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.
kirbywarp: How about when a person is in front of you, saying they want to kill X person or persons, and giving reasoning that seems to indicate mental illness? How about if it is a type of violence overwhelming associated(and not just in popular culture) with mental illness? Because at that point, bringing up the statistic that very few violent offenders(of all categories) are mentally ill becomes misleading, much less bringing up a statistic about victims of violent offenders when no one is asking about the mental status of the victims.
weirwood: Completely appropriate when someone is bringing up ‘crazyness’ as the reason for a violent act apropos nothing but stereotypes. When there is actual evidence for mental illness intersecting with motivation for the act, then bringing up that statistic is… not terribly appropriate. Since the statistic does not in any way say that any particular offender cannot be mentally ill, and that their mental illness cannot inform their violence.
Full diagnosis: Asperger’s/autism, schizoaffective disorder (bipolar II and schizophrenia), PTSD.
Number of crimes I’ve committed: I smoke pot sometimes, but otherwise, zero. Not even petty childhood stuff like trespassing, not even before I was diagnosed and medicated.
Number of crimes I’ve been a victim of: Eight years of physical child abuse, three months of paedophillic rape, three gay-bashings, 28 burglaries and home invasions.
So yes, I have a personal stake in this bullshit zombie lie you’re clinging on to like a baby blanket.
(And again, thankyou to the non-trolls for letting me say this without treating me like a three-headed leper on fire.)
What reasoning? Provide examples. In this thread, we’re discussing a virulent misogynist and there’s no evidence I’m aware of that misogyny has its roots in mental illness. It’s a cultural problem.
What type of violence is this? The only one I can think of is infanticide associated with post-partum psychosis. Which is definitely not the topic here. Violence against women has not to my knowledge been associated with mental illness.
And by the way, which mental illnesses are you referring to? Mentally ill is a really general term. It could include schizophrenia, bulimia, trichotillomania, depression, anything. Which specific illnesses are you arguing to be the cause of criminality?
@Kerlyssa:
-_-
Why yes. If there were a hypothetical situation in which you were correct, I would agree that you would be correct. Good one, Kerlyssa, you sure out-logic’d me.
*clap clap clap*
Oh good, my sarcastic slow-clap processor is still functioning.
I take it you’re talking about the OP? If so, what source exactly do you have in your pocket that shows that killing women is a type of violence overwhelmingly associated with mental illness?
Not even going to both with the “reasoning that seems to indicate mental illness,” because a) I don’t see it, b) neither of us are experts, c) the whole point of this exercise is that internet diagnoses is pointless and harmful. Guess you win that point.
*clap clap clap*
Excellent, it’s still working.
Anarchonist,
SOLANAS. I don’t disagree with you that Valerie Solanas was a complex person. But that Solanas’s ideological hatred for men had something to do with her willingness to kill a man is, at least, I think, reasonably arguable. As Valerie Solanas herself told reporters after her arrest to explain her violent actions:
That manifesto advocated for the killing of all men.
Paul Elam’s expressed hatred of women would certainly be relevant if Elam someday kills a woman. It would take a lot of intellectual cartwheels to avoid looking at Elam’s history of violent anti-woman rhetoric when discussing his murder of an innocent woman, even if there was a personal argument about something else preceding the murder.
I think those cartwheels are essential to your willfully blind characterization of Solanas’s determined attempt at murder as an “artistic dispute.”
Solanas actually tried to kill three men on June 3, 1968. Her target going in was Warhol, but she opportunistically added other men to the list simply because they were present. She aimed at and injured a man she didn’t know, an art critic who fled the scene. And Solanas put her gun directly to the head of Warhol’s manager, Fred Hughes. She pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed.
Perhaps commenter Ellesar can explain for us how this attempt at an execution was merely “provocative and ill advised” and put it in the correct “artistic context.” Then perhaps we all can see how the actual mayhem Solanas unleashed on three innocent people was morally better than Peter Nolan’s words.
If Warhol were still alive, perhaps Ellesar’s characterization would have soothed the artist’s pain:
I’d call that trauma from being the victim of a senseless act of violence. We Hunted the Mammoth commenters seem to disagree. Or, at least, it apparently doesn’t compare to being the victim of somebody bad talking.
FEMINISM IN 1968. Of course feminism in 1968 is not identical to Men’s Rights in 2015. But I didn’t argue that. I argued that there are similarities worth investigating. Both are gender-based rights movements, for one. That’s a pretty strong base of similarity. And feminism in 1968, especially in New York, was indeed a free-for-all where ideas that we find shocking to the conscience today were given platforms for serious public discussion among people with power in the movement. When Solanas tried to kill a famous man, she became a “heroine” to many, and her genocidal manifesto was eagerly sought out, closely read and considered as a plan of action. The eventual result was encouraging, however — those terrible ideas were eventually kicked out of the discussion and are no longer present among mainstream feminists.
And that’s where an important potential difference enters the picture. Who is going to throw these very similar horrible ideas out of the Men’s Rights movement?
The “eliminate the male sex” quote is from what is possibly the most-often-quoted passage in the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas:
Here it is quoted four days ago in Time Magazine.
As far as which significant feminists in the movement took Solanas’s ideas seriously, read Betty Friedan. She was a major player who successfully fought them and dealt with the splinter groups they formed. Ti-Grace Atkinson, president of NOW’s New York chapter, was perhaps the most serious adversary, but she was far from the only one.
HAH. Thanks Kirbs, I needed that . =)
Any time, SFHC 🙂
kirbywarp: A rewrite of that would be ‘almost 20%’. A rewrite might also include those diagnosed post-shooting. A rewrite might take into account the % of the general population vs that almost 20%. Or you could just skip to the end and realize that ‘not the best’ is not the same as ‘not’, and realize that you just said that mental illness correlate positively with mass shootings.
My beef with completely shutting down discussion of mental illness with regard to advocating or committing violence is situations where the shoe actually seems to fit. At that point, it becomes suppressing inconvenient facts in order to promulgate a positive stereotype.
weirwood: That vast majority of almost anything don’t commit violent crimes. We make distinctions for a reason, especially when it comes to crime. A crime motivated by bigotry is going to be treated differently than one that stems from greed, or mental illness. Folding those crimes into other motivations as a strike back against stereotyping of mentally ill people doesn’t make discussing, legislating, or countering those crimes work any better.
kirbywarp/weirwood: I was talking about the mass shootings Kirby brought up earlier, actually, tho OP is somewhat appropriate. Assuming he actually kills someone, his beliefs concerning his ‘war’ are pretty extensive and delusional, and sufficiently beyond the postings of other online misogynists to not be considered a cultural belief. Equating the belief that one can declare war on the women of X country and have their murders be treated as combat deaths is misogynistic, but not just plain misogyny.
SFHC: You are one person. You could be a murderer and not significantly affect crime stats at large, unless you committed a really specific form of murder. I am not going to trade diagnoses with you, and I am not going to compete with you for who deserves to win an argument based more on past and present suffering.
No. There’s a big difference between a group that is the oppressed fighting for their rights and a group that is the oppressor claiming victimhood in order to fight against equal rights for the oppressed group.
MRM and feminism are no more comparable than the civil rights movement and the white power movement.
@Kerlyssa:
*sigh*
That is from my third link. It also doesn’t expand upon whether the mass shootings were caused by the documented psychiatric history.
That’s from my first link. I didn’t link these sources just for funsies, I linked them so you could actually learn something.
Why yes, and “77% did not.”
It would also include indications of whether the mental illness in question was the cause of the violence. My first link indicates that the likelyhood is quite low.
About 18% of US adults have some form of mental illness. Unfortunately we don’t have more detailed information to conclude anything further.
Violence suffered while growing up, substance abuse, and exposure to violence as an adult are all much more strongly correlated with violent acts than mental illness. Since people with mental illness tend to be more exposed to these factors, the difference may be entirely up to those factors alone and have nothing to do with the mental illness itself. All three of my links corroborate to indicate that this is the likely scenario.
Our beef is that you think the shoe seems to fit simply because of the presence of violence, coupled with your belief that the mentally ill are more likely to be violent. Your reasoning, as far as I can tell since you haven’t gone into much detail yet, is circular.
Yes… much better to pull convenient facts out of your ass in order to promulgate a negative stereotype.
Too bad for you that one of the links Kirbywrap posted stated that the minority of mass shooters were diagnosed with a mental illness.
You are not Nolan’s psychiatrist. Maybe he does have a mental illness. But if you’re not his doctor, you’re not qualified to make a diagnosis. If you are his doctor, it’s a violation of medical ethics to be discussing him publicly.
If you are going to diagnosis him, for the love of kitties, please diagnose him with a specific illness. It’s highly suspect when people just label someone crazy. Crazy is not an actual diagnosis. People like you always use vague language because you don’t want to either have to defend a specific diagnosis or sound like you’re calling everyone with that diagnosis violent.
The notion that the fight against feminism is a noble war of some kind is actually widespread in the manosphere. They constantly talk use violent, warlike and apocalyptic rhetoric. Nolan just takes it to its logical extreme.
O_O
but… you said…
And my link said…
So mass shootings are not overwhelmingly associated with mental illness statistically, although they are in popular culture (because media leaps immediately to mental illness as a reason even without evidence). So… you’re wrong. Demonstrably. What was that hypothetical supposed to prove again?
http://www.minddisorders.com/Br-Del/Delusional-disorder.html
Whenever I hear of what to me sounds like delusional thinking, as with this person, I can’t help but think they do indeed have a diagnosable mental illness. Of course mental illness doesn’t cause hate, but a delusional disorder may contain hate as part of that delusion. So I have no trouble saying that people who exhibit this type of behavior may be mentally ill. Not putting down anyone else with a mental illness.
Just in case you’re wondering if Men’s Rights Activists care about men’s rights the way neo-Nazis care about white rights…
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/eddie1.gif
Kirby: What, the links that said that perfect treatment of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression would make gun violence go down by 4%?
Or the link that said that those with schizophrenic disorder were 70% more likely to be violent than those without any mental disorders, and that the risk went up dramatically the more co-disorders the person had?
Or the one that said that 18% of crimes committed by the mentally ill were majorly or directly linked to mental disorders? Crimes in this case appearing to be all crime, not just violent crime.
Because none of those links say that mental illness doesn’t correlate with increased rates of crimes/violence committed. All they said was that the rates in question were smaller than they were popularly conceived to be.
@Pandapool, I was just thinking about that Eddie Murphy gif the other day. Totally saved.
@Falconer
It’s describes this clusterfuck pretty well IMO.
As far as which significant feminists in the movement took Solanas’s ideas seriously, read Betty Friedan. She was a major player who successfully fought them and dealt with the splinter groups they formed. Ti-Grace Atkinson, president of NOW’s New York chapter, was perhaps the most serious adversary, but she was far from the only one.
So your evidence that the SCUM Manifesto was embraced by 1960s feminists is that prominent feminists condemned it (which hardly needed to be done, as it’s an absurd fantasy complete with robot armies). Get back to me when any prominent member of the MRM tries to shut down violent threats against women, instead of gleefully encouraging them and wanking off to visions of the coming Manpocalypse.
Of the major human rights movements, feminism has accomplished the most with the least violence. I don’t think that makes it the best or most successful, but it’s surely the least threatening. It always baffles me when anti-feminist guys seem seriously frightened of women using their amazing new powers of voting and having jobs to Kill All Men.
Agreed. In that they are comparable as social movements trying to achieve goals. And both movements have had arguments with regard to the use of violence in achieving their goals. (Malcolm X vs. Dr. King, for one example.) This isn’t a new thing. Neither feminism nor the MRM is unique in this way.
As far as oppression goes, I’m pretty sure the MRAs who focus on the practice of circumcision feel that infants who have a piece of their body sliced off without their consent are being oppressed. The fathers who lose custody of their children in divorce certainly see themselves as oppressed. As do male victims of domestic violence who see oppression in the ridicule and neglect they face. Oppression is part of their own narrative, even if it is not part of your narrative of them. Dismissing their perception of oppression does not make them go away. They are still organizing, still hashing out ideas, still doing what social movements do. What will they do next? To answer that question it helps to look at other social movements that tried to achieve similar change in similar circumstances. “But they’re wrong!” is irrelevant to the question.
So far the reactions here to my bringing up Valerie Solanas are three for three: All responses seem to imply that Peter Nolan’s words deserve condemnation because he purports to speak for men, while Valerie Solanas’s actions are excusable because she was on the side of women.
I have to say, I did not see that coming.
Tiresome. Again, my original statement, and the only reason I bothered posting, is because I am tired of seeing ‘mentally ill are more likely to be a victim of violence than a perpetrator/than a non mentally ill person’ be bandied about as a reason why violent people either aren’t mentally ill. It’s a misuse of statistics.
Just because MRAs feel that men are oppressed, doesn’t mean they are. Also, by the admission of one of their own leaders, Paul Elam, they don’t do any activism other than go to internet comment sections and there are no plans to organize in the future. The MRAs are not a social movement. They’re a group of angry man babies yelling on the internet.
@Han
Citation needed and very much desired, I’d love to know where exactly radical extreme feminists are in political power and their iron fisted rule has so blighted oppressed men’s lives.
Ffs, Kerlyssa.
Nobody ever said that mentally ill people can never be violent. You’re arguing with a straw man. We’re objecting to the assumption that people who are violent in action or ideation must be mentally ill. That is why it is relevant and not misleading to point out that the mentally ill are more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than the perpetrator. Because the stereotype is wrong.
And you think we’re tiresome? You’re deliberately misinterpreting some of our points and refusing to even address others.
I’m still waiting on that DSM supported specific diagnosis by the way. Since you can tell over the internet whether or not someone has a mental illness, it should be a snap.