This was the big weekend, folks! The weekend of the historic International Male Issues Conference in London!
Wait, that’s not right. International Male is the clothing company with that famous catalog. I meant the International London Men Conference. No, that’s not it either. Oh, wait! The International Conference on Men’s Issues in London. I’m pretty sure that’s it. Catch the excitement on the conference’s official Twitter hashtag!
Now, it’s true that the event this weekend did not draw a ton of media coverage.
Or any, actually: As of Sunday afternoon, a Google News search reveals that the only media outlet, and I use that term loosely, to report on the conference was Breitbart. Last fall. (The conference got a brief mention in the Jewish Chronicle online, and someone mentioned it in a comment on The Guardian’s website.) Indeed, media interest in the event was evidently so tepid that the organizers cancelled their press conference at the last minute.
The lack of media interest might have something to do with the fact that the conference organizers — led by political failure Mike Buchanan of the Justice for Men and Boys party — refused to give out press passes to the event, instead demanding that reporters shell out £265 for the privilege of hearing a bunch of idiots talk nonsense about the supposed oppression of men.
Not even the prospect of getting autographs from “Janet Bloomfield” and/or Paul Elam was enough to lure the media there.
But one wily media outlet was able to sneak a photographer into the event — We Hunted the Mammoth, the very blog you are now reading.
And so I present to you these EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS of ICMI16 from our man in London. Who might possibly be a cat.
Wait, is that Tiger Woods? Sitting next to Rod Stewart? With Ozzy Osbourne, Madonna, and Sean Connery behind them? Except that none of them look quite right?
Sorry, folks, I think this is just some picture of a bunch of celebrity impersonators.
Wait, is that Austin Pow…
Never mind, it’s more celebrity impersonators. Besides, I can’t imagine that this many people made it to the ICMI.
All right, that’s just a bunch of dudes dressed as Abraham Lincoln.
And that’s a bunch of people dressed as Albert Einstein. What the hell.
THESE AREN’T EVEN PEOPLE!!11!
I’m beginning to think that our photographer didn’t actually go to the ICMI at all.
Luckily, one Youtube doofus who did attend the conference posted this footage of some of the conference goers milling around awkwardly outside of the venue.
https://twitter.com/6ame/status/751795513549328384
Ah well. At least that’s more than the zero who attended their conference last year.
Funny how Mark hasn’t responded to the actual studies about marriage benefiting men. He just ignored them and disappeared.
In other words: studies have been posted here that disprove everything Mark said about marriage. He then went offline.
I hope that he is busy growing a spine somewhere…
@ brony
Congratulations on the new job; that sounds perfect for you. I hope all goes well.
I also really enjoyed your blog piece. It’s interesting what you say about the use of disagreement as a form of conflict rather than for examining a topic. That tallies with my experience that we tend to make a conscious effort to support arguments from people we like and are less likely to raise challenges whereas we might if it was a stranger.
Congratulations, Brony! That job sounds like a good fit for you.
@Alan Robertshaw
Thank you!
I try to take a view of social conflict that reduces it to a minimal picture that matches what I’ve read of psychology and brain science. I think that some parts of social interaction are inherently conflicts and there are social structures that attempt to minimize this. I’m sure there are people that don’t experience disagreement as conflict and I’m also interested in how that would work. I try to be honest about my biased perspective so I can take it into account.
At it’s base a disagreement is a contrast between views of reality. They are inherently incompatible in some manner. Acting on incompatible views of reality produce incompatible beliefs, manner of thought, actions and communications. While there are social messages having to do with “live and let live”, at some point the downstream beliefs and actions of the incompatible views get in the way of one another and depending on the importance of the subject of contrasting views the “sides” will act with different urgency.
That urgency is subject to the effects of emotional intensity on psychology resulting in in-group psychology altering how we interact with the views on each “side”, increased efforts to “win” with rhetoric and strategy relative to attempts to be correct about reality and many other things. A whole collection of spectrums related to variables that I’m hoping to outline.
@ Victorious Parasol
Thank you!
Now off to work.
@Brony
Congrats on the job! Also, love the Wiseau image. 🙂
@ brony
Oh I could go on about this for days!
I certainly don’t see disagreement as necessarily being conflict. It’s a part of my world view that there are some things we can’t be certain of but also that different opinions can all be valid. There’s no one right answer as it were.
This also crops up a lot in my professional life. In the legal profession it’s a fundamental axiom that there can be a wide range of opinions, decisions, judgements etc. that can all be equally valid and correct, even if they are contradictory.
This becomes very relevant when decisions are appealed. An appellate court won’t interfere with a decision, even if they would have come to a different decision, unless the original decision is so fundamentally flawed that no reasonable person (or tribunal) could have come to that conclusion.
We call that concept “Wednesbury Unreasonableness” (you may find it interesting to read up on that)
I apply that principle in my everyday life; otherwise I’d only have friends who agreed on everything; which would be pretty boring.
I too am late to this party!
But on the off chance that Mark can/does show his chops around here again I’d like to ask him to please explain how I, a feminist ladything, managed to divorce my first husband zero fault and actually refuse alimony.
And as a bonus question I’d like him to explain how I’ve been with my existing manthing for 14 years since then in an exclusive relationship in which I am actually the breadwinner and for the last 2 years support us both on my own (including paying the mortgage!) as he goes back to school?
I look forward to his explanation of this phenomena.
Why has this very obvious, very juvenile and incredibly stupid troll not been banned?
And why is Mark who calls himself a Man who Goes His Own Way, even here?
It never ceases to amaze me how Men Who Go Their Own Way, dont go their OWN WAY – but keep coming to tell people, usually women, again and again and again that they will.
Is it that you and your ‘friends’ are waiting for permission Mark?
Because if so, you certainly have mine.
Do you have a timeline or date on which you have agreed to actually go your own way?
It would be nice to know that you actually mean what you say, and after all, you would feel better in yourself if you behaved with a modicum of integrity .
Therefor you should stop seeking attention from women and certainly posting here and act on your ‘philosophy’.
If not, then you are an utter fraud, quite apart from being boorishly offensive and mind numbingly idiotic.
You know that thing where as long as the first and last letters of a word are correct, even if the rest of them are jumbled your brain reads the correct word? Every time Mark wrote WRA my brain thought it was WNBA and I got confused about why he was upset about women’s basketball.
@chessewitt
He probably is upset about women’s basketball. I mean with it being women invading a men’s only space like pro sports and all
@ Oogly
Yup, used to take that! It’s my favourite one, side effects are less bad than many others and it has benefits beyond helping with depression. It will make it much easier for you to learn a new habit during the first months when you first start taking it. If you have the energy to try something like that, and have a habit that needs changing, this might be a good opportunity.
@ EJ
Thank you! It’s amazing, I feel like I came back from the dead.
Aqua,
He was banned. He’s socking now.
I’m personally I’m favor of feeding trolls until they burst though. Banning them right away just vindicates them. He’ll probably stick to the flounce though. Asking for him to back his claims up and us being more bored than upset seems to have sent him scampering.
I tend to prefer the “what troll?” approach. I remember an RPGnet thread that got an anti-Semitic troll getting thoroughly derailed by people ignoring said troll and eventually turning the thread into a discussion of Jewish food and exchanging recipes. Not only successful, but delicious!
That’s kind of like the talking about girly things like bras and makeup that works with sad boner trolls.
This gif of two WNBA players has been circulating on my tumblr dash and I love it to pieces, even though I don’t follow basketball. : 3
Though, I have been following the U.S. Women’s Soccer team’s fight to get equal pay as the men’s soccer team.
TL;DR: The men’s soccer team is getting paid more to lose than the women’s soccer team did to fucking win the world cup. And the women’s soccer team pulled better ratings too.
@ weirwoodtreehugger
I know that argument well, but am not entirely convinced. Allow it and it grows.
Mould, viruses, ignorance.
We have just fucked ourselves over in the UK by letting our media platform bigoted lies – and the result has emboldened the kind of conspiracy theory knee jerk bigotry that this creature encapsulates.
I for one have had it up to here with the current worship of stupid.
Probably the restrictions on photography mean that a few of the people attending are sex offenders.
@ weirwoodtreehugger
And as an earlier post pointed out, he is in someones ‘house’ with house rules, but most of all as I ranted earlier he is a MGTOW – so on he goes- good feckin riddance 😉
@Paradoxy
I’ve taken to pulling out the soccer example every time some wage-gap-denying pubic hair starts comparing female part-time worker apples to male CEO oranges.
Of course, that just changes their rants to one about GIRLS CAN’T SPORTS, but it’s still a step up.
What Mark sounds like:
http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/if-black-lives-matter-isnt-racist-hate-group-then–4610
That reminds me of that troll we had a while back who was whinging that women wanted to be CEOs, but they weren’t helping build the buildings, so they obviously were incompetent and didn’t deserve the position of Chief Executive Officer because they weren’t operating cranes to lift I-Beams like THE MENS.
Now that women can be drafted in the US shouldn’t these dudes be thrilled?
That’s because their reverse Lysistrata act won’t work if nobody notices it.
Granted, it wouldn’t work anyway, because barely any men do it, which is the reason why nobody notices it.
Plus many of them are, deep down, desperate for attention from women. Which they wouldn’t get if they get if they genuinely went their own way instead of trying to do a pointless, passive-aggressive rebellion. I say “pointless” because, even if they could somehow convince enough men to join their cause, the message of “all women should be whatever pleases my boner or they get no sex” only makes sense if women were psychic. And either had pro actor skills or could change personalities at will. Because different men have different ideas what “pleases their boner” because they’re not a monolith any more than women are.
That, or their message is so muddled that “please my boner or no sex” is the best that anyone outside the manosphere can make of it, which wouldn’t help their cause either.
No. They want men to be oppressed in certain minor ways which women aren’t, so they can pretend that using it as a cudgel to demand more privileges could actually work. They hate it when you take their imaginary cudgels away.