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.
On the subject of eating bugs… Termite queens (taste like peanuts) and honey ants (taste like duh). They’re really good. Not sure if you can get honey ants outside of Australia, though. o~O
I had fried mealworms once. They tasted like peanuts but has the consistency of the papery bit in peanuts. They’re pretty good. 10/10, would eat again.
It just occured to me that mealworms might actually make a good substitute for peanuts. Mealworm cookies, mealwormbutter, mealworms in Thai food – if peanut tasting insects retain their flavor when cooked into other foods, what would be the excuse for manufatures using that instead of what many people are allergic of?
I’ve seen mealworms sold at 2 bucks for 50 little worms, seems like a lot for so little.
Still I guess you could raise them, how hard can it be?
I assume they’re priced like that because they’re usually for lizards, fish, and similar animals that a) are pets people keep as hobbies, not necessities, and b) have very small appetites. I bet they could be priced much lower if there was a larger market for them.
@katz
Especially if they’re actually farmed on a large scale instead of just a small time deal. Bugs aren’t that hard to raise and take up very little space, so a large farm could produce much more, way cheaper than some of the smaller timers do now.
I would try mealworm cookies, if they taste like peanut butter! My only objection to eating insects is how they look… but then, shrimp freak me out too for the same reason, and I eat them.
@SFHC apparently there are honey ants in some parts of the southwestern US?
Oh lord…someone do a ‘Shop of this. And then add the caption “Mein Fraulein”
(I’m pretty sure that’s not grammatical German, but grammar wouldn’t be the point, would it)
@David Futrelle: “…they came from a man who is by far the most influential man in the men’s rights movement today, and from something he (re)posted just this week.”
So you say. I’ve never heard of him. I can tick of a list of self-proclaimed feminist leaders, black leaders, etc.. And, I can easily cite ridiculous statements from these actually known, actually influential people. Some, like Sharpton, have committed manifestly unethical acts of fraud (e.g., Brawley rape claims). Despite these failings, these people get interviewed as spokespeople for their movements. They get invited to the White House. That’s disturbing.
If MRAs have 1% of the influence on politics, I haven’t seen it.
I don’t agree with your suggestion that an inordinate number of MRAs are ticking bombs. Certainly, one can find more threats or acts of violence among SJWs, as well as the Muslims that many SJWs refuse to criticize for fear of “punching down” (or, just for fear of getting death threats for complaining about their treatment of women, gays, religious minorities, etc.).
I understand that, for many here, this is a holy war, in which the other side is always evil. But that’s a major fault of identity politics in general. People should be judged individually, not discriminated against, not attacked for “privilege”.
@Chie Satonaka “…you compared a man who [did bad things] culminating in an actual terrorist attack on a police department to the protests of police brutality following multiple executions of unarmed black men and children in which the police involved faced zero consequences for their actions.”
No, I didn’t make that comparison. I compared violence with violence, not violence with protests.
I’ve been a very vocal critic of police abuse of power for nearly two decades. And, while the impact of such abuses impact minorities disproportionately, the fact is that abuse by law enforcement (and government in general) is not a racial problem. It’s a problem of government power, particularly in the lack of accountability of those on the bleeding edge where government power is exerted through law enforcement on the streets. People of all colors get murdered, hurt, terrorized, and otherwise abused. Making it only about black victims, and twisting the facts of particular cases to make Michael Brown (who attacked the cop and tried to take his gun) the same as Walter Scott or Eric Garner, is factually wrong. And, being based upon false claims, that undermines justified protests for actual cases of abuse.
A decade ago, Salvatore Culosi was shot in the head when a SWAT team was sent to serve a warrant on him for petty gambling. Last year, Albuquerque police shot James Boyd, a homeless man, for sleeping in a park. These were arguably more sympathetic victims than Michael Brown, but since they were white, their cases are largely ignored. Certainly people aren’t marching in the streets over them.
“Civil unrest has its place….”
Burning down businesses of innocents has no place in civilized society. Shooting cops in the head has no place, either.
“…claiming that Boulware had no voice and was unfairly targeted by police is ludicrous on its face.”
Who did that? That’s your straw man argument. You deal with it.
Keith, other people will be along to address your hand-waving of away of racially motivated violence and the murder of black men by cops because I haven’t the time and mental energy at the moment.
An MRA who’s never heard of Paul Elam? And please, if Elam & co. and all the assholes David writes about on this blog aren’t representative of the MRM, can you name some who aren’t misogynists who are? Even one non-asshole MRA?
The thing about how bugs taste is best summed up by Samuel L Jackson.
“Sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’ll never know cuz I’ll never eat the filthy mother fuckers.”
Shut up, Keith. You’re an ignorant racist. GTFO.
When they’re No True MRA-ing the guy who invented MRAs as we know them…
Schrodinger’s Movement.
Is that Keith guy the one who derailed the topic about Walter Scott about his fucking boohoo about child support?
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/lpstk.gif
Seriously, fuck you.
Fuck you so hard making a topic about a racially charged killing about fucking child support.
Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.
http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/bye.gif
There’s more important things in the world than having to pay a several hundred dollars a month for your own children, dickhole.
http://33.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lowilxqbRn1qihsweo1_500.gif
@Keith
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, you didn’t even fact check that before you made your argument! How pathetic. You actually just proved yourself wrong just by bringing him up.
http://www.abqjournal.com/374350/news/hundreds-protest-shooting.html
In case it’s not already obvious by the name of the URL, the title of the article is:
Hundreds protest police shooting of homeless man
Here’s a snipet:
http://s27.photobucket.com/user/reaper_man/media/Phoenix%20Wright/edgeworth-shrug.gif.html
Checkmate.
*sign* Really, embed mammoth? Really? 🙁
White men are never brutalized by the police for being white men. White men who experience police brutality are usually in another marginalized group. Such as homeless or mentally ill.
That sounds like distancing oneself.
“These people say things that I don’t agree with and they get invited to the White House instead of me!”
Also, the Brawley rape claims happened in 1987. This was three years before I was even born. On top of that, I didn’t see anything about Sharpton in any of the articles I looked up. Most likely (and this is just conjecture on my part) if Sharpton was involved, he was just supporting someone he believed to be a victim.
So this is relevant how?
No politicians claim to be MRAs, but they sure do love hating women like you do if their refusal to let a woman get birth control (that has lots of health benefits besides not getting you pregnant) on health insurance (but Viagra and penis pumps that are solely to help men get it up are a-okay) or their insistence to force people with uteri to carry unwanted fetuses to term is anything to go by.
And here we go with the “I haven’t seen US act bad, but YOU GUYS ARE THE WORST!” argument.
Also, I hate to break this to you, but “Muslims” are not a monolithic group. They aren’t a hive mind. There are individuals who use their religion to treat women, “gays” (We either prefer LGTBQA+, or “queer people” for short if the acronym bothers you. But be careful with “queer”, as it’s still considered a slur in some places.), and “religious minorities” (by which I can only assume you mean atheists because that’s all most MRAs care about) like shit. But people like that exist in other religions too. (i.e. The Westboro Baptist Church)
There are several Islamic people who are indeed feminists. There are queer Islamic people. Because “Muslims” are people. And people are diverse. And some people are assholes. Like you.
The reason why we don’t “criticize” Islamic people the way you think we should is because we’re not fucking racists who want to treat people badly simply because stereotypes and propaganda.
However, feminists do criticize the way that religions can treat women badly. And LGBTQA+ groups do criticize how religions treat queer people. It’s just not only Islamic religions that we criticize. Christianity and Atheism are part of the criticisms as well.
As for your claims of “SJW” and “Muslim violence”: Sources or GTFO.
This isn’t a “holy war”, Keith. This is a fight for us to simply survive and exist. And MRAs don’t think we, as women, deserve that. They want us to be silent and pacified, they want us to exist solely for their benefit and our detriment. We exist, in their eyes, to please their boners, have their babies, and clean up after them while they go and rule the world, not realizing that everyone is miserable under their system. Not just women, but men as well.
People should be judged individually. So, please tell that to people who say things like “All women are bad drivers!”, “Girls suck at math!”, “Black people are thugs!”, “Muslims are terrorists!”, etc. Because whenever a member of an oppressed group does something wrong, they suddenly are representative of their entire group, and used as an excuse to keep the rest of the group oppressed.
But when a cishet, white, upper-class, Christian, male does something wrong, not only is he judged as an individual, but people will still defend him.
People are only “attacked” for privilege when they use it as a means to ignore what’s going on to people who don’t share in it, or when they use it as a means to attack others. Having privilege doesn’t instantly mean someone is bad.
For instance, I’m white. I have privilege over people of color. Does this make me a bad person? No. What would make me a bad person is if I used my privilege to talk over them and ignore them, or insist that they need my help or “saving”.
So, please fuck off with your “egalitarian” world views. The world is not a level playing field, and insisting that we just say that the playing field is level now and keep going would ignore that there’s very real sexism, racism, and other discrimination going on right now.
You’d still have an advantage, even though you’re insisting that the playing field is now level. Sure, it looks good and level to you, but I’m still trying to dodge potholes and walls.
@Paradoxical
http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/marylin.gif
@Keith
so you’re back. With more stupid false equivalencies.
“I compared violence with violence”
You see, fucker, that is also a false equivalence, and that’s what I hate about this shitty argument, because it is always – always – brought forward in bad faith. “Violence” is a very vague term, and what you’re actually comparing, asshole, is a guy who planned a murder spree with assault rifles with riots in which no one was actually planning on killing someone. That is the important legal distinction between murder and manslaughter. Also, no one was killed in the riots. I’m ready to debate the use of violence in protests, but it is not the same as actually planning mass murder. So don’t try and make the one about the other, idiot.
And yeah, of course civil unrest has its place. Your whole political system is based upon a revolution. Also note that civil unrest is a social phenomenon which usually points to the disenfranchisement of large parts of society, while you think it’s a valid argument to equate a whole group of people angry about decades of repression and daily humiliation at the hands of police with one psycho who felt so entitled that a personal slight brought him to try and kill people who had nothing to do with his imagined victimhood.
Your efforts at making Michael Brown the bad guy and derail the conversation about police racism are also obviously in extremely bad faith, fucker. As if there weren’t a host of activists from the civil rights organisations who talk about homelessness, criticize public policy towards the poor and homeless, and help build and uphold shelters. And yeah, I even agree with you – this is not just about police, but about a whole administrative system and institutional racism. But guess what, asshole – racist cops are part of that system. Also, “A decade ago” and “last year” – nice. You are comparing that to three murders of black teens by police in the last 12 months alone, you nitwit. And those are only the most prominent cases.
P.S.: I’m not really ready to debate political violence with you, because fuck you.
@Paradoxical Intention
http://replygif.net/i/716.gif
For those of you who are not in the US and are (fortunately for you) only familiar with the American right in passing; mentioning Sharpton is a huge tell. The far right is obsessed with Al Sharpton for some reason. They perceive him to embody everything they think is wrong with both the left and black people. Moderates tend to barely even know he exists. The left doesn’t even quote or discuss him that often.
Keith may be casting himself as a neutral above the fray type, but he’s not. I’m sure everyone is shocked about that.
@Bernardo Soares “There is a fundamental difference between a broad, diverse movement with a long history like the feminist one, and a (relatively) small group of angry men who spout misogynist nonsense.”
“Broad”? Putting aside the obvious pun, the political mindset of feminists is rather narrowly leftist. “Diverse”? The very foundation of feminism is the opposite. (Oh, you meant racially? How does that not apply to men who speak out against feminism, in support of the rights of men? From my experience living outside the US, as well as dealing with men from other countries, I’d strongly dispute any assertion that white males are most oppressive of women.)
Basically, you think the size and longevity of a group gives it special consideration? Because plenty of feminists, particularly the more vocal, perfectly fit the “angry [wo]men who spout [anti-male] nonsense” description perfectly.
To dismiss the complaints of MRAs as nothing but “misogyny” is just a smear tactic. I don’t agree with the tactics of MRAs–identity politics are a cancer on Western culture, which go hand in hand with cultural Marxism. Adopting these poisonous tactics is surrendering valuable principles for the sake of short-term oneupmanship. But I’ve seen enough arguments to know that your portrayal of them as nothing but woman bashing is an abject lie.
As a reactionary movement, they are driven by outrage at unfairness, mostly the result of political feminism tilting the courts and laws too far. Any rational person should look at both movements and recognize that neither are reasonable, as a whole. It’s not that the “balance” is off, but that making blanket judgments on the basis of sex is fundamentally wrong, and correcting past instances of such can never be accomplished properly by using sexism in the opposite direction. People should be judged individually. That’s it.
I can’t address your accusations against AVFM as I don’t know anything about them.
“Your insinuation that feminists don’t care about individuals rights is just bullshit.”
No, it isn’t. The bulk of feminists are leftists and collectivists.
“…in a society that is built on day-to-day discrimination…”
False premise. American society, and Western society in general, was a historical leap forward in individual rights, with the obvious caveat that the original sin of slavery, and other such prejudices, meant that not everyone in America (or the West), enjoyed this seminal leap forward in humanity. Technological and financial success occurred and occurs best when people are free to pursue their self interests. Ending discrimination, slavery, and other such evils has often been the result of Enlightenment culture coming to fruition, as people with political power see the unfairness and contradictions inherent in such conditions and don’t want to be the bad guy.
“…it is necessary to talk about and work against the dicrimination of groups in order to get to the point where everybody truly has equal rights….”
Except the leftist, collectivist identity politics approach attacks discrimination as a matter of political patronage (how many people of what color or sex or other identity hold office) or (frequently misused) statistics (demographics of a TV show, raw average pay rates) rather than the day-to-day exercise of freedom by the individual. I don’t care if the president or those in Congress who purport to represent me look like me. I care that they don’t interfere with my going about my business.
“…equal access to education, material wealth, and the justice system.”
There you go. Equal access to wealth, i.e., you advocate stealing from people who have more. Your “justice” is envy driven. There’s nothing respectable about envy. And, you can’t tell me you believe in individual rights when you’re about stealing to even out the different groups.
Look at the empty shelves in Venezuela, the starving millions in North Korea, the GULAGs, killing fields, reeducation camps, and all the other atrocities which resulted from taking Marx’s bullshit notions to their logical conclusion. Marx had no clue about why people did what they did. He didn’t understand human nature, the fundamental forces underlying economic activity. That tens of millions perished and billions suffered under the yolk of the egalitarian fantasies is one of the greatest tragedies of history.
The bottom line is that two wrongs don’t make a right. If some of the white males of past centuries wronged minorities and women, then taking from whites and males today isn’t learning from the past. It’s just envy-driven revenge.
“There is a fundamental difference between a largely peaceful demonstration against injustice, in which violence is limited to damaging stuff and maybe accept that somebody might get hurt in the process, and a deliberate, premeditated murder spree like this guy tried to pull off, and which the MRM in other, similar cases has endorsed and used as a threat.”
You forget that two policemen were shot in Ferguson, Mar 12, 2015. Also, there were the two NYPD officers murdered in NY Dec 25, 2014. Other attacks on police may also be related to the anger over Michael Brown.
The protests in Ferguson, MO over the shooting of Michael Brown were misdirected, not simply because the circumstances were misrepresented (while other far more clear-cut cases of unjustified homicides have not garnered what I would expect to be a proportionate amount of anger). The biggest problem there was not race, but financial class. People who were struggling to make ends meet faced excessive numbers of tickets and a snowballing of additional fines and punishments each time they couldn’t afford to pay. That created a major source of resentment. That the police looked different was just an easy point of venting. Real solutions in a place like that aren’t about talking about race or placating violent protesters. Real solutions require a total reform of the system of ticketing and court, to stop putting poor people into major binds over minor mistakes. http://wapo.st/1JWweDy
“Given that white riots after football wins and football losses are routinely excused as ‘the guys need to blow off steam’, and black riots are presented as dangerous and uncontrolled, your insinuation that white guys can’t be violent is at the very least inappropriate as fuck.”
Riots over sports teams winning and losing isn’t a white phenomenon. Perhaps hockey rioters are more white than basketball rioters, but that kind of crap happens all over the world. And, anyone who excuses them is an idiot.
I never claimed white guys can’t be violent. That’s your straw man argument.
The issue is that when some white guy shoots up a place or carries out some other form of violence, the media and SJWs don’t rush out to examine what the targets/victims did wrong to provoke it, as they did with Pamela Geller, Charlie Hebdo, race riots, etc.. The answer isn’t to give violent white thugs an excuse, to blame their victims, as a way to achieve parity. The answer is to stop blaming victims, period.