For A Voice for Men, and its Edmonton offshoot, terrifying women is a form of “human rights activism.”
Men’s Rights Edmonton activist at work
So the self-described “human rights activists” at A Voice for Men have found three more women to harass. Here’s the story, which for many of you will have a depressingly familiar ring:
Members of Men’s Rights Edmonton, a small group that is for all intents and purposes a local chapter of A Voice for Men, has been putting up pictures targeting Lise Gotell, the chair of women’s and gender studies at the University of Alberta. The pictures, which seem inspired by “Wanted” posters of yore, feature a large portrait of Gotell and the caption:
Theft isn’t black. Bank fraud isn’t Jewish. And rape isn’t male.
“Just because you’re paid to demonize men doesn’t mean rape is gendered. Don’t be that bigot.
Gotell’s crime? She was involved in what appears to have been a remarkably effective rape awareness campaign focusing on date rape and featuring the slogan “Don’t Be That Guy.”
A Voice for Men took exception to the campaign because, even thought it did deal with the male victims of rape, it didn’t devote equal time to the problem of evil, false-accusing “girls.” No, really. Men’s Rights Edmonton Activists put up “satirical” versions of the campaign’s posters with the slogan “Don’t Be that Girl.” Now, MR-E and AVFM, at least according to the “argument” advanced on their new poster, seem to be upset that the campaign didn’t devote equal time to the problem of female rapists. [Note: this paragraph has been corrected; see note at end of piece.]
Gotell spoke out against the posters, and now Men’s Rights Edmonton and AVFM are doing their best to smear her as a “bigot.” Because she doesn’t believe that women are responsible for half of all rapes.
Since this is not actually true — more on this in a later post — it’s hard to see how this makes her a bigot.
As a rule, I don’t support tearing down the posters of one’s ideological enemies. Free speech and all that. But these posters are different: they’re slanderous personal attacks designed to harass an individual. Were they posted in my neighborhood I would tear them down.
And evidently that’s what some people in Edmonton have been doing.
Indeed, one recent night, several members of Men’s Rights Edmonton claim to have caught two women doing just that. While they don’t seem to have video footage of the women tearing down the posters, the MRAs filmed themselves following the women down the street and angrily confronting them for this alleged crime.
They posted the video to YouTube, and AVFM posted it as well, under the typically overheated title “Men’s Rights Edmonton confronts fascists.” They screencapped images of both women from the video and announced their intention to uncover their personal information:
MR-E would like to know the names of these two women so that charges of destruction of property can be laid against them. Also, the world should know the identities of those who seek to silence and censor messages advocating for human rights.
Of course, this is ridiculous. Tearing down a poster that was almost certainly posted illegally in the first place isn’t “destruction of property.” No one is going to be prosecuted for this. The police have better things to do.
But of course that’s not the real intent here. The real intent here is to scare the shit out of these women and other feminists by exposing them to harassment online — like the woman labeled “Big Red” and countless other women who have been targeted by AVFM and other MRAs (sometimes completely erroneously).
AVFM’s Paul Elam gave the game away with an “editor’s note” added to the post:
[A] woman who vandalizes man’s property and then flips him off when he confronts her about it on a dark street at night only acts in this manner because she is certain she has absolutely nothing to fear. Feminists terrified of MHRAs? My ass.
Elam could not have made it any clearer: the main point of this kind of “activism” — which has become AVFM’s bread and butter — is all about intimidating women, not helping men.
AVFM, where terrifying individual women is “human rights activism.”
Here’s the appropriate response to that:
CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION: I rewrote the paragraph starting with “A Voice for Men took exception,” which confused AVRM/MR-E’s current objection to Gotell’s views with its original “argument” against the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign.
Posted on September 18, 2013, in a voice for men, antifeminism, doxing, drama kings, edmonton, entitled babies, evil women, harassment, imaginary backwards land, men who should not ever be with women ever, misogyny, MRA, not-quite-explicit threats, not-quite-plausible deniability, oppressed white men, paul elam, playing the victim, rape, rape culture, taking pleasure in women's pain, the poster revolution has begun, things that aren't fascism and tagged antifeminism, edmonton, men's rights, misogyny, MRA, rape, rape culture. Bookmark the permalink. 937 Comments.
Which all sounds very nice until you realize that the people who you’re trying to target with the “justified” doxxing will then use that as an excuse to target the people who you would prefer not to be targeted, and you’ll have helped create the online atmosphere that allows them to get away with it.
@freemage
I never heard about that before, did people drop his doxx or find his doxx and report him to the police? If something illegal is going on reporting it to police makes sense, but honestly even if something illegal is happening I really don’t see any point for just throwing someone’s information out there. The only thing that could possibly come from that is harrassment or worse.
@John-H
I just finished that article… Jesus.
Another problem with “justified doxxing” is that there are no guarantees that groups of people on the Internet will actually identify the right person. In the case of violentcruz, they actually were correct in identifying the right guy. But what if they had made a mistake? They could have ruined an innocent person’s life. That’s one reason societies make rules and laws against vigilantism.
I agree it’s complicated, though. I have zero sympathy for violentcruz, and I’m glad he was stopped.
MRM got some discussion in a recent episode of the Feminist Current podcast. This stuff in Edmonton gets a brief mention.
http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/feminist-current/2013/09/street-harassment-mens-rights-activists-and-hate-speech-inte
Basically the “it’s justified, and we can target the right people!” argument sounds to me like it comes from a position of not thinking things through from the perspective of the vulnerable groups who will inevitably be targeted most often if doxxing is a thing that people thing is justifiable. For every Reddit pedophile targeted there will be 100 people who just happened to attend a protest or post a comment that pissed someone off online while female, or black, or gay, or all of the above, because that’s how these things always go.
Can we have more interesting drive-by trolls? Or am I asking for the impossible here?
baileyrenee: VC (I misspelled the ‘nym in the earlier post: it’s “violentacrez”) was a redditor who started numerous subreddits that were pretty much all about spreading misogyny and racism. Among the most notorious of these was r/jailbait, which featured candid and secret shots of underage girls. Since the girls were still clothed (they just happened to be momentarily in poses that the vile and disgusting used for their arousal), there was no actual lawbreaking going on. When bad publicity forced Reddit to shut that one down, another one started (r/creepshots, just as nasty as it sounds), and when they started to get more heat, they asked VC to become a moderator, to which he readily agreed.
Eventually, a blogger on the site Gawker managed to identify VC and opted to dox him, publishing his real name. VC got fired, and Reddit instituted a site-wide ban on links to Gawker articles as a retaliatory strike; this later became a ban on specific sub-reddits, but not site-wide.
VC never violated the law, but he was a pernicious and disgusting presence on the internet, and I can’t say I’m sorry to see him go. Doxxing is how that happened.
So, yeah, complicated. I fully understand CassandraSays and thebionicmommy’s concerns–they’re both legit and justified, and not easily addressed. But I also don’t see how you deal with people who hide behind an assumption of the right to anonymity to harass and harm others, without doxxing, or something very like it.
So your answer is that you know that encouraging doxxing is going to create problems for people who’re already vulnerable online, and that people may be misidentified, and that may lead to vigilante crap, but you’re still going to go with “yeah, let’s dox people”?
On behalf of the people who’re going to continue to be the most likely victims of malicious doxxing I’m going to have to continue to point out how ethically questionable a position that is.
To be clear: I’m not trying to ‘encourage doxxing'; I’m saying it may be, at best, a necessary evil in the non-system we’ve got right now, at least until we come up with something better. I’d rather that Reddit, Twitter and Facebook (and all the others out there) took seriously the notion of eliminating the worst of their shit. But that day seems a long way off; we get victories on that front, but new sources of this crap pop up, and the cycle starts all over again. And even the notion of getting the companies to do it is flawed–the misogynist faction has already made it clear that they intend to deliberately spam the proposed Twitter ‘report’ function in an effort to silence voices they don’t like, rather than actual ToS violations.
I’ll accept that my position is hideously flawed, with a lot of dangers and pitfalls. But your position would leave the VC’s of the world intact. I’m not sure I see a change in the law that would work to stop them; neither do I see an easy way to deal with their shit.
Honestly? At the end of the day, I’m saying “I don’t know”. I don’t know which is worse, I don’t know which leads to less harm, and I don’t know how to devise a better system.
Just after the Boston Marathon Bombing, a page went up on reddit aimed at crowdsourcing the identity of the bomber(s). Apparently people were supposed to take the lead “a man in a hoodie and backpack was sighted in the vicinity of the Marathon shortly before the attack” and Sherlock the right guy out of it.
They didn’t.
Someone tried it again for the Navy Yard shooting and reddit shut them down fast.
I’m not seeing any way in which a system that says that doxxing is OK if the people doing it feel that it’s justified could be considered to cause less harm, given the things that we already know people consider to be adequate justification for doxxing. The position you’re laying out is one in which you’re willing to accept whatever collateral damage happens as long as we can occasionally take out some bad guys. I’m not OK with that, and I suspect that you wouldn’t be either if you were part of one of the demographics that’s most likely to end up in the collateral damage column.
PS – Saying “no, I’m not willing to accept the collateral damage, but we don’t have any other options” is in fact being willing to accept the collateral damage, no matter how prettily you word it.
Doxing should not be acceptable. Even if you ID the right person and something good happened out of it, doxing should never be acceptable because you could totally screw up and ruin some innocent person’s life.
Not to mention that even having an excuse for “justified doxing” means that the MRAs would use this with impunity under the cover of “well, she was trying to attack me with box cutters!” or some bullshit like that.
WOW, HTML code fail much? I must have forgot to add the slash.
CassandraSays: That’s fine–but then accept that the collateral damage of your position is that you are willing to accept a VC continuing to exploit and harm young women who’ve been targeted by creepshotters. Saying “No Dox, ever” is no more free of collateral damage than saying “Dox Away”.
How many more underage girls would’ve had their upskirts posted on reddit between last year and today if VC had NOT been doxxed? I don’t think that’s a question that can be easily dismissed.
Again, my preference would be goading the larger social media companies to self-police more effectively. That’s an ongoing fight, and one I support wholeheartedly. But we’ve got a space between now and then on the calendar (assuming it’s even a winnable fight), and I honestly am at a loss on what the best way to deal with the harm being done right now is. Do you have a suggestion beyond “no Dox”?
I do agree that law enforcement does not do nearly enough to protect people from cyber crimes like harassment, threats, and stalking. It’s frustrating that marginalized groups can’t depend on the police or the FBI to keep them safe, but rich and powerful people can. It’s similar to how police fail to enforce many restraining orders, and only seem to care once something bad happens and it’s too late.
But I don’t think the solution is doxxing and Internet vigilante groups. I support people to have the right to self defense, but I don’t classify online mobs as self defense.
If nothing else, if feminists are doxxing, then MRAs can point at us and yell “Doxxers!” and add something real to their list of awful things that females and betas do. Either that or use it as a justification of their own activity… or, more likely given their consistency issues, both.
Thanks for attempting to mansplain what’s best for women to a woman, dude. We duly take note of your concern for some of us, when it’s convenient and supports the position you want to take.
I’m done being nice about this, and will soon start wielding the clue bat with more force if the conversation continues in its current direction.
Shit like this is still going on, so exactly how much good did doxxing one asshole do, again?
I can easily dismiss your privilege and your ‘splaining. Watch me.
Seriously. Doxxing is disgusting. I expect to have my personal information kept private, and doxxing anyone opens them up to harassment, stalking, or worse.
This is the big argument to me: If a group you disapprove of does something you disapprove of, then you have to not do it yourself, ever, or you have no moral high ground. You can’t really go “but I only do it to people who deserve it” or “but there are circumstances that make it acceptable in this case” because those things are subjective and anyone could claim they applied in any circumstance.
Same reason I don’t approve of Name the Problem.
I’m going to keep a link to this conversation on file for the next time I need to illustrate to someone what privilege blindness is, and what happens when people choose it over their stated desire to be allies.
This might be a slippery slope here, but oh well. I think this situation really is a slippery slope. I agree that VC got what he deserved. However, what’s to stop “the good guys” from getting a thrill from defeating “the bad guy” so they start targeting people for more mild offenses? If someone says a misogynist slur online, should an online mob dox them? What if someone enjoys a problematic song like Blurred Lines or TV show like Game of Thrones? Who decides what offenses merit the punishment of doxing?
That’s what the Baldknobbers did. They first went after Confederate outlaws. But the power got to them, and they started going after anyone they happened to dislike for any reason. They got so out of hand, another vigilante group formed to fight them, calling themselves the Anti Baldknobbers. By the time the feud ended, nobody knew why they were fighting anymore, but 30 people were dead. The Hatfields and McCoys are another example.
Heh–check out this guy’s Reddit history. Apparently he exclusively comments on threads about guys sitting with their legs wide apart.
Sitting with the legs wide seems a little vulgar to me. Unless you are sitting cross-legged.
Huh, that’s a very…specific interest that Reddit dude has there.
I will cease to push the point. I probably should done this at least one post earlier, and I apologize for not doing so.
It was the point itself that people objected to, not the fact that you continued pushing it once other people disagreed with it.
This is OT, but I found this: http://laidnyc.wordpress.com/2013/09/19/the-walls-of-facebook/ and it definitely show the true, creepy colors of PUAs and MRAs. I’m sure one day they will want middle-school girls. Their delusion that they’ll all be like Shaun Connery when they hit 60 and the centerfold syndrome they have is childish at best.
Count me in the anti-doxxing camp, but I admit to sometimes being confused sometimes as to whether or not something is doxxing. Is what Adria Richards did doxxing, or is it not doxxing because she didn’t release their names or call for people to identify them? When do investigative journalists cross the line into doxxing?
Am I being obtuse? There is some evidence that my brain is not firing on all cylinders today.
Richards didn’t dox, and neither do investigative journalists. I think doxxing has a more malicious element. Doxxing is just shit-stirring, and while I’d like to have doxxers lick that particular spoon, I gotta be against doxxing them too.
Cassandra: I get that. I’m still processing the arguments you and the others have made against my point, and I’m re-evaluating my position. In the meantime, though, I kept pushing back, rather than just saying, “Hey, I need to re-evaluate this; you’ve given me a lot to think about.” That tendency is probably behind some of my most common mansplaining fails, so I try to apologize for it when I do it.
I am curious about answers to cloudiah’s question. It gets particularly tricky in the internet age, when anyone with a blog can call themselves an investigative journalist.
Oh and just smack me if I’m JAQing off.
hellkell: So because the Gawker author followed the commonly accepted ‘rules’ of investigative journalism (doing careful research, actually contacting the person to give them the opportunity to comment, etc), he didn’t actually dox VC in the sense that you oppose? I could get behind that, because it would allow for some way for people to be called on their shit, without just turning back to mob justice.
Having a blog doesn’t make you a journalist, no matter how many random bloggers claim that it does. Journalists can of course also have blogs, but it’s not the same thing. There are some blogs that host actual journalists, but even there it gets tricky. Gawker hosts some actual journalists, for example, but not everyone who writes for Gawker really merits the title.
(This is a pet hate of mine, particularly when people try to use their random little blogs as a way to acquire press passes for events, and then behave in ways that illustrate exactly why bloggers who’re not really journalists shouldn’t be given press passes.)
@yaoi huntress earth,
Ewww, those guys are terrible. One of them, Wald, said
I feel sorry for girls and young women that would ever run into guys like him. “Mold the future wife” *shudders*
Also, do you mind if I ever shorten your name to yaoi?
Maru got a sister:
Freemage: I wasn’t even thinking of Gawker as investigative journalists, at all, ever. I think Chen doxxed VA completely and did it on a blog.
Cloudiah, those cats are just adorable. Maru’s a perfect name! (I think it means “Ball” in Japanese) :D
Mara has a sister!
If we refer to one of our commenters as yaoi I’m going to get super confused and wonder if I’m on the wrong blog.
cloudiah, I always thought that giving out addresses and workplaces was doxxing. I may be wrong though.
Ew. No. Ugh. No.
Besides the obvious creep factor this just doesn’t even sound correct… I didn’t have boobs or a pimple-free free face until my 20’s, I definitely did not “peak” in highschool.
Curious asked him
and LaidinNYC answered
So even though LaidinNYC is awful, Curious took the top prize for awfulness. Congrats, Curious!
Yeah, so I just looked up yaoi on urban dictionary. Oops, that’s embarrassing. Forget I asked then.
These fucking MRAs are making me want to become a recluse. Who the fuck are they anyway, & what the fuck are they thinking? They are suck ignorant fucks that they have no fucking idea what feminism is really about. It’s only about 1 thing & has 1 ultimate goal – the goal of having women being treated as regular people, not “females” or “princesses” or “trophy wives” or any of that other shit. Just regular people. With that goal, feminism has taken a very hard stand on many things, like owning up to the sick fact that there are women who are rapists, child molesters, & child abusers of both genders. Oh & feminism has nothing to do with hating men & boys.
These sick fucking thieves, the thieves of the term “Men’s Rights”, they don’t care about men or boys. They don’t even want to own up to the fact that men rape & abuse anyone. A rapist, to them, is some guy, some mysterious pervert, who is prowling the streets & hiding in bushes at 3am. Not “nice guys”, not “decent guys”. Well, you fuckheaded MRAs, do you want to know who was considered a “nice & decent guy”? A guy who was considered smart, attractive, & could get just about any woman he wanted? Fucking Ted Bundy! & still he assaulted & murdered so many women. He would trick them by sick means, he would break into their houses & apartments & attack them in their sleep, & he would stalk women too, before he would attack them. Do you really want to be associated with the kind of thinking & behavior of someone like Ted Bundy, a convicted murderer & rapist that was sentenced to death?
& calling feminists “fascists” is a bunch of bullshit too. If anyone is fascistic & totalitarian, it’s the fucking MRAs. They want to shut women up, they want to shut anyone up who isn’t like them, & doesn’t agree with them. Pretty fascistic, wouldn’t you say?
For the sake of comic relief since this thread hasn’t been much fun, have a SNL sketch from Korea (with subtitles) about yaoi fanfiction. Apparently they based the sketch on an actual fanfiction (DBSK, I believe).
Hana is super-cute. *Nods* And the SNL K thing is… wacky, on several levels. Thanks for the amusement, CassandraSays.
Before continuing: I’m still working through it all. Cloudiah’s comment (“smack me if I’m just JAQing off”) is very much applicable to me as well.
Cassandra: That was why I specified “followed the rules of journalism” (and I should have said, “followed the rules of professional journalism” to be clearer that I’m trying to use a very specific set of standards). That’s something I actually am more than passingly familiar with, and from what I can see, Chen really did do everything that a professional, paid-by-a-media-company journalist would do in that situation–most importantly to my mind, confirming beyond doubt that the ID was correct, and then giving VC an opportunity to speak for himself (which the vast, vast majority of doxxers never do, obviously).
hellkell: Hrm… Okay, then–what about that column makes you put it in the Dox category, as opposed to the Journalism category?
Cassandra: thanks for the brain bleach/eye candy. I didn’t know there was an SNL Korea. The guy with the longer red hair has the best facial expressions ever.
Freemage: why are you so insistent on this being journalism? Do you consider Watergate doxxing?
Maybe I’d feel better about it if the internet had a better track record.
@PJ
BUT IF I DON’T WHINE HERE, HOW WILL ANYONE SEE MY GLORIOUS, MANLY OPININONS????ELEVEN
@sarahlizhousespouse
I know. Not enough time to have fun poking them, but still to much time having to look at their boring, deraily, comment.
You’re supposed to learn something new every day, and today I learned what yaoi is. I’ll call that a win.
@ hellkell
The Korean version of SNL is new to me and I’m loving it so far. This is my favorite sketch (about plastic surgery and how judgy people get about it).
And this one is just weird, though I have to give the dude props for being willing to do it, since there aren’t many men that famous for being hot who’d be willing to make asses of themselves in public that way.
Kendra, considering I assume you just got an unexpected eyeful, that’s a very positive attitude to take.
@thebionicmommy : It’s ok, you can shorten it. Most people do. And there’s a story behind the whole name, but I don’t want to bore you with it.
The thing with the response is that these guys still don’t acknowledge their wives after the children are born. They’ll mention the kids (as in “my kids”) and their boners, but the wife is just something to tolerate after she hits 30. If all they can value is her looks, youth and virginity (the later two will be gone), how can they respect her as a person?
Oh, that’s just sad. I’m unmarried, but I always imagined that, if I do eventually marry, I’d marry someone that I, you know, loved. It must be a shitty life if you pick by birth-date alone.
My answer? Leave her. She’ll thank you for it… though why she hasn’t already left you by this point is a mystery for the ages.
@Ally
Yeah. I think ‘drive by’ and ‘interesting’ don’t go well together :P
@thebionicmommy
Ugh, yes. May they step on all the legos forever.
baileyrenee: Part of the problem with that definition is that in the current era, one usually leads to the other. (That is, if I post your name, someone else will be inspired to do the hunting for your home address and your boss’ phone number.) Since the consequence is fairly predictable, the onus then falls on the person making the decision to name-drop to determine if that’s an acceptable outcome.
On that link… that horrible, horrible link… Ugh.
Maru has a sister! Most important and cheering news of the day (and between politics here and my jerkbrain making life difficult, I could do with it).
Also Hana is SO PRETTYYYYYYYYYYYYY.
Yea, identifying someone can lead to officially doxxing them for sure, and a lot of the time trying to find someone’s name is basically just hoping someone else will doxx them. I think it can be an important distinction to make though, because with, let’s say, David’s name out there, someone could doxx him and then be all “well, he doxxed himself first! His name is out there already!” But, maybe to avoid that, just putting out anyone’s personal info they didn’t want known should be considered doxxing. Either way the whole thing makes me scared of the internet.
This Korean SNL is way better then American SNL, btw. I’m liking it.
though why she hasn’t already left you by this point is a mystery for the ages.
But that’s the strange thing…when she does leave, they have huge fits about it. It’s like they never think that the woman has thoughts or opinions of their own, and girls do mature, even after 22, even if they think they “molded” them. So it completely takes them by surprise that their sex-dispensing sandwich making machines leave them, all because they were totally wrong about women. But instead of going “Huh, I guess I was completely wrong about that”, they whine and bemoan the fact that women are horrible.
Sporklift – yup, they never do grasp that they can’t turn a woman into a Stepford wife, even if they’ve had the opportunity to do their pedo-grooming from puberty.
I am totally anti-doxxing. If you are willing to do the wrong thing for the right reason, you are one step closer to being willing to do the wrong thing for the wrong reason. It’s not worth it.
I haven’t read all the comments but I reported the video. I hope you guys do the same. It’s definitely defamation of character and bullying, and should go against youtube’s tos.
I’m just dying over the commenters calling the women’s acts vandalism of private property. I didn’t realize the MRM owned all telephone poles.
One guy said they should’ve called the police. The video of the police laughing at them would be much more interesting than this.
And I am ok with doxxing in the event that the person is committing a criminal act, or is a danger to themselves or other people.
Note: that comes from someone who has been maliciously doxxed in an attempt to silence my discussion of someone’s very public behavior (that didn’t include doxxing him as his full name was associated with what he was doing online by his choice) in a way he didn’t like (criticism). He definitely did it with the intention of having people do something to me (or at least make me so scared of that possibility so I would stop calling him out).
I do not condone following doxxing with threats, harassment, or violence, and only see it as a way to give information to the police if what was happening was illegal, warn other people of a predator in their area, and hold people accountable for criminal behavior.
Obviously tearing down a poster isn’t criminal behavior and so doxxing these women would be completely ridiculous.
I definitely don’t condone publishing people’s home addresses because the only thing to really do with that is to harass or physically hurt a person or their property. However, I believe linking people’s names and areas to their behavior is the only justice there is for most of the horrible shit that happens on the internet because police can’t be bothered most of the time, nobody in power seems to want to update laws to prevent things that absolutely should be illegal, and major social media sites don’t take anything seriously when they should be reporting ips and other identifying information to police for criminal behavior.
I don’t think there is such a thing as the “right” to anonymity on the internet, especially when you’re committing a crime or admitting to criminal behavior.
You can make a slippery slope argument all you want but to me there is a very clear difference between attaching a person’s name to a criminal act when they thought they could freely do that anonymously and posting someone’s name, address, workplace, phone number, etc, and telling people to stalk them, just because they said something you don’t like.
That Frederick Coombs link was interesting. As was the related story it led me to, of Bummer and Lazarus the dogs.
“AVFM, where terrifying individual women is ‘human rights activism.'”
Do those bitches really look terrified to you?
And do you have any evidence whatsoever that these posters were “almost certainly posted illegally”?
@Jason,
I think they probably were scared but trying to put on a brave face. If a woman shows fear, then she’s called a drama queen, but if she acts stoic, then people minimize the danger she is in, like you just did. Oh yeah, and they are not “bitches”, they are women, courageous women.
I don’t see any bitches, Jason. I do see a petulant troll. :D
Jason,
Do you believe the MRA’s got any permit to post their crap everywhere? It’s one thing to post a lost pet sign up on phone poles, but another to post up their pseudo wanted posters of a professor they hate. Anyone who tears down those signs is doing a great service to their community.