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.
@Laura Lodygowski, is your avatar the Confederate flag? What the hell.
Also no to your Freudian nonsense.
Oh come on Han, no.
Your straw feminists of the “extreme fringe of feminism that delights in punishing men any way they can and taking away anything they can for them with the goal of taking out sociopolitical vengeance on individuals of the group they perceive as the enemy”? I’ve never fucking met one.
And saying MRAs are just so desperate because of all those evil straw feminists that want to take away men’s rights? NO. Stop excusing their misogynist bullshit. If they really were concerned about how society treats men (and yes, there are problems here!) they would do actual activism, opening shelters for the homeless etc. But they don’t.
*headwall*
*headwall*
*headwall*
Just because lying-with-statistics really annoys me:
while the mentally ill ARE far more likely to have violent crime committed against them then to commit violent crime, AND are more likely to have a violent crime committed against them then to a non mentally ill person is, they are also more likely to commit a violent crime than a non mentally ill person. Point of interest being that violence correlates really, really well with treatment noncompliance.
Given that every damn thread on this site now has that shitty statistic spammed in it, thought I’d mention what the spam elides.
@SFHC, yeah, this whole comment section is a bit of a disaster, huh?
Oh my Christ. Don’t look at Laura’s linked FB account if you don’t want to vomit your kidneys up. Birtherism, NWO and Big Pharma conspiracies, #PoliceLivesMatter (ButBlackLivesDon’t), it’s a veritable cornucopia of nope.
@Kerlyssa
You are missing the point. The point is not “mentally ill people don’t ever do this,” the point is “mentally ill people should not be scapegoats for this, and are more likely to be victims of it than perpetrators.” You yourself admit that the statistic is correct. Also, shove off with the whole “mentally ill people are only nice because TREATMENT” implication.
And reported to Twitter, blocked on Twitter, and reported to the FBI. Glad these criminals make it so easy to spot them, at least. I am frightened, but I will not be cowed into silence by a sexist who clearly illustrates what I am fighting against. I will report you because you, Mr. Nolan, are doing some very illegal stuff that should land you in a jail cell in a prison with the highest security for terrorism.
If you’re going to pose as a feminist, you should probably do a little bit of reading on the subject. Then you’d know that sex positivity is associated with third/fourth wave feminism, not second wave.
Best of luck in your future “I’m totally a feminist, now hear me tell you why feminists are bad and MRAs have a point” trolling!
Cite your sources, fucko.
(Who wants to place odds on whether this claim came from the University Of Kerlyssa’s Ass or whether it’s “Real” but counts non-ill people who were declared “Oh, they had to have been crazy, because only crazy people do that – wait, what do you mean that’s circular reasoning” by society/the media as ill?)
andiexist: I am not addressing ‘the point’, I am addressing the means used to promote it: a misleading statistic.
Are you using ‘niceness’ to mean ‘non violent’?
SFHC:
Nice to know you’ve got it figured out already.
For anyone who does care where I got it from:
http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/resources/consequences-of-lack-of-treatment/violence/1381
Kerlyssa,
Your own link says that mentally ill people are not, generally violent. All it says is that a small percentage of crimes are committed by the mentally. Nobody was arguing that no mentally ill people ever commit crimes. We’re arguing that internet diagnosing every hateful and/or angry person as “crazy” furthers the stigma that mentally ill people are dangerous which your own link argues against. I’m not sure what your point is? At this point it would just seem to be sealioning.
I meant to say hateful and/or violent. Not hateful and/or angry, but I guess that applies too!
@Kerlyssa
The statistic is not freaking misleading. You yourself admitted its accuracy. Even your link does more to tear down your argument than to support it. Why are you so wedded to the idea that violent people must be mentally ill?
(I was using “nice” to sarcasm at the whole ‘one of the good ones’ idea, which you seem to be trying to cover yourself with. As in, ‘well, you must be being treated, so *of course* you’re one of the good ones!’)
Go away and read your own link. You know, the one that says that being a young man or abusing drugs correlates more with being violent than being mentally ill? The one that says most violent people aren’t mentally ill at all? The one that says that a lot of the mentally ill people who *were* violent were probably also using drugs? That one? Or did you forget it already in your rush to spew your ableism all over this comments section?
andiexist: On rereading, I think I see what you were addressing. When I said correlate, I actually meant correlate. I understand that it is often used interchangeably with ’caused’. I was not saying that not using treatment _causes_ people to become violent at greater rates.
I don’t know what the situation is in the US but in England there was a survey done of how many crimes were committed by people with mental illnesses. The survey used figures from Sweden because that was the only place they could find that actually recorded such data.
The survey looked at different types of crime. Mentally ill people committed between 3 and 7% of the various crimes. The problem of course is that there are no exact figures for how many people may suffer from mental illness, which of the many different types of mental illness they had and whether the illness actually played any part in the offending.
So it doesn’t seem like there are any statistics anyway; certainly nothing to suggest there’s any correlation between mental illness and criminality.
One figure we do have though is that military veterans, even the ones with PTSD, commit significantly fewer violent crimes than the general population.
So, door number three, then: Deliberately misconstruing their sources to fit their beliefs and/or troll us!
Seriously, your own damn link says ill people might be up to five times more likely to commit crimes, but they’re also up to 140 times more likely to be the victim of crime. One of these numbers is bigger than the other.
weirwood: My point is that mental illness can and does play a part in some violent acts, and mentally ill people being more at risk for violence does not preclude the above statement. That the vast majority of mentally ill people don’t commit violent crime doesn’t negate that either: the vast majority of every large demographic fits that bill, since it’s pretty baseline for functioning in society. I forget what sea lioning is, other than a pun on something in a long ago thread.
andiexist: It’s misleading because it is in response to the assumption that violent OFFENDERS are likely to be mentally ill. It says that the mentally ill are more likely to be targets than offenders, which is technically true, but doesn’t actually address the first statement/assumption.
I wasn’t making any assumptions either on whether you had a mental illness or whether you were being treated, since it doesn’t really matter either way.
That other things correlate MORE doesn’t make another not correlate. Unhelmeted motorcycle crashes correlate higher with death than helmeted ones, but both are higher than driving belted in an SUV. Untreated mental illness also correlates higher with drug use, and with violence. Causation is harder, and is mostly addressed by interviewing said persons about their motivations for refusing treatment and using drugs(self medication is a common answer).
SFHC: Yes? I never said the statistic was wrong, but that it was misleading. I addressed why in my previous response to Andiexist. I agree that people with mental disorders are a heavily victimized demographic in a number of ways, I disagree that this fact means that mental illness cannot or should not be addressed as a factor in committing violent offense.
Why are you paying any attention to this nut? Slow news day?
It’s relevant because people associate the perpetration of crimes with mental illness even though only a small percentage of crimes are committed by the mentally ill. They don’t associate mental illness with being the victims of crime. There’s no association between mental illness and criminality. There is an association between mental illness and risk of victimization.
I said that mentally ill people are more likely to be victims than perpetrators because the stereotype is the opposite.
http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/04/mental-illness-crime.aspx
http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/mental-illness-and-violence
http://www.propublica.org/article/myth-vs-fact-violence-and-mental-health
Long story short? There are many intertwined factors involved with predictors of violence. The biggest indicators being things like being young and male, substance abuse, and being exposed to violence around you (while growing up and while an adult).
When people with mental illnesses commit violent crimes, only a small percentage are actually related to the mental illness itself. Also, the vast majority of deaths caused by mentally ill folks are suicides. Only an extremely small percentage are homicides.
What makes everything more complicated is that we treat the mentally ill like crap; people with mental illnesses are more likely to be homeless and have substance-abuse issues. If there’s a substantial difference between likelihoods of violence between the mentally ill and non-mentally-ill, chances are those other factors are going to be the cause.
But never mind all that, let’s talk about lying (or eliding) with statistics. People with mental illnesses are a small percentage of the population. Violent criminals are also a small percentage. Let’s pretend that people with mental illnesses are twice as likely to commit a violent crime as someone without. Now you have a violent criminal in front of you; what’s the likelihood that they are mentally ill?
Small. That’s how statistics, and basic Bayesian reasoning, actually works.
Even though mental illness can be a factor in a violent crime some of the time (see Andrea Yates), that doesn’t mean that it’s appropriate to internet diagnose someone as “crazy.” It also doesn’t mean that misogyny or any other kind of bigotry is a mental illness. That’s the assumption we’re arguing against.
One of my links talks about a study that looked at something around 150 mass shooters. Less than 1 in 5 had been previously diagnosed with mental illnesses. On the other hand, over 60% had substance-abuse issues.
Even in the highly selected world of mass shooters, mental illness is a bad bet. There are much better potential indicators of violence that span across the entire mental health spectrum.
That the majority of people be they mentally ill or mentally healthy do not commit violent crimes is precisely the point we’re making. This is why criminals should be called criminals not “crazy” or “insane.”
I’m starting to think kerlyssa is a sock for one of the other commenters that got called out for ableism. It’s awfully suspicious that all of a sudden someone pops up out of nowhere to make multiple comments on the subject.