So John the Other has responded to my post about A Voice for Men’s “bounty” on the makers of the SCUM video. It’s a fairly unhinged rant, even by his standards. Here’s the money quote:
It’s a bizarre bit of circular logic: if some deranged asshole literally kills one or more of the videomakers, this is proof that the Swedish justice system isn’t working, which therefore justifies the deranged asshole’s actions. So the existence of vigilante violence justifies vigilante violence that justifies vigilante violence.
Since when is making a video a capital crime?
After all this, John rather bizarrely claims that “[u]nlike David Futrelle, I do not and will not lend myself to the support of violence, or indeed, of murder.”
That’s because, according to his daft logic, shooting the videomakers would count as “self defense,” because evidently someone posting a video on YouTube that you don’t like is equivalent to someone coming at you with a knife.
While challenging AVfM’s “bounty” — without actually defending the video in any way — apparently means that I support murder. Go figure.
But dwelling too much on the specifics of this one case is to miss the larger point. A Voice for Men has essentially set itself up as a sort of antifeminist Witchfinder General. In the 1968 cult film of that name, you may remember, the corrupt Witchfinder tested whether the accused were witches by lowering them into water; those who floated were judged guilty, and burned at the stake. Those who sank were innocent, but dead.
Paul Elam and his sidekick John have a similar approach. They intend to do feminists harm, to “fuck their shit up,” regardless of what they’ve done or said. None of those who have been placed in the Register-Her “registry” as “bigots” deserve to be smeared or harassed (or put on the phony “registry” in the first place). But if you look at what they are ostensibly there for, well, you’ll discover that it matters not at all to Elam whether they sink or float. The point is to harass feminists; almost any excuse will do.
One of those on the “registry,” a radical feminist who posts online as Vliet Tiptree , has indeed said some fairly vile things about the male gender; she is the only one who might conceivably be described as a “bigot.” But others are there on trumped up “charges” based on highly tendentious readings of some of their writing; it’s clear that they’ve been targeted mainly because they have been publicly critical of the men’s rights movement.
Meanwhile, another of the alleged feminist bigots is not a feminist at all, but rather a traditional-minded “mom blogger” who aroused Elam’s fury by saying that she didn’t want male daycare volunteers taking her daughter to the bathroom, and for suggesting (incorrectly) that men make up 99% of abusers. (She has since apologized, but remains on the “registry.”)
And one recent candidate for inclusion, a feminist blogger whom Elam has pledged to “stalk,” seems to have made it on Elam’s naughty list simply because she has helped to highlight how pervasive harassment of women and feminists is online. Complain about harassment; get harassed. But Elam’s “critiques” of her are all suspiciously vague. It’s not clear if he has read even a single one of her blog posts. Nonetheless, he promises her that
by the time we are done you will wax nostalgic over the days when all you had to deal with was someone expressing a desire to fuck you up your shopworn ass.
In a post from some months back, Elam offered a similarly psychosexually charged justification for his campaign to “Fuck Their Shit Up.” Directly addressing the “feminazi scumbags reading this right now,” he declared:
I am not going to stop. You see, I find you, as a feminist, to be a loathsome, vile piece of human garbage. I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.
Let’s repeat that last bit for emphasis:
the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection.
Does anyone still doubt that the aim of A Voice for Men and Register-Her.com in publishing personal information of their enemies is to intimidate – indeed, to terrorize?
Does anyone still doubt that their campaign is driven by hate?
Does anyone still doubt that they don’t give a shit if their actions cause someone to be physically assaulted or even killed?
We all could use rousing Springtime, ja? Ja!
And before some troll tells me I’ve missed the point of that ridiculous blog post, I’ve seen other woman-haters complain about the term “feminazi” before.
Here are some forum posts narrated by Something Awful, Feminazi-guy comes in at 3:03:
SA has been parodying this kind of crap for a long time.
Making fun of misogynist MRAs is…
PS! The weekend web video is probably not SFW. You’re not working if you’re in the US anyway. 😉
Geese Howard: You’re attacking pro-choice movements by saying the Nazis aren’t so bad, because :
1) they believed their own propaganda
2) killing a adult or child Jew is not as bad as killing a fetus
3) they caused a global war killing millions of (very much born) people
4) feminists are “nagging” (and other democratically allowed things) in order to advance their views
Hum.
I really don’t know how to argue with a troll so stupid that if I was to show these arguments to any reasonable person (and I will broad the definition of the world to include pro-lifers and I even hope many MRAs) s/he would automatically disagree with you. I might as well go on MRM forum and say: “you’re evil because I like torturing puppies and eating babies’ brains”, if that’s the level of the debate these days.
Also, why so much hate on Belgians?
One last post: Sorry if I have insulted anyone working today to make ends meet! I’m so bad at being PC. 😮
My post was simply pointing out that godwins law if very common among groups who have a named enemy. In this case the MRA’s who name feminism the enemy. The marilyn french quote was appropriate as it names men the enemy and names them nazis.
‘Play the old anti-feminist song, Ullere…’
Yeah I don’t know the song, but I remain pretty anti anyone who ignores evidence and reality. Do feminists ignore evidence and reality? Probably some do, many feminists have started to point out the injustices facing men so I guess many don’t.
Avfm continues to prove godwins law for me with ‘In the shadows of Dachau’
Ullere, the guy who comes in on a feminist site claiming he’s neither a feminist nor anti-feminist, but a searcher after truth, unbiased observer, and guy who is devoted, utterly devoted to empirical unbiased evidence and hard reality, an enemy of all forms of extremism…
Well, he rarely ends up being an amazing, unbiased titan of reason when it all shakes out, fair and evenhanded in his judgements. But surprise me, I’d love it if you did. Be the first!
Ullere, your examples above trying to equate feminism and Nazis highlights your lack of knowledge about both.
And for the love of little green apples, can you fools please pick something from recent times to harp on and use as proof of The Great Evil of Feminism? The Women’s Room was written almost 40 damn years ago.
I know I keep saying this, but kee-rist on the Concorde, step into the now.
To add to zhinxy’s comment, the last one who made this claim is FactFinder, I believe, who left after having been linked to a project for a video game about two pregnant prostitutes fighting for the the love of the future wealthy father until one of them lose her fetus.
Brandon, as in I-don’t-see-the-problem-with-secretly-taping-women-I’m-having-sex-with-Brandon, also regularly makes the same claim.
So… I guess good luck not to follow the same road, Ullere.
Exactly.
There aren’t many feminists who argue that men are inherently, intrinsically, from birth, dangerous or cruel. What French meant is that society has created a system whereby men must oppress women in large and small ways. Those who go along get certain perks, those who won’t are treated like the rest of the oppressed.
She meant that if a man who knows what’s going on actually makes the conscious choice to go along with it, whether he’s just afraid not to go along or he actually gets off on doing women harm, the promise of what his humanity could have been is gone.
Man, you folks are giving more thought to these items of that “Feminist Quotes” list than the trolls have.
Though, undoubtedly, they’re just looking for ANYTHING to justify their douchebaggery, details and facts be damned.
That’s sort of the point…giving things actual thought, following it through.
Admittedly, though, it doesn’t take much thought to be MORE thought than those tools are capable of. That’s why they yap so much about how. much. time. feminists spend on refuting their crap, as if it would actually require effort to do so.
zhinxy: This version has John Barrowman. Despite the overall suckitude of Torchwood, I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Captain Jack Harkness.
How much ‘credit’ is due for not wanting to kill people, again?
Mind, I’m not accusing MRAL of cookie seeking. I’m merely trying to figure out when not wanting people to physically suffer for speech became cookie worthy.
The, “moderate” MRAs we keep hearing about may figure people ought not suffer for free speech, but they aren’t saying anything about it, anywhere.
MRAL, in public, as an MRA has said this shit is fucked up. That’s taking a stand. It’s also a stand that he thinks might cost him a little bit; because he has seen some of the movement he values, and a part of it which he had previously thought to be reasonable.
Those are more than just thinking people ought not be made to suffer for having different opinions.
So it may not be a huge thing. It’s not as if MRAL (or anyone else) has started a movement to hang out in front of Elam’s house with signs telling him he’s a pathetic toad, but he’s not been silent about it.
Which is a positive act.
And what if they get killed David? What if rather than be arrested – as promoters of hate, and public advocates of murder, what if these depraved and murderous female supremacists come to harm at the hands of a citizen.
One of the things in this (and it’s not limited to MRA groups) is the use of the othering language of, “citizen”. It implies the women he is talking about (the one’s he thinks need to be punished for making a video he thinks is anti-man), aren’t actually citizens anymore. That they have removed themselves from the polity
The situation (people whom he posits will forgo the law, so they can engage in a lynching) is one of people he has deemed to be “outlaw” and no one can be, justly, punished for killing them.
And this is the group that says it’s not about hate, but rather reform.
My feelings about the issue Spearhafoc brought up: I think that telling someone you think they’ve crossed the moral event horizon is a bad way of getting them to ever be willing to see your point of view.
ithiliana:
But the point is they did it, so obviously we’ve lost the moral high ground whether we claim to condmen it or not.
If we really objected, we’d have used feminist telekineses to stop them from doing it in the first place.
gjdj:
If you recognize that we say posting information is wrong, and you say it’s wrong, what is the point you’re trying to make?
@Hershele Ostropoler: If we really objected, we’d have used feminist telekineses to stop them from doing it in the first place.
Hey! I didn’t get any note about feminist tekekinesis upgrade! Am I on the wrong sooper sekrit feminist conspiracy to kill all the men listserv or something?
Ullere: The Woman’s Room is a piece of fiction. It’s no more a statement of the author’s personal views than any other work of fiction.
In the 2011 election the bnp increased their share of the national vote by +1.2% which sounds small, but in the previous election the BNP had gained only 0.7% of the vote, which means the more than doubled their support over the course of 4 years.
I presume this is a typo, and you meant to say they increased their percentage of the vote to 1.2 percent. Because as you wrote it, they had an increase of 1.2 percent, which would be negligible.
Even at that, unless the gains continue, it’s not a significant number.
gjdj: Ask yourself honestly – who would you see as the bad guys in this situation? I’m confident that you would see the video as vile and the response of the feminist organization as either justified or several orders of magnitude less bad than the original video.
The people who preached retaliation at the people who made the video. Reversing the genders doesn’t change the nature of the offense.
And the “SCUM group” you are talking about aren’t members of some radical fringe group of man-haters who think men ought to be killed, but actors, in a play, which (it seems) was much more subtle and nuanced than the publicity stunt they pulled (and which lots of feminists have said was over the top). So tell me again why they need to be called out for engaging in (as you said) fictional violence, while you are making a defense for people calling for real violence?
“And for the love of little green apples, can you fools please pick something from recent times to harp on and use as proof of The Great Evil of Feminism? The Women’s Room was written almost 40 damn years ago. ”
On another thread I asked him for an example of a current feminist saying something and he gave me Ti-Grace Atkinson. The woman is 73 years old, and her most notable publication was released in 1974.
I guess that would be current if you mean in geological terms…
Obvious troll is far more obvious than he realizes.
Blasphemy! I will have to begin a feminist luftwaffe against you!*
*(I have little doubt that line will be quoted by MRAs somewhere as evidence feminists are Nazis)
The video was staged by anti-feminists themselves as a scare tactic and a way to shame feminists. The video was staged by misogynists out to degrade the reputation of feminists.
‘My post was simply pointing out that godwins law if very common among groups who have a named enemy. In this case the MRA’s who name feminism the enemy. The marilyn french quote was appropriate as it names men the enemy and names them nazis. ‘
‘The Woman’s Room is a piece of fiction. It’s no more a statement of the author’s personal views than any other work of fiction.’
I suppose it’s vaguely inappropriate to quote my own posts in response, by please read.
No, the argument that it’s a fictional character speaking still stands. Even if you “were simply pointing out” that it names men the enemy, you’re still comparing a character in a novel to real life mras.
May I ask you a question? Who are some top contemporary feminists right now, as we speak?