Urm, actually… These glyphs were pressed into wet clay and then fired.

Much like Ea-nāşir should have been.

This exactly.

They don’t see imposing a state of fundamentalist Christian supremacy as tyranny, because their ideology is one of Christian Nationalism (which in the US is inherently white nationalism).

They see the erosion of their relevance as the tyranny they’re supposed to stand up to despite it mostly being driven by cultural changes instead of government mandates. This means that the militias are meant to commit violence against civilians; they know the cops will side with them in a scrum. They’re more afraid of a lesbian with blue hair than a rogue sherrif depriving them of rights.

I take your point, but look at the way power is arranged in our society from the makeup of the ownership class to the way unpaid labor usually falls to women.

I do like the framing, but I see it as evidence of the patriarchy and how it damages men too and I don’t think it’s a difficult argument to make. Women have only recently, within my mother’s lifetime, been able to get their own credit lines separately from their husband. They recently lost their hard-won reproductive freedoms. They are far more likely to be killed by their long-term partners than are men. Furthermore, the issues that you bring up where men are worse off is also due to the expectations this system puts onto men, and who is worthy of charity & support.

There has been a long and sustained project to keep women from the levers of power through subjegation, and the perpetrators are the reactionary men who vote, terrorize, and argue that women shouldn’t be the equal of a man. Their ideology comes from a long western tradition that is thousands of years old. It seems in my mind incongruous to suggest that there was not a patriarchy in Roman times, when a paterfamilias could legally kill anyone in his family (including his wife), or during the middle ages or Renaissance when women were kept from political or religious offices (with minimal exceptions), or today when women are legally restricted from moving between States due to pregnancy. There is certainly a continuum between what constitutes patriarchy or not, but I don’t think it’s time to slide over to the “not” side yet, especially as the hits keep coming.

I do appreciate your well-thought out post though, and will certainly incorporate your points into my position in the future.

It’s exactly why reactionaries have spent decades demonizing feminism: it keeps men defending the patriarchy that damages them too (although not as much as other people).

Huh, I always thought Incel culture was c. diff.