Not at all. It’s a serious discussion and I think it’s good if a comment thread can explore a few perspectives of the same story. My impression though is that a smaller (yet equally relevant) discussion can fail to establish itself if replies are separated by a few screens of unrelated discussion. Sometimes I would like to be able to bypass certain threads to see where less controversial discussions lead. Actually, this is especially the case when I’m on a mobile, as there’s no “in reply to ___” button and someone could be replying to a comment that was made days ago and dozens of comments back. I think people tend to give up at that point, which is a shame.
One thing I really do like about this new BBS system BB is experimenting with is that they seem to be listening to our concerns about how the system functions and are constantly trying to improve it. You could always bring the threading issue up as a new topic and see what the powers that be say about this… Maybe it’s something they are working on? I don’t know…
The core of the mens rights activists are the issues we’ve already covered. You can point to Elam and his ilk, but by throwing everyone under that same bus you are using the same logic which goes: some few muslims are extremist terrorists, so lets demonize the whole lot of those buggers.
Elam seems to claim to be a leader of mens rights activists, but the only people I know of who have validated that point of view are feminists - presumably because he’s so fun to write about, particularly for folks like Marcotte who seems to have a natural love of and talent with invective filled rhetoric.
Codinghorror moderates the meta thread “design suggestion box” iirc, there is a strong sentiment along those lines. At any rate if you sort threads by “meta” there are some there where that discussion is ongoing (or has happened, I don’t keep current).
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The only thing I’d really say about the MRA/feminist issue is that while I agree that MRAs can be quite unpleasant and fail to address the issues they raise in practice, there also seems to be some effort to discredit people raising real issues based on guilt by association. It is quite true that the equality that feminists are fighting for will also benefit men, but this doesn’t change the fact that feminists come to the issue from a particularly female perspective and particularly focuses on women’s issues. While feminists value male allies, there are different opinions on whether a man can actually be a feminist. I don’t think that men’s issues are about equality with women on the whole, nor are they in opposition to women’s rights. However, I’d question whether feminism is best placed to deal with a number of the concerns that men have.
While in a sense it’s true, I’d also disagree with reducing it to “patriarchy hurts men too”. The culture we find ourselves in was shaped to a large extent by men, but the intention was not primarily to put women down or to provide a trouble-free existence for all men. We have a lot to deal with besides patriarchy, some of which affects men more than women. I don’t think we should focus too much on people like Elan (using men’s issues to dismiss women) or Marcotte (using extremists like Elan to dismiss men’s issues) when dealing with these concerns.
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