social safety net. There was a time I was in a financially constricted position (no job, damn all for assets; living a single room on charity). I was enrolled in college courses (GI Bill meant I didn’t have to upfront tuition/fees; even if I did have to pay 33 percent of them), but I didn’t have a job (no one had responded to résumés, not just turned me down… not responded; for about six months), and my GI Bill Stipend (a whopping $1,100 a month, for Palo Alto) wasn’t going to be arriving for some indeterminate period of time.
So I needed something to bridge the gap. So I applied for food stamps. First, I did it wrong. I applied in the wrong office. That was a two week delay to get the denial for that. So I get to the right office. Fill out the forms (again), and get called back immediately for a screening.
Where I made the mistake of saying I was enrolled in college. To get food stamps as a college student… you have to have a job which guarantees a weekly wage equal to at least 20 hours pay at the federal minimum wage.
So, since I was unemployed, but getting an education, I wasn’t entitled to $270 a month in food.
If I dropped out of school, I’d have been able to come back and reapply, and get $270, per month.
Thankfully my friends weren’t going to let me starve/require me to live on the street, but it was tough until the stipend started to arrive (oh, and someone finally gave me a part-time job, so life wasn’t as tight as all that, but damn if those months weren’t stressy as all fuck).
I made a 😯 face when I actually read the 13th amendment and discovered that slavery wasn’t illegal in the United States.
My thought process: “Wait…so it’s okay to enslave criminals? But felons also can’t vote. So couldn’t you just make something really trivial a felony and enslave everyone who does it and they wouldn’t be able to stop you because they can’t vote?
…
We’ve already done this, haven’t we?”
In the US? Yep. Now factor in race.
Our entire ‘justice’ and legal system was designed around keeping black people enslaved. Everything from the origins of the Police force to the decisions about which drugs to make illegal. All of it.
And top it all off with a heaping pile of Capitalism, bake covered at 350 F for half a century, and the modern Prison Industrial Complex is complete. Serves rich white people, but literally no one else. Refrigerate leftovers.
Yes, yes we have.
I won’t say all of the justice system was built for that. I will say that making do that is pretty easy, and the loophole in the 13th amendment was immediately used for that purpose when the Rebel States were “rehabilitated” back into the Union.
Also mostly temporary, part-time, contract, or all of the above.
I think Ta-Nehisi Coates says it best…
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/a-drug-war-in-the-time-of-color-blind-policy/276569/
To say nothing of the racist roots of the criminalization of marijuana.
Well, that goes without saying.
This may have already been stated but what it looks like to me is that the government pretty much realizes marijuana will be legal in most states relatively shortly. That means all the previous “felons” who would have gone the school to jail route will not be going to jail. So they will need jobs or welfare assistance (likely both since wages are so low). So to prevent them from obtaining either, these drug tests will be made mandatory for both.
OK but what’s the point? You’re going to have a whole bunch of people with neither jobs nor assistance so how will they survive? They will have to live with family far into adulthood, join a hippie style commune or “intentional community” as they are called now, or reach critical mass and form a revolution.
Is there an agenda behind this? What is it?
Good for you. Now all you need to do is to stop being a libertarian and an MRA.
Anyone who can look at the US prison system and think the problem is “misandry” is seriously not getting it. We imprison the poor, and people of color–and since we’re still a very racist society, there’s a great deal of overlap there.
I think that part of my issue here is an issue of background. I was born into a fascist state masquerading as socialism that turned into a decent approximation of socialism before we immigrated to the US. It’s an alien concept to me that there was actually a debate about national healthcare, as it’s a universal right of citizenship where I’m from. Now, we may be ass backward on a lot of issues, but we have an educated, healthy population and an extremely low unemploymemt rate.
To solve the problems of poverty in the US would require a complete overhaul, not only of the government, but of the mindset of the population. I highly doubt that it will happen anytime soon, as greed and corruption are so firmly entrenched in the minds of those in power. I’m living with my parents, so that I can supplent their meager retirement and Social Security Disability benefits. Even after both Medicare and private insurance, their medical expenses would bankrupt them. For a 9 day hospital stay, I paid nearly $2,000 in copays, after Medicaid and private insurance picked through the charges. Why? Because just about every healthcare system, from Insurance companies to hospitals, pays certain people a shitton of money to do very little. They will not give that up without a fight. This is one of the reasons that stripping made sense to me as an occupation. The easy availability of Immediate cash comes in handy during an emergency. Because those CEO’s will crush the average person to protect their million dollar bonuses.
What I’m suggesting is not a cure all for poverty. Even in my home country, there are people in poverty for a number of reasons. But, it will help some people improve their situation. Maybe not as many as we’d like, but even a single family lifted out of poverty is worth it. Even a single drug addict that is able to recover and live a sober life is worth it.
When I was growing up, I knew I was just another drone that kept the empire running. Nobody made any pretenses about it. Here, it’s the same situation, although it comes with a pat on the head and a soothing lie about how everyone is special and valuable. We are nothing more than cogs in the great machinery of society. While there are no cure all solutions, there are some ways to help some people avoid being crushed.
Welfare reform will only result in less for those in need. There is a finite number of tax dollars to go around and those multimillionaires mentioned earlier are the ones playing golf with those in power, using clubs that cost more than a poor familys budget for several months. A dollar that goes to a poor family, that has no value to them, is one less dollar the government can spend on them. Getting as many people as possible out of the system and self sufficient is the best we can hope for, under the system that we have.
Nova — the problem is that even if there was a job for every applicant, there’d still be people who can’t work, or shouldn’t be forced to. And the way the US runs things, any attempt to push those who can work into work results in fucking over those who can’t or shouldn’t (anyone remember the failures of “Welfare to Work” and mothers of young kids having to work only to them dump most of that money into childcare costs?)
“The basic point here is that welfare is a provision to help you survive, not a reward for good behavior, so it shouldn’t matter what kind of person you are.”
QFT. And thank you. I’ve about had it up to my nose hairs with whether I’m too nuts to work. Cuz hey, it might make me suicidal, doesn’t mean I can’t find “some sort of job” (by all the gods am I glad meds psych from hell is gone, I hope she never sees a client again)
I’m pretty sure that mandatory minimum incomes would not be very popular with most libertarians.
Fortunately, neither is anyone else. This is entirely a right-wing meme, not something those of us who are pro-welfare would advocate for.
I also don’t think “handout” and “hand up” need to be mutually exclusive.
QFT.
I want to marry this comment, especially the first paragraph, as I’ve been saying this since I was in middle school. Someone needs to pick the food and fix the cars and haul away the trash, and to look down on them and say they don’t deserve to feed their families (or that their families don’t deserve to eat) is just ridiculous to me. And other working-class people go along with it, which just boggles my mind.
Since when do libertarians favor a minimum wage? I thought that was government overreach and the free market would sort it all out.
It’s like you don’t even known any feminists (which makes sense, you being an MRA and all).
Nova, ” I’m living with my parents, so that I can supplent their meager retirement and Social Security Disability benefits. ”
Good for you. I always thought it totally bizarre the way adults who live with their parents are painted as “losers” in American media and pop culture.
I think its just a plot of Big Consumerism to get people out, and buying separate homes, cars, furniture and kitchen appliances.
I often wonder what would happen if people just stopped. Like one day if all ordinary citizens of the US just didn’t buy gas, just didn’t go to work, didn’t buy squat. Like for a day or week.
“Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes.
Hearts starve as well as bodies: give us bread; but give us roses!”