It was, perhaps, inevitable, and now it has come to pass: obviously fed up with Men’s Rights Redditors questioning his wisdom (and his tactics, and his general narcissistic assholery) on a fairly regular basis, A Voice for Men Supreme Leader Paul Elam has started up his own Men’s Rights subreddit – r/mensrightsactivists –in which he can summarily ban all ”armchair activists” and “white knights” and “people who disagree with him.” Yep, that’s right: he’s made like a Trotskyist banana, and split.
Elam has long had a fairly strained relationship with Reddit MRAs. If you search through his comment history on Reddit, you can see evidence of numerous meltdowns on his part, which occur fairly regularly whenever anyone challenges him on pretty much anything, even when they are otherwise sympathetic to his views. On his own blog, he responds to such criticism by quickly banning the critics; on Reddit, he has tended to respond with schoolyard insults, digs at the masculinity of his critics, long recitations of his many fine accomplishments as a dedicated armchair activist, and the occasional rape joke.
Clearly the final straw for Elam was the reception given to a post of his on the poster controversy I wrote about here. Some samples from the discussion. Builtbro offers a substantive critique of Elam’s badly worded posters:
HolyCounsel is a bit more blunt:
And then there’s this edifying exchange:
The massive numbers of upvotes for Elam’s critics and downvotes for his, er, rebuttals seem to be at least partially the result of an invasion from r/SubredditDrama. Still, Elam seems to take each and every downvote personally, so the 238 net downvotes on his “Kleenex” comment must have stung.
In his new subreddit, threads like these clearly won’t be allowed to happen. As Elam explains in his less-than-welcoming “Welcome” message to new visitors:
While dissenters and the blue pill public will be welcome to post links and comment, trolls and other annoyances will be summarily booted with pleasure. This is an MRA dominated zone.
A couple of things to consider: Dissent, especially that which serves to further the improvement of the men’s movement, is welcome and appreciated. But if you want to post here, as a supposed MRA, telling others what is wrong with their work, you better have some MRA credentials.
Inactive, armchair quarterbacks, are not allowed here, unless their posts reflect genuine concern for improving and supporting the MRM and respect for those actually doing the work. If you want to ask questions so that you can learn, that is fine. But if you want to question, just so you can tear down, and you are not an MRA, then it will be adios for you. I’d sooner give a feminist the floor than a back seat driver.
R/mensrightsactivists: Come for the Elam-approved opinions, stay for the bans! Indeed, Elam devotes as much space in his “welcome” message to explaining whom he’ll ban as he does to actually spelling out what the subreddit will ostensibly do differently than good old r/mensrights.
Of course, this is not the first time that some angry MRA or two has decided to start another Men’s Rights subreddit designed to appeal to more, well, belligerent MRAs. Reddit already boasts an assortment of such subreddits, all of them fairly sparsely populated, including Rights4Men, Male Studies, and FeMRAs, a more obnoxious alternative to the already sparsely populated LadyMRAs. There’s even another subreddit devoted to MRA activism; it goes by the name of, well, MRAactivism. (There may be several more, but I can’t remember what they’re called.)
The Men’s Rights subreddit has nearly 45,000 subscribers; Elam’s new subreddit currently has 49, which is no doubt why he continues to post links to his blog in the original Men’s Rights subreddit. Whether Elam’s new subreddit succeeds and splits the MRM in two, or dies an inglorious death, one thing is sure: there will be plenty of new material for me here at Man Boobz.
Thanks for the help!
@thebionicmummy
It really does say a lot about the MRM that one of their bigwigs has the same mindset as a group that was declared a hate group by the KKK…
You are forgetting the important work he did publishing personal info on women he thought were radical feminists. The fact that he got many of them wrong and a visit from his local law enforcement as a result is totally beside the point. He are an active activist. Not like those armchair activists who just criticize his very important work. And posters.
I have always been a cat. MUAHAHAHA, my mind control is working!
I’m just commenting to show off my new kittytar….
Instructions edited:
@everyone who wants cat avatar:
1.)Go to this site: http://neutralx0.net/tool/bnmk_e.html
2.) Go make your kitty!
3.) Save kitty.
4.) Go to gravatar.com (the thing that deals with your avatar on wordpress).
5.)If you have an account already then log in. If you don’t have an account create an account using the email you use to post on manboobz.
6.)Click the add image in the list of options under my account.
7.)Click select from computer hardrive and select your kitty pic where you saved it.
8.)Crop pic to your liking and click crop and finish.
9.)Select the rating.
10.)Then check off the email address you would like to use the pic for.
11.)It usually takes a few minutes so don’t panic if it doesn’t show at first..
12.)If you are not kitty after a few moments, remember to clear your cache.
13.)You are now kitty.
I think I made my kitty’s background solid. Testing!
Testing Borg kitty.
New goal! Keep the recent comment list in ALL CATS ALL THE TIME!
I can’t ever think about Internet cults of personality without thinking about Icycalm (Alex Kierkegaard) from Insomnia.ac. (The site requires an account.)
For those who don’t know, it’s ostensibly a video game review and discussion site, but actually it’s a giant vehicle for its owner (Icycalm) to promote the awesomeness of his massive intellect and the superiority of his opinions, and to allow him to wield the banhammer mightily against anyone who doesn’t obey his rules. Opinions like “casual games are all crap,” “Nietzche is the greatest thing since sliced bread (and only I can understand him),” “grammar mistakes are a bannable offense,” and of course “women suck.”
Dive into his massive treatise… if you dare…
Yeah, that’s how to bring a movement together. Split it into more pieces!
From katz’s link up there
It all comes down — to make a long story short, and to anticipate our conclusion, which is not fully elaborated in these essays, and with good reason (since it lies beyond the domain of game theory, cutting across all disciplines, to finally end up as the ultimate question of philosophy proper) — to the debacle of meaning.
Oh. My. God. I can’t read any more. I cannot.
The debacle of meaning. OMFG. JOAPS.
Katz, my eyes glazed over about a sentence in, but I tried reading one of his other articles, where he argues that “gameplay” is a stupid word, completely ignoring that it has come to grow a specific meaning (that is, the way the game functions as intermediary between player and actions which are not combat, character or puzzle-oriented).
The running theory is that he’s a batshit insane narcissist, but at least one (guy who claims to be a) journalist says he’s a con man – I guess he could be both. This guy claims that the Phelps cult is not only extremely well organized with the obvious aim of getting the most amount of attention for the least amount of protesting, but that their craziness and offensiveness sets up another layer of the scam, where they sue anyone who looks at them wrong. Now, you’d have to start out as a pretty hateful person to make baiting people at your anti-everything protests your job, but once you got started then it’s just a matter of a man being able to believe anything if his paycheck depends on it.
I don’t usually put that much stock in random just-so stories from the internet, but this guy’s theory explained something that never made sense to me – protesting the military funerals because somewhere out there someone was gay. I always thought that was too out there and that anyone who truly believed stuff like that would be too far around the bend to organize cross-country, media-baiting protests campaigns. But it makes sense as a cynical ploy to keep a bored media entertained and maybe tempt a cop to take a swing at you.
kysokisaen – I think that’s true too. They have a huge proportion of lawyers in the cult and file tons and tons of suits, which is their main source of income. And constantly daring people to assault them or censor them is how they gets suits to file.
I wonder if it’s a hybrid operation, where Fred Phelps is really that hateful but the others are mostly just unscrupulous, but that’s just my own pet theory without much to back it up.
Is this irony, or just hilarious?
Speaking of the WBC… here’s a picture to make you go “awww” and also “holy shit, those kids are brave”:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Gay_Pheleps.JPG
I love that Cliff did a hamster thing to be different. 🙂 And I love seeing everyone’s kitty avatars!
It’s easier for me to picture the ringleader as being the least hateful/most unscrupulous and the others, which as I understand are mostly members of his family, actually drinking a bit more of the Koolaid. Not that he isn’t seething with hate, just to keep them all in order he’d have to be a little more business like – unless he’s becoming a figurehead and someone in the background, out of the public eye, is really in charge. It’s really hard to say – they put on an extremely convincing act, and to be that virulent while keeping cool enough to remember not to say or do anything that would jeopardize your case later, well, that’s discipline.
I am not a hamster! I am a guinea pig!
vrrrt vvrrrrt
Thanks for explaining how to change pictures! I never knew how people did that.
I assume Sybil Pandemik’s resume has “cat” on it somewhere.
Friend Computer has not granted permission! Do you want me to go against Friend Computer’s wishes, like some kind of commie?
Do you have Friend Computer’s permission to adopt that guise, Friend ShadetheDruid?
Oh, weird, it changed my name to the login name I made for Gravatar. Let’s try this again.
Thanks for explaining how to change pictures! I never knew how people did that.
I assume Sybil Pandemik’s resume has “cat” on it somewhere.
Part of me wants to go make popcorn, but the rest of me wants to wait until I have enough bacon grease to cook it in, I know it’s unhealthy, but bacon popcorn is delicious.
Somewhere in the HyperCloudText dictionary of the future, there’s going to be an entry for “trying too hard (verb)”. Next to that entry there’s going to a picture of one of those posters.* Immediately above the entry for “trying too hard (verb) there’s going to be an entry for “trying too hard (noun)”. Next to that entry, there’s going to be a picture of Paul Elam.
*(They’re all so divine. I can’t pick which one. I liked the one with the pears, though.)