Last night, as you probably have heard, a Dallas man named James Boulware launched a one-man quasi-military assault on the Dallas Police Department headquarters, firing an automatic rife with such abandon that early reports suggested that there were as many as four different shooters. After fleeing the scene in an armored “Zombie Apocalypse Van,” leaving behind an assortment of improvised explosives as a kind of going away gift, Boulware was cornered in a restaurant parking lot; after a long standoff, he was eventually killed by a police sniper’s bullet. It was something of a miracle that no one but Boulware ended up dead.
Boulware’s father told local news that his son had been “pushed past” his “breaking point” after losing custody of his son. Men’s Rights activists often describe men who “resort to violence” after losing a custody dispute as victims of a cruel family court system.
But in Boulware’s case, it appears, nothing could be further from the truth.
Because, you see, he lost custody of his son two years ago — after a violent incident that offered a chilling prequel to last night’s rampage. As the local NBC affiliate reported at the time
A Paris man was arrested after family members reported to authorities that they were concerned he could go on a shooting spree. …
Officers confiscated several guns from a Paris home, after arresting the owner. “There are four or five long guns and three or four pistols, tubs full of ammunition, and the body armor,” says Paris Police Chief Bob Hundley.
James Boulware, 33, allegedly grabbed and choked his mother in Dallas on Tuesday morning, and he has made other threats, police and family members said.
“That he was going to just kill all the adult members of the family and then that’s when he made the comment he may shoot up some churches and schools,” says Hundley.
“He had been talking about the schools and churches being soft targets, being easy targets because no one in them was armed,” a man who identified himself as Boulware’s brother “Andrew” said.
After this incident, a judge handed over custody of Boulware’s son to Boulware’s mother; it seems rather clear that the court was right to deem him unfit to care for the boy.
Further confounding the standard Men’s Rights narrative is the fact that the mother of the child, reportedly a drug addict, was also deemed unfit; both were ordered by the court to pay child support to Boulware’s mother.
Boulware was well-known to local police for this and other family disputes — as well as for repeatedly threatening the judge involved in his case.
Indeed, he littered Facebook and other websites with comments ranting about the alleged injustice done to him, alongside angry and often hateful attacks on “Comrad [sic] Obama” and the “fag loving, abortion have typical queer American brain washed troll[s]” who argued with him online. After a commenter called him “dumb” in one recent discussion of American foreign policy, Boulware declared that “I’M TRYING TO FIND OUT WHERE YOU LIVE SO I CAN DRAG YOU OUT OF YOUR TRAILOR AND BEAT YOUR BITCH A$$!!!!”
His conspiracy theories may have been driven by delusions; Boulware’s mother says her son “heard voices” and that she and other family members had tried in vain to get him the mental health treatment he needed.
After last night’s events, Boulware’s father told local media that, while he didn’t think what his son had done was right, “we all have a breaking point, and they pushed him past it.”
But Boulware, it seems fairly clear, was already plenty broken long before “the system” got to him. And no matter how sad or angry he was about losing custody of his son, nothing justifies a violent attack on innocent strangers with assault rifles and explosives. Most people, even if they were pushed far past their breaking point, wouldn’t respond with attempted mass murder. We are not all rage bombs waiting to go off.
And that’s when this post comes back around to the Men’s Rights movement. No, despite his anger at the police and courts for “taking away his kid,” and his penchant for calling people “BITCHES” in comments sections he doesn’t seem to have been a Men’s Rights activist.
But his was the kind of rage that Men’s Rights activists like to “warn” us all about; his violence was the sort of violence that MRAs all too often excuse.
I’ve written many times before about the way the Men’s Rights movement has lionized Tom Ball, a New Hampshire man who committed suicide several years ago by lighting himself on fire outside a court building — in hopes, as he explained in a long and inflammatory manifesto — of inspiring other men to start fire-bombing courthouses and police stations to avenge the wrongs allegedly inflicted on men by the family courts.
We’re lucky no one took him up on this suggestion, just as we are lucky today that no one except Boulware died in his assault on the Dallas police.
Boulware’s apparent mental illness, and the extreme nature of his assault on police, may keep him from becoming the MRA martyr that Ball became after his death. But MRAs have been willing to excuse if not justify similar violence in the past.
Consider, for example, “How we kill Johnny,” the story Men’s Rights celebrity Paul Elam has just posted to his new “consulting” site An Ear for Men.
In the story — presented as a true one — Elam describes his feelings upon learning of the murder-suicide of a young man he’d worked with as a substance abuse counselor. After a quick mention of the murder part of the murder-suicide — Johnny was said to have “killed that little girl he was married to” and shot, though not fatally, the man she was sleeping with — Elam moves on to the real victim, in his estimation: Johnny, the guy who pulled the trigger.
Johnny, as Elam sees it, was really only guilty of loving the woman he killed too much.
You see, men love. They love with the most profound intensity and selflessness of which any creature on this earth is capable. And the steely bond between them and women is, unlike their hearts, unbreakable. …
They will lay down in traffic for the women they love and stand in the way of bullets to protect them.
Yes, that’s right. He’s waxing poetic about men protecting the women they love — in the middle of a story about a man who killed the woman he loved.
I hope, more than anything else, that at some point in our future that people start to think. When you see the story on the evening news about a man who set himself ablaze outside a family court, ask yourself what kind of pain could drive someone to cure it with fire?
I can only assume this is a reference to Ball, who hoped that men would rise up to avenge his pain with firebombs.
When you read in the newspaper about the man who holed up in his house with a gun and his children, threatening to take them all out, ask yourself if this is just a crazy man, or a man driven to the brink by a pain so monstrous and devastating that even the unthinkable could become an option?
The fact is we “read in the newspaper” and on the internet about men like this all the time. And they are virtually always men. Murder-suicide, while rare, is an overwhelmingly male crime. Women lose custody too — as did the mother of the child in Boulware’s case — but outside of a few exceptional cases they don’t react to this by trying to murder fathers or judges or an entire police departments at once. Men sometimes do.
Elam has in the past “warned” us all that unless we start kowtowing to angry men like him, and soon, we will create a massive “male bomb” that will tear apart society as we know it today.
But men — or at least the vast majority of them — aren’t rage bombs. Those men who do resort to extreme violence — like Boulware and all the men we read about who kill their partners and sometimes even their children before, as they say, “turning the gun on themselves” — aren’t the victims they and Men’s Rights activists would like us all to see them as. They’re the perps — invariably men with an overgrown sense of entitlement, too in love with their own rage.
Those who use these men as a “warning” to the rest of us are playing a very old game, perfected by domestic abusers and bullies of all sorts. Abusers and bullies learn very quickly that they don’t always have to use violence to get what they want; the threat of violence is enough. “Don’t push me,” they say, and the implicit threat of an “explosion” of rage does the rest, all while enabling the bully to pretend to be the victim.
The Men’s Rights movement, to a large extent, is all about taking that implicit threat to the societal level.
It’s up to us to keep them from getting away with it.
Eew, Natural News? I had a run-in with one of their owners/admins/mods after they tried harassing my best friend through email to guilt her into buying into their homeopathic “Autism cure” scam.
Ah, didn’t know that, whoops!
I thought I heard it on QI a while back, so just looked for an article that mentioned it.
I’ll make sure to ignore Natural News if it ever shows up in a search again, thanks.
Here’s the clip from QI where Fry mentioned it, I think.
At the risk of sacrificing my big-tentness, I’m not going to take anyone very seriously as a feminist if they think women should be treated the same as animals.
There are a lot of very compelling reasons to be a vegetarian (I’m a “try not to eat meat too often” type myself, an excellent position for drawing all of the wankers out of the woodwork), but “there’s no difference between humans and other animals and they should be treated the same way” is not one of them.
re: Hitler as vegetarian — yes, he was, and it was well documented even in his time that he was put off by meat and convinced that it was bad for people (he did, however, eat eggs and caviar — and occasionally, as noted in the New York Times, “a slice of ham”). But the circumstances under which he became one are kind of hinky. His niece, whom he had been sexually harassing, committed suicide, and apparently that was what later put him off pork. Not, as one might expect, concern for helpless animals. Nope, it was because he’d seen the body, and probably handled it, too. Creepy? Doubleplus.
(At least, this is the version I heard.)
Oh as far as they’re concerned there is a difference; animals are better! “No animal kills for fun” etc. (like cats wouldn’t be building their own anti mouse missiles if only they had opposable thumbs)
Don’t forget, we are talking about people who won’t drive through a town if it has “Ham” in its name. (only a slight exaggeration there)
@Katz @Alan
There are two kinds of antispeciecist/Animal Rights proponents that basically separate along this line. There’s the Australian utilitarian Peter Singer, who actually argues that Great Apes have a “potential for happiness” greater than that of children born with disabilities (such as people with trisomy 21 and spina bifida), a position which is widely criticized as leading to eugenics (which he denies). He supports euthanasia, arguing that a coma patient doesn’t add to “the greatest possible happiness for the greatest number”, but a well-fed horse does. And there are Antispeciecists who emphasize that giving animals the same rights as humans doesn’t and shouldn’t lead to denying humans any rights, but rather broadens the application of the concept.
The first is, to me, an unsupportable position. Singer is professor of Bioethics in Princeton and strongly involved with the Great Apes Project. He is not a marginal figure, but I think his elaborations, particularly on people with Down Syndrome, are appalling. There are many antispeciesists who criticize his positions.
To the second, I say that in contrast to the movements – workers, women, POC, LGBT – who have fought and continue to fight for equal rights, animals can’t fight for themselves, which points to a fundamental difference between humans and animals. Also, if you give animals the same rights as humans, how are you going to enforce the rights of a mouse that was eaten by a cat? Human rights are not just rights, they are also responsibilities – human rights are only worth anything if we can hold people who violate them responsible. Of course, Antispeciesists only want to hold humans responsible for what they do to animals – which in principle, is totally fine by me, but here they accept that there is a fundamental difference between humans and animals. Also, many antispeciesists draw new distinctions – insects are not counted, then fish, some only count the Great Apes, and so on. And, as others have argued, our presence in certain ecosystems has changed them so much that we sometimes need to kill animals to uphold the balance.
There are too many ethical problems and contradictions in the concept, and I don’t understand why it isn’t enough to argue for protection of animals from excessive harm – like in the factories and in mass breeding for milk and meat, without going so far as giving them human rights.
@ Bernardo
Thanks for that; it was really interesting.
Yup, these are the sorts of debates I have a lot with my mates. My starting position is humans are part of nature. How come when a beaver builds a dam it’s all “aww, so cute and clever” but when we do that’s interfering with nature? Etc. (I argue that all human behaviour is just part of the extended phenotype) It’s quite stimulating though.
But to get back to the original point, I’m sure if the poster who equated women with livestock was called out on it, my friends would be genuinely baffled as to why someone would shun a compliment like that.
Read some of the writing’s of his personal physician. One of the reasons Hitler transitioned to a vegetarian diet was her had wicked gas. Vegetarianism was one means by which he could manage his farts.
To add to the above; my friends would also say that there’s no difference between arguing for animal rights and the fact that people in persistent vegetative states are appointed lawyers before life support is turned off. That they are ” A voice for the voiceless” is one of their rallying cries.
Wait, so they want to give animal rights, but only some animals? That’s, like, the opposite of antispeciesist.
Also, what the hell sort of rights do they want animals to have? They can’t vote, they can’t marry or sign contracts or anything like that because they lack, as a species, the intelligence to be able to do those things and the concept of consent – we have laws in place that make sure many animals aren’t abused, which should be expanded on, yes, but what more can we give to them that they can actually use?
No, seriously, what more rights should animals have under law?
That’s basically my position; I care deeply about animal rights, but “give animals all the same rights people have” Just Doesn’t Work because animals don’t act the same way as people. So you have to have to take a different ethical approach that takes into account the ways animals naturally interact with their environments, and once you do that, predation is a possibility.
I think this can be reasonably differentiated from the argument from nature, the latter being a simplistic “we should always keep doing things the way they were done (or we imagine they were done) long ago,” the former being more of an ecological argument about the way we best fit into our environment.
@Pandapool:
It’s about basic human rights. Antispeciesists hold that our society behaves towards animals like it behaves towards women and POC – sexism, racism, speciesism are similar ideologies that enable the exploitation of those deemed “lower”, less intelligent and so on. I don’t think it’s coincidence that most antispeciesists you’ll encounter are white and middle class. But, yeah, it’s extremly inconsistent.
Re: Hitler:
AFAIK, it’s neither clear nor important whether Hitler was actually a vegetarian and for what reasons. But it wouldn’t be such a big exception. The völkisch movement, from which the NSDAP was born, was obsessed with purity of spirit and body and had some elements that we would today regard as progressive. For example, völkisch groups were early proponents of environmental protection, only they saw it as “Heimatschutz” (Heimat is difficult to translate, basically homeland for the volk) and connected it to racist ideas of Germanic tribes living in harmony with nature. Vegetarianism was a part of that.
Animals should be judged on their capabilities as a species, just as we’ve done with humans. We’ve decided humans as a species warrant a great deal of legal rights based on their intellectual and emotional capacities. Well, there as some other species (admittedly, not many) with similar capacities to think and suffer emotionally and physically who have investment in their lives and belong to societies (albeit non-human ones) that will suffer as a result of losing them prematurely.
It’s not humans vs. animals. Humans are one species of animal. Other species can be judged on their individual merits as well. The assumption all species have the capabilities that we have determined define “personhood” in people is just as dumb as the assumption people are the only ones who possess such characteristics.
The notion cone snails and porpoises are particularly comparable and deserving of the same rights is just as absurd as the notion humans are so profoundly different from every other species they’re the only ones deserving of rights.
@ Bernardo
As well as all the Volkish mythology there was also a lot of emulation of supposed Roman ideals (unsurprising considering the roots of ‘fascism’.)
Many legionaries were vegetarian; for lots of reasons; health, religion, matters of taste etc.
My favourite reason though was simple snobbery. There was a faction of middle class Romans who looked down on meat eaters the same way some people look down on consumers of junk food. Honeyed dormice were of course the Big Mac of the Roman world.
@katz: yup, totally agreed.
@Alan: that’s interesting, thanks! So food and class were always connected in strange ways. Although I wouldn’t argue that vegetarianism today is only for the wealthy, it does have an aspect of this; also, people often don’t understand that there are countries in which people live on an extremely meaty diet because there isn’t much possibility for vegetables to grow; Namibia for example.
@Bina
“Sexually harassing” is putting it mildly – Hitler was an incestuous nigh-paedophile and I agree with the theory that she committed suicide because the bastard was raping her.
(So that’s another thing he had in common with the MRAs who worship him.)
Ephebophile!
@Bernardo
Animals are treated like PoC or women? If only people treated each other as well as they treat animals half the time.
We arrest shitheads that torture dogs but we sanctioned torture on humans; homeless animals often find shelter and food handed out to them by humans but homeless people get spit on; a police officer shoots a black person, “They had it coming.” A police officer shoots a dog, “YOU FUCKING MONSTER!”
I mean, fucking seriously.
At the very least, I hope to fuck those “anitspeciest” are rallying against PETA. They have fucking pets euthanized and shit. Fuck them. Of course, I’m guessing many antispeciests are in PETA.
I’m against animal testing, I’m against factory farming, I’m against veal and foie gras and all that shit, but until animals display enough intelligence to weigh the consequences of voting against Prop Tucan or Prop Cheetah, the best we can do for them is make sure they are protected and treated well under the law. In a couple 100,000 years or so, we can start scholarships to put Bonnie Bonobo through college, and I will happily pay my taxes for it because I’m immortal and can do that.
https://youtu.be/OQL5DiNVC9o?t=8s
@katz
Hah! Oh hell, now I’m imagining Hitler in a fedora. =P
Great post. I have been trying to figure out what name to call this kind of talk, the threats of violence if someone is not satisfied. Now you’ve given me the names.
Whether rhis man had a mental illness or not is irrelevant. A mental illnessis not an excuse for this behavior. I’m tired of people trying to use it as such.
This man’s father is a fool, trying to excuse the inexcusable behavior of his son. The father really believes it, too. A man can only take so much…what is he taking and why. There are choices in this world.
Ah, hell, i don’t know. I’ m just so so tired of this bullshit. Take responsibility for gods sake. Own your behavior and feelings. Shit, maybe everybody should go through rehab.
@Pandapool
yup, at least PetA talks about speciesism a lot. I remember that letter Newkirk wrote to Arafat in 2000 or so concerning the poor donkey some idiots had used in a bomb in Tel Aviv. Her concern was not the use of bombs, but she wanted him to keep the innocent animals out of it. As if the cafegoers who had died in the blast weren’t innocent. PetA is just despicable.
Also, the euthanisation of pets is exactly the consequence of their logic – if they lived, they would suffer. Wherein “suffering” is of course defined by the people who kill the pets, not the animals themselves…
@Mew York Kitty
As stated previously in this thread… it’s just cultural weirdness, and I agree it makes no sense. Companion animals I can understand bc it’s an emotional thing… though would I try cat, or dog? Yes. But lots of people are sicked out by, say, eating horse, or snails, or grubs, or rabbits. Just isn’t what they’ve been exposed to as ‘normal’.
Heck, I know people who are grossed out by lamb and goat, which are not exotic or ‘weird’ in my city by any means.
Also – raising my hand as someone who can’t thrive on plant-based proteins, and who knows this based on her experience being very sick while doing so – and who has no issues with meat-eating in general anyway, regardless (issues with large-scale agriculture/food production? yup, and that’s not limited to the animal end of things) and who doesn’t much appreciate having her moral character determined by her dinner menu, thanks. Though I do accept such as payback for when I was a righteous (and ill) vegetarian in my 20’s, so no biggie 😉
Oooh, oooh – someone mentioned eating bugs, and a company in my area is farming crickets and making ‘flour’ out of them. I’d love to try it but it’s $40 A BAG, for chrissakes! $40!!!! It’s sustainable and great for protein, but apparently bugs are for rich folk in my neck o’ the woods, unless I go wrassle ’em up myself.