Category Archives: facepalm
MRA: It’s time for a Grandchildren Strike to show would-be grandmothers what’s what!
If you cut the baby supply off at the root, you can eliminate the grandmother problem entirely.
Among those who celebrate Christmas, the holiday is often (for better or worse) a time to celebrate family, and to bring usually distant family members together – parents and their adult children, grandparents and their grandchildren, and so on.
A proposal from the guy behind the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog would mean a bit of a change in this tradition: it would eliminate grandchildren from the equation utterly. Not just by excluding them from the holiday celebrations, but by eliminating them altogether – at least until his demands are met.
FeMRA TyphonBlue: What if the men who seem to run the world … AREN’T REALLY MEN?
Women ruling the world?
When confronted with the simple fact that men hold the overwhelming majority of positions of power in the world – in government, business, culture, and pretty much everything else – MRAs like to pretend that the actual gender of those in power makes no difference because, well, the men in power are probably a bunch of manginas doing the dirty work of the women who really run the world. Or something like that.
Indeed, some MRAs have even managed to convince themselves that the very basic historical and sociological fact that men in power, by and large, tend to represent men’s interests more than women’s interests is some sort of locical fallacy – something that they’ve labeled “The Frontman Fallacy.”
Now A Voice for Men contributor and YouTube videoblogger TyphonBlue has done these guys one better in terms of sheer antifeminist loopiness. In the comments on one of the Warren Farrell protest videos I recently wrote about, she argues that men in power don’t really push male interests because … they probably don’t even think of themselves as men.
Here she is, writing under her other nom-de-net Genderratic:
I don’t even know what to say to this. I mean, WHAT?!
PROTIP: You’re not going to convince anyone you’re a great ally of trans* people if you refer to them as “it.”
What Men’s Rights guru Warren Farrell actually said about the allegedly positive aspects of incest. (Note: it’s even more repugnant than that sounds.)
So there has been a great deal of controversy surrounding the recent talk that old school Men’s Rights guru Warren Farrell gave at the University of Toronto. Protesters troubled by Farrell’s repugnant views on incest and date rape, among other things, blocked the entrance to the building holding the talk; police broke up the blockade. You can find various videos of what went down on YouTube. I’m not going to try to sort out all the various claims and counterclaims about what happened.
I personally don’t approve of blocking people from giving talks, even if their ideas are repugnant. But I certainly do approve of holding people responsible for what they say, and Farrell – in addition to being wrong about nearly every aspect of relations between men and women – has said some truly awful things over the years.
Exhibit A: A notorious interview he gave Penthouse magazine in the 1970s in which he discussed a book he was researching about incest, tetatively titled The Last Taboo: The Three Faces of Incest.
Let me put a giant TRIGGER WARNING here for disturbing discussion of incest and child sexual abuse.
The Thinking Housewife: In the wake of Sandy, why are New Yorkers dressed so drably?
Now THESE gals are dressed for a hurricane.
The single strangest reaction I’ve seen thus far to the devastation of Sandy comes from Laura Wood, the genteel bigot and feminism-hater who blogs as The Thinking Housewife. After looking through a gallery of photos on the Daily Mail showing some of the damage in New York city, Wood suggested that the real problem is that New Yorkers aren’t wearing cheerful enough clothing:
THESE Daily Mail photos of New York City after the hurricane remind me of just how ugly the streets of Manhattan are, with almost everyone dressed in drab, uninteresting clothes that rival the uniforms of Maoist China for their homogeneity and lifelessness. America is one of the most aesthetically impoverished nations in history. I wonder how many thousands of people are on medication because they are depressed by their own clothes and their ugly, hostile environments, surrounded as they are by impersonal denim, sneakers with tire treads, plastic-covered down jackets, billboards with oppressive smiles, and the austere, chilling cliffs of modern skyscrapers. This is the environment of a people that idolizes equality and sameness. The only way to survive amid such poverty is to possess an interior castle, a place of tapestries and mahogany where denim and sweat jackets are nowhere to be seen.
Just make sure this castle of yours isn’t reduced to rubble by 85 mile-an-hour winds and flying debris.
Speaking of New York, here’s an interesting (if a bit shaky) video of a walk through that city’s dark streets after the hurricane hit.
Charity Begins at Home: A Reddit Quiz
Here’s a quick Reddit quiz. Take a look at these comments, found this afternoon on Reddit:
To whom are they directed?
a) A Redditor known as Help4Yew, long-time moderator of the Help4RapeVictims subreddit, who recently lost her job.
b) A Redditor by the name of CouchSurfer666, a guy trying to make a trip around the world sleeping on the couches of different Redditors, but who was injured while hiking in northern India and unable to afford a plane ticket back to the US.
c) The Redditor formerly known as Violentacrez, the man behind many of Reddit’s most notorious subreddits, including Jailbait, Chokeabitch, Niggerjailbait, Rapebait, Hitler, Jewmerica, Misogyny, and Incest, and who lost his job after Gawker revealed his real identity.
Do I even need to tell you the answer here?
It’s C, by the way. I made up the other two examples. There are threads soliciting donations in the following subreddits, among others: c1rclejerkers; c1rclejerkers again; ImGoingToHellForThis; mensrights; legalteens. (These are links to the threads, not the subreddits; don’t read the comments in c1rclejerkers if you want to retain any faith in humanity or at least Reddit.)
For more on Violentacrez, check out the media coverage linked to on the front page of SRS’s Redditbomb subreddit at the moment.
Ann Barnhardt, contemporary anti-suffragette: “As soon as the 19th amendment was passed, men were effectively castrated, and in many, many cases disenfranchised by their wives.”
Birth of a suffragette
As election day draws ever nearer – at least for those of us here in the States – I thought I’d devote a couple of posts to some of those who think that half of us should be prevented from casting our votes this November. I think you can probably guess which half.
The strangest thing to me about those who still think that Women’s Suffrage was a bad idea – aside from the fact that they exist at all – is that some of them are women.
Consider the strange case of Ann Barnhardt.
A right-wing blogger and the founder of a now-shuttered commodities brokerage, Barnhardt has very strong opinions about a lot of things, including Presidential politics, and is not shy about sharing them. Indeed, when she went all Galt and shut down Barnhardt Capital Management last year, she declared:
I will not, under any circumstance, consider reforming and re-opening Barnhardt Capital Management, or any other iteration of a brokerage business, until Barack Obama has been removed from office AND the government of the United States has been sufficiently reformed and repopulated so as to engender my total and complete confidence in the government, its adherence to and enforcement of the rule of law, and in its competent and just regulatory oversight of any commodities markets that may reform.
(For the rest of her explanation, see here.)
Despite her strong political convictions, Barnhardt also believes, apparently with equal conviction, that she should not be able to express her opinions through the ballot box.
The whole world is watching … A Voice for Men “activists” making asses of themselves
Well,I got carried away there. It’s not literally the whole world. Only a teensy weensy portion of it.
The fellows at A Voice for Men, you see, evidently stung by criticism that they aren’t activists, have begun engaging in real, honest-to-goodness real-world activism, by which I mean that a handful of them, some in Canada and at least one in Australia, have been putting up posters advertising the AVFM website.
In other words, their activism consists of putting up posters for a website whose only activism thus far has consisted of putting up posters for itself.
Well, eventually they’ll get the hang of it, I guess.
GOP congressman and Senate nominee Todd Akin: Rape is an effective form of birth control
Not a doctor, but plays one on TV.
Our completely incorrect biology lesson today comes not from Chateau Heartiste or The Spearhead or EvoPsychBullshitBeliever997 on Reddit but from an actual elected official with influence in the real world: Republican Congressman Todd Akin of Missouri, currently his party’s nominee for Senate.
In a recent interview with KTVI-TV, the Fox affiliate in St. Louis, he explained that the ladies just don’t get pregnant from rape — well, “legitimate rape” anyway. As he put it:
From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.
But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.
As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake notes, this whole “rape as birth control” thing is not actually, you know, true:
Akin’s claim is one that pops up occasionally in social conservative circles. A federal judge nominated by President Bush in the early 2000s had said similar things, as have state lawmakers in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. …
According to a 1996 study, approximately 32,000 pregnancies result from rape annually in the United States, and about 5 percent of rape victims are impregnated.
Talking Points Memo notes that this isn’t the first time Akin has suggested that
some types of rape are more worthy of protections than others. As a state legislator, Akin voted in 1991 for an anti-marital-rape law, but only after questioning whether it might be misused “in a real messy divorce as a tool and a legal weapon to beat up on the husband,” according to … the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Akin: making up shit to deny rape victims their rights since 1991!
Currently, Akin has a big lead in the polls over his Democratic rival, sitting Sen. Claire McCaskill.
Here’s the relevant portion of Akin’s interview; you can find the whole thing at the Talking Points Memo link above.
Reddit Island Redux, or, The Possibly True Saga of Current Island
Dudes, try making a Lego island first, see how that goes.
You remember Reddit Island, right? The utterly serious, unintentionally hilarious project in which a bunch of Redditors attempt to set up a Reddity miniature utopia on some remote island somewhere? They are still trying to find an island, and apparently that process is … not going so swimmingly.
As Adrian Chen of Gawker notes in a nice long piece on the project, a fortysomething IT guy from Virginia names Mark Wells has been telling prospective Reddit Islanders that he may have found the perfect place for them:
Wells, who uses the handle Citizenpolitician, explained in a series of increasingly breathless posts on Reddit Island that he’d been scoping out a tiny tropical splotch called Current Island. Just off the coast of Bahamian island of Eluthera, Current is sparsely inhabited, and could be a possible option for their settlement. He’d cold-called members of the local government about the possibility of having a few hundred internet nerds settle Current Island. And he had been met with a very promising response.
MGTOWer: Women paid six-figure salaries “for flailing their arms about and making silly noises.”
Women are far more interested in posing all sexy than in assembling munitions.
Hey ladies! You know those “jobs” you have? That “work” you do? You may have thought you were hired because you had “skills” and “education” and because you’re “actually quite good at what you do.”
But over on MGTOWforums, the locals say “nuh-uh” to these delusions of yours. In a recent thread, “Experienced Member” Stewie explained that women only get hired because women run the world and the government does their bidding.
