Working in the quote mine, going down down

So our blabby friend JohnTheOther has an especially blabby piece up on A Voice for Men at the moment. Its ostensible subject: the pure eeeevil of unnamed anti-MRAs who misrepresent the World’s Greatest 21^st Century Human Rights Movement –  the Men’s Rights Movement, that is – through the eeevil practice of “quote mining.”

I didn’t read the whole thing. Mr. TheOther is not what you’d call an efficient writer. Here are a few quotes mined from the article more or less at random that I think will give you a good idea of his, um, style:

Biology, or indeed, evolutionary theory is not really the topic of this discussion, rather it is provided here as example of a rhetorical practice increasingly common among opponents of a small but growing human rights movement. …

 The developing practice in opposition to human rights, of quote-mining goes beyond pathetic, into the realm of craven, futile depravity. …

However, it seems that no matter how many times it is explained that a thing formed from (bad) ideas – an ideology, and a group of people, identifiable by sex, are two distinct things, gender ideologues continue to conflate them. …

I don’t know if any of this makes any more sense in context, as I didn’t read the context. Let’s continue:

A year ago, I wrote an article focusing on the necessary public repudiation of violence, and the responsibility of open opposition to those who advocated or promoted a climate of acceptable violence, including those who openly advocate murder, such as a group of swedish feminists, and eugenics advocates on the squalid radical-hub. Statements from my original piece were quoted by at least one amoral zombie, and reframed to present my view as one which called for violence.

Of course, the author of those yellow pixels might not have realized that the original article, along with it’s unambiguous opposition to violence was posted on a site with substantially higher traffic than his own. The craven and stupid dishonesty of the quote-miner was apparent to all but a few, blinded by their own ideological goggles.

Oh, wait, I think those last two paragraphs were supposed to be about me. And I think they were supposed to refer to this post of mine, which took a look at a post of his that defended A Voice for Men’s “outing” of a group of Swedish feminists that the AVFM crew had decided, on the basis of a brief video promoting a theatrical production, were “murder advocates.” His post contained the following (unedited) paragraphs.

That’s right manboob, identifying a group of self-declared murder advocates to the public is more important than protecting those murder advocates from the consequences of advocating murder.

In the truth-is-fiction world of Futrelle’s mind, the men’s right advocates calling for public identification of a hate organization have been transmogrified into promoters of violence.

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. If that happens, it will mean that a society’s system of law, designed to prevent hate organizations, and to allow redress of grievance through non violent due process is gone, wiped out by your ideology of violence and hate. That’s what you’re defending, David.

In my post, I quoted the final paragraph; here I have included the two preceding grafs to give it a bit more, what’s that word, context.

Of course, a couple of paragraphs by themselves are still kind of “out of context” I guess. Since I am pretty sure no one would like it if I simply pasted in the entire post from JtO here, I will instead direct you to his original post, here. You may make of it what you wish. I rather doubt that you will see it as a clearheaded treatise of nonviolence. Especially with that line: “And what if they get killed David?” (Which you can read in context above, or, again, in his original post. Let me link to it a sixth time here, just to make sure you know how to find his original words in context. Oops, that’s seven times now)

Interesting that a master debater of Mr. TheOther’s caliber somehow forgot to provide even one link to the controversy he was referring to, so people might be able to see for themselves what had happened, and judge his claims accordingly. I wonder why that might be?

I’ll skip the next bit in Mr. TheOther’s latest post, in which Mr.TheOther suggests that an opponent of his might have taken a quote of his out of context in a way that  makes him look racist and homophobic. But since he offers no links to the actual discussion, there’s no way of judging whether this particular quote-mining claim is true. (Perhaps this discussion on the Men’s Rights subreddit could shed some light on it?)

In any case, if we put this particular discussion in a broader, er, context, there is certainly ample evidence of homophobia amongst the A Voice for Men crowd, as I have pointed out here and here. (Protip: If you want to convince people you are not homophobic, you should probably not feature a video mocking “lesbo-bos” in the sidebar of the site you help to run.)

Anyway, this next bit of his definitely has something or other to do with me:

Bottom feeding quote miners indulging in snarky feats of futrelian deceit likely do win rhetorical brownie points, at least when seen through their own ideological goggles. But they are cementing their own a public persona which will wear about as comfortably as klan robes do at a NAACP meeting. The altered landscape this movement is building is not someday, it is now, and it is coming faster all the time.

Uh, dude, my last name has two L’s in it. It should be “Futrellian deceit.” If you’re going to turn my name into a slur, at least spell it correctly.

For individuals in opposition to human rights of men and boys now, whether through lying, repetition of old, false dogmas, or the craven tactic of mis-represented and mis-attributed meaning, the comfort of a formerly one-sided monologue is over. The public squirming we see in attempts to render MRA voices silent or apologetic will escalate before it abates. But that’s okay.

Hey, Mr. TheOther. If you really want to prove my “futrelian” or even my “Futrellian” deceit, how about this: provide specific examples of me taking something you or some other MRA has written out of context in a way that distorts its meaning.

For your convenience, you can find all the Man Boobz posts that reference you here and here.

And for anyone who now has the song “Working In the Coal Mine” stuck in their head, here’s the Lee Dorsey original: