Well, don’t ask me why, but I was over at Amanda Marcotte’s site reading about that asshole who shot a bunch of people in Norway.
Anyways, I read the comment thread and this jumped out:
“One of the worst crimes of kyriarchy is that it stunts the imaginations of people who buy into it. They become unable to conceive of a relationship that doesn’t involve domination in some sense. The key link between anti-feminism and and anti-immigrant sentiment is that they both depend on viewing society as a zero-sum game—in order for one group to gain in influence and respect, everyone else has to lose. If women gain more freedoms, they must be taking them away from men; if immigrants get jobs and homes, they must be stealing them from natives. If you’re not on top, then you must be on the bottom.”
Comment #31: David Paul on 07/28 at 08:48 AM
Just before that, I was at Simon Rierdon’s site, reading about race. More specifically, violence perpetrated against white victims by black attackers in flash mobs. Now, this seems to be almost the opposite of the previous article where Marcotte suggested misogyny may have been the root of Breivik’s killing spree. She goes on to say, “All bigotry provokes violence at its ends, of course.”
However, I do see a common link…
In both cases, the “victimizer” saw the victims as somehow responsible for their failures and refused to take responsibility for their own lot in life. They put the people they victimized into a class that they blamed for all of their shortcomings. These individuals allow themselves to view the “other” as their oppressor class. By dehumanizing the “other” they can destroy the “other” without guilt. Granted, they may be sociopath’s who are incapable of guilt in the first place.
Easily Enthused wrote a post awhile back about being attacked by black men. He also compared it and contrasted it to the infamous Schrodinger’s Rapist article. He talks about how being attacked left him in a state of anxiety for along time and that it caused him to have apprehensions about “thuggish” looking black men. He even carried a weapon for protection and was ready for a round two that never came about. He states, “And eventually I came to the realization: those guys who attacked us almost a decade ago weren’t evil thuggish black men. They were people who did a bad thing.” I’d recommend reading his Schrodinger’s Racist as well as the Schrodinger’s Rapist.
One quote that I saw on a videogame:
