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.
@WWTH, cats hunting mice can be good for humans as pest control, but if left unchecked though carelessness can have really bad consequences for everything else in the environment due to the food web being messed up and the ecosystem destabilized.
Mice eat many fruits and plants and help spread seed through their feces, like many other plant eaters.
They’re also a main food source for many predatory animals, like owls, hawks, eagles, shrews, skunks, wolves, coyotes, bobcats, bears – all carnivores eat mice as they are plentiful and highly nutritious, and they often fill up the niche deer take up when deer are not currently in the area and are much easier to hunt. Without mice, many predatory animals wouldn’t have the nutrition or energy to keep other herbivores in line. Same with rats.
They also hunt rabbits, moles, shrews, gophers, lizards, snakes, frogs – all sorts of animals that are smaller than themselves and are important food sources for predators as well as animals that help keep down insect populations.
Of course, cats also hunt a variety of birds, which like mice help spread plants through their feces, but also keep down insects and arachnids populations. Cats will also attack bats, which keep down moths and mosquitoes.
Because cats are an invasive species, they disrupt the ecological balance enough with their sport hunting – because cats do kill for fun, and many kill for fun exclusively since humans often give them all the requirements they need to live.
And they kill a lot.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/science/that-cuddly-kitty-of-yours-is-a-killer.html?_r=0
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-08-06/house-cats-kill/56831262/1
So, yeah.
Also, mice are important, damnit, which was the whole point but I got sidetracked but ya get the point.
WWTH: I wasn’t implying it was wrong. Rather, I was scratching my head about how people who buy into traditional ideas of gender roles as often as not regard cats, which are furry little killing machines, as “feminine,” while regarding women as more or less the antithesis of that, and somehow not tripping over their own cognitive dissonance every time they stand up.
MYK: As for meat, animal welfare, etc.: there are health benefits to eating meat in moderation. Vegetarians and vegans are healthier than the general population because their diet is regulated, but regulated diets with meat in them still tend to outperform vegetarian and vegan diets–the difference is more pronounced in people who need large amounts of protein, like athletes and especially bodybuilders, than it is in the general population, as well as people with special dietary requirements that rule out many plant-based sources of protein.
Claiming that you can’t eat meat and support animal welfare has some serious problems with it. You can like meat and still support banning factory farming, for instance; there are people who eat free-range and grass-fed meat. Eliminating the consumption of meat would do little to help the animals that we raise for meat, many of whom have no ability to survive in the wild and are only around because we raise them for food. And where animals we *hunt* for meat are concerned, I actually live in an area with a serious prey species (deer, specifically) overpopulation problem. In the past I didn’t think much of hunting, and I still don’t think much of destructive forms of hunting like poaching and the killing of endangered species, but I’ve become much more accepting of the hunting of overabundant prey species in particular.
But then again, I’m an American, which probably accounts for many of the differences in my views.
@Allison
If you live in the mountains, like Rocky Mountians or Colorado/Mountain/whatever, blame the fucking people who are assholes and killed off the fucking wolves.
Fucking wolf killers man, they’re fucking assholes.
It’s like that Henry David Thoreau paper, and those deer just eat fucking everything and everything goes to shit because there’s no goddamn wolves fucking eating the deer!
FUCK PEOPLE WHO FUCKING HUNT WOLVES YOU SUCK AND YOU’RE AWFUL STOP BEING SO AWFUL, MAN.
SERIOUSLY.
STOP IT.
YOU ASSHOLES.
Nah, I don’t live in the mountains. I actually live in the swamps of Wisconsin–lots of farmland, lots of hills, lots of valleys, lots of forest, lots of swamp of course, no actual mountains. I imagine displacement of native predator species has a lot to do with the explosive deer population, though, leaving the invasive apex predator species (us) to pick up the slack.
I agree on hunting of wolves being a bad idea, though. Unlike deer, they are *not* overabundant, and being a predator species themselves, they’re not even good for us to eat.
@Allison
I recently picked up my copy of Never Cry Wolf and I forgot just how fucked up people were to wolves just a scant 50-60 years ago. In the preface, Mowat mentions a policy the Quetico National Park in Minnesota has back in ’72 which they proposed to hunt 200 wolves a year until the population of around 500 wolves were gone.
Then there was this undeveloped piece of land that had 15,000 timber wolves in where the Quebec Minister of Fish and Game proposed a huge fucking massacre of wolves with the goal in mind of 5,000 killed! The most successful hunters were given a wolf’s jaw bone encased in plastic and engraved. Sickening.
All of this was because of hunters who were so sick and tired of wolves eating up all their deer.
Fuck ’em.
I’m unsure if either of those actually played out off hand because the preface is from a 1973 edition of the book and I’m too lazy to google it now.
It was all because of the fuck up views Western society had with wolves. Seriously, fucking shit. We knew so little of wolves back when we’ve been with them so long it’s just…awful. Wolves being unrelenting killing machines that roam the world, looking for prey and humans to eat, just, fuck. Fuck that shit.
I should also mention that in the book, Mowat speaks to an Inuit hunter who estimates he killed around 200-300 deer a year, around 2-3 deer a week. There are thousands of hunters and fur trappers who do around the same number of killings a year. Mowat estimated that 112,000 animal died per year at the hands of hunters.
But, of course, it’s the wolf’s fault!
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/rabid.gif
Oh, sorry, the premise of why Mowat was in the woods in the first place is to investigate wolves to learn how to kill them more efficiently because hunters are complaining that’s they’re eating all the game.
Fuuuuuuuck yooooooooooooooooooooouuu!!!!!!
Turkeys are dinosaurs, though not tiny by modern dinosaur standards.
BTW, It’s something of a cliche in palaeoart community that the small, egg-predating theropod dinosaur Oviraptor is painted with turkey-like color patterns.
So you could say that (some) tiny, evil dinosaurs look like turkeys, rather than the other way round.
Are you seriously comparing the undeniable fact that we evolved from omnivorous apes to be omnivorous apes to MRA evo psych? Bloody hell. If your body can handle the diet, that’s great (no snark), but mine can’t. I’ve tried.
turunga Leela,
I can’t believe you just compared women to cows and actually give a fuck about feminism.
To combine cats and law; in Ancient Egypt the fine for killing a cat was enough grain to cover the cat’t body (to compensate for the loss of kitty’s mouse policing skills)
And I’m sure you all know that it’s from the Egyptian cat deity Puscht that we get “Puss” from.
@ Lea
I can believe that. A lot of my vegan friends passionately believe that ‘speciesism’ is as bad as sexism or racism.
[We’ve had many a debate about intersectionality and it’s application to “non human persons” as they put it]
Turunga Leela, seems to have the zealotry of the newly converted.
I have been a vegetarian for a little over 10 years now. I will straight up admit that I am probably 99% vegetarian because it’s difficult to be 100% certain about the sources of additives in any processed foods.
@turunga Please stop representing vegetarianism as the only moral choice. You only push people away. I would much rather convince 100 people to eat a few meatless meals a week than get 1 vegetarian convert.
That being said, I do run into people arguing against straw-vegetarians far more than I run into radical vegetarians.
Just to respond with my thoughts on a few common arguments/points
1. The pain of plants: eating animals that eat plants causes more plant death than eating the plants directly. Harm reduction, yay!
2. (I don’t know if I saw this one here) If you’re not a fruititarian who sweeps in front of yourself so as to avoid killing insects, then you’re a hypocrite. I hate arguments which make the perfect the enemy of the good. These completely ignore the idea of harm reduction.
3. Natural omnivores: Arguments from nature are usually crap (see bad evo psych). What is natural and what is good are things we determine independently.
4. The cost thing is complicated. We subsidize the cost of meat by subsidizing the cost of feed. Also, if you are trying to find vegetarian options and go for the meat-substitute packaged foods, they are definitely more expensive. Eating beans, rice, veggies, and a bit of nutritional yeast really saved me money during some really broke times in my life. However, food distribution is a fucking mess and not everyone has easy access to these. Even if we fixed distribution, the populations in food deserts would need time to adapt.
I don’t think people are bad because they eat meat. I am perfectly capable of living in a pluralistic society where I disagree with people on some pretty fundamental things without trying to say they are immoral.
Also, I would point out that as a male, I don’t have a monthly hit to my iron. That could significantly alter any nutritional needs. I can survive off of the plant sources we have available and part of that is privilege.
Alan,
That’s sad. The problem with treating people like livestock is not that we should treat livestock better.
Though, we should. I can’t remember who said it but I like the quote, “The question should not be “Does it think” but “Does it feel”. We can do better. We can consume less. None of that has anything to do with racism or feminism.
opium4themasses,
I hear that. I swear, if one more person had asked my where I got my protein, I might have eaten them. People would get so offended that I didn’t eat what they ate. They were so rude. It was easier to change my entire diet than it was for me to deal with assholes every time I ate outside of my home.
Going back to a plant based diet would mean cooking separate meals because my little kids do not want to stop eating meat and it could eventually kill me. I’m not going back, but I’m glad I got some perspective. It was a good experience. I learned alot. For instance, I’m a much better cook now and a careful label reader.
Yeah, but the problem is feral cats. Ones dropped off in new places to manage, say, an introduced rabbit population. It’s right there in the ecology article: the most egregious damage was done in the 1800’s by Europeans just dropping cats off places.
That’s a far cry from the one bird every month or so my cat brings home. It means people with cats should take care of them and spay and neuter them.
Re: vegetarianism-
Being a vegetarian isn’t such a big thing, but being a vegan can be a pain. Managing the trace elements and their interaction is a huge task and lots of the science isn’t in yet.
One of my exes was vegan, until she broke her ribs in a coughing jag. Turned out the greens she was eating were leaching calcium out of her system and she was developing brittle bones, even though she was taking tons of calcium supplements and eating lots of things that were supposed to have it, like basil.
This all reminds me of something. I’ll leave it to you all to envisage the circumstances that lead to this telephone exchange:
“Have you remembered to feed the cat?”
“Sort of”
“And how’s that tame Robin?”
“The cat’s fine”
But remember, it’s men who are the rational ones dripping with logic and women are the ones who live at the whim of our emotions.
@Pandapool
I didn’t know mice were so important.
I’ve had mice in my garage. To me they seemed like nasty little brutes crawling into places they aren’t wanted and leaving little turds all over the place.
Basically the closest thing the Animal Kingdom has to Red Pill Trolls.
Also, as far as eating sustainably goes,
I thought that we could do a lot of good if we stated eating more small animals. I mean, if sardines are lower on the food chain than tuna, maybe we should give the tuna a break and eat the smaller fish? There might be more of them.
More power to you if you are vegan, but that lifestyle is not for everyone.
@Tabby
Yup. According to these guys, it’s also part of male nature to rape women. And possibly murder the ones they’re obsessed with too, if “she drove him to it” (read: turned down his advances or broke up with him).
So loving. Much selflessness.
Krib,
There’s less mercury in sardines. So, they are safer too.
When these guys say they love women, they mean they love owning one. It’s more like how other people say, “I love swimming!”. They love experiencing the high from the power trip. They hate women. They crave feeling manly, dominate and in control. Without women and kids to be an authority over, they can’t feel those things. No kings without peasants, after all.
@Krib – there was a discussion on the radio I half-heard about eating bugs, grasshoppers and things, as a cheap source of protein. Yum, bugs! …I mean, I’m sure you could make a tasty bug paste, but there’d be somewhat of a psychological hurdle for people who are grossed out by the idea.
@Pandapool – (to reply to your reply a few posts back) yup, like I thought, meat in Canada (at least Quebec and Ontario) must be more expensive than in the US. I just checked in my mom’s freezer – she was the one who bought the ground beef – and it’s lean ground beef, nothing fancy, distributed by the Loblaws company. $8.19 for half a kilo (about a pound). Sigh.
When I was living on my own in Ontario (well, with other people, but buying/preparing most of my own food) I didn’t even bother with raw meat. Occasionally I got cheap fish or cold cuts. I think I lived mostly on sandwiches.
(“On” sandwiches! Now I’ve got this mental picture of bouncing around on giant sandwiches. Yay for prepositions!)