On May 7th, as I noted here yesterday, Men’s Rightser Mike Buchanan only managed to score a humiliating 153 votes in the UK election. This brought the total number of votes cast for Buchanan’s Justice for Men and Boys Party to — let me doublecheck the math here — 216 votes. 216.
The Labour Party, by contrast, won a total of 9,347,326 votes. But this was considerably less than the victorious Tories, and was seen as such a disaster for the party that Labour leader Ed Miliband resigned in disgrace.
But Men’s Rights Activists can never admit defeat. And so huge loser Mike Buchanan has declared his total drubbing to be a victory of sorts, telling the world — or whatever tiny portion of it that was paying attention — that his party had “achieved what we set out to achieve.”
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
Here’s the, er, logic behind his victory claim, as set forth in a statement posted on his website, and on Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men.
Around 05:30 today, the results were declared in the two seats where Ray Barry and I were standing. I secured 153 votes, Ray 63, and I’d like to thank the good people who voted for us.
While more votes would have been welcome, we achieved what we set out to achieve, which was to use the democratic process to break the conspiracy of silence about J4MB and men’s human rights, and show up the hypocrisy and blatant gynocentrism of the mainstream political parties.
If your aim was merely to make a bit of noise, congratulations, Mike; a radiator can do that.
Mike took a moment to point out one piece of “evidence” for this terrible gynocentrism: Labour’s Gloria de Piero, who won the seat Buchanan competed for so miserably failed to compete for, didn’t even bother to mention him in her victory speech.
“Whether you voted for me, or Helen, or Philip, or Simon,” de Piero declared, “I promise to represent you all, and work tirelessly for you all.”
Buchanan sniffed:
So it’s only men in Ashfield for whom she won’t work tirelessly over the next five years.
Either that or she just didn’t feel the need to acknowledge a ludicrous “candidate” who got such a small percentage of the vote that it didn’t even round up to 1 percent. Or maybe she just forgot? In any case, I’m pretty sure there are some men who voted for her, or Helen, or Philip, or Simon.
Buchanan acknowledges that “we expected to secure a higher number of votes” — no shit; a fart in a jar could have done better — and blames the poor showing on the fact that “this was our first general election, fought with very limited funds.”
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
But even though he and his party comrade failed miserably at the polls, Buchanan takes heart in the fact that the complete assholes who blight the comment sections of every major UK newspaper were on his side.
[T]he comment streams in articles by the Telegraph, Independent, Mail, Express, and even the Guardian and Observer, have been highly supportive of J4MB, and many thousands of people have been led to our website after reading these articles.
I guess, from my point of view, this is a highly reassuring result, showing that these commenters don’t reflect the opinions of some silent majority, but rather that of a very loud but actually quite miniscule minority.
But Mike, seriously, you need to acknowledge your failure, as have the leaders of all the major losing parties. More than this, you need to accept the painfully obvious conclusion:
Your party has tried a male leader, and he — that is, you — failed miserably.
Clearly, you need to step down and let a woman take charge.
“These guyz will not be happy until women are seen in public ONLY in the role of boner pleaser.”
When my feminist friend Katie takes over, the prestigious office of “lord high boner pleaser” will be given to a man, possibly Brad Pitt. That’ll shake things up.
200 votes? That’s probably less than the expected from random choices of people who don’t really care and just vote for a fancy name or for the lulz.
The only reason Fart Jar wasn’t on the ballot is because the British people aren’t ready for REAL gaseous representation! Just because Gaseous-British people are a small minority doesn’t mean their voices should be heard!
GASIANDRY! GASINADRY ALL OF YOU!
I bet some of Buchanon’s voters only voted for him because they don’t like Labour or the Tories and just picked a random third party candidate.
We have instant run off voting in my city. The last mayoral race had 34 candidates. Is Mayor Betsy Hodges a misandric feminazi if she didn’t actually all 33 other candidates? She’s a progressive feeemale, so probably!
Does anyone have more brain bleach? I’ve been inundated with angry dudes for 2 or 3 hours now because I made a comment on Gawker connecting male entitlement to family annihilators. My brain hurts.
This is the best goat video because it also has science in it (elastic dynamics or something) so is therefore also educational and not just funny.
Did anyone else read the comments on the speech at AVfM? Apparently, Paul Elam will be doing a hangout with Mike Buchanan tomorrow. I’m sure that will lead to some interesting discussion.
Nat Geo mofo.
I think my favorite part of these results is the long list of strange minor parties that beat out the MRAs: the “Monster Raving Looney Party” got 18 times their votes, while “Cannabis is Safer Than Alcohol” got 38 times their votes.
This doesn’t have any goats in it (fainting or otherwise) but it’s a bit sciency so I may as well stick it here….
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/09/philip-zimbardo-boys-are-a-mess
I wish there was something in my life that no matter how badly I did I would congratulate myself.
When I was at UC Berkeley, there was a member of the Student Senate who ran as the candidate of the Conservative Gumby Party. He always campaigned in character, and had been returned to office for YEARS. Funny part was, as a student senator he was effective, collaborative and well respected. So, utterly unlike Buchanan.
@Alan Robertshaw
“Ugh, what is this? What? What?…oh, wait…okay he’s making a poi–no, no, that was a miss…okay…I feel ya, I feel ya, oh, nope, swing and a miss again…entitlement? Everything handed on a platter? Media showing men with stunted emotional growth and infantile personalities? Yes, yes–oh, nope. Nope. Nope…okay…okay…
“THE POOR PERFORMANCE OF BLACK KIDS IS THE FAULT OF LACK OF FATHER FIGURES AND THIS IS SPILLING OUT OF THE BLACK COMMUNITY TO THE WHITE COMMUNITY?
“ಠ_ಠ”
It’s like a toddler trying to pronounce “butter”, but it comes out “buffer”. So close, so close. And racist. So racist.
It’s interesting isn’t it?
Some of his points seem really worthy of consideration. I can see an argument that boys who only have ‘virtual’ relationships with computer games will lack social skills; but then some of the other stuff!!??
It’s almost like Einstein did his paper on the photo-electric effect and concluded “So we can see that the quantum effect will give rise to a release of energy in the form of a photon; and also that women can’t parallel park”
No, no, no, you misunderstand completely! It’s gynocentric because even though men are doing the hard work of running for office and then governing once they are in office, it’s the women who are pulling their strings. Because butts. Women have cannily tricked men into doing all of the work while they wiggle their rears and reap all the rewards!
Actually, any woman at all in public life represents a failure for the gynocracy, because it means that lady couldn’t force a man to do her work for her.
I love fainting goats, but you’d think that would be a condition that got removed from the gene pool mighty quickly. Falling over helplessly is not the response you want when startled by a cougar or pack of wolves.
@Alan Robertshaw
I remember this guy from my psych class in high school. His biggest achievement was doing a hack-job of a prison experiment back in the 70s.
It’s just so glaringly obvious from this article that he needs to get with the times. I don’t know how often he reads about new psychological theories and studies and shit, but he really needs to step it up a notch. How often are professional encouraged to go back to school? You’d think in psychology (and medicine, to be honest), with all the new theories every month that doctors would be inclined to go back to school and learn about these things at least every decade.
I bet this guy still thinks that “women peak sexually in the 30s” and shit.
@ childrenofthebroccoli
There are some interesting thoughts as to why the “fight, flee or freeze” responses evolved.
Some predators will be suspicious of ‘dead’ prey so just lying there can be a good move.
It’s like what they recommend for dealing with bears; although the addendum that “in these circumstances bears have been known to cause only minor injuries” is less than reassuring.
Well, in all fairness, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich were pretty gorgeous.
Domestic animals aren’t subject to natural selection by wolf attack. Being bright white isn’t a trait sported by many wild non-polar animals, either, because wolf attack, but it’s common in domestic goats.
@Alan Robertshaw
Oh, oh, look at this comment I found:
“‘I presume boys masturbate much more than girls – there’s no good data on that’
No way not true!”
And the response:
“Are you crazy of course it’s true. Many women have never masturbated. How many men do you think haven’t?”
http://i.giphy.com/QgixZj4y3TwnS.gif
But surely, if women masturbated there’d be a market for devices to facilitate this?
The Monster Raving Loony Party has actually managed to get local councillors elected – and in one case repeatedly re-elected, suggesting that his voters actually appreciated his input. They’ve never had any MPs, unsurprisingly (the bar to entering Parliament is tens of thousands of votes higher than for a place on a town council), but perhaps their greatest electoral triumph was in 1990, when they polled more votes than the formerly mighty but rapidly dwindling Social Democrats. SDP co-founder and leader David Owen, realising that he’d never survive this humiliation, abolished the party shortly afterwards.
(Incidentally, I’m well aware that a word in the MRLP’s name is normally frowned on round these parts, but since it’s the actual name of one of Britain’s more famous minor political parties it’s hard to avoid using it. But I’ll obviously be only too happy to respect whatever people think is the most appropriate usage.)