By David Futrelle
Men’s Rights activists really do seem intent on finding justifications for men to punch women. There’s the “jokey” slogan they like to use: “Equal Rights mean equal lefts.” There was Paul Elam’s “Bash a Violent Bitch Month,” in which he imagined men responding to physical abuse from women by “beat[ing] the living shit out of them. … I mean literally … grab[bing] them by the hair and smack[ing] their face against the wall.”
Now a Redditor calling herself Tozae222 seems to suggest that men should be allowed to hit their partners in response to verbal abuse that pushes them to their “breaking point.”
Apparently that’s what happened with a friend of hers who, as she explains in a post on the Men’s Rights subreddit, has “just been jailed because his ex has finally gotten what she wanted.” By which Tozae222 presumably means enough of a beatdown to leave visible bruises behind, because cops generally don’t arrest anyone for domestic violence if there aren’t physical markings on the victim. But in Tozae222’s mind she made him do it.
“If its never okay to physically abuse a woman, it should never be okay to push a man to breaking point,” Tozae222 writes.
If a woman has got the balls to be in a man’s face being verbally abusive, even physically they should be prepared to cop the same back.
You’re not entitled to respond to abuse with abuse of your own. And you’re definitely not entitled to escalate — to respond to a finger wagging in your face with a punch –which is presumably more or less what her jailed friend did.
NO one deserves to be screamed at in nose to nose distance. NO one deserves to be constantly threatened that they’re going to leave or going to take their kids away. NO one deserves to be belittled infront of family and friends.
Well, no. All that is clearly abusive behavior. But what it isn’t is an excuse to respond with a punch — even if, in your mind at least, you’ve been “pushed to the breaking point,” whatever that means.
And just who in this scenario gets to define what this “breaking point” is? Some men see any “backtalk” as such a threat to their fragile masculinity that they respond with physical violence. Should these men be able to tell the cops that “she pushed me to the breaking point” and thus wiggle out of any arrest for physical violence? Violence is never the answer, even if the woman in question has been shrieking like a banshee in her partner’s face. Even if someone on Reddit thinks the victim “has finally gotten what she wanted.” This is the case regardless of the genders of those involved.
Hell, even if the woman in question resorted to physical violence herself, the response must be proportionate. You can defend yourself; but you can’t give someone a concussion.
Naturally, this being the Men’s Rights subreddit, most of the regulars responded warmly to Tozae222’s argument, and her post got 100 upvotes. “You’re a really good person and I don’t get to say that often,” wrote one new fan of hers. “That really nice to hear,” wrote another.
Only one commenter had the temerity to suggest that escalating a verbal fight into physical violence was a bad idea.
Maybe there’s a good reason why some people call the Men’s Rights movement an abusers’ movement,
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@Naglfar
Fucking this. I feel like I’ve been shouting at people at the top of my lungs for the last five years, and just not being heard, often not even by other radicals. Staring death in the face like this day after day is exhausting as fuck.
@Alan
Which is grand if you’re someone who reasonably assumes that no assailant will want anything but your wallet. For those of us who are popular targets of hate crimes, that’s not necessarily an assumption we can afford to make.
@ dali
Indeed.
As the saying goes “You can’t reason someone out of a stance they didn’t reason themselves into” so de-escalation generally won’t work on someone determined to hurt you. And often such people use an initial acquisitive crime as the ‘interview’ to determine how you might react if/when they step up to assault.
@ Dali:
there are so many of us whom the predator wants our soul….
@Alan
Which is why I have named the telescopic baton in my purse ‘Reason”.
@ dali
One production manager we worked with carried around a baseball bat labelled “attitude adjuster”.
Spinal Tap is scarily real.
@Dalillama
I’m always slightly surprised at the number of jurisdictions that allow people to carry guns or unnecessarily large knives, but the carrying of batons is illegal. Texas, for example.
I guess the whole “if you outlaw X, only outlaws will have it” only applies to guns, and no criminal would carry a stick if it wasn’t allowed.
Wife calls hers Hugs. 🙂
A small PSA on asps though – Give it a flick once in a while if you don’t already – handbag lint can jam it. She found that out the awkward way.
(Yeah, they’re illegal here but so what. I’d rather find cash for bail than for a funeral.)
@Alan:
I’ll admit I’m not actually sure where the law stands on children’s rights either here in Canada or in the U.S. The U.S. does seem a whole lot mushier on that aspect (they still haven’t actually ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, whereas Canada rewrote significant parts of its Criminal Code to match almost twenty years ago) but one of the problems is that what the law says and what a judge actually does in his court don’t always match up.
In the Ezekial Stephan case I mentioned before, the second judge who dismissed the case (mostly it seems because of racist attitudes towards the Crown’s expert witness) got hit with an appeal where one of the grounds for the appeal was ‘Establishing a medical standard unknown to law’ which is a polite way of saying he completely ignored precedent to rule the way he wanted to. In this case he claimed the cause of death was ‘lack of oxygen to the brain’ rather than what the expert witness (and autopsy) said had caused the lack of oxygen to the brain.
It’s not actually a legal requirement to vaccinate children here or in the U.S. as far as I know… unless you want to send them to school. That’s part of why there’s a non-trivial overlap between the anti-vaxx movement and the homeschool movement, particularly in the U.S. where both are often seen as a ‘muh freedoms!’ thing. (Yes, there are other perfectly valid reasons to homeschool, but religious indoctrination seems to be the biggest one in the U.S.)
Of course, that hasn’t stopped certain non-state schools (the Waldorf schools being somewhat infamous) from deliberately turning a blind eye to the vaccination status of their students.
And yes, Wakefield screwed a lot of things up. He’s now a big hero in Texas, which of course is chock full of the ‘muh freedoms!’ sort of folk.
@Jenora Feuer
Indeed, this is where Andrew Schlafly and his bunch of cranks got their start with Conservapedia being intended for fundamentalist Christian homeschool teachers to use. He also was a homeschool teacher before that, despite AFAIK having no relevant credentials.
I follow a number of ex-Evangelical (or “Exvangelical”) people on Twitter and almost all of them have talked about being homeschooled and what a nightmare it was. Regular physical and emotional abuse, complete distortions of science and history (though this often happens in public schools as well), and more.
@Naglfar:
And it doesn’t help that people who want to homeschool for other reasons often find that most of the support groups and curricula they can find are geared towards people who actively want to push a specific religious viewpoint. The big homeschool lobbying groups and ‘umbrella’ groups are all evangelical-run.
And yes, I remember that about Schlafly. No, he had no relevant credentials; embarrassingly, I seem to recall his training was as an electrical engineer. (Embarrassingly because that’s technically my degree as well, even if I focused more on microelectronics and computer design.) Which, of course, made it all the more interesting when he started ranting about not believing in imaginary numbers at one point, as imaginary numbers are required for mathematical handling of AC circuits in electrical engineering…
@Jenora Feuer
I remember that incident. I’m rather curious how he ever passed any of the relevant courses for electrical engineering if he doesn’t believe in imaginary numbers. Unless he got it from some fundamentalist diploma mill or something. Anyway, I hope nobody ever hired him as an engineer, they’d be setting themself up for trouble.
RationalWiki has a whole article pointing out some other weird ideas he has on mathematics, like how he creates practice problems about the number of “conservative words” or his claims that a liberal conspiracy is making it look like Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem is elementary. Or the fallout of his “Critical Thinking in Math” course. Or his inability to divide 40 by 8.
Ditching the imaginary number representation and replacing it by another one is actually decently easy. I doubt he have the intellectual honesty to do it, and I am not sure he have the intellectual capacity to do it, but imaginary numbers are used here for convenience more than anything.
More probably, he use them and still rail against how they are unnatural. Conservatives are quite good at hypocrisy after all.
40/8 = 14. Prove me wrong.
(it’s a very private joke coming from one of my math teacher)
@Pie
The baton is legal here afaict. The large clasp knife (“Kindness”) less so, but as Threp says, better to worry about bail than funerary expenses.
@Threp
It’s got a nylon sheath that came with it, so that should help.
To be fair, the term “imaginary number” is itself misleading and seems to imply a concept that doesn’t exist and we just pretend it exists anyway, even though that’s no less the case with numbers or even concepts in general. The construct of complex numbers is just the construct of pairs of real numbers, with a way of multiplying and dividing them together to produce other pairs of real numbers.
@An Impish Pepper
Still, the way Schafly frames it as some sort of controversial or contested idea in math is inaccurate, as they’ve been accepted for centuries without issue. And, arguing that something doesn’t exist is different than saying the vocabulary used to describe it is confusing or odd.
@Nagfljar : the way he describe it *is* inaccurate, but imaginary numbers are somewhat controversial still, and have been accepted for centuries only because two centuries and change is technically still several centuries.
I do believe real numbers should be way more controversial than complex number, but for imaginary / complex number there is a good argument that they should not be called number as they describe planar, 2 dimensional notions and not linear, 1 dimensional notions like real numbers.
If you want to know why real numbers should be more controversial than complex numbers, it’s because the vast majority of real numbers are pathological in the sense they aren’t representable, aren’t solution of any equation that use rational number, and they outnumber rational numbers to an extent who is impossible to realize. The leap from rational to real is much worse than the one from real to complex in term of elegance, added complexity and added abstractness.
To me, all maths stuff might as well be this.
@Ohlmann
I would say we should still refer to complex numbers as numbers, because although they can be visualized in the complex plane, they don’t have to be. And they can produce products which are real when multiplied by the appropriate conjugate, so that’s another point for them just being numbers. They’re different than real numbers, but that doesn’t disqualify them as numbers.
Either way, this is more an issue of semantics than mathematical theory.
@Alan Robertshaw
The last digit of Graham’s number is a 7. Since 7 is the hardest integer below 10 to work with IMO (it’s the hardest to find divisibility for, harder to multiply or divide by, 1/7 is messy as a decimal, etc), I feel like this is the universe’s way of flipping us off.
Aye, that’ll keep it clear enough. She prefers not to use a sheathe – she’s more of a grab and go style person when it’s needed, and since her bag generates kipple at a truly alarming rate, the odd jam happens.
@Naglfar : sort of semantic, yes. It’s loosely linked to philosophical debates about constructivist mathematics vs non constructivist one, but even constructivism is rather passe nowaday.
The whole shebang about conservative maths is rather sad. There’s a tons of interesting things to say about the reality of mathematics and choice of abstractions and methods. And constructivist mathematics are in a lot of way an intelligent application of conservatism to mathematics ; but because conservatists have overall turned anti-intellectualists and love their gut feeling more than logics or data, they end up protesting for incredibly silly reasons even when the target of their ire is somewhat debatable.
Parralels exists with a lot of MRA logic to be honest. The redditors discussed in the current article *could* say intelligent things about emotional abuses, but it’s too much effort and it’s too likely to make his worldview collapse, so he don’t and refer to cliche and gut feelings ; and his post is much more destined to gather sympathy and approval than to explain a good course of action or discuss how abuse work.
@Ohlmann
This is part of what really annoys about MRAs. They occasionally stumble upon real issues (male victims of rape and abuse, male suicide rates, etc) but instead of addressing these things which need to be addressed, they use them as cudgels to attack women and feminists (and often other groups like racial minorities). And, by association, they taint these issues and make it harder to discuss them legitimately.
A note on mathematics: Real numbers have some very nice properties, such as forming a continuum (which means you can take limits) and being able to represent numbers like π and √2. As for complex numbers, they form an algebraically complete field — every polynomial has solutions in the complex numbers — and as for regarding them as “numbers” rather than some special sort of vectors, it is typical to regard members of a field (or even a ring, especially a division ring) as numbers since they can be used as scalars in contexts involving vectors.
Oh, and one more thing: complex numbers not only exist, but are extremely fundamental. As far as physicists have been able to determine, the basement level of reality consists of quantum wavefunctions whose values at every point are complex numbers. Everything from “classical” physics is what happens where those wavefunctions constructively interfere.
Consider all the paths between two points, however squiggly or weird. Put a wave along each of those paths and in most places the waves cancel out. But along the straight line segment between the two points they add up instead. The cause is that the path length has a minimum there, and things depending on it (like the positions of wave fronts in space) become stationary momentarily at a minimum. This means most of the amplitude in typical quantum wavefunctions is found very close to, and along, a minimum-length path through space-time, or more generally, a path that minimizes the “action”. Most of classical physics follows from the principle of least action applied to point-particles, plus the fundamental forces. All of it is essentially a corollary of some complex analysis involving path integrals, plus QM, plus the assumption that the system you’re looking at is large compared to the relevant wavelengths. That’s all classical physics is: the behavior of quantum systems at scales large compared to their wavelengths. And the math for all that doesn’t work unless the amplitudes are complex numbers!
I liked maths in t’olden days when it was just “One, two, three, loads”.
For most practical purposes that would seem to suffice.
Shepherds count sheep in base 20 though. One wonders how they stay awake whilst they’re doing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_Tan_Tethera
I can so relate to this.