The News of the Screws

As much as I think sometimes I'd like to be/would have liked to have been a journalist, I come across scenarios that remind me I probably wouldn't have been willing to go as far as would be required to fully report a story, all the way out to the edges as it may require. Sure, there are things I'd like to know and write about and the idea of researching my way through a puzzle to build some kind of clarity where there had been (intentional or passive) obfuscation or ignorance is a deeply compelling one. But enough to motivate me to make phone calls or talk to actual people in person? Or in any other way be mildly uncomfortable for a finite amount of time? I mean, a write a nonsense blog, a good decade past the point where this was still considered a socially relevant form of human communication, and I do it under a pseudonym. It's possible I'm afflicted with an overabundance of caution.

As much as I admire real journalists and what they do (intensified by the fact that actual journalism, not undermined by the concerns of parent company corporate shareholder interests or their aggressive enforcers in the beholden governments that represent them, has more or less disappeared from the modern global capitalist western episteme), I'm slightly embarrassed by the idea that I'm never going to approach the contribution to the education of a blinkered public that Glenn Greenwald has, since I know in the aftermath he's been forced to make a run for it and live in exile as a refugee for the cause of truth. He's a refugee with an income and living in Rio, but still, you don't have to be housed in a barbed-wire pen after walking for four weeks and dying slowly of cholera to be counted as a victim of political injustice. It happens to middle-class people too.

The courage and sacrifice of someone like Veronica Guerin, of course, is so far out of the question it actually ends up less an actual question and more like a joke, explicitly at my expense. As much as it is my dream to have a movie made about my life starring Cate Blanchett as me, there's a limit to how far I'd be willing to go to make it happen. I'm not sure exactly where the lines of that limit are laid, but it's safe to say that any limit at all means "death" is ruled out as one. I'm not even comfortable with the idea of death as a consequence of a long and fruitful life, let alone in exchange for whatever it is Irish newspaper writers get paid.

I bring this all up because I wanted to write something about the text-only fight on the internets between so-called "social justice warriors" and a really gross thing called "men's rights activists." In order to really understand it, the best way would be to go straight to the horses' mouths in the places where they knicker and whinny at each other, namely the men's rights internet fora on places like reddit. I looked at the headers kicked up by google searches for "men's rights" and... I immediately noped out. How little am I willing to be made to feel uncomfortable in the pursuit of deeper understanding for the benefit of you, Beloved Reader? Skimming the results of one search engine results page. That's about it.

Even places where journalists have already parsed some of this shit out for me is a bit more than I can stomach. The frustrating thing is that I genuinely am curious what "men's rights" even means. I've been thinking about it and thinking about it and the only conclusion I can reach, as a non-crazy person,* is that there are no rights that men do not have. Like, I can't think of a single one. I mean, there are some human rights failures down toward the bottom of the economic scale and certainly limits to due process by race, but tragically, people like Sandra Bland and many others prove that women are just as susceptible to that kind of a rights abuse, so while the abuses may fall disproportionately on men of color, they're certainly not exclusively so.

I don't want to make generalizations about the kind of men who are SUPER MAD, BRO about the new all-female Ghostbusters cast, but my guess would be these are not the kind of people worrying about paying for food or looking over their shoulders due to constant police harassment. I cite as evidence the example of them having the kind of free time needed to bitch at length on the internet about a movie featuring people who fight ghosts.

I wonder though about what it means to complain loudly about the alienation of rights when you have all of the rights. If there are essentially no limits on your behavior or mobility, wouldn't the stuff you're complaining so loudly about necessarily have to do with the limitation of someone else's? A group of people who have historically been denied nothing--in fact the opposite, guaranteed so, so much without merit, cause or process--can only be complaining about an infringement on their franchise as the automatically-deferred-to. For example, the existence of International Women's Day is cited as somehow harming a man's "rights," but his rights to what? Not acknowledge women? Suffer another group (any other group) to be celebrated?

I don't get it. I could probably if I were willing to properly investigate it. Hell, it isn't even hard in the days of the all-powerful search engine to investigate stuff, especially when it's all just abstractions of abstractions in text on the interwebs. If only I weren't dissuaded by the way that, when I read things MRAs write, I find them yucky.

I guess this was why we miss Edward R. Murrow. Well, that and because he's dead.

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*Please note that I am aware that this is exactly how 100% of crazy people describe themselves.