Most Men’s Rights Activists who wish women didn’t have the right to vote are savvy enough not to say so outright. Instead, they make up fairy tales about how men’s right to vote (at least here in the US) is contingent on men signing up for the draft.
This isn’t actually true — when the draft was abolished in 1973, men weren’t suddenly stripped of their voting rights. And while it is true that young men in the US have been required to register for the draft since 1980, there is no draft, nor will there be one at any point in the forseeable future, making registration about as much of a burden as signing a pledge that you won’t sprout wings and fly to the moon.
But not every anti-suffragette resorts to this sort of sophistry. Take, for example, the Alt-Rightster and woman-voting-opposer Axel Mckibbin.
In a recent post on his blog The Anti-puritan, McKibbin argues that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they’re a bunch of lazy, emotional, dishonest, irresponsible and irrational cowards who will bring Western civilization crashing down around us if they aren’t stripped of their power, and soon.
In a post with the lovely title “Why women can’t be trusted with voting, free speech, national budgets, or power,” Mckibbin sets forth his case against women.
It’s not a very original one. He starts off by contrasting the rational, data-driven approach he thinks men bring to complicated problems with the emotional, irrational “feminine method.” As he sees it,
Men argue or accommodate information they don’t like, women stifle upsetting discussion with emotional tyranny and censorship, or simply bury their heads in the sand.
This wouldn’t be much of a problem if women had no power whatsoever, but for some silly reason men gave women the vote — and the world has been going down the toilet ever since.
[S]ince women have achieved the right to vote, power has shifted from the masculine to the feminine, and thus, from logic to tantrums, from debate to censorship.
Tantrums, huh? I guess he’s right. I’ve never seen men throwing tantrums when people disagree with them.
Oh wait.
Ok, ok, ladies! Don’t throw a fit about this! Let’s just assume that fellow is an outlier, and move on.
Like the rational, data-driven dude he is, McKibbin then throws out a free-associational list of all the things he thinks the ladies are doing wrongly and badly and femininely. Naturally, he provides no evidence for any of his assertions.
It is not a coincidence that the most challenging academic disciplines and hazardous jobs are male dominated. Women are psychologically, not just physically, weaker than men. They choose the easy road in everything. They censor rather than debate honestly in women’s studies departments. They chose easy majors that pay less. They chose easy low paying jobs rather than dangerous/difficult high paying ones. They lie about wage gaps rather than take responsibility and do difficult work.
Then, without even a pause for a paragraph break, he essentially accuses women of being a bunch of lying false rape accusers.
They believe that regret constitutes rape when they could instead take responsibility for their sexual choices.
And then, again without a pause, he offers what is either a weird, out-of-place dig at Hillary Clinton … or a suggestion that all the women of the world routinely mishandle top-secret material.
The screw up classified emails rather than do a minimum of ass-covering. They hate white men who they disagree with rather than Muslims who rape them.
Dude, I’m pretty sure women do hate Muslims — and Christians, and Hindus, and atheists — who rape them. They’re just a little less likely to blame all Muslims (or Christians, or Hindus, or atheists) for the actions of some Muslims, or Christians or, well, you know the rest.
Whenever a female is given a choice, she will choose the cowardly, dishonest, low agency method rather than the courageous, honest, high agency masculine method.
Yes, this is an actual sentence a human being wrote.
She would rather have handouts than balanced budgets for her children’s futures. She would rather censor than be upset. She would rather falsely accuse men of rape than take responsibility for her sexual choices when drunk.
And he’s back on that false accusation thing.
She would rather get divorced than work through the rough patches. She would rather vote stupidly for Bernie than understand economics. She would rather have a 15 dollar minimum wage than a job.
Uh, maybe because raising the minimum wage won’t actually cost us jobs?
She would rather vote for the wage increase than study the issues.
Or maybe she already studied the issue?
She would rather have alimony and child-support than a lasting marriage.
Or perhaps she would simply like to get out of a miserable marriage. And would like the father of her children to continue to pay some of the costs of raising them.
As I have said in other places, democracy is the ethnic form of government of white males. It is designed for high agency individuals of relatively equal capacity and relatively high intelligence. It simply does not work for low agency people.
Ah, racism. It’s about time you showed up. It wouldn’t be a true alt-right rant without some racism to go with all this misogyny.
To a male the state is a series of threats, to a female a series of benefits. Women cannot be drafted (yet), they are arrested at much lower rates, and given shorter sentences for the same crimes.
Hey, he managed to work the non-existent draft into the equation!
Men are arrested much more often than women, it’s true; they also commit many more crimes. The best way to reduce the number of men arrested for bullshit charges? Get the cops to stop racial profiling. And end the war on drugs.
Women do tend to get somewhat shorter sentences for the same crimes. This is partly because the men committing the same crimes tend to have longer criminal records. It’s also because some male judges are more likely to treat women more leniently. Female judges tend to be more egalitarian in their sentencing.
Despite men being victims of domestic violence, only women have state-supported domestic violence shelters.
Most shelters get only a small portion of their funding from the government. Many if not most also provide shelter for men in the form of hotel vouchers. There’s nothing stopping Men’s Rights activists from building shelters for men. Aside from the fact that they’re Men’s Rights activists, and MRAs don’t actually do crap for men.Â
Only men can be successfully prosecuted for raping women, despite the fact that women also rape men. Women get preferential treatment and custody in family courts. Men are essentially guilty until proven innocent in affirmative consent states.
None of this is true. Women are prosecuted — successfully — for rape. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it happens, and will almost certainly happen more in the future.
While more women than men get custody, that’s not the result of bias. In the overwhelming majority of cases, it’s because that’s what the divorcing parents agree to out of court. When men do go to court to ask for custody they often get it.
“Affirmative consent” laws apply to colleges, not criminal law, and they actually go a long way to clearing up anxieties about consent between partners. If you get an enthusiastic “yes” from a partner who is’t wasted before having sex, well, you know you have consent.
Men are taxed at higher rates.
If they earn more, yes.
Women receive benefits that men don’t. Since only women get custody, only women qualify for welfare. Even WIC means Women Infant Children program.
WIC is designed to provide assistance so poor kids don’t starve to death. Despite the name, WIC provides food vouchers and nutrition classes to men responsible for kids getting fed. True, it doesn’t provide cis men with the same benefits it provides pregnant and breastfeeding women, but that’s because cis men do not get pregnant.
The state treats males as disposable in war, letting them die homeless on the streets while paying females with five baby daddies to get pregnant at the taxpayer expense and receive food stamps.
Yes, it’s terrible that the government provides minimal assistance to keep babies and young children from starving. A quick Google search would have told you that men and women without children can also get food stamps.
It attacks marriage and men with alimony and child-support. The state is nothing but threats for men and benefits for women.
You know, rich women can end up paying alimony just like rich men. Fathers raising kids are entitled to child support from their exes, just as mothers are. And again, child support is designed to support children.
This is why women cannot be trusted with national budgets. Even if a woman possesses the courage to engage with uncomfortable facts she still has a disincentive to defend her national interest.
Er, what? Is it somehow in our national interest to let kids starve?
Combine with low agency she works to destroy her society, letting in rapugees, voting for handouts, creating guilty until innocent rape laws, censoring males in the workplace, filing bogus sexual harassment charges, and on and on. Here, low agency and incentives make her nothing but a threat to civilization.
Or at least to that portion of civilization that thinks it’s hilarious to make awful sexist jokes at work.
Her right to vote is a right to destroy other’s rights with redistribution, censorship, and false rape accusations, to bring in hostile raping refugees while attacking the conservative men who defend her as racists, even though Islam is not a race!
Yeah, it’s just a big coincidence that so many of the people the alt-right hate tend to be black or brown.
She will get a Muslim America in the bargain for her efforts. Women will never take equal responsibility, have equal agency, or be equally courageous. Strip them of power before they destroy civilization.
Honestly, the biggest threat to civilization right now is named Donald Trump, and women are a good deal more likely to vote against him than men.
I say, let’s keep women’s suffrage, at least for now.
I use different utensils for the peanut butter and jelly: a metal spatula like those made for spreading icing on a cake because it can get all the peanut butter in one fell swoop.
A spoon to get the jelly because the jar is smaller and all I need is a spoonful.
Not because of cross contamination, though. Just because a regular butter knife required several dips into the peanut butter to get the desired amount, and because the jelly would slip right off the blade.
I don’t mind jelly and peanut butter getting mixed together. But toast crumbs in the butter? *shudder*
I hate it when you leave peanut butter and jelly on the knife which you set on the counter after use. I mean, would it kill you to toss it into the sink that is literally 3 feet away?!?
You know what’s worse than getting peanut butter in jelly? Getting bits of ground meat in butter. Still worth it to make a tasty, filling lunch though.
EDIT: Well I should probably post what I mean, lest people think of me as someone who puts margarine on meat. I take some seasoned ground taco meat, put it in a flour tortilla, butter the outside, and fill the inside with meat and cheese. I put the taco-thing (I don’t have a name for it) into a panini maker, and take it out when it’s browned. Doesn’t take more than maybe 10 minutes to make, and is really very good. A bit to clean the grill if you use butter though.
Thanks for the edit on that one, it did strike me a bit odd at first that you’d find yourself in a situation in which you’d get ground meat in your margarine 😛
But I mean, I have a friend that eats ketchup on saltine crackers, so I’ve certainly seen stranger things.
I like to melt a cheese sandwich in the microwave. Instead of grilled cheese, which has the crispy toasty bread, I prefer the bread to get mushy and greasy and become one with the cheese (sharp cheddar or pepperjack). That’s my weird food quirk.
@Slutty Miss Havisham Penguin
Thank you.
I’m sorry to hear about the Dyspraxia. I’m sure it can convey some of the experience as there is a kind of awkwardness from having to concentrate on my movements as much as possible. I can be quite clumsy when not paying attention and then more controlled than most people when focused. It’s a condition of extremes. I hope the struggle gives you useful knowledge about the systems that your condition involves.
That thing about the shrinking brains and evolution is a tough one to figure out as far as what it means. Less inhibitory regions can result a functional increase in something for example. I need familiarize myself with the anatomy in question. I’ve read quite a lot about brain anatomy so that I can actually make sense of the meaning of all the anatomical changes in TS, ADHD, autism and such. Some things are thinner, some are thicker and the specifics do match with the details of the features (like thicker regions that represent body-processing). Brains are quite plastic and if there have always been many kinds of people when it comes to behavioral trends, do you have a link by any chance?
With so much diversity the idea of what a human 2.0 might mean is kind of complicated, for all the kinds of humans. Many things that are part of my nature our species could use less off, like the authoritarian streak for example. Some of it is also things that are quite old expressed in a new environment. I honestly believe this is another culture’s version of what I am, but how to make it work today? We are demon possessed in the west.
@Scildfreja
It’s definitely an odd combination. The monkey and lizard have been split apart and the monkey feels the lizard as if it were an external presence. It makes the mortar between the bricks of consciousness stand out like a paper-cut that seamlessly stretches through perception and cognition.
@Kat
You are welcome.
My older cousin used to make me those for a late night snack when I was little and staying over at her house. I LOVED them. But only there. I never ate them at home or when I was older.
Maybe I should give it a try!
@Brony
First, thanks for your reply!
I’m sorry to hear this (still impressed how you’re handling it all, though!).
It’s strange how humans (and other animals), in their most traumatic states reach enlightment like this. I believe that being able to look objectively at oneself is truly a wonderful thing – it gives so much perspective.
Oh, and thanks for the links! They were quite informative (I especially loved the ABC article – it truly brings the hopes up in a gray world like ours that people just do what they do and don’t give a **** about anything bad.)
I wish you all the strength you can get and good luck with everything! If you ever start a blog (or have one) about your journey, I’d love to read it!
@A Space Alpaca: It’s more an example of something that is generally a good idea in the Criminal Law having serious downsides when applied to sexual offences.
However, there’s a lot of wiggle room on limitations. If you were a minor when it happened it’s likely that the limitations timer will only start from when you were of age.
Secondly the timer can be extended for equitable reasons if there is a finding that a plaintiff could have been intimidated out of or otherwise prevented from launching their claim out of fear.
Also the timer doesn’t have to start from the event, it can start from when it was “discovered”, in the USA the case on point says that the timer starts from the time a plaintiff has a “complete and present cause of action”. Now a rape conviction in some jurisdictions depends upon a criminal intention to commit the act of rape (as opposed to intent only being necessary to show for penetration), so a confession of rape may be enough to say that the offence was only “discovered” at the time of confessing.
All told though (sorry if my grasp of US law is a little hazy) I would reckon that sexual offences should have a separate statute of limitations designed intentionally to meet the injustices that come about when victims are afraid to come forward or when the only possibility for conviction is confession.
Now that I’m hungry (damn you, damn you all who mentioned food!) it’s for bacon with chocolate ice cream.
*sigh*
Some of my work-related tasks over the last couple of weeks have really gotten me upset and/or depressed about how people treat each other. And their actions affect the small persons they’re supposed to take care of, supposed to protect…say they love more than life itself.
@Blerkathon
My nym links to my blog. I have had some trouble feeling motivated to update it for a while though. However I’m almost done with a deconstruction of the awful video that Richard Dawkins approvingly tweeted about a couple of months back. It just took me a bit to get functionally fluent in the theories on humor.
I’ve also applied to Freethoughtblogs and if they accept it will focus on neurodiversity, social conflict and places where atheists are the same as the religious. That last one is because most criticism I see of religion in athiesm is pretty shallow and ends up criticizing things that apply to us equally.
When religion is studied the focus is on things like the evolution and nature of society, social rules, role-modeling, social organization and conflict…I don’t need to agree on ultimate issues to care about that stuff, and there is a very interesting resistance to addressing those things in the atheist community.
@Brony
Oh, oops, I see! (I’m sort of new to this site, so I don’t know how everything works just yet… haha.) Thanks!
Interesting choice of topic. Hmm, about that last one, good points. What do you think of those kind of atheists? Are they an interesting subject of study, or just the situation they create?
I would really love to read that.
@Clo
But I might want another PB&J later. What bugs me us rinsing the plate and setting it in the sink instead of the dishwasher.
@WWTH It was Beale. I could have sworn it was Roosh, but I guess I was thinking of his video “All Public Rape Accusations Are False”.
ETA: Sorry, that link goes directly to Alpha Game Plan, but in my defense donotlink.com appears to be broken.
@Blerkathon
Both. I’m still considering the details, but it has to do with the schism in the atheist community over the lase 3-4 years that relates to reactions from people trying to get social justice concerns addressed. It was part of a larger uptick in anti-social justice activity around the net and I actually experienced two schisms at the same time so there was some analysis, but it takes three for solid patterns (the other was as a moderator at a Brony image board).
Basically I saw a bunch of atheists engage in irrational and or illogical activity, social posturing and similar things that we tend to simply frame in terms of it being a problem with religion. We were fine scrutinizing religion when it comes to sexism and sexual abuse, but the moment people tried to get it (and racism, and homophobia, and transphobia…) taken seriously it was all about focusing on the problems in other groups, the same crap we criticized in defenders of religious groups.
Whatever else religion is it objectively exists and has been a benefit to our species independent of appeals to the supernatural, most likely in the area of social organization. Those places will be places where atheists need to think about things because if there are a lot of things getting caught up in the criticism that apply to us to that is a problem. Another example, group socialization is a big thing that many atheists have been put off of simply because of the connections to religion.
I tried bringing this up in an atheist facebook group last week and I had someone who just could not stand seeing religion treated in any positive context. They insisted that I prove that there was no better way than religion to get the benefits of social organization and that I admit that religion does far more harm than good, when those are completely beside the point of understanding what did happen and religion as an expression of social instincts and emotions. So they basically made my point for me which was delicious.
“I always ask people, what will a balanced budget do for the average citizen? For anyone? What actual benefit does it have?”
Speaking as an USian; we could move towards a time where the $223 billion USD that is spent yearly just on interest could be spent on other things? I realize that government spending is different in many ways than personal spending, but borrowing and paying off debt like a fiscally irresponsible frat boy with his first credit card is never good.
Although knocking all the white moms with 6 baby daddies (or whoever the boogey man of the day is) off of welfare won’t solve any budget issues either. Anyone who bitches about welfare usually doesn’t know much about where we spend our money.
@mockingbird
Could it possibly be this radiolab segment about a man who looses the ability to feel emotion after having a tumor removed?
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91642-overcome-by-emotion/
@mrex,
Balancing the budget today has no effect on the amount of money we’ll be spending on interest in the future. Those are loans we already took and still have to pay for.
For the past 5 years or more, investors have been trying to lend money to the US government at roughly 0% interest. There’s no downside to borrowing money right now.
@Orion
“Balancing the budget today has no effect on the amount of money we’ll be spending on interest in the future. Those are loans we already took and still have to pay for.”
Balancing the budget today means we won’t take out more loans and will start paying off the ones we have. The interest goes away when the loans are paid.
“For the past 5 years or more, investors have been trying to lend money to the US government at roughly 0% interest. There’s no downside to borrowing money right now.”
Still a loan, still borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today. I’m not obsessed with balancing the budget, but we’ll have to stop and pay everything off eventually.
The problem with balancing budgets is that austerity increases poverty, which decreases demand, which increases joblessness, which decreases incomes further, which decreases the tax revenue coming in, which makes balancing the budget harder, which means that more austerity is needed. It’s a vicious cycle.
And we don’t actually need to pay off the debt. Creditors are content to just collect the interest. Especially when we’re talking about a country with a large economy. Calling in the debt would collapse the whole global economy and no one benefits from that.
The big difference between a government and a household is that a government is immortal, a household is made of humans who only have so many years of earning money and paying down debts in them so a creditor finds it necessary to make sure the debts are paid.
That’s not to say that there’s no limit to what a government can spend or borrow at all, just that balanced budgets don’t need to be the biggest priority, and in fact, shouldn’t be.
@ WWTH
Creditors prefer to collect the interest. Note that most loan agreements have penalties for early repayment. Even at a governmental level, creditors don’t want the money back (what would they do with it?)
So long as the borrower can service the interest they’d prefer if you kept the principal for as long as possible. That’s why they’re so happy to extend/renew loans.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how state debt (or any debt) operates. We are already “paying off the ones we have.” We don’t have to “start” doing that. Just like with a car loan, the payments started the month after the loan was taken out.
Additionally, in an economic environment of inflation, money is worth more now than it will be in the future so debt is advantageous. If inflation is 2%, I have to grow my money at 2% in order to have the same net buying power later as I have now. So if I loan someone money at 3% interest, and inflation is 2%, I’m only getting a real interest rate of 1%. In other words, I will only have a 1% gain in my buying power in the future, rather than the 3% one might expect. If the interest rate is 0.25% and inflation is 2%, I am literally losing money on this deal and the borrower is making out.
Right now the US government can borrow money for faaaaaaaaaaaar less than inflation, so borrowing money is a fantastic deal … presuming that we spend it on something that pays a dividend in the future, such as infrastructure. The shameful thing about American debt is not that it exists, or how much of it there is, but that we are not spending it on useful shit like infrastructure or educating our young.
Furthermore, there is exactly zero chance that a state that controls its own currency will default on its debt … unless that state is the United States and chooses to do so deliberately. There’s no actual economic reason for that to ever happen. Debt crises occur in states that do not control their currencies, like states that use US dollars as their currency, or EU states that are on the euro. Greece’s debt problems would be resolved tomorrow if Greece still used the drachma instead of the euro.
No, we don’t. Every corporation in world operates in continual, rolling debt, because operating on debt is intelligent. ExxonMobile, despite raking in profits that are impossible for the ordinary human mind to grasp, has massive debt on its books. You can see that for yourself if you bother to read their SEC filings. The entire financial sector is a spinning top made out of debt. There’s not any reason to stop and pay off your debt, ever, and good economic reasons to keep the debt wheel turning.