If there are any stray British MRAs reading this blog, have I found an opportunity for you! How would you like to serve under the political whiz-kid who triumphantly led the Justice for Men And Boys (and women who love them) Party a landslide victory in the UK election this May, unexpectedly winning 216 seats in …
Oh, wait, the party didn’t win 216 seats. It got 216 votes. Out of 30,691,680 total votes cast, for a stunning 0.0007% of the total.
That’s one-fortieth the votes received by the Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol party, one-eighteenth of those won by the old school classic Monster Raving Loony Party. (Note to non-Brits: those are both real parties.) 153 of these votes were for J4MB leader and A Voice for Men friend Mike Buchanan; 63 went to the party’s other candidate.
Anyway, fresh off this magnificent triumph, Buchanan has just announced that he’s now taking applications for an assistant — that is, for the prestigious post of Deputy Leader for the party. He’s looking for someone who will help to “enable the party to move to the next stage of its development.” which presumably involves getting more than 0.0007% of the vote next time.
Why not just appoint one of the party’s dedicated political activists to the position? Apparently they’re all a bit too embarrassed to take the job. As Buchanan delicately explains it in a post on his blog,
[a] number of outstanding people who have been central to the party’s success to date wish to remain ‘below the radar’ for a variety of reasons, and have therefore declined the position.
Yes, that’s right, in a sentence in which he admits that literally no one in the party wants to be its Deputy Leader, Buchanan refers to “the party’s success to date” as if it has been anything else but the most abject of failures.
But at least Buchanan has a clear strategy for WINNING next time, in the Charlie Sheen sense at least. In a post-election discussion of the party’s plans for 2020, Buchanan explains
Following a strategic review, we’re changing our position on the political parties we challenge at general elections. Until now we’ve taken the position that we’ll decide some time before general elections whether we’ll target the marginal seats of the Conservatives or the Labour party. Our new strategy is to challenge the party in power – i.e. the Conservatives until 7 May 2020 – or parties, if and when we again have a coalition government. …
By targeting Conservative marginal seats in 2020 we’ll increase the possibility that the party won’t be re-elected, and it will then have five years in opposition to reconsider their anti-male policy positions.
Emphasis mine. I’m sure the Tories are quaking in their boots as they consider the literally dozens of votes you may take away from them.
Buchanan says the party, which ran two candidates in the May elections, will put up 20 candidates in 2020.
Oh, by the way, J4MB is seeking applicants for candidates as well.
In case no one wants these jobs either, let me spell out some of their fine benefits:
- Talking to Mike Buchanan regularly (probably)
- Meeting the party’s new Deputy Leader (position yet unfilled)
- Almost certainly losing the £500 deposit you and the party will put down so you can run in the election (which is only returned if you score more than 5% of the votes cast)
- A ride in the J4MBmobile (probably)
- Having your friends and relatives laugh at your for the rest of your life after you win fewer votes than the Ow Me Bum Hurts party candidate (NOTE: the Ow Me Bum Hurts party does not exist — yet).
Get in on the ground floor sub-basement of this exciting new political phenomenon!
Ah the good ol’ UYA, my alma mater. Go Wild Donkeys!!
Over the past twenty years only two people have been elected MP after running either wholly independently (as opposed to MPs elected under a party banner who later fell out with them) or as part of a strictly local movement (as opposed to single-MP but nationally-ambitious parties like the Greens or Respect).
Martin Bell (Tatton, 1997) was a BBC war reporter famous for wearing a white linen suit in combat zones – which became a symbol of his “Mr Clean” candidacy when he stood against the incumbent Conservative Neil Hamilton, who had become a symbol of political corruption. Bell won by a landslide, but I suspect the decision of the Labour and Liberal Democrat candidates to stand aside played a reasonable part in his success, as did a massive amount of pro-Bell media coverage. During his acceptance speech, Bell said that he’d stand for one term only, and kept his promise – in the 2001 election he stood for another constituency and lost.
Dr Richard Taylor (Wyre Forest, 2001 and 2005) ran on a platform primarily bigging up the local Kidderminster Hospital (then threatened with closure), and his campaign was similarly helped by the Liberal Democrats opting not to run a candidate, something they did in 2001 and 2005 but not 2010, when Taylor lost his seat.
Actually, I’ve just thought of a couple more, which better fits the “strong constituency worker” requirement – Peter Law was Labour MP for Blaenau Gwent, but he resigned from the party after a falling-out over its imposition of all-women shortlists in certain constituencies (Law was strongly opposed). He ran as an independent in 2005, won handsomely (I suspect his exemplary local track record as an MP was critical here), but died the following year – whereupon his former election agent ran under the same independent banner and also won, although Labour took the seat back in 2010.
But although I’ve doubled my original total, it’s still very, very rare indeed for anyone to become an MP without national party backing.
The next Hitler he is not.
UK born and bred, here. We sing Rule Britannia, because countries are always female, like boats. It was written in 1740, when patriotic shit like that was bigger than Rock music.
If you want to tell us how we Brits all doing things wrong, you should take a fucking lesson on your own country’s political history first.
The US Draft was brought in by Congress in 1940… 33 years before the first woman was elected into Congress in 1973. So blame fucking MEN for that. They decided the rules.
And then the last draft was for the Vietnam war, despite all the subsequent conflicts the US has been involving itself in for the last 40 years. Unless you are over 70, you have never been obliged to fight in any war.
Over here, Tory government is consistently anti-poor, anti-working-class, which financially hurts a lot of men, but still it has been proven that the group worst affected by the austerity measures are… working-class women*. The government is in effect more anti-woman than it is anti-man, because women have always been a huge part of the unpaid domestic workforce, as well as being paid less for the work they do outside the home.
* although the disabled, unemployed, or other marginalised “shirkers” are literally dying by the thousands, but I don’t think they were ever factored into the reports, because Ian Duncan Smith has a very good reason to not want anyone to know exactly how badly his policies have affected people on out-of-work benefits, and Cameron doesn’t consider anyone who doesn’t work to even exist, except as a whipping-boy.
So Piss Off, yank-splaining MRAsshat.
Fun van they got there. Ehh.
I know this is nit picking of the highest order, but I guess I’m just and expert picker of nits… 216 votes out of 30,691,680 total votes is not, in fact, 0.0007% but 0.000007%. So, Mr. Futrelle was off by two whole orders of magnitude. :O
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of war – let’s not forget all the women doing hard work in the munitions factories while the men were sent overseas. Often working with dangerous machinery or chemicals like TNT, which turned their skin yellow, earning them the nickname “canaries”.
Even Queen Elizabeth II herself was a mechanic in the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service, and drove a military truck as part of the war effort.
Every woman would be expected to volunteer for war work, or grow and preserve food for her family, or keep pigs in the back yard, join the ARP or any number of other jobs.
And everyone who wasn’t fighting abroad had to see entire cities levelled by incendiary bombs, and live with the uncertainty that the next night might bring another air-raid, that the luftwaffe might score a direct hit on their house.
The war was not easy on anyone, even on the Home Front, and we still feel its effects decades later.
And unsurprisingly is a huge factor in preventing women from engaging in the political field. Ironically it was Cameron’s attempt to acknowledge and begin to rectify the vast under-representation of women on the Conservative frontbench in 2009 (at the time the party only had 19 representing women MPs) by opting for all-women shortlists that sparked Mike Buchanan’s mantrum and final flounce from the Tories to start his own What About Teh Menz party.
It’s difficult to argue that UK government prioritizes women’s issues and is anti-man when an attempt to equalize embarrassing stats like these:
“Overall (in 2014) only about 23% of MPs are women, putting the UK 65th in the world – beaten by Afghanistan, Iraq and more than 20 African nations. In government, six of the cabinet committees that set policy do not have a single female member, and not one of the 26 has a woman as its chair or deputy chair” – http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/apr/13/westminster-problem-women-equality-maria-miller
leads to actual rage-quitting.
And we do not speak of Labour’s attempt to canvass women’s votes.
The Barbie Bus. THE BARBIE BUS.
Lots of Massachusetts town names are linguistic booby traps. Haverhill, Natick, Billerica, Quincy…
And C.V. Compton Shaw is pronounced “assfax”.
OK, it’s *Rule* Brittania not ‘Hail’
It’s not our anthem (though many of us think it should be)
It’s ‘Rule the waves’ not ‘Rules the waves’; it’s prescriptive not descriptive. It’s an exaltation that we must keep a strong Navy if we want to remain free. (cf the Falklands)
this seems really neat. it is a free pattern to crochet a mermaid tail for cold areas. some of the commenters suggested it would work well for people in wheelchairs as well (if you shorten the flukes).
http://stfueverything.tumblr.com/post/122635349535/opisaterf-rubato-jhameia
@ EJ
The contribution to our armed forces from those born abroad, especially the Gurkhas, is of course exemplary, and very welcome; but as a matter of both domestic and international law they aren’t classed as mercenaries; so they qualify for all the protections under the Hague and Geneva Conventions for example.
It does however illustrate the point about conscription (or rather the lack of it). There are something like 2,000 applicants for every available place in the Gurkha Regiments. It’s not like we have to press gang people.
wow, that did not post the way i intended. sorry!
Oh, it’s probably also worth mentioning that in England maternity leave can be split between the two ‘parents’; so mum could go straight back to work and dad could stay at home and put his feet up.
[It doesn’t have to be mum and dad, can be mum and mum etc. There just has to be some connection; I can’t just find a mate who’s having a baby and say ‘ooh, can I have some of your maternity leave?’]
@Alan of course that’s just stat maternity leave – yes, it holds your job and that’s really important but it doesn’t pay out very much. Plus I’m not sure how many men actually want to take it. My boss is desperately hoping that his wife isn’t aware of this potential for split parental leave, but since she’s a lawyer, I don’t fancy his chances.
US employment law is so preferential to women, we don’t even have paid maternity leave.
Oh, wait.
And receipt of social services? If women make up a higher percentage of people on those, it’s because women are more likely to be poor single parents and elderly women are more likely to be impoverished than elderly men. What a huge privilege!
Unrelated: What the fuck, this is gross. An IndieGogo fundraiser for a pro-#GamerGate
pixel-based massacre simulatorgame named Troops Vs Women, where the heroes are all #Gaters (dressed as Nazis, because of course), the enemies are all straw feminists and the background NPCs are all topless women.I agree British needs a better navy than the excuse it has today.
To correct a previous statement, the first woman to serve in the US Congress was Jeannette Rankin, who was elected to one term in 1916 and a second term in 1940. I doubt she would have been very popular with our British friends, since she voted against US entry into both WW I and WW 2 (the only Congresscritter to vote against declaring war after Pearl Harbor). She was not an Anglophobe — there were quite a few of those in the first half of the 20th century — but a pacifist.
The MRAs are a constant fount of wrong and fail, but the one that galls me personally is the wailing about the draft. I was a Vietnam draft resister and only of the lucky few who got to spend an all-expenses-paid vacation in the federal slammer. Women did not start that war; women did not escalate it; women did not draft me; but women in my age group gave a great deal of support to those of us who opposed the war. So I invite the MRA draft-whiners to dinner: roast legos with lego sauce, mashed legos with lego gravty, fresh-picked sauteed legos, and lego mousse for dessert.
But but..video game journalism SFHC! I’m sure that game has something to do with ethics…
I had a quick look at this. Their team currently has no actual developers, and the ringleader calls himself an “indie dev in training” with no experience in games. They need to hire programmers because they can’t do it themselves. They seem genuinely surprised that you have to pay people to make a video game for you. They think they will get £30,000 for a really boring, simple 2D shooting game that they could probably make in Scratch in an afternoon. Yeah, this won’t get funded.
Then again, GamerGaters and other misogynists will throw money at any pile of garbage that strokes their ideological ego (see: Honey Badgers getting $30,000 to waste on a fake lawsuit), so you never know.
If they try and get it green lit on steam I hope it gets rejected just like the “Kill the gays” game did.
Gamergaters have shown time and again that they are naive; and wherever naive people exist, there will be scammers on the make. This game sounds like just another bunch of people running a game on them.
Traditionally Muslims were exempt from conscription, but the exemption was lifted in 1916 and a lot of them were drafted and made to fight the Ottomans, which they were understandably unhappy about. There was a big revolt that the army had to put down.
Nowadays…I dunno.