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.”
You would think that MRAs trying to portray their movement as something other than a hate movement would try to disassociate themselves from those blatantly preaching racism. But some MRAs seem unperturbed to find themselves in the company of allies like this.
A case in point: A Voice for Men, which has just republished an anti-SPLC post by Pamela Geller, a far-right racist whose virulent Islamophobia made her Norwegian terrorist mass murderer Anders Breivik’s favorite English-language blogger, and whose latest provocation involves subway ads implying that Muslims are “savages.”
The opening sentences of her post (which can also be found on her blog) will give you some idea of Geller’s style:
The communists over at the Southern Poverty Law Center are among the gravest threats to freedom in the United States … The enemedia eagerly laps up and repeats their designation of pro-freedom groups as “hate groups,” and uses this designation as a propaganda tool to demonize and discredit us.
You may also recall the weasel-worded not-quite-justification for Breivik’s rampage she published on her blog shortly after the murders, describing the victims as
the future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, who commit major violence against Norwegian natives, including violent gang rapes, with impunity, and who live on the dole… all done without the consent of the Norwegians.
Next to a picture of camp attendees taken before the massacre, she wrote
Note the faces which are more Middle Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian
She later removed this bit, but you can see it screencapped here.
For more on Geller and her odious ideas and actions, see this profile from, yep, the SPLC and this piece in Slate. Heck, in the wake of her “savage” ad campaign, even Fox News is beginning to distance itself from her.
Geller’s post is getting a similarly chilly reception in the Men’s Rights subreddit – and even some of the AVFM regulars are put off by her extreme Islamophobia.
But for AVFM head honcho Paul Elam, it looks like any enemy of his enemy is a friend, so long as they’re angry enough about it.
Indeed, it seems as though Elam read Geller’s post so carelessly that he didn’t even notice that the bulk of it was actually a quotation of an SPLC “expose” by James Simpson of the right-wing Capital Research Center. Apparently a quick skim of a blog post and a glance at the rest of her blog was all the “due diligence” AVFM did before climbing into bed with this particular political bedfellow.
I tried to make a tinfoil hat for my cats to wear last night. It was not a success. Let me rephrase that: The hat was a success, but making my cats wear it did not go well even though I patiently explained that if they let me photograph them wearing the hat they could well become a viral internet meme.
I am not sure cats understand the vital importance of internet memes.
The other day on Facebook, a friend of a friend actually stated that Obama was against Medicare because it was a part of the medical system that was beyond government control. I shit you not. I couldn’t resist pointing out that Medicare is, in fact, a government program–a single payer system that is only open to seniors and some of the disabled, financed by payroll taxes. Medicare is, of course, far more socialist than anything Obama has ever proposed. Surprisingly, I received no response.
CB: LOLwut? Is this person one of those who was going to move to Canada if “Obamacare” was upheld?
@someguy
The MRM is not a tree that bears fruit up high, it is a crawling creeper that has awful fruit, like some sort of hateful strawberries. Low hanging fruit is all there is.
*awards CaptainBathrobe today’s Honorary Internet for Best Use of a Harry Chapin song*
@drst,
I’d like to thank the academy, my parents, and Satan, Prince of Darkness, my never ending source of inspiration. Peace out, y’all!
@hellkell,
To be fair, I think he had a problem with Obama’s supposed opposition to Medicare Advantage, which allows Medicare recipients to subscribe to private plans under Medicare. Supposedly, this is due to Obama’s desire for the government to control all aspects of our lives, or something. I don’t know if Obama is even opposed to Medicare Advantage (it’s a popular program), but one objection that’s been raised is that it costs more than traditional Medicare, since inserting private insurers as middle men, surprise surprise, drives up costs. Of course, that’s so at odds with the Government Can’t Do Anything Right narrative that I think his head would have exploded it I’d mentioned it.
Ah sorry, I meant “hate” colloquially, rather than politically. I.e. “I hate brussels sprouts” rather than “I hate Jews”.
I have few, if any, positive feelings for religious fundamentalists, unabashed racists, misogynists, free marketeers, or modern-day Republicans. That said, I try and get along with them in person when necessary, and neither engage in any actively destructive behaviours towards them that I would not accept in return, nor support legislation which targets those groups to the exclusion of other bad actors.
P.S.: Thanks for the name complement. 😀
I too have a rather odd bug phobia. Moths. I know, I know. Pathetic. I’ve just had too many land on me, blunder into my face, cast sudden giant shadows when I’m trying to read, and leave their giant rotting corpses in my bag of “pre-washed” spinach.
I’ve gotten much better at it, but still, a moth flying around in my room turns me into a cringing flinching mess.
I thought I was the only person to have ever found a moth in a bag of spinach — what is up with that?!!?!
I found a pill in a cereal box once – after I had poured the cereal and put it in my mouth. Freakiest thing ever. Thankfully, it turned out to be a vitamin of my father’s that he somehow dropped in the box while getting breakfast.
I’ll finish reading later, but I just wanted to say: “Oh my god, why does it seem like every time some Mrm dude compares the mrm to feminism it’s like some villain telling the hero ‘you know, we are a lot alike, you and I’.”
If the Villain knew what made the hero different, the Villain would be the hero.
Like imagine Harry Potter if Voldemort knew the power of friendship.
The moth wasn’t even the weirdest although it was the freakiest. Strangest was a chunk of wooden dowel in an “Oh, Henry” bar. Pine I think. A little under a centimetre long and about the diameter of a chopstick.
*starts singing* My Little Voldy, My Little Voldy…
Nope nope nope
NOPENOPENOPETOPUS! 😀
Dude. Schticky. He made a blog just for you in 30 seconds. If you are complaining about him having a platform somehow unavailable to you, you are just about the laziest human being I’ve ever seen.
Also, lols for the false equivalence between SRS and r/mr. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that Schticky’s criticisms of SRS, when they aren’t exactly as vague and off-point as his criticism of David, are going to be “freeze peaches” and “they make fun of straight white cis mens which is just as bad as misogyny”.
Just so you know, “savage” is a technical term. Its just rarely used that way these days. Hadrian built a wall across Britain because Rome didn’t want to bother civilizing the Scots.
“Savage” isn’t a technical term because racism isn’t a craft.
But apparently this crafts store is racist.
http://www.yelp.com/biz/jo-ann-fabrics-and-crafts-cockeysville
Diogenes: Anything of merit to add, or is it just the usual?
So many things wrong with this. Hardly know where to begin. How about the Antonine Wall? Rome did want to ‘civilize’ (read conquer) Caledonia. They set up a defensible border but they wanted to keep pushing that border forward. They just kinda, y’know, failed.
How about how the word ‘savage’ was used for hundreds of years before becoming a technical term amongst racist 19th century historians?
How about how the Caledonians of the Roman era wouldn’t have counted as ‘savages’ amongst 19th century theorists because they had domesticated livestock, thereby counting them as ‘barbarians’ rather than ‘savages’?
How about you just accept that you don’t know much, and work on fixing that?
Pamela Geller is a hateful scumbag.