CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the AVFM screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here.
I feel a little guilty. Men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men had to “withdraw” one of its posts earlier this week after I demonstrated conclusively here that the site had used a fake screenshot to try to back up the article’s strange claim that Google searches for “violence against men” in fact returned mostly results related to violence against women. (It doesn’t. Try it.)
Thing is, A Voice for Men had been hoping to use that post to boost its claims that Mens’s Rightsers, and men in general, are being “censored” and otherwise stymied by feminist-dominated Internet power players like Google and Facebook.
You may not realize it, but the Men’s Rights movement depends on such false claims of male victimhood to keep its members happily angry. AVFM’s head cheese Paul Elam — who seems to live off the donations of his fans — depends on such false claims for his very livelihood!
If only their claim about the search results for “violence against men” hadn’t been so obviously false! If only their screenshot hadn’t been so obviously fake!
And so, we here at Man Boobz would like to offer a little olive branch to AVFM — and a little bit of assistance. My diligent deputies in the Man Boobz Internet Research Labs have pulled together some phony screenshots that we would like to offer to AVFM for them to use in their next OMG MEN ARE TOTALLY BEING CENSORED SEND US MONEY!!111!! campaign.
As you can see, these images are much more convincing than the screenshot you guys tried to fob off as real earlier in the week, and we hope that the sophistication of our forgeries will enable you to pass them off as real.
If you wish to return to the whole “violence against men” issue, try this screenshot:
This screenshot appears to demonstrate some very peculiar results for a search for “misandry.”
And you can use this last one to show that search results for A Voice for Men itself are being tampered with by evil feminists. Or, possibly, poodles.
Best of luck with all your future lies!
Thanks to Inurashii and Cloudiah for their invaluable assistance with this project.
snore — would you say that you’re some guy who is … bored? Bored with Dave’s schtick, perhaps?
I love how even when he’s saying that David is doing something right, Snore can only phrase it in terms of complaining.
snore would be the most aptly named troll ever. Insomnia to deep sleep in a dozen words.
Asstrelle, you should know that repeating “men’s rights hate site” makes you look unoriginal. AVfM holds itself to the highest literary standards, do you?
Are you sure he’s filing? The thing he has open looks like it accepts the round things on the shelves… but what are they?
Magnetic tape rolls, I think; Mum used to have those in her job. They were for backing up the day’s work, so it is filing, of a sort.
Snore, do go on and tell us more about what you think adds value to the universe. I think reruns of Futurama add value to the universe.
I think kitties add value to the universe.
Fish tanks. Fluval filters (go go German engineering!) ALL THE TECH
Chocolate. Coffee.
LBT’s Infinity Smashed as it’s currently saving my brain from total meltdown over the sheer number of religions I’m typing up for the survey (there are seriously hundreds)
My photo composites!
Knitwear!
Thanks kitteh. I fell better again knowing he’s in his place.
LOL!
namegoeshere, mostly I laugh. And I’m glad when I see *any* evidence of rationality from MRAs. Esmay’s meltdown there is really quite spectacular; I’ll probably do a post about it, though I really want to move on from this topic.
Off topic:
Damn, I just read a really annoying thread about women’s representation in one of the movie blogs that I read. It went along something like that:
‘Do we really need another movie where women are killed to propel the plot?’
‘Not interesting! Stop talking about it!’
‘If you’re not interested, you can just… not talk about it and let people who do want to talk about it, talk about it?’
‘I was completely pro- feminism before you made me angry!’
Argh, doesn’t that give you that awful deja vu feeling, dsfrogs?
Yep!
Anyway, now that I’ve got it out of my system, OMG the screenshots! Misandry! XD
Oh, big Trek discussion took off!
DS9 is my favourite Trek. Voy was the first Trek I watched, so it’ll always have a special place in my heart. It was really up and down quality-wise and yeah, they never really seemed to suffer a lot from the fact that they supposedly had limited resources. Still, I think Voy has been unfairly bashed by fans. I’ve seen loads of people complain that it was always “press reset button” at the end of each ep, but the same can be said about TNG, who seems to be most people’s favourite Trek.
I liked Data too, but I think he was sometimes badly handled. They keep saying he lacked emotions, but most of the time he was written as someone who totally has emotions, only less vivid than those of a regular human being. Plus I hated how much, uh, bioism Pulaski got away with, and to some extent the rest of the crew as well (Husband and I debated what it should be called when you have prejudices against robots, and we settled on bioism – feel free to suggest alternatives).
Still, overall I liked Pulaski, she had a proper arch, started out really obstinate and bioist and eventually mellowed and became much nicer. Crusher didn’t have much of a personality at all. I think the female characters were much better written in both DS9 and Voy (and for all that Seven’s catsuit was ridiculous and unmotivated, and still liked her a lot as a character).
This is also something that’s cringeworthy about TOS and the movies with the original cast now (I still enjoy them overall) – the way McCoy keep making speciesist comments to Spock. Compare if you had a member of a crew with an autism diagnosis and one of the neurotypical crew members consistently talked about how autists don’t understand neurotypical people and don’t get this or that and are so annoying with their different manners… Or compare if you had a single black crew member in an otherwise white crew, and one of the white crew members kept referring to him as “thick-lipped blackie” or something like that. Seriously, that’s not friendly banter, that’s out of line.
Sorry, I obviously meant “and for all that Seven’s catsuit was ridiculous and unmotivated, I still liked her a lot as a character”.
When it comes to Ent, I tried watching it but didn’t really like it… We’ve talked about giving it another go, though.
Help
choking
mini-wheats
As for the “reset button” … it was a rare TOS episode that even mentioned a previous episode.
I think Kirk pulls the Corbomite bluff twice, and there’s a minor woman character who recurs in two first-season episodes (Angela Martine).
Generally if the landing party is Kirk, McCoy, Spock (in one instance Sulu) and someone new, you know who’s not making it home (unless the new person is a woman, in which case she’ll be central to the plot).
In the few episodes where a regular does get killed, he’ll be back by the end of it
because there is a contract, dammit.Oh, and the TOS skants get a lot of flame for being really short. They started out really short, and all the velour costumes apparently shrank every time they were dry-cleaned. The regulars got spiffy new polyester shirts in the third season, but the velours still make an appearance, mostly in stock shots (they have this one they love of Sulu turning from the main screen to look at
the cameraKirk) and on extras.Oh my god are we talking about Star Trek?
I have watched TNG and Voyager and I love them both but I think Voyager is my favourite.
I adore Captain Janeway with all my heart and soul and I also love B’ellana (angry women FTW) and Chakotey and Harry Kim.
I liked TNG, but the lack of decent main female characters always bothered me, Beverly Crusher and Deanna were good but it always felt like they were rather surplus to requirements and didn’t get the character development that the male characters did. Plus their roles and on the ships and their personalities felt a bit cliched.
But Voyager, you have to glory that is Janeway and then you have B’ellana, a mixed race woman who is a genius engineer and you have Tuvok, Chakotey and Harry Kim. There is quite literally only one main character in Voyager who is a white man and I found that so refreshing.
The only thing I think would have been better would have been to have a few more women of colour as characters, but I think B’ellana’s actress was a WOC.
I’m actually currently re-watching the whole of Voyager in order as I’ve previously only watched it when I’ve caught re-runs on TV.
Oh and I love 7 of 9, I really like the mother-daughter feel to the relationship between her and Janeway that develops.
Well, there’s a reason TNG gets exempted from the “Reset Button” criticisms. At the time, episodic storytelling was the norm. Common wisdom was that you wanted to get people into the show at any point, and be able to scramble the order of episodes in syndication. About the only shows to really dabble in story arcs were “Hill Street Blues” and “St. Elsewhere”.
By the late 90’s though, there was a strong trend towards connected story arcs, with Babylon 5, ER, and DS9 getting into the action. Voyager, People were getting a taste of the complex story arcs, and loved it. Voyager’s premise seemed tailor made for this kind of storytelling, so the fact that it didn’t engage in it when DS9 was with the Dominion War seemed like a lot of wasted potential.
Now, this probably isn’t a fair accusation, partly because many of the shows engaging in long-form storytelling were taking off AFTER Voyager was a couple seasons in, so it’s asking a lot of the production team to take that risk. They also may have felt that Voyager needed to be more of a “Classic Trek” format while DS9 was departing from the formula.
@Historiphilia: B’elanna’s actress, Roxann Dawson, is either hispanic or half-hispanic if memory serves me.
I also loved Janeway. She was tough and brave while not being traditionally “hot”, and that’s extremely rare for female characters, even today.
Btw, Ishka from DS9 has got to be the absolute nightmare of all MRA:s… She’s a feminist, she manages to convince her lover and leader of the planet of several of her ideas, she overall likes to barge into formerly exclusively male areas, and she looks like this: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Ishka