Internet Lunatics - RadFems, PUA's, MRA's, MGTOW's, etc.

I generally avoid self selected anonymous sources on the internet for teaching tools. I recall one poster we had on TFP (whos name I forget) who was constantly molested apparently where ever she went. Some people like to tell stories.

You also have current cultural memes (non internet type but Dawkins idea) that women are too hard on themselves, as promoted by Dove and posted all across face book feeds, and then you have the scientific truth...
Survey: Most of us think we're hotter than average - Health - Skin and beauty | NBC News

(not the best article on it, I'd have to dig for more scholarly ones).

 

when i read the story on castration i cracked up laughing.

the Castrator... like a really bad sci-fi film! lol!

BEWARE THE CASTRATOR SHE WILL CHOP YOUR BALLS OFF!!!

ROTLF

 

Did you just claim that you don't care for anonymous sources when it comes to women sharing their experiences about how living as a woman is challenging and then post a link to an anonymous survey of Elle and msnbc.com readers?

How does that work? Are anonymous sources on the internet okay or not? Do you think it's odd that you dismiss, apparently without even looking, women sharing their experiences on twitter, but are willing to spend time searching for, reading and then posting a link to a survey of Elle readers?

 

Yes. Many aren't anonymous at all. You know exactly who they are because they tell you.

Also of note, the woman who started the #YesAllWomen hashtag ended up shutting down her Twitter account because we can't have nice things.

 

Me, I don't discount the possibility of learning from anonymous Internet sources. I think all of us have.

The Elle survey, with self-selected participants, says more about the non-scientists who put it together, wrote the questions, and interpreted the results, than it does about the real world. That being said, it was published in what Wikipedia would consider a "reliable source", and can legitimately be cited as evidence that someone is making these assertions.

 

Selection bias - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I have an anonymous twitter account, not that I use it.

And look how many people fake stories that seem quite real out there...

The death bloggers (Wired UK)

 

I agree with you about learning from anonymous sources. Credibility and anonymity aren't mutually exclusive.

With respect to the Elle research, the article says that UCLA handled the methodological heavy lifting. Which just goes to show you that if you've got money, there is an academic department somewhere who will take that money and use it to pay a grad student to help you conduct market research, provided you let them get a paper or two out of it.

 

Oops, I missed that part.

 

Surely you're aware that a survey of Elle and msnbc.com readers suffers from significant selection bias? Or are you saying your prefer the selection bias of the Elle survey to the selection bias in testimonials from Twitter users?

 

That was my point.
The other attacks have fallen off the radar because people have decided they know what kind of crazy caused them.
They don't need to know more and except for a tiny fringe who are not accepted by society there is no one to celebrate the killers.
This time there is a bizarre response to the murders and it's not necessarily from the press.
They are doing the standard 24/ 7 coverage with assorted talking heads, some of whom have valid observations and many are idiots.
There have been columnists who have written some pretty stupid pieces like the one who blamed Seth Rogan's Neighbor's for the shooting. That was wrong on so many levels.

The scary part has been the sites saying if he'd gotten laid everything would have been okay.
Or that he was driven to it by a feminist culture.
Saying that those posts are false flags is paranoid to the point of ridiculous.

 

In a related note, there is a link in the Sir You Are Being Mocked Tumblr post that leads to this study claiming 40% of rapists are women, which has penty of arguable leaps of logic and questionable content in itself, but I did like the way (in relation to not counting male-on-male rape due to all the prison rape inflating the numbers) they phrased it like "The greater rate of male-on-male rape may be a byproduct of more men cycling through society's rape-camps (otherwise known as prisons)."

It certainly is true - we make our own hardened criminals. We have a very efficient system for it, too. Send a goofy stoner to prison for a year or two for a nonviolent crime like having a little too much reefer, and he comes out the other end as a muscley shaved-head sociopath with a penchant for violence and a history of being raped and raping others. Our prisons largely function as criminal training camps, where the worst get better at being the worst, and the not-so-bad get trained by the worst to become the new worst.

But that's a whole 'nother thread.

Also,

I don't think those are false flags, I think they are (mostly) just done by notorious opportunists like Roosh V in order to bolster their own notoriety, or to further their own pet agenda.

 

Pick Up Artists? To my mind, the vast majority of these types of organizations start with the premise that men are owed some sort of relationship with a woman. That if they just "get their chance to shine" the woman will choose them. Have a read of this article, it make some interesting points.

Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds

In the face of what women are saying through, #yesallwomen, it's an interesting contrast.

The Most Powerful #YesAllWomen Tweets


There is a disconnect in perception.

 

The problem is once again that article pushes the "epidemic" agenda that's patently false. We're not in an epidemic of sexual assault, we've never had less of it in our entire (modern) history. Pushing the narrative of fear and divisiveness is, if anything, very likely making things worse at this point because we're giving rapists the idea that their behavior is more common than it is and we're telling victims things are worse than they are. We should be celebrating the fact sexual assault (and everything else along with it) dropped 80% in the last two decades and is still going down.

And that's part of the problem with the YesAllWomen tweets, if you know the actual facts about crime you can see how a lot of those are directly the result of a culture of fear caused by media sensationalism. If a man were walking around holding an improvised weapon all the time out of sheer fear people would be saying he's paranoid and needs help from a doctor, despite the fact he's around three times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than the woman who actually tweeted that.

It can't be healthy for women specifically to live with this kind of fear and terror pushed at them constantly, what kind of developmental effects does it have for someone to grow up thinking the world is orders of magnitude less safe than it really is? How much does it affect patterns of behavior, are women being taught to be less bold and take less initative because of this artificially inflated fear of victimization? With particularly insidious crimes like domestic abuse and sexual violence could perpetrators be emboldened by a false idea of how common their actions are?

And on top of that it's definitely not healthy for our society to have its worldview distorted so much that we become obsessed with less than 1/3rd of the victims of violence and utterly ignore the other more than 2/3rds. What kind of message does it send to people growing up to see that one set of human lives are simply that worthless? Could that be why men are so overwhelmingly likely to risk their lives, or take their own lives? They simply don't value them as much? Could it be why men universally perform worse all through childhood and education? How does it affect interaction between men and women, or how women view men? How much of our current outright hostility to the mere acknowledgement of male victims is due to the idea that they just don't deserve it? Hold on to this thought, it'll be relevant later

Which is, I think, where groups like Pickup Artists come in. Men are taught they're defective trash from birth. They're taught everything about them is wrong and inherently evil, and their very lives are worthless unless they can provide external value somehow. That external value comes from two things: Money, and more importantly female approval. PickUp Artists exist to prey on men who will fall for the sales pitch that PUAs somehow understand the "system" and can offer better results with women. It's like all those test prep courses that advertise they can guarantee you some minimum score or percent improvement in your LSAT or GRE results.

It's not because men feel "entitled" to a woman, it's because men feel their lives have no value unless a woman chooses them. Even if we magically erased all misogyny from the world tomorrow PUAs and the like would still exist because the underlying problem isn't men hating or feeling they're superior than women, it's men hating themselves. Until men as a whole feel their lives have inherent value without needing money or a woman's approval the desperation to procure both won't go anywhere.

Which kind of leads into Arthur Chu's article. After all, what's the single universal constant with bullying and abusing nerds? What's the one aspect of the slur that's never changed even as the words themselves went from "nerd" to "neckbeard"? Unattractiveness, specifically to women.

This article makes some interesting points... but not the ones you're looking at. What I find interesting is how we've gone from ignoring mental illness and 2/3rds of his victims, to blaming the MRM he had absolutely no connection with, to now blaming nerds themselves for this. I find it interesting that somehow Elliot Rodgers has become an empty hat that can be placed onto every hated and reviled group by any author, and how readily people are taking to using him for that purpose. I haven't seen someone try to use him to smear bronies yet but at this point I'm willing to bet money that it's going to happen.

I find it interesting that he's hammering on the narrative that Elliot Rodgers wasn't a complete lunatic but just another normal healthy man, this time an "Angry geek", who happened to snap. He takes the lies even further by claiming PUA was started "by nerdy men, for nerdy men", despite the fact that PUAs almost universally despise nerds and are a direct continuation of the culture that bullies and abuses nerds throughout childhood.

I find it interesting that he can, with a straight face, completely erase the brutal harassment and abuse nerds face simply for existing. Harassment which has led to an unprecedented suicide rate, placing suicide as the second leading non-accidental cause of death starting at only ten years old and costing us more young men's lives than the entire September 11th terrorist attacks every. single. month.

I find it interesting, though at this point genuinely frightening as well, that he can bring himself to claim Rogers' writings are "a standard frustrated angry geeky guy manifesto, except for the part about mass murder".

What?

The writings of a deranged psychotic who wanted to murder absolutely everyone for everything from their race to having more money than him or just being healthier than he was are a "standard frustrated angry geeky guy manifesto"? The writings of someone who was so insane he thought he could telepathically win the lottery, and flew into an apoplectic rage when it didn't work are normal for nerds and geeks?

Is anyone else absolutely terrified by this article? That someone could take a group even more utterly unrelated to Rodgers than the MRM and not only throw blame at them, but take it to the level of claiming that rogers was par for the course with these people? To actively argue against his mental illness being responsible for his actions and views and claim he's a "standard frustrated angry geeky guy"? The idea that he might actually believe that, and worse that this is getting publicized and just giving people yet more ways to pathologize nerds, terrifies me.

And I think the reason it frightens me so much is because of how familiar it is. I had to read it a few times to put my finger on what it reminded me of, but when it hit me my hands got cold.

Walk through it with me: This article ignores every fact we have and goes on for pages about how the target group is inherently evil, how their culture is sick and twisted, how this crime is just an inevitable product of their culture and beliefs, how this sort of thing is normal for them, and how they're all just like the perpetrator and any one of them could be next.

Don't tell me you haven't seen this pattern before.

Remember that thought I said to hold on to earlier?

Imho, this is it. Look at Arthur Chu's argument here. Because a literally vanishingly small percentage of men are criminals all men are "stupid and wrong" and need to just shut up and listen to women. Any guesses whether he'd say the same works in reverse? It fits right into a narrative that men are broken, defective, or evil and women are the standard of normality and goodness. It even follows the same pattern of wildly overinflating female victimhood and almost totally erasing male victimhood (or female perpetration).

The same thought is present in YesAllWomen, which unlike the cherrypicked examples above is mostly a really ugly conversation. Which is why a lot of women started and continue to support the YesAllPeople hashtag Just look at the responses to it:

"Ugh there is now a #YesAllPeople on twitter because men literally cannot handle anything not being 100% about them 100% of the time"
"#YesAllWomen because the #YesAllPeople tag is essentially about men feeling left out. How does it feel? Not good? Wow would never guess"
"I love how #YesAllWomen turned into #YesAllPeople because most men can't handle something not being about them for 37 seconds"
"I love that misogynists had to make a #YesAllPeople hashtag in response to #YesAllWomen. It's almost like they don't see women as people."

This is the result of being raised in a world that teaches people not to value human life unless it's female. 2/3rds of Rodgers' victims were men, over 2/3rds of murder victims are men. 1/2 of all sexual assault and domestic violence victims are men. But the moment it's NOT 100% about women 100% of the time they start claiming that people are trying to make things 100% about men 100% of the time. Unless we're actively and absolutely hostile to the very existence of male victims we're being misogynist.

I don't know if you can teach this as a one-shot like that. It's something that needs to be built on a solid foundation of mutual respect, and I don't think we're there yet as a society.

 

Sorry, #yesallwomen really isn't about you, Shadowex. It isn't about you getting sexually assaulted. It isn't about who gets to define rape.

It's about what many (many? Apparently all) women experience on a daily basis.


They are speaking about THEIR experience.


Your experience is something else. Why is it so difficult to see that?

 

This will surprise no one, but I strongly, strongly agree with this.

The women's rights movement deserves a lot of the credit for getting the criminal justice system to take rape seriously, and hence for the sharp decline.

But few people even know about it, because it's not in anyone's particular interest to impart this news, and not just about rape.

Almost everyone who doesn't pay attention to statistics has bought into the bullshit paranoia of crime is constantly rising! Crooks are running wild! The world is more and more dangerous!

I don't know enough PUAs to be knowledgeable about it, but speaking as a nerd, this makes sense to me.

 

See, this is what I mean when I say you don't even read my posts beyond the bare minimum necessary to not get caught. Unfortunately you got complacent and just proved, once again, that you don't read or care about anything other than your own talking points.

Here's what you said:

And here's what I ACTUALLY said:

You literally word for word demonstrated exactly the kind of callous bigotry and victim erasure that motivated women to start #YesAllPeople, while hypocritically doing exactly what you yourself accuse me of doing.

So to use your own words against you:


Sorry #yesallpeople isn't ONLY about your side Charlatan. It isn't about ignoring half of the people who get sexually assaulted. It isn't about pretending they weren't deliberate excluded.

It's about what everyone, man or woman, experiences on a daily basis.

They are speaking about THEIR experience, together.

You are trying to silence them, trying to silence half to 2/3rds of the victims and claiming that hearing their voices victimizes you. That makes you part of the problem, because you care more about making sure they aren't heard than about actually solving the problem.

Why is it so difficult to see that?