By David Futrelle
In a move that surprised no one who has been paying attention, the Boy Scouts of America filed for bankruptcy yesterday in an attempt to protect itself financially from hundreds of sexual abuse lawsuits — and the specter of more lawsuits to come.
You might think the occasion might lead to somber reflections among Men’s Rights Activists about this all-American organization that purported to prepare young boys for responsible adulthood but that instead looked the other way for decades while sexual predators abused literally thousands of the boys the organization swore to protect.
But no. As they did when the Boy Scouts first hinted they would be filing for bankruptcy, back in 2018, the handful of Men’s Rights Redditors who were even interested in discussing the topic blamed the organization’s troubles on its relatively recent decision to allow girls into the organization. And the evil femininsts and so-called SJWs who pushed the group towards more inclusivity.
“This was the lefts goal all along,” complained someone called HoosierFordDad in one of the Men’s Rights subreddit’s discussions of the bankruptcy.
In another thread on the subject, MayonaiseHOBO offered a similar argument.
They took it over and killed it. Time to start selling cookies like little zombies
1) whine about inclusion 2) get included 3) start excluding people over semantics ( 4) bankrupt organization open since 1910 in less than 5 years. 5) find new organization to whine at.
Another commenter asked “[i]s 2020 the year of #GetWokeGoBroke?”
Meanwhile, a commeter called elebrin thought he had an answer to the Boy Scout’s current problems: more secrecy.
The boys had something good, they wanted to kill it so boys wouldn’t have something good anymore, and so they killed it.
The only way men are going to have anything of our own is to host it and cultivate it in secret and defend it ardently.
Yes, I’m sure that’ll prevent all future cases of abuse.
I found only one Men’s Rights Redditor willing to push back against the #GetWokeGoBroke narrative — and show some actual sympathy for the abused former scouts.
“Damn, you’d think an organization being held accountable would be a good thing,” wrote fendenkrell.
If they didn’t want to become bankrupt, they shouldn’t have allowed, or ignored and/or covered up for the sexual predators among them.
Ya think?
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@Diego Duarte
When I did the Scouts, we didn’t do anything quite like that, but there definitely was a fair bit of military fetishism going on. In addition to minor things like the uniform, there was an overwhelming air of nationalism (one of the chapters in the handbook was titled “America is Great” or something similar). And one of the trips (that I didn’t go on) was to a military base to sleep overnight on a battleship. Maybe for kids interested in that kind of stuff or interested in pursuing a career in the armed forces that was fine, but it just seemed needlessly militaristic.
One difference (as I understand it) between Boy Scouts of America and Scouts Canada is that chapters of the former were usually sponsored by local organizations which tended to be churches. I’ve heard numerous comments that the Boy Scouts in Utah was pretty much a Mormon youth group and your chances of getting very far if you weren’t Mormon were low to start with. Comparatively, Scouts Canada has generally been a more top-down organization enforcing nation-wide rules.
Scouts Canada hasn’t been entirely free from this sort of scandal, but they’ve generally handled it better because it was handled at the top rather than letting the local groups enforce their own rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scouts_Canada#Child_protection
Of course, as noted above about the Mormons and also true with other groups, the moment Boy Scouts of America tried to actually enforce nation-wide rules a lot of the more religious sponsors pulled out, many of them to set up their own parallel youth groups.
“The only way men are going to have anything of our own is to host it and cultivate it in secret and defend it ardently.”
That’s right, host and cultivate all your good stuff in secret, on Reddit. Then when it doesn’t work, blame cookie-vending zombies. Nobody told you that lurkers could read, no sir. Why weren’t you informed? It must be part of the plot. (Christ almighty.)
Great idea! That always works out so well!
Ot
My nsfw photos to my husband got sent to other people and I’m extremely upset.
@Jenora
Where I lived, it was hosted by a Catholic Church. Although the chapter didn’t do anything overtly religious while I was there (that I noticed), it was slightly uncomfortable to be the only Jewish scout in a Christian group.
@Lainy
I’m so sorry about your photos. I was able to track down some tips for dealing with the situation, hopefully these help.
See also, that (Roy) Moore pedo jackass in Alabama. The amount of support he got was positively frightening.
I was in Scouts for a hot minute. The nationalism was what turned me off. It wasn’t just “America”, but “white America” in my troop, and I was the Italian kid who got called Hispanic slurs. So here’s one boy who left because of the other boys. Conversely, my wife, who was the only Hispanic girl in her Girl Scout troop, loved Girl Scouts and made it to cadet. She made friends she still keeps in touch with today. She also didn’t remember any creepy leaders, or abuse allegations, so it totally makes sense that the newly-joined girls are BSA’s real problem… (eyeroll)
Reading through the comments, I am a bit shocked by the whole nationalistic part of the American Boy Scouts. I was in Austrian branch of the World Organization of the Scout Movement and those made a very rough time of my life so much better and I still have my fondest memories, traveling throughout Europe with backpacks and friends. We were mixed, had male and female leaders, some openly gay members and even though the chapter was strongly connected to the local catholic church, I as a religious minority at the time, was never treated poorly.
So… lucky me, I guess.
Though, if the kind of crap came up with my old group that is causing the bankruptcy now, I’d look at them with different eyes.
@TheKND
That could be a function of location, America has a lot more of a nationalist streak than a lot of other countries. I haven’t been to Austria so I don’t know about the situation there, but it could be a cultural difference.
@TheKND, Naglfar:
A lot of the streak in America isn’t just nationalism, it’s the whole ‘You can’t tell me what to do!’ attitude. It’s the people who do ‘rolling coal’ (deliberately de-tuning engines to make them belch out more exhaust to spite the environmentalists). It’s the people like Cliven Bundy who trample and overuse common land and then get pissy when asked to pay up for their usage. It’s the people in the NRA who are all for gun control when it’s the Black Panthers arming themselves, but against it when it might affect them. It’s the people who think that the sort of medical insurance system used (in some form) by every other industrialized country with better and cheaper results is ‘communism’ and thus must be horrible.
A non-trivial chunk of Americans, if told not to shoot themselves in the foot, would look you straight in the eye and shoot through their own hand instead.
They do this because they have been sold a bill of goods about ‘independence’ and ‘the American dream’ which is useful to the people in power to keep others distracted, and they have so swallowed it as part of their identity that any attempt at pointing out there is a problem gets a massive defensive reaction.
The BSA issue is built from the same. The ground-level ‘troops’ would get so pissy about any outside oversight that there pretty much wasn’t any, and the local bigotries that ran rampant in a great many communities were just amplified in places like the BSA where it was possible for a lot of mediocre (usually white) guys to gain some measure of power over others.
OT: Last night an incel asshole in Hanau (Hessia) shot first his mother, than 8 people in two different shisha bars, and then himself.
All victims aside from his mother had a migration background.
He was a fucking nazi and into qanon bullshit.
The press and all the politicians are bending over backwards to paint him as ‘mentally disturbed’.
As fucking usual.
Asshole is not a mental illness. Neither are hatred, misogynism, and racism.
@Jenora Feuer
That definitely is a part of it, and I think that’s a lot of what drives MRAs as well. Feminists start talking about holding men accountable or talk about rape, MRAs see that as someone telling them what to do. Therefore, they blame the people they perceive as telling them what to do for whatever ails them.
@Knitting Cat Lady
Mental illness is a convenient scapegoat for the far right because it deflects responsibility from them and allows them to do nothing. Anyone who blames far right terrorism on mental illness (and that does include some on the left, especially the “dirtbag left”) is a part of the problem.
And of course, if it was mental illness (and I know it isn’t) the smart thing to do would be improve the way mental health issues are handled and reduce the stigma about treatment. Instead, it all gets used to demonize all kinds of people and scapegoat us.
@TacticalProgressive
Fascinating inside scoop on the Cadets. I was a Cub myself; saw the Cadets around, but by the time I was that age, school and gaming kinda consumed my life.
@Jenora Feuer
One difference (as I understand it) between Boy Scouts of America and Scouts Canada is that chapters of the former were usually sponsored by local organizations which tended to be churches. I’ve heard numerous comments that the Boy Scouts in Utah was pretty much a Mormon youth group and your chances of getting very far if you weren’t Mormon were low to start with. Comparatively, Scouts Canada has generally been a more top-down organization enforcing nation-wide rules.
Which is interesting because I vividly remember the Cub Book containing all sorts of Baden-Powell-esque Anglicanism. Granted, it didn’t crop up much in our Cub troop. We mostly played dodgeball.
@TheKND, well I guess Austria remembers with concern a certain Austria-born man who went on to cause a lot of trouble through nationalism, so perhaps it’s careful not to let organisations like the Scouts act as incubators for such attitudes?
Google “Richard Turley Scouting”. He was my camp counselor in July 1977, 9 months after leaving Patton State Hospital (for kidnapping and molestation of a boy scout)and 2 years before he had molested enough boys for the scouts to chase him out of California, back to Canada where he continued to molest boy scouts for another 15 years. I didn’t know about any of this until about 5 years ago. I liked Rick. He was charismatic and took a real interest in me. I always wondered what happened to my old friend, and I nearly fainted when I found what I found in that Google search. It was literally happening around me, but luckily for me, not to me. Some odd memories started to make sense, like that trip to the abandoned showers, or little Chris crying in the woods… I will forever hold it against the BSA because they knew (and if you follow the links in the Google search you will see this), and will happily piss on their grave.
@ An Autistic Giraffe
I still remember back in the day when many people applauded the exclusion of gay men from the BSA on the grounds that it was crucial in protecting young boys from sexual abuse. Because, you know, all gay men are sexual predators and all sexual predators are gay men. Which was the prevailing wisdom at the time, thought by many to be established scientific fact.
Look up the case of Bernie Barran (also an episode on the Not Guilty podcast), it just breaks your heart to think of what that poor guy went through, how much of his life was stolen, and how many special needs children he could have helped–sounded like he had a gift for working with the particularly difficult and troubled ones,the ones everyone else gave up on. And the only reason he got out was because the bigots who put him in there weren’t satisfied with putting a gay man in prison, they got greedy and insurance lawyers uncovered the truth. Because nothing is a better motivator than money,a man’s life be damned.
But yeah, if we filter out all The Gayz and build a wall between them and all the children, only then will children be fully protected from rape.
@Moggie
Scoutmaster Kevin?
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/20/bloomberg-is-the-equal-evil/
Yikes!
Presidential preference order after reading that:
1. Sanders
2. Warren
3. Any other Democrat not named “Bloomberg”
4. Dumpster fire
5. Steaming dog turd
6. Toxic waste dump or any non-Trump Republican candidate
7. Bloomberg
8. Live, damaged, unstable nuclear warhead
9. Adolf Hitler’s zombie
10. Four more years of Trump
There’s a big gap though between the first two, a YOOOGE gap between 2 and 3, and the last four or five are pretty tightly clustered.
@Surplus
I don’t agree word-for-word with the article, but many of its points seem rather accurate on Bloomberg. I am at present simply trying to do what I can to keep him from getting the nomination. It doesn’t look like he will get it, but it is frightening how much he has shot up in the ranks.
My personal top choice is Warren, followed by Sanders, then the others. If it came down to Bloomberg vs. Trump I would vote for Bloomberg, if only because I think a Bloomberg presidency is less likely to get me personally killed.
Even were they likely equally bad, two reasons would still exist to vote for Bloomberg in the general.
1. To get rid of Trump. Trump has had his chance and proven unfit to retain office. Also, Trump would promptly land in the crosshairs of a lot of investigations and prosecutions and likely go to prison, a fate he richly deserves, rather than going unpunished.
2. Trump continuing to consolidate his power and firmly establish a network of yes-men loyalists and crony accomplices would be, at least in the short term, much more dangerous than a new wanna-be fascist dictator having to start that process from scratch, and with Trump appointees still loyal to the Cheeto Benito obstructing him at every turn. He’d have to uproot the loyalist-network Trump’s been cultivating, root and branch, and replace it with his own before becoming as dangerous as Trump is now. With luck the transition chaos would last long enough for something to happen to de/rerail things. A massive general strike, perhaps, or an economic collapse that makes all of this moot and gives the nation as a whole much bigger fish to fry. (Last time resulted in FDR and the New Deal.) Heck, I’d even take an actual miracle, as in divine intervention, at that point. 😛
@Surplus
The best hope for this would be for the states to start state-level proceedings against him. Some states where he has property, like New York and Illinois, would be very likely to do this. He might try to escape the country, so that is still a possibility.
The real issue remains, regardless of who the nominee is, that Trump could simply refuse to leave office or try to get election results ruled invalid. Millions would support him in this, so I’m not sure if there is any good way to resolve that situation should it arise. I just have a hard time seeing him and his supporters taking it well if he loses. Even if he is forced out and a Democrat takes office, his supporters could start riots or other terrorism. The nominee should be prepared for this and have a plan.
@Lainy
FWIW. You are absolutely right to be upset, but at the same time it’s the people sharing those images without your consent who are garbage. You’re you. Any shame is all theirs and it cannot touch you. Your body is yours and only yours, and no one can take it away from you. No matter what they might try.
I know you know all this already, but just wanted to reiterate it from an outside source.
I feel like it’s my fault for sending them in the first place.
@Lainy: did you accidentally send them to someone else, or did your husband? Or was your account hacked or something? I’m so sorry it happened, whatever it was. That sucks a lot.
@Lainy
Nope. Not to seem dismissive but none of this is your fault. End of story.