So, it finally happened. The men’s rights lecture and rally in Toronto that A Voice for Men have been breathlessly promoting for weeks — in no less than 17 separate posts — have both come to pass. Men’s Rights celebrities flew in from across the continent to attend the exciting events. Paul Elam was there! So was Karen Straughan! Even Dan Perrins made an appearance! (Oh, wait, I think he lives around there.)
In a post-rally post, AVFM’s Robert O’Hara declared the “Historic MHRA rally in Toronto” to have been a “huge success.”
Well, you can be the judge of that. Go here to watch some actual footage of the event. (Sorry, I can’t get it to embed here.) So far I’ve only watched the final 8-minute video at the top of the page, but it’s pretty revealing in and of itself. The event organizers almost outnumber the sparse crowd. And one of the speakers calls for MRAs to take up arms against their “communist” opponents. No, really, just watch.
In case the video gets pulled, or censored, I’ve taken the liberty of transcribing his remarks: :
There’s an organization out there called communism, and the communist manifesto says that the first thing they have to do is take over power. And they’ll never get elected. And they know that they’ll never get elected. So what they do is they say “we have to take power by violent methods,” right, so if you want to crack back against these people, I hate to say it, but you’ve gotta be prepared to pick up a gun and put down the books.
Emphasis mine.
Someone in the audience responds to this with a hearty “yep!” There’s a smattering of applause, mixed with boos. AVFM’s Dean Esmay hurridly ushers the speaker away from the microphone.
The speaker who follows Esmay — I didn’t catch his name — describes the counterprotesters (who held their own rally nearby) as being of “the hammer and sickle” and denigrates them as “queers.”
This isn’t so much history being made as history repeating itself. I suspect the rhetoric was similar at a lot of White Citizen Council rallies in the sixties.
Oh, and the HISTORIC LECTURE that so many MRAs were hoping and dreaming that feminists would disrupt? Feminists ignored it. Apparently, according to one MRA on Reddit who claimed to have been there, a little more than a hundred people showed up.
Congratulations, A Voice for Men, on your FLAWLESS VICTORY!
I’ll watch as much of the rest of the rally as I can force myself to sit through, and add anything else worth adding.
EDITED TO ADD: I watched the video that covered the rest of the rally. It was pretty uneventful: a low energy, sparsely attended rally with a bunch of half-assed speeches. Apparently no one at A Voice for Men or CAFE, the co-host of the rally, bothered to prepare anything to say — perhaps because they were all expecting some sort of feminist riot? The “pick up a gun” speaker wasn’t one of the scheduled speakers, just someone they gave the microphone to when he raised his hand after the scheduled speakers were done.
One moment that did stand out: a trans man — apparently a member of CAFE — briefly took the mic, taking offense at the chants from the counterprotestors calling MRA’s “anti-gay.” I would suggest he take a look at AVFM’s not-so-proud history of homophobia and transphobia.
EDITED TO ADD AGAIN: Here’s a picture of the event from Civilian Media. You can almost taste the excitement! From left, Nick Reading of Men’s Rights Edmonton, Dean Esmay of AVFM, the legendary Paul Elam (looking a little bewildered), and two other dudes. Paul evidently HEARTS Fucking Their Shit Up. Oh, Paul, we HEART U!
Aaaaaaand there goes my assumption that I’d be safe from Breaking Bad spoilers in this thread, lol.
TBH I have no right to complain because I am just starting to watch it.
Late to the party and on a side topic (as always!) but that skid-mark-hatred thing got me thinking. Sure, they’re gross and some people could do with better hygiene, but (TMI warning!) I have IBS so I understand you can’t always make your crap behave the way it should. My pet loo peeve is urine-related — I’ve lived with dudes who get royally pissed off (pun intended) with the amount of toilet paper women use, of course a massive generalisation but you can’t reason with some people. They’d never stop to think that in Western cultures those of us with short urethras who sit down to pee tend to wipe those last droplets off, whereas the long-urethra folk tend to shake them off ALL OVER THE GODDAMN SEAT AND FLOOR!
Sorry, enough toilet talk from me. I seem to have caught my poor mother’s obsession. She has a touch of anterograde amnesia which means she never can remember the last time she went, which leads to her pestering me to tell the nurses she really really needs to go mere minutes after the last visit, and massive meltdowns when her “requests” are turned down. Argh.
Esmay would love this exchange: http://books.google.com/books?id=LFnvmAbxK0wC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=%22out+of+short+pants%22&source=bl&ots=dR4lPgDMoY&sig=PpN0wdtof4iy_nVl2jShpTSGJe4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-4pIUrWnGrjF4AOD6oDADA&ved=0CJEBEOgBMBI#v=onepage&q=%22out%20of%20short%20pants%22&f=false“You call me sir.”
Damn you wordpress. The relogg-in stripped the html.
“There’s an organization out there called communism…”
Lol.
I am to out of short pants! (Your link? It wandered over here)
Minor memory spasm – back in 1980, I attended a teach-in/learn-in on educational democracy at UC Berkeley. There were a number of leftish groups with info tables, including one from CPUSA (M-L). It was like seeing a coelacanth go swimming by. I still remember one ancient codger, who had probably known Gus Hall, hold up a pamphlet and bark cheerily, “Take a look at this, it’s right on the money!” It struck me even then that that was an odd way to promote the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Fi – fellow IBS person here, and seconding your comments! It’s less that we can all have spotless posteriors than that this dude is whining that a woman would be less than ecstatic about washing his skidmarks for him.
Well, if someone needs a furrinati rpg, I would also recommend this:
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/92647/Cat-%28Revised-%26-Expanded%29 Cat (Revised and Expanded) by John Wick.
Which is also pay what you want (in pdf and epub) currently. 🙂
I am still reeling from Cloudiah’s revelation that at one point in the rally Dean Esmay was in fact wearing long pants.
HOW AND WHEN DID HE CHANGE INTO SHORTS OUTDOORS AT A PARK?
And did he desecrate the war memorial in the process?
Or do Canadian parks have changing rooms in them, along with free healthcare?
That’s where you receive your free healthcare, David; in the public park toilet.
True, Kittehserf, and I’d even venture to speculate that most d00ds who can’t be bothered to wash their own undies can’t be bothered to wipe their arses properly and sure as shit can’t be bothered to mop up their stray piss.
To think I promised no more toilet talk! Silly me.
David, he might have been wearing those trousers you can zip the bottoms off to turn them into shorts? Practical, and stylish. Well. If you ignore the impractical and unstylish aspects.
Clearly there were so many other participants that they were able to form a human shield to guard him from prying eyes so he could change.
Also is he wearing sneakers not crocs?
Speaking of Cats Saving People, has anyone else seen the movie Cat’s Eye by Stephen King? It’s one of my favorites.
http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTMzNzM3Njc1OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNjY4NTc5._V1_SY317_CR1,0,214,317_.jpg
I’m freaking out a little because Robert O’Hara is also the name of one of the professors at my college, who I was sorta friends with, and I don’t think he would get involved with the Men’s Rights Movement, but I’m not completely sure. Does anyone know about the MRA Robert O’Hara’s background, or does he appear in any of the pics shared in the comments here, so that I can rule out that it’s the same person? I believe I’ve looked at all the pics and didn’t see anyone who looked like him.
Damn, that oxytocin is powerful stuff. It’s not even MY neurotransmitter!
So there we were, trapped in the burning ruins of the wizard’s tower, wounded, tired and low on resources, but determined not to surrender our haul to the attackers, and the thief turns to my ranger and asks, “How many dragons are out there, do you reckon?”
Yes, I have seen it repeatedly as a child, but not for years. I was meh about the first two segments — adult problems — and I thought the last segment was awesome.
Although I don’t think you can actually do that with a record player and a plastic fan.
TTRPGs…
There we were, three against a thousand. The fight raged all over the hilltop from mid-day to almost sundown. There were bodies stacked like wheat, bundled in sheaves; and reived by the sickle. The grass was trampled flat, and slick with blood, men had slipped and tumbled to their doom, trampled by the press seeking to get to the fight. The very top of the hill had been turned into a charnel house floor; blood and dust churned into an ankle deep mud which sucked feet into it like cement, trapped like that scores met their doom.
But we were victorious, when all was said and done the hill was secured from the foe.
Dumbest thee mothers we ever fought.
This rally was a huge success, for the Feminists, because it was a total failure for the mra’s . LMAO.
Whatever are you talking about, sirtooting? I have a weird documentary to show you, with new agey music that occasionally drowns out the narration, and grainyb&w effects, that proves there was a crowd of thousands. Why, just listen to the thunderous applause at around 2:50.
TTRPGs you say? I’m the P&P sort, but I have a few winners.
I’m a Toreador with minions, someone or another has decided the prince must die and I am in charge of disposing of the corpse (as for how there was one, take it up with the ST). Being the Toreador I am, I tell my minions to do it, lest I get dirty. Want to guess where they put it? My office. I walk in and the corpse of the damned Prince is on my desk. When I was done threatening to cut their heads of, I told them to remove his and dump it separate from the rest, preferably in the sewer.
——
There are a bunch of us, I may’ve been a Toreador for this one, but I was sitting a single session so it’s moot. Previous ST’s older brother is in town and running it for the evening. Puts the lot of us in the sewer against some foe…who, even combined, has us beat to rights. As if that weren’t bad enough, one of our lot is a Tremere with a case of the dumbs. She blood mage’s a skidoo in the flippin’ sewer. Scared the foe off, or rather, when one of his brothers was in torpor (vampire for you’re about to be truly dead if someone else doesn’t get blood into you) and the other just alive enough to do that, and the rest of in barely any better shape…thanks to the skidoo, not the foe…our ST had his baddie run off since he didn’t intend to kill us all.
——
Same ST as the first, my ex-fiancé and a couple friends had been running Lucita, Anatole and Beckett. Lucita had gone to my ex’s head and I was asked to take the Amenti book, and figure out how to stop her, ignore starting stats, I could have whatever XP I needed. Basically, I had permission to build a trio of gods. I ended up with two women and a man, but in the end the story needed me to run a Pooka too, and I can only do so many things at once, so the male Amenti got handed off to another player.
Now…the actual quest? Besides taking Lucita down a peg or three? We needed to rescue an elder Pooka (hence my having to run one) and obtain some bit of written something or other…from within a vampire stronghold. Knowing the odds where very stacked against me, I equipped the male Amenti with wrist mounted flamethrowers since vampires…flame…it was meant as a last ditch cut and run solution. Genius decided to torch the kid at the comic book store who didn’t know where X was…because asking who picked up the package he knew the kid had handled was too hard or something?
Me? And why he had the actual weapon? Paired together the women could, and did, go invisible and “cut” a magic portal “door” in the wall, walk up the stairs, untie the Pooka, taunt Lucita, take her on a cat and mouse chase across some roof tops and have her using some seriously obvious Lasombra powers in the sky above London.
I apologized for failing to directly attack her, got told I did better, I gave cause to call a blood hunt.
Oh and this was after she stole one of my female Amenti’s pants…and face…but my damned pants! My amulets were in those pants! Including the one allowing sky walking! Which I was doing at the time! (Yes my then fiancé effectively pantsed me in a RPG)
——
My personal favorite? The ex’s main character had this giant spider haven guard. I skewered it.
Sure. I’ll play.
—
Bask bugs the hell out of me. Gets on my nerves like few things ever have, and I wish – I wish! – it was for a good reason, some excuse to pander to the noble side of my tarred soul. But no. It’s not that Bask can hit the a dew drop on a pin from three miles, or curve a bullet around a corner or even that the bloody fool has the sheer gall to start flirting with Ms. Johnson. No, no I don’t care about that, that’s small stuff, tiny things, like that one time he dropped a det-charge in that office building.
Or that accident with the noodleshop and the plasma ammunition.
You know what?
Bask doesn’t ever blink, that’s what fucking gets me. I know his eyes ain’t real, so it’s not like he needs to, but couldn’t the fucker at least pretend to blink for our sake? You spend three hours sitting next to him in a cold, rainswept tower, waiting for some unlucky sod to stick a vulnerable body part out a bunker, and Bask not bothering to blink fucking gets to you.
Just him, sitting there, cradling that bloody rifle of his and muttering incantations. Waiting.
Gives me a chill.
Next bloody run done I’m buying that frakhead a pair of cyber-eyelids to go with his damned cyber-eyes.
(Shadowrun)
—
No!
“Repeat”
The answer, you royal rat of a ravens leftovers, is that you are not, NOT, marching a piss-ant peasant army through my damned gates. This ain’t the Kingdoms, this ain’t your thousand damned thrones, we don’t have to answer to no divine right and so I say no! The toll’s three silver, you pay or you take the long way around!
“This vessel is the First Voice of the Thousand Kingdoms, This vessel is honored from north to west, has spoken the words of Law in a thousand-thousand cities, and leads an army of knights more numerous than stars, each tested, tried and true in the grand tournaments of a hundred countries, with banners underneath our own from the foes we have fought, felled and forgotten! This vessel shall not be denied passage by a mere sergeant and three-score soldiers guarding a pass at the edge of the most insignificant speck of soil in the world!”
Sod it, you royalist, blustering buffon! You pay the toll or you damn well walk around the mountain, them’s the rules! We’ve held this post against shades, weremen and things that eat bones with a look and spit metal! The toll’s three, whether you’re the First Voice, Grand Theurgist or damned straight-from-the-First-City Heir Apparent! And the Heir Apparent bloody paid the toll, and threw in spare change to boot! So. Sod. Off!
“Charge! Level this post and the mountain too!”
After four days of fighting, the First Voice and the Ever Victorious March agreed to pay the toll.
Sarge got to decorate the mess hall with a couple of hundred new swords, which really rather look nice once Cook gets the fires going. Personal-like, I figure maybe we should have told that lot and their Voice ‘bout the Cook’s pet dragon. Lying’s against the Chivalric Code, they told me… But then again, it’s not like it was a secret for very long.
(Dungeons and Dragons, 3.5)
—
Slip has a few issues. He – and at times he’s not sure he is actually a he – has some problems dealing with people. Sometimes, he forgets which word to put at the end of a sentence and just sort of petters off. He hasn’t had a good, filling meal in what feels like years. There’s the occasional nervous twitch and itching sensation in his head that just won’t go away.
Oh, and sometimes he blacks out when under stress and wakes up in curious places surrounded by tiny, mangled bits of what used to be , and emphasis on used, local well known criminal elements. His partners all swear they don’t mind, and that he does a lot of good, but when he occasionally starts eating walls or growing extra arms, they do get a bit unnerved. And that habit of picking things up without actually touching them can get a bit problematic, especially when you think about getting a cup of coffee and one comes floating by without Slip actually being in the room… Or the building.
On the other hand, the lad has a knack for slipping into places. And those gangsters did get well surprised when they tied him up once and he grew another set of hands…
(World of Darkness)
—
Take a ship across the sea, they said
Go to the Dominion they’ve got jobs and gold, they said
You’ll find work and a living, they said
Won’t be too bad, they said.
You’ll hardly be in too much trouble, they said.
Come back rich, they said.
And here you are, covered in sand and blisters, sunburnt skin peeling off to join the toes you’ve already lost to mummy rot – and they did not mention the mummies, now did they? – and staring down a band of mercs who’ve decided that they’ll be the ones to grab this cache of Fireglass, what with outnumbering you and Lucky Firp, Grin and Smiles three-to-one and preferring to negotiation rates at the end of twelve crossbows. Bloody old tavern goers with their bloody tales. They lied! And they seemed so eager and earnest after that sixth drink!
This place is nothing but sand, wind, sun, shit and short-tempered mercenaries squabbling over the discarded remnants of a long forgotten divine icon.
Oh, and the cults.
No one mentioned the cults.
For some reason, that one just straight up slipped every mind otherwise damn-well dying to talk your ear off. Mentioned the sand, they did, and the sun, and the sandworms hiding from the sun in the sand and always annoyingly apt at eating your boots, and oh, oh, did they ever talk your damned brain straight out of your headbin about dwarvens this and dwarven that and dwarven tenacity, but no, not a single mention of crazed cultists attempting to gather the pieces of their broken idol and bring back that nightmarish case of order, apathy and mechanistic profit-crushing shattered so long ago.
So, here you are, sandpapered smooth and with enough bolts pointed at you to consider a career in professional pincushionery, and it’s not like you really have time to negotiate rates with this lot what with being on an apocalyptic schedule and all. So it’ll have to be a split of all to zilch, favor: you, since if the Gathered Attendants of the Broken Sky get their hands on much more of this stuff you can kiss your world goodbye.
And if the world goes, you’ll never get a chance to drag those lying bastards out into the street and give them a kicking! That’d just about kill you, if the planetary holocaust didn’t do you in first.
Which WoD species? Almost sounds like Changeling…except not. (Then again, Pookas aren’t the killing sort usually)