JohnTheOther of A Voice for Men Seems to be Completely Losing Touch With Reality

I am beginning to wonder – seriously wonder — if JohnTheOther of A Voice for Men has completely lost touch with reality.

Take a look at this angry, delusional tirade he posted on Reddit yesterday after a couple of his AVFM comrades were banned from Reddit, possibly for their promotion of “doxxing” – that is, their attempts to find and reveal the personal information of a Toronto feminist activist. In this embarrassing public meltdown, JtO turned on the regulars in the Men’s Rights subreddit for criticizing AVFM’s doxxing campaigns – and accused them, astonishingly, of being a gang of closet feminists.

Here are some excerpts; the whole thing is nearly 700 words long.

Dear feminists, and by feminists, I mean most of you sorry cretins who inhabit r/mensrights. …

Why do any of you dolts imagine Paul, Dean, myself and other actual MRAs advocate public exposure of the evangelists of hatred and the initiators of proxy violence? Do you think, in your pea brains we intend harm to come to the cretins we document? A summary pass through any of our collected writing will quickly disabuse you of that stupid assumption.

Really? You may recall that when once upon a time I suggested to John that harm might come to some of those AVFM targeted in a previous doxxing campaign, he responded with a dismissive “[a]nd what if they get killed David?”

His recent tirade continues:

In fact the concern over the practice of outing the agents of hatred and the initiators of proxy violence is not a moral concern at all. It’s fear of offending the powerful. On Reddit, that would be the feminist hegemony who seem able to indulge in any cruelty and hate with impunity – on the misguided notion that if only we in the r/mr reddit were a bit nicer, they’d come right around and embrace the undeniable reality of our concerns.

Stupid and cowardly. Thats what this concern is.

And just in case any of you slow-witted dolts haven’t got it yet, while I wont do it on reddit – respecting the rules of the house here, outside of this forum, I will publish the name of anyone – male or female, MRA or Feminist who advocates violence or initiates violence, including by proxy, and I’ll do it with satisfied smile on my face, and not even a slight twinge of guilt.

Ironically, AVFM seems to have had no problem with the “proxy violence” of the police in Toronto against the feminist protesters at the Warren Farrell talk that has inspired all this drama. (See here for footage of the police removing protesters by force.)

Or do you snivelers think accountability is only for men, and that women, or feminists (including feminist men) have a free licence to commit and cultivate violence and hate?

Do you think women are so fucking helpless and infantile they cannot possibly own any accountability – even in the commission of direct violence? If you /do/ think this, then you are indistinguishable from a gender ideologue, and you will have earned my unlimited contempt. How can you possibly oppose violence without supporting accountability for it’s direct and proxy initiation?

Oh, and if anybody, after reading this cares to claim that publicly identifying the initiators of violence is /actually/ a backhanded technique for putting them in harms way, then you’re too stupid to be allowed to participate in an adult conversation. Yes, you too David.

Thanks for the shoutout. The woman in question “initiated” no violence. You can find my post explaining why I think your doxxing campaign is dangerous here.

I expect I’ll be getting banned on reddit directly after posting this, which will simply be the wider reddit community making itself even less relevant on the topic of the Men’s Rights Movement.

And to the Reddit Admins: Go on, ban me, and tell yourselves the violence cultivated and committed by the feminist community is harmless because it principally targets men.

He has not been banned.

In several followup comments on Reddit, he expanded on his bizarre assertion that the Men’s Rights subreddit is dominated by feminists. At one point he wrote:

there are over 50,000 subscribers to this sub-reddit. Do you think there are 50,000 MRAs here? or about 10,000 MRAs, and about 40,000 feminists.

Meanwhile, he’s continued to rail on about an incident in which he claims to have been threatened by a knife-wielding mob of feminists. In one recent comment on Reddit, he wrote:

I saw box-cutters the last time I dealt with a mob of feminists, and I believe the violence in their movement is dialling rapidly UP. And that’s why attaching identity to behaviour matters. Or we could do nothing substantive, condemn it without any real effect, and wait until we have some serious, and possibly deadly violence from them before we start looking for names.  

Trouble is, this confrontation with a “mob” of violent feminists never happened.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, video put online by John and his supporters shows not a confrontation with a mob but a mildly heated verbal argument between John and a handful of feminist activists who are evidently using a boxcutter not to threaten him but to take down some posters of his. If there really is footage of JtO being threatened by a boxcutter-wielding mob, I would like to see it.

In a posting on AVFM, meanwhile, JtO offers a similarly paranoid fantasy coupled with a threat:

Dear feminists,

I see you, and I hear you, and I notice the knife in your hand, and the machine gun drawn on your placard. I get it, you’re not kidding, and I know you are not speaking metaphorically. You want to kill. We all get that you are entirely serious. But your violence – as you obviously dial it upwards will not be met. It will not be answered and you are uninvited from the rumble.

But where are you going with this brutality? Do you really want this to devolve to a street-fight? Really?

I think at this point JtO’s biggest beef is with reality.

Meanwhile, some of the more sensible voices on the Men’s Rights subreddit – yes, there are a few – continue to try to explain why AVFM’s doxxing campaigns are bad for everyone. In one comment, a Redditor called ibm2431 breaks down the damage he thinks Elam et al are doing to the Men’s Rights cause:

For what purpose will their names be made known?

They’re not prominent members of a movement. They have no real power or influence. They’re just stupid students who love their misandrist circlejerk.

So, again, why the effort?

To harass them. Don’t pretend for a second that (almost obsessively) hunting down their identities to “expose” them will do anything else. …

[Elam] must satisfy his lust for vengeance by hunting down a couple of stupid students. He can try to dress it up as some sort of moral righteousness, but that doesn’t change the fact that his sole motivation is vengeance. He must know that there is no benefit to “exposing” them other than to open them up to harassment.

And if you realize that such actions only benefit those who claim that MRAs are hateful people who will dox those that disagree with them? …

Oh, but don’t worry, you’re not stooping to the protesters’ level by trying to censor their speech. You’re just trying to chill it. You’re just demonstrating that if they disagree with you that you’ll try to hunt them down, “expose” them, and open them up to god only knows what kind of retribution from your posse of internet warriors.

Yes Paul, the protesters made you very angry. They made us all angry. But there’s a line to be drawn between being righteously angry, and using that anger as an excuse to try to harass people. Being able to recognize that line is what helps to see what helps the movement, and what only serves to hurt it.

If the Men’s Rights movement has any hope of becoming anything other than a hate movement, it had better listen to people like this – rather than retreating into hateful delusions, as JohnTheOther and Paul Elam seem intent on doing.