Men’s Rights Activists love to “warn” women that they may soon face a day of reckoning if they don’t shape up and start acting the way MRAs think they should. Don’t make men angry, they say; you wouldn’t like us when we’re angry!
Still, most MRAs making these “predictions” at least make a token effort to pretend to be horrified at the notion of men rising up to wreak vengeance upon uppity women. This isn’t what we want, they assure women; it’s just what will happen if you continue to “provoke” men with your bad behavior.
Other MRAs find it impossible to contain their glee; like doomsday preppers with well-stocked bunkers and enough ammo to kill every living thing within a 500 mile radius, they can’t wait for the end of the world.
Peter Andrew Nolan is one of these other MRAs. And he’s started to celebrate a little bit early.
In a series of recent blog posts and Tweets, Nolan has heralded a number of murders of women at the hands of their exes in his native Australia as portents of a new age of antifeminist retribution. (Click on screenshots below to see archived versions of these Tweets.)
I’m sure actress Denise Richards was delighted to find the above in her Twitter notifications, sent as a reply to a Tweet of hers wishing her father a happy Father’s Day.
Several feminists who ended up in a discussion with him on Twitter were treated to the following.
As Nolan sees it, the murder of women in Australia and Ireland is now perfectly legal, as he has officially declared war upon both countries.
Nolan thinks politicians and police officers are also legitimate targets in his “war.”
And he assures us this “war” will continue until he is properly compensated for whatever terrible injustices he thinks have been done to him.
Now, Nolan’s “legal” claims are of course ludicrous, and he is obviously in no position to “release” any murderers of women in either Ireland or Australia.
But as bizarre as his arguments are, Nolan is no troll; as longtime readers of this blog know all too well, he’s deadly serious about all of this.
The man who used to call himself Peter-Andrew: Nolan©, but who now prefers to call himself Joschua-Brandon: Boehm©, is a follower of the exceedingly strange and dangerous Sovereign Citizen movement. He thinks the odd punctuation he’s added to his various names actually means something important, and he does indeed believe that he is at war with Ireland and Australia, that murdering women is legal in both countries, and that he has the right to enforce these claims of his as best he can.
Happily, he is not actually in either of these countries — last I heard, he’s in Germany, and as I understand it, he is barred from entering Ireland and possibly Australia as well. At least according to the laws that the rest of the world follows.
This isn’t the first time Nolan has justified or indeed celebrated violence against women. His declarations of “war” are not new. He’s offered some (barely) qualified praise for far-right mass murderer Anders Breivik, and at one point he warned any women thinking of commenting on his laughable Facebook ripoff MAN-BOOK that he just might just kill them for it.
But these recent Tweets are pretty brazen, even by his standards. He is clearly a threat to women, as well as to politicians and government employees regardless of gender.
H/T — @TheFirstPaige
NOTE TO COMMENTERS: Please avoid describing Nolan as “crazy,” or attempting to diagnose his mental health. Mental illness doesn’t cause hate. And please refrain from violent language, even when it is clearly metaphorical.
@Kerlyssa:
I have not seen you dispute one statistical claim actually made by anybody in this thread. The only argument I’ve seen you make is that the claim “mentally ill folks are much more likely to be the victims of abuse than the perpetrators” does not imply that a specific violent criminal couldn’t possibly be mentally ill. This is an argument nobody here has made.
What I’ve seen from you in your replies to me has been a burning desire to point out that the correlation between mental illness and violence is not zero, nevermind how low that correlation is, how it comes to be, or what it means. I’ve seen you try to use numbers from the sources I linked without demonstrating an understanding of what those numbers actually mean, because you didn’t actually read them at first and relied on my vague summaries as if they were exact quotes.
So hey, I think you’re completely wasting your time here with an argument that, while not technically wrong, is so pedantic and unnecessary that it become insulting. But go ahead an show me wrong; point out the comment containing the statistical argument you’re upset with. Maybe then we can get this whole mess over and done with.
If you can’t diagnose over the internet, which is what we were saying to start off, then why are you supporting the people who are dismissing misogynists as crazy? You’re so eager to disagree with us that you’re twisting yourself in knots to do it.
I’ve already explained why the statistic I posted was relevant to the discussion. Something you’ve ignored because it doesn’t fit your argument. That we’re scientifically ignorant idealogues.
So, uh, why does “Mentally ill people are still people who deserve to be treated and respected like people” count as “Ideological” to you?
(The answer is “You’re a bigoted puddle of gooey goanna shit in the loose shape of a troll.”)
weirwood: I am not supporting ‘those people’. I simply saw that statistic about more victims being mentally ill for the nth time and was finally annoyed enough at it to post. I think there are perfectly valid reasons for not discussing the possible mental illness of the hatemongers this site covers, without implying that it shouldn’t be discussed because the mentally ill are less likely to be violent than their non mentally ill counterparts. If I agree with a stance, it doesn’t mean I am going to agree with every argument made in favor of that stance.
SFHC: because it IS an ideology. So is Feminism, or Democracy, or Atheism, or the civil rights movement (of the US), or what have you. Just because it is correct, or righteous, or ‘good’, or whatever doesn’t change it from being an ideology.
What is a goanna?
kirby: I commented on your links several pages ago, in a post addressed to you. My comments were based on my reading the articles you linked to. As I did read them, and did respond to what I read, and did post my response with your name at the front, I’m satisfied that that is a sufficient good faith effort on my part to investigate your claim.
Sorry but this guy is bat shit crazy!
@Kerlyssa:
Hey, remember when you said, in your comment talking about crimes that are predominantly associated with mental illness, that you were referring to mass shootings? And remember when my source said that only a minority of the mass shooters had any psychiatric history? That was fun.
The main problem here is that you’ve been arguing for something absurdly specific; that mental illness is correlated with a non-zero increase in the chance of violent behavior. Doesn’t matter how that comes about, or how big the increase is, just that it’s nonzero.
Meanwhile, my point in introducing those sources was in the titles and summaries:
Note the “not usually” and the “not as much as” in there. That was my purpose in linking to them, because I assumed you wanted to be able to say that it was reasonable to assume that a particular violent criminal was mentally ill.
One of my sources even has this:
Oh no, 3 to 4 times more likely! My worldview is shattered, some sever mental illnesses do cause violence!
Oh wait, no it isn’t. That right there is a hint that you’ve been arguing against a phantom.
In fact, here’s another thing I wrote:
And another:
And what was your response?
All because of the 20%-ish of mass shooters that had any sort of psychiatric history prior to the shooting (which of course does not mean that 20% committed their crimes due to mental illness).
And yet you go on to claim that your reason for posting here was because of our dreadful misuse of statistics, comparable to anti-vaxers. Sorry, I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith here.
Nobody ever said mentally ill people are less likely to commit crimes than anyone else. Why get all indignant and annoyed at a claim that never happened anywhere but in your head? All we’re arguing is that people shouldn’t be assumed to be mentally ill simply because they’re hateful or violent.
…
And all the other comments about 2nd wave feminism engaging in, accepting or promoting violent talk.
What modern readers and writers overlook when discussing this is the context in which feminists were working and the very real oppression of women at the time.
Marriage.
Divorce was difficult and expensive. No fault divorce didn’t start in Australia until 1975, California in 1969 but the rest of the US took a while, it wasn’t universal in all 50 states until after 2000. The UK still doesn’t have universal no fault divorce. There were no refuges available for women and children to escape violence in their home until the 1970s. I don’t know how they went elsewhere but here in Australia, the staff at Elsie had no protection by government or the police. Their only defence was a cricket bat.
Sex and rape.
Rape in marriage was legal. It was first criminalised in an English speaking country in South Australia in 1976. It only became illegal in all 50 US states in 1993. Only 52 UN countries explicitly criminalise marital rape even now. Rape in other circumstances only counted, if at all, when it met the definition of “forcible” rape. Other violence in marriage was often dismissed or discounted as being the natural “right” of husbands to enforce the obedience they were entitled to expect. (Especially seeing as marriage vows consistently involved women literally promising to obey their husbands.) Many countries have now changed the general laws against rape so that the forcible portion of the definition is excluded.
For feminists in the 60s, these changes in the following decades to laws on rape and other violence against women were more or less unimaginable. If some, or many, women concluded that marriage was inherently violent as well as disadvantageous to women it’s hardly surprising. Especially given that it was difficult, if not impossible, for many women to get out of violent marriages. For women in these circumstances, talk of reciprocal violence or of getting men out of any position where they would have any power over women sounded like A Very Good Thing.
Kirby: Nope, didn’t say it was comparable to antivaxxers. If it was, I’d post here a hell of a lot more often. Most of my posting across the interwebs is about antivaxxers and various types of medical fraud, with the occasional foray into religion if it comes up somewhere. This blog is one I just read, because I haven’t had anything in particular I wanted to add before.
So, really, I’m just arguing that responding to every mention of insanity with ‘the mentally ill are more often victims’ is deceptive, and I disagree with deceptive rhetoric.
Probably going to stop posting here. Don’t think anyone in this thread is really interested in whether or not a popular rhetorical tactic is misdirection or not, and I’ve run out of things to say about it. Peace.
@The Mad Cow
I just woke up and am getting ready for work so I won’t have time to read your links and give a longer reply right now, but some things jumped out:
No. Please don’t try the painfully white “good and bad activist” bullshit with MKL and Malcolm X. One, neither were fully pacifist (fighting an oppressive system cannot, in reality, be effectively done with utter pacifism, as power structures must be torn down in order for equality to happen. That won’t happen by kowtowing to the majority and asking them nicely to not, maybe, oppress others?) Two, again, small radicals simply don’t have the institutional backing of those protecting the status quo to cause massive damage. Considering the Black Panthers ever only targeted police officers, not an unreasonable stance in light of recent events, they are nothing like, say, the KKK, who murdered large numbers of unarmed civilians.
You claim to be a feminist, yet you ignore the reality of privilege-based violence in favor of concern-trolling that one feminist from half a century ago who is the only example MRAs can ever think of when warning us of radical feminists. The MRA are not like feminism in any shape or form. Feminists focus on social change, MRAs focus on opposing social change, like all right-wing “movements”. Not to say how other people should do their feminism, but are you seriously denying the dynamics of gender-based violence and oppression?
Oh, shit, another argument portraying Valerie Solanas and the SCUM Manifest as more than a small footnote in feminist history.. Solanas was a brilliant person who suffered from mental illness throughout her life. The Scum Manifesto was never regarded as “Plan” by anyone — it was regarded as a valid expression of the rage many women felt at the constant mistreatment they suffered in society at the time. Ti-Grace Atkinson’s support of Solanas was only one of many factors that caused her to leave NOW; mainly she was a radical who thought that NOW was far too timid, while NOW was trying desperately to stay in the mainstream of American life and found Solanas’s manifesto far too incendiary. And I suppose there was some person somewhere who argued for the mass murder of men, but no serious feminist — and certainly not Atkinson — ever proposed putting this “Plan” into action.
You are trying to promote a baseless misrepresentation of early feminism to justify people like Paul Elam and Nolan who propose beating or killing women who aren’t willing to be traditionally submissive to men. I’m calling bullshit. Begone, MRAsshole.
You’re such a sad excuse for a human let alone a decent man- NOT!!!
Can we just start getting bans on ableism after the third comment that doubles down?
I’m sick to death of knowing that every single time I read the comments sections after some white dude murders or promotes murder that his bigotry will be blamed on mental illness.
It’s bigotry in itself. Why is it allowed to continue?
Kerlyssa,
You ignorant smarmy ableist fuck, you can go any time. You are breaking the rules. You are being an asshole. Just leave.
Might feel good to flex those outrage muscles.
You know, that is exactly what racists say to people of color and misogynists say top women. You think maaaaybe you’re being the baddie? Hmmmm? Maybe when you accuse people of just loving to feel shitty about the bigoted-ass things you say you might need to take a mo to shut up and consider that you might be engaging in assholery?
The demonization of the mentally ill makes the world harder and less safe for them while pretending that “normal” people cannot be violent and hateful for irrational reasons only make the world safer for violent bigots. Wars, genocides and slavery are things perfectly sane persons take part in. Othering to make yourself feel better about humanity and by extension yourself isn’t helping anyone. It only makes dealing with the actual causes of human hate and violence more difficult. What you are experiencing right now is a kind of denial. Let it go.
Lemme try that again.
You know, that is exactly what racists say to people of color and misogynists say top women. You think maaaaybe you’re being the baddie? Hmmmm? Maybe when you accuse people of just loving to feel shitty about the bigoted-ass things you say you might need to take a mo to shut up and consider that you might be engaging in assholery?
The demonization of the mentally ill makes the world harder and less safe for them while pretending that “normal” people cannot be violent and hateful for irrational reasons only make the world safer for violent bigots. Wars, genocides and slavery are things perfectly sane persons take part in. Othering to make yourself feel better about humanity and by extension yourself isn’t helping anyone. It only makes dealing with the actual causes of human hate and violence more difficult. What you are experiencing right now is a kind of denial. Let it go.
At best this guy is a delusional, and certainly a sociopath. More like he is psychotic. He believes at least one flat out lie to be true and his manifesto is moronic. Anyone who believes him or debates with him is borderline intelligent or does not understand this disorder. And no he should not be threatening women or inciting violence against wimmin. the police and FBI should be informed and tracking his behavior. Lithium would help. The mans brain is not okay. I bet if a cat scan were done you would see a big piece missing or underdeveloped, possible a head injury. Wonder what kind of substances he has used or is using, that could be a major contributing factor to his problem. His poor mother…..
Somewhat off topic,
I’m more and more convinced that all horror is based on the fear of the evil or at least the fatal flaws within. Sometimes that evil is projected outward, but people are at their core most afraid of themselves. Werewolves, aliens, vampires, wicked witches, ghosts and zombies are humanoid for a reason.
I gave a friend my copy of Willow Creek today. We ended up talking about Psycho and other movies we liked. Got me thinking about why certain films stick with ya and others never register as scary. Watching people do mental gymnastics to explain away plain ‘ol human ignorance and wickedness makes me want to continue that conversation. Hopefully, my buddy will be back soon.
Whatever feminist hatemongering you write, MRAs are not going away, we are growing and pushing back feminist hate now, men and women.
All in favour, raise your virtual hand.
*raises virtual hand*
Sorry David, I know this is your site, but like Lea said, this happens every time; we’re never able to have a real discussion in the aftermath of yet another threat or assault or murder spree. This thread derailed only 11 posts in. And that’s what the right-wingers and the trolls who work for them want. They want, need, to keep everybody distracted with roundabout arguments on mental illness (but not improving mental health care, ever, because that would be communism!) so that no members of the general public scratch the surface deeply enough to notice the real culprits – cishet white male entitlement, misogyny, racism, violent right-wing rhetoric of all kinds – and none of us who already know have the time or energy to do anything about it.
It’s not just harmful to our discussions here, or to those of us with mental illnesses, or to other people with mental illnesses; it’s harmful to the entire world’s chances at finally stemming the tide. And they’re counting on it.
Ugh.
http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/raises-hand.gif
http://33.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ls7beqqYGb1qhwhzt.gif
http://33.media.tumblr.com/a59ff8ee13a63eaf3e3bc729ea42e900/tumblr_inline_myv3dyrN7J1ruzo1y.gif
*raises virtual hand*
Because damn, I’m sick of these derails.
And now, a possibly futile attempt to re-rail the discussion:
Has anyone ever noticed that The Colon sure likes to use the word “LAWFUL” a lot, but is totally clueless as to what it actually means?
http://www.louisaheinrich.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/inigo-montoya_that-word.jpg
Because, as has been pointed out above, both Ireland AND Australia have gender-neutral laws saying that you can’t get away with murder there for any reason.