Everybody, stand back! The intellectual powerhouse who goes by the name Joel Reinstein is hosting a Facebook page called STOP the “International Conference on Men’s Issues!”, and you know Joel is a badass motherfucker when he pulls out the ALLCAPS!
Before you go over there with your misogyny and patriarchy hanging out all over the place messing up the throw cushions and doilies, be aware that “Misogynists’ comments and posts will be deleted. Threats and harassment will be screencapped and reported to relevant authorities.” Joel means business.
Advance warning: this kind of misogyny will not be tolerated:
I posted it more than once and was continuously deleted, because the sheer vitriol and hatred in that was unbearable to someone as delicate and sensitive as Joel.
Some of Joel’s supporters seemed at least marginally willing to engage in debate about specific issues but Joel took the hardline and deleted comments that failed to toe the MRA=WomanHater line, leaving all the supporter responses up, so that the threads became incoherent. Like this one:
- Sarah Gray Safe haven laws are gender neutral, and it does *not* absolve the abandoning parent of their responsibilities.
Sarah Gray Women are legally required in all but two states to reveal the fathers identity and notify him if she wants to adopt out.
Men should keep track of their sperm, they can always contest an adoption because fathers have rights.
Samuel Molnar Guys, this isn’t a dialogue. Don’t get it twisted. We want to get the sexist abuse-apologists to stfu and gtfo. So dont come here looking for dialogue.
Sarah Gray No, women cannot unilaterally choose to have no responsibility got a child that actually exists.
When a woman has an abortion there is no child that needs support.
Sarah Gray Safe havens most certainly do. Every effort is made to find the parents.
Sarah Gray Funny how sticking up for the rights of children and their fathers is construed as not caring about men.
Sarah Gray Men can leave babies at sage havens too.
Sarah Gray Other than forcing a woman to have an invasive medical procedure. If pregnancy took place outside of women’s bodies entirely, I would agree with the general concept.
Sarah Gray No, a man can drop off a child at a safe haven without having legal custody.
Sarah Gray Giving men special rights is bullshit, that’s why.
Sarah Gray If MRAs stopped blaming women for their (sometimes valid, but not caused by women or feminists) problems, they might be more effective in their quest for equality.
Sarah Gray I am correct about safe haven laws. They are gender neutral.
Sarah Gray If the woman agrees to such a procedure, I guess she could do that, but that’s not what is being proposed for “choice for men”, where the man opts out of supporting a child that exists while the woman has all the responsibilities.
Sarah Gray Men should keep track of their sperm then.
Sarah Gray Because “discussing these issues” involves blaming women, encouraging the abuse of women, and denying much of reality.
Geoffrey Hughes Gee Alison, a more perceptive commenter might just get the idea they were not wanted and go elsewhere
Sarah Gray I’m not sure what your point is. We don’t have artificial wombs, and ending a pregnancy is distinct from removing a viable fetus to an artificial womb
Sarah Gray If men are concerned about that, they should keep track of where they put their sperm.
Safe haven laws are gender neutral.
Geoffrey Hughes Well, Alison, that sure sounds rough. Maybe you should go make your own page where you’re the moderator and you can apply your own rules of moderation.
Sarah Gray So? That sounds like a good reason for men to use birth control every time no matter what a woman says.
Sarah Gray Read up on the laws, they are gender neutral. It has nothing to do with legal custody.
Of course what they deleted was me actually reciting the law to them, verbatim, about safe havens, which is apparently misogynist and far too harsh for their sensitive brains to contemplate.
Can I really keep my baby a secret?
Yes, you can keep your secret and keep your baby safe. The Illinois law says that as long as you don’t harm your baby, you can hand your newborn (30 days old or younger) to personnel at any hospital, police station or staffed fire station in Illinois for adoption with no questions asked.
No one will ask your name. Your baby will get medical care and be adopted into a loving family. You can even provide anonymous medical information, so your baby will grow up with a medical history.
Sarah also refuses to believe that Safe Haven laws are used generally by mothers, even when they are written as gender neutral, which is not the universal case at all. In four states (Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, and Tennessee), only the mother may relinquish her infant.
The National Safe Haven Alliance explicitly identifies mothers as most likely to surrender newborns under these laws, no matter how the law is written.
The whole discussion should just engender (ha!) a giant eyeroll, no? Obviously it is going to be the mothers who surrender newborns with no further legal or social responsibility – how on earth could a father take a newborn and surrender it without the mother noticing? I can’t find any examples at all, because they don’t exist no matter how gender neutral the laws are written.
The safe haven conversation, in which the fact that women do indeed have the right to legally surrender a child after it is born was proven, combined with a private conversation I have been having with the Amazing Aetheist has led to me a new understanding of how feminists (and often MRAs including myself) see key issues: oppositionally rather than inclusively.
And that is a problem, perhaps our biggest one.
Sarah, and other feminist protesters see an issue like the right of men to choose parenthood as an attack on their own right to choose parenthood. Literal legal equality is perceived as an attack on their own special status, so statements like “giving men special rights is bullshit” and “because “discussing these issues” involves blaming women, encouraging the abuse of women, and denying much of reality” doubly ironic.
The only way they can counter the dissonance is to deny they have special status in the first place, which is simply not true. No one is saying women should not be able to choose parenthood – the argument is that since women can in fact decide if they will be parents, why can’t men?
Pick any issue, and this seems to be the dominant approach: pointing out that men can and are raped by women does not deny that women are raped by men. It simply highlights that rape can be and is committed by both men and women with both men and women as victims. How does noting that fact encourage the abuse of women? It encourages accountability, to be sure, but what about accountability is abusive?
I myself have railed heartily against the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign in which all men are treated as rapists, but perhaps a more strategic approach would be to treat everyone as a potential rapists and to make all students sit through lectures in which consent is explained? Make women understand when they are in fact being rapists, as well as men.
It didn’t take long for the protesters on the Facebook page to start alluding to vague and not so vague threats. One of the earliest posts on the page was by a man named Eduardo Guzman (Russ Tiller) who wrote “these people make me trigger-happy”. He only got four likes though.
Guzman also put forth the suggestion that the only way to properly protest was to “storm the conference” and bemoaned the fact that his inability to meet the cost of a ticket is the only reason he will not be attending.
Guzman’s own page links to two sports: motorcycles and Gabby Franco, an Olympic markswoman. Hmm. Interesting. Wonder if the protesters are worried about that?
There was concern expressed for hotel employees in case they got tear-gassed, too. My. That’s quite a protest you’re planning if it involves tear-gas.
Another protester, Emma Howland-Bolton is apparently planning some sort of staged event that will …. I dunno – be fun I guess? Wonder what that will be? Maybe another staged attack like the one that “happened” at Queen’s University? That worked really well.
Other protesters are warning that things could very ugly and it won’t be a dance party.
There is also some curious funny business going on with moderators claiming that they are not deleting comments, but rather that MRAs and those that question the protest are in fact deleting their own comments in an act of cowardice and fear, and yet when moderators accidentally delete a protester’s comments, they openly admit to deleting any and all comments that are not strictly supportive. It was pretty serious, too. The commenter who was accidentally deleted had her faith broken, her trust shattered! She was cruelly silenced! I hope she didn’t get #PTSD from the experience.
So, I guess the takeaway is that democracy is alive and well? Nothing says First Amendment quite like trying to prevent voices you don’t like from speaking and vigorously silencing all internal dissenters at the same time. The Founding Fathers would be ever so proud, but they were all men, weren’t they, so screw them anyways.
I hope the protest goes well for our FB friends. Sounds like it will be a riot. Storm the ramparts, folks! Tally-ho!
We’ll be over here, eating cake.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
*sigh* so classy, so stylish… Starting to get over humans…
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Why do all these self-assured types want to stifle debate?
To steal from another scam, global warming/climate change/whatever new name they will come up with, “the science is settled!”
Well, if it’s settled, like this whole “Stop the protest” movement argues, why stop the protest?
If your (not yours, jb, theirs) arguments are so logical, if you have the facts on your side, why be afraid of some debate?
Why delete comments and posts that are not openly belligerent, but that are in simple disagreement?
I suspect, as you state far better, that it is because their conclusions are far from proven, and they will simply allow no disagreement with their dogma.
Sarah sounds like a True Believer. Don’t cloud her mind with facts! It is already made up.
I get having a difference of opinion, I really do. But I would also welcome reasoning disagreement. It’s how my beliefs are tested, and how I get some insight into why people might legitimately disagree.
You were not nasty, you were not attacking people, and they STILL stifled you, and the only reason I can see is because they CANNOT counter what you point out.
And you tried anyway.
I really wish there were more who did what you do.
Thanks for posting.
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Hey JB, I found one instance of a father using the safe haven law, where he abandoned 9 kids ages 1 to 17 (his wife died, which is why he did it): http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26887181/ns/us_news-life/t/father-abandons-kids-under-safe-haven-law/
Also this document is interesting: “https://www.childwelfare.gov/systemwide/laws_policies/statutes/safehaven.pdf”
It is a summary of laws by states. I searched the file for the word “father” and there some interesting non-gender-neutral things such as “If a relinquishing parent (!) has not made a timely claim to the child and if no timely claim has been made by a
nonrelinquishing father (!)” (Notice, parent-father twist)
Anyhow, it seems like while the legislators realize that reproduction is not exactly gender-neutral and many states have specific provision that attempts should be made to find a father. Such as this one for Utah (“The division shall direct the Office of Vital Records and Statistics to conduct a search for a birth certificate for the
child and an Initiation of Proceedings to Establish Paternity Registry for unmarried biological fathers maintained by the Office of Vital Records and Statistics within the Department of Health and provide notice to each potential father identified on the registry.”) but it’s very common across the states.
And most importantly, you are right. If fathers start to use safe haven laws the laws would either get changed or the father will go to jail for kidnapping.
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OK. I’ll give it a shot. I’ll try to be nice.
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Can’t find the page. But here’s another of Joel Reinstein’s issues: “Call for Cultural Boycott of Israel (BDS)”. Hmmm. Interesting.
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I do hope that the Detroit event is not protested. On the other hand, whenever they do stage protests, they manage to cover themselves in manure and weaken their credibility.
Thanks for trying to get a differing viewpoint aired. It does seem as if they are incapable of an honest dialogue.
With the approaching conference and in the wake of the Isla Vista killings, it seems that they’re going to dial it up to eleven. Let’s hope that the general public sees them as they are.
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So, I guess the takeaway is that democracy is alive and well? Nothing says First Amendment quite like trying to prevent voices you don’t like from speaking and vigorously silencing all internal dissenters at the same time. The Founding Fathers would be ever so proud, but they were all men, weren’t they, so screw them anyways.
Not to be pedantic, but it’s important to remember that the First Amendment extends protection only against censorship attempts by the State – not private individuals, corporations, or organizations or their property. Since FB is a privately-owned concern (admittedly an assertion open to legitimate doubt, given abundant evidence of the USG’s extensive meddling in/data mining from it), they are free to censor at will, notwithstanding the irony of the very same FB page owners most guilty of this clearly being people who gag on heavy doses of their own medicine when it’s rammed back down their throats.
Thus while there is nothing illegal (or even necessarily immoral) in the FB page owners’ censorship moves, it does serve as the best available evidence that they are exactly the cowardly, ignorant, hate-filled, shallow anencephaloids we’ve always known them to be.
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Excellent point!
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As a UCSB alum, I am almost desperate to attend the conference. The cost would be worth it. However, I work in live theater and I simply cannot get away that weekend. Please help me stay informed about all that goes on. Thank you for everything JB.
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Here’s something you can say at the conference Judgy Bitch; “All of the complaints that Feminism has ever made from the very beginning and to this very day have all been LIES, half truths, fraud and disinformation and everyone just throws money and support at them because they are women. All of the complaints that men have are REAL and not only does no one even believe them, they’re considered one step away from a terrorist organization and Feminists and everyone else has a blank check to terrorize them (MRAs).”
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Was with you up until you conflated massive amounts of data collected over decades by scientists, who, by their very nature are trying to prove climate change wrong, but are failing to with alarming consistency, with Feminism, which collects minimal, intentionally biased data, then throws away anything that doesn’t agree with it.
To learn how feminism is wrong, we had to learn something about feminism, no? So, go learn about the scientific method and get back to me.
So very, very not the same.
Finally, what’s the point of a debate with settled science? If you’ve got an issue with the very notion that boron exists, why should we bother to listen to you? There’s more than enough evidence for it, and none against, so, well…
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Hey, even a broken clock can be right twice a day…
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Is this going to be UofT all over again? That was what made me aware of the Men’s Rights Movement in the first place.
I didn’t stick around and disagree with a lot of the MRM, but I appreciate that my perspective was expanded because of it (and I do still enjoy this blog). It would be interesting to see another clusterfuck the likes of UofT now that I’m more conscious of gender politics.
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So they deleted a real post because they were hypersensitive to concern trolling. Poe’s law strikes again.
You know – they had exactly the same problem over at Conservapedia. Banning real conservatives because they weren’t rabid enough, or accidentally said something that might be construed as liberal.
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Maybe Emma’s big suprise is that she has figured out what rhymes with both patriarchy and misogyny.
Because chanting is must with these types.
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Certainly the US constitution only regulates the United States government. But the free-speech provision are there because all governments, all states, ought to have such provision.
So what counts as a state?
Governments govern by the consent of the people, so anywhere where people consensually agree to be ruled (typically, to accomplish a common goal) is a mini-state. Free speech is necessary because consent can only be given where it is informed consent. Suppressing information (including speech) means that the ability to give informed consent is taken away – and the act is only the more insidious because those who have had their ability to grant informed consent aren’t aware of it.
Therefore, any association, any mini-state of any sort that practices censorship is a tyranny, because it does not govern with properly-granted consent..
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The last time I went to a protest, someone foolishly gave me the megaphone. All I could think to chant was “Hey hey, ho ho, this fucking chant has got to go”…
Made it to the third round before the megaphone was politely removed. If only they got it…
Yeah, the day Feminists develop a sense of humor, we might be in a real fight, rather than trying to Jiu-Jitsu a sumo…
/metaphorical whimsy
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Yeah, the day Feminists develop a sense of humor
… will be the day after alligators learn to do somersaults on their own and Lady GaGa takes her vows and enters a convent.
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So, an all-round great day for entertainment?
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“oppositionally rather than inclusively”
One of my main reasons for being an anti-feminist is actually this. They claim to be for equality, but lack the understanding that equality means that men get to have the same toys as girls and vice versa.
Feminists have been clawing for the same privileges as men for decades now, but never once stopped to say “Hey, maybe we should have some of the responsibility, and maybe men should get some of our privileges?”
But oh do the men need to have the women’s responsibilities, so that the woman can run off and be “successful” and “powerful”.
The feminists I have read/talked to all seem that by giving men some rights then women automatically lose the same right. But that isn’t true, but they lose some privileges. (If you can no longer bank on money from the baby daddy for instance.)
As for debate:
If you are afraid to let the opposition speak, then you don’t have much faith in your stance.
If you try and censor your opposition, you are weak and need to sharpen your debating skills.
ALWAYS listen and talk to the opposition, that is the only way forward.
If your stance is the “right” way, then why are you afraid to prove it?
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I think you sort of answered your own questions there :p
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You are gonna have a field day with this judgybitch:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/classify-mens-rights-movement-terrorist-group/W5018W63
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” Finally, what’s the point of a debate with settled science? ”
Well, the science of global warming might be settled, but the best ways to deal with problems arising from it are not.
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I am a bit concerned about Emma Howland-Bolton as she appears to be a teacher of young students – http://vimeo.com/88318266
and she appears to have many professional connections – http://www.linkedin.com/pub/emma-howland-bolton/14/559/bb1
with an extensive resume who apparently works with the group Teaching For America – https://seelio.com/p/17d/emma-howland_bolton
I can only ponder how “The Children” are affected and treated by Emma Howland-Bolton, especially the while males…
She also seems to approve of lawless criminality – http://www.dcourier.com/main.asp?TypeID=1&ArticleID=55472&SectionID=74&SubSectionID=114&Page=1
and she seems to believe calling the illegal “illegal” is hate speech – http://prescottdailycourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=36&SubSectionID=73&ArticleID=54986&TM=62143.73 – and she appears to wish to respect criminals.
Perhaps she and those like her should be brought to the attention of law enforcement school, municipal, local, county and state authorities, regulators and legislators…She appears to be insinuating that violence is perfectly fine and seems to be secretly planning for violence at the MR conference. Perhaps her, her group and her occupational practices educating our most vulnerable should be investigated as well…
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The point is not whether AGW is correct or not; the point is that both Global Warming activists and Feminists actively seek to stifle any debate and censor those who disagree with them.
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It was fun arguing with them. Back them into a corner using reason and logic and suddenly your post disappeared and the left over counter arguments were usually horrible. But that Sasha Grey girl was delusional, to the point of outright ignoring the way the world actually is.
The Emma girl on the other hand needs to be checked out by the F.B.I. with the recent threats to the hotel hosting the International Conference of Men’s Rights it is peculiar timing. The fact she mentions “actors needed” and the threat involved using people acting like guests….well personally I don’t believe in coincidences.
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It may be right twice per day but still wrong given the time zone.
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Cute, but really unsure as to what it might mean, other than being cute…
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Um, no, really, really different.
Lets look at this from a non-stupid angle, shall we? How about: the thing climate-change deniers and feminists have in common is they refuse to accept proven scientific facts, and will sit through reams of evidence just to find one tiny, inconsequential side-note that doesn’t make sense… to them… and then declare the opposition null and void.
Hell, the only thing climate scientists are guilty of is witholding info from deniers because they know it’ll get quotemined. And that’s all those emails ever proved. I really don’t understand what that fuss was over anyhow.
Feminism = anti-science, climate denial = anti science. I = pro science, thus I’m allowed to use the internet, which only works because of science. Now, I’ve heard the argument that feminists would appreciate men if we went on strike. Seriously, imagine science went on strike. No more planes, medicines…
I’ll let you think up the rest *headdesk*
Simple parting fact: There is a particular isotope of carbon dioxide that is specific to human activity, and is different and distinguishable from that which is the result of the natural carbon cycle. This particular isotope makes up the bulk, in fact, nearly all, of the increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
Discuss…
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I almost disagree, since most of the countries that could do anything seem to be agreeing on doing abso-fucking-lutely nothing, as they have been for over 20 years.
Democracy is truly the least-worst system of government. I hope there’s time for us to think of something better…
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