An open thread for non-personal stuff. As always with open threads, no trolls, no MRAs, etc.
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Open Thread for Non-Personal Stuff: Mid-August 2015 Baghead Party
We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
We Hunted The MammothAn open thread for non-personal stuff. As always with open threads, no trolls, no MRAs, etc.
@indifferentsky
Coming out of the woodwork (long time lurker, hi everyone!!) because that article made me so so soooo fucking angry that I just had to say something. Shit like that is exactly why MRAs are so infuriating and dangerous. They are trying to normalize the idea that women actually have it BETTER than men, and they are very good at recruiting disenfranchised young men to their cause. You know, like ISIS and the KKK.
It’s articles like that one that remind me just how delusional those guys and their message is, and reinforce my drive to continue the work of feminism here in the West. Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how much of this kind of shit still happens here. Man, I am MAD now.
Also, David – I LOVE your blog. You make it possible to monitor these assholes without completely losing faith in humanity with your killer humor. Thanks you, and keep on keepin’ on!
@Indifferentsky,
I read that article a few months ago, that case history is heartbreaking. Whenever MRAs start trumpeting about how women abuse children more than men do they’re talking about cases like this, where women are punished for not stopping a man from hurting a child. But how often are absent fathers jailed when they leave children in the care of abusive mothers or stepfathers?
Not to mention the fact that primary childcare overwhelmingly falls on women, so even if there are more cases involving women, it doesn’t make women innately more likely to abuse. It’s like saying male pilots are more likely to crash a plane because most air crashes involve a male pilot, ignoring the fact that most pilots are men so of course more accidents involve men.
PS: Does anyone play Clicker Heroes? Looking for a guild.
… You guys have/had a minecraft server? I wish I knew this sooner!
@katz: Try “histrionic”. (The Latin root is histrio, “actor”, so it’s not gendered!)
This is a complete non-sequitur, but how has it taken Nintendo this long to market a Mario level maker?!!
Admittedly, it’s not something I had even thought of before I heard of it, but since hindsight is 20/20 you’d think they’d have put something out for the original Wii, if not the Gamecube.
Ooh, “histrionic” is good. (And I’d been avoiding it because I thought it had the same etymology as “hysterical!”)
@katz: I wasn’t sure either, so I checked!
Yeah, I was hosting a modded server, which was fun while it lasted, but the mods ended up being a bit to intense for a lot of people and it boiled down to only a few regulars. I think I’ll look more seriously into renting a vanilla server tomorrow or Saturday, and I’ll post here when I have details.
The old server still exists on my machine, so I could bring it up again if a group wants to play again. 🙂 I toned down the health and damage of the Grimoires of Gaia mobs so they should be a little bit less terrible. Just send me a message on steam if you want me to put it back up.
It was fun to fight a giant minotaur … once.
@Nequam:
“Histrionic” is, IIRC, a defunct clinical term for a cluster-B disorder. Histrionic Personality Disorder certainly produces that form of behaviour, but it’s also a formerly-recognised personality disorder and so you may wish to avoid it.
@Kirby:
I had great fun playing with you lot. That said, I thoroughly support the idea of a vanilla server to allow a wide base of players. If you need me to kick some cash in to help with the server costs, please let me know.
I may have to rebuild Mammoth Hall. Alas. What a hardship. It had an onsite creche and everything.
@Falconer:
I’m surprised that they didn’t do what everyone else does: tidy up their in-house design tools and release those. It’s an easy win with the community, not that Nintendo has ever needed that. Then again, Nintendo has never exactly been supportive of the modding scene compared to, say, Paradox or Bethesda.
I absolutely cannot deal with the mass-murder story in the other thread, so here is a capybara in a tutu.
iwillshowyoufearinahandfulofdust, and sn0rkmaiden,
Yeah that was a tough one, and of course women are with the kids more. I did see a break down in stats for when women are the SOLE abusers of children and the stats are much lower than an MRA would think, and I would imagine that most cases have some horrible poverty going on, not that it makes it ok. I see that the women that were cut no breaks on their own abuse were women of color in conservative states. I am also the type that has zero sympathy for not protecting a child because I can’t relate to it, but some of the accounts clearly show monstrous abuse when the mom tried to leave and protect the child. This is why shelters are so dam important, but not just that they exist, that women know they exist. In the area I lived in years ago, the shelters were in secret locations, and the cops couldn’t even know where they were because their partners were in the shelters as well. So they had to drop off at a location and someone would walk and some meet you and walk you there, looking over their shoulder the whole time, and begging you the whole time not to tell anyone where the place was once you left.
Yeah, I’m sure men’s shelters would have to do the same thing, right? This was so not my original point, I got off on a tangent here. But oh yes, shelters and knowledge of them, important. But when you have to rely on the system to get you there… you can see the complications. Also you can’t really stay there indefinitely. A week was the limit if I remember correctly. Women with children don’t have options if they don’t have family to run to. The way MRA’s trivialize this and continue their abuse of these women online is beyond disgusting. It’s also sad they have been able to spread around that dv is even between the sexes. It is absolutely not. That’s a longer topic to get in to, but to keep it simple, fatalities are no where near even. The stats are hard to find, sometimes you have to go state by state. Washington state for 2013 gives a breakdown of the deaths and for 2013, ALL the murderers were men. The report is good because it breaks down the perps and the victims. Another thing to be careful of when you look at DV reports… check this out… in Washington state where every single perp was a man, there were men killed. They were bystanders, current boyfriends or husbands killed by ex husbands, etc. So sometimes when you see a breakdown of how many men are killed unless the report STATES outright that the female partner did it, it’s more likely that the man was killed by another man.
*no, the time limit was probably a month, not a week.
Hey guys, remember a while back we had a discussion about people treating Nazis like movie villains? I wrote a post about it and was wondering if anyone would check that it comes across right, since it’s such a sensitive topic.
Katz, I don’t see a problem with it, but I’m so girt with privilege I might have missed something.
It’s so true that Nazis have become like cartoon characters in the public mind.
OK, good. I just wanted to make sure I hadn’t missed something egregiously anti-Semitic or anything.
@ Katz
Really liked your article. Some really interesting points that cry out for further discussion. You up for a chat about this?
You familiar with Allo Allo for instance?
Not familiar with that, but you can tweet me @gwenckatz or comment on the post itself or just talk here (the latter presuming it wouldn’t bug people).
That’s an interesting point you raise, katz. I think you explore the concept very well.
Two questions immediately spring to mind:
A) In the long run, everyone is rehabilitated. Vikings, Pirates and Cowboys, to name only three, have become acceptable costumes for children; and none of them were exactly the good guys. Do you see this as part of that process of rehabilitation or as qualitatively distinct from it; and if so, how?
B) The power fantasy of being associated with a deeply transgressive set of symbols is fairly common amongst outcast groups: Hunter S. Thompson recorded the same thing amongst outlaw motorcyclists. Do you believe that this disempowers the symbol by associating it with pathetic outcasts rather than badass evil people? Is that an even more insidious process than them being restricted to straight up evil?
Oh, EJ just made my key points, but better.
This is an idea I’ve gradually been forming, so there’s still tons of room for refinement. Anyway:
Heh, my high school mascot was the Vikings. I think the key is that something can be safely rehabilitated in fiction once it’s passed out of real-life relevance and therefore become harmless. Neo-Nazis still exist and do harm (and broader white supremacist and fascist ideas do a lot of harm), whereas I don’t think there are many neo-Vikings. (Though an occasional reminder of what those groups were really like could be good for us.)
Is this in reference to GamerGate? While I certainly wish Nazi imagery would be permanently associated with hateful losers on the internet, I think it’s pretty thoroughly outweighed by all the media depictions of Nazis as powerful and effective.
I saw an interesting article I though you Splatoon lovers (Looking at you, SFHC.) would love:
Armor Score: Permission to be Femme in ‘Splatoon’.
Connecticut just got rid of the death penalty!