Yesterday, I wrote about former A Voice for Men Number Two Boy Dean Esmay’s weird and hyperbolic AVFM post attacking Roosh Valizadeh, the scummy pickup artist that a previous AVFM post had described as a “deep thinker” and “a layered, tempered and earnest guy, who truly wants to help other men.”
Today I’d like to bring to your attention another, even weirder attack on Roosh that ran in AVFM alongside Esmay’s post. In “Roosh Rage,” longtime AVFM commenter Bryan Scandrett angrily denounced what he described variously as the “The Greatest Rape Hoax Ever,” “The MSM Global Rape Hoax,” and “the Great MSM Rape Hoax.”
By this he apparently means the tendency of media outlets to refer to Roosh as a Men’s Rights Activist, thus conflating the pure and innocent Men’s Rights movement with the terrible rape apologist Roosh, even though he’s not technically an MRA. (And it’s true, he’s not officially an MRA; he just shares so many of the beliefs of MRAs that last year AVFM was praising him as a deep thinker and decent dude.)
Like Esmay and presumably most other AVFMers, Scandrett assumes that journalists were wrongly calling Roosh an MRA on purpose, as part of some nefarious plot, and not because to most people outside the manosphere MRAs and PUAs look like conjoined twins.
“The MSM Global Rape Hoax was never about Roosh or PUAs or even the legalizing of rape allegation,” Scandrett asserts.
That was simply the excuse to call for proxy violence against men. While PUAs did receive some Discussion within the articles, without exception to my reading, not once did they miss calling him an MRA. Their real target. …
It is simply an attack on men, to silence their voices, to vilify and demonize Men’s Human Rights Activists with a false allegation of rape advocates.
As you can see, Scandrett is not what you’d call a particularly lucid writer.
And his post only gets weirder, with Scandrett declaring that this “call for torches and pitchforks” was really
about reasserting Mummies’ procreative abilities as the central and only thing of critical importance in our global human culture. The woman on the pedestal is a mother. The issue of her uterus is what gives her absolute protection and absolution from all crimes, her carte blanche. She has parlayed this privileged position over the centuries into power and speshul snowflake privileges. You are all attached, at a primal level, to your mothers, with few exceptions. A primary attachment. Even those who didn’t for various reasons, likely pined for her warm stereotypical comforts.
Null gravida women assume the same authority by virtue of being potential mothers. Sugar and spice becomes ‘I have the pussy, I make the rules.’
You want the sugar, you bend the knee.
Well ok then.
Scandrett continues onward with his peculiar and generally incomprehensible argument, declaring that “Feminism is a false allegation” and attacking Roosh himself for “help[ing] to tar us all with the false allegation of rapist at a global level of perception.”
Scandrett has managed to convince himself that none of Roosh’s critics are really bothered by Roosh and his toxic views; they just want an excuse to beat up on the real enemy, MRAs.
The gynarchy couldn’t give a flying toss about PUA’s. Or even any actual attempt to legalize rape should a single human in the history of humanity be stupid enough to try it. The more the boys get between the girls legs, the more babies get born and child support gets paid, the more future economic growth and taxpayers we can expect and the more money gets released to the US states.
Drunk or sober, they couldn’t give a rats. So long as the livestock keeps breeding, the Great Human Ant Colony will thrive.
Nonetheless, he warns, “[t]he lying sexist feminist pigs,” will use Roosh’s “‘thought experiment’ … as a club for as long as they draw breath.”
Scandrett leaves us with a few other bon mots as he staggers unsteadily to his conclusion, my favorite being this “sentence” here:
The selfish paradigm that boys getting their end away as central and paramount is idiotic in the face of the ocean of male suffering we confront daily.
Scandrett concludes by informing us that “Roosh Rage is better out than in,” whatever that means.
Meanwhile, Roosh has decided to troll MRAs by declaring himself one of them.
https://twitter.com/rooshv/status/697291119911161856
I think I have a gif for this.
Yeah. You can find case histories of women committing all sorts of interpersonal violence offenses. There’s plenty of research into behaviorally profiling them. MRA’s assert that something is statistically significant by rejecting all evidence to the contrary and selectively focusing on hand-wavy plausibility arguments. There is technically some evidence for their claims, but it’s like the evidence that the Earth is stationary because you can’t feel it move.
But there’s absolutely no evidence that women who report stalking and abuse are “black widow” murderers.
Even if there were droves of women out there asking men to murder people for them, those men can still say no.
<span class=”mra”>But… but… women control men with their butts! Men have to kneel before women if they want the sugar! Men can’t help themselves when a(n attractive) woman asks them to do something!</span>
Oh, about 100%. It’s not hard to tell the difference, honestly.
These guys aren’t just random wild-eyed creatures of the streetcorner near the derelict mental hospital. They’re actually organized, with a sub-culture and a sub-language of their own. They have fora, which are not labelled as being “for the mentally ill”.
Plus, there are plenty of mentally ill people (some of whom are regulars here) who aren’t assholes.
And there is, sadly, no pill that these guys can take that will keep their assholery in check.
Asshole ≠ mental condition, capisce?
No need to suspect. That’s the actual definition (well, “Definition”-in-snark-quotes, anyway).
I think part of it is so abusers can justify retaliation against men who assist with reporting, etc.
Having poor moral character or being a bigot isn’t the same as having a mental illness.
Even if we were to change the definition of “mental illness” to automatically include bigots, we already know that medication and talk therapy don’t work on them. It may even make them worse if they learn social skills that help them deceive and manipulate people. It also hurts people with actual mental illnesses to be associated with horrible people. There’s already a widespread misconception that mentally ill people are dangerous.
@Scildfreja
& others
I’m not sure if you are deliberately misrepresenting me or just don’t understand where I’m coming from.
I have read the comments policy (which I understand to be a prohibition on the use of language which is insensitive to people with mental health problems). Given that that’s pretty much the opposite of what I’m trying to do, I’m not sure why so many knee jerk “read the policy” responses are necessary, and at the same time nothing substantive in the way of addressing my question. Yes, I know the difference between NPD and “narcissist”, tyvm – it’s ok to hate on morally-bankrupt narcissists but not ok to hate on people with a “bona fide” psychiatric diagnosis, apparently. I also know there are plenty of people with mental health issues who aren’t misogynistic assholes – most, one suspects. And that mocking people for disability is grotesque (actually, my point).
So far, so obvious.
I’m curious that someone can feel free to say that you are 100% confident that these people have full mental health (and are by extension legitimate targets of your scorn) but at the same time say that it’s impossible to assess mental health based on what people say/do. Isn’t that something of a contradiction?
If someone ACTUALLY believes some of the more far-fetched conspiracy theories of the MRM, they have, without any exaggeration whatsoever, lost touch with reality. They are therefore, to all intents and purposes, psychotic. DSM is not required to make sense of this. Just because people fling around medical diagnoses as terms of abuse, doesn’t make this less true. It’s is possible to experience induced psychosis through the use of drugs, sensory deprivation, severe trauma, etc. Why not through exposure to toxic ideology? Not sure why you find this to be such a sacred taboo.
In any event, I’m really not sure what benefit accrues from simply stating over and over again that these guys/gals are gibbering idiots. It’s rather smug, it might make one feel superior, but I’m not sure what else it accomplishes. I get that there is a need to vent about stupid-shit-people-say, but ultimately I’m not sure it does anything other than escalate the petty flame war. I’m not saying I have all the answers, which is why I was humbly asking for some. If you don’t have any that’s all you needed to say.
@Guest
You claim to have read the comments policy, yet you keep ignoring this part:
If you have indeed read the comments policy, you are now admitting to deliberately breaking it. That’s grounds for a ban.
Also, you’re not adding anything to the discussion right now.
http://i.imgur.com/M7DgVn7.gif
Sometimes I wonder if this GIF should constantly shower down the screen like Javascript snowflakes on a Geocities page. … Nah, they still wouldn’t get it.
Seriously, what is it with people who barge in and assume the comments policy doesn’t apply to them. Have some fucking sense. We’ve obviously already discussed these things before and have come to certain conclusions. Maybe try to contribute something, ANYTHING, to the community before you start dictating what the rules should be.
For the record, that was 390 words to say what could have been said in three (either “Fuck your rules” or “I’m a bigot,” depending on whether they’re feeling more argumentative or more honest). Yeesh.
Cute. Someone wants to play “long winded white person.” This is a game I’m good at.
Lemme break it down for you, Guest.
No they are not. A psychotic person cannot choose what they hallucinate or how they respond to stimuli, but copes with those responses as best they can. A conspiracy theorist sees the same reality as us, but chooses to respond inappropriately. The two are diagonally different.
Some conspiracy theorists may suffer from mental illnesses (in any large group there will always be some ill people, that being how statistics work) but there is no learned study which has found that conspiracy theories are consistently the result of illness.
On the other hand, many mentally ill people believe things which are entirely true. We have a regular on this site called Policy of Madness who’s one of the smartest and most insightful people I’ve come across, and who self-describes as insane.* Her opinions are therefore by definition those of an insane person. They also happen to be right.
Because that isn’t how the human brain works. The types of psychosis that you have described come from things that impair the physical operation of the human brain. Ideology does not alter the physical operation of the human brain. It may cause a person to disagree with you, even to believe things that you find abhorrent, but they have arrived at those opinions through the rational operation of the human brain.
It’s easy to write off someone’s opinion by declaring them to be insane. This is a traditional thing for men to do to women who disagree with them, and for white people to do to black people who disagree with them. Like most easy answers, it’s usually wrong.
It’s also tempting to claim that only mentally ill people do or say terrible things; and that therefore a) I personally could never do those things, and b) the people who do those things must be mad, crazy, The Other. This, too, is wrong.
The Soviets were sane when they engineered the famine of 1934. The British were sane when they implemented the great genocide of Sri Lanka. The Americans and Australians who exterminated their native inhabitants, and their descendants who refuse to acknowledge this as genocide and to make restorations, are sane. Sane people can do terrible things. You are (so far as I know) sane; you are capable of doing terrible things. So am I. Does this terrify you?
—–
*PoM, my most earnest apologies if this is not the term you prefer.
@Guest,
Since you singled my comment out I’ll reply. I know you’re just using it as an example of the replies you have gotten.
They may have NPD! This is true. They may have biological reasons for their behaviour that makes it a compulsion, even!
We don’t diagnose someones’ mental condition over the internet here, however, because anyone qualified to make a diagnosis would say that’s a stupid thing to do. We can’t know, and further, it’s irrelevant. There is no need to assume mental illness of any kind.
Their brand of hate is eminently explainable as plain old bigotry and hate. There’s no need to tack on “And perhaps mental illness!” This does nothing but perpetuate the stereotype that people with mental illnesses are unstable, dangerous, and selfish.
People with mental illnesses are more likely to be the victims of hate and violence, not the perpetrators. On this blog, we try to be on their side, to support them instead of driving a hatebus over them. So, we don’t associate bad behaviour with mental illness, because they are poorly associated.
Got it? I hope you can see where this position is from. It’s why we have a “no ableism” policy here, and why we try to avoid associating “crazy” with “bad”. Because that’s a stereotype, not a real association.
If you have other questions as to why we have this policy, you can ask, but please abide by it. It’s not something we like ’round here.
EDIT – oh god EJ mentioned neuroanatomy. I will not ramble about neuroanatomy. 😡
@SFHC
My sister in law gave me this mug for my birthday. 🙂
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/Mobile%20Uploads/20160213_170204_zps1hsednzy.jpg
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/Mobile%20Uploads/20160213_170212_zps52zr6clz.jpg
She just got back from Japan a few weeks before.
@Scildfreja:
Fixed it for you.
Hi, mentally ill person here with some brain damage to boot! When I first came here, I thought the policy was odd. I mean, everyone uses crazy as shorthand for a lot of situations that don’t literally mean mentally ill. But I made a mental note of it and hung around for a while. I started to understand where the policy came from after the umpteenth time someone came in here claiming that these guys are just crazy and that we shouldn’t take what they say seriously. Because it’s obvious that these ideas are not born out of illness but of hatred. These people are not making assertions that are completely detached from reality. Their ideas are in line with ideas that are deeply entrenched in our society. This is not a disease. And to say that they act just like they have a specific or even non-specific disease is insulting to the people who have that disease or class of diseases. You’re telling everyone who has that disease that you think they’re just like these terrible people, and your only evidence for thinking that is the terrible things these people say and the terrible things they do.
I hope I’m making sense. I just woke up after a long night of insomnia.
:O
EJ, I have to go visit my dad in the hospital and do some errands. Then I’ll come back and blather on about my poorly-researched syntheses if I remember!
@ scildfreja
Good job the comments policy prohibits discussion of, what was that term you used, a biological basis for compulsion. 🙂
Personally though I’d encourage you to tell us about that. What with your stuff and IP’s language lessons I learn more here in my skiving moments than I did in three months of Uni.
Actually, while we have an ableist in the thread, I have a question for them.
@Guest
How do you ableists make sense of your apparent belief that every mental illness, disorder and disability, from schizophrenia to autism to brain cancer, all have the same symptom (that is, misogyny)? How would that work biologically? Do you think that all people are naturally misogynistic, or that there’s a misogyny switch in the brain, or what? And if so, wouldn’t that render all the desperate othering moot? I’m serious, I don’t get it.
@dhag
Hah, adorable! Love it. =D
I confess that sometimes it takes more conscious effort to avoid terminology that is in conflict with the comments policy but does tend to be part of discussions I have on a regular basis elsewhere. Still, I know that not using the terminology or armchair diagnosing is part of the price of admission (the other part is not being a rude troll) to comment here. I wouldn’t be here unless I was willing to make that effort (I’m fairly new here myself so adapting is ongoing) but I can tell the difference between asshole who chooses not to abide by the policy yet still thinks they have the unfettered right to break it, usually with WAY TOO MANY words that amount to ‘special so logical excuse-maker’ and other kind of new-ish people such as myself.
Just because those assholes come here and try to drown everyone in a flood of words doesn’t change the fact that there is a policy and not abiding by it can result in assholes being thrown out on their butt.
I love the gif at the end, where is it from?
poiuy, Anita made it so people could use it in posts like this!
http://giphy.com/femfreq
What’s up, On occasion your navigation bar disappears on my iMac, I thought you may like to know.