Category Archives: terrorism
MRAs: The way to defeat feminism is not through debate but by “inflicting … pain” on feminists.
Men's Rights "Activism"
What can you do when you realize that you’re losing the war of ideas? You can rethink some or all of your ideas, seriously considering the unnerving possibility that you might be, well, wrong. You can reconsider how you present your ideas.
Or you can give up on ideas entirely, and attempt to pressure or harass or even terrorize others into some form of surrender. That’s what the the uber-radical Weathermen did in the 1960s and 70s, turning first to violent direct action in the aptly named “days of rage” and then to bombs when the revolution that many in the New Left had been prophesying failed to materialize. That’s what the anti-abortion movement has been doing for decades now, with some in the movement harassing women trying to get abortions while more radical antis bomb clinics and kill doctors. .
And now we’re seeing rhetoric from Men’s Rights Activists that suggests some in that movement may also be giving up on talk. Consider A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam, who declared in a fundraising letter a couple of months back that:
Progress for men will not be gained by debate, reason or typical channels of grievance available to segments of the population that the world actually gives a damn about. The progress we need will only be realized by inflicting enough pain on the agents of hate, in public view, that it literally shocks society out of its current coma.
Elam is – presumably deliberately — vague about what exactly he means when he talks about “inflicting … pain,” and as far as I know he has never explicitly endorsed violence. But he has spoken openly about “stalking” individual feminists and otherwise “fucking their shit up” by, among other things, posting personal information about them on the AVfM-sponsored site Register-Her.com for all would be vigilantes to see. And in the “activism” section of his website he has reprinted a manifesto explicitly calling for the firebombing of courthouses and police stations.
Elam isn’t the only MRA who has officially given up on “debate and reason” in favor of “inflicting … pain” on feminists. The “counter-feminist” wannabe philosopher who calls himself Fidelbogen makes a similar argument in a recent post on his blog:
Feminism is your enemy, and the obligation to treat feminists as fellow human beings is officially waived. They are not fellow human beings, they are ALIENS.
Dehumanizing the enemy always a good start.
[L]et’s not hear any crap about so-called “hate speech”. You see, there is simply no way that you can resist evil, denounce tyranny, or call pernicious things by their right names, without crossing a fine line into “hate speech” or something very like it. Extremism against a bully is no vice, and since bullies have their own moral economy, you are entitled to pay them in their own coin.
It’s not hate speech if you really do hate them?
The important thing to understand about the feminists is, that they will not change their outward behavior unless social heat and pressure are inflicted upon them.
Fidelbogen, a sometime contributor to A Voice for Men, is also vague about what exactly he means by this “social heat and pressure.” He continues:
What, do you think they will stop what they are doing just because somebody intellectually convinces them they are mistaken? They will do no such thing, because they are people with an agenda who know they are “right”, and they lack the gift to see themselves as the rest of the world sees them.
IRONY ALERT. IRONY ALERT.
Over on Reddit, meanwhile, the charming JeremiahMRA – who used to post comments here as Things Are Bad – thinks the “inflict pain” policy should be extended to all women, any time they engage in “bad behavior.” Responding to a poster asking how to handle a disagreement with his mother, he explained his theory in (sometimes redundant) detail, receiving several dozen net upvotes for his post:
The ONLY way you change women’s bad behavior is by punishing them if they won’t start acting like adults. …
The only way you change a woman’s bad behavior is by making sure they know it hurts them. …
Reasoning with her will not work. The only answer is to use the power he has as her SON to threaten to hurt her emotionally. Women are emotional creatures. Nothing else will work. This is what it means to be a man: you do what you have to do so that things will be better in the end, even if you don’t like it. …
It isn’t about convincing her what’s right, it’s about showing her she will suffer if she doesn’t do what’s right. That is the only thing that will work.
The Men’s Rights Movement likes to pretend that is it a civil rights movement. But threats, harassment, hate speech, and emotional blackmail aren’t the tactics of a legitimate civil rights movement. These are the tactics of angry narcissists clinging to retrograde prejudices, who have given up on the war of ideas because on some level they know that history is against them, and that they will never win.
Feminist koalas, and other grave injustices faced by men
MRAs: Just like Martin Luther King. Wait, not Martin Luther King. I'm thinking of someone else entirely. I'm not sure why I said Martin Luther King. I mean, that's ridiculous.
I’ve been following the Men’s Rights Movement for some time, and I’ve never been quite sure exactly what the major injustices faced by men are. I haven’t really noticed much to speak of in my own life, but evidently there are some and they are really, really bad.
Luckily, in recent days A Voice for Men has begun to clarify the issue for me. For example, AVfM Radio’s new theme song points out two of the worst injustices of all:
- Men having to hold doors open for ladies.
- Ladies wanting to marry us.
But these are not the only important men’s issues out there. In a recent post titled “A hard rains gonna fall: how hard is up to you” (clearly a reference to the famous song by Carly Simon), AVfM head dude Paul Elam spells out the most important issues of all in a set of bullet points. To save the beleaguered men of the world some important man-time I will summarize them for you here. Bullet-time!
- Thomas Ball’s suicide isn’t mentioned on Wikipedia because feminism.
- The Obama administration urged colleges to use the same standard of proof used in most non-criminal cases in their non-criminal disciplinary proceedings dealing with rape cases. Because feminism.
- Australia. Something about Australia. Ok, here’s the deal: Australia is very, very far away from me, like literally on the other side of the planet, and my eyes sometimes glaze over when reading about it. I’m sure whatever Elam is mad about is really bad. It might involve Koalas. Feminist Koalas. But that’s just speculation on my part.
- In India, where women are routinely harassed in public and groped on train cars, there are a tiny number of women-only train cars set up to cut down on the groping.
- In Sweden, a small group of feminists did a theatrical production based on/dealing with the writings of Valarie Solanas. It was performed in some schools.
- “Men constitute the lion’s share of combat deaths[11], workplace deaths[12], suicide deaths[13], and are afflicted with almost every known human malady and disease more frequently and more severely than women.” Obviously, the feminists are to blame, for their staunch opposition to women serving in the armed forces, and for their secret program of giving men girl germs.
- There are agencies dealing with women’s health issues. Clearly, men need to have just as many of their own agencies to deal with such male health issues as not being pregnant.
I hope my summary of these issues has been fair. As Elam has pointed out on a number of occasions, I am fat, so really nothing I do or say has any value. Plus, of course, I am a mangina. Just, you know, FYI.
In any case, these injustices have Elam plenty mad:
I am truly curious as to what festering, morally atrophied deviation of humanity could look at anything approaching this level of discrimination and suffering without becoming angry.
So mad that his metaphors all get up in each other’s business:
Whether it becomes a wave of social change, or a violent tempest of indignation and fury, the pendulum will continue to swing.
So there you have it. Naturally, Elam’s readers are grateful for his efforts to bring justice to the world by yelling about it online and trying to get people really, really mad at certain specific ladies without explicitly advocating violence against them. That’s pretty much how Martin Luther King did it, only with fewer references to “bitches” and “cunts” and not so many threaty remarks.
As Alfred E puts it:
Well said Mr Elam. May the harpies finally get a clue about their complete lack of compassion for men and boys all the while living in a gold box carted around by the prince.
Justice and compassion for all, except you harpies in your gold boxes! And also the rest of the bitches, cunts and manginas.
NOTE: That bit about Carly Simon above was a joke. Obviously the song in question was written by The Bangles.
Does A Voice for Men really think that firebombing is a form of non-violence?
Reading through some comments on Men’s Rights hub A Voice for Men the other day, I ran across a fairly bloodthirsty contribution from an MRA with the charming nickname Brutal Antipathy, suggesting that the Occupy Wall Street protesters needed a bit of what he called “the ol’ Tienanmen Square treatment.”
Mr. Antipathy’s rhetorical outburst struck me as fairly typical of the tough-guy rhetoric that the site’s regulars love to indulge in — though usually the targets of the rhetoric are feminists, not Occupy Wall Street activists.
So I was a bit surprised to see site founder Paul Elam respond with this:
It seems a little odd for Elam to claim to be shocked — shocked! — to find such rhetoric on his site. Elam, after all, seems to positively revel in making his own vaguely threatening pronouncements towards his ideological enemies.
In a recent fundraising appeal, for example, Elam let out all the stops:
We now have a team of individuals that goes beyond what we advertise on our pages, and we are gearing up to add a new doomsday prophesy to 2012. Let’s put it this way: The fembots better hope the Mayan’s were right about next year, because they would rather deal with that than the things we are cooking up. …
Progress for men will not be gained by debate, reason or typical channels of grievance available to segments of the population that the world actually gives a damn about. The progress we need will only be realized by inflicting enough pain on the agents of hate, in public view, that it literally shocks society out of its current coma.
Elam is purposefully vague about just what he means by “inflicting pain,” but it is hard not to read this comment as a threat of something dire.
Others on the site are similarly fond of this sort of vague, threatening language. MRA blogger Fidelbogen, recently brought on board as a contributor to AVfM, let loose in a recent comment on those who think MRAs should tone down their rhetoric towards feminists and other enemies:
Apparently, Elam believes that the deliberate vagueness of these kinds of threats makes them shining examples of Gandhian non-violence — or at least that it gives the site the requisite “plausible deniability” if — when? — someone actually moves beyond the threats to actual violence.
It’s ok, evidently, to talk about “inflicting pain” on your enemies, so long as you don’t specify just how. It’s ok to boast about frightening your enemies, to muse about “stalking” individual feminists, to post their personal information online, and so on and so on.
Heck, apparently it’s not even a problem if someone, using the personal information provided on the site, actually tracks down individuals targeted by Elam and pals and quite literally kills them. As AVfM managing editor John the Other put it in a recent post (which I wrote about here):
And what if they get killed David? What if rather than be arrested – as promoters of hate, and public advocates of murder, what if these depraved and murderous female supremacists come to harm at the hands of a citizen. If that happens, it will mean that a society’s system of law, designed to prevent hate organizations, and to allow redress of grievance through non violent due process is gone, wiped out by your ideology of violence and hate.
Nonetheless, JtO, like Elam, insists that “I do not and will not lend myself to the support of violence, or indeed, of murder.”
But all this dancing around the issue of violence is rather a moot point, given the one rather striking exception that Elam has allowed to his “no explicit advocacy of violence” rule.
And that is the terrorist manifesto he’s been hosting on his site since last summer.
I’m referring, of course, to the lengthy manifesto written by Tom Ball, a man who burned himself to death on the steps of a courthouse in Keane, New Hampshire last summer in a protest against what he saw as unfair treatment in family court.
Ball has been hailed as a hero in numerous articles on AVfM, and he is mentioned in an “invocation” in the new theme song for AVfM Radio.
The manifesto is posted on AVfM — in its “activism” category.
What sort of “activism” did Ball advocate? Hint: It involves Molotov cocktails, and government buildings.
In his words (emphasis mine):
So boys, we need to start burning down police stations and courthouses. … [T]he dirty deeds are being carried out by our local police, prosecutors and judges. These are the people we pay good money to protect us and our families. And what do we get for our tax money? Collaborators who are no different than the Vichy of France or the Quislings of Norway during the Second World War. All because they go along to get along. They are an embarrassment, the whole lot of them. And they need to be held accountable. So burn them out. …
There is no evidence that the police, courts, or government is planning to do anything different in the immediate future. And they will not do anything different until we make it so uncomfortable that they must change. Bureaucracy at its worst. So burn them out. This is too important to be using that touchy- feeling coaching that is so popular with business these days. You need to flatten them, like Wile E. Coyote. They need to be taught never to replace the rule of law. BURN-THEM-OUT!
Most of the police stations built in New England over the last 20 years are stone or brick. Fortunately, the roofs are still wood. The advantage of fire on the roof is that it is above the sprinklers. But even the sprinklers going off work to our advantage. There is no way they can work in a building with six inches of water. And I am certain we will disrupt their momentum once they start working out of a FEMA
At this point the AVfM editors cut Ball off in mid-sentence, and insert this “Editor’s note”:
Editor’s note:
Several paragraphs in this copy of Mr Ball’s original letter have been omitted. The omitted paragraphs contained detailed instructions on the manufacture and use of simple incendiary devices.
If you are really interested in seeing the omitted sections, you can find the complete manifesto elsewhere in the Mansophere.
Ball was quite serious about all this, and hoped that his self-immolation would inspire other “activists” to “manufacture and use” his favored sort of “simple incendiary devices,” as the AVfM editors gingerly put it. Ball himself was a bit more blunt:
I only managed to get the main door of the Cheshire County Courthouse in Keene, NH. I would appreciate it if some of you boys would finish the job for me. They harmed my children. The place is evil. So take it out. …
And bring a can of spray paint to these fires. Paint the word COLLABORATORS ( two L’s with an S on the end) on the building before you burn it.
Ball frankly acknowledged that if others followed his suggestions, people would die:
There will be some casualties in this war. Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.
How does Ball’s explicit advocacy of terrorist acts directed at government buildings, acts that if carried out would almost inevitably mean the deaths of people within those buildings, square with Elam’s purported no-advocacy-of-violence policy for his website?
You’ll have to ask him. I have no fucking clue.
The All-Singing, All-Dancing Men’s Rights Movement
Not a picture of Jade Michael and the FTSU Crew
The Men’s Rights Movement now has a theme song! A couple of talented young men calling themselves Jade Michael and the FTSU Singers Crew have put together a catchy little grunge rock number they call Go My Own Way, which will now serve as the opening music for the A Voice for Men internet radio show.
As AVfM head cheese Paul Elam puts it, straining his prose-generating abilities to the breaking point as he attempts to find words eloquent enough to describe this new musical masterpiece:
Jade Michael, artist, professional musician and MRA, founder of Artistry Against Misandry, has taken his talent hammer and given it a mighty swing to our benefit. He has forged, in the fires of his own passion, the new theme song for AVfM Radio, titled Go My Own Way. It is not to be confused with the similarly titled offering from Fleetwood Mac, Go Your Own Way. No, not in the least. Jade, with his band, Jade Michael and the FTSU Crew, have produced a veritable anthem for the red pill crowd. It is replete with a great, purist rock sound, a touch of humor, attitude, and a ton of gut level, red pill honesty. Pay close attention to the end for the invocation of Thomas James Ball.
Without further ado, here’s the song:
You can find the full lyrics on YouTube and on AVfM. But I thought I’d share a few of my favorite bits.
The song starts off by addressing one of the most savage injustices faced by men today: evil ladies who expect men to hold doors open for them.
And we’re through with holding doors
Entitlements abound
You say that we still hold you down
And you cop that attitude
No remorse or gratitude
Seriously, ladies, would it hurt you to say “thank you” once in a while, to the men who literally enable you to walk through walls, by holding open the doors you would otherwise be unable to open? To paraphrase Barbie: Doors are hard!
Then there’s this bit:
You’re obsessed with my ability
I won’t be your utility
I’ll never carry you
And I sure won’t marry you
Women around the world, consider what you’re losing here: no longer can you expect to marry guys who hate you so much they made a song about how they won’t hold doors open for you!
And let’s not forget:
Cos’ the time has come to fuck your shit up
The time has come to fuck your shit up
The time has come to fuck your shit up
Perhaps I’m missing some of the subtleties here, but this sort of suggests to me that Jade and the Gang are not so much Men Going Their Own Way as they are Men Still Hanging Around Acting Like Assholes — not MGTOW but MSHAALA.
I appreciate the efforts of Jade Michael and the MSHAALA, but I can’t really help but think of this little song-and-dance number, from the excellent Belgian horror film Calviare (The Ordeal), as the Men’s Rights movement’s unofficial anthem.
In case you’re wondering, this scene makes a little bit more sense in the context of the movie itself. A little bit. It’s actually quite a brilliant little film with some interesting gender stuff going on in it, if you can deal with fairly violent horror films. But, oh my lord, TRIGGER WARNINGS for pretty much every trigger there is.
NOTE: In case you’re wondering about the song’s reference to Thomas Ball: Ball burned himself to death outside a courthouse in Keane, New Hampshire last year in a protest against what he saw as unfair treatment in family court. He hoped that his suicide would inspire other men to start firebombing courthouses and police stations. (This wasn’t mere rhetoric; in the lengthy manifesto he left behind he provided tips on how to make effective Molotov cocktails.) Naturally, many in the MRM have hailed him as a martyr for Men’s Rights.
Spearheaders on the SlutWalks. Again. It’s bad.
From the Dallas SlutWalk
Oh dear. The Spearheaders are talking about the Slutwalks again. The discussion may be the worst on the subject that I have run across so far. Some of the lowlights:
Keyster seems downright pissed that women actually have the right to say no:
They’re high functioning children with sexual power and they don’t want you to forget it. They’re outraged that just because a young woman dresses and acts in a sexually provocative manner, that she might receive unwanted attention from young men that don’t appeal to her.
She should be able to dress like a street whore and abuse alcohol to the point of delerium and they feel compelled to lecture us on how that doesn’t mean this is an advertisment to be sexually harrassed, sexually assaulted or heaven forbid raped. …
They want the “RIGHT” to dress as sexually provocative as they want to without being constantly annoyed by lowly beta males. They’d prefer you not “sexually victimize” them, unless you’re hot and they’re into you, then it’s totally OK. …
Remember this: She didn’t bother to get dressed up for the likes of YOU. Her hope was a worthy athelete or Hollywood star might notice her and talk to her; not some weak, pathetic loser …
“We’ve got the sexual power, the power of consent, the gate keeper of the holy vaginal crevice. See our bouncing propped up cleavage, our long legs and glorious ass protruding from those heels? You want it don’t you?
….ha, ha, ha…you can’t have it because I SAY SO! Because I have THIS power over you, lowly little man. Bow down to me and beg me a little, I might even let the others see me talking to you, without calling the cops.” …
This isn’t feminism, it’s flaunting female sexual power in the faces of men.
You’re seriously complaining that woman have the “power of consent!?” EVERYONE has the power of consent. No one male or female is obliged to have sex with anyone they don’t want to. That’s, you know, rape. It bothers you that women are the “the gate keeper[s] of the holy vaginal crevice?” Who the fuck else should be the gatekeeper of a person’s vagina other than the person whose vagina it is? The mind reels. But apparently the 50+ upvoters of this piece of abhorrent nonsense aren’t bothered by any of this.
Demirogue, meanwhile, suggests we need to better discipline our women:
While perusing FB last week I came across the newest deviation of this mentality which is going topless. … And they want to cry about rape? They need to cry but only because people said enough is enough and started to belt them on their asses.
Women need to be controlled and on a very, very short leash. They’ve been given every right, every option, every opportunity to be something and what do they do with it? Abuse and manipulate it with reckless abandonment and incessant demands.
Geography Bee Finalist himself thinks the slutwalkers must be retarded:
I wouldn’t worry too much about these Slutwalk sows.
They have no redeeming features. None.
They cannot figure out that if you dress like a whore, you deserve to be treated in a disrespectful manner. Even conservatively dressed mentally retarded women can figure this out and conduct themselves with more propriety and intelligence than these Slutwalkers … .
Knuckledragger blames it on those damned suffragettes:
…we let ‘em drive, we let ‘em vote, and this is what we get.
Ridiculous to even offer attention to another excuse to dress like a whore, goof off in public, and not bring me a beer.
Any man worth his salt should fire any skank who was “sick” from work to attend this nonsense.
SingleDad seems to think that all accusations of rape are made up:
Rape is now the extra tax women charge men if some how their unsatisfied with whatever arrangement was made before or after any encounter in or outside of marriage.
Other lowlights:
Poiuyt agreeing with Anders Breivik’s “observations surrounding this femaleist pandemic,” while adding that he “is to be rebuked for taking the wrong cureative actions to solve it.”
Demirogue (in a second comment) complaining that “overvalued pussy is all [women today] have to offer and only to certain men.”
Anonymous age 69 explaining that “rape laws were intended to protect women of good character, from being sexually violated,” not “to protect promiscuous sluts .”
And more, much, much more. Many of the worst (including most of those quoted here) have many dozens of upvotes. Go read the thread yourself, if you think you can stomach it.
There are no arguments to rebut here; I can only repeat the basic message that the slutwalks are trying to convey: no one deserves to be raped, no matter what they are wearing or how much consensual sex they engage in. Even if they show some cleavage or prefer athletes and/or rocks stars to so-called beta males.
More violent talk, more excuses for terrorism, this time from the inaptly named Happy Bachelors Forum
Try pointing the finger at yourself, for once.
On the ironically named Happy Bachelors forum, the regular poster who calls himself khankrumthebulgar – and whose real name is Randall Joseph Shake — has been complaining about those of us who’ve pointed out that much MRA and MGTOW rhetoric sounds all too similar to the rhetoric of Norwegian terrorist murderer Anders Breivik. In response to Hugo Schwyzer’s post on the topic at the Good Men Project, he wrote:
This smacks to me of extreme desperation. As they are trying to draw us into a response. They should hear Crickets chirping. … they are in need of traffic, controversy some off the wall unhinged response. When they receive none, it simply means we will not waste the oxygen to answer these absurd and insane accusations. No evidence exists that the MRA or MRM is in any way connected to the Norwegian gunman. IF we were there would be dozens of dead Feminists by now. There is none, hence this is a weak and pathetic attempt to incite violence and is irresponsible on their part. …
If such violence were to happen. After such outrageous accusations, it is Hugo Schwyzer and the Good Menz Project who is financially liable for stoking and promoting extremism in the hopes of generating a violent response. The blood will be on their hands not ours.
You will notice that this argument is identical to that of Angry Harry: if an extremist commits an act of terrorism or violence, don’t blame him or his extremist ideology; blame the people who pissed him off. Taken to its logical extreme, this specious argument would mean blaming the Jews for the Holocaust; after all, they’re the ones who got Hitler so worked up in the first place.
It seems to me that if you don’t want people to associate you with terrorists, you should probably stop talking like terrorists, referring casually to “dozens of dead feminists” and trying to blame the enemy in advance for any violence that comes from your side.
Also, you should probably stop making comments like the following, which were posted in response to Amanda Marcotte’s recent post on Misogyny and Terrorism. The first one, from spocksdisciple, a board moderator, fantasized about a violent backlash that would put women in general and feminists in particular in their supposed place:
[T]he backlash against feminism and it’s misandry will be both awe inspiring and terrifying at the same time.
Modern radical feminism is doomed, any woman sprouting these kinds of statements after the backlash won’t last very long, people and especially men are growing angrier everyday and all these whining losers in the feminist movement is doing to kicking a sleeping bear even harder.
Feminism is so done that women will be lucky if any man bothers to even look at them other then as a piece of meat, the days of the 19th century are going to come back where women either know their place or they’ll suffer the consequences of their actions and arrogance, big daddy gov’t isn’t going to be around to protect the rights of women to act like bitches.
And you probably shouldn’t talk about burning down buildings with people inside them, as khankrumthebulgar (that is, Randall Joseph Shake) does in this comment:
Feminists will be treated like the French Nobility was during the French Revolution. There will be a payback to these Evil Bitches. … As to the Good Mangina Project, they are our enemies. Burn the building to the ground with them in it.
Is he literally talking about burning down a building, or is he speaking metaphorically? In the wake of a tragedy that involved a man literally gunning down the children of his leftist and feminist enemies, khankrumthebulgar’s comments are indefensible either way.
Let me reiterate: these are posts from men who are angry that people have linked them in any way to the Norwegian terrorist. Are they really this lacking in self-awareness, or are they so used to talking in an environment where violent comments about feminists are so common and accepted that they don’t even realize the irony?
I don’t know, and I don’t care. I just wish that those in the MRA and MGTOW movements who are bothered by this kind of talk – and I know there are some who are – would actually step up and declare this sort of shit out of bounds. I’m not holding my breath.
Note: The Happy Bachelors forum is members-only, so the links to the forum won’t work if you’re not a member. Here are screen shots of all the forum comments mentioned in this post, in order. Click to see the full-sized image. I edited several of the comments, but indicated all removed material with ellipses. As you will see the edits did not change the meaning of what was said.
khankrumthebulgar gives his real name
khankrumthebulgar on Hugo Schwyzer (just the portion of the comment that is from him; the rest quotes Schwyzer’s post).
spocksdisciple comment
khankrumthebulgar’s “burn the building” comment
Angry Harry: Violence is justified, but don’t blame us for it.
Anyone who has spent much time at all on MRA message boards knows that they tend to be littered with vague and ominous “predictions” of an inevitable violent backlash of men driven to fury by our supposed feminist overlords; some of these predictions are delivered with such obvious relish that they seem little more than justifications in advance for future murderous rampages on the part of people not too far distant in their ideology from Anders Breivik.
Of course, most of those making such predictions-cum-threats don’t want to actually face any culpability when their bullshit gets real. Fear not, MRA prognosticators, for one prominent British MRA has come up with what he sees as a brilliant way for MRAs to avoid getting implicated in future terrorists attacks. According to longtime MRA blogger Angry Harry we shouldn’t blame violence on the beliefs of right-wing terrorists – we should instead blame it on the people they’re mad at.
Angry Harry uses this bit of sophistry to explain away any culpability the right seems to have in the Norway massacre:
The recent massacre by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway is being portrayed by the left-wing media (such as the BBC) as being motivated by extreme right-wing groups - the idea, as ever, being to demonise and, hence, to intimidate, as much as possible, anybody who does not support their malicious self-serving agenda.
But if you look more closely at the evidence, it is quite clear that, if anything, it was the various machinations and rhetoric engaged in by the deceitful LEFT that infuriated this man. …
Quite simply, it is the Left, not the Right, who are the more to blame for this incident.
Ingenious. Of course, this logic only really works if you agree with the extremist ideology of the terrorist or murderer in question. Let’s apply Angry Harry’s approach to a historical example that also involved extremism and murder on a large scale:
Hitler hated Jews. Hitler killed Jews. Therefore, according to Angry Harry’s logic, we should blame the Jews for getting him so mad in the first place.
Is that unfair? Given that Breivik is a mass murderer with many ideas strikingly similar to those of Hitler, I think not. The logic is the same, whatever the body count.
Apparently Harry thinks his bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand will absolve MRAs when, not if, the violence comes:
MRAs need to get to grips with this type of situation because it won’t be long before they are being blamed for something or other - perhaps a family court judge being murdered.
Why might this be a particularly sensitive issue for Harry? Perhaps because in another posting of his, he offered a justification for doing just that — murdering family court justices and those involved in enforcing their decisions.
In a post with the blunt title “Why Violence Is Often Justified,” Harry put it this way:
[A]nybody who takes away a man’s children and/or his home deserves little sympathy if they suffer significant retribution.
I suppose that for some men, arguing their case in court is a reasonable option, but for many men - particularly the less intelligent, the less wealthy, the less articulate and/or the less able they are to deal with officialdom - such an option is going to get them nowhere. And so, in my view, violence is not only understandable and predictable, but also morally quite justifiable.
To put it bluntly: If someone is taking away your home and your children then I think that you are quite justified in behaving violently towards them.
In his recent posting on Breivik, Harry offered an obligatory comment suggesting that, if course, he wasn’t actually justifying the Norwegian’s actions – oh, no! – even though the logic of his argument seems designed to do just that. Then he went on to make some predictions about what the future holds for his leftist and feminist enemies:
I think that it is fairly obvious to my most excellent readers that the war against the Left is hotting up. …
In fact, what I can never seem to understand is why it is taking so long for people - particularly for men - to rise up against the Left, given its appalling attitude and behaviour over the past two decades.
In combination with the feminists, the leftists have done their very best - with much success over here in Europe - to break up our countries, our cultures and our families, while at the same time heaping hatred upon hatred on to their very own people!
I just cannot understand how they have gotten away with this for so long.
You cannot go round continuing to display rigid intolerance and horrendous injustice against millions of men in your very own country and not expect some kind of violent backlash from them.
And matters are definitely going to get much worse.
He ends with a weasel-worded half-endorsement of this “violent backlash.”
The war against the Left will just continue escalating and, at some stage, with any luck, the leftists and the feminists will be defeated without too much carnage.
Well, that’s reassuring. Harry doesn’t want there to be “too much carnage.”
Which naturally leads to the question: just what does Harry regard as the right amount of carnage?
I hope we never have to find out.
Links: Michael Kimmel and Amanda Marcotte on masculinity, misogyny and Anders Breivik
The world doesn't need any more macho Nazis
A couple excellent pieces on Anders Breivik and misogyny.
First: The other day I posted a link to a piece by Michael Kimmel on Breivik and the sexual politics of far-right thought. It turned out that the article was a draft that got published prematurely.
Now the final version of the post is officially up at Sociological Images: A tale of two terrorists redux. Kimmel argues that what we know about Breivik thus far
indicate[s] that … it will be impossible to fully understand this horrific act without understanding how gender operates as a rhetorical and political device for domestic terrorists.
These members of the far right consider themselves Christian Crusaders for Aryan Manhood, vowing its rescue from a feminizing welfare state. Theirs is the militarized manhood of the heroic John Rambo – a manhood that celebrates their God-sanctioned right to band together in armed militias if anyone, or any governmental agency, tries to take it away from them. If the state and capital emasculate them, and if the masculinity of the “others” is problematic, then only “real” white men can rescue the American Eden or the bucolic Norwegian countryside from a feminized, multicultural, androgynous immigrant-inspired melting pot.
Meanwhile, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon offers some thoughts on Misogyny and Terrorism:
[T]here’s definitely a strong link between misogyny and violence that can’t be denied. Misogynists are far likelier to be violent people than non-misogynists, which is why rape and wife-beating are such common crimes. (Domestic violence is the number one cause of injury for women 15-44.) All bigotry provokes violence at its ends, of course. This isn’t the Oppression Olympics. But misogyny and violence go hand in hand so often because misogynists really buy deeply into the idea that women are weak and men are “strong”, by which they mean aggressive. A steady drumbeat of misogynist thought couldn’t be better designed to reach the unhinged and cause them to lash out violently, all while imagining themselves to be big, tough men who claim they were forced—with “why did you make me do this?” being the battle cry of wife beaters—into violence.
Discuss.
MRA Peter Nolan on Anders Breivik: “In different times … he would be called a hero.”
The work of a "hero?"
Some in the manosphere have been quick to label mass murderer Anders Breivik a “madman,” trying their best to pretend that his noxious misogynist ideology bears no resemblance to their own. Others, while endorsing at least some of his ideas, have distanced themselves from his actions.
As for MRA loose cannon Peter-Andrew: Nolan(c), well, I’ll just let him explain himself. In a comment on The Spearhead, which naturally earned him multiple upvotes from the assembled mob, the man with the strangely punctuated name offered this take [LINK FIXED] on the killer:
Anders Breivik sees himself as a soldier who is fighting for a worthy cause. That cause being his country. Women and leftists then make him out to be “insane” and are looking for “who is to blame”. Well they might start looking in the mirror. The most pervasive element of western civilization today is its hatred of men and all things male. There is a particularly strong hatred of fathers and husbands. I know. I used to be a father and a husband. I have never experienced hatred in my life as vehement as by women in divorce.
And then the justifications began:
It is only natural and normal that some men decide to take matters into their own hands at all the hatred spewed at them and their marginalization. Men often see that some things are worth fighting for. Men often then take action to fight for what they believe in.
Anders Breivik is not crazy. He’s as rational as the next man. He sees that his country is being destroyed. He sees that the people responsible for that destruction are the left of politics. And he would be correct. He took action to stop what he believes is the destruction of his country.
Followed by a smug told-you-so:
I have been telling women for three years now that hatred of men in general and fathers in particular is going to see men killing a lot of women and children. Well? We just saw 76.
Of course, when Nolan refers to “telling women” that angry men will erupt in violence, what he means is “offering guys on The Spearhead specific tips on how exactly to kill innocent people.”
I’m not going to repost the vile suggestions he set forth in a now notorious Spearhead comment some months back, but I will note that they included handy tips on how to efficiently kill police officers, as well as specific advice on the best ways to take out large numbers of people in “malls … girls schools, police stations, guvment buildings. Full of women and manginas.” He ended the comment with a not-terribly-convincing attempt at plausible deniability:
Do any of you here realise just how easy it is to ANY of these things? I am not recommending them or even condining them. But if a man got into the frame of mind of Sodini and was actually SMART about it. There are PLENTY of ways he could attack women and manginas and their cop protectors with NO CHANCE AT ALL OF BEING CAUGHT as long as he kept his mouth shut.
Naturally, this comment got dozens of upvotes from the Spearhead regulars.
In a followup comment on The Spearhead last night, Nolan mocked another commenter for offering words of sympathy to the “innocent victims.” That last phrase seemed to send him into a fury:
Those who were killed were not “innocent victims” in the main. Anders Breivik is as sane as the next man. …
This was an act of war and he considers himself a soldier. In different times, as in WW II, he would be called a hero.
The people he killed were the children of those who had betrayed him and his fellow norwegians. I would put forward the opinion that the political leaders are responsible for the war on men and the destruction of the families of men. What could be more “an eye for an eye” than to kill the children of those who were so willing to destroy mens families and destroy the homeland of men?
In killing children of those who are betraying men? He is sending a very clear message.
“You may think you are protected by your police and your security…..but we can find your children…and you can not protect them except by locking them into a secure area.”
He then went on to make what I think can only be called a veiled threat towards Predident Obama’s daughters; I won’t repeat it here.
Then back to the “innocent children” remark:
These “innocent victims” of whom you speak are the children of those who are criminals. And since Anders Breivik could not get to the REAL criminals he went after the children. Is that such a bad idea? Are they not legitimate targets if the primary targets can not be reached?
This also received multiple upvotes from The Spearhead crowd, and a much smaller number of downvotes. [UPDATE: The post has now started attracting downvotes, but the upvotes still outnumber them considerably.]
Yes, it is truly strange that anyone could possibly associate the MRM with violence in any way.
Guest post for Shakesville
Just a note: I’ve got a guest post up on Shakesville today. It’s basically a condensed and polished version of my recent Breivik posts. (If you decide to comment there, be aware that their comments are much more heavily moderated than the comments here.)
And while I’m doing the link thing, here’s an excellent piece about Breivik’s misogyny: Michelle Goldberg’s Norway Killer’s Hatred of Women on TheDailyBeast. And here is a not-terribly-excellent discussion of the piece on the Men’s Rights subreddit.
NOTE: This post originally linked to a piece by Michael Kimmel on Sociological Images. That piece, it turns out, hasn’t been officially published there yet, so I removed the dead link and a link to a cached version in the comments here. I’ll post the official link when the piece goes up.
