Sunday, May 25, 2014

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about Elliot Rodger, the crazed misogynist killer in Santa Barbara, and the rightbloggers who don't see what's so sexist about his feverish rants. My only regret is that Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser hasn't said anything about it yet. Well, I can always update.

UPDATE. FMguru informs me in comments Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser has weighed in, and I swear to Christ this is her headline:
The Elliot Rodger Case: If Pick-Up Artists Are Guilty, Then So Are the Feminists
DMOP hears that women are getting plenty of mental health care but men aren't. What might the cause of that be? Is it that men often don't like to admit they need help, as the feminazi National Institute of Mental Health suggests? Or are all those "you must have a vagina to enter" signs at psych wards keeping them out? For Dr. Mrs. it's not a tough call: "Perhaps it is the feminists and their supporters who block funding and education going to boys’ and men’s issues that are to blame," she says. Don't worry if the feminized shrinks don't want your money, fellas, DMOP's man clinic is always open.

366 comments:

  1. The amazing part about the responses to this - whether from the brethren or from the PUA/incel/MGTOW/women-hating crowd - is that they all assume that this was a rational act. Well, of course he sprayed a street with gunfire - he wasn't having sex, the liberals promised him sex, it was bound to happen. The fact that he was an extreme narcissist who was taught that women owed him whatever he wanted obviously had nothing to do with it.

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  2. LittlePig7:01 PM

    Ah, para-military wing of the MRA. Gotcha'

    (I heard some of the manifesto on the radio. I feel sorry for the poor bastard, though sorrier for the poor folks that no earthly idea of why there were being killed).

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  3. M. Krebs7:28 PM

    This PUA is a thing? And all these years I've thought that Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia was fictional.

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  4. MBouffant7:35 PM

    Meanwhile, the AP has revealed a certain, shall we say, bias in their reportage, which I am looking to make a big deal from. If any of you out there aren't slacking on the big three-day (but a wk. early) wknd., & "have a platform," you might want to disseminate some words or whatnot concerning this.

    Also web-log pimping, but Tengrain's got a better item to link/retweet.

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  5. MBouffant7:43 PM

    Just go ahead & shoot yourself now it's as real as reality telebision:
    The Pickup Artist is a tale of transformation. For these eight lovable losers, "socially awkward" is the understatement of the year. And when it comes to this lonely hearts club, desperate times call for desperate measures. Enter Mystery, best-selling author and ultimate pick-up artist--a former nerd from the Great White North who has discovered the secret to wooing women. Under his expert tutelage, he'll guide this group of hapless horndogs through the rough waters of romance and help them find the courage to overcome their biggest fear--talking to women.

    In The Pickup Artist, eight misfits will live together, learn together and love together as they compete for the title of "Master Pick-Up Artist." Over the course of eight episodes, the men will learn the ins and outs of the Mystery Method-- "how to open a set," "the number close" and "the kiss close" among others. Aided by his faithful wingmen, Matador and J Dog, Mystery will teach these average guys how to turn the women of their dreams into the women of their reality.

    But this seduction school isn't confined the classroom. After each lesson, Mystery's awkward apprentices will put theory into practice, hitting bars, clubs and coffee houses in an attempt to make a love connection. Via hidden cameras, Mystery is always watching to see who's got potential and who's got to go.

    In each episode, one contestant will be declared the winner of a challenge and granted immunity from elimination, while one sad sack will be sent packing. At the end of the eight weeks, one winner will be named "Master Pickup Artist" and awarded $50,000.

    They may not all win the prize, but every pick-up protégé departs with the tools he'll need to change his life forever.

    Who will rise to the occasion? Who will crack under the pressure? And who will become...The Pickup Artist?

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  6. Kordo8:01 PM

    Baker has enough shame (or whatever impulse passes for it in his reality) to go with the selective editing dodge. Feyerick states flat-out that there will be no discussing anything that might rile up the gun nuts.
    http://crooksandliars.com/2014/05/cnn-guest-shames-anchor-banning-gun

    Socrates may be laughing, but Ed Murrow is bawling his fucking eyes out...

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  7. TheLawyerCheneyShotInTheFace8:23 PM

    Geez, where's Ted Nugent when you really need?

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  8. FlipYrWhig8:25 PM

    The things that "postmodern leftists" supposedly believe in, according to Roy's Pundit Zoo, don't seem to have any relation to either postmodernism or leftism. Why, it's almost as though the people using those terms have no idea what they mean and employ them as synonyms for "diabolical evil"!

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  9. eohippus8:32 PM

    I remember being young, lonely, broke and awkward looking.* I was once intrigued by the PUA thing, because it is far easier to believe that you only need to perfect a 'technique' to get women than it is to acknowledge that you might be a loser with no prospects.

    Even then, I was repelled by the cold, mechanical, purely-manipulative approach. The woman-as-a-person was an obstacle; a padlock that held a pair of legs closed, if you could only figure out the combination. I didn't know much about myself, but I knew I was not that guy.

    *I am now middle aged, happy, not-so-broke and awesome looking. I grew into it.

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  10. "Postmodern" is a term beloved by conservatives with pretenses towards intellectualism. It appears to mean the same thing when they say it as "communist" or "socialist" do when used by their lessers - a generic term for ebil liberals. You also occasionally hear it among theocons, usually as a synonym for "atheist" or "secular." I don't think any of them know what the term actually means. Ask me if this surprises me.

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  11. Kordo9:24 PM

    I can't claim innocence, myself. I remember being insanely jealous of guys who had figured out how to get girls to sleep with them. I just knew it was all about girls' determination to inflict lifelong virginity on me (back then, an avid interest in SciFi, D & D, and science wasn't the chick-magnet it is these days; Felicia Days existed, but they were as awkward and unlikely to approach me as I was them) Then I turned 14, and got over myself. Somehow, my hormone-addled brain clued into the fact that girls were People, and not walking vaginas. Turns out if you treat them like people, and not targets, they're much more amenable to the idea of spending time around you. Who knew?

    The weirdest thing about these MRA-PUA clowns, for me, is the fact of grown men, apparently large numbers of them, who somehow go through life without seeing 51% of their fellow humans as human. I wouldn't know how to begin to talk to one, to set them straight, because I can't even figure out a point of common reference...

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  12. Atticus Dogsbody9:29 PM

    "really traumatized" at first seeing porn



    The first time I saw porn (not page 3 boobs, but a lady and a gent performing the act.) at the tender age of 12, my reaction was "Oh, righto. I get it now."



    Although, I do admit that given my knowledge of male genitalia was limited to the sight of the mushroom caps my peers were aiming at the urinal at school and having seen my dad and older brother naked, the great big thing that the gent was waving around like a baby's arm holding an apple was somewhat disconcerting.

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  13. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person10:12 PM

    and the rightbloggers who don't see what's so sexist about his feverish rants

    OK, that beggars belief. Now I'll go get my belief beggar'd. I hope it doesn't hurt...

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  14. hellslittlestangel10:19 PM

    I thought the right-whinge had already concluded that the killer was gay. Why is it so hard to keep up with people who are so fucking stupid?

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  15. redoubtagain10:21 PM

    Ugh. The scurrying to blame this on "leftism" reminds me of how they tried to blame these actions on "leftism". . .

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  16. When I was a kid, I signed up for some PUA-esque email newsletter and proceeded to pretty much ignore it. When I finally read one of those newsletters, it was more amusing than anything - a mix of common sense advice (be confident, mind your appearance, etc) and some ridiculous "techniques" that only made sense if you assumed that women were replicants. Pretty typical for the time, treating relationships like they were video games and they were handing you the Contra code.


    I've seen what these guys preach now, and it's actually gotten way worse. The Mystery/NLP/speed seduction crap that was popular 10-15 years ago was disrespectful, but it was more silly than anything. These days, what you get from PUAs includes advice on date rape, finding abused women (and abusing them further) and sex tourism.

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  17. petesh10:28 PM

    No. There is no such occasion. Really. Better music, worse PoS, you can find it. Easily.

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  18. i find myself in sympathy with the brethren this time; a real sexist would've gone on to twitter or started a blog in order to prove his superiority and victimize women he's never met.

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  19. In fairness, I studied postmodernism for my PhD, and I could only give you a partial, provisional definition. That's part of the point, really. But...yeah, especially having studied it, it's always weird to me when wingnuts hurl the term around as a general term of abuse.

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  20. eohippus10:45 PM

    They don't understand what it means, and that's scary, and scary things = the leftist agenda, so they know it means that.

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  21. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person10:50 PM

    Did we mention Althouse is a professor of law?

    Althouse and her ilk are the best argument for Two-Year Law. Cutting exposure to this sort of idiocy by 33% can't be bad...

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  22. These guys have studied enough PoliSci to have heard postmodernism referred to as an extreme or radical leftist position. I don't think it goes farther than that. It makes a little bit of sense when the theocons use it, since their absolutist beliefs would obviously clash with the subjective po-mo worldview. But the examples Roy dug up are just nonsense.

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  23. I think it may be because they are soooooo fucking stupid.

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  24. eohippus10:58 PM

    Ah yes, the Internet has a way of reifying things to their essential natures, and PUA is strictly for assholes.

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  25. mortimer200010:59 PM

    Yeah. I'm sure somewhere Pamela Geller is disappointed that this killer's manifesto doesn't mention her at all.

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  26. gocart mozart10:59 PM

    In other news, DeadBrietbart and Fox are part of a conspiracy to cover up Obama's crimes or so says Joe the Plumber.

    http://joeforamerica.com/2014/05/breitbart-bury-birther-issue-fearing-government/

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  27. M. Krebs11:12 PM

    Here's what postmodern means to me: Warhol, Derrida, and crappy architecture. Am I way off base?

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  28. M. Krebs11:14 PM

    And you keep trying to grasp something, anything, that makes sense.

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  29. hellslittlestangel11:17 PM

    I see. I haven't been using enough O's. D'oh!

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  30. DocAmazing11:21 PM

    They've had years of practice arguing that Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire were color-blind. Ignoring Rodger's misogyny was something they spent a long time preparing for, like an examination that they knew was coming. They passed; they advance in the Wingnut Welfare Sweepstakes.

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  31. M. Krebs11:21 PM

    Holy fuck. Can't these people find something else to occupy their minds for a few hours? They tell me that TV is better than ever.

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  32. This thing's not even 48 hours old, and you can already put a column together from various bloggers (not just random Twitter or YouTube dipsticks) being awful examples of human beings. Ain't that a helluva note.

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  33. BadExampleMan11:33 PM

    Men didn't cry back then. He's just gloriously stinking drunk on blended whiskey.

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  34. AGoodQuestion11:34 PM

    From Warner T-H

    What we need to do in this country is eliminate the college education as a prerequisite for every last entry-level job.



    You may think that the spread of jobs with college degree requirements is the result of corporations instructing their HR departments to look for them, in essence to thin out the herd. Know this, though. It's actually gay studies professors behind it (if you know what I mean and I think you do), seeing an opportunity to get their hooks in America's innocent youth (if you know etc.)

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  35. AGoodQuestion11:43 PM

    Shorter Donald Douglas: "I'm rubber, libtards are glue."

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  36. M. Krebs11:44 PM

    I went probing around at http://www.pick-up-artist-forum.com, and they seem to be just a bunch of sad dorks who want to get laid. Maybe they aren't representative. Seems like the nuts tend toward the PUA Haters club.


    A little as it is, I already know more than I want to know.

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  37. FlipYrWhig11:47 PM

    If there's any thought to it, and not just that they parrot each other's rhetoric without understanding it (the way parrots do), it's probably that they've conflated "postmodernism" with "relativism." How "leftist" got in there, like the elephant in the pajamas, I'll never know.

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  38. FlipYrWhig11:50 PM

    Tenderloin, tenterhooks, it all makes sense now.

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  39. M. Krebs11:52 PM

    Aw Jesus. I think I can already hear his stubby little fingers typing out a response, with Mad Jewess egging him on.

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  40. AGoodQuestion11:52 PM

    He's still all about the birth certificate. None of the wingnuts have clued him in that Benghazi is where it's at now? Or he just distrusts foreign-sounding words on principle?

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  41. Megalon12:05 AM

    "...I couldn't hate Elliot Rodger. He was too pathetic to hate, like a ventriloquist's dummy."

    I can certainly hate him. In fact, it sounds it would be hard to find someone more easily hateable. I can also hate those quoted in Roy's column. For them it seems the real tragedy isn't the murders but that it might make them look bad and that trying to stop them from happening again might inconvenience them. They're the same sort of narcissistic sociopaths as Rodgers, the only difference is in degree.

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  42. Christopher Hazell12:10 AM

    My mind is boggled...


    Like, if somebody has a popular opinion, and they jump on this distressingly frequent "Kill a bunch of people and then yourself" trend that's sweeping the nation, I get why people get defensive about it.


    Like, just because a killer played Doom doesn't mean that caused his crime.


    I would not have thought there was such an audience for blatant misogyny, especially when it was so directly tied to the crime. Like, the guy talks about and then does kill a bunch of men and women because women are his property and other men are stealing them.


    Does that viewpoint have so many adherents that they need to go to bat for it?


    It's like if he had said "I hate black people" and then shot up a black church, would this pile of whackadoos go on about how he wasn't racist, just hateful and brainwashed by the left?


    Why for Christ's sake?

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  43. DocAmazing12:12 AM

    This incident is very recent, but there's nothing new under the sun...
    http://poietes.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/he-man-woman-haters-club-bw.jpg

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  44. I really am beyond joking about this. The whole thing reminds me of the many cases of angry young male spree killers taking aim at young women, stalking young women, choosing places where they think they can find the most young women to take out. I'm sending my first child to college in the fall and she's going to a historic women's college. I know fate is the thing that creeps up on you wherever you are but still I'm chilled, just chilled, at the realization that there is a not insignificant number of damaged and armed young men out there who see nothing wrong or even difficult about killing women anymore than a hunter sees anything wrong with shooting an animal.

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  45. I would have said it's a vole in their pajamas, but that's postmodernism for you.

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  46. What's weird to me is discovering how many young boys and men go through this awkward period and seem surprised and distressed by it. Girls go through an awkward phase, too--its called your entire life. People criticize the way you look, dress, makeup, hair, the way you stand, whether you smile enough, how you sit.


    Not only are there magazines that explain how to improve yourself and get a mate but every adult in your life considers him/herself an expert on how you can fix yourself up. Despite being lectured, nagged, cosmetically enhanced, and humiliated on a daily basis until you "get" the right status boyfriend and perform your function of being attached to a guy this is considered so normal that rebellion or withdrawal are not considered an option. If you don't like it, or can't handle it, the only thing to do is to take up anorexia or bulimia or addiction to something. Very few girls pick up a gun. I guess what I'm saying is that even our despair is gendered.

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  47. Daniel Björkman12:49 AM

    I can actually answer that, seeing as I've believed just about everything at one point or another, and is somewhat of an expert at hating stuff besides. :P
    First off, you say "misogyny" like it's something people will naturally realise is bad and something to back away from. But every opinion - every single one - seems perfectly normal to the person holding it. The fact that something is misogyny will not make a misogynist think it's bad, only that it's being misunderstood by society at large.
    Secondly, men who are feeling hurt and angry because the whole "get a sex life" thing that everyone assumes is going to happen at some point (and which, yes, our society considers absolutely vital and necessary for human worth) just didn't happen for them without them being able to understand why... well, men like that are a thing. Human nature being what it is, they're unlikely to be philosophical about it, so they're going to blame someone - and if you are angry about not getting sex, who are you going to be angry at other than the people who, in the ideal version of your life, would be having sex with you but aren't?
    I mean, I suppose the completely rational thing to do would be to be angry at the sex-obsessed society that creates those idiotic criteria for who is and is not a worthwhile person in the first place, but when are people ever that rational? So yeah. Angry and hurt male virgins lashing out at women exist. And some people who aren't among their numbers can still see enough of themselves in them (in a "there but for the grace of God" sort of way) to want to defend them and their perspective.
    And, well, most of these bitter and hateful no-sex-having men do not in fact go on killing sprees. Talk shit about women online, yes, go on killing sprees, no. You can hate someone an awful lot without getting violent about it - case in point, the fact that I haven't killed any libertarians yet.
    As for the guy-shooting-up-a-black-church example... uhm, yes? Of course the right-wing pundits would make that argument. Seriously, where have you been that you haven't come to expect that? :P

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  48. badJim12:59 AM

    What I find striking about the whole phenomenon is that these guys feel frustrated that they can't get a beautiful blonde girlfriend. It can't be just an average girl, it seems. "Love the one you're with" was the theme when I was growing up. Maybe that was just the hippie thing.


    Now they're insisting that since they're alphas they won't settle for less than an alpha mate, defined strictly in terms of sexual appeal, as though a woman is the same sort of status accessory as a luxury car.

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  49. Daniel Björkman1:01 AM

    I think it's because for girls, there are in fact all those magazines and lectures and nagging adults. It's pretty clear to girls what they should be, even if it's something that's unrealistic and borderline-unattainable.
    Boys, on the other hand, are told to be themselves - are told, in fact, that to restrain their natural behaviour in any way is to be weak and unmanly. It's just that they're also told to be themselves while being massively socially and sexually successful. This either works or not, but it if doesn't work, then there is just nowhere to go from there, because you already did exactly what you were told to do, and it inexplicably didn't work.
    Most men who end up in that state of confusion deal with it in non-gun-related ways, of course.

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  50. Spaghetti Lee1:08 AM

    I agree that assholes have always existed, and twitter and other sites just give them a fast and easy outlet for assholism. Similarly, it wasn't until the invention of indoor plumbing that mankind could transport human waste in vast quantities, rather than just flinging it out the window and hitting whoever happened to be there. Sometimes a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind.

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  51. Wowbeta1:25 AM

    3 years ago Rebecca Watson was crucified - even by Richard Dawkins - for saying a man following her to her hotel and soliciting her for sex when she was alone with him in an elevator was creepy. Now do you f*ckers understand why she was afraid ? Sure, "not all men" will stalk you in a hotel eleator but #YesAllWomen would be creeped out

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  52. Pope Zebbidie XIII1:43 AM

    as though a woman is the same sort of status accessory as a luxury car.


    For these people a beautiful women is a status accessory to a luxury car.

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  53. Spaghetti Lee1:43 AM

    I don't get it either. I guess some people are just wired that way. I mean, in theory I should be an easy target for these guys with my recluse lifestyle and total lack of a sex life, both of which I can work up a good angst about when I'm in the mood. But even in my darkest moments it would have never occurred to me to blame women as a whole group and put them at fault for my struggles. If I blamed or hated a single person, it was myself, and just the winds of fate and genetics for making me fat, dorky, and clumsy instead of cool and attractive.

    Even if someone is stuck in the women-as-prize mindset, it seems like a bizarre leap of logic. Why convince yourself that the one thing you're striving for is actually worthless or actively antagonistic? Where's that going to get you? I have to think people who think that just hate women no matter what, and would come up with an excuse to hate women even if they were getting laid all the time.

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  54. Pope Zebbidie XIII1:48 AM

    The man was staying at the same hotel and had been talking to her (as part of a group). But Rebecca had every right to be annoyed and creeped. Dawkins tarnished himself quite a bit there.

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  55. This tragedy was the result of an MRA/NRA synergy.

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  56. They view women as objects and the Entertainment Industrial Complex has held blonde women with thin waists and impossibly large breasts as the ideal. All those movies and the more mainstream spank mags are basically advertisements and these schmucks see Pamela Anderson as the equivalent of a Maserati.

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  57. Spaghetti Lee2:04 AM

    This would seem to be the point where "for whatever liberals are against and vice-versa" descends from parlor game into gibbering madness. As far as I can tell, the shooter acted for non-political reasons, but I guess these guys are just so used to having to defend mass-murdering psychos who blame the government or the Left in their death screeds that they just automatically assumed this guy was one of theirs too, so they could establish that and get busy on the project of loudly proclaiming that he was not one of theirs and it's all the left's fault.

    To the extent that there's a unified left-wing response to this sort of senseless violence, it's something like "This may have something to do with how society trains men to view and treat women, and we should try to change that". And their response is that mass murder of innocents is preferable to ever admitting that gender relations in society are messed up and they have helped maintain those messed-up relations with their own sexism. They'd apparently rather every misogynist on earth kill a bunch of random people than even one misogynist admit that he's wrong. Because that would be admitting that The Left Was Right and they are so completely psychotically paralyzed by fear of admitting so that it becomes their only guiding principle: they are literally defending murder rather than admitting anything that could ever be construed as conservative will ever be used to hurt people or do wrong.

    I know I'm kind of babbling here, but what the hell can someone say to this? It's insane. Absolute madness. What is wrong with these people?

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  58. It's just another "one weird trick" scam.

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  59. This tragedy was a convergence of two right-wing narratives: on the one hand, there's the MRA narrative, which posits that women are evil, castrating sluts who withhold sex from worthy males in order to torment them. The second is the NRA narrative, which posits that a "good guy with a gun" has moral justification for killing "evil doers". Here we have a narcissist with a gun who thinks that women are evil- he combines these two narratives and the end result is 7 corpses in a college town.

    It's the whole "Rush attacks Sandra Fluke" thing, but with guns instead of a microphone.

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  60. Brian Schlosser2:36 AM

    It may not be overtly political, but I have never run across a genuine PUA/MRA type who was not a Republican or worse. Lots of Libertarians in that nest of addle-pated adders.

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  61. Brian Schlosser2:38 AM

    Exactly. All his guns and ammo, legally purchased, despite a known history of violence and mental illness.

    I would APPLAUD if there was a law that said someone with my suite of ICD.9 codes was prohibited from owning guns.

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  62. Brian Schlosser2:41 AM

    The alpha/beta things makes me foam at the mouth. They can't even keep it straight themselves. Half the time they are complaning that women spoil themselves with Alphas, leaving them, the poor Betas fuckless and Forever Alone. Then they turn around and say they ARE Alphas who deserve hot and cold running pussy 24/7.

    They should have read more than the back of Brave New World, then they might know they are really Epsilon Minus Semi-Morons

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  63. Spaghetti Lee2:45 AM

    Oh, that's my experience too. Crank magnetism and all that. I guess my thinking is that if you're willing to get yourself killed over it (or spend life in jail if you do survive) you've got issues that go beyond politics. I can't hate this guy as deeply as I hate the people and groups who got him thinking this way and are now dodging all responsibility for it and the people who are jumping in to exploit it for their own ends. I've contemplated suicide before over my lack of human contact (sexual and non), so I guess I can't not sympathize with this guy on some level, no matter how loathsome his MRA politics were.

    Maybe he could have gotten psychiatric help. Maybe he was a good guy who got steered wrong. Maybe he was an asshole through and through. I sure don't know, and society at large never will. When you die at 22, it's hard to tell.

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  64. Brian Schlosser2:47 AM

    All PUA's are sexist creeps, as are all men who label themselves MRAs. PUA's view women as literally nothing but fuckable meat, breathing Fleshlights. The claim to "love" women, but its like a person loves a pet, or a type of fruit. Its not healthy.

    The Mens Rights Movement may have roots in noble ideas like Father's Rights and Prison Reform, but it has been entirely corrupted now and is beyond saving as a banner under which to fight for those good ideas/

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  65. Brian Schlosser2:49 AM

    Was he mentally ill? Yes. Was he competent to stand trial, had he lived. Hell yes. Its absolutely easy to hate him. The Right always says we hate too much (it's always projection), but in cases like this I say fuck it, lets act like they expect.

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  66. Spaghetti Lee2:50 AM

    Not that I want to particularly spend time studying these guys, but I sense a difference between the guys who are dazzled by their own mastery of how to manipulate and control women, and guys who are mostly frustrated by their personal lack of a sex life and seek advice from the first group. The alphas and betas, respectively, of their own subculture, as long as we're using such terms.

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  67. Brian Schlosser2:50 AM

    That quote is a perfect example of being right for all the wrong reasons.

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  68. Wrangler2:52 AM

    Your perspective on this is really valuable, Aimai.


    When I was about 16 I was working the closing shift at my summer job (Hobby Lobby!). I got held up for some reason and so I was the last person to leave along with my manager. As I was departing she asked me if I would accompany her to her car. That was an odd request to me, but there didn't seem to be anything particularly wrong with it so I obliged. I told this to my mom later when I got home and she filled me in on the obvious. It had seriously never occurred to me that one could be wary of going from a retail store to the parking lot just because it's weakly lit and empty and you're a woman. Pretty much my next thought was, "Oh shit. What if she isn't scared for generic reasons? What if it's for historical reasons? What if she's worried because she's been attacked before?"


    This is a silly story, but it pretty much blew my mind in half at the time (it also really depressed me: my mom, my sister, my girlfriend... they are all right there. How can I be so oblivious to something so obvious? It's embarrassing.) It also taught me, as a white guy, how much relevant experience starts precisely when one is neither white nor a guy, so it is important for me to be quiet and listen to what other people are saying about their own experiences. The internet may feel like a common cesspool most of the time, but I think it has actually been very, very useful for picking up this kind of information.

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  69. Brian Schlosser2:53 AM

    Orly Taitz recently revealed some information...

    Hey gang, we're gettin' the band back together! Party like it's 2009!!

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  70. Brian Schlosser2:53 AM

    Isn't 24 back on?

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  71. Brian Schlosser2:56 AM

    Also Jasper Johns

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  72. Spaghetti Lee2:56 AM

    Hey now, I can assure you that I've never tried to emotionally manipulate my cat into having sex with me.

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  73. Brian Schlosser2:57 AM

    Also, it has something to with the book learnin' down t' th' College.

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  74. Wrangler2:58 AM

    Sorry, Roy. I love your writing but I can't read this one, mostly for the same reasons why I won't watch Salo ever again.

    ReplyDelete
  75. Brian Schlosser2:59 AM

    It's a code for me to ignore them harder.

    Like when a Freshman Princeton student writes a whiny essay about White Privilege, and he uses the word "weltanschauung" unironically in his opening paragraph, I know I can ignore everything else he says.

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  76. Brian Schlosser3:02 AM

    http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com

    David Futrelle's wonderful site picking apart PUA/MRA/MGTOW idiocy. Check it out, if you want to learn more about the loathsome bastards.

    ReplyDelete
  77. Brian Schlosser3:02 AM

    And that's the sanitized, Edited for TeeVee version...

    ReplyDelete
  78. Brian Schlosser3:07 AM

    That's true, to an extant. But they also loathe what you might call "Natural Alphas", which are the dudes who don't HAVE to be PUAs to get laid (AKA, normal, well adjusted guys).

    Sadly, I am drawn to these idiots like I am drawn to creepy bugs and those photoshops of people with lotus pods in their skin. I study them too much...

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  79. hellslittlestangel3:09 AM

    Post-modernism is what you complain about when your audience is too highbrow to listen to you complaining about arugula.

    ReplyDelete
  80. Brian Schlosser3:10 AM

    The kind of guy who yearns for the day they invent a Vagina Equipped car, so he no longer burns his dick in the tailpipe...

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  81. Brian Schlosser3:11 AM

    Slip a little 'nip into their milk... #notallToms

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  82. Brian Schlosser3:13 AM

    Not the editing, then, I take it

    ReplyDelete
  83. Brian Schlosser3:15 AM

    Who want's to bet we see a #NotAllGunOwners tag pop up?

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  84. Vani Triana3:32 AM

    and the rightbloggers who don't see what's so sexist about his feverish rants

    OK, that beggars belief. Now I'll go get my belief beggar'd. I hope it doesn't hurt...

    Berita Today

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  85. Jeffrey_Kramer3:40 AM

    Constant rejection leading to embitterment and resentment is pretty well-accepted....


    Yes, but I really doubt that was the primary dynamic in this case. If somebody has grown up being told that anybody can get a good job if he (or even she) studies hard and applies himself, and finds that things aren't working out that way, we can understand why he might look for explanations for his failure in terms of the bankers' conspiracy or the Jewish conspiracy, etc. And that's one way we try accounting for the militia movement, etc.


    And we may tend to try accounting for this murderer with something like the same frame: he was told, via porn or popular culture, that anybody can get laid in college if he practices personal hygiene and can memorize a few lines. When he found things weren't working out that way, he looked for explanations in terms of the feminist conspiracy.


    But that does not seem at all likely in this case. He describes himself as a 22-year-old who has never been kissed, and I think far-and-away the most likely reason (assuming he's telling the truth) is that the women he approached sensed something dangerous about him, and stayed clear. In other words, it not that rejection turned him into an embittered misogynist who saw women as conspiring to deprive him of his sexual entitlements, it's more likely that women correctly perceived that he was a misogynist who thought of them as existing for his sexual pleasure, and that caused the rejection.

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  86. Spaghetti Lee3:46 AM

    Yeah, that probably makes more sense than my explanation. Lets the guy off the hook less too. That's like the missing link for so many of these guys: if you hate women, think they're evil and manipulative and can't be trusted and are working against you, they'll think the same about you. Treat them decently and they (might) return your affections. Is the entire MRA culture just guys who were out sick on the day they learned about the golden rule in kindergarten?

    Like I said, I obviously can get pretty mopey about this stuff, but the idea that women, as a group, are rejecting me on principle because feminism is telling them too, rather than me just not being their type...I mean, I can't even wrap my head around that enough to argue against it. I don't know what causes someone to think that way: where does such madness incubate? Just fuck everything about this story, I guess.

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  87. Jeffrey_Kramer3:50 AM

    I think it means something like "up-is-downism" for the right; that is, they're convinced that claims like "America's founders were flawed human beings" or "Western imperialism did play a major role in creating the conditions for Islamic extremism" are just exercises in cynical trolling. We liberals who say such things must simply reject the very notion of "true vs. false" if we can proclaim such fantastical paradoxes as these.

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  88. montag23:54 AM

    The University of New Mexico has a huge wasteland of a parking lot that abuts Central Ave. in Albuquerque (the old downtown Rt. 66, which, further west, is pretty seedy), so women were very understandably worried about having to walk it after dark.

    A few years ago, there were a number of assaults/rapes/attempted rapes in or near that lot in a fairly short period of time, lots of incidents in the news, which, of course, generated considerable heightened awareness of the need for safety.

    Didn't take long for that heightened awareness to be transformed, a) into a pick-up technique (meet new women by offering to walk them to their car or the bus stop, and, b) every pervert on campus suddenly got the idea that offering to escort a potential target through the lot at night was a neat way of guaranteeing a victim.

    Maybe Kant was right about that crooked timber thing.

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  89. Spaghetti Lee3:56 AM

    Which is weird, because so many of these assholes actively pride themselves on being 'unconventional': feminism is actually bad for women! Affirmative action is bad for minorities! Unemployment insurance is bad for the unemployed! And so on.

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  90. Jeffrey_Kramer3:58 AM

    It probably wouldn't work anyway. Now, golden retrievers... they fall for it every time.


    Or so I've been told.

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  91. badJim4:07 AM

    Rebecca Watson contributes occasionally at Popular Science. What she writes is unsurprisingly sensible.

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  92. Christopher Hazell4:27 AM

    Well, I get it from that angle; I also have really severe depression, combined with Aperger's which makes it very hard to emotionally read people.

    The short version is that I seriously can't tell when people are interested in me and I'm terrified/don't know how to show interest on my end.

    There is very much a cultural perception that, essentially, nobody has that problem.

    I get the appeal of the whole PUA thing on those grounds; I see the appeal of an approach to dating that non-judgmentally says "Okay, we're going to work from the premise that none of this is intuitively easy for you."

    It's just that the whole PUA scene seems to be filled with shitty assholes.

    I actually feel weird talking about how frightening/confusing sexuality is to me because not only is that kind of generally shameful in society, there's now this whole subculture of internet people who are not just awkward with the ladies, but also horrible, unsympathetic people. I really, really really do not want to be or be seen as one of those people.

    Anyway, though, it's still really weird to me that Roy found at least a couple of people who just outright deny that there's any misogyny here at all.

    Like, if you wanted to defend Islam in the face of this story you'd probably say something like "Not all Muslims believe in death for apostasy!"



    On the other hand, it would be pretty damn weird to say, "I don't see what this has to do with Islam, assuming there even is such a thing as Islam, which I very much doubt."


    And yet there, on the fringes, are people denying that this textbook misogynist is a misogynist.

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  93. Daniel Björkman4:36 AM

    Mmm. I am very skeptical to the common claims that women have an infallible sixth sense for dangerous craziness. Neurotypical people in general are always telling me how sharp their instincts are, but I can't help but notice that quite frequently they seem to trust the wrong person.



    Still, clearly there was something wrong with him above and beyond being socially unsuccessful - because again, most people are capable of hating other people, hating society and hating their lives without going on killing sprees over it (and I have both the years of foaming-at-the-mouth blog posts and the spotless criminal record to prove it!). So maybe he really was noticeably sadistic and selfish and that drove people off. It seems as likely as not, really.

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  94. Daniel Björkman4:40 AM

    The short version is that I seriously can't tell when people are interested in me and I'm terrified/don't know how to show interest on my end.


    Yeah. I feel ya. I've got Aspergers too, and a tendency towards suicidal depressions, and I've definitely been there.


    I wish I could cheer you by saying that everything worked out for me, but... mostly, I just mostly gave up on the whole area of sex and resigned myself to celibacy. The best I can say for it is that it gets easier once you hit thirty and your hormones calm down a bit.

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  95. Daniel Björkman5:13 AM

    This particular f*cker understands why she was afraid, yes.


    Back when that whole thing was blowing up, I got asked how I would feel if a huge, scary black man asked me for money in an elevator. It was a rhetorical question, because the fact that I'm a racist can apparently be taken for granted. But had anyone been interested in the answer, it would have been this:


    1. I would have been scared shitless and wondered if he was planning on killing me for my wallet. (because it's true, in some ways I am a racist in spite of myself. Intellectually I believe there is no difference between the races or need to treat them differently. Emotionally, the idea of black man = scary has been ingrained in me. It is shameful, but I can't seem to change it)



    2. I'd still have taken out said wallet and given him some money.


    3. I would not then have gone on stage and whined about how huge, scary black men need to walk on eggshells around me because it's so important that they don't frighten me in any way.


    Because, you see, I support the right of huge, scary black men to ask people for money in elevators, as long as they can take no for an answer. I am not sure I'd consider it a good idea for them to do that, or very likely to yield results, but if that is what they feel is their best course of action, then I think they have every right to do so without getting publically rebuked for it. I also, of course, support the right of flabby white middle-class boys like myself to feel frightened when they do - as long as such flabby white middle-class boys are aware that them being afraid by something that turned out not to be dangerous is their own affair and their own problem.



    Now, do you understand this f*cker's position, or would you prefer to chalk it up to me Just Not Understanding Your Pain?



    And yes, the hate campaign against RW was downright disgusting in how overblown it was. But then, seeing as I learned last month that a webcomic I follow is on hiatus because the cartoonist (who has a history of shaky mental health) was driven into a nervous breakdown by the unrelenting assault of feminists who didn't think his portrayal of a recovering rape victim was realistic enough... seeing as that is the case, I also have very little sympathy for any feminist on that score.

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  96. smut clyde6:04 AM

    who somehow go through life without seeing 51% of their fellow humans as human.About half of my ancestors were female, and I like to think that most of them were human. How do these people cope with believing that half of their parents were rape-robots?

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  97. Derelict8:16 AM

    Indeed. For any parent, anywhere, the seemingly bottomless barrel of mentally unbalanced young men is matched only by the bottomless barrel of weaponry this society has made available to them. A rational society might consider taking steps to make sure those damaged young men would find it difficult or impossible to get their hands on such weaponry. Instead, the NRA will no doubt be out front-and-center this week to push legislation to make it illegal to not own a gun, or something equally calculated to increase both gun sales and violence.

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  98. Boys, on the other hand, are told to be themselves - are told, in fact, that to restrain their natural behaviour in any way is to be weak and unmanly.



    But what if what you wanted to do was something other than the expected natural behavior? That was my experience as a boy growing up in the late 60s-early 70s--that there were all those rules pushing me to be the sort of macho jackass I was instinctively repelled by, rules governing everything from how I moved my body to what I was supposed to be when I grew up, none of which seemed the least bit relevant to my experiences or ambitions. To this day I still can't cross my legs without worrying that someone will consider my doing so weak and unmanly. I may not have had the magazines so much--the Weekly Standard inveighing against the plague of Men Without Chest Hair (of which I am one) was some years in the future--but I certainly had the lectures and the nagging adults; Victor David Hanson could have been my high school history teacher.

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  99. LittlePig8:55 AM

    The Mystery/NLP/speed seduction crap that was popular 10-15 years ago was disrespectful

    My take at the time:

    "Aha! We will turn the Bene Gesserit techniques against the females! "

    "Mu'ad Dweeb! Mu'ad Dweeb! Mu'ad Dweeb!"

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  100. Ive got a cousin-- now late forties--with aspergers, a wife, two children and a job. People can find love and happinness if they are lucky and if they dont let despair ruin everything. My understanding of my cousins situation is that his wife made all the plays for him rather than he having to be in quasi predator mode, stalking her as prey. Relax, be your wonderful self, and be open to letting some woman or man take you by storm.

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  101. Kordo9:18 AM

    "Mu'ad Dweeb". I love it. I'm a sucker for the smart Dune reference.

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  102. What is the "but" doing in your comment, pope zebbiddie? A guy standing near you in a hotel bar is a comete stranger and may be as crazy as any PUA. In fact even dawkins may have his moments. Following her into the elevator and propositioning her was a hostile act. In fact if he had attacked her many people would have blamed HER for letting him follow her and get on the elevator. I was taught at around puberty to get off an elevator if it looked like id be alone with a guy be ause they are such prime areas for harrassment.

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  103. Kordo9:36 AM

    Great resource; thanks, Brian. Holy shit, do I need brain-bleach really bad right now...that Paul Elam dude is fuggin' scary. The guy with the How-To for domestic abuse is scarier. I'm constantly amazed that our species ever made it out of the cave, though I guess an argument could be made that some of us never did.

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  104. This one's a bit hard to joke about. Despite "Dexter" and other similar pop culture exercises, actual rampage murderers are fucking ugly and terrible. And the people making excuses for them are just enraging. Or maybe I'm simply too emotional about it.

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  105. Your brain instinctively tries to protect itself from the stupid, much in the same way that your eyes reflexively blink when mud splatters at your face.

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  106. Would that be the "one weird trick" that gets both doctors and plumbers worried and angry?

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  107. LittlePig10:07 AM

    Thank you. As as autistic kinda porcine, I tend to forget about that aspect, because I don't have any fear of that situation. I have absolutely no problem with being told "so that I feel safe going out to the car" or the even more obvious 'because I'm scared some moron might jump me in the parking lot' (hell, I'd look forward to it, then).

    My female friends cheerfully talk to me in straight lines, because they know the obvious needs to be explained and that my male ego will suffer none the less. I only ask that women not assume that I am 'going to get it', because I won't, on any of a wide field of human endeavors (I have the sobriquet 'Crow Bait' amongst my practically joking minded friends), and that has nothing to do with thinking less of anybody as just not having an auto-suggest that gives that kind of implied understanding.

    Or make me carry something. This will automatically kick in my thirty-years-as-husband circuit and my forearms will raise for the load.

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  108. So if you agree that Watson had good reason to say "please don't try to pick up women in elevators", then why are you also mad at her again?

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  109. I always though post-modern was the future.

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  110. coozledad10:09 AM

    The literature of exhaustion? Alain Robbe Grillet? The Fluxus movement?
    I think it's already over.

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  111. You know, I understand your frustration if you constantly have blacks asking you for money. I get the same thing in certain neighborhoods & it's fucking annoying. But I guess I feel like the Watson Elevatorgate thing is an issue of a different kind.

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  112. It's Flargh's Third Law: Any sufficiently stupid behavior is indistinguishable from magic.


    It rather makes past observation an unreliable indicator of future events.

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  113. I'm not sure what kind of insane person political agenda you'd have to have to essentially defend misogyny itself as an ideal.


    That's just it though. Most of the rightbloggers lack the guts, or perhaps the deep stupidity, to defend misogyny itself, much as they want to. So they throw up chaff instead and try to change the subject and blame it all on the Godless Left.

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  114. LittlePig10:15 AM

    Super Colon-Blow?

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  115. coozledad10:17 AM

    Not to mention the percentage of guys who are just fucking jerks. They may not kill or rape anyone, but they're half the way there.


    I'm sure I'd rip the few remaining strands of hair on my head clean off if I had any children, male or female, but the thought of a young woman being subjected to the idiots I went to college with just drives me batshit.

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  116. LittlePig10:20 AM

    Always confuses the hell out of me. Where did the time traveling part come in?

    (Everybody knows that time travel won't arrive until next year, when LHC is powerful enough to knock some matter into another universe. The sudden materialization of the hundreds of machines that now have a meta-verse coordinate to home on knocks everybody's socks off!)

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  117. LittlePig10:29 AM

    I'm not sure what kind of insane person political agenda you'd have to have to essentially defend misogyny itself as an ideal.

    A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free
    State, [T]he right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be
    infringed.

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  118. A narrative I read earlier today cautioned that "He stabbed his first three victims, who were men, so it's not all misogyny or teh gunz."


    Point taken. The man was a sociopathic self-identified loser who would've killed, male or female, with whatever weapon came to hand. I'm not sure how much society can control for the dangerously deranged walking among us, literally ready to pounce at any moment, but you can't tell me there's no way we can keep them from acquiring weapons of mass fucking destruction.

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  119. FlipYrWhig10:35 AM

    Against the ERA.

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  120. LittlePig10:42 AM

    College age me, still living at home, spoke to my mom about how this woman in my computer lab irritated the living hell out of me. I went on and on, what a royal mean sorry pain-in-the-ass...Finally she says, "Oh, That's the one you'll marry. I wondered about it". That was THE most ridiculous thing I had EVER heard.

    And yes, of course, the woman in question was my bride of 30 years this past October. We live in our autistic spectrum home, raising a kid that is more normal than either of us (though still Our Kind).

    I was, and remain, damn lucky.

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  121. I went through high school in the sixties and saw that all the jocks were hooking up with the cool chicks while I was either "just a friend" or was too blind to see what good was really trying to come my way in those days. Yeah, I had women problems, and they led me eventually to get into a stupid marriage because "This is the best I'm ever going to get." I have learned better over the years.


    I have no sympathy for this mook. He had issues, but instead of trying to fix them, he fed them. I'd tell him to "get over yourself," but now he's dead.

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  122. I think where this comment went wrong, DB, is about the same time Bundy's comment about "the Negro" went wrong. To put it kindly no one needs to hear how women's natural fears of being attacked and raped by men who are stalking them and approaching them for sex are analagous to your totally constructed, fanciful, politicized fear of being attacked by black men mugging you.

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  123. Oops, I missed this:

    3. I would not then have gone on stage and whined about how huge, scary black men need to walk on eggshells around me because it's so important that they don't frighten me in any way.

    Because, you see, I support the right of huge, scary black men to ask people for money in elevators, as long as they can take no for an answer. I am not sure I'd consider it a good idea for them to do that, or very likely to yield results, but if that is what they feel is their best course of action, then I think they have every right to do so without getting publically rebuked for it. I also, of course, support the right of flabby white middle-class boys like myself to feel frightened when they do - as long as such flabby white middle-class boys are aware that them being scared by something that turned out not to be dangerous is their own affair and their own problem.



    That is one fucked up fucked up fucked up statement and what follows it is worse.

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  124. Mostly it strikes me as a non-sequitur.

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  125. Dr. Hunky Jimpjorps11:31 AM

    Where your metaphor falls apart completely is #3, because there isn't an entrenched, loud segment of society that says large black panhandlers can do whatever they want if they're after your spare change, and everyone just has to deal with it, and if you complain you're just a miserly prig who probably never has any fun with his own money.

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  126. XeckyGilchrist11:34 AM

    You're not babbling, you're exactly right. In my opinion they not only crossed but w00t-holleringly pole-vaulted over the Rubicon when they started defending and promoting torture under Bush's reign.

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  127. chuckling11:36 AM

    1. If you believe that there are such things as different human races, then you are a racist and as intellectually astute as those who believe the earth is 4000 years old.


    2. The term "huge scary black man" goes way beyond the soft racism of scientific ignorance into white hood territory.


    3. When you start a sentence with "I also have very little sympathy for any feminist," there is nothing possibly good that can come from that construction.

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  128. XeckyGilchrist11:42 AM

    I was gonna say. When I talk with my dog, I'm genuinely listening to what he has to say.

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  129. LittlePig12:06 PM

    "felt terrible if something she had done as a sorority girl had caused this to happen."

    Grrrrrr. Richard Bruce Cheney has done more than a few things that might merit this fate, but this poor girl? That is so sad. But then the truth, that she was prey - nothing more and nothing less - is even worse.

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  130. Echidne said it best, I think.

    Because of the misogyny he so plentifully expressed, I read the manifesto looking for examples where he would have been rejected by women. Oddly enough, there are none, unless we count a girl who pushed and yelled at him in childhood, because he first bumped into her. Other examples are of the type where a woman he smiled at didn't smile at him, where a woman he said "hi" to didn't respond. If female rejection was what he mostly blamed for his suffering, where is that rejection in his manifesto? Or did he expect women to flock to him, without any necessity to make an effort to meet them or talk to them?

    I cannot say for certain. But the impression I got is that he never approached women at all, that he expected women to approach him, and when they did not, he felt enormous pains of rejection.

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  131. AGoodQuestion12:35 PM

    I didn't realize this was that kind of party.

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  132. AGoodQuestion12:49 PM

    Race aside - and that's one hell of an "other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?" - if anyone tried to mug me or seemed like they were going to mug me in a well-lit elevator on a finite trip while I could see their face, I'd be secretly kind of jazzed that someone had invited my Mr Hyde side out to play. The analogy doesn't really hold up, is what I'm saying.

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  133. AGoodQuestion1:05 PM

    Sex may be the one area where it's healthy to adapt Mrs Thatcher's formulation that there is no such thing as society. Which is to say once you start comparing yourself to others who get so much more and trying to emulate them, you've already lost whether your efforts are successful or not. Only by being true to yourself and seeing what grows out of that can you find any kind of peace.

    And yeah, there are douchebags who get a lot of pussy. They tend to have money, looks, and all sorts of social capital*. That's what sets so many MRA followers up for disappointment.

    *The Rodgers, by the way, might have been doing okay financially, but they were not the "Hollywood Royalty" that some cons have been portraying them as. Second unit directors are tinseltown's middle class

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  134. Christopher Hazell1:14 PM

    One thing that constantly amazes me is how incredibly bad many self-professed libertarians are at putting themselves in other people's shoes.


    If you're a libertarian, you ought to be of the opinion that women don't owe you shit, because they're autonomous human beings with their own goals that they ought to be allowed to pursue for their own edification.


    And yet...


    It really does bother me how many libertarians won't/can't extend their principles to people who aren't exactly like them.

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  135. glennisw1:21 PM

    I was surprised to read in Echidne's excellent blog post about this that his three roommates, who he stabbed to death, were of Chinese decent. I did not read his manifesto - too disturbing - but I'd seen quotes in other posts where he wrote of his disgust at seeing blonde white women with Asian men, or any man of mixed or non-white race. I know that he was Eurasian, so there's some complicated self-loathing going on there. But it surprised me that he would have chosen to live with three Chinese men - there are so many layers of complications to this story.

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  136. StringOnAStick1:26 PM

    To be a libertarian is to be completely lacking in empathy, and without any interest whatsoever in other people's shoes. At least in my experience anyway.

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  137. glennisw1:30 PM

    Let's remember, too, that it's not just our daughters that this person targeted, it's our ordinary sons, walking out of delis, riding skateboards, or in the case of his roommates, going about their daily business. This person hated and envied ordinary people enough to kill them at random. As a mother of a young man, I'm fearful too.

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  138. glennisw1:32 PM

    This. #notallsexistcreeps are murderers seems to be damning with faint praise.

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  139. glennisw1:42 PM

    There seems to be a misunderstand that runs through some of these discussions, about the value and satisfaction of having a lot of sex, getting laid, etc. It's held up as a quantitative goal, like collecting something - the more you get, the better and more fulfilling your life is going to be, somehow.


    But take it from someone who was once pretty promiscuous, it isn't necessarily always fulfilling. I'm at an age where I am finally able to read old diaries, and let me tell you, I was not a happy person.


    Those people Rodger was envying may or may not have been happy. It's really such a fantasy - he sees two people walking on a beach and assumes they're happily rutting like weasels, when in reality I am sure each set of human relationships he viewed were much more complicated than that.


    It frustrates me that we're talking about someone being so motivated he'd kill other people over something that doesn't really exist.

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  140. Derelict1:51 PM

    To be fair, we really have no idea what this kid was taught. Mental illness is extremely difficult to understand. The mind of someone who is mentally ill simply does not work like that of an "ordinary" person.

    This in no way excuses the kid's actions, nor can it lessen the monstrousness of it all. But I'm not so sure we can blame this on anyone teaching him to be misogynistic. And I cannot imagine what his parents must be going through, dealing not just with the loss of their son, but also the knowledge that their son got so far beyond help and comprehension as to become a monster that inflicted such suffering on so many other families.

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  141. StringOnAStick2:05 PM

    Perhaps we should consider that it isn't so much about unlocking the key to the vagina as it is to have power over the vagina. In that respect, these MRA guys have the mentality of a rapist - it isn't about sex, it's about power, dominance, and control.

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  142. StringOnAStick2:09 PM

    My recollection is that the harshest enforcers of gender codes are high school teachers. Maybe it was the age I was at the time, but seriously, they seemed worse than my fellow awkward, searching adolescents.

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  143. I disagree. We do have a very good idea what he was taught, because it's everywhere in the culture (he doesn't need one particular person to teach him to be misogynistic, because THE ENTIRE CULTURE is misogynistic). His manifesto and videos made clear that he picked up these messages without a whole lot of distortion.



    Just because someone is mentally ill doesn't mean they aren't a product of the culture around them.

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  144. Oh, it's real, and it's sickening. Let David Futrelle catch you up on what you've been oblivious to: http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/

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  145. Yes, shy, lonely boys are advised that the problem is with the girls they seek. The shy, lonely girls are advised that the problem is themselves.

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  146. They're also told that their reward for being successful or even for being themselves is a girl. So when they don't get the pussy avalanche for behaving in a bare-minimum sort of way to girls, they get their noses out of joint. Some of them grow up and figure out that women aren't a prize, and that being "nice" is necessary but not sufficient for attracting the attention of another human being. Others get bitter and angry that women aren't falling all over themselves when they do the "right" things. Because women have cheat codes, apparently.

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  147. StringOnAStick2:34 PM

    We'll get a clue on the sadistic and selfish front as soon as the news media finds a few of his friends who are willing to talk. If there actually are any friends, and I would not be surprised that the guy was mentally ill to the point that he had no friends other than his internet buddies.

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  148. Derelict2:40 PM

    I agree with all of this, but it refutes an argument I wasn't making. The entire culture teaches misogynistic values and lessons, but only a mentally ill person takes those and distorts them into what apparently was going through this kid's mind.

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  149. StringOnAStick2:42 PM

    Your parents did you a big favor on that lesson, and I am sure there are many other good examples. My folks are so clueless that they once left me at a bar at age 22 and asked some random guy to make sure I got home OK. How I got through my younger, clueless, and chronically depressed years without being the victim of a serial stalker/killer still amazes me.

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  150. Christopher Hazell2:44 PM

    It's kind of weird to me because my politics have become increasingly anarchist/libertarian, but I came to it through reading feminist and anti-racist thinking.


    Basically, while sexism, racism, anti-gay bigotry, religious bigotry and so forth are all distinct, I feel like they come from a similar Procrustean mindset; they're represent people saying,


    "You don't fit into the box I've built for you in my head. I'm going to hurt you until you do fit."


    I don't think you ought to do that.


    And then I started to think about, say, the war on drugs, and how much it represents government officials saying "What you do with your body doesn't match the image I have of what you should do with your body. Therefore I have the right to hurt you."


    I've come to a position where I believe, morally, that hurting people ought to be your absolute last resort. That if you can possibly avoid hurting somebody, you should.


    The government always has spent a lot of time unnecessarily hurting the people who don't fit in the box.


    It's not a big skip from there to real sympathy with anarchists and libertarians, who critique the government from exactly that perspective.

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  151. redoubtagain2:44 PM

    You say MRA, I say NRA, let's blow the whole thing up

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  152. Ellis_Weiner3:03 PM

    Or, to coin a phrase, "It's always projection."

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  153. DocAmazing3:06 PM

    You should have gone in to advertising. "Pussy avalanche" would sell wildly as a fragrance from Axe.

    Once you've figured out the way that MRA and PUA-types think, you might be forgiven for trying to make a buck off of them.

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  154. DocAmazing3:18 PM

    That's dropping a large load on mental illness.

    The most dangerous group of people, statistically speaking, are sane adult men. Sane people commit murder all the time.

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  155. LittlePig3:21 PM

    "Pussy avalanche" would sell wildly as a fragrance from Axe.

    I know! The commercials write themselves. zuzu would make a mint.

    Though now I'll never get "Pennies From Heaven" out of my head. The tune anyway. (the slightly altered lyrics playing in my head wrote themselves as well. Instant theme song. Works too - "Don't you know each cloud contains...")

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  156. DocAmazing3:25 PM

    "Libertarian" in the classic Anarchist, rather than the Reason magazine minarchist sense, one hopes. Because, you see, while government does spend a lot of time hurting those who don't fit in the box, so do private-sector actors. Anarchists oppose all power, not just government power, while Libertarians have no problem with the power of wealth.

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  157. You were not kiddin about that Donald Douglas post.

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  158. Derelict3:36 PM

    Also true, and also refuting an argument I'm not making. This kid was mentally ill. I did not say, or even imply, that all murders are mentally ill. Just this kid.

    And it's through that lens that we have to consider this case. Misogynistic monster? Yep. Steeped in our horrible dick-first, gun-worshipping society. Very much. The fact that all misogynistic gun-loving assholes (think Ace O' Spades here) DON'T go around slaughtering women, men, or children tells us that something more was in play here. And that something was a mental/emotional breakdown.

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  159. sigyn3:42 PM

    My cat can really hold up his end of the conversation, too.

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  160. chuckling3:47 PM

    No, "race" is not a synonym for "social category." According to the best scientific data available, there is no such thing as race. Humans are humans. To believe otherwise is racist by definition. Aren't we supposed to be the reality based faction?


    Since you call yourself "atheist," think of it in religious terms. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever to support theism. One is by definition a theist if he or she believes in any kind of god or gods. Same thing with racism. Best to just dispense with that shit and deal with real problems in the real world, among which social categorization is a major one.

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  161. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person3:52 PM

    and get busy on the project of loudly proclaiming that he was not one of theirs and it's all the left's fault.


    Let Rush Limbaugh lose his shit and leave a trail of bodies (actually rooting for the former, but not the latter), and the RWNM will strip its gears and burn out its windings trying to distance itself from the man who arguably created it in the first place, while simultaneously blaming Obama, Pelosi, Soros, and probably even Pajama Boy. Since he's held it together this long, it probably won't happen. I suppose--IANAP!--if you're gonna blow, you'll probably do it long before your 60s. I can still hope, though...

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  162. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person4:07 PM

    fuckless And Forever Alone


    #FAFA!

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  163. hellslittlestangel4:12 PM

    I find it disturbingly weird the venom directed at this clearly mentally ill murderer. I don't recall even the Sandy Hook killer getting hated on so much. It beats the fuck out of me what satisfaction people get from saying, "He's evil, I tells ya -- EVIL!"

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  164. Christopher Hazell4:13 PM

    I think there's such a huge gulf between how men and women experience these things.


    For example, nobody ever told me not to hit on women who are alone in elevators because those are prime areas for harassment.


    Not that I ever have hit on a woman in an elevator, mind you.


    And for me, I've been hit on by a stranger exactly once in my entire life; I decided to look up what Rebecca Watson was up to, and one of her more recent posts is about being propositioned four times in one night.


    So, I think a lot of men kind of get how somebody could be so clueless as to hit on her that way without meaning to communicate anything sinister.


    I didn't really get why there was any backlash at all, though, because in talking about it she was very much talking about the way it made her feel, and not really ever accusing the guy of anything.


    Anyway, nowadays she's playing video games with TV's Frank Conniff. I'm deeply jealous.

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  165. I'm betting that gay teenagers have a different take on being solicited for sex by older men, or frequently approached for sex, than do straight men. That is--there is a predatory quality to male sexuality in this culture which forces or inclines men to "make the first move." That's ok, as far as it goes, but its when you are simply trying to live your life, go to your hotel room, walk through a public park, or go grocery shopping without being propositioned the self starting quality of male sexuality can be problematic.


    While nice guy X may experience himself as shy and not inclined to presume--maybe it even takes tremendous nerve for him to approach a given woman--there can be ten or twenty guys at the conference who (just as shy) have also tried to take their chances with an individual woman. Especially if she is high profile or otherwise desirable. So by the time she walks past shy, polite, guy X after a long day she may have been accosted already several times.

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  166. People hated on the Sandy Hook guy plenty. And they still do.But why he did what he did remained a mystery. One reason that people are obsessed with talking about Rodgers is that he published a manifesto and his manifesto fits in with a well accepted social position--there are large numbers of guys out there who absolutely agree with Rodgers that women as a class deserve death for failing to make men as a class happy. Rodgers is not the first spree killer of women who deliberately chose young women as his target to get back at them for the sins of feminism, or sexual rejection. Lanza was the first person who ever shot up a kindergarten. The two acts are not comperable in that one was truly unusual and inexplicable and in the other the guy and his supporters are telling us over and over again why they did it and why they intend to do it again.

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  167. smut clyde4:37 PM

    That is even more romantic than my own story of meeting the Frau Doktorin when I volunteered as a guineapig for a drug trial she was conducting.

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  168. Its Alicublog, innit?

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  169. smut clyde5:00 PM

    he pretty clearly had no sense of humorBalloonJuice quoted Rodgers' description of buying his first gun... the furtiveness ("I did this quickly and hastily"), the sense of difference afterwards... it read like an old losing-one's-virginity account with only a few words changed.

    I have to keep reminding myself, this was not written as a parody.

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  170. hellslittlestangel5:01 PM

    I can't conflate Rodgers and his "supporters" (I'm more inclined to call them exploiters). I have contempt for the people who are making excuses for him (even though they haven't necessarily murdered anyone), while I see Rodgers as a sad, wretched, sick person. Spend some time around mentally ill people and you'll find a significant number of them prone to spewing racist, misogynist and homophobic garbage, but these same people also have a lot against the CIA and Martians. The kid's "manifesto" is the product of psychosis. He may, in fact, have been a terrible, rotten person, but I can't make that judgement based on what's currently known about him.
    As for the amount and degree on hating Rodgers versus Lanza, I wasn't clear that I was talking about comments in this space. For me, when I see a psychotic murderer, my first thought is, there but for a chemical imbalance or a brain tumor go I.

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  171. I see the war on drugs as a war on 1) hedonism and 2) anti capitalist theft by the worker of their own productivity. The drug war ignores people who are functional, quiet, addicts who continue to produce for the market. Its a war on addicts who withdraw their labor from the market because they can no longer hold down their jobs or are unreliable.

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  172. ChrisTS5:10 PM

    I believe it was two (the third man was not his roommate), and they were randomly assigned to the unit.

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  173. JennOfArk5:18 PM

    Hmmm. I'd never thought of it that way, but that's a point. I always figured that the war on drugs was, like everything else, part of the war on the poor.

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  174. Men kill women all the time. Face to face. Strangulation, stabbing, shooting, burning. And they are plenty sane when they do it. In fact they are considered so sane when they do it that we used to excuse it on the grounds that killing a woman for cause (such as infidelity) was no crime at all, or took a lesser form of punishment than out and out murder of a stranger. Until we invented the concept of "domestic violence" the violence of the domestic sphere was kept separate from the legal system and not treated as assault at all.


    When I see a young man who kills a bunch of people to avenge his wounded manhood I don't see a "psychotic murderer" who is suffering from a brain tumor or a chemical imbalance. He was a perfectly high functioning person who knew what he was doing and chose to do it--egged on by other people in his internet social circle.


    Sure: I could develop a brain tumor tomorrow and start thinking I was Marie of Roumania and kill someone to protect the throne but that would be a sharp departure from the person I am now, the person whose life I have always lived. Can you point to a moment when this person, Rodgers, was not an angry, entitled, little shit? Because according to his manifesto he has been angry, entitled, eaten up with jealousy, and lashing out physically at women and men around him for some time. If he were black/hispanic or poor he would have been locked up already for some of his assaults.

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  175. hellslittlestangel5:30 PM

    You write as if you know a great deal about this kid. And maybe you do. I know essentially nothing about him, only about other mentally ill people I've known. If he has a criminal record, I suppose that could support what you're saying.

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  176. We're always at war with the poor but I see a special kind of rage from the government for people who are not functioning alcoholics. Of course, ironically, it appears that both cocaine and meth get their start as a kind of "energy drink" that enables people to meet the ruthless demands of the economy. At least that is the argument of Methland. Lots of guys start with meth in order to handle the demands of working in the factory or the meat processing plants. But once the Meth takes over, and the economy of meth production becomes the only thing around, the problems of meth for people and society multiply and its not possible to restrict it to the merely recreational.

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  177. ChrisTS5:36 PM

    If you look at some of his videos - not just the 'final' one - you will see a very, very off-putting person. I imagine that most girls just found him disturbing in some general way. And, given the extent to which women have to be careful, they would not need a red light shouting "Dangerous!' in their heads to keep away from him.

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  178. ChrisTS5:37 PM

    He had one that eventually rejected him because of his sadistic fantasies,

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  179. He described several assaults on people in his manifesto--at least one of which came to the attention of the police. This is not the case of a kid who had a psychotic break. It was a slow motion tragedy. It may well be that under our current system his family could do nothing since it wasn't possible to involuntarily commit him but I just don't see this kind of crisis as at all forgiveable at this point. I can't just shrug and say "there but for the grace of god go I" and I can't just shrug and say "its one of those things."

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  180. JennOfArk5:42 PM

    Lots of soul-baring in this thread. To the guys upthread who have related their own miseries with regard to the opposite sex, dating, etc., just know that it's not only men who have problems with this stuff. I pretty much removed myself from the game a dozen or so years ago, figuring that I just wasn't much good at it among other things. I never thought of myself as socially awkward and I wasn't intimidated about talking to the opposite sex, but I really was pretty clueless at reading signals about whether or not someone was interested in me. At the same time, I harbored a deep ambivalence about the notion of being partnered up - I thought it was what I wanted when I was in my 20's, when everyone else was getting married, but then by my early 30's, most of them were already divorced and I started to re-think. I can remember vividly a dream I had many times while I was in that phase of thinking I wanted to find someone and get hitched - it was always the same, a wedding dream, I was getting married, the groom was never revealed, and always the issue was "how am I going to get out of this?" I mean, everyone's there waiting for the bride to come down the aisle, and I, the bride, am in a panic because I know if I go through with it I'll be making a big mistake. In the worst version of the dream, the wedding is taking place in a big hotel, everyone is waiting downstairs for me to show up, and a guy whose affections I didn't want stood between me and my escape, hanging outside the room where I was getting ready and imploring me to not go through with it but run away with him instead. No hope for a clean getaway with him hovering about!


    I kind of jettisoned the whole idea in my mid-30's...I remember one time sitting on the couch reading, and it suddenly occurred to me that what I really wanted when I was a kid was for everyone to shut UP so I could read my books in peace. And I thought, hey, I've got exactly what it was I wanted!


    I did have 3 meaningful relationships during that time, but there were always things that wouldn't work - one of them we were both too young, one of them was too hung up on being at his ex-wife's beck and call, and one of them lived several hundred miles away and we both had career stuff going where neither one of us wanted to relocate; his assumption was that it needed to be me. Beyond those, I never thought my judgement regarding who I was attracted to - and I wasn't attracted to that many men in the first place - was very good. And the last, and really biggest fear was that if I did get the kind of guy you should want - a really nice guy - that I would walk all over him. There were a couple of guys who would have married me at the drop of a hat if I had just gone along, but I was afraid - pretty much just knew - that I would not treat them well, they would want more than what I was prepared to give, and I would make them miserable. So, I didn't go there.


    I think it was the right choice. Some people just aren't cut out for coupledom, at least not for the long haul. Though it does pose problems if you at all want to have sex on a regular basis. It never made me hate other people who are able to make it work - though it is from my perspective an alien concept, pretty far removed from my own personal experience.

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  181. hellslittlestangel5:45 PM

    I didn't shrug.

    This conversation seems to be generating more heat than light. How about we just hang it up?

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  182. Similarly, OxyContin and other opiates are the drugs which allow a person to work while hurt.

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  183. I said "I can't shrug..." I did not mean that you were shrugging. I think we are, as a society, caught in some kind of weird trap about mental illness. Most mentally ill people are not dangerous and should not be treated like criminals. The police should not be used like a para-medical force and a mentally ill person should not be placed in jail because there are no treatment options for them. On the other hand, if this kid was in some clinical sense "mentally ill" he was also being managed in such a way that he was free of supervision and was able to drive where he went, buy and store guns, put up those videos and eventually kill 7 people. That's a failure of whatever we might consider we have of a system. Whether we need to strengthen the hands of parents and communities with respect to potentially dangerous an uncontrollable individuals or rethink our hands off approach to (some) kinds of mentally ill people is unclear to me. All I'm sure of is that nothing will be done.

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  184. hellslittlestangel6:12 PM

    I said "I can't shrug..." ... All I'm sure of is that nothing will be done.

    Sorry, I just couldn't help it.

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  185. Tehanu6:18 PM

    " To the guys upthread who have related their own miseries with regard to the opposite sex, dating, etc., just know that it's not only men who have problems with this stuff. ..."

    Exactly so. When I was young I really did not have a clue about anything I was doing, and I was just, simply, very very lucky not to get pregnant or get raped or hook up with an abuser. Eventually, after a long series of failed relationships and one-night stands, I was so unhappy that I "settled" for less than the ideal Prince Charming of my dreams and married the guy ... and found out that stopping looking for Prince C. was the smartest thing I ever did in my life. We've been married 40 years and I thank my stars every day that I survived singles hell. The greatest thing was (and is) that my husband saw me as a person he liked talking to -- not a trophy to show off or proof of his own manhood.

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  186. glennisw6:20 PM

    Thanks for talking about this. I keep thinking about the lesson it took me what must have been ten years at least to learn, which is rather than worry about whether someone else liked me, to actually LIKE the other person for who he (in my case) was. So often what I valued was that someone found me attractive - which was superficial, based on hormonal chemistry. Although it was true indeed, it was short-lived. And especially, when I look back, it must have seemed to them that all I wanted from them was more of that affirmation that I was attractive. Instead of being interested in what made them tick; how they thought; what they wanted.


    In retrospect, I think I was lucky enough to have encountered people who, despite "breaking my heart" as I felt it at the time, were well-adjusted enough to sense that I was not any more ready for commitment to them as they were ready for commitment to me.


    I think I'm lucky for having grown up enough before having the chance to meet the man who is now my husband.

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  187. Not only that, but meth used for work is definitely not recreational: a study I saw found that people who use it for the energy it gives them to work don't use it when they aren't working. Which makes sense, because you're probably so wrung-out from the demands of the job and what the drug does to your body to meet those demands that meth is the last thing you'd want to 'enjoy' on your time off.

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  188. M. Krebs6:49 PM

    "Race" is simply a word that people invented to categorize humans according to certain traits. Sure, that endeavor was unhelpful, stupid, evil, or whatever, but I'm pretty sure that the word exists.

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  189. mgmonklewis7:11 PM

    Somebody else has probably commented on it by now, but did anyone else find it weird and/or creepy that the anti-feminist advertisement signed "John Galt" used a German Gothic script? You know who else used German Gothic script? (And I say that in all seriousness, not as Godwin-bait.)

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  190. mgmonklewis7:15 PM

    To clarify: The entire ad didn't use that script, but John Galt was printed in a German Gothic. Gott in Himmel!

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  191. chuckling7:22 PM

    Sure, the concept exists, but the concept is at odds with reality. And the concept of race is used to provide justification for plenty of other false concepts, white supremacy perhaps chief among them.


    Best to just keep it in the reality based community, stop using words based on hateful fantasy, and replace it with "culture," which is a whole nother

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  192. LittlePig7:51 PM

    Whoa. You don't have to be Fellini to get that reference.

    (This Carlin paraphrase is used almost daily in my home. "and what's the big scene in the Tiparrilo commercial? It's a train going into a tunnel, man. (doppler decreasing): "ding ding ding ding ding ding". You don't have be Fellini to figure that one out").

    From AM/FM, one of the finest albums made, specifically "Commericals". Ah, epic.

    "Wonderful WINO, the big sound in the big town!"

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  193. Spaghetti Lee7:55 PM

    Oh, I'm sure that I'm idolizing sex and romance that I've never had, probably to a far greater extent than I realize. But you know, even if it is a question of going from one set of pains and problems to another (and that's about the most cynical way possible to look at it) I'd rather deal with the problems I've never dealt with before. Novelty and all that.

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  194. Ellis_Weiner7:55 PM

    "...their presumptive public intellectuals, are incapable of anything but
    incompetent propaganda in furtherance of a bankrupt ideology,"


    A thousand times this. Then my q. is, Do they know, or sense, that it's bankrupt? One ans. could be, "They must--that's why their writings combine the desperate and the insupportable." When you're writing that The Monster That Devoured Cleveland is a conservative movie, you're not trying to claim the movie for conservatism. You're writing in an effort to make conservatism still seem legitimate.

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  195. Spaghetti Lee8:05 PM

    "Pain" would be too strong a word, but I can't deny that I've felt something like that before. Not that I hate their happiness or their love and want it to crash out of spite, it just reminds me of all that I've never had. If someone promised me a 50/50 chance of a serious fulfilling relationship in the future or a 100% chance of a few-month hormonal fling right now, I think I'd take the latter.


    Jesus Christ. I hate these threads in part because the subject matter is so horrible, but also because any honest examination of my feelings brings me closer to creeps like Rodger than I'd ever want to admit.

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  196. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person9:04 PM

    Mud, derp, what's the difference?

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