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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.
someguy.
This site is called ‘manboobz’. The tagline is “Misogyny. I mock it.”
Am I missing something? When did David declare his intention to improve the Men’s Rights Movement? Why does he have the responsibility to do so?
We call out the people here when they say busted stuff — see above. We have no need (nor motivation) to wade into the filth on MRM sites, even ‘relatively moderate’ (but still hateful) ones, so that we can help them tell the difference between the products of their constipation and the products of their diarrhea.
Now, now, Falconer, let’s be fair. He was right about the Bible having a dude named Jesus in it.
Please explain how the SPLC is among the gravest threats to freedom in the United States today. Please explain why it was okay for Breivik to kill those people because they were not “pure Norweigans.”
Don’t you understand, he’s only trying to hot-glue the journalist hat on your head, David, so you can’t ever take it off. Because you’re a journalist, you see. And journalists never take off the journalist hat. They’re always journalists. The dinner table conversation at a journalist’s house is awkward and stilted because the family knows that the journalist is going to have to write everything down immediately after the pudding because that is just Journalist Code, man.
Why do you resist being pigeonholed for the rest of your life, David? Someguy’s only doing this for your own good!
Nope. Any other questions?
Also, he has a platform that not everyone has access to? You know what this is, sticky? A blog. Like everyone and their cat has. You have a blog, sticky- dave made you one. Ergo, you have access to the same platform Dave has.
Now I want to make a really hardcore D&D monster called The Zombie. You know it’s hardcore, because it’s the generic name of a monster.. with a capital letter! I’m thinking the zombie of a powerful Ogre or Giant warlord.
Raised from the dead by an evil necromancer, and after 1000 years of unlife, he is known in legend only as The Zombie! Oooohhh..
Good point. I’ve always felt “Islamophobic” was the same as “homophobic” or “antisemitic”; an IRRATIONAL hatred of a group.
It’s certainly possible to criticize the behaviour of a group without resorting to imagined or misrepresented claims, conflating subgroups with the whole, blowing issues out of proportion, or singling the group out for retribution and punishment.
Oh hey, just described the MRAs. :/
Holy leaping logic, batman.
@ShadetheDruid: The beautiful thing about 3.X and templates is that you can zombify an ogre or a giant and they won’t all be based on the same monster (I think there was a giant zombie in the Monstrous Manual). Some people complain that all the undead are templates, but I think it makes sense — every lich or death knight was a person before they died and rose to walk again. And anyway the wights and wraiths and shadows and spectres aren’t templates.
Why does sticky’s nonsense sound suspiciously like fox’s nonsense about how Jon Stewart is a journalist because he makes jokes about news items and networks in a newslike fashion? Sticky, Dave isn’t even using a faux news platform- this is a plain old blog, and he is doing what bloggers do- writing about shit he cares about.
@Falconer
*wakes up dazed*
Whuh… what happened? Why are there tissues on my face? And this floor is not comfortable. I need a massage… and a bandaid…
*gets up slowly, walks back to desk, finds it broken, sits in chair*
————————
(Sorry… I’m just trying to not respond to some boring guys…)
I think that’s a fair statement. Doesn’t everyone think the D&D one is hilarious? Or this one? There are vampire dogs!
I just love that sticky seems to think journalism is some all powerful profession. I’m a journo, I write nationally syndicated news stories for a radio network, and I can’t even get my cat to listen to my opinion.
*points to the blog David made for you Boring Troll*
Go on, go there. You can write about anything you want…even about how you are OH! so disappointed that David the private citizen mocks misogynists without maintaining David the Journalist standards (which for the record, he actually does cite and link to every hateful disgusting thing your moment says.)
Falconer: I’d be inclined to just make every undead type a template, for the funzies! Though making a giant wight that energy drains you into oblivion while pummelling you with giant fists might be a little mean. 😛 But it’s an awesome concept at least.
Also the same with things like wraiths and spectres, because some things just have to be done (dragon wraith!). I mean, there’s the ghost template, but I dunno.. Slapping “ghost” on something and picking whatever ability from a list seems a bit.. generic to me, when you have so many different types of ghost with interesting lore already.
Also, I deny the concept of shadows as undead! Well, it doesn’t bother me when people use them that way, I just prefer to do them a different way. 😀
/end D&D geekages
To the first: A lot of self-identified “liberals” favour some (or many) severely regressive or reactionary policies. This is especially true in the United States, where the political dialogue on the whole is so tilted to the right that pretty much anyone who’s not in favour of maintaining literally every single oppressive power structure in the nation counts as a “liberal.” (It’s also very true in Canada, although there it’s more because liberal is understood to mean centrist with a small concession to leftist policies, whereas the U.S. pretends liberal means “radical socialist.”) There are racist liberals, homophobic liberals, misogynist liberals – being a “liberal” is no guarantee that you aren’t still an oppressive shitstain. In fact, “oppressive shitstain who still thinks of himself as progressive” probably describes a lot of young, straight, cis, able-bodied, white dudes, and guess what? That’s mostly who hangs out on Reddit! Funny, that.
To the second: I’m skeptical, in part because you didn’t provide a link and in part because voluntary polls are basically the laziest and least effective way to sample a population. At the very least, I hope these polls were answered by, at minimum, 22,000 people each, since you have made a great commotion in the past about David drawing any conclusions about the community at r/mr without demonstrating that a majority participated.
Libertarian isn’t liberal.
So what?
No, really. So fucking what? Since when is it David’s responsibility, or mine, or anyone’s, to fix anything? Why can’t we all just sit here and mock the stupidest shit MRAs say? Who says we have to try to fix the MRM? Or contemporary feminism? Why does David have to act like a journalist in this case? Other than because you think this is a brilliant attack soundbite?
Do you even understand you’re engaging in one of the oldest forms of derailing with this bullshit “don’t you have more important things to think about” line of argument?
Also for the 9,000 time, this isn’t a news site, it’s a blog. I know you think you have this killer intellectual arrow you stab into David’s heart every time you accuse him of not living up to journalistic integrity standards here, but THIS IS A BLOG. If it was the New York Times, then you’d have an argument. If David had founded this blog to do something other than mock the MRM, you’d have an argument. You don’t. I’m sorry to kill the boner you get every time you think you’ve struck this great rhetorical blow with the journalism argument, but you look stupider every single time you trot it out.
Liberals can be misogynist. When someone says something misogynist, I don’t check to see if they’re liberal because somehow being liberal makes it not count as misogyny.
Also, I have noted many times that r/mr is generally not as blatantly misogynist as the rest of the MRM online, and pointed that out many times before I got banned there. That doesn’t mean there’s no misogyny there, oh holy crap no.
sticky, so what specifiically is wrong with SRS? Please give specific examples.
If this is the standard by which you judge all human behaviour, why are you still whining about it instead of starting your own blog to work on fixing it yourself?
No, seriously, why do you think it is a better use of your time to moan about how disappointed you are in this one blog?
Sticky, please give at least 3 SEPARATE examples.
Also, Mr. You’re Sick, one more thing.
People here aren’t going to claim, by and large, that there is nothing wrong with the greater feminism movement. Most of us probably take time in our lives to course correct and to improve the movement because we believe in it.
But we don’t do that here. We mock misogyny and misogynists. That’s what the space is for. The shit you keep bringing up is derailing, and I’m going to keep pointing that out because it sucks and you’re not listening.
We’re not here to tell you what you want to hear. We’re here to tell you what we want to say.
It’s funny how “liberal” means “left-wing” in the USA. In Sweden it means “right-wing”.
I remember when a former boyfriend of mine was in a protest march against the then social-democratic government’s politics. An American exchange student asked him why they were protesting, and he said “well, there are lots of particular political decisions we object to, but basically, we think they’ve become WAY too liberal!”.
It wasn’t until much later that he realised he had given the completely wrong impression.