By David Futrelle
Three, three indictments in one! Three former Trump campaign officials are in the hot seat today. Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is the big name on the list (along with his pal Rick Gates), for such fun things as conspiracy against the U.S. and money laundering. But even more intriguing is the GUILTY PLEA of relatively unknown Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, whom Mueller has presumably flipped, who seems to have been doing some active COLLUDING WITH THE RUSSIANS.
So here’s an open thread to discuss the news and any other indictment fun that transpires today.
NOTE: Sorry to have gone missing for so long. I’m still dealing with a combo of health issues that have made it very difficult to work. Thanks again for your patience and support.
@GrumoyOldSocialJusticeMan
I agree there are probably not many fathers who want to give their daughters to Roosh. But sadly the idea that fathers should control the sexuality of their daughters is very common.
There is this trope in movies where the father guards the virginity of his daughter from horny teenage boys. Or when a potential boyfriend needs to be approved by the girls dad.
Roosh just takes patriarchy to it’s extreme forms.
@Chiara, @Grumpy,
Not to mention the real-life example of those creepy virginity pledges from daughter to father. Emily Maguire has done some excellent writing on those, and the fetishisation of female virginity more broadly.
@wwth,
I just saw your woodpecker photo: what a gorgeous bird! A few nights ago a small owl perched on the balcony railing outside my son’s room and we were all gaga over it. Bird nerds for the win 😀
@ Jesalin (re: reading the Gor books)
You got your time back in the form of a learning experience….
The Universe sometimes has a funny way of turning a page….
I disagree. I believe this to be purely male entitlement. Just because Daryush Valizadeh’s misogyny is more pronounced than your “typical fratboy misogynist” doesn’t change the underlying cause of his behavior.
I also have to take issue with your assessment of what the “typical fratboy misogynist” would/would not accept. When the fraternity hangs a sign off the balcony reading “No means yes; yes means an*l”, that’s your “typical fratboy misogynist”….
Today I’m wondering whether Mueller’s turned up any dirt on Nigel Farage. I mean, he wouldn’t be a main target from a US investigation because he’s British, but if he found something he might just turn it over to the British police. And Farage does hang out with Cambridge Analytica, Bannon, Trump, Putin and Assange. And Brexit is so very helpful to Putin, so maybe…
I’ll be delighted if it happens. I think he needs to step on all the Legos, but nobody seems to be even investigating him this side of the pond.
Sheila, the Electoral Commission is investigating Arron Banks, the major UKIP and Brexit donor, over whether his donations broke campaign finance rules – and whether he was the true source of the money, or just acting as an agent for others legally ineligible. In the book The Bad Boys of Brexit, Banks talks about meeting Russians, including the ambassador, who took a keen interest in the Brexit campaign. He seems to be quite a shady character, and he’s close to Farage.
I don’t expect the EC investigation to amount to much (that’s not the British way), but you never know.
@Sheila Crosby, from your lips to Mueller’s ears! (well, from your typing fingers to his eyes, but youknowwhatimean)
I would fucking love to see that pos with all his hail-fellow-well-met faux bonhomie in the dock for what he has done, if only that were possible.
Banks is being looked at re channelling Russian funding to ukip, though, so maybe …
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/01/electoral-commission-to-investigate-arron-banks-brexit-donations-eu-referendum
Now here’s something that made me chuckle. A guy who runs the American arm of an Italian neo-Nazi party tried to resurrect telegony (the old myth that a woman’s previous sexual partners can affect her children’s genetics). As “evidence”, he cited an article from The Guardian. The only problem? The article was about fruit flies! That definitely seems like something David could parody.
@TreePerson
Hardly surprising; I would imagine there’s plenty of guys who see it as a license to abuse.
It’s rare for me to engage an alt-righter directly; my snarking is typically confined to a referring tweet or YouTube vid. Point definitely taken though; it’s easy to lose sight of how an angered d-bag will lash out at the most vulnerable.
But speaking of d-bags…
Why Milo keeps getting resurrected is a head-scratcher. Because to me he’s probably one of the easiest guys to counter tactically: his whole schtick is that he’s so “dangerous” that he’s worthy of protests, but he is in fact the most pedestrian and dull troll I’ve laid eyes on. He’s “dangerous” insofar that he’ll stochastically terrorize vulnerable groups, but as far as edge goes, guy’s about as edgy as a rusty lead pipe. You want to counter him, buy out the front row of his talk and bring pillows with you and then fall asleep snoring loudly. Performative as well as hitting him where it hurts.
Given that your typical fratboy misogynist is an MRA with a Reddit account and a Trump hat… Huh?
> Given that your typical fratboy misogynist is an MRA with a Reddit account and a Trump hat… Huh?
In my experience they tend to be too sociable to spend that much time online and many have never even heard of the MRM. Some even tend to identify as progressive.
> I disagree. I believe this to be purely male entitlement. Just because Daryush Valizadeh’s misogyny is more pronounced than your “typical fratboy misogynist” doesn’t change the underlying cause of his behavior.
Perhaps. Roosh however has far more than just male entitlement hounding him. It takes unbelievable levels of emotional distress to tout this kind of belief.
> I also have to take issue with your assessment of what the “typical fratboy misogynist” would/would not accept. When the fraternity hangs a sign off the balcony reading “No means yes; yes means an*l”, that’s your “typical fratboy misogynist”….
Have you ever heard any of them argue that we should impose a white European version of sharia on women?
@kupo
I already know feminism 101. I’m genderqueer. I teach it to cishetero people.
I’m simply skeptical that male entitlement is the only thing Roosh is experiencing. He seems profoundly insecure and vindictive, something your typical misogynist fratboy is not.
@croosters – seriously, forget about it.
Speculation on the mental issues of people are a no go area here, per the comments policy. While it’s a conversation that might be worth having – have my own ideas on the subject (which disagree with yours 😛 ) it’s not a conversation we can have here. OK?
@Gussie Jives:
I’m afraid I have some bad news for you:
http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/210283/Tales-of-Gor-Gorean-Roleplaying?term=gorean&test_epoch=0
Oh, so that‘s what they’re dancing around. Awesome.
*sighs*
@Croosters
http://i.imgur.com/M7DgVn7.gif
@Surplus to Requirements:
It wasn’t originally meant as a link. That said, just typing ‘Geek Social Fallacies’ into any search engine will come up with lots of references. See http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Five_Geek_Social_Fallacies for one.
Basically, the Geek Social Fallacies are:
– Ostracizers Are Evil
– Friends Accept Me As I Am
– Friendship Before All
– Friendship Is Transitive
– Friends Do Everything Together
Combined, they’re a recipe for groups who feel under attack from the outside to treat protecting their own against the outside as higher priority than protecting their own members from each other, which in turn leads to an environment that actively protects abusers as long as they’re ‘one of us’, and silences any internal criticism. Assault victims often end up having to give up most of their friends in order to get away from the one person that nobody else is willing to do anything about.
@SFHC
Yeah, here’s the post that started this conversation. https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2017/10/30/happy-indictment-day-open-thread/comment-page-3/#comment-1787005
Even if Roosh has a mental illness or is experiencing “emotional distress” or whatever, so what? It isn’t what caused the misogyny. He’s choosing to be a misogynist whether or not he has mental health issues.
Really, every time someone says something misogynistic, what they are saying is that women aren’t people. Not really real people like men are anyway. Roosh is just saying what on some level every man who makes a sexist remark or holds a sexist opinion is thinking. It’s comforting to think that the manospherians are just outliers who are “crazy” because the truth is scarier. That misogyny really is this pervasive and they are just a reflection of that.
Roosh didn’t even write the article in question. Some other asshole did. And, as has been pointed out, being an asshole isn’t a mental illness.
Further to what wwth said, I’m also finding it odd that Croosters keeps talking about misogyny as if its solely a “fratboy” phenomenon.
Over here, I can go months without meeting the antipodean equivalent, and yet racist relatives, gropy taxi drivers, sleazy churchmen, patronising self-made men – all deeply and proudly contemptuous of women – are an everyday occurrence.
And their kind are probably a bigger part of Roosh’s target audience than fratboys, current or former.
Brett Ratner joins Harvey Wankstain on the abusers pile.
There has been some MRA/MGTOW infiltration of fetlife groups for sub men+domme women (if they were going their own way… WHY are they bothering us!?) and it is ridiculous. Not as ridiculous as trying to convince us to help them turn sub or vanilla women dominant, but still…
They don’t seem to comprehend “no, if the women are sub, we trust them to know their own mind.” And “no, trying to push a vanilla woman into things she isn’t into is not what we do nor what we encourage.”
This is such a tough thing for people to accept, but it’s so important to understand it:
Perfectly normal people are entirely capable of behaving just like Roosh, and worse
Asking what sort of mental illness he has is – at best – a distraction from the misogyny and hate, like SFHC said. At its worst it protects the abuser while tarring innocent people with actual mental illnesses with the same brush.
All it takes to end up like Roosh is to believe that you’re right pretty much most of the time, and to believe that you deserve to be allowed to do something that you aren’t allowed to do. Most people believe the first one; the second one varies by person, but all these MRA assholes hold some sort of “ownership of women” there.
That’s all it takes. The rest, the brain will sorta naturally do on its own. The anger, the abusiveness, the aggression, the resilience to reality – all of that comes for free from a normal, healthy brain.
That’s the hard pill to swallow. We’re all capable of this sort of horrible evil, so we have to watch for it in ourselves and others. The communities these guys swim through encourages that sort of awful behaviour, though. So you have to watch your friends and families to make sure they don’t get pulled into that sort of a community, too.
Saying “They must have some sort of mental illness!” is easy and removes that anxiety and responsibility – it puts the onus on the vagaries of nature. And it’s wrong. It’s plain old normal humans doing human things, and being terrible about it. It’s not illness – it’s just badness.
The guy who wanted women to tell him how to get his wife to stop hating when he spanks her yet continues to do so because he thinks it makes her feel better emotionally despite her protestations got read to filth though. Warmed my cold black heart I tell ya…all the people coming in to tell him what a rotten jerk he is, about consent being paramount and more.