Men’s Rights Activists learned a long time ago that the easiest way to win an argument with someone is by playing the old straw man game, ignoring what they actually believe and instead pretending that they believe something much less defensible — and much easier to rebut.
Trouble is, when you’re actually debating one of these people directly, they may point out to you that they don’t actually believe what you claim they believe. And this makes it oh so much harder to win the argument.
Luckily, MRAs have found a workaround for this little difficulty. Instead of debating real feminists who can argue back, they debate imaginary ones who say only what the MRAs allow them to say.
One quick visit to a stock photo repository and hey, presto! You’ve got yourself the following memes depicting Straw Feminists Confused About Everything.
Er, what? Feminists have the power to ban hot babes from going out in public? Do these hot babes have to make themselves less hot before they can get a walking around permit from the Department of Jealous Feminists Who Won’t Let You Go Out if You’re Too Hot?
I think I may have posted this one before, but I still don’t quite understand it. Hey MRA dudes, you’re supposed to confuse the imaginary women in your memes, not the rest of us!
This dumb little cartoon, drawn in 2003 by a dude hoping to sell a few t-shirts, has provided MRAs with thirteen years’ worth of cheap outrage so far. Congrats, MRA meme-maker, for squeezing a little bit more outrage from its desiccated corpse.
I ain’t saying she’s a golddigger but, yes, you are saying that. Again. That song is more than a decade old. Move on, dudes.
@Dustin
I live in Gothenburg, Sweden. Here’s the link to my local doctor’s office’s website:
http://www.bergsjonvardcentral.se/
As you can see, I can indeed just walk in anytime between 8:00am-4:30pm Monday-Friday, except for 11am-1pm on Wednesdays, or I can just walk in anytime between 10:00am-1:30pm on weekends, and I will get to see a doctor usually within an hour or two.
So, yes, 7 days/week I can just stroll down there and see a doctor almost immediately, and it would cost me the equivalent of $12.
Except right now it would cost me $0 since I’ve already reached the $130 yearly ceiling in overall health care costs, due to my disability that I mentioned previously.
These are easily verifiable facts which directly contradict your beliefs. Your response is to deny facts.
I love it when American right wing extremist views collide with actual facts in such a brutal fashion. You guys just don’t know how to cope with reality outside the bubble.
TIL that illegal immigrants and criminals would drive poutine into the ground. The ground I say!
@Imaginary Petal
I didn’t know you lived in Sweden! Jag bodde i Örebro!
Loved it there. Such good people and, yeah, the taxes paid for an awesome community park for me to play soccer and hockey in all summer long. Not to mention as legal foreign residents my family all had immediate walk-in access to healthcare for the same cost as citizens.
Now there’s a place I wouldn’t mind moving back to.
My meds were costing me literally thousands when I lived in the States. Here? $32 Aus a month for both. And if I ever need antibiotics, it’s $8 Aus per full course.
Seriously, Dustbin, there are no fucking downsides to this.
@ Dustin
What makes you think I’m a “leftist”?
So, what’s your military training? I was a lecturer at the MOD’s Special Training School* so if you have any great tips I’d love to pass them on.
[@ EJ – I can’t help but think that you’re now going “Ha, knew it!” 🙂 ]
@weirdoodtreehugger
What makes you think I’m doug-whistling? How do you know the kids aren’t white? Aren’t you being racist by assuming that certain demographics are prone to sagging and listening to music with unwholesome lyrics (lyrics that people like you would complain are sexist, homophobic, and contains death threats)?
I just can’t understand why right wingers would rather pay more out of pocket for services than they would pay in taxes. Especially since we often pay more for less when services and infrastructure are privatized.
Remember when Colorado Springs had to shut off street lights due to a budget crisis? Citizens voted down a small property tax increase to fund the restoration of several services, including street lights. Some of the citizens instead opted to donate money to “adopt a street light.” I remember a few years ago, reading an interview with a resident who participated in the volunteer program. He had voted no to the tax increase, but was willing to donate a higher sum than what the tax hike would’ve been in order to adopt one single street light. It would’ve have been less expensive and less time consuming to just pay a slightly higher. But he had principals, damnit!
Right wingers wring their hands over the US turning into a third world country. And they might be right about that. But it won’t be because of liberals, feminists, brown and black immigrants, and trans women using the women’s restroom. It’ll be their own doing. Other countries are willing to invest in their people and invest in their infrastructure. They’ll leave us behind if we don’t do the same.
@kupo
What word did I say?
@Policy of Madness
Are you accusing me of poisoning the well? I didn’t think my nose was that big.
That weirdness where newer replies push down older ones is happening again. This comment from Plaatsvervangende Schaamte
keeps going lower as new comments are posted.
@ WWTH
I can understand the mentality behind people wanting to choose themselves where their money is spent rather than leaving it to those in power to decide.
The danger with that of course is that you can end up with that Victorian idea of differentiating between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. Mind you, we still see that attitude today. Cutting welfare for ‘skivers’ and ‘malingerers’ drives a lot of UK politics. Even our Labour Party bottled out of challenging welfare cuts here as it was seen as an electoral risk. The fact we have television programmes with titles like “Benefits Street” and “Immigrants on benefits and proud” isn’t helping (Demonising the vulnerable is now mainstream entertainment ).
I’m a big believer in the principle that people are the best judges of how to live their own lives, but if you left it up to me and my friends to decide how much money to give and where it should be spent, the UK would probably have the worlds best equipped donkey sanctuaries but no running water, so this is at least one area where perhaps the Government should play a role.
(Goes off to write dystopian novel where donkeys take over after humans nearly wiped out in cholera epidemic)
@Alan Robertshaw
“Donkeys” is a funny way to spell “leftists”.
She’s obviously raised them better than your own guardians did you.
Alan,
In the case of Colorado Springs, the tax referendum was specifically to be for restoring municipal services such as street lights. The citizens did want street lights, they just wanted to go about paying for them in a less efficient and cost effective way.
@ WWTH
Ha, that is weird; but we’ve had similar things here. Although that’s usually with less critical stuff like village greens.
Of course, under the ‘pay for your own lamps’ regime presumably our warlord friends don’t chip in (it being for public rather than personal benefit) yet presumably they don’t close their eyes at night to avoid stealing the benefit of the light provided. Which ironically makes them bigger moochers than the hospital patients they complain about.
http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/3/35/Fluttershy_coy_smile_S4E16.png
Okay. I’m going to write this for you, specifically, Dustin. Take it how you will, but I am being sincere in what I write.
My gosh, where to begin? You’re sort of all over the map here, Dustin. Climate change, libertarianism, tax policy, health care. But none of that’s really important. That’s not why you’re here.
You’re here because you hurt. Maybe it’s not in the front of your mind right now; anger has a way of masking pain, but you do. I don’t know if you’re a ‘channer, or if you just happen to swim in a similar sea, but you’ve been bitten by the same bug as the *chan boards, Reddit, and similar spaces. You act in similar ways.
(Of course, it’s not that those places cause the problems, they’re deeper than that. Those boards and forums are just places for people who have been hurt similarly, and who react to the hurt in similar ways, congregate. 4chan, specifically, can be a great place for people to gather in anonymity, share their stories of pain, and get acceptance from a community that won’t judge them for the things that have happened to them.)
People generate self-esteem in a few ways. They can generate it internally, with great effort and practice. They can share it with others, sometimes mutually or sometimes freely. (That’s what i’m trying to do now.) They can beg or borrow it from others – guilt trips, sympathy plays, and passive aggression for example. Or they can take it from someone else, through bullying, condescension, arrogance, or other methods. Most people aim for the first method, but we all fall back on the last two from time to time for a hit of good feels.
Some of us have been something of an ego-tap for others over the years, from the latter two methods. Friends and family who don’t realize that their playful jabs are hurtful, sapping us of our happiness one bit at a time. Bullies of all shapes and sizes. This hardens a person, makes them put up protection against others, to help save what little reserves they have.
Now, with that said. You claimed the following:
You see others as ugly – no doubt you’ve seen a lot of the two negative sorts of ego exchange. It’s very easy to decide to “get revenge” on everyone by using their own dirty, soul-stealing tactics on them. This is the disease that 4chan and its family has, and it seems to have you, too.
You hate what was done to you – if you remember the events or whether they were a thousand slim cuts, subsumed over years of anger – you hate it, and it’s ugliness to you. And you’re right in that – it is ugly. Emotional predation by guilt or by aggression is an ugly fact of what we are. But it’s not the nature of humanity. Humans are ugly in part, and beautiful in part. We are complex beings. You are a complex being.
You can choose which ideal of humanity you want to strive for, Dustin. We’re all works-in-progress, and we all get to choose the sort of person that we will become. Will you choose the bitter and wind-swept plains of hate, or will you choose the alpine meadows above them? It’s a tough climb, but I guarantee you – once you start, you’ll find that there are others making the same journey and are willing to carry some of the burden. I bet you’d even find some here.
Safe travels, Dustin, wherever you end up going to. And I hope you choose your destination wisely.
hushed tones
(And now we witness the migration of the majectic Plaatsvervangende Schaamte Comment. Every year it begins its laborious journey southwards from the comment header down, down, down to the page footer, where it will eventually find a nesting-ground suitable to rear its young. Should chance be in its favour it will emerge from the long winter months, a brood of preening commentlets twittering beneath its mighty wings)
Ah, the old “American exceptionalism” trope. Amazing how the so-called “greatest country on earth” (according to jingoists, many of whom are also quick to invite anyone who disagrees with them to move elsewhere) can’t manage to incorporate into its social structure stuff that most other developed nations consider basic tenets of civilization.
Apparently none of those other, non-exceptional places have criminals, or illegal immigrants, or some other uniquely, specially American element that makes the US uniquely, specially vulnerable to collapsing under the slightest advance in communal welfare. Huh.
That doesn’t seem very exceptional to me.
Or maybe it’s just that a large portion of the non-criminal, non-immigrant demographic isn’t nearly as developed, or civilized, as it likes to think it is, and that’s what’s holding the US back from being an actual, instead of a self-styled, champion of human rights and freedoms for all.
*tugs collar*
I, er, sliding back into the shadows and re-lurking is proving difficult at the moment. I’m sorry, comment order mammoth, sibling of the blockquote mammoth, for whatever I did to anger you. I bring you this basket of bath beads, floral soaps, and scented candles. May it appease you and allow my comments to return to their rightful places, out of the prying eyes of random passersby.
Pandapool says:
Yeah, but going from the dogwhistles, the kids are black. So whatever the woman does to raise them, they could never be the equal of a naturally superior product of “human biodiversity” like him.
Yeah, in his mind, perhaps, but this is reality.
Let’s trot this guy out next time we get a “without government everyone will get along and not take advantage of each other” libertarian.
Can we nominate Scildfreja for Queen? Because I’m feeling that she deserves it.
So, um, what are these ‘natural skills’ of yours, Dustin?
@Dustin
You should probably look up what “dog whistle” means. No, calling out a racist for using racist dog whistles is not in itself racist.
We’ve been around for a while. We’ve heard right wing rhetoric before. You’re not the first one to use these exact dog whistles.
We know that when right wingers say “pants around their ankles”, they mean black kids. When right wingers say “music” in scare quotes, they mean hip hop music. Because it’s not “real music”. Because black people invented it. (/s)
We also know that when right wingers call someone a “thug”, they’re referring to a black man.
“Welfare queen” = black woman
“Baby mama” = black woman
“Baby daddy” = black man
You’re not being clever using this kind of coded language. We all know what it means, since racists are allowed on TV every day, and they all use the same dog whistles.