In the wake of the Portland train stabbings that left two men dead and one seriously wounded after they tried to stop a white supremacist from harassing several women, Paul Elam — still probably the best-known Men’s Rights Activist online — posted a tweet that spoke volumes — not about the incident itself, but about the utter moral bankruptcy of the Men’s Rights movement.
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/868917239143178240
When other Tweeters objected, Elam doubled down and began spewing insults — aimed not just at his critics but at the murdered men themselves.
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/869066210964631552
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/869068999577006080
In one tweet, he suggested that the victims themselves were the cause of the violence that left them dead.
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/869064408252772354
In his capacity as a leader of what is essentially a hate movement, Elam has said many terrible things over the years — from his post suggesting that women who go home with men without wanting to have sex with them are “damn near demanding” to be raped” to a short story offering an apologia for — indeed, a glorification of — domestic abuse. These tweets, I think, rank up there with his most reprehensible writings, for two main reasons.
First, as many observers have noted, it was not “chivalry” that killed these men. It was an angry and hateful man with a knife who was harassing women on a train.
Elam thinks it unfair that the tenets of chivalry call upon men to protect women — why should men have to serve as unpaid bodyguards for women, he has often asked? What he doesn’t like to talk about is that these volunteer bodyguards aren’t protecting women from bears — there aren’t a lot of those in my neighborhood — but in the overwhelming majority of cases from other men.
There are a lot of problematic things about “white knights,” as Elam insists upon calling them, but the plain fact is that the “good men” that Elam castigates as terminally stupid would be out of a job if there weren’t so many bad men around harassing and abusing women.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, Elam is essentially declaring war on the very thing that sets us apart from brute nature — our ability to feel empathy for others, including people unlike ourselves. A man standing up for a woman who’s being harassed may or may not be engaging in an act of chivalry but it is certainly an act of altruism and basic human solidarity. It’s driven by the same empathetic and altruistic impulse that led so many non-Muslims here in the US to rush to their nearest airports to protest Trump’s Muslim ban.
This sort of cross-cultural solidarity is pretty much the only thing that can save our country from the hatred and meanness that is Trumpism. We need more empathy, not less.
Elam would rather we raise our sons not to feel this sort of empathy towards women. That’s bad enough. But he’s not the only MRA with an empathy problem. And it isn’t confined to his feelings about women.
It’s not just that MRAs are indifferent towards, if not actively hostile, towards women; they lack empathy towards boys and men as well. Indeed, in one notorious post (archived here; I wrote about it here), Elam literally told the “troubled men” who have turned to A Voice For Men for help to ““go fucking bother someone else with your problems” if they weren’t donating money to his site, which is to say him, as he keeps the donations for himself.
Even though he seems to have taken in literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations over the years, he’s never bothered to even try to set up, say, a hotline for men. Instead, he’s set himself up as a sort of ersatz internet therapist for men — he has no actual training as a therapist — literally charging the “troubled men” he claims to be an advocate for $90 an hour to talk to him on Skype.
But he’s not the only MRA who combines a hatred for women with an utter lack of interest in doing anything altruistic for their fellow men.
In the first few years of second wave feminism in the late 60s and early 70s, feminist activists set up shelters and women’s centers and countless other entities designed to benefit women in desperate need of help. In the seven years I’ve been covering the Men;s Rights movement, MRAs haven’t even set up a single hotline, much less a functional men’s shelter. The only notable MRA, er, victory? Being so obnoxious they’ve convinced numerous media sites to shut down their formerly MRA-infested comments sections.
It’s no wonder MRAs feel such hostility towards real heroes. They’re only heroes in their own minds.
Accusations of “virtue signalling” are just another trick in the big right wing book of “They’re Just As Bad As Us (Or So We Want People To Think).”
It’s regular practice for these guys to try and make out that liberals are the enemy. Just look at ChessPiece above with his claim that the two victims started the fight, that they were the first to “get violent.” Those like him are serial liars and projectors. That’s why they cry “virtue signalling” when progressives are trying to have an actual serious conversation about a problem instead of just making noise about it for PR plus points like they do.
OT: “Donald Trump is a liar / water is wet.”
Trump ‘Knows Republicans Are Stupid,’ Jared Kushner Allegedly Said to Former Editor
http://www.newsweek.com/kushner-trump-republicans-stupid-617850
@Collateral Thought
It’s natural that MRAs would see humanity as a pack of feral ghouls.
An MRA has a limited imagination, and so cannot picture anyone different from himself.
But now that I think about it, I realize you’re being unfair to feral ghouls. Ordinarily, they deserve the bad rap they get, but they don’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as MRAs.
@ Kat:
I was thinking in terms of Fallout 4, based on SFHC’s comments. In that franchise, they’re mindlessly destructive cannibalistic monsters.
So, yeah, you’re right. My bad.
MRAs are far worse.
@Collateral Thought
Snort.
Man, feral ghouls are sympathetic. Their mental faculties have been damaged and they can no longer operate on their own. That’s a tragedy of circumstance! MRAs are just arseholes.
Also, re: accusations of liberal shovery… even if, and that’s a big even if, this guy had been shoved and hassled on this bus… when is a reasonable response to shoving “pull a knife and kill two people”? That is never a justifiable response to that scenario!
There is so much outstanding mockery and scorning of trolls on this thread (@Alan, I felt you were channelling Scjildfreja there! (in addition to being yourself, of course)). In the face of something as horrific as the Portland terrorism murders, metaphorically bug-squashing the trolls is one facet of a positive response. Anyone of any decency is mourning the heroes, supporting the victims, despising the murderer and the apologists.
@David
I wonder if the alt-lite and cons. will address this…hmm, most likely not.
Morning all
Y’all seen the ‘covfefe’ thing? Cos this is the funniest shit
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/31/politics/covfefe-trump-coverage/
@Lea – late coming back to the party as usual, but your line “Alan has you pegged” is making me giggle, especially in context.
Oh. I see.
No. I didn’t mean it that way at all.
I’ll try to choose my words more carefully.
It’s the next day and I’m still thinking,
“You stole my heart and my cat.”
😀
I’ve read the first two pages of this comment thread so far.
Could the troll actually be one of us, making fun of the actual creeps?
I would hate to think some people out there are really that stupid.
@ opposablethumbs
I wish! Scildfreja would have been a lot more forensic; she’d have known what was going on rather than having to ask. Thing is, I genuinely am curious about how kids like that get embroiled into all this. It was actually numerobis’s sister who came up with that ‘trajectory of radicalisation’ model. Turns out she’s an expert in radicalisation/deradicalisation, so she’s been enormously helpful in my little project.
@Sup:
Ironically, L.M. Montgomery did that, too. But she made up for it by actually telling enjoyable stories about girls and women (Anne of Green Gables, etc.), so there’s that.
(‘morning all!)
@Ivory Bill Woodpecker, keep reading. I think you’ll agree none of us would have gone that far, even in jest.
I knooow. Between Hancock’s lines when fighting them and Oswald’s quest…
I always feel so guilty about killing ferals (said the woman who invented raiderball). I don’t want to hurt them, I want to hug them! ;_; … And then they’d tear out my jugular and eat my face, because zombies, but still.
Enough is enough!
I have had it with these covfefe snakes on this covfefe plane!
@Pie:
Hence the “proto-” prefix. He was kind of a forerunner of the idea of redistribution of wealth (take from those who have too much, give to those with too little). I regard him strictly as a legendary rather than historical figure, though, since there’s no real evidence to support his existence. (Sort of like Jesus of Nazareth, come to that. Who was also kind of a proto-socialist.)
@David:
You don’t say! Why, it’s almost as if he was PLANNING to murder someone, and only needed to psych himself up for it and get good and bombed (and frothy with self-righteous rage) before actually doing so. That DOES put rather a different slant on things, doesn’t it?
(Well, not for me it doesn’t…I figured out that he had plenty of violent tendencies already, and knew there had to be an “almost” in there somewhere. But Trollman seems to be a little hard of reading comprehension, so I’m sure this is news to him…assuming he hasn’t skedaddled for one of the migtoe threads, where he’s on safer ground!)
Hello.
I do not know for Greeks and Norses, but ancient and “medieval” japan was not considering spears (and naginata) and bows as “feminine” weapons. Both sôjutsu and kyûjutsu were praised among the samurai caste and the nobles. Mind you, samurai were first mounted archers (the katana was present but not the primary weapon, at least at the beginning). Naginata too were not considered as a “feminine” weapon, but the fact is that it was in general the first weapon to be taught to noble girls and women to know how to fight with. This trend, combined to the fact that the boom of naginata may be due to (the real or fictional character of) Tomoe Gozen (who was said to figth well with the other weapons too, but was some kind of prodigy with a naginata) may be a reason that this weapon is seen as “feminine” from a western eye.
So, traditionnaly, maybe. But “because it was weapons for pussies”, not that much, except in assholes’ mind.
Have a nice day.
Dang, missed an epic troll fest last night, apparently. Hoo-boy, those posts from that, hehe, that “Nightmare” chap. They just reek of trying too hard.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this bubble of hatred–call it the “alt-right” or neo-Nazism or the Deplorables–needs a Spotlight-level investigation done on them. Every day that goes by that I have to hear about 4chan or Reddit or some meme-spouting nobody terrorizing vulnerable people just reinforces the notion I have that this is the primary cultural rot in the world today. More than just some little quirky internet subculture where there’s no inner censor, I want to see major publications run story after story on the daily lives of these people, if for no other reason than to remind them that they are just the most pathetic people in the world.
The handful of stories that we’ve got about the “Dark Enlightenment” and the genesis of 4chan have been outstanding, but it can’t just be places like The Baffler or the New Statesman running the occasional “ain’t these guys weird” snippet. I want to see a multi-part column-length series run for month’s worth of Sundays in the New York Times or the Washington Post so that the next time little Timmy McPepe blurts out “Remove Kebab” while he’s hanging out with his friends, Mama McPepe’s only response will be “Timothy Edgelord McPepe, you will go right to your room without any internet activity for a year!”
I want the little old lady who has never used the internet to know what a dank meme so that if she catches her 48-year-old jobless manchild son shitposting on 4chan from her kitchen, she’ll know that the next step is to kick his ass to the curb pronto. I don’t see this stopping unless we make this abhorrent behaviour culturally radioactive and soon, and it won’t be as long as they get to stay ensconced in their bubble, whispering comforting lies to each other about how it’s all just “lulz.”
Hope springs eternal.
If you haven’t watched Anne With and E, the Netflix adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, you should. It’s really good. It stays really true to the books while still managing to have a little more of a contemporary feel. The acting and casting is spot on too.
Aulma,
Of course not. They are too busy delfecting by announcing that he was an early Sanders supporter and was mentally ill rather than examine the beliefs that caused him to act this way. Because he’s white, you see.
I was talking to someone yesterday who chastized me for bringing up *his* religion, because I was “trying to demonize white Christians.” I had said nothing about religion at all.
I was like, “Dude. His name is LITERALLY Christian. His name is Jeremy CHRISTIAN!!
“Oh. I didn’t know that.”
So…what? You’re going to defend this guy without even knowing what the fuck his name is?!? Stop wasting my time.
His name is Christian? What’s his Christian name? *sigh*
Bingo. It’s pure projection. They know they’re acting in a bad faith, Machiavellian fashion, so the only way that they can justify their own actions to themselves is by pretending that their opponents are just as craven as they are. This plays out in every talking point they have about some SJW transgression. You’ll see this any time “Matt Taylor’s Shirt” or “Thunderf00t’s dad” are invoked: “You SJWs claim your not bullies, but you bullied Matt Taylor over his shirt, so that makes you bullies too! Therefore, any you say about reducing bullying is just virtue signalling! You don’t really believe it!”
The thing that really irks me about the phrase “virtue signalling” is that it started out as a decent phrase to describe that insufferable asshole whose every action is inconsistent with progressive values, but says he voted for Obama once, so he’s one of the good guys. That’s what virtue signalling was initially meant as according to its conservative coiner (going by Hbomberguy’s rundown). Now apparently anybody who demands better of another is a virtue signaller, the subtext being that nobody lives up to their values so anybody who demands better of others is obviously a hypocrite.