I guess this fellow was just trying to bring back traditional values.
A man punched a pregnant woman, tossed her to the ground, kicked her and told her he was going to kill her baby — all because she didn’t thank him for holding the door, according to the victim and NYPD.
"He said, ‘I’m going to kick this baby out of your womb,’" victim Lakeeya Walker told DNAinfo New York.
She’s OK, her pregnancy is fine. But clearly, we have to work harder to teach women the virtues of good manners. This would never have happened if she’d just said those two little words, “thank you.”
(Pssst. There might be just a teensy bit of sarcasm in that last paragraph.)
When I was reading that I mis-read it and thought for a second that it was the NYPD that did that. Which, unfortunately, didn’t immediately seem implausible.
I hope that the perpetrator of this awful attack is caught. I guess he’s probably mentally ill, so whether or not he’ll get the treatment he needs is debatable.
@dick #2, I dont recognize your nym so I’ll be nicer than your comment deserves.
Don’t. Do. That. Asshole does not equal mentally ill.
Asshole equals asshole. Kind of like your comment.
I am a great guy. And if you do not acknowledge how great I am, I will make you pay!
@Rawnaeris#3
Asshole does not usually equal mentally ill. FIFY
You are not doing the mentally ill any favours by denying it. I’m guessing that you are trying to not let assholes off the hook, a commendable goal, but it doesn’t work.
Broken brains do often produce aggressive anti-social behaviour. Phineas Gage, the first recorded lobotomy victim, is the textbook example. There’s viral infection called rabies that does the same thing.
The prisons contain large numbers of untreated victims of mental illness who are put there by a justice system that conflates some types of illness with evil.
“Today’s top story here at MRA News: a New York man was arrested and imprisoned today for holding a door open for a woman.”
If you are going to diagnose “mental illness”, you should be more specific.
Does he have bipolar disorder? schizophrenia? obsessive compulsive?
@Dick #2:
Assuming facts not in evidence. There is nothing which suggests the assailant is mentally ill rather than grossly entitled and prone in at least one known instance to demonstrate that entitlement through acts of extremely violent misogyny. I will also thank you not to equate violent misogyny with mental illness. Mentally ill people are much more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators.
As to the article,
Scary shit, that.
kevinalexander, #5
I doubt Rawnaeris is saying mental illness cannot be a cause of violent behavior.
The point is, when all the information we have is that someone attacked someone for no real reason, why is it that we’re saying “he’s probably mentally ill”.
How many violent attacks are committed by the mentally well? Why not blame them?
@kevinalexander #5; no, sorry, I’m not going to accept that modification.
You speak of “the mentally ill” as though you are someone outside that group (if I’m wrong, I apologize, but thats how your post reads). I’m speaking as somone who the conflation of “asshole” and “mentally ill” directly harms. I won’t deny its possible to be *both* but internet diagnosis of mental illness helps no one. Particularly when, as in the report from the OP, “asshole or misogynist” is a much more likely and simpler conclusion.
Further, while I agree that the (US) prison system is fundamentally flawed, and does no favors to those with mental illness, I’m not sure what you’re getting at with that part of your comment.
@2: The article talks about a “suspect” but says there has been no arrest yet and the investigation is ongoing. IOW: they’ve “caught him” but need to do the paperwork and make a case to the Prosecutor.
(Insert obligatory genuflection before the altar of Our Lady of The Presumption of Innocence).
Yeah, mental illness is usually the first thing people grab for, not as a way of saying “mentally ill people deserve help and compassion”, but rather as a way to distance the act from the “normal” people who would never do that shit, rite, and to Other the person in question. Thus, not to combat the stigma, but to add to it.
And Saad @9 clarified me better than I can clarify me while I was composing my response. Thanks!
Just out of curiosity, how much of the outrage (1) Is because the victim is pregnant; (2) Is because the victim was a woman; (3) Is because the victim was a person; (4) Is because the assailant is (assuming no mental illness) an arsehole; or (5) Other ?
Obviously, the assailant didn’t help her/his/its case by referring to the victim’s baby-to-be. Putting that to the side (hard as it is)… Whether or not mental illness is involved, the victim and her/his/its status is not relevant.
<snark>Of course, obviously, a child victim, or a Kochroach brother victim, or a puppy victim would be a different matter.</snark>Saying ‘Fuck You!’ to someone who doesn’t say ‘Thank You’ is an asshole move. Knocking someone to the ground and kicking them is a little more serious so it’s understandable to suspect mental illness. I think that Dick was wrong in saying that the person was ‘probably’ mentally ill but I also thought that Rawnaeris was a little rough on him by calling him an asshole.
I am very lucky that my own difficulties are manageable but I personally know people who’s demons are not. One of my oldest friends, the daughter of an alcoholic, cannot control her aggressive impulses, impulse control being one of the symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome. As a result, I may be her only friend, everyone else thinks she’s an asshole.
Untreated mental illness is one of the major fuck ups of a fucked up prison system, the biggest one being the war on
the poordrugs@kevinalexander:
Oh, fuck it, KevinAlexander:
Reworded:
That some “assholes” are men does not make the statement
asshole = man
true. Bizarrely, it turns out that sane people can be violent, horrible people. “Assholes” to use the language above.
Therefore,
is perfectly truthful, perfectly accurate and far more kind than dick deserves*1 when dick
…uses evidence of violence as evidence of mental illness!!!
For Freud’s sake, why are you trying to defend the use of evidence of violence as evidence of mental illness?
Have you never heard of crazy blaming or the PharyngulaWiki comment thereon? This community has been talking about this for years now.
*1 …For instance, this might have been more appropriate:
@kevinalexander
Read Rawnaeris’ comment again. Nowhere does it place “dick” within “asshole”.
If you can’t reading comprehension on the fly, perhaps you should set the computer on the desk where it will be a bit more stable.
kevinalexander @ 15
No. It isn’t. Mentally well people do shit like that all the damn time. Far more often than mentally ill people do, in fact. It’s the exact opposite of understandable.
kevinalexander @15
So what’s the dividing line between asshole and mentally ill? If the guy had punched her instead of knocking her to the ground would that still equate to mental illness? How about punching her twice? If you’re going to differentiate between asshole and mentally ill you have to explain, preferably with links to DSM 5 or another authoritative source, how one can tell the difference, especially when making a diagnosis over the internet of someone you’ve never met or even heard of before.
Or you can stop shrieking “mentally ill” when you read about someone being an asshole. Your choice.
Misogyny is not mental illness.
You guys who need to put mental illness between yourselves and misogyny, fuck you.
Misogynists aren’t some strange monsters whose heads are not right, they are your friends, fathers, brothers, uncles. Maybe yourselves.
+++
Back on topic: But women being wary of randomn strange men? Misandry!!!!
Fortunately we can safely rule out mental illness on account of the suspect being black. Now we can move on to discussing black-on-black crime.
/snark
The first time I came across this story, I decided to look it up and found an article at nymag. The comments were amazingly sad to read. Some seemed to think he was kinda justified because she was rude. Many others just wanted to talk about how rude young people are today, not thanking people for holding doors. There were surprisingly few comments actually expressed any sort of horror that someone would do this over his expectation of being thanked.
@17:
I see what you did there.
“Asshole” and “mentally ill” are independent traits that can exist simultaneously in the same individual, or not. While, where they coexist, one does sometimes influence the *outward expression* of the other, this is a very different thing from one causing the other, or from them being equatable. >.>
In this case, we know that a person who perceived himself as being slighted by a woman brutally assaulted her. However, brutal assault is a behavior observed in many people who are not mentally ill (more commonly, I think, than in those who are, particularly if a couple specific Personality Disorders are excluded), therefore it does not specifically indicate mental illness.
Other sources have her claiming that it was not because she did not say “thank you”. She says that she may have been targeted. Since she is not yet obviously pregnant (nine-weeks), only someone that knew who she was would have known she was pregnant.
http://7online.com/news/pregnant-woman-attacked-in-chelsea-she-suspects-she-was-targeted/556818/
This is not Soviet Russia. “Mentally ill” is a medical condition, not a description of behavior we disapprove of (no matter how much our disapproval is deserved).
I read that as calling Dick an asshole. If that is not how it was meant then I apologize for misreading it. I do have serious reading comprehension problems though curiously it is worse in some places than in others.
I have and your point is well taken.
If you made a Venn Diagram using the set of all the mentally ill and the set of all assholes there would be a small but significant overlap so I’m not saying that there is a false equivalence here, I’m saying that there is a dividing line. To ignore that is to sweep a serious problem under the rug. To repeat, I acknowledge that the guy was most probably just an asshole, there just could be more to it than that. Diagnosing someone when one doesn’t know the facts is unwarranted, sure, but isn’t calling someone just an asshole a kind of diagnosis?
Anyway, I do keep forgetting that this is a community and that, as a community, there is a consensus. I don’t think that the consensus here is wrong, just that it is incomplete due to the emotional difficulties in trying to resolve it.
Kevinalexander missing the point:
Nope, it is describing the behavior, not the cause of the behavior. If you behave badly, you are behaving like an asshole. Why you behaved badly requires more information, especially for a claim of mentally ill.
kevinalexander @27
As I asked you before, tell me exactly where this “dividing line” is. Please be as explicit and detailed as possible. Or admit you’re talking out of your asshole.
kevinalexander
No. Any other stupid questions?
Would all the actual psychiatrists in this thread who have access to the arsehole’s medical records, and who feel that, having made a diagnosis, they are ethically bound to publish that diagnosis on some random internet thread, please speak up?
Everyone else attempting to diagnose medical conditions over the internet, please shut the fuck up.
How do you know he’s a misogynist? He did call her by a certain vulgar term. Other than that, there’s nothing in the article that suggests he was motivated by misogyny.
For that matter, how do you know he’s an asshole? Okay, this is extremely antisocial behavior. If you want to define “asshole” as “engages in extreme antisocial behavior” I guess I can live with that. But it’s also not in his best interest. He’s now in trouble with the police. I would say that a generic “asshole” label would imply a person who doesn’t hesitate to hurt others when it serves their interests.
If you made a Venn Diagram using the set of all the neurotypical and the set of all assholes, there would be a small, but significant overlap. If you used the set of all women. If you used the set of all men. If you used the set of all white people (the overlap would be probably be at its largest here).
Spot the weasel word.
ChristineRose… you DON’T think that man is a person who doesn’t hesitate to hurt others when it serves his interest? What the ever loving fuck sort of planet do YOU live on? Also, man attacks woman possibly for not saying thank you for having a door held open is totally a case of misogyny. If he was set upon her by someone else, the fact that he was willing to beat her up is blatant misogyny because of the power differential between the genders.
My point is that he hurts others when it DOESN’T serve his interest. That suggests some other motive.
And no, I don’t see that it MUST be misogyny. People do beat up men for stupid reasons. It certainly SUGGESTS misogyny.
From the link in the OP:
This just went up about three notches on my scale of scaredness. All we can do is hope he’s caught quickly, I suppose.
If someone hurts someone when it doesn’t serve their interest, that makes them an asshole. Why is this difficult for you?
Yes, people beat up men for stupid reasons, but men are the ones in position of most power.
Being that hurtful for reasons other than self defense is assholish.
This, on the other hand…I don’t think it works that way. You’re moving into meaningless word salad terrain. The “holding the door open” thing seems like a common gendered thing, and that is the part that indicates misogyny as far as I’m concerned.
Well, as Christine dismissed that as being misogynistic, I started becoming a more more…. expansive? in an attempt to explain why without going into detail because I’m a- at work, and b- functioning on 2 hours sleep so brain no thinky gud.
While all spontaneous actions have consequences, not everyone thinks through all of them when committing said spontaneous action. So there’s that.
Also, he may not have thought that he would/will be caught (so quickly / easily / etc.), therefore his interests are safe. If his point was to beat up on a woman, well, he succeeded, and he’ll probably blame her for it, too.
“Suggests misogyny”. Hmmm. Are you going to ask for more evidence and/or a trial before drawing a conclusion next?
(In the same way that not all racist acts are committed to the loud cries of ‘n*gg*r’, not all misogynistic acts are committed to the loud cries of ‘b*tch’.)
+++
FFS, ChristineRose, he BEAT UP a woman. What does he have to do to qualify as “asshole”? Murder her? kick a puppy on top?
He threw a cup of coffee in the face of, then choked, kicked, and beat up a woman he somehow magically knew was in her first trimester of pregnancy in an attempt to make her miscarry because she didn’t thank him in the way he wanted her to for opening a door she could presumably have opened herself, and he called her a fucking bitch while doing so. In what way does this merely suggest misogyny is the question I want to ask but don’t want to know ChristineRose @36’s answer to.
Last year, a guy at McDonald’s said this to me…not joking at all, completely serious: “I’m a gentleman. You won’t lay a finger on a door if I’m around. I’ll break your arm if you do. Because I’m a gentleman.” I did not know this guy. He was a stranger who decided that because I was alone and at my laptop clearly very involved in what I was doing online, I needed to engage in conversation for an extended time. With him. At my table.
@kevinalexander – If your argument would be that some mental illnesses may cause people to behave violently – fair enough. But that’s not what you wrote. You suggested that the man is mentally ill, for no other reason than that he was violent. Then you referred to Venn diagrams, implying some correlation. Those are pretty bad assumptions. In reality, people with mental illnesses are far more likely to become a victim of violence than a culprit. Statistics are: if someone is violent, chances are bigger that he is mentally sane than that he is mentally ill. So please stop spreading prejudices. They are wrong both factually and ethically.
Anyone diagnosing mental illness in this case must either be:
1) This person’s mental health caretaker and, having made an informed diagnosis, is grossly and blatantly violating doctor-patient confidentially,
– or –
2) Not in a position to make such a diagnosis and is therefore talking fully, completely, and utterly out of their ass.
Anyone diagnosing mental illness, please assign yourself one (1) of the above categories.
Thank you.
First thought: Given recent comments on other threads I could note that many would have us believe that the attack simply couldn’t be life threatening, possibly not even serious, because the man was unarmed.
Second thought: Would anyone care to bet that this man wouldn’t easily fall into the MRA camp and assert his right to have his baby, assuming it was his baby, carried to term. No matter what the mother might decide.
lorn @46
…. What? You could note that? Didn’t you just do exactly that by broaching the topic at all? It’s not like you could just wave it away once the cat is out of the bag. Explain in more detail about what the commenters living in your head would have us believe about the attack. Because right now, the apparent straw-manning seems to indicate you’re picking nits about the fact that some people commenting here are for firearm control.
Jesus. This thread is fucking sickening.
The OP is not about mental illness. We really should not still be having ‘conversations’ about the aptness (i.e. none) of making uninformed internet diagnoses.
The OP is not about firearms control. And words completely fail me on that score. If you want to carry on with that, lorn, take it to the fucking T’dome where it belongs.
The OP is about a pregnant woman who has been viciously attacked by someone who she does not know, but who does apparently know intimate details about her; and who made a point of making sure she knows he does.
kevinalexander,
What percentage of physical attacks like this are done by people without mental illnesses? What percentage are done by people with mental illness?
Do you know?
What is your basis for suspecting mental illness (and which one? there are so many different types)? What is tipping you off that this would probably be mental illness? Do people without mental illness not commit enough unbelievably horrid violent acts for you?
Daz,
Yeah, you’re right. I shouldn’t have replied to kevinalexander’s asinine comment and derail the thread further.
Looks like it’s Non Sequitur Sunday again. (re: lorn)
The mental illness derail hit at comment 2. Is that a record?
Lorn, go fuck yourself. This isn’t a thread that needs to be about your personal obsession. Jesus.
Go fellate a revolver. Practice only the safety measures you believe should be mandatory in doing so.
lorn @ 46:
Oh? And who would that be?
Specifics would be nice. Such as, a quote saying that unarmed attacks can never be life-threatening or even serious.
Presumably you have such quotes, or their equivalent, right?
Because the alternative is that you’re terribly stupid, terribly dishonest, or both.
So, should we wait you to quote these ‘many’ people?
Or should we assume you’re not worth listening to?
(Or will you just slink away from the thread and hope no-one remembers it the next time you make a comment?)
I think the idea is that if he’s “mentally ill”, he hasn’t necessarily passed some kind of Moral Event Horizon but might instead be treatable – in other words, there is hope.
No. It’s a whole heap of conditions that have nothing in common except being
not normalvoted into the DSM.Some mental illnesses do make people behave like assholes. Others render them incapable of this. Many, if not most, are orthogonal to the question.
I’m not that much against Internet diagnoses; my point is that “mentally ill” isn’t a diagnosis.
Not so fast. Some people believe in the Moral Event Horizon and use terms such as “asshole” for those people who have supposedly crossed it; they do believe that “just an asshole” is a diagnosis, because they believe that “asshole” is an irreversible personality trait.
I don’t know if anybody in this thread fits this description, though.
o_O
O_o
I’ve never encountered such a narrow definition. The only one I’m familiar with is simply “evil person”.
And with this I leave the microphone to my good friend Captain Obvious.
Cpt. Obvious: Weapons increase the probability that an attack will be life-threatening. The probability doesn’t start at zero! Unarmed attacks aren’t automatically harmless.
Me: Thank you, Captain!
*deep breath*
er
what
colorless green ideas sleep furiously
Please explain.
That’s possible, but unlikely.
We need to bring back the word “evil.” This asshole isn’t mentally ill, he’s evil. Not only does it take the onus off mental illness, but it drives home the point that the violence isn’t random or “crazy”, but deliberate and part of a specific mindset.
There might be some concern about the term “evil” othering the offenders–but I don’t think so, it wasn’t so long ago that the inherent evil of humanity was a commonly accepted belief. On the contrary, I think the fact that we don’t outright call people “evil” anymore is part of the problem–in trying to find a different word to describe people who flagrantly break moral norms, we fall back on terms like “crazy” or “mentally ill”.
Let’s just call it like it is, this douchebag was evil, plain and simple.
What Daz at 49 said. Lorn especially can just fuck right off.
Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too:
Dangerously close to a threat.
Anyway: This truly a horrific story. Almost unbelievable, but tragically, somehow at the same time, not surprising. It kind of illustrates what is behind the mask of chivalry for some men. Sometimes “benevolent sexism” isn’t so benevolent. Honestly, it’s disgusting.
I pretty much agree with Doug Hudson @58. Evil as a nouns is, obviously, symptomatic of religious word-views, but I have no problem at all with the adjective. It describes a particularly nasty breaking of moral norms, and is perfectly apt.
Holy shit, roachiesmom. Did you back away slowly? That’s probably the most terrifying description of this sort of “chivalry” I’ve ever read. I hope you made it out of there safely.
Also, can we please all just hold doors the way it worked at my university? If you’re walking out the door and there’s a person behind you, you press the door open with your outside hand while continuing to exit. The person behind you then presses their hand against the door to keep it open. That way everyone does their fair share of holding the door without making one person stand there waiting for everyone to leave.
re: doors
Nice link here.
It’s incredibly creepy that he knew she was pregnant. For the armchair (office chair?) psychiatrists I think that moves it well out of the “probably mentally ill” camp into the criminal hired to attack a pregnant woman camp. I hope they figure out who instigated this and put both the attacker and that person behind bars. What he said along with the attack indicates some level of misogyny, but given his knowledge of her I doubt that was the motivation for the attack.
@Rowan #33
Why? Every group has their fair share of assholes. Every ethnicity, every gender, etc. Some belief groupings have more than their share, but that is entirely different.
@Grewgills:
Rowan might or might not actually believe something like the “set of all white people” comment, but strongly suspect this is mere cynical sarcasm, with a core of personal experience that Rowan would acknowledge has no predictive power but still has enough residual joules to produce a sharp jolt of snark when touched.
Aren’t you precious.
From the immediately preceding line in the same comment:
“Dangerously close to a rape threat ” if we’re really dishonest or muddled enough to equate “suggesting someone perform an action” with “threatening to do it to them” and not just trying to score points…..
Azkyroth
Are you really equating
‘fuck off’
to
‘put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger’
really?
Well, Azkyroth, I am not trying to score points, because I do not see the point of that. B,ut from where I stand suggesting to someone to essentially commit suicide because they behave as an asshole is in itself an asshole move. My opinion only, but I have reasons to hold it.
*Points at Crip Dyke* That. Much fancier than I could have put it.
Of course not. One of them was said by someone other than me, the other was (actually not said by, but attributed to, me). All the difference in the world.
(Incidentally, I said nothing about pulling triggers. I literally suggested the person in question perform a sexual act with the murder-toy he loves so much and insists isn’t dangerous.)
(In any event, the comment may well have been in poor taste, but characterizing it as a “threat” or as substantially similar to one is simply, and insultingly absurd, which was the point I was actually trying to make. I think I’ve made it. >.>)
Looks like it option #3 for lorn.
Big surprise.
. . .
Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :) @ 71:
True, what you said was not a threat, in exactly the same way that saying “I hope (xyz rapist) gets thrown into jail so he can see what it feels like!” isn’t a threat.
It was a public wish for something violently bad to happen to someone as a sort of karmic ‘justice’.
But, no, it wasn’t a threat.
(You could, I suppose, argue that you were saying “I just said he should put a gun in his mouth and suck on it, I didn’t actually technically say it should go off or anything!” I suggest you repeat that aloud to yourself three or four times to see how it sounds before making that claim.)
Azkyroth @71,
If it’s any consolation, I read your statement as “give oral sex to your gun”–pretty obvious, really, given that you were talking to a gun-loving freak.
If you’d said it to some random person, sure, it might be taken as a desire to see the person commit suicide, but context is important–the insult, crude though it may be, was clearly aimed at a particular person in a particular circumstance, and in context was just a variation of “go fuck yourself.”
Criticizing single sentences out of context is lazy thinking, especially when one is implying that the statement is “dangerous close to a threat”. (Which was ridiculous).
Oh, and beyond my comment on the usefulness of the word “evil” (thanks Daz! I agree that evil as a noun might be problematic), I don’t have anything to say on the story, because I’m not sure what there is to say. Dude was an evil douchebag who demonstrates how chivalry is just another manifestation of the patriarchy.
Though in fairness, I do generally let women board buses in front of me, in a way that I don’t do for men. But I hold doors open for everyone.