Search Results for paul elam
New Men’s Rights hero: the Cleveland bus driver who punched and choked a female passenger
The bus driver winding up for the punch; the passenger’s arms are by her side.
Men’s Rights Activists have a new hero: a Cleveland bus driver who punched and choked a belligerent female passenger who had apparently refused to pay her fare.
The top post in the Men’s Rights subreddit at the moment, with more than 500 upvotes, links to a petition urging the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority to reinstate the bus driver, Artis Hughes, who was suspended after video of the incident leaked out. (See videos here and here.) According to the petition,
As a bus driver, mr. Hughes was lied to, insulted, threatened and eventually attacked by one of the passagers. He was clearly justified in striking back. Were he to suffer any negative consequences to his employment as a result of defending himself and striking back, this would set a disasterous precedent: he and other employees would legitimately believe that their workplace expects them to put up with harrassment, and that they will lose their jobs if they choose to stand up for themselves. …
As well as being a bus driver, mr. Hughes is a man, and [Shidea N. Lane, the passenger] is a woman. We continue to live in a world in which some people see fit to scold men for fighting back against the women who abuse them. After mr. Hughes struck ms. Lane, a woman could be heard protesting about it, saying “That’s a [censored] female”. Mr. Hughes responded by saying: “I don’t care. You want to be man? I’m going to treat you like a man!” This is a healthy attitude: if men refuse to strike back, fearing that the law will favour their female abusers over them, we create an environment in which women can harrass and victimize men with impunity. Instead, a man’s decision to fight back against a woman should be respected.
It is for these reasons – the fact that the bus driver was the real victim and was justified in hitting back; that he and other bus drivers should not fear the legal consequences of responding to attacks by passagers; and that men in general should not fear the legal consequences of responding to attacks by women – that we urge you to reinstate mr. Artis Hughes following the investigation on the incident, and hope that future policies will safeguard him and other bus drivers from legal assault whenever they respond to a passager’s physical assault.
A Voice for Men publishes a post by racist blogger Pamela Geller, whose Islamophobic writings helped to inspire Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik [UPDATE]
Some of Pamela Geller’s other work.
NOTE: Man Boobz Pledge Week Continues! Big thanks to everyone who has donated!
If you haven’t yet, and want to, here’s the button you’re looking for:
UPDATE: AVFM has taken the post down.
Men’s Rights Activists have had a serious hate-on for the Southern Poverty Law Center ever since the hate-group-monitoring watchdog wrote about the misogyny in the Men’s Rights movement last spring.
Since the SPLC devotes its time to ferreting out bigots and exposing them to the world, this has put SPLC-hating MRAs in some interesting company. While not everyone who’s criticized the SPLC is a bigot – both Harper’s magazine and the Nation have been critical of the group and its fundraising methods – many of the most virulent critics of the SPLC are far-right racists. On Reddit, for example, the anti-SPLC subreddit, called simply SPLC, is dominated by white nationalists; indeed, at the moment, one of the top links on its front page is titled “Interest for White Student Union grows.”
Imaginary feminists shut down debate with other imaginary feminists (allegedly) [UPDATE 2]
UPDATE: In a new post on his blog, Marshall explains what (he says) actually happened. See below for details.
UPDATE 2: AVFM says “Oops!” (See end of post.)
I just hope none of you were planning on attending the Great Vancouver All-MRA Debate on whether or not feminism has “gone too far.” Because the already strange story of this debate has taken an even stranger turn, which seems to involve a large degree of blatant lying from someone, or a bunch of someones, connected to the debate. Which, by the way, isn’t going to be happening, at least not any time soon.
A Voice for Men yesterday announced that the much ballyhooed debate would be “delayed due to outside interference.” The announcement told a dramatic tale:
Chris Marshall, a father’s rights activist and the manager of a Vancouver business where a scheduled debate addressing the question, “Has feminism gone too far?” reported that he has just been fired from his job, and escorted from the premises by Vancouver Police after 30 months of employment. The timing of Mr Marshal’s ejection comes 48 hours prior to that scheduled event.
Posters getting torn down: A crime against humanity? (Includes video footage of JohnTheOther’s epic confrontation with alleged box-cutter wielding gang.)
Farting kittens: The real oppressors?
So I’ve been mostly avoiding writing about the whole Men’s Rights postering controversy in Vancouver, because it’s such a tempest in a teapot. The tl;dr: Some posters got torn down, and some of the people tearing them down yelled at the blabby MRA videoblogger and A Voice for Men second fiddle known as JohnTheOther.
MRAs: Given that virtually none of you have any experience as actual real world activists, you may not be aware of this, but POSTERS GET TORN DOWN. It’s annoying, and I don’t support it myself, but it happens all the time. Sometimes, you may actually run across people tearing down your posters, at which point there is usually some sort of awkward confrontation that may include yelling.
You know what you do when this happens? You put your posters up again. You know what you don’t do? Compare the experience to rape. Because, on the list of the grand injustices of the world, having posters torn down is pretty far down the list, somewhere around “stubbing your toe” and “kitten farts on you.”
PUA douche Roosh V: Men’s Rights Activists “use their illusionary movement as an excuse to sit on their ass and be a loser at life.”
Roosh V, making the world a better place
Men’s Rights Activists, I hate to have to break the news to you, but Roosh V, the rapey pickup guru I’ve been writing about a lot lately, is very disappointed in you and your so-called activism. In a sort-of followup to a post of his from several years back with the self-explanatory title “Men’s Rights Has Become A Euphemism For Sexual Loser,” Roosh lays into the “manginas” of the Men’s Rights movement, which he says isn’t really worthy of the name.
The biggest problem with MRAs is that they are not activists. They are pamphleteers. … They believe that one-thousand of them typing away and producing ten-thousand blog posts will change society. … [But] their movement hasn’t produced any results, only little online playgrounds where sad boys can sit in the sandbox and helplessly watch girls play with the cocky boys who understand the rules of the game.
The whole world is watching … A Voice for Men “activists” making asses of themselves
Well,I got carried away there. It’s not literally the whole world. Only a teensy weensy portion of it.
The fellows at A Voice for Men, you see, evidently stung by criticism that they aren’t activists, have begun engaging in real, honest-to-goodness real-world activism, by which I mean that a handful of them, some in Canada and at least one in Australia, have been putting up posters advertising the AVFM website.
In other words, their activism consists of putting up posters for a website whose only activism thus far has consisted of putting up posters for itself.
Well, eventually they’ll get the hang of it, I guess.
Men’s Rights Redditor on a Men’s Rights critic: “He is getting older and homosexual and … people like these tend to age like milk instead of wine.”
In yet another discussion of Arthur Goldwag’s latest post on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog (looking at MRAs bad-mouthing the men who lost their lives protecting their girlfriends in the Aurora shootings), longtime Men’s Rights Redditor Liverotto offers this intriguing take on what he sees as Goldwag’s motivations for criticizing the Men’s Rights movement:
Yeah, a dude actually wrote that, and a couple of people actually upvoted it.
I’m trying to understand the logic: Goldwag is growing older and more homosexual (do men usually become gay as they age?). But gay men age badly, which makes them mad at their “suitors.” So therefore Goldwag has come to hate the (mostly straight) men of the Men’s Rights movement?
Another highlight of the discussion: The r/mensrights regular who thinks I’m Paul Elam. No, really.
JohnTheOther: the Aurora heroes aren’t heroes. KEYWORDS: calculus of death, vagina, drug addled slut
Children: Not worth saving, apparently.
JohnTheOther, blabby videoblogger and Number Two at A Voice for Men, has now weighed in with his own, slightly tardy, manifesto on the Aurora shooting and the evils of supposed male “disposability.” I didn’t read the whole thing – seriously, dude, OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS – but a few things stood out when I skimmed it. For example, this lovely passage, which seems to be a longer and fouler version of that ill-advised tweet from the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto that I mentioned in my last post.
Our mainstream, which is to say, our corporate media – that which bends and fawns for access to the corrupt elected officials and modern robber barons of corporate statehood – is telling you, young man, that in order to be worthwhile, a real man, you’d better be prepared to die without complaint for the child, or the little old lady, or the drug addled slut in the next seat.
But Mr. TheOther is having none of it:
The instinct – expressing itself variously as chivalry or as fatal self sacrifice — is just one more that no longer has any discernable benefit. It is an encumbrance to any real pursuit of a civilized society in which one class of humans is not legally and socially elevated over another.
Sorry, kids; sorry, old ladies; sorry “drug addled sluts” — you’re on your own. Apparently, in a truly civilized society, no one ever looks out for anyone else. Altruism is for barbarians and Bill Bennett!
Here’s JtO’s stirring conclusion:
Those three men are not heroes, they’re just dead. The calculus of death, where one life is traded in celebration for another by preference of a vagina, is pathological and regressive. It must be recognized as the sickness it is. Those who lionized these men, whose fatal and unexamined instinct led to self-destruction; those who held them up as a heroic example to follow, are cordially invited to go first — or to go fuck themselves.
Charming as always, Mr. TheOther.
In the discussion of Mr. TheOther’s post in the Men’s Rights Subreddit, AVFM’s Paul Elam expands on the whole they aren’t heroes” theme, arguing that we need to retroactively strip away the hero status of the three men who died protecting their girlfriends — because they died protecting women.
A Voice for Men has 99 problems, and the word “bitch” is one.
Here’s JohnTheOther on A Voice for Men, complaining that Australian journalist Tory Shepard has unfairly accused “men’s rights extremists” associated with AVFM of using the term “lying bitches.”
“[L]ying bitches” might have [been] pulled from from a reader’s comment on one of more than 1200 articles on AVfM. But that phrase forms no part of this human rights movement’s standard rhetoric, which if Shepherd were a journalist, she would know.
Huh. Yeah, it’s probably just some sort of incredible fluke. Just one reader’s comment on one of more than 1200 articles!
Oops, I guess it was used more than once.
But it’s not like this sort of language is encouraged by JtO or his boss Paul Elam.
To be fair, they don’t always refer to women as bitches. Sometimes they refer to women by the much more genteel “cunt.”
Like the time Elam described the CEO of the Good Men Project as “a disingenuous cunt that makes her living off trying to turn men into lap dogs.” And the time he referred to comedic actress Katherine Heigl as a “misandric cunt.” Oh, and that time he referred to a commenter on his site as “Ms. Cuntforbrains, or if you are male, Mr. Cuntforbrains.” And the time he referred to the feminist blogosphere as the “cunt-o-sphere.” Very witty!
I know, it’s unfair to cherry-pick comments from the guy who actually started and runs A Voice for Men. Clearly he isn’t representative of the site at all.
(Note: Yes, I did say yesterday that I wasn’t going to read that JtO post on general principle. And yes, I did read a little bit more of it. But I have not read the whole thing, and I never will!)
A Voice for Men continues to spread its message of peace, love, and f*cking people’s sh*t up
Poor Paul Elam. Here he is, the self-annointed leader of the world’s greatest 21st century human rights movement, and for some strange reason people keep mistaking him for some sort of two-bit hatemonger.
No, really!
In his latest post on A Voice for Men, Mr. Elam laments the evil way one Australian news site took AVFM’s rallying cry – “Fuck Their Shit Up” — and made it seem kind of mean. Also, they added an “ing” to “fuck.” Elam writes:
[Journalist Tory] Shepherd (or her editors) gave a subheading to her piece which read:
Hate site’s motto is ‘F***king their s**t up
Misuse of the transitive verb aside, and ignoring the fact that even when properly quoted it is not the sites motto (which is “Take the Red Pill”), the use of that phrase in the sub-header was calculated to make AVfM appear to be a hate site.
How unfair to tag a website with the slogan it uses constantly! And, really, how could anyone see “fuck their shit up” as anything but a spirited call for peacefulness, understanding, and love?
