If the Men’s Rights movement is looking for a celebrity endorser, I think I’ve found just the guy for them: the mixed martial arts fighter, and erstwhile porn actor, War Machine, currently sitting in jail on charges of brutally beating and attempting to kill his ex-girlfriend, porn star Christy Mack.
Men’s Rights activists should be able to look past these criminal charges; after all, as they remind us all the time, women are forever falsely accusing innocent men of all sorts of terrible things.
And in so many ways War Machine is perfect for them. An MMA fighter, he’s already only one letter away from being an MRA. A misogynistic asshole with rage issues, he’ll have no trouble fitting in with the Men’s Rights crowd. And, especialy important for a movement that has a lot of trouble getting any good PR, he’s a bit more comfortable on camera than the Paul Elams and Dean Esmays of the world, with experience on television (on the reality show The Ultimate Fighter: Team Hughes vs. Team Serra), and in seven films (albeit pornographic ones).
Best of all: he’ll need no ideological education from what A Voice for Men likes to call Fuck Shit Up University. War Machine – real name Jonathan Koppenhaver – is already an outspoken proponent of many of the Men’s Rights Movement’s core beliefs.
Consider these selections from a little Men’s Rights manifesto War Machine wrote a few years ago during a previous stint behind bars, serving time for felony assault after two bloody bar fights. His rant, which a friend posted to the internet, would fit right in with the sort of stuff we’ve seen regularly posted on the Men’s Rights subreddit, or The Spearhead, or A Voice for Men. I’ve bolded some of the Men’s Rightsiest bits:
The oppression of MEN is worse than oppression of Jews in Nazi germany, worse than the slavery of Blacks in early America…
There has always been the oppressor and always the oppressed. Before, it was blatant … NOW the oppressor has learned to disguise his evil. You can see man, but you can not see MEN. How easy it is to oppress a minority that is invisible to the eye! How genius of the oppressor! And what a better target too! …
Men challenge injustice from Government, MEN fight for their Constitutional rights, that are slowly being taken away every year. …
And they don’t just oppress us by making more laws and taking away more freedom, they are far more clever than that! Ask yourself what your REAL dream was?? If you gave up on this dream, why? Because of the brainwashing of the Government, that’s why! They taught you to “play it safe.” They told us a responsible man has ONE wife, a house, good credit, good job, and kids. How are you supposed to chase your dreams while maintaining all of that!?
Men are supposed to take risks and be aggressive! What accomplishments have ever come of a man scared to risk it all!? None!? Where would the world be? Still ‘flat!’ Still ‘Earth at the center of the universe!’
If any of you have your Men’s Rights Bingo cards out, I’m guessing you might already be close to scoring a bingo. We’ve got a comparison to slavery that could have come straight from the pages of A Voice for Men, a marriage-is-death-to-male-dreams rant that could have been borrowed from any MGTOW forum, and an evo-psych-esque argument that men are the true risk-takers and the world’s real innovators.
And I don’t think War Machine would have much trouble with Paul Elam’s “Bash a Violent Bitch Month,” either.
[I]t’s Christmas day and I’m laying in my bunk wondering “Why in the hell do American men get married!?” … If your wife is being a bitch you can’t slap her, if your wife is yelling at you, God forbid you yell back … Next thing you know it will be illegal to fuck your wife! LMAO! Maybe then, MEN in this country will get the fucking hint and MOVE! This country forces you to be a bitch!
In another online posting, War Machine touched on another Men’s Rights hobbyhorse, the notion that the justice system is stacked against men:
[L]ook at the prisons, they are FULL of MEN, not women. Are men “evil” and women not? Or do the laws target and attempt to restrict NATURAL MEN’S BEHAVIOR? How many of the HEROES in American history would avoid prison if they lived today? Davey Crockett? Thomas Jefferson? David Bowie? General Grant & General Lee? Shit, George Washington. … Laws target MEN and men’s behavior. Women want to bitch and cry about their rights and equality… LMAO! MEN are the ones locked away like animals, while women run free!
Someone might have to explain to War Machine that David Bowie is not actually a famous American HERO but a famously androgynous British musician who once recorded an album called “Heroes.” (Mr. Machine may be thinking of James Bowie, a well-known 19th century American frontiersman and slave trader, and the guy the Bowie Knife is named after.)
But other than that, he seems ready to go.
There is, of course, that whole attempted murder charge to deal with.
It’s true the Men’s Rights Movement has had few problems in the past rallying behind men with histories of violence. But War Machine might be a harder sell as a Men’s Rights hero. His alleged attack on Mack left her with a cracked rib, a ruptured liver, numerous broken bones, missing teeth and her eyes swollen shut. (See here for photos of her injuries; obviously this link is NSFW and could be triggering.)
While Mr. Machine denies attacking Mack, he joked to a TV host last year that if she were to leave him “I would just kill her” and get a tattoo saying “Rest In Peace” above the tattoo of her name he has on his neck.
And several hours after allegedly trying to murder her, War Machine tweeted this lovely message about his ex:
https://twitter.com/WarMachine170/statuses/497663075831787521
War Machine does seem to be at a low point in his life. Even aside from the charges he faces, and the time he seems likely to serve, his career in porn is almost certainly over. The “Alpha Male” clothing line he helped start wants nothing to do with him. Nobody but the prison system seems to want this guy.
In other words: Men’s Rights activists, this is your chance! War Machine may not be the, er, hero you want. But he’s certainly the hero you deserve.
Dawkins has no ethics, and no understanding of the humanities and social sciences, I realised that with Dear Muslima. Now he’s demonstrating he’s not a particularly good biologist either.
Next thing you know, he’s going to go full Nobel disease and start hawking Super Rational Supplement, or something.
Thanks for bringing that up, Catherine. We can focus on MMA for ages, but the root of the problem is more widespread an insidious. As a society, there’s a general acceptance that, if a woman cheats, she deserves to be assaulted. Or that she invited the abuse, because she was in or had been in a relationship with her abuser. Or that her abuse doesn’t matter, because she’s a lesser person due to her job, her race, her gender identity or her sexual proclivities.
The icing on this is the constant references to her work or comments that she didn’t deserve the abuse… even if she was a porn star. Like it somehow makes an iota of difference whether she was a porn actress or a librarian.
This society still has a fucked up notion that women are partly responsible when a crime is committed against them. It still has a fucked up notion that a woman who uses her body and/ or sexuality to earn a living is subhuman and deserving of abuse. This is the problem and it’s one that every sex worker faces every time she’s brave enough to go to work. It’s one that every woman faces when she’s brave enough to have a relationship, a job or even go outside.
I’m getting ready for work now, knowing that there is a high likelihood that I will have to defend myself from sexual assault. Whether it’s someone touching me inappropriately, someone trying to forcibly penetrate me, somebody trying to forcibly remove my clothes, the perpetrator thinks that its ok, because I’m just a stripper and not human enough to have things like feelings or sexual boundaries.
You know, I will never attempt to judge or second guess another woman’s reasons for having an abortion, because that way lies nothing good, but on the idea that not aborting someone with Downs is immoral? There’s a guy with Downs who lives near me who I see around all the time. Nice guy, super friendly, every time I see him he’s listening to music. I see absolutely no reason why allowing him to be born could be described as “immoral”. Suggesting that nobody like him should ever be allowed to be born, otoh…
He’s not implying he’s outright stating it.
https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/502106262088466432
He dehumanises as well, he uses “it”. The original tweet used “kid”.
Sorry, meant that to be a link to the tweet.
He could have said “the child” rather than “it”. Dawkins is such an asshole.
‘xactly.
LEGO BODY SLAM!
(content warning: Actual Lego body slam)
WHOA!!!! Mods! Can you turn that into a link!? That wasn’t supposed to embed!
@leftwingfox: AWESOME. :slowclap:
I don’t mind the pics but someone really should try to fix that before the trolls figure out that they can post images that way and proceed to post the most upsetting things they can think of.
Nova: then yeah, I don’t blame the sport, but I do blame the organizations for the fact that no such rules are in place, and the fanbase for not turning their back on the guy.
And Holy Shit, Kevin Sorbo is an asshole. I honestly didn’t give a shit when he mouthed off about atheism–his ignorance was so painfully blatant that I could just dump him in with all the other actors and actresses that I have heard that junk from. But hat Ferguson rant… fuck that shit.
This disappoints me in part because of his participation, a couple years back, in a very amusing skit on Key & Peele (the “racist zombies” piece). If he had any ethics at all, if he truly doesn’t believe there’s a problem with cultural racism, he would’ve turned down that gig (and the associated paycheck).
And that shitty not-pology he gave afterward can go fuck itself, too.
I am so, so sorry guys. I’ve e-mailed the mods and asked them to moderate that post.
Yeah, this might be a problem if WordPress is automatically converting links to images into <img> tags. It’s something David should look into.
@freemage: That not-pology left me cold, too. Just walking back one statement doesn’t not make you a racist, Sorbo.
Lee: All I did was copy-paste the URL for the imgur page that image was hosted on, and it auto-embedded the content. 🙁
It has to be a WordPress update thing, I think, since David certainly wouldn’t have enabled that feature on purpose.
Unfortunately, of all the stew of vileness in Dawkins’ latest Twitshit, his use of the word ‘it’ is probably the most defensible, if only because the forced-birth lobby is so fond of using words like “child” and “person” to refer to a fetus, in order to win with manipulation where they can’t win with empathy and reason (because they don’t use those things very well). That said, “it” is a really lousy choice–he should’ve gone proper-English-ditch-the-pronouns, and just said “the fetus”, thereby avoiding the possibility of confusion.
I’ve always associated “it” with erasure and dehumanization, myself, like when the kids in The Goonies called Sloth an “itI.
Unfortunately, I think the thing with the pics is unfixable; wordpress.com just changed how it does links, and I don’t seem to have the option to turn it off. But I made the lego thing a link.
Ugh, Dawkins. Now he’s trying to say that he would *never* tell a woman what to do about abortion. No, just say that she’s immoral if she doesn’t abort when she’s going to have a DS baby.
It’s bizarre he thinks himself a great human rights crusader when he has so much trouble relating to, you know, actual humans.
I much prefer the other Richard Dawkins on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/RlCHARDDAWKlNS
What’s wrong with the word “fetus”, then? Sorry, I don’t buy it.
How about one just uses the term that the person in the original tweet uses. That way, none of us force our viewpoint onto the woman. The woman in the tweet used “kid”. I would be okay with Dawkins using foetus or embryo or whatevers (and he could have phrased the tweet so the comment didn’t use a specific referent). He phrased it the way he did to be even more of an arsehole.
We don’t force women to abort, and we don’t force women to stay pregnant.
Speaking of Kevin Sorbo, here’s the trailer to an actual movie he was in. No, it’s really a real movie and not some bizarre parody:
It’s this kind of mentality that actively seek to silence even the genuine concerns men have. Just as much as there are extremists in mens rights movement, there are equally extremists in feminists movement which you are obviously happy to ignore in your DESPERATE attempt to be politically correct. There are men rights issues that should be addressed, denying that makes you not worth listening to at all. Men rights issues should be addressed by men themselves, NOT by females. You might wanna try and listen instead of systematically choosing the bits that suits your agenda to look like a good man by vilifying and ignoring even what matters.