Missouri Senator Josh Hawley spent Halloween night trying his best to scare his fellow right-wingers with blood-curdling stories about the left and its diabolical program of destroying men just for fun or something.
As Hawley explained in a speech at the National Conservatism conference,
Home? I have no home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal! The jungle is my home. But I will show the world that I can be its master! I will perfect my own race of people. A race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Sorry, sorry, that wasn’t Hawley. That was Bela Lugosi as mad scientist Dr. Eric Vornoff in Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster.
Hawley’s also-quite-melodramatic speech went more like this:
I want to talk with you about the Left’s attempt to give us a world beyond men.
We meet at a time of reckoning. As we speak, the Left controls the commanding heights of American society. They have the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate. Their voices predominate in the news media, in Hollywood, arguably sports, and of course, at our universities. …
What I want you to notice, what I want to call out tonight, is this fact: that the deconstruction of America begins with and depends on the deconstruction of American men.
Ouch! That sounds quite painful.
You see, when the left talks about challenging “toxic masculinity” — meaning some men’s tendencies towards violence and bullying and never showing any emotion to the world beyond rage — they are actually trying to destroy every good thing about men.
The Left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic. They want to define the traditional masculine virtues—things like courage, and independence, and assertiveness—as a danger to society.
This is an effort the Left has been at for years now. And they have had alarming success. American men are working less, getting married in fewer numbers; they’re fathering fewer children. They are suffering more anxiety and depression. They are engaging in more substance abuse.
You know, it’s possible that men (and women, by the way) are having fewer children because they don’t want to raise kids in a world heading for ecological catastrophe and in which college tuition can cost more than a house. (A tiny one anyway.) Oh, and the world already has nearly 8 billion people on it.
I have a lot of anxiety and depression and trust me, none of it has anything to do with anything the left is doing.
Aside from not having kids or getting married young, what other terrible consequences has the left’s war on men had?
Brace yourself.
Video games. And porn, too, we can’t forget the porn.
Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography, and video games.
I mean, it’s not like men would be into porn or video games were it not for the left’s man-destroying campaign.
Another example of said dastardly plan? Gillette made some ads challenging toxic masculinity. Specifically, bullying , domestic violence and sexual harassment.
Nightmare.
Somewhere in the middle of his rambling diatribe, Hawley brings up former leftist icon …
Wait for it.
Herbert Marcuse, a lefty thinker that I don’t think anyone has thought much about since, oh, 1974. Hawley devotes more than a few minutes trying to blame Marcuse (who died in 1979) for the current culture wars.
Similarly weird is Hawley’s attempt vaccine mandates into a class issue.
[T]he Left is writing this same men-are-the-problem mantra into policy.
Working class men have been a particular target for this Administration. President Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate on private citizens puts millions of working class men squarely in the cross hairs. Shut up, get the jab, or get lost.
Eat shit, Hawley; it’s a public health issue. Vaccine refusers make it hard if not impossible to reach herd immunity and move on from this deadly pandemic.
Hawley ends his speech by declaring that “the crisis of American men is a crisis for the American republic.”
Wrong again. American democracy is in trouble not because leftists and feminists and the Gillette company are trying to fight off the deleterious effects of toxic masculinity. We’re having a crisis of democracy because the Republicans have basically declared war on democracy so they can have something like permanent minority rule in this country. And there’s nothing virtuous about that.
H/T — Alan Robertshaw
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Full Metal Ox
Should I read that to mean that you did most or all of the actual work?
No effing way!!! He was reading Hegel et al in the original 19th century German. Me? I could read this stuff aloud phonetically – I’d be lucky to get the meaning of any sentence even by chance. “Helping” brings to mind the unbelievable drudgery – esp to a fast reader like me – of turning his ghastly handwriting word by word into something near legible for the benefit of the poor typist, and then … checking the draft once it was typed. Erk! Spellchecking a language you can sing but not read is pure torture.
I now wish I’d known about the reading “backwards” trick. It’s especially important when checking your own writing, but it’s really simple. Just read the last sentence first. Then the previous, and so on. It means that you’re not forever having to pull yourself up from having speed read over a few sentences. Because you’re breaking up the original flow of words just by reading in the wrong order. Works a treat.
@ oncewasmagnificent
Years ago I got a manga version of Star Wars. That was printed ‘backwards’. But if you read it the Western way, it’s the story of a hotshot young pilot who fails to prevent the sudden construction of the Death Star and retires to his aunt and uncles’ moisture farm.
@ Talonknife
At this point I’m wary of electing those with experience too.
Well it looks like Californian Condors at least were enamoured by the SCUM manifesto.
The lady condors anyway.
https://academic.oup.com/jhered/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jhered/esab052/6412509
*sigh*
I need help with Facebook again from someone technically knowledgeable. I can’t get the messenger page or little chat boxes to work correctly, for the past 20+ minutes now. The obvious (reloading the page) didn’t work. In fact it made things worse. I was having some minor glitchiness, mostly it was getting “stuck loading” older messages for a subset of my contacts, so I’d see the last two or three messages and above that a persistent annoying spinning ring instead of even earlier messages. After a while of this I decided to reload the page — usually things like this are because their crummy page scripts eventually start getting gummed up for some reason and a reload fixes things — but in this case reloading made things way, WAY worse and messenger virtually unusable.
I state for the record that I disagree EMPHATICALLY with the judgment made against me, to wit that reloading the page was a catastrophic mistake. I should not be punished for reloading a page in an effort to clear out a few cobwebs and I maintain that my decision to do so was reasonable based on past experience and the information available to me at the time. Therefore it is wrong for me to be punished for that decision and I demand the retraction of the judgment that has, evidently, been made against me.
And I need to know how to undo the effects and immediately get it back to working the way it was earlier today. A link to click, a button to push. Must take no more than 5 minutes of my time and must not cost money, require (re)installing software, or require rebooting my computer (all of which would likely exceed 5 minutes anyway).
Also, I will need to know how to prevent this from happening again. And why the other people of this world are so impossible to please: according to them, and their mechanical proxies, I’m a worthless klutz who can never do anything right, a judgment with which I vehemently disagree. I am cautious and meticulous when I do things and careful to do everything exactly correctly. Yet I am constantly treated as if I am a bumbling fumbler anyway. Why?
I grow weary of being obstructed in carrying out everyday, ordinary tasks that I AM competent to do. Your (collective) opinion of me is wrong. I am not wrong. I have not done anything wrong. And on that basis I demand to be able to continue with my tasks without any further delay. I don’t care who thinks I stuffed something up or pushed a wrong button somewhere. You can take your opinion of me and shove it straight up your ass. Give me back control of my Facebook and get the hell out of my way, or else.
WHY AM I BEING TREATED THIS WAY??!!
It was a simple page reload! I don’t deserve this! Would you have done this to me if I’d reloaded for a different reason, say to install an update? I. Do not. Deserve. Punishment. Rescind this!
OK. What words must I put in whose ear to get this undone? What do you want from me? Why is my ability to communicate with half of my contacts being held hostage, and in exchange for what? You might get what you want if you’d stop ignoring me and actually tell me what you want from me. Probably not, but if you don’t tell me, then certainly not. We’ll just remain at loggerheads forever, you not getting the thing you want from me but refuse to articulate, and me not having access to messenger anymore. Is that really what you want? Or can we negotiate like actual human adults?
On the other hand … why on Earth should I negotiate with, and have to bargain something away to, someone who has unilaterally seized something from me without anything remotely resembling due process of law or any other legitimately constituted authority? You’re just a common thief, and I should be justified in using force to pry a restoration of my access out of your hands if it comes to that. Now how do I identify and locate the culprit? I doubt police would be of any help. Maybe for a stolen car or something, but a stolen Facebook feature access? How would one even begin to investigate such a thing? Where would one dust for fingerprints? I suppose they’d have to use specialists in hunting down malicious hackers or something.
Of course all of that would take way, way too much time, given I need my access restored to normal now, not after ages of slow-moving investigations and subsequent court proceedings.
@Surplus to Requirements
Serious question: Why do you believe the universe is tormenting you specifically?
Observational evidence.
It seems Mark Zuckerberg and I are having a minor disagreement over whether or not it was a wrongdoing for me to hit “reload” on one of his precious web pages.
The facts are, of course, solidly on my side, though it seems no one else is.
How does this get resolved, and resolved quickly?
I don’t think that answers my question. What have you done to it? What have you done to more local systems? Who are you in the grand scheme of things?
I’ve seen you present some of the supposed evidence of you being targeted, but it seemed to me to be flimsy at best.
What I’d like from Suck, oh I mean Zuck:
The evidence is: I hit “reload” on my Facebook tab, I’ve been more-or-less locked out of the messenger functionality ever since, therefore it must consider my reload to have been a severe wrongdoing warranting a severe punishment.
The problem is: there seems no way to appeal this decision. Nor was there any way to anticipate that it would respond so harshly to a mere page reload. Reloading usually fixes minor hiccups and certainly is not supposed to make them worse, which suggests that whoever’s sitting on the other side of the chessboard unilaterally rewrote the rulebook. Which is to say, he cheated. On that basis I appeal the sentence being pronounced against me.
Gonna say right away that I’m probably going to regret this.
The way you word things is very confusing to me sometimes, Surplus. Your decision to refresh the page does indeed seem eminently reasonable. The fact it made things worse really sucks, but phrasing it as a punishment or judgment is baffling. There is no conscious agent making decisions in response to your own, here–it’s just electronics and computer code. How in the world could Facebook judge or punish you? It is not a conscious entity, it’s a piece of software.
As you explained, your decision to refresh the page was extremely logical. The fact it didn’t work is not an indictment of you, your intelligence, or your abilities. I have very little technical expertise, but I’ve used enough software and hardware to know that sometimes they malfunction in unpredictable ways.
I don’t know; I feel like I’m saying things you already know, but I don’t know what else to say. Not all occurrences are the result of deliberate choices by conscious agents. I mean, you already know that, but the way you write contradicts that. Sorry, it’s just very confusing.
It was programmed by humans. And some human evidently slipped in a change to the code recently (overnight?) that said, “IF (human reloads page) THEN (lock them out of messenger, the bastard!)” … that’s a judgment.
Indeed there’s a rapidly growing trend of people being judged by algorithms, with all kinds of motives behind them from combating spam and other abuse (Facebook, Google) to maximizing exploitation (Amazon’s employee monitoring systems) and copyright enforcement (Google). These algorithms’ judgments often have significant consequences (e.g., loss of a monetized Youtube channel because of supposed copyright infringements) and rarely is there any decent mechanism of accountability. Youtube at least has an appeals process that apparently triggers a human review, but it’s been reported to be of limited effectiveness. Most of the other examples lack any apparent appeal process, including whatever got me today. Amazon’s algorithms have been known to fire people for having such human needs as the need to take 2 minutes out to go and pee. There are scary rumors of much worse being trialled in China.
This may end up being a major political/human rights issue later in the 21st century, if we don’t blow ourselves up or get roasted by climate change first.
And in the meantime how the everloving blue fuck do I get back into FB messenger?!?!?!
I’m not sure what I did but I got it working again. The proximate action was to create a whole new tab at the FB home page and close the old tab, but I’d tried that earlier without success, so that wasn’t the whole recipe. I still don’t know either:
Which is an indictment of Facebook and of Zuckerberg. If their products are going to malfunction in complex ways that require tricky, hard-to-guess multi-step actions by the end user to fix, then it behooves them to publish a goddamn instruction manual. The only thing they currently have that comes even close is their “help center”, which a) mostly just suggests reloading the page (yeah, that was a big help this time, when the first reload made things way worse) or that maybe the other person blocked you (doesn’t explain glitchy behavior affecting everyone at once, unless the whole world decides to mass-block you one day), and b) the time before this one that I was having difficulty using FB normally, I couldn’t access their “help center” at all.
Oh, and the original problem, with all but the most recent message or two getting “stuck loading” for a subset of my contacts, is still there. The problems triggered by the reload I originally did to try to fix that problem are gone.
Any suggestions?
@Surplus
I can’t tell if you’re joking or not, but, even as a humorous exaggeration, that seems quite unlikely. I mean, it’s not impossible, but aren’t there so many other potential causes? At the very least, even with my level of expertise, I know a coding mistake is a potential cause.
Ah, okay, gotcha. I’m just not used to thinking of algorithms in that way, but I can see how the word applies now that you’ve explained it further–thank you.
I really wish I could help with the Facebook thing, but I’m hardly a tech expert, so I’m pretty useless when it comes to this kinda thing. Sorry 🙁
This is probably a bad idea, but what the hell.
Today I opened a door and walked through, then started to back up and the doorknob hit me in the right cheek, because for some reason the door did not properly close. I attempted the obvious fix and tried slamming it shut, at which point because the doorknob had been deliberately designed to inconvenience me in particular, it didn’t latch and swung back open again, almost hitting me in the face. Further examination revealed due to shoddy workmenship, the latch is in fact so dirty it is stuck and will only actually latch if I hold the door in place and turn the knob, instead of latching automatically, like it should. I have wasted a whole minute and thirty seconds trying to fix a problem that could have prevented had anyone bothered to think about clearances for dirt and crud at the factory.
This is not the first time a common piece of technology has chosen to fail on me, yet everyone else seems to be unaffected. So who or what is specifically targeting me for this torment? Why are they doing this? What do they gain by coming into my place and putting dirt in my appliances?
Obviously this is a legal issue, as I, by purchasing this particular doorknob three years ago, entered a contract with the manufacturer to be issued a functioning doorknob, which this is clearly not.
My questions to you are: First, how do I get my doorknob to work as intended, or failing that, who do I contact to get it properly serviced? The manufacturer? The place that sold it to me? Lastly, how do I sue the manufacturer?
So, Surplus, does any of the above seem ridiculous to you? Because it certainly does to me.
What the heck is a ‘wobbly’? I’ve never heard of one before, and this is the second time in the last day I’ve seen the term. (First time was in a subtitle of a Black dude’s biography I saw in the library; possibly the same guy the OP is talking about above.)
Otherwise I keep thinking it’s a reference to the Weeble (?) toys from the 1970’s. Egg-shaped people who lived in a tree house (the tree was the house, not a house built in a tree). The tag line for the toy was something like ‘you can knock them around, but you can’t knock them down’.
(Memory is a weird beast, isn’t it?)
Don’t worry; you don’t have to burn a bakery down. Moggy is a type of Parkin we have here.
But the reason for posting, it’s bonfire night here tomorrow. I was chatting elsewhere about some of our traditions; including Moggy and Parkin Pigs. And as we have a few baking fans here I thought people might like if I shared some recipes.
Parkin Pigs
https://traditional-yorkshire-recipes.info/parkin-pigs/
They’re easier if you have the right cutter. They seem to be readily available online.
Moggy
https://grandmaabson.blogspot.com/2018/10/yorkshire-moggie-cake-knows-how-to-purr.html
So remember Guy Fawkes as the only man to ever enter Parliament with honest intentions; and enjoy!!!
@ redsilkphoenix
Oh great, now I have “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down” stuck in my head! 😀
ETA: Sod it! If I’ve got it I’m taking everyone down with me!