{"id":13582,"date":"2011-06-27T17:01:56","date_gmt":"2011-06-28T00:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=13582"},"modified":"2011-06-27T17:01:56","modified_gmt":"2011-06-28T00:01:56","slug":"youd-better-free-your-mind-instead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=13582","title":{"rendered":"You’d Better Free Your Mind Instead"},"content":{"rendered":"

As you may have heard, if you frequent the wingnutosphere, last week Thomas Ball, a divorced man angry about paying child support, committed suicide through self-immolation<\/a> on the steps of a courthouse in Keene, New Hampshire. For this act he’s been praised by the usual suspects<\/a>, who see his act as some sort of brave stand against those evil feminists who control the courts. And the right is shocked — shocked!<\/a> — that some on the left could see Ball’s action and his suicide note-slash-call to terrorism<\/a> as some sort of violent act.<\/p>\n

I don’t have time to give Ball’s jeremiad the kicking around it deserves, not today; hopefully I’ll be able to later in the week. Suffice to say that everything you need to know about Thomas Ball is written by he himself, in the sixth paragraph:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the sainted martyr of the MRA movement — a man who admits to slapping his child so hard that he cut her lip, because she was, like most children, being silly and testing boundaries.<\/p>\n

A four-year-old child. Who just wanted to play with her dad.<\/p>\n

He hit her so hard he cut her lip.<\/p>\n

And he was remorseless.<\/p>\n

Suffice to say that if, as Dr. Mrs. Wingnutty Professor opines<\/a>, “His statement is not the ramblings of a madman,” I don’t want to be sane. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As you may have heard, if you frequent the wingnutosphere, last week Thomas Ball, a divorced man angry about paying child support, committed suicide through self-immolation on the steps of a courthouse in Keene, New Hampshire. For this act he’s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,31,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-feminists-and-their-pals","category-feminism-sexism-etc","category-men-and-masculinity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13582"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13583,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13582\/revisions\/13583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}