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By David Futrelle
Anyone who has ever tried to discuss almost anything with a Men’s Rights Activist knows how much they pretend to care about those killed in workplace accidents — more than 90% of whom are men.
So you might expect MRAs to be up in arms about Don Blankenship, the reactionary, racist Republican who’s the frontrunner in the West Virginia Senate primary, to be held tomorrow. Up until he entered this race, after all, Blankenship was best known as the coal industry exec whose grotesque disdain for worker safety got him convicted of conspiring to willfully violate mine safety and health standards after an explosion in a mine he ran killed 29 miners in 2010.
But MRAs aren’t saying a word. Pretty much literally. I searched the two most prominent MRA websites — the Men’s Rights subreddit, an active forum with more than 177,000 subscribers, and A Voice for Men, recent winner of a coveted “you’re a hate group”award from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The results? Blankenship — a man who has been in the news so much in recent days that he is literally being discussed on MSNBC right this instant as I type these words — has been mentioned all of three times in the history of the Men’s Rights subreddit, the most recent mention coming two years ago.
He has never been mentioned on AVFM at all.
You can recreate these searches yourself if you don’t believe me. Click here to search the Men’s Rights subreddit; click here for AVFM.
And it’s not because either site ignores the issue of workplace deaths; both the Men’s Rights subreddit and AVFM talk about it all the time.
But I suppose that is the point. While MRAs like to talk about the issue all the time, it’s usually as part of a laundry list of complaints intended to prove that men are the “disposable sex” — or that they deserve to earn more than women.
Meanwhile, they do absolutely nothing about it — launching precisely zero campaigns to actually make workplaces safer for anyone. Indeed, MRAs who voted for Donald Trump — and there are a lot of them — have actually made the problem worse by helping to elect a man who is doing his best to gut workplace safety protections, as I pointed out in a recent post. Trump’s assault on worker safety is likely to result in a lot more than 29 deaths.
While the chance of any individual man dying in a workplace accident are vanishingly small — in 2016, the most recent year for which we have complete data, American working men had only a 0.006 percent chance of getting killed on the job — workplace safety is a real issue that needs addressing.
One obvious way to take a stand against it would be to actively campaign against a Senatorial hopeful whose deliberate violations of mine safety standards contributed to an accident that killed 29 of the coal miners that MRAs claim to care about.
But MRAs have done and will do nothing, because they don’t really care about making the world a better place for men; they’re much more interested in ginning up excuses to yell about — and at — women.
The guy has a criminal conviction. It boggles the mind that he’s even on the ballot, let alone the front runner, expecting the friends and families of the men his violations killed to vote for him. It was the worst American mining accident since 1970, for Pete’s sake. That alone should be enough to turn voters against him.
I live in West Virginia. I’ll be voting in the primaries tomorrow. I have coal miners in my family. Fuck Don Blankenship. We haven’t forgotten Upper Big Branch.
@Talonknife
Best of luck to you.
Yeah, I did a little Google search to see if MRAs were talking about Blankenship a few weeks ago and got similar results back then. I’m glad you’re covering it. I really hope an MRA comments here and attempts to explain this away.
I’m sure no one is surprised. After all, there’s no obvious woman to blame here. So that kind of takes the fun out of things for them. Plus, Blankenship likes to brag about how he’s even more Trumpish than Trump himself. Which means he hates women, POC, immigrants, and LGBTQ people as much as MRAs do. We all know reactionaries will forgive anyone anything as long as they hate the right people.
Men dying on the job is never the fault of the men in charge, even if the bosses are ignoring reasonable safety precautions. It’s women’s fault. Darn us to heck for “making” men work. Isn’t that the sort of thing Elam and his followers say?
Good luck, Talonknife. I’m from a coal state, too. “Peabody” was a swear word in my family.
I truly do not think Blankenship will win the primary against two other GOP candidates.
I also don’t get the recent spate of felons that currently think it’s just ducky to run for state/federal offices.
It takes a special type of cojones to be that cocky.
Thank you Dave. Safety matters – if only MRAs cared more than hating on women.
Transmission from the land of tobacco and coal dust
Kentucky’s sure the state if you want your lungs to bust
Perhaps I’m a little detatched
But I doubt here I’m outmatched
Back in the day, death workin’ was a little more likely
Not to mention it made mountains quite unsightly
Hours and hours spent
Canaries could get bent
Someone far better than me sung about this years ago
Somethin’ about sixteen tons and souls to the company store
That said somethin’ about then
Seems we need it again
The conditions held then would make any of these wimps yip
And they’d never see a red cent–pay would doubtless be in scrip
Can’t spend that outside
Really takes a person for a ride
And so then the unions started and showed they gave a damn
With WWI leftovers the overlords didn’t bother with a telegram
Tried to blow up the strikes
You’re allowed to say ‘yikes’
So that should tell you something about workplace safety
The ones getting the money, well, they’re none to hasty
To move to fix the issue, little less in their pockets
I suppose they’d rather send rockets
Could go on ’bout protection or the unions savin’ asses
Or make it about the dreadful struggle of the classes
But just for now I’ll say that we were once in a far worse way
Do we really want that today?
Welp. Eric Schneiderman resigned.
I think toxic masculinity is complicit in a lot of work place death.
Because PPE is for wimps.
And the short cuts people take to make things ‘easier’ are hair raising…
A convicted felon running for office? I expect he’s at least not allowed to vote for himself.
The house across the yard is getting a new roof.
The roofers are supposed to wear safety harnesses and lines and hard hats.
They don’t wear any PPE…
Troubelle: lovely. I feel there should be a banjo and fiddle tune alongside it.
Yes; convicts running for office. And people who probably should have been convicted, too (Roy Moore… Trump…)
Even odder that their voter base seems to be partly the religious right. I suppose character and morals do not weigh so heavy when there are tax breaks for millionaires and relaxation of even minimal safety regulations – sorry, I mean “red tape” – on the other side of the scale.
Florence Reese from ~1970 doing her 1931 anthem of the Harlan County War
And Honey Dewdrops sing of depredations in coal country
@ bluecat
The “religious right” are not concerned about morals or character… they are concerned about creating a divine justification for their hatred and bigotry.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-miller-trump-jesus_us_5a5e3c51e4b0fcbc3a13f575
Ayup, as you made clear in your DOOMED interview, it’s all talking points, no action with these guys, and that was the tell for me. They’re not organizing union drives or trying to counsel men on identity issues under 21st-Century late stage capitalism, they’re just finding statistics and blaming womz for them.
Part of me wonders if this continual drift towards more and more extreme voices and personalities are a result of a search for action in the wake of being conned so many times. I’m a fairly shrewd man myself, but I have been scorched by bad buys in the past, usually a cheap product that failed right out of the box. But I shrug, tell myself not to do it again, move on with life.
But these guys… imagine being a teenager in 2012, cutting your teeth on 4chan and Reddit and discovering AVFM or ROK, soaking up the talking points and regurgitating them everywhere. But then GamerGate happens and finally, there’s something you know. You donate to The Sarkeesian Effect. You sign up for Carl Benjamin’s Patreon. You start shoveling money (whose?) into their pockets… and what do you have to show for it? A crap YouTube video and endless repetitive livestreams with the same dumb shibboleths over and over again.
It’s almost an inevitability that some of these guys will latch on to spree killers like Elliot Rodger. They’ve fallen into such epistemological capture that they can’t admit to themselves that they’ve devoted thousands of dollars and a half-dozen years of their lives to a scam. So they take the action that they’ve been primed to take, with tragic results.
This is why I’m most vehement in my distaste for the alt-lite “freeze peach” enablers more than a Richard Spencer or an Andrew Angelin. Because those guys are always going to be out there. 20 years ago, they were hiding out in northern Idaho and the only time we saw them was on TV shows like Jerry Springer or Phil Donahue. But the enablers… not only are they opening the door and amping up the threat of “the other”, but the only action item they’re offering their audience is to give them money. That leaves a lot of primed, scammed, angry people just looking for a more extreme voice, and they skate away from any semblence of consequence with a shit-ton of superchat and Patreon dollars. The profits are privatized and the costs are socialized.
At least Springer and Donahue had a sense of responsibility for their content, exploitative as it was. Whenever they hosted the local neo-Nazi, they said up-front “so you guys are scumbags… what’s your deal?”
@ lumipuna;
from Non-ProfitVote.org:
So, I dunno if he’s still on paper or not
Just got my voting in! Unfortunately, it’s only the primary, so I couldn’t vote against Blankenship, but I’ll be ready for him if he’s still around come the general election.
David wrote:
I’m not sure if those statistics make sense? My guess would be that chances are extremely low for most people but higher than that for people in very high risk jobs, right? Like if you’re a coal miner with a shit boss you have a higher risk than 0,006 percent.
Well, looks like he’s losing the primary.
OT, but I ran into this in the convenience store the other day:
http://i.imgur.com/82PtrcH.jpg
Anyway, here’s hoping David’s creepy filters work their magic.
C’mon. Give the man credit for the best ‘worst campaign ad ever made’. Its like watching a slow motion train wreck.
TW – some offensive racial labels and weapons grade stupidity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laO0JULtxSc
Blankenship lost, so fuck him.
I do not like these characters (Blankenship and Elam). Together they have about as much conscience as a rock, and maybe that’s not fair to rocks.
But an excellent ballad from Troubelle, thanks! I really like this verse:
ETA: @PeeVee the Third – good!
MRA’s are full of shit and don’t actually care about anything but their toxic agenda.