A few guys have been doing great work covering the Tom Ball self-immolation and Amanda Marcotte’s fucked up response to it. There’s a lot of overlap between my site and theirs, but it won’t hurt to get the exposure out there about this story.
Pro-Male Anti Feminist Tech. Posts here.
Ferdinand Bardamu
Snark. Here and here. Some thought Snark was defending Marcotte by saying that she isn’t evil, but he’s actually laying more blame at her feet. Evil is almost an excuse. Let’s realize that Marcotte isn’t evil but that she is incorrect and unfair in her thinking processes – processes which she derives from radical feminism.
Robert Stacy McCain
Donald Douglas
(If I forgot any, I’m sorry, I have to be at work in, like, 5 minutes).
So Marcotte left this comment over at ManBoobz. I’m sure you’ve all seen it or heard of it:
I’ll point out that setting yourself on fire is an extremely effective tool if your goal is to make your ex-wife’s life a living hell, and if your anger at losing control over her overwhelms all other desires. Which is common enough with abusers, who will ruin their own lives and their own shit and turn their children against them in an effort to hurt the woman they’ve fixated on.
Setting yourself on fire is also extremely effective in ending your life and sending a big “Fuck you” to society. She wrote this in response to Tweets I’d sent her:
@GLPiggy I believe in nuance and understanding the complexities! Scary, I know.
I responded with a logical point (she hasn’t responded to me as of this writing):
what nuance was there in saying that men often kill selves for revenge? do you nuance all suicides?
and how about your duke lacrosse nuance? what about nuance in cases of alleged rapes? you aren’t consistent in your nuance.
Marcotte’s original post ignored that Tom Ball didn’t seem especially bitter towards his ex-wife for his adverse outcomes. He was angry at the state and at people who meddled in his relationship with his children – such as social worker Maureen LaFortune who told a court that she wouldn’t recommend visitation or custody for Ball’s two oldest children until he “changed his attitude”. The question becomes, at what point does a person outside of a familial situation have the right to determine when someone’s attitude is not properly attuned? That grants one person way too much power over the lives of too many people. LaFortune, backed by the state, was playing God with the Ball family.
Further, Marcotte calls Ball an abuser who wants to get back at his ex wife by setting himself on fire (where he’ll seemingly laugh his ass off from his grave?). But Ball had no history of abuse with his wife – the two charges against him were that he smacked his daughter in the mouth and drew blood and left a bruise on the back of one daughter’s neck while breaking up a fight between that daughter and another one of his kids. Ball had no history of vindictiveness against his ex, and he didn’t abuse her. So if you want to nuance this shit, you might want to see if the people who do use suicide threats as a way to gain power over an ex also usually use physical abuse against the person they’re trying to gain power over. Surely if this were Ball’s strategy there would have been a history of that type of abuse.
Barring that, perhaps Ball was just a man at the end of his rope. Perhaps he had a legitimate claim and didn’t want to fight. He took extreme measures to deal with that – which is always the case with suicide. The final point I need to make is that liberals and progressives are usually sympathetic to people who kill themselves, but, as with most issues, the sympathy dries up as soon as a white man is the victim.
Marcotte is targeted here because she has a hand in shaping the storyline of so many news events. She writes for widely read publications, and she appears on “proper” and “good” debate platforms like Bloggingheads TV. Marcotte isn’t just some crackpot who nobody listens to. She has influence. As I wrote to PMAFT on his blog, the interest in Marcotte on this case is that if we can yank the thread that is her ridiculous position on the Tom Ball incident, something else may unravel.
Like this:
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Reading Ball’s letter now.
“My story starts with the infamous slapping incident of April 2001. While putting my four year old daughter to bed, she began licking my hand. After giving her three verbal warnings I slapped her. She got a cut lip. My wife asked me to leave to calm things down.”
Why the heck would anyone slap a 4 year old for licking a hand? Everyone knows that tickling kids is the way to get them to stop doing something, get tired, exasperated and go to sleep.
My suspicions are piqued just knowing this much, but I’ll continue reading and honoring the dead by giving him the benefit of the doubt.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/davison_emily.shtml
This is the one item which is hanging people up: the slap. It was rough, no doubt there. But it doesn’t warrant a felony charge of DV.
Vic, it makes you wonder what else went on. And where did the kid learn to “lick” some part of her dad. I’m just sayin……
But that’s my point; I find myself arguing with people who “just don’t trust him”. Today, on another blog, I argued with someone who said that “they knew this wasn’t his first instance of abuse.” I thought we were supposed to presume innocence. Someone correct me.
This guy Tom Ball was a loser. Don’t try to make him a hero to the angry White guy set.
Drop it.
Sure, Marcotte is a bigot and a racist based on her writings but Tom Ball was a loser.
He went out like a fuckin faggot crybaby.
“I believe in nuance and understanding the complexities! ”
I guess Mad Mandy isn’t quite as humorless as i would have thought!
I keep on trying, and I’ll try again. I’m not asking if he was a hero or not. I already know he wasn’t. My question is, does his punishment fit the crime? Does a felony charge of DV match the crime of slapping your kid? That is all.
Vic,
The court actually found that he wasn’t guilty of DV because corporal punishment isn’t punishable. But a social services outfit told Balls wife that shed have to call the cops our face charges of her own.
Amanda Marcotte is like the retard in class you keeps peeing herself. It’s best not to bother helping her change her pants, she’ll just do it again in the afternoon.
Instead, give her more water and watch as she tries to pretend she shouldn’t be in special ed.
lol, *who* not *you* in the first line there.
” Does a felony charge of DV match the crime of slapping your kid? ”
Of course not. GL said that’s not what happened. “But a social services outfit told Balls wife that shed have to call the cops our face charges of her own.” She could have ignored them. They have no authority to arrest. Social Services are between a rock and a hard place. They get blamed and sued if they don’t do enough and they get blamed and sued for doing too much. They are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. There’s no way I’d ever want a job like that and I do empathize with them much of the time. People go into that line of work because they genuinely care about kids at risk. Imagine the guilt if you suspect abuse is taking place and you don’t do anything about it and then something happens to the kid, like getting murdered! There are cases like that all the time. Its easy to criticise, but imagine being in such a postiion yourself.
I still think he should have killed at least the two worthless bitches who were making his life a living hell. I mean if a man is going to take that step of offing himself he might as well eliminate his tormentors too. To let them live is to reward them for their cruelty and vindictiveness. He died for nothing – there will be no cry of compassion from his fellow man because America (and the West) lacks any principled men.
PIPA –
Actually many social services in many states are operating under “mandatory reporting” regimes, whereby if they become aware of something that might be criminal abuse, they must report it to the authorities (unless someone else has already done so). Basically what happened here was that the mandatory reporter told the mother that if she didn’t call the cops, the mandatory reporter would have to, and the cops could arrest both mom and dad at that stage. So mom called the cops.
As for the case, the weak point is obviously that event. It basically destroys any sympathy most people could have otherwise possibly had for this guy in a few small words. It is exempted under the DV statute, but almost no-one thinks that this kind of behavior towards a child is appropriate under any circumstances. So it sinks the sympathy ship almost immediately. As a result, his suicide was basically futile.
As we say, “bad facts make bad law”. That’s because bad facts don’t generate a sympathetic response. Here that initial fact is quite bad, regardless of how people try to minimize it, really. I can’t imagine ever hitting my son with that kind of force, really.
How to avoid a false rape claim:
1. Bring your belle du noir to orgasm.
2. Goto 1 as much as necessary.
This shit is checkers, not chess. Stimulate clitoris to orgasm, insert penis and stimulate vagina to orgasm, rinse and repeat. If simple clitoral stimulation doesn’t work, stimulate g-spot to orgasm and repeat Penises insertion to orgasm. I learned everything that I knew about g-spot stimulation (prior to my 30th birthday, I’ve had a lot of practice since that day) from bloody Maxim magazine and I’ve yet to have any woman complain about being raped by yours truly (whether I was a 30+ minute ironman or a 3 minute chump).
OTOH, having the Game skills of Cupid and the looks of Apollo won’t do anything to.protect you from a vengeful conquest if your sexual encounter(s) can be timed with a chess hourglass (as with other strategy-based games such as Go, chess usually has a 3-5 minute time limit between moves at a professional level.) If you’re the type of guy who thinks that the only thing necessary for a woman’s orgasm is damp drawers (thus negating your need to either keep her brain in seduction mode or to trigger her body into penetration mode), you deserve what you get.
A friend of mine said that “when crazy people sound this sane, we should all be very concerned”, and I agree.
I think the fact that he didn’t “take anyone down with him” demonstrates he was at heart a non-violent person. There plenty of people who, even in the act of suicide harm others through narcissistic negligence (and i’m not referring to suicide bombers – i’m talking about people like that hispanic guy who deliberately parked his pickup across some railroad tracks, waited for the next train and derailed it, killing several other people – yet he lived!).
the moral of this story is that government is not your friend; avoid all contact with it because it will only worsen your life. Also, let the national debt situation worsen until default is inevitable, and then government will have to shrink, thereby becoming less intrusive and pervasive.
I like much of what you write here; but I am curious about one thing: Why do you (or any other man in the manosphere, for that matter) go through such trouble refuting anything those dumbass feminists say? They won’t read you. Even if they do, they won’t accept anything you have to say. You might as well argue with a wall.
We don’t write for feminists; this is just us guys (mostly white) sharing valuable info and building alliances.
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Look, it’s a real sad day when even the US Marine Corps considers suicide an act of abuse.
http://www.usmc-mccs.org/famadv/download/domestic%20abuse%20severity%20level%20guidelines.pdf
It really bring to mind Hillary Clinton’s quote: “Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare victms. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children”
As Jack Kammer retorts: You dead and maimed guys are so lucky.
The crap of ignoring men, it goes deeper than anyone dares say.
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