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.
*I’ll say it, even. The case of the mysterious vanishing apostrophe!
@Bernardo
He’s Libertarian.
@Keith:
I’m an astrophysicist by training. I work in numerical analysis. I hang around on atheist websites a lot. As a result, I very often see the following exchange:
SCIENTIST 1: “The thing is, an ion drive has a high specific impulse but the impulse that it provides is too low to reach orbit. Until we solve that problem, ion drives aren’t really practical.”
SCIENTIST 2: “You could put it up into orbit in some other way. Float it up on a laser, perhaps. All I’m saying is don’t write ion drives off just because they can’t do the first 160km of the journey.”
SCIENTIST 1: “That first 160km costs you 97% of your fuel. The remainder of the journey may be interesting from an engineering point of view, but it’s not something we should be considering until – ”
CREATIONIST: (Jumping in) “Hey, did you know that prayer is far more important than this? Also, if you love Jesus enough he’ll help you get to heaven, which can save you because God didn’t intend us to go to other planets. He built this one for us!”
SCIENTIST 1: *blink*
SCIENTIST 2: “Look, that’s adorable. Here’s a bouncy ball. Why don’t you go and play somewhere else.”
CREATIONIST: “Debate me properly! If you can’t face my arguments then I win!”
SCIENTIST 1: “Screw this. I’m going to go play Minecraft.”
SCIENTIST 2: “Okay, let’s start at the beginning. Here are Newton’s Laws.”
CREATIONIST: “But Newton’s Laws are part of the laws of physics, and they include relativity! And relativity is impossible because God is everywhere and knows everything so your laws of physics must be wrong. Checkmate, atheists!”
SCIENTIST 2: “Yeah, screw this. Where’s the Minecraft?”
CREATIONIST: “I win again!”
That’s you. That’s what you sound like. You may not be aware that you sound like that, because to you your arguments are completely sensible and everyone else is talking nonsense. However, people here are being very charitable by choosing to engage with your little game at all, and you are responding by insulting them. This is not only poor manners; it also lowers the overall quality of discussion on the internet because the loud idiots drive off the intelligent commentators.
Here’s a basic tip: if you believe that you’ve discovered a fundamental flaw in the basic concepts which underlie a large, complex academic field, and you do not yourself have a doctorate in that field, then it is far more likely that you simply don’t understand it and have confused yourself. If you need me to write this out using Bayes’s Formula, I am entirely happy to do so.
If you want to learn about racial politics, go read Ta-Nehisi Coates and Chris Ladd. Read everything they’ve written. Clear your mind of the delusion that you have anything to add to the discussion. Your opinions are not original; your insights are not deep; and inasmuch as your beliefs differ from those of the academic consensus, your beliefs have no value. Do not feel that you add anything to the world by participating in the discussion.
Here’s a bouncy ball. Go play.
@Pandapool
Yeah, should have known. BRB, need a shower.
@Jackie: Did you ‘shop those yourself? That’s really well done. Kudos.
keith
All of us, every last one of us, has been raised in a culture which is sexist, which is racist and is soaked in every other kind of bias and bigotry.
Not one of us has escaped these influences. Whether they came from our families of origin, from our peer groups as we went through our education, from our workplaces, from the media we’ve all been exposed to, our religious education and the people we’ve befriended and had relationships with as adults. We all have to check our language, our emotional responses, our thoughts, our opinions, our spoken arguments for the traces that remain despite our best efforts to eliminate or to change them.
If you think that you have, by sheer force of will, become immune to these influences the only person you’re kidding is yourself.
Especially when you’re talking of Latin Fucking America #NotInMyWatch
Foreign intervention (cough:US:cough) coordinated all Latin American dictatorships during the 1970s: see Operation Condor
Yesterday it was the anniversary of the coup d’Etat against consitutional presidente Perón in Argentina in 1955.
The economic elites ordered an attack, and sent in the air force to bomb Plaza de Mayo, where the government house is (imagine right wingers bombing the White House… yeah, that’s what it was).
This was the only time in history in which the city of Buenos Aires was bombed. And the bastards used our own army to do it!
I know Argentina is not Venezuela, but the tactics for coups d’Etat, dictatorships and state terrorism are pretty much the same all over Latin America.
Most of this is actually US-sponsored, especially in Venezuela where they used to get very conveniently cheap oil.
http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/35770314.jpg
You all may be the funniest people in the world.
(Not you, Keith.)
Libertarian drinking game:
“Collectivists” – bonus if it’s used with the a priori assumption that “collectivism” is bad “Rational” “Al Sharpton” and/or “Jesse Jackson” “I value freedom and/or liberty!” “Cultural Marxism” “Identity politics” – bonus if it’s accompanied by use of Libertarian as an identity “MSNBC” “Radical left” as description for
On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 9:12 AM, we hunted the mammoth wrote:
> Lea commented: “You all may be the funniest people in the world. (Not > you, Keith.)”
Whoops, sent that too fast
should be “radical left” as description for centrist to moderately-right wing positions “Democrat party” “Black fathers” … am I missing any obnoxious signifiers here?
Also, is QUILTBAG no longer a thing?
On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 9:25 AM, David Sanborne wrote:
> Libertarian drinking game: > > “Collectivists” – bonus if it’s used with the a priori assumption that > “collectivism” is bad > “Rational” > “Al Sharpton” and/or “Jesse Jackson” > “I value freedom and/or liberty!” > “Cultural Marxism” > “Identity politics” – bonus if it’s accompanied by use of Libertarian as > an identity > “MSNBC” > “Radical left” as description for > > On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 9:12 AM, we hunted the mammoth [email protected]> wrote: > >> Lea commented: “You all may be the funniest people in the world. (Not >> you, Keith.)”
http://i.imgur.com/NFBRRiI.gif
AHAHAHA OH MY GOD MY SIDES ARE KILLING ME. Wow.
Uh, Keith, are you aware of what blog you are currently on? By all means, feel free to peruse any small portion of it at your leisure. *snrk*
I know it’s just a silencing tactic pulled from their ass-shaped hat, but I do have to wonder just what counts as “Identity politics” and what doesn’t according to the Handbook For The Recently-Begun Troll. Car owners invested in safety standards and road upkeep? Zookeepers lobbying for harsher penalties for animal abusers? Libertarians voting?
Normally, libertarians use “identity politics” to mean “disadvantaged groups organising and acting in such a way as to fight that disadvantage, instead of trying to remove themselves from the disadvantaged group.” So for example a black person who tries to end racism instead of simply trying to leave all other black people behind is indulging in “identity politics.”
This leads to hilarity, such as when people say things like “The SJW identity politics is crushing gaming, and us true gamers must unite against it!”
What they call identity politics, everybody else calls solidarity.
My scale? Because I invented political ideology? Flattered…I guess.
Seriously though, you are a right winger. Just because you think of yourself as an individual, doesn’t mean you are. Your posts contain right wing talking point after right wing talking point. You think you’re so wise and individualistic but you sound like every white upper class teenager who just discovered Ayn Rand. Your opinion of yourself is waaaay too high.
Did you not bother to check what blog you’re on? Let’s see. The header says The new misogyny, tracked and mocked. Could it be that this very blog is the evidence that MRAs hate women? Why look! On the right side of the screen there is a list of categories! You can click on “MRA” and see years worth of examples of MRAs saying misogynistic things. We take MRAs being misogynist as a given because we come here every day and see misogyny in the manosphere. And no, that one guy on Facebook is not proof that there are non-misogynist MRAs.
Seriously. This means nothing. Every misogynist claims they don’t hate women. Every bigot claims they aren’t a bigot. The KKK even claims not to be racist. Because we’ve progressed enough that being a bigot is considered socially unacceptable. But that does not mean that bigoted attitudes have disappeared. I don’t care whether or not someone claims not to be sexist. I judge by attitudes and opinions and every MRA has sexist attitudes.
You came to this blog and posted of your own volition. We disagreed with your posts. We mock you because that’s what this blog is. A blog for mocking misogynists. That’s neither slander or propaganda.
Your claim that we’re propagandists is hilarious considering that the US government and by extension the corporate media hate Venezuela because Chavez didn’t prioritize the needs of oil conglomerates over the needs of Venezuela and its people. The US and other powerful governments don’t have a problem with governments having less then democratic qualities (although BTW Hugo Chavez was in fact democratically elected in UN monitored elections). They only have a problem with “third world” leaders when they stop cooperating with what the super wealthy want them to do. That’s why CNN and Fox News and the like greatly exaggerate the problems in Venezuela over the past decade or so and don’t mention anything good that’s happened there at all.
If you know so many people from “third world” countries than you should know that they
1) Tend not to love the white savior mentality a lot of people in the Anglosphere have. Our interventions have a history of doing more harm than good and it’s condescending to assume they are unable to do activism themselves.
2) Don’t all live in squalor and misery. When you try to silence us by bringing up all the major problems in the “third world,” you imply that this is the case. It’s isn’t.
3) Don’t typically have any problem with us fighting injustices in our own country. Seriously. None of the people I’ve ever met from Africa, Asia, Middle East or Latin America have ever said to me that I shouldn’t care about oppression in my country. Not any of the refugees I’ve spoken with. Not any of international students (mostly from India, Pakistan and Ghana) I met in college. Not any of the people I’ve spoken with online from these countries. A lot of people from these countries understand that we’re not the bastions of equality and freedom we sometimes claim to be in the US.
The only ones who say things like stop whining because Saudi Arabia, North Korea, etc. are privileged white guys. It’s very condescending and colonialist; not to mention assholish to speak on behalf of oppressed people in other parts of the world in order to use them as a weapon against people speaking out against injustice.
@Keith
How does our fact loving individualist support his many claims? Why, with everyone’s favorite type of evidential support, references to past conversations with unnamed people.
At first, I found your numerical estimate of Muslim extremists to be a little vague, because I couldn’t gauge exactly how many constitute “not small enough” and “disheartening”. Thankfully that story about one conversation started to give me a better sense of the overall political leanings of group that makes up approximately 25% of the world’s population. Once I learned about the existance of past arguments you had with other Muslims, which meant you discussed politics with at least three of them, it was clear to me that you’ve won the day.
While Evangelicals may agree to disagree with adult biologists, they have worked very hard to shape how science and history is taught in U.S. public schools, mostly by turning school textbooks into agenda driven travesties.
Evangelicals do have more enthusiasm for harsh punishment aimed at LBGT folk. Several prominent virulently homophobic American evangelicals, such as Scott Lively, lobbied for harsh anti-gay laws in African countries while spreading the Good News, which led to laws in Uganda and Nigeria that punish homosexuality with life sentances.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2014/0225/Uganda-s-anti-gay-bill-refocuses-attention-on-US-evangelical-influence-video
They’re lobbying other African countries to pass similar extreme anti-gay laws.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/23/africa-homophobia-uganda-anti-gay-law
Lively also pushed for anti-gay laws in Russia and Eastern Europe.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/rainbow-belongs-god-anti-gay-us-pastor-sets-sights-sochi-f4B11189762
Not only did you learn an immense amount about MRAs from that guy on Facebook, your conversations with foreigners have no doubt been fruitful. There’s no need for any details, we’ve already have real sense of your above average conversational skills from your interactions here with us.
You can stop telling us over and over again that you’re an individualist. We know. If you ever actually want to successfully express your political philosophy to others you should consider employing more than one word.
. Of course your assumptions about being more informed than all of us was based purely on fact.
If you’re actually interested in sharing your knowledge with others in productive way you should consider not being an assholish pedantic blowhard. For instance, people who know the origin of the terms left wing and right wing also tend to know that the meaning of both words have evolved quite a bit and no longer only refer to the seating arrangement of the National Assembly during the French Revolution. In an earlier post you claimed all feminists were leftists, so I’m not sure why you’re now claiming the term “right winger” is simplistic and offers no insight.
Finally, there are an endless number of places where you can rant about things Al Sharpton did 30 years ago, so please take your Sharpton fixation to Free Republic or other places where your fellow Sharpton obsessives congregate.
Right! It’s not like I was born and lived all my life in Argentina to this day and I’m supportive of everyone facing sexism in the US!
It’s not like people from all places in the world write in this comment, and could raise our own objections right here, right now!
But no, of course, we need an internet asshole to tell us what we really think. Cause reality ain’t so unless they approve of it.
Wait, I’m supposed to live in the Amazon Rainforest and eat once a month and have no internet connection, right? I should get out of the internet then o.O
Oh good! That’s a relief. I don’t have to worry about fixing the clogged drain in my basement because some people don’t have houses. I mean, I was going to go out and buy some Draino, but now I realize I was just being selfish. Some people have it so much worse than me, so clearly my clogged drain is not actually a problem that needs solved.
This.
Whenever I go home to Johannesburg, I have to signal to my family that I’m coming via a messenger bat. The bat flies to the local witch-doctor, who translates its message and sends it on via talking-drum. A runner with a cleft stick then carries it to the final destination where my family await, wrapped in leopard skins in our mud huts.
Unless it’s raining. Then we just use email.
In the part of the third world I’m from, we have our own struggles against racism, sexism and religion; and we deal with this in our own ways as best we can. However, this doesn’t mean that we don’t feel solidarity with those doing it in other countries. Everyone on this website wants the same thing, more or less, and fuck anyone who tries to set us against one another or suggest that we should overlook assholes in rich countries because there are assholes in poor countries.
#NotYourSword.
BTW Keith, that you use the word ‘impertinent’ in a discussion between people you claim to consider your equals shows how you do not, in fact, consider anyone here your equal. Words have connotations as well as meaning.
@Luxbelitx:
Hivemind!
@EJ
Brilliant hiveminds… ahm… remain hived?
This! There is only so much reactionary conservative Christians can do to oppress others in secular democracies. But I feel quite safe in assuming that if American conservative Evangelicals did manage to overthrow the government, they would implant Talibanesque policies pretty damn quickly. Such as punishment for being gay. Abortion being outlawed and birth control maybe being outlawed too. Conservative dress codes. Christian propaganda being taught in schools in lieu of actual history and science. Marital rape legalized. Severe punishment for adultery but only if women commit it. No fair trials. Etc.
I think the reason that there don’t tend to be Christian terrorist groups beheading Muslims or suicide bombing in predominantly Muslim spaces is because they don’t need to. Most reactionary Christians live in powerful countries that can bomb and/or occupy Muslim countries under the guise of “freedom” and “security.” Right wing evangelical Christians always cheerlead for war in whatever the current most hated Middle Eastern country. They may not directly commit violence, but they sure are happy to enable it.
If you care so much about those “major” problems, why waste your time here when you could be out raising awareness of said problems? Complaining about people complaining is a much bigger waste of time than complaining about “minor” “first world” problems ever is.