UPDATE: I have no reason to believe that the harassment alleged by Kyle Lovett — which I discuss below — involved anyone even tangentially connected to this site, or indeed that it ever happened. The “evidence” he provided only showed that he got traffic from a link on this site. He never provided any evidence that the alleged harassment occurred or that, if if did, it was perpetrated by anyone who found his site through my site. The rest of my piece still stands.
The other day, a commenter here linked to the blog published by one of the moderators of the Men’s Rights subreddit. Kyle Lovett, the mod in question, says that not long afterwards, someone contacted his workplace saying that he was a member of a “hate group.” Claiming to be concerned about his safety, he temporarily hid his blog. And stepped down as mod.
Lovett says he suspects that this person who he says contacted his work is a Man Boobz reader, and has now provided evidence that seems to back up this suspicion. If Kyle is indeed telling the truth about the harassment, it was a Man Boobz reader who contacted his workplace. (There is no evidence it was one of the regulars here, merely someone who was reading the comments in that one thread. Nor am I completely convinced that the alleged harassment happened; Lovett has lied about things in the past.)
But if the harassment happened let me be blunt: That’s not cool. I don’t like that sort of harassment when it’s directed at feminists, and I don’t like it when it’s directed at MRAs. As Rebecca Watson once said, in a different context, “guys, don’t do that.” Seriously, DON’T DO THAT.
All this said, Lovett and other MRAs are acting as if the link to his blog here was in some way equivalent to “doxing” – that is, tracking down the personal information of someone posting anonymously, and posting it online, for purposes of harassment..
It isn’t. Kyle publishes his blog under his own name, and he regularly posted links to it on Reddit. It was no secret that he posted on Reddit as Qanan, just as my real name Is no secret.
I’m not sure why it’s necessary to point this out, but I will anyway: If you publish things on the internet under your own name, people will indeed connect your name to these things. There is absolutely nothing wrong with posting a link to someone’s blog. No one here advocated harassment in any way.
Needless to say, the indignation on the Men’s Rights about this is hypocritical, to say the least. MRAs harass feminists all the time.
A Voice for Men, the worst offender in this regard, has published the personal information of feminists, and once put out a thousand dollar bounty in an attempt to find out the identity of one feminist who had been posting anonymously online. AVFM head Paul Elam talks about “stalking” feminists and on his radio show gleefully discussed the prospect of not only revealing the names and addresses of women he considers evil, but also their routes home from work. He orchestrated a harassment campaign against one commenter here, which led to people contacting her workplace in an attempt to get her fired. There are many more examples.
Meanwhile, today on the Men’s Rights subreddit, one commenter’s call to harass a woman got two dozen upvotes from the regulars:
Guys, don’t do that.
EDIT: I have added a few comments in the post above to highlight my concerns that the alleged harassment may be a fabrication; I will remove these comments of Lovett provides proof, publicly or privately, that the harassment occurred.
Putting aside everything else that’s been said, Black Bloc is right about one thing: whatever we do will have no affect on what the MRAs do. They will always see everything as an attack on them, they will always see themselves as the oppressed rebels against the feminist-state AT-AT walkers, and they will always feel justified in what they do. Radhub didn’t attack Elam, but he put a bounty to find out their real personal info. e_e And he justified it that he was just protecting the children e_e
There’s so much rhetoric about “war” and AVfM has that “in the shadow of dachau” post that literally compares us to Nazis. People who believe that are not going to be people who notice that nobody’s actually attacking them xD
That’s not saying that we should attack them or nething. That’s merely saying we shouldn’t do bad things because they’re bad things, not because we hope it will stop them from doing bad things. They will do what they do, we should focus on our own beliefs and ethics 🙂
It’s not just that violence begets violence, but also, violence begets very few people who say in all sincerity “I wasn’t going to adopt your point of view, but that punch in the nose was really persuasive.”
Mostly, though, violence scares me because “it’s okay to do to bad people” requires everyone to use their own judgement of who’s a bad person, and, well, people’s judgement there differs.
Even if violence got people to agree with us, I wouldn’t advocate it. :
@Holly, I completely agree. We think they’re bad? Well, they think we’re bad. Who’s right? Us? Right, because they’re a hate group that promotes violence against – oh wait.
@Ami, me neither…
OMG, this plus a million. No, this TIMES a million. Squared. Plus infinity.
Hey, AryoBarzan the “4chan personal army” general is here! What’s your facebook bro? I’m sure you’ll have no problem sharing it since you’re morally superior to us all. 😀
As a former pacifist who spent years thinking about this issue, I think there are many complicated parts of this that aren’t being discussed:
1) Though the ends don’t always justify the means, ends do matter when evaluating the ethics of the means. Chopping someone’s hand off to punish them is a bad thing ethically, chopping someone’s hand off as a proper medical measure to save their life is general not (provided they consent). The circumstances do matter, social realities do matter, and we shouldn’t give into every single false equivocation either.
2) What gets named as violence and what doesn’t is extremely variable based on social positioning. Entire swaths of the country advocate policies that would lead to my suffering in death. Is it not violence because it is indirect? Because they perpetrate by means?
3) What is self defense? Where do we draw the lines there? Surely not all violent resistance to oppression is unacceptable. If you say it is, and you are not a full pacifist, you are a hypocrite/a supporter of oppression.
4) There is a difference between saying that violence is in many cases not the best or an acceptable solution and saying that violence is never an acceptable response. Circumstances do matter.
5) Do you apply this to other situations? Do you apply this to foreign wars, to police brutality, to black children carrying candy shot by white men on the street?
I am not saying I advocate violence against mras, because in general, I do not. I tend to be pretty strict about what situations I think warrant violent defense/violent resistance to oppression.
Also, as someone who outed themselves as queer at work to help defend and protect another queer person and suffered employment consequences because of it (I can never work at that place again, they won’t hire me, and I know it’s because I have been labeled an uppity queer by management), if this sort of doxxing is violent because it harms people in their employment, the misogyny that the mras support is also violent, because it harms women in their jobs on a daily basis. “No harm done, it’s just internet speech” isn’t an argument I find overly persuasive. Bigoted speech does do harm. The fact that legislating it typically does more harm only applies to that balancing act, it doesn’t suddenly make it harmless.
I’m sorry, but something is fucking fishy.
I heard that someone contacted his employers and said he was USING COMPANY ISP/LOGIN whatever to access these sites.
So… the person that did that have to have BG info. A random commenter would NOT know what his ISP looks like! This is so confusing! Or was that just a rumor at the start?
Also, so let’s say that did not happen and some random commenter looked at his blog and found his real name… then what? How do we get to ’emploers’ from there? That sounds like a huge leap to me?
Also all the vile scumsuckers that we deal with, suddenly a manboobzer is going to target this guy? Sounds like a load of horseshit to me.
Either that, or people are failing in their relay of what happened.
I can’t read it. 🙁 Can anybody else? Does it names a manboobzer?
Kyrie, he doesn’t name anyone. This seems to be his evidence that it was someone from here:
(emphasis mine)
So he has no proof it was even the person who visited from the Ann Arbor IP address. If it happened at all, it would need to be someone he worked with. If it happened, the anonymous tip would be more likely to have been from part of his work’s IT team. Workplaces do monitor internet use.
Thanks snowy. So can people get IP addys from visiting blogs?? Never heard of it.
Pretty much. I have no idea how you could get someone’s IP or find out where they worked from looking at some blogs either. Maybe it’s a new feminist conspiracy!
re: IPs. Using programs like Google analytics and others, it’s possible to track very accurately not only the ISPs of people viewing your blog, but where they click over from (I am not an expert, but have learned a bit by hanging around fandom). Both LiveJournal and its fork Dreamwidth allow users to ‘see’ IPs of commenters.
I don’t know enough about blogs and what goes on here–David does can identify the IP’s of posters, and also when they’re using a program to mask their IP. That’s how he can see where people are posting from. However, an IP alone is not sufficient proof of any one person being X (i.e. universities tend to have one IP for example); but in the harassment case against me, the university police collected all the stuff I was sent (the disgruntled colleague was going online and giving my name and university contact information to loan specialists, online education, and a bunch more including Republican politicians in an especially nasty move! getting political communicatinos and stuff at work is a no-no). I was getting up to 20 calls a day at work, plus a shitload of emails about the product/service, PLUS hard copy stuff (which turned out to be useful since the official university snailmail address was used which tipped off th LOVELY POLICE MAN WHO WAS AN INCREDIBLE HELP AND SIMPLY WONDERFUL NWO). They contacted the companies who had been told by “me” online that I wanted this stuff and in a number of cases got the IP; they contacted the ISP with a subpoena, and got the name of the account holder, and then they got a warrant and consficated all the devices that could access the internet from the suspect’s home for analysis. One issue of course was while they could prove that the account holder had accessed the sites, there were multiple people living there (his wife and children). That was some years ago, and I imagine things have gotten even more sophisticated since then.
I glanced at Kyle Lovett’s blog just now. I didn’t read it carefully, just glanced at it and skimmed a post or two, so I am probably missing a lot. But can someone explain to me why he is apparently bad? He seemed to be pretty reasonable. He was talking about how we should care that men are being raped in prisons and are committing suicide. That makes sense to me. I do care about that.
I didn’t see him saying anything particularly misogynistic. Did I miss something while I was briefly skimming?
Not trying to be antagonistic. I am genuinely curious.
@BlackBloc
“At the end of the day, who wins trumps who’s right.”
You are definitely correct. We see this quite clearly
—————-
“The reason the MRM are doxxing people is because it works. People like the One People’s Project and Anti-Racist Action (and Hollaback, and and and) were doing it before these clowns ever figured out it was a good idea.”
You are correct again. Hollabacks motto is, “if you can’t slap him snap him!” So who gets to decide if “he” deserves to be slapped? Any woman at all, of course. It seems a bit one sided when one gender can take pictures, (very personal indeed) and under her discrection decide he is bad.
—————-
Would it be humane to introduce female dogs in heat repeated to a male dog and then beat the male dog down if he dares to respond? Of course not, that would be sadistic and cruel beyond belief. So why do women demand the right to do everything in their power to sexually arouse and entice all men and then beat them down if they respond?
Surely women aren’t so dense that they believe that doing everything possible to enhance and magnify their sexual allure isn’t doing exactly the same thing? What’s the difference between men physically and intellectually manipulating women, or women sexually and emotionally manipulating men. Both are equally wrong, yet in modern day society only men are wrong.
—————
http://gothamist.com/2011/09/15/gloria_allred_defends_right_to_badm.php
Here we have dear old Gloria Allred saying it’s a womans “right” to post on a site called liarscheatersareus.com. Very personal information about men again. And of course any woman has carte blanche to dictate what man is bad.
She goes on in the video about how men are so bad and women are hapless victims. Had a high price lawyer who was a man said the same about women, he’d be in a soup kitchen by the end of the day. If you watch the video, the man is bad because he chooses to marry a woman other than the two pictured. A man can’t even choose to marry, (foolishly under present law), the woman he wishes without publicly being branded a liar and a cheater by women. The woman on the left is filled with glee in the video and the woman on the right is doing a poor job of faking sorrow. Gloria just can’t help beaming with pride at her hatred of men.
Why are women not demanding her resignation? She insulted, as so many women in power regularly do, all men. Don’t women as a whole care about men as a whole? Insult “one” woman who is asking the State to dictate what a religious institution can or can’t do and it’s a war on women. Insult all men and be cheered for it.
—————-
And so the game escalates. Men have been telling you for eons that women are being manipulated by the actual bad men at the top.
—————-
I noticed no one actually answered my question about VAWA. Oh, there was the standard posting of the book o larnin, and the owlslave is the bad man answers, but not an actual answer.
If men and women are equally protected from violence under law, what’s the purpose of VAWA other than special treatment for women.
Is a man hitting a woman worse than a woman hitting a man?
Is the person who is more bruised in a DV dispute an automatic victim?
Is the person who displays tears an automatic victim?
Women cry far more easily than men, not due to any socialization but because men and women are different. Just as women bruise far more easily. If the display of tears, fear, bruises and emotional distress indicate victimhood, won’t men always be the guilty party reguardless of who initiates violence?
Since this is the very foundation of VAWA, women have carte blanche to intitiate all domestic violence and still be the victim. Perhaps someone could answer my questions instead of attacking me for existing as a man.
AMZB
Can you show us anywhere in these comments where someone said he was bad?
Your comment makes no sense, because if you had seen anything saying he was “bad”, then the comment you were reading would say why.
So it would help if you pointed out the comments saying this dood was “bad.”
I’m not trying to be antagonistic, I’m genuinely curious about your thought process.
Have you seen anything “bad” on this blog? Have you seen any unfair commentary in what David has written, or links that are misleading? And how did you find this blog? Either you knew the MRA sites first, or this one first. If you knew this site first, you know exactly what the issues are and what David documents and mocks. If you’re coming from the MRA site only, then you should look around here before assuming anything.
Also people here are very handy with links (not me) they can link you the comment threads he was in, which I think were completely uneventful.
@AMZB: I don’t recall anybody on this site saying he was particularly bad (though I may be misremembering)–did you read the discussion that he claims led to what happened (here)? He certainly didn’t stand out to me as one of our Vile Trolls. And there is apparently some debate on just how likely his claims are, and the lack of evidence he has (and his attempting to step down from being a moderator). The issue may be what is allowed at the redditor site-but, again, I don’t recall anybody saying X is horrible horrible person who deserves to be punshed (here). Citations needed.
Ninja’ed by BoomBoom!
Or, we are a hivemind. I’ll see if I can find the links.
LINKS:
Without a lot of fancy formatting OR summary–do the work yourself:
Methodology: I find Google better than blog search engine, so I googled “Qanan” and site:manboobz.com
Got a half dozen or so hits:
Here’s a link where Cotton Pony Wrangler who linked a PUBLIC blog with a PUBLIC pseud by someone who has self linked the materials gives their take on QANAN:
http://manboobz.com/2012/03/16/on-harassment-dont-do-it/comment-page-1/#comment-135553
Splitting up links to avoid moderation
Another link with info on the original discussion:
http://manboobz.com/2012/03/15/betamaxipad/comment-page-2/#comment-135420
The main discussion took place on the comics cavalcade — once you click on the comments, you can use CTRL F to “find” any term you want (though I think it doesn’t search all the comments, but I’m not sure, have only done it a few times).
But click on this link and do the CTRL F and type in “Qanan” and you get 15 hits, reflecting both his comments posted and the responses that use his name.
http://manboobz.com/2012/03/13/mra-comics-cavalcade-part-one-the-pigman-and-pals/comment-page-4/#comments
I don’t see anything that bad happening in my quick reskim–but of course it all depends on how one defines bad.
So, AVBM or whatever (due to MRAL and DKM and NWO, I have a bias against people using only acronyms for names), what was done that was so BAAAAAAAAAAAD?
And be sure to give links: evidence must support your claim.
Oh dear, I have not made myself clear enough! I’m sorry. Sometimes I forget that other people do not live in my mind.
Forgive me if my comment sounded accusatory! I didn’t mean to suggest that people here were saying he was bad. I was merely referring to his claim that someone called his workplace and accused him of being some sort of hatemongerer. I was confused because he doesn’t seem to be saying very awful things at all, so I was wondering where the harasser’s vitriol was coming from.
I read this site regularly, though usually not the comments too. I am glad this blog brings attention to the disgusting misogyny in the so-called manosphere. Lovett’s blog, though, seems to be very different from the sort of thing usually highlighted here. So I’m not sure why someone would target him.
(Though while I’m at it, what is it that makes people suspect he is lying about this harassment? I suppose it made me a bit uncomfortable that a few people were suggesting that right off the bat, unless there’s some very good reason to suspect him that I don’t know about.)
Ok, this login dealie is killing me. This is like the third time I’ve typed out a post, only to find out that I’ve been logged out 🙁
Anyway, the gist of my post was that I agree with boomboom and ithiliana that no one has singled him out as bad in any way. And even assuming that one poster could track another poster’s IP without mod priviliges, it’s not an easy thing to do and Lovett hasn’t done anything so egregious that I would believe someone would expend that kind of energy on tracking him and contacting his workplace.