Earlier this week, the Mars corporation set off another culture war skirmish by launching a new, all-female package of M&Ms as a way of showing some sort of candy-related solidarity with the women of the world. “We’re celebrating women who are flipping the status quo, transforming the world around them to make it a more colorful and welcoming place for all,” the company declared.
They also released a picture of two of the lady M&Ms holding hands, which could only mean one thing: LESBIAN FEMINIST candy!
Naturally, the folks at Fox News were outraged.
As was this famous ALPHA MALE (who I’m half convinced is a parody).
But no one was quite so angered by the lesbian separatist M&Ms as the alpha males in the Antifeminist subreddit.
“Flipping the status quo?” asked Forcetobereckonedwit.
Oh, you mean like getting those empowered wimminz out on the power poles in winter, at night, when the storms knock out the juice to a whole neighborhood? Yah .. I didn’t think so.
“Ah yes, doing anything to push the agenda onto kids who’s beliefs are malleable,” wrote the appropriately named Giga_mad69. “Seriously fuck the people trying to indoctrinate this kind of stuff into the youth, I hope they rot.”
“I’d rather support women by not encouraging even more of them to become overweight or obese by eating candy. 73% are, last I read,” wrote OkraGarden.
Just for the record, 68% of American women are overweight or obese, as compared to 77% of men.
The maddest of the lot was a fellow called username2136
Oh you want to flip the status quo huh? I bet you wouldn’t be saying that if you suddenly have to:
Work full time on a back breaking job where you are constantly getting yelled at by your boss over stupid shit.
Come home to a husband who only had to take a couple hours of his day to clean the house with nothing stopping him from listening to music or his favorite podcasts and plays video games afterwards.
Said husband constantly bitches about you needing to do your “fair share” of the housework after you are already exhausted from work or any other stupid nitpick like your boss already does.
Said husband rubs further salt in the wound by saying that you are a worthless piece of shit or that you are nothing but a “woman-child” or just straight up beats you if you tell him to go fuck himself and his stupid demands. Doing so knowing you won’t fight back because he will tell the cops that you were the instigator and they will believe him without question because that is what they are trained to do under the Duluth Model.
Have fun with that!
Q: How many antifeminist Redditors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: THAT’S NOT FUNNY!
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@Trying
You mean the criminology grad student who stabbed four people? I haven’t seen anything about him being an incel.
@ trying
An ex-FBI agent has been suggesting a possible incel connection since before even the arrest. That’s based on the fact the victims were women and the absence of any other apparent motive.
I’m always wary of speculating before all the facts are known; but I can see why that possibility has been touted.
A friend has obtained as much of the material as seems available; and she’s doing a bit of a deep dive into all that. There are reports he was bullied at school for his weight; and was teased by the ‘popular’ girls. Although other reports say he was outgoing, gregarious, and not unpopular in later life.
Unless and until any of that is verified though I’ll keep an open mind.
FWIW my own hypothesis (and this is just idle pondering) is that he may have been intending the ‘perfect crime’. That is to say, he may consider himself very forensically aware, and want to prove he’s smarter than the authorities. He did put out that survey of people’s experiences in committing crimes; and how they did or didn’t get caught.
Maybe he got a vicarious thrill from that; but wanted to take it further? In any event it would provide a bit of a knowledge base.
ETA:
There is some gossip in the local community that there may be another motive; but that is pretty defamatory about a person. So unless and until there’s anything a bit more authoritative and reliable comes out about that; I’m filing it under ‘unsubstantiated rumours’
I have an acquaintance who is a criminal defense attorney practicing in the same courthouse that is housing the murder case’s proceedings.
Though there’s no guarantee he would say anything to me, there’s also been no hint from him this is incel-related, and he’s talked about the case enough in the internet chat spaces we share that I think he would have mentioned it.
He was actually in consideration for being appointed this guy’s counsel and sent out a relief message with a number of reasons why he was relieved spelled out quite specifically (he had been understandably reserved in his statements before that). I kinda think, “he’s an incel jerk” would have been among the reasons specified if he had knowledge (or strong evidence) that was the case.
Again, not at all definitive, but I’m leaning towards “not incel-related” right now.
There’s lots of good American chocolate. We simply don’t export it. All the fair trade, stone ground, single source you could ever want. So MAGAts have never eaten it, because it costs waymore, and thus the crappy chocolate will taste exactly like they want it to. No point in wasting the good stuff on them. Lindt is too fancy and expensive for them, much less other imports from furriners. Non-Americans don’t realize the legal distinctions between “chocolate” and “chocolatey”; the MAGAs prefer chocolatey because they don’t either. MAGA chocolatey bars could be full of corn syrup, no sugar, and all the artificial flavors science can manage.
[Yes, there is artificial chocolate flavor. No, it doesn’t taste anything like chocolate, European or American. A Brazilian list of ingredients, probably the same everywhere is: ethyl alcohol (solvent); ethyl vanilla (flavoring); xanthan gum (homogenizer); benzoic acid and diacetyl 2,3 – butadione (diluents); potassium benzoate and potassium sorbate (preservatives); monopotassium glutamate and magnesium diglutamate (flavorings); corn syrup (sweetener); citric acid and tartaric acid (food acids) and caramel IV (dye). Which might be cytotoxic.]
Cadbury Dairy Milk for a time couldn’t legally be sold in the US as “milk chocolate” because it doesn’t have enough cocoa butter in it. It was defined as some sort of “chocolatey treat”. US Cadbury adds more cocoa to come up to the definition. This inconvenient truth quite annoyed Brits of my acquaintance when they realized their sacred chocolatey bar wasn’t available because of not living up to US standards!
@Alan: Oddly, I find British chocolate, candy and fizzy drinks much too sweet for my taste. Came across one that had sugar, aspartame, and saccharin, at which point I yelled at the bottle “Pick a LANE!” Too much sugar in the ketchup too, and other things. Everything just seemed gaggingly overly sweet most of the time, and the food was bland unless it fell into some category of “ethnic”. Most of my friends agree. Doesn’t matter if it’s sugar, corn syrup, or artificial sweeteners — too sweet is too sweet.
Also, biting the ears off chocolate bunnies is the canonical way to eat them. Removing the sugar paste eyes is also an early step. Heck, you’re supposed to bite the heads off Peeps and maybe take the eyes first too, and they’re all sugar. So passeth Easter candies. Maybe you could switch to jelly beans or some other jellied candies to assuage your guilt over jelly babies.
@Jenora: Whereas a Torontonian friend of mine, on her trips into the US, always bought Chex cereal. Crispix and Shreddies are NOT the same. So she was the only one who, could make Chex Mix. If friends were visiting from farther south, they were requested to bring no gifts except what varieties of Chex they could fit in the luggage, preferably rice.
Cons always have people selling imported candy, which is how I used to get my Violet Crumble. And jelly babies. Which, even though I am a carnivore, always made me feel a bit off.
@ Alan Robertshaw
I avoid the problem of where to start by not getting chocolate bunnies at all – in other words I wimp out! That place in St Ives looks incredible, I’ll have to checck it out next time I’m down that way visiting family. Which probably won’t be until next year, I’m off to Scotland on Friday, tostay in a building designed by Charles Rennie Macintosh *happy sigh*
@ GSS ex-noob
Cadbury’s is pretty gross to my taste, as you say you have to pay to get decent chocolate Or come to that decent ketchup etc. as with choclate the smaller producers tend to produce far better sauces.
British food really shouldn’t be bland, although it all too often is, but a lot was traditionally eaten with strongly flavoured tracklements – hot mustard, horseradish sauce, pickled walnuts, all sorts of chutneys, mushroom ketchup, etc. etc. added to taste by each diner at the table.
I wonder if all these conservative hosts realize that they are giving free advertising to M&Ms. Indeed, there is one guy they like very much who is very good at getting media attention by saying outrageous things (hint: he used to be the President).
Oh, who am I kidding. They don’t care so long as people keep watching. Ultimately Fox gets viewers and Mars gets free advertising. Everybody wins!
Easter rabbit aside: the Bissinger’s chocolate company makes rabbit ears. Just rabbit ears.
Me, I go the Emo Philips route: gnaw the eyes out while yelling “Stop staring at me!”
@Nequam: When they introduced “Just Ears”, everyone I know wondered why no company had done that before.
@Alan Robertshaw:
FWIW my own hypothesis (and this is just idle pondering) is that he may have been intending the ‘perfect crime’. That is to say, he may consider himself very forensically aware, and want to prove he’s smarter than the authorities. He did put out that survey of people’s experiences in committing crimes; and how they did or didn’t get caught.
Maybe he got a vicarious thrill from that; but wanted to take it further? In any event it would provide a bit of a knowledge base.
That’s certainly a common villain motive, but does it happen in the real world? That someone would go so far as murder for the sheer abstract intellectual satisfaction?
@ FMO
Well I guess this is inherently difficult to monitor; as by definition successful attempts wouldn’t even make it into the data set.
But it certainly does happen. Perhaps the most notorious US example was Leopold and Loeb.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/leopold-and-loeb-gain-national-attention
I’m aware of a number of more recent examples. Mainly US ones as you can get to see the police interviews; and I find the questioning techniques interesting and useful to watch.
I’d say the perps fall into two broad categories.
People who’ve got all their information from detective shows. These tend to be lesser educated people who just haven’t thought things through. There though usually there’s a primary motive (get rid of a partner, financial gain) and they just think they can get away with it if they take a few simple steps to cover themselves.
Youngish college educated people who turn out not to be as smart as they thought. But often these crimes are otherwise motiveless. They may pick a victim they know, but often times it’s just random (which does help in making a crime harder to solve). But they all come across a bit “I am very smart”. You see this in the interviews. They still try to play games. That’s opposed to the first category who usually just unravel as soon as the evidence is put to them.
Generally though it’s Dunning-Kruger in action.
This isn’t art law per se, but the perp is a gallerist. So he’s been getting a lot of traction in the art scene. I’m not a huge fan of social media pile-ons*; but I think the pressure applied to artists not to deal with him was a justified move; and it seems most of them voluntarily condemned him anyway.
But apart from his actions here; I was especially nauseated by an interview he did where it was all faux apology and claiming he was the real victim. But at least now some official action is being taken by the authorities. Initially they just guarded him and his gallery.
(*except with animal abusers; quite happy to be a hypocrite over that)
@Alan: Local news here, so it was all over the place.
More toxic capitalist masculinity — he’s educated and owns a business, therefore HE is the victim.
I don’t know anyone who’s on his side. Even the people who are (administratively) terrible to the homeless don’t go hosing them down mid-winter.
He’s also not very bright — in a major high-tech (liberal) city with lots of foot traffic, why didn’t he think about the fact that everyone’s got a phone, and would notice this in broad daylight?
It’s now only a question of how much jail time he’s going to do. If they can find 12 local people who haven’t heard about it already.
Mars is now giving in to the Fox News crowd and is scrapping the female M&Ms. Unsurprisingly, girl power even of fictional candies is not actually a value a major corporation is sticking its neck out to support. They want the kudos, but not at the cost of sales.
They are switching to Maya Rudolph. Cue Tacker Carlsen complaining she supports illegal immigration or whatever. Or that she is fat. Mars is going to find out the haters will never be satisfied.
@Dave: That’s a shame, but not surprising. I bet only the male characters come back.
They will complain about Maya Rudolph’s father being Black, for sure.
I will console myself with eating the all-green M&Ms (mint), which have no spokes-character, but since they’re 3 shades of green, must be some sort of lesbian thruple orgy.
@Alan:
Have you ever read the book What Cops Know by Connie Fletcher? Basically it’s a bunch of anecdotes from ~125 cops on the Chicago Police Force about things they’ve seen and done on the job. It’s a bit dated now (it came out in 1992, I think), and it has some non-PC language and attitudes in it, but it gets recommended a lot as a way for writers to see how cops work in their own words.
Some other books she’s written on life in law enforcement:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Connie-Fletcher/author/B000APFJZG?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true
The real life CSI book sounds interesting, at least to me.
And since we’re on the subject of cops, a humor story:
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department
Be warned there may be a paywall on this one.
@ redsilkphoenix
Ooh thank you; I had not.
Obviously with my job I’ve got to chat to a lot of serving and ex Dibble. They do have some stories.
One of my law and bar school mates was a cop. He used to get extra cash by providing ideas to the TV series The Bill. His career came to an end when he went on a two year long undercover investigation. But he ‘went native’ as the bosses put it. Hs take was that he related that the people he was investing were nicer than the people he was working for. He’s got a book out about it.
The experience did really mess him up. But now he channels that into fiction novels.
I also used to go to a lot of forensic science things. Coroners have a particular sense of humour. I guess that’s how they cope. But at one very posh and academic event someone was presenting a seminar. It was all very sombre and serious. But one of the slides was a survey. Most of the questions were pertinent to the lecture. But the last two questions were:
Number of doctors who secretly think Shipman had the right idea: 43%
Number of doctors who openly think Shipman had the right idea: 17%
Shipman?
Harold Shipman, , a British doctor and serial killer from the late 20th century.
@Redsilkphoenix:
And since we’re on the subject of cops, a humor story:
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department
Be warned there may be a paywall on this one.
Here’s a loose plank in that paywall:
https://archive.ph/CLzba
@ redsilkphoenix & dali
Presumably with a libertarian police force, I could just outbid the complainant and pay the officer to let me go.
But as always Nigel Kneale was ahead of the game.
@Alan,
Glad you like it. Going strictly from memory (my copy is in storage right now) there’s all sorts of fascinating stories in it, like the singing search warrant that got used on a suspect that the cops didn’t like much. (“🎶 And because you’re such a louse / we’re even going to search your house!”).
There was also a good discussion on various aspects of abuse (sex and otherwise) too, and why it doesn’t get reported as often as it should. One officer comments that they didn’t think the rates of SA were actually going up at the time (late 1980’s) so much as that was just getting talked about more. Their proof: after the officer got done giving public talks on the subject they’d get approached afterwards by little old ladies who’d tell them ‘officer, what you were talking about tonight, that happened to me.’
Fascinating book, as I recall.
Another book you might be interested in is The Making of a Cop by Harvey Rachlin, who trailed four New York City police trainees and showed what they had to go through to become cops in the late 1980’s. It was another book that was recommended to writers as research for how cops think and things. Good book as I recall it, though I don’t know how well it stood the test of time. That one’s in storage too. :/
@Dave: I’m not convinced it’s not a setup for some kind of wacky Super Bowl ad.