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.
ian martinez,
Sure, dude.
berdache from a previous life,
You can go find info on ableism on your own. Your edification at our expense may be nice for you, but it is costing the people the ableism is aimed at quite alot. You may learn more about why racism is wrong by seeing people defend themselves and others against racism. That does not mean they should have to do that.
berdache,
You don’t give a shit about “mods”. You also came in being ableist as fuck and you want to be able to keep it up. Who do you think you’re fooling? Our memories are not that short.
@Lea,
How long do I have to be here without using ableist language before you believe me? If the answer is “Never”, I understand. That would make me sad, but I understand.
I’m not going anywhere, unless David bans me. I don’t intend to give him any reason to. I may very well slip up and use ableist language simply because I’m not practiced at avoiding it like I am with racist and sexist terms. But I will be, over time.
I’m so sorry I made such a mess of my first post. I hurt and offended people whom I respect, including you.
I apologized when I realized what I had done. I have not repeated the behavior. I’m not going to repeat it. If there is anything else I can do to make amends to you and to the board,let me know.
In the 2nd tweet above he’s given himself away. He wants our attention. He. Wants. Our. Attention. This is what it always boils down to doesn’t it? Elliot Rodgers etc. They want attention from women and they want it NOW. But they stink of dysfunction and wierdness so, who would? No-one.
Yet because they were born into a world that promised them ‘kingship’ and privilege and they have no insight or problem solving capabilities they are in a bubbleheaded funk about why mummy isn’t giving them milk and toys and a cleaned up backside and nappy (diaper) on demand.
We all know that MGTOW is a big fat sulkfest of grown babymen throwing their rattles out of their pram.
Will all MGTOW please do just that. Right now. And STFU once and for all.
By the standards of the bovine pitching a tantrum, a group of guys wanting to establish a colony on Earth’s fifth moon, who choose to work towards this goal by playing games of hopscotch, counts as a movement, as well.
To the ableist fuckheads:
Consider, just for a moment, that even if you are right and Nolon is mentally ill, that it may be the mental illness that’s keeping him from actual violence.
Consider his most blatantly contrafactual statements–“legal murder” and “state of war”–the ones that are most commonly used to support the claim that he’s actually mentally ill. If we accept that he believes these sincerely, and that they rise to the level of some sort of clinical delusion, then the fact that he believes that there are a swarm of men out there prepared to rise up and wage that war may be the only thing preventing him from acting on his very does-not-require-mental-illness misogyny. If he were to realize that he is, by and large, on his own with no teeming masses supporting him, he might instead act out of desperation to try and hurt those whom he hates personally.
My point is not that he is or is not mentally ill; it’s that mental illness does not determine his attitude. We cannot know how his rancid, vile positions are influenced by any mental health issues he may or may not have, so speculation on that front is unhelpful, even if it were totally harmless–which it most definitely is not.
Bahhhhhhh ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! I love satire!
Shaenon,
I’d suggest you read what I actually posted. I quoted from a wide variety of sources, none of which were Wikipedia. I provided links. You can use your mouse to click on those. Clicking on provided links is a good way to tell if someone can be “bothered to look outside Wikipedia for information.”
Also, if someone accuses you of not being “bothered to look outside Wikipedia for information,” even though you provided links to sources exclusively outside Wikipedia, that’s a good way to tell that they didn’t read what you wrote. At least not with any significant comprehension.
The manifesto quote is the most famous quote from the work and also happens to be the opening paragraph. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t on Wikipedia. The Atkinson quote has been famous for ages (there are feminist books and essays with titles that play off of it); I didn’t need Wikipedia to tell me about it. If you want to know why I quoted Atkinson in that parenthetical, you should read what I wrote and use the context to get the meaning. It’s fairly clear.
To my knowledge, no feminists started building robots after reading the SCUM Manifesto. You are correct about that.
Wasn’t the #killallmen hashtag created by antifeminist dudes on 4chan? Not only is it a joke, it’s not even a feminist joke.
The Atkinson quote has been famous for ages (there are feminist books and essays with titles that play off of it); I didn’t need Wikipedia to tell me about it. If you want to know why I quoted Atkinson in that parenthetical, you should read what I wrote and use the context to get the meaning. It’s fairly clear.
I’m sorry, you’ll have to help me. I don’t know what you’re trying to say with that quote.
I did look at your links, as you know since I mentioned reading one of them in a previous post. They didn’t seem to provide strong support for your arguments that a) the SCUM Manifesto was a major feminist document or b) feminists took it seriously. For example, the interview with Solanas’s biographer opens with her saying that she’d never read the SCUM Manifesto until she started researching Solanas, and that when she did read it for the first time she laughed because it was so absurd.
Feminists building robots is the only part of the manifesto that’s true, dude!
http://robohub.org/25-women-in-robotics-you-need-to-know-about/
https://medium.com/backchannel/this-woman-makes-robots-and-no-one-is-going-to-stop-her-f58ac7f5cbbb
http://blogs.ptc.com/2014/11/21/female-roboticist-wants-girls-to-build-break-and-make-things/
Anarchonist,
If you’re saying that Elam has written things just as hateful as Valerie Solanas did, I don’t disagree. That was actually my point. If you write that you hate men and they all should die, and then you attempt to murder three men, and then you tell people to read your manifesto to learn why you tried to murder the men, it is reasonable for people to see a connection between your words and your actions.
This sounds a lot like the apologetics we always hear following other ideologically motivated violent actions. The connection between Elliot Rodgers’ violent actions and his previously stated ideas about women is fairly obvious. But when it comes to Valerie Solanas, all of a sudden nuance is discovered as a concept. We need to look at her “complex personality” and her “obsession with being noticed.” Anything but her prior expressed hatred for men and her own confirmation after her arrest that the ideas in the manifesto motivated her.
You are dead wrong about this. TODAY, feminism is not about attacking men. It was not always thus. In the 1960s, feminists were not nearly as clear as they are today about goals, process, methods or even basic ideology. They had to figure this stuff out. And rage was, of course, part of the mix. Feminism had to figure out the right path, and that process was extremely messy a lot of the time. In the 1960s, a lot of the confusion was just part of being in the 1960s. But a lot of it also had to do with feminism being so young. Young movements are messy, and there is usually a lot of infighting (much of it good).
And yet many did. NOW’s Ti-Grace Atkinson read it and personally re-typed it, copied it and distributed those copies. She was determined that it should be part of the conversation. Betty Friedan was just as determined that it should not be.
I included a link to letters between Atkinson and Solanas in a previous comment. I assume that you didn’t read anything there. And I suppose that if you continue to avoid looking at facts, you can continue to believe that your own personal reaction to SCUM must also have been the reaction at the time.
Shaenon,
I only asserted b), which is beyond reasonable dispute. Although I would modify what you wrote to say that SOME feminists took it seriously. As I said above,
There is ample evidence that Solanas had a rapt audience at NOW. And there is plenty of documentation about the fights over Solanas elsewhere. They wouldn’t have been fighting if there weren’t at least two sides.
Some feminists try to Memory-Hole this fact, some do not:
I personally feel that it is just plain dumb to try to ignore history at all, but I also feel there’s no strategic reason to Memory-Hole this particular history. The result is as good as it gets in the real world of social movements and group dynamics. Nobody should reasonably expect the history of a movement to recognize women as fully human and full citizens would be neat and tidy all the way through, especially considering where we started.
@The Mad Cow:
Now, granted, I haven’t been following this thread since yesterday, but you keep repeating that “some feminists took [the scum manifesto] seriously,” and bring up evidence that it was part of the feminist discussion.
I asked you if you knew why it was discussed, and what bits the people who liked it actually liked. You evaded the question.
So I’ll ask a different, but related question. Why should we care if the SCUM manifesto was an important feminist document? Is that fact supposed to indict feminism in some way? If so, how? Be as explicit as possible, please.
I’ve been skimming Mad Cow’s posts – can someone fill me in on whether there is something worthwhile in there, or if it’s just pointless tl:dr sealioning?
I had never heard of this man until now. Wow. Can he not get pulled up on this, legally? Or at least investigated?
I’m just now quite sure why modern feminists should care about the SCUM manifesto, which was written before most of us were born as part of a movement with very little resemblance to modern feminism. If second-wavers really liked it, that would still not make it particularly relevant to us.
All in all, this conversation is not changing my impression that it’s nothing but a stick antifeminists pull out to try and beat us with because they literally can’t find anything else remotely questionable that feminists have done.
kirbywarp,
The correspondence between Solanas and Atkinson is available to you. I have linked to it twice. Just scroll up a little bit and use your mouse to click on it. You could also read Betty Friedan for the perspective from the other (winning) side. Or you could investigate any of the other links. Or you could read Breanne Fahs. Or you could even do your own research. Your question is answerable. But since the question is “Why?” it is going to have a lot of different answers, because people are different. Why Friedan was discussing Solanas (she correctly perceived a threat) is different than why Atkinson was (she saw a potential ally and media star).
No, the Solanas/SCUM disputes do not indict feminism. The result was a good one. As I said, it’s the best result that you can really get in the real world. Please let me know if you require more explicitness.
The parallels between the beginning of second-wave feminism and the current state of the MRM are obvious to me. But then, I am intimately familiar with the innerworkings of a wide variety of groups (I’m old). From direct experience, I know that many of the challenges faced by groups with different aims are nonetheless the same. Same-sex marriage advocates face many of the same problems that Focus on the Family does. Anti-nuke groups had the same kinds of internal fights as free-speech groups. It really only takes about one step back to get this perspective.
Peter Nolan, the subject of David’s post, presents the same problem to the MRM that Solanas did to NOW: Is this where we want to go? I am very interested to see where this trend goes. It is not obvious to me that the MRM has to continue down the current path of blaming women and feminism for everything, and reaching for violent language (or worse) as a matter of habit. But they could.
Unlike (apparently) most here, I do not see the MRM primarily as a source of entertainment. Admittedly, they are darkly entertaining. But they are also growing, and pretty soon they’re going to figure out that they can do things. I’m worried about what they will do.
PoM: Generally, the tantrum-throwing bovine’s posts are worthless, except as a prelude to reading Shaenon’s take-downs, really. Those, as always, are good stuff. Though it does amuse that he’s now quoting himself, in blockquotes, even, to help substantiate his implication that there was a faction of 1960s feminism that was ready to launch the Man-o-caust and replace all the doods with robo-butlers (as opposed to a disagreement over whether the tone of the satirie was too strident, or whether her assassination attempt was sufficient reason to disqualify her as a member of the movement entirely).
@PoM
I wouldn’t even call it sealioning anymore, he dropped any pretense of “Just asking questions” as soon as he first mentioned Solanas. Now he’s just screaming about her like Republicans scream about Obama (angrily and full of conspiracy theories).
So yeah, you’d be able to find more worthwhile stuff in a clogged toilet.
I’m good at jumping down rabbit-holes, so I see what Sad Boner–I mean, Mad Cow–is going for, here.
He’s attempting to establish the legitimacy of the MRM as a social movement by comparing Elam, et al to Solanos. He wants to establish the idea that the ‘extremists’ should not be used to judge ‘the movement’.
Of course, he can’t quite state this comparison directly, because it falls apart like cheap tissue in a hurricane upon closer examination:
1: The MRM consists of nothing but ‘fringe’. There’s no mainstream for radicals to break off from; they are solely comprised of extremists. They occasionally glom onto convenient issues (such as cosmetic male infant circumcision), but no actual group taking action to fight those battles identifies as an MRM group–compare to NOW or other groups that take action to expand abortion rights, fair pay and so forth, and which are explicitly feminist.
2: The MRM does not seek to improve the status of men’s lives, but rather solely exists to make a case why women’s lives should not be improved in any way, shape or form. Even most radical feminists don’t really object if some men–usually those who act counter to normative toxic masculinity standards–benefit in some way from advancing women’s rights.
3: The Nolon-Solanos comparison, of course, also falls apart when comparing intent–the SCUM Manifesto is a dark, fantastic satire, whereas Nolon is dead serious and literally wants women to die at the hands of violent men.
There’s more, but seriously, those three should be enough.
Mad Cow is a sealion for sure. I’m definitely through engaging.
freemage,
This one absolutely must win the prize for murder apologetics.
When looking to draw a contrast between Valerie Solanas and Peter Nolan, you heroically manage to find the neural pathways to this: It is Nolon who we can be sure has true murderous intent.
Not the person who actually tried to kill three people.
Andy Warhol would surely have been relieved to hear that his lifelong wounds were merely satirical.
Thanks, all. Your sacrifices (reading this nonsense so I don’t have to) are deeply appreciated.
(Granted, THIS sea lion is more amusing by far.)
@The Mad Cow
Once again, my time is short, but anyway:
I did read your links, but there was nothing in there that supports your nonsense. We have pointed out time and again that even if everything you’ve written so far was true (and boy, is it not), you’re presenting a false equivalency based on an inability to tell apart ridiculous fantasy from actual threats. Go and read Nolan’s tweets, then read the SCUM manifesto again. Can’t you see a difference in tone right there? Not even a little bit? Actually, I can understand if you don’t, MRAs are famously incapable of understanding what constitutes as satire and what does not.
Yes, I’m calling you an MRA. I really don’t know why you would continue trying to lend credibility to such a joke of a movement if you didn’t have a stake in this. The MRAs are not in a similar place as feminism because the MRM is not a social movement. Never has been, never will be. Capiche?
No, you insufferably tedious sealion, no. I repeat: Not agreeing with Solanas’s actions does not mean there has ever been a reason for anybody to take her manifesto seriously.
Not that it’s either here or there, but Warhol forgave Solanas for the shooting. So it stands to reason he knew something you do not.
And Rodger’s manifesto is nothing but 100+ pages of an incredibly privileged young man whining how haaaard his life has been, with trips to Disneyland and tons of toys and whatnot. No manospherian has ever reached Solanas’s wit. You cannot draw a comparison by any stretch of logic.
I’ll see if I’ll bother to write anything else after coming home from work. You’re tedious, you’re wrong, and you have no leg to stand on.