By David Futrelle
Men’s Rights activists really do seem intent on finding justifications for men to punch women. There’s the “jokey” slogan they like to use: “Equal Rights mean equal lefts.” There was Paul Elam’s “Bash a Violent Bitch Month,” in which he imagined men responding to physical abuse from women by “beat[ing] the living shit out of them. … I mean literally … grab[bing] them by the hair and smack[ing] their face against the wall.”
Now a Redditor calling herself Tozae222 seems to suggest that men should be allowed to hit their partners in response to verbal abuse that pushes them to their “breaking point.”
Apparently that’s what happened with a friend of hers who, as she explains in a post on the Men’s Rights subreddit, has “just been jailed because his ex has finally gotten what she wanted.” By which Tozae222 presumably means enough of a beatdown to leave visible bruises behind, because cops generally don’t arrest anyone for domestic violence if there aren’t physical markings on the victim. But in Tozae222’s mind she made him do it.
“If its never okay to physically abuse a woman, it should never be okay to push a man to breaking point,” Tozae222 writes.
If a woman has got the balls to be in a man’s face being verbally abusive, even physically they should be prepared to cop the same back.
You’re not entitled to respond to abuse with abuse of your own. And you’re definitely not entitled to escalate — to respond to a finger wagging in your face with a punch –which is presumably more or less what her jailed friend did.
NO one deserves to be screamed at in nose to nose distance. NO one deserves to be constantly threatened that they’re going to leave or going to take their kids away. NO one deserves to be belittled infront of family and friends.
Well, no. All that is clearly abusive behavior. But what it isn’t is an excuse to respond with a punch — even if, in your mind at least, you’ve been “pushed to the breaking point,” whatever that means.
And just who in this scenario gets to define what this “breaking point” is? Some men see any “backtalk” as such a threat to their fragile masculinity that they respond with physical violence. Should these men be able to tell the cops that “she pushed me to the breaking point” and thus wiggle out of any arrest for physical violence? Violence is never the answer, even if the woman in question has been shrieking like a banshee in her partner’s face. Even if someone on Reddit thinks the victim “has finally gotten what she wanted.” This is the case regardless of the genders of those involved.
Hell, even if the woman in question resorted to physical violence herself, the response must be proportionate. You can defend yourself; but you can’t give someone a concussion.
Naturally, this being the Men’s Rights subreddit, most of the regulars responded warmly to Tozae222’s argument, and her post got 100 upvotes. “You’re a really good person and I don’t get to say that often,” wrote one new fan of hers. “That really nice to hear,” wrote another.
Only one commenter had the temerity to suggest that escalating a verbal fight into physical violence was a bad idea.
Maybe there’s a good reason why some people call the Men’s Rights movement an abusers’ movement,
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@Ohlmann:
I have a certain amount of sympathy for the constructivist mindset.
(There’s a reason why the old joke about the physicist, the engineer, and the mathematician woken up by a fire in a hotel room with a fire extinguisher nearby ends with ‘and the mathematician, having determined that there existed a solution to the problem, went back to sleep’.)
And it is, as you say, very much a conservative attitude.
The main problem I see with pure constructivism pretty much is how conservative it is: it just doesn’t expand the boundaries of mathematics much. A number of problems need to be solved by non-constructivist approaches before somebody even has an idea on how to start with a constructivist proof. It’s kind of a depth versus breadth issue.
By which I mean that mathematics is probably best served by having both approaches actively in use.
Your bit about real numbers is well-taken: Cantor’s diagonal and all that. The number of real numbers is infinitely greater than the already-infinite number of numbers that can be algebraically defined.
Of course, Schlafly probably has problems with hierarchies of infinities as well. That’s something that’s difficult for most people to grasp, but it really sticks in the craw of the over-literal religious sorts that believe in one overarching infinite presence and resent the concept that there might be anything past that.
I seem to recall Schlafly is one of those people who doesn’t believe in Einstein’s theory of relativity either, because moral relativism is a horrible thing. And yes, that makes exactly as much sense as it sounds like.
@Alan Robertshaw
I didn’t know that. The Ancient Mayans also used base 20, and since I was interested in that culture growing up, I taught myself to use the Mayan number system. Somewhere I’ve still probably got pages of arithmetic done out in base 20 that I did while bored in classes.
Alternative base is alway interesting. I am a sucker for prime number base, because it make fractions somewhat simpler, albeit I guess it’s way too much effort to change base now.
@Surplus : insofar as a number have a physical meaning, it’s indeed reasonably easy to find use for complex numbers, as well as quaternions and all the higher order additions. It’s much easier than for most irrational number even, since each time you have coordinate on a plane you can use complex numbers, while measurables values seem to never be a continuum.
Also, I might be wrong on that, but don’t you need quaternions to solve x^4 + 1 = 0 ?
@Jenora : I do agree that constructivism have shown to have too much limits. Its best interest now in my opinion is that it help remember that mathematicals constructions and limits are somewhat arbitrary and philosophy-based.
An example of when it’s good to remember that is when physic scientists are forced to renormalize their equations because they end up with infinite or otherwise absurd values.
Those guys are so “sensitive”…
x^4 + 1 = 0 should have four solutions in the complex plane. Indeed, x^8 must equal one, so the solutions will be eighth roots of unity, and those are +/- 1, +/- i, and (1/2)*(+/- √2 +/- i√2). All of the first four raised to the fourth give +1, so it’s those last four, on the unit circle on the main diagonals, that must be the fourth roots of -1.
It’s easy enough to check: if we let a = +/- √2 and b = +/- i√2, (a + b)^2 = a^2 + 2ab + b^2 must be 2 +/- 4i + 2i^2, which reduces to the +/- 4i part. The actual point was a/2 + b/2, so the square will be the square of (a + b) divided by four, so +/- i. Another squaring, of either, gives -1.
The yan tan tethera, the vigesimal system used to count sheep, is a vestige of the time when Brythonic languages (and particularly Cumbric) were spoken in Northwest England and Galloway. You can see this by comparing the numbers of the yan tan tethera,
with the same numbers in modern Welsh,