This lovely meme, found in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, pretty unreadable even at full resolution. But it’s not too hard to see what point the meme-maker was trying to get across.
Naturally, Reddit’s MGTOWs have many thoughts on this subject.
Like these:
And these:
Wait, am I reading this correctly? Has the legendary Chad Thundercock been replaced by his brother Chuck?
I feel kinda bad for the models who posed for the stock photos MGTOWs love to appropriate for their memes. No one wants to discover one day that they’ve become the focus of a MGTOW two-minute hate.
@Alan
http://ir.energytransfer.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=106094&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2227348
Good point, Alan!
Hence this tactic on the part of the water protectors:
Standing Rock activists stay in place, fearing pipeline victory was a ‘trick’
Though the US denied a permit for the Dakota Access pipeline, many worry that the Trump administration and the pipeline company could reverse the decision
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/05/dakota-access-pipeline-standing-rock-protest-trump
***************
@Neremanth
Yes! And so long overdue.
Although I’m not holding my breath, I still can’t wait for my government to make the same kind of apology — and set itself on a sustainable path.
****************
@Elizabeth Regina
I’m so sorry about your loss.
And your late partner’s statement is a beautiful combination of logic and empathy.
@NicolaLuna, maybe your son should start baking evil cakes. Like cakes that explode. Or contain some noxious substance, like zucchini.
@ Elisabeth Regina
He sounds like a sensible and wonderful guy. You were lucky to have him while you did, and I am truly sorry you lost him.
As for the OP, it never ceases to amaze me, how utterly pathetic these men are. Though the thought of actually talking to one IRL is more than a little horrifying, I confess to a sort of morbid curiousity. I would love to hear an answer to the question: “What, exactly, is it that you want? What would make you happy? Describe it to me. Because I can’t tell by reading your rhetoric. You complain so constantly, so inconsistently, and with such toxic bitterness that I don’t have any idea what would make you happy. Do you? “
@Otrame
If I can judge by my father and one of my brothers, both deceased now (who were MRAs in the before-time — even before the Interwebz was a thing), your questions would be met with silence and a smirk.
Like the rest of the extreme right, they got nothin’.
Except hatred.
And an inability to understand how to handle their own emotions.
I think they cannot be happy, as they demand the impossible on a par with square circles and colourless green – the service and devotion of mythical creatures who by definition cannot exist in reality, since it is not actually possible for human beings to have absolutely zero thoughts or desires of their own (not to mention that devotion requires sentience, and sentience in women causes them problems).
(They would not be happy with bots, as they demand to triumph over and subjugate real humans in order to give themselves a sense of self-worth, but they would not be happy with even the most lobotomised of humans either as what they actually want is a fantasy of continual triumph over and subjugation of fresh or infinitely re-freshed subjects. And now I feel rather sick).
How dare you, sir. You have impugned the honor of my mom’s (delicious) zucchini bread.
@LindsayIrene
I express a similar sentiment, albeit for my grandmother’s take as opposed to my mother’s.
@Elizabeth Regina, I just read your comment. He sounds like he was wonderful. You sound like you are, too. I hope that his guess was wright, and you’re doing well!
@opposablethumbs, you’ve got me wondering with your comment about the connection between misogyny and various other reactionary mindsets. It has always felt to me that misogyny was one head of the hydra – there’s a deeper and more fundamental hate or resentment at the seat of it, and the various prejudices we all know just take turns on the throne. Sexism (as far as I know) has no direct biological root, unlike racism, but there are heuristics that are similar which must influence.
My first thought it is “authoritarianism,” the belief that people should organize and be faithful to a leader. It’s part of our social thought processes to evaluate people for “qualities of a leader”, whatever those are, and then to act in some way relative to the leaderbot. That’s not a right-or-left thing, either – if anything, it appears that the left has a stronger urge towards authoritarianism than the right. I imagine that “leader” could also be a concept.
Is that what’s firing here? Is the misogyny all nothing more than “you don’t look like a leader-type, so shut up and sit down”? Or is something else going on there? Interesting stuff.
Thanks for the kind comments.
He was a great man and father, such a good emotional support, even when things were very tough for him.
He also didn’t put up with bullshit or bigotry. I hope I’m doing okay by his standards – everyone else can go jump.
@Scildfreja, perhaps one common thread at least is insecurity: seeking a kind of security in strong/rigid/immutable hierarchies and in the notion that one has one’s rightful place in same, with some kind of leader-figure (politician/deity/etc.) to guide you and always always the reassurance that there are plenty of people permanently below you (there may or may not be people of the “wrong” and “inferior” colour and attributes around for you to hate on, but there are almost always women and children not far away no matter what the context).
Um …. ??????
ETA … which is in no way an excuse, of course. One can have insecurities, and one can have good reason to have insecurities, without thereby becoming a misogynistic (or racist or otherwise bigoted) PoS.
It’s generally against the terms of use for stock image actors to be humiliated.
@Scildfreja:
Of course, if you want an example of trying to make medicine as hard as possible, there’s the specialty field of bioinformatics. Too much information to sort by hand, too many squishy spots to handle with traditional computing (DNA matching has to account for the fact that some amino acids can be produced by as many as six different DNA sequences)… during the original Human Genome Project, they had to develop an entire new field for the tools required.
(I actually had a character in a story I wrote be a major in bioinformatics with a psychology background before that… before working as a counsellor on an AI project.)
We actually do work with a microfluidics lab that handles a lot of the same problems! We help them with the AI techniques needed to make sense of their ocean of data. Convolutional nets to the rescue \o/ That really is the rewarding thing of this job. You get to make some amount of sense out of the hopelessly senseless, and get to make everyone happy.
I like your story concept! It sounds, uh, very familiar.
@opposablethumbs, mmmmaybe. I don’t know, it’s hard to tell whether the feeling of insecurity is the cause or if it’s just a correlative excuse for the behaviour. Interesting idea though.
*chuckles* Well, that was just the character background for one of the primary characters. The short story itself was more about a project for ‘growing’ an AI by creating a VR world and raising the AIs as characters in it surrounded by motion-capture actors, and sometimes getting to play with other children via a video wall. And what happens when the sole success from the first phase of the project starts getting bored because everybody is now focusing on the SECOND phase of the project instead. (So, effectively, a human-raised AI now getting jealous of all the attention given to her little brother.)
Not particularly groundbreaking, but I had fun with it.
Certainly a metric fuck-tonne of excuses involved, probably completely obscuring anything else!
Maybe it’s just that bigotry-as-a-misdirected-desperation-for-certainty is the nearest thing to something I can personally sort of get my head round – i.e. it’s really just me trying vainly to rationalise something that makes no sense: that all too many people really do enjoy causing harm. Despite all evidence to the contrary, in a world where it’s only too common.
Imagination fail on my part, I suspect :-\
@Scildfreja
That’s certainly an…interesting claim. Perhaps you’d care to substantiate it?
@Dalillama,
Originally, this paper
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00568.x/full
suggested that conservatives were more positively correlated with authoritarianism, etc. Published back in 2012, and cited pretty widely. It was retracted and reversed earlier this year
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/11/liberals-not-conservatives-more-likely-possess-psy/
with the authors saying that they had reversed the results, and that it was liberal leanings that rated higher on that part of the scale (what they label “psychoticism”), with conservatives rating higher for other areas that were previously considered liberal (“Neuroticism” and a few other things. I’m not as familair with the psychological model they’re using).
I’d also like to point out that the study, while good, only hinted at the results, and didn’t show anything conclusively. As usual, the conclusions found in the study bear little resemblance to what’s spoken about in public discourse. Specifically, the study examined peoples’ political leanings as well as finding their standings on a questionnaire related to the Five-Factor model (One of the sources of the ‘dark triad’ concept).
A really interesting paper, and wow, that error. The paper’s been cited in over 100 follow up works, and I shudder to think of how far it’s propagated from there.
It appears that study is behind a paywall and I can’t read it but I’m wondering what the questions about political leanings and attitudes consist of?
On the surface it would seem that conservatives (in the USian sense) would be anti-authoritarian if you take them at their word. They say they like small government and individual liberty. They perceive themselves as meritocrats and as good people therefore they can’t be bigoted.
In reality, conservatives say they’re for liberty but support authoritarian policies. They are anti-choice. They are for militarized police using force. They like the drug war. They like stop and frisk and racial profiling. They like imperialism. They use meritocracy as a way to avoid addressing the way that marginalized people are disadvantaged in our society.
So, how do you measure authortarianism without relying on the disingenuous or delusional beliefs the right always seem to have about themselves.
Maybe the paper addresses this? Like I said, I can’t see it.
It’s of course entirely possible that I have biases preventing me from seeing how liberals could possibly be more authoritarian than conservatives but based on everyone I’ve ever known, I’ve got to say I’m incredulous. I do think both the left and right can do a cult of personality, but it when it comes to holding authoritarian views, the right definitely wins in my experience.
@weirwoodtreehugger:
Well, the highly religious portion of the Right considers themselves “meritocratic” in the sense that they believe in a just world fallacy on steroids because of god. Except most of them also seem to have a double standard where “bad things happen, therefore it’s deserved” doesn’t apply to themselves because of fundamental attribution error.
Many of them also believe in “freedom” in the sense of “freedom of my religion to persecute those not of my religion” plus the freedom of having a captive audience. I’m not sure if most of them also believe in freedom from the same being done to them, or if they’d be happy to be persecuted because of martyr complex.
Sorry! I know the paper’s behind a paywall :\ It’s NIH. At least, that’s the one I have access to. Here’s the assessment inventory they’re using for personality metrics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eysenck_Personality_Questionnaire
The inventory for assessing conservatism/liberalism is something called the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale, which hasn’t got a wikipedia article, unfortunately.
(I’m a little leery about that one myself, Wilson is apparently sort of an evolutionary psychologist with annoying tendencies towards explaining things away through the magic of evolution, but it’s one of the standards of the field so I’m in no position to cry foul.)
Anyways, here is the part of the paper that discusses the conclusions regarding authoritarianism. Remember, when it says “conservative”, they mean liberal, and when they say “liberal” they mean conservative, because of the error. (Also important to note that they distinguish between economic and social conservatism / liberalism here.
And here’s the part on how they collected their data:
There’s a lot more in there, and it’s a real mess of technical jargon, as one might expect. The terms are annoying and definitions are hard to come by. I’m no expert there, so it’s hard to extrapolate real-world meaning out of it, but there seems to be some tentative findings to be had there.
I was surprised by the outcome too! Still puzzling over what it means in a larger sense. I’ve been a lot more introspective about whether my actions are reflective of a pull towards authoritarianism as a result. Not sure what to make of it, really.
Forgot to include a more expanded definition of P:
In the above, they’re talking about their expectations of P: that they should correlate with conservatism. They originally had that expectation confirmed; that was the error. So now I don’t know what they’re thinking!
I’m pretty sure it means “This whole study’s about as reliable as a chain email from GuaranteedHomeopathyCuresForHIV.org.”
(I’m going to headbutt a wall if that’s a real site.)
@Scildfreja
Ha! But yeah, I don’t doubt the conclusions. Or the revised, unreversed conclusions rather. Interesting findings…