We’ve seen a lot of epic flip-floppery from Men’s Rightsers in the last few days on the subject of the Occidental College fiasco — that is, for those who haven’t been following it closely, the organized spamming of Occidental’s anonymous online rape reporting form with false reports by Reddit MRAs and 4channers. Notably, the Men’s Rights subreddit mod known as sillymod went from blaming the false reports on trolls one day to hailing them as necessary activism the next.
But a reader has alerted me to an even more epic flip-flop, this one from Pierce Harlan, a blogger obsessed with what he sees as an epidemic of false rape accusations.
Harlan started out as one of the voices of reason — at least by MRA standards — on the Occidental College spamming. Refraining from the hysteria of his fellow Men’s Rightsers about Occidental College’s anonymous form, he actually pointed out in one post that the form wasn’t being used to punish anyone and that anonymous reporting may be “a necessary evil” in order to get a true picture of the extent of rape.
On Friday, he went further, announcing in a post on his blog The Community of the Wrongly Accused that he was so disgusted with the behavior of his fellow Men’s Rightsers in the Occidental fiasco that he was planning to give up blogging entirely. The phony reports from MRAs, he sadly noted, “did no favors for the wrongly accused,” and this sort of “activism” only served to make MRAs look bad.
[T]he actions of the spammers were misguided at best, puerile and malicious at worst. They’ve given those of us who are trying to raise awareness about these issues in a serious way a black eye. I couldn’t care less how some radical feminist characterizes this incident, my concern is how it plays to middle America — and this can’t be spun in a positive way.
The incident, he wrote, was
the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. We’ve long sought to engage our readers, both here and via Reddit, to take certain actions that we felt could actually make a difference for the wrongly accused. These efforts invariably were met with either a lukewarm response or the sound of crickets chirping. …
Yet, now, someone suggests men’s righters spam a school’s rape reporting site, and for that they come out in droves. Hundreds of false rape reports. …
If we could have had this kind of support for the various initiatives we’ve tried to launch, I think we actually could have made a difference for the wrongly accused. We didn’t.
And so, he concluded in frustration,
the time has come to hand this blog over to others who will continue to raise awareness about the injustices to the wrongly accused. I will continue to follow the issue and offer my two cents on issues I think are important, but I’m not going to run this blog any longer.
Yep. That’s right. MRAs are such shitty “activists” that their most notable and attention-getting work of “activism” since I’ve started this blog drove the MRA most dedicated to that issue to such disgust and despair that he announced he was basically giving up the fight.
But Harlan’s retirement didn’t last long.
Apparently deciding that his camel’s back could handle a bit more straw after all, Harlan quickly took down the post announcing his retirement — though it’s still up, at least for now, in Google cache, and when that goes away, here’s a handy screenshot. (In case you’re not an ant, click to see it full size.)
On Saturday, Harlan came out with a new post suggesting that maybe he’d been wrong to challenge the hysteria of the false-report-submitting MRAs in the first place. Remember that bit from above in which Harlan said that the actions of the false-report spammers “can’t be spun in a positive way[?]” Well, Harlan decided he was going to give it the old college try:
Progressives are having a bona fide conniption over the Reddit Men’s Righters who spammed Occidental College’s anonymous rape reporting system with fake “rape” claims (from what we can tell, they were not really false rape claims, just snarky comments about the injustice of anonymous reporting). The righteous indignation from feminists is deafening. The spam attack, they tell us, is typical men’s rights hysteria, the result of an undeservedly privileged class being stripped of its power.
The men’s righters were out to prove that it’s too easy to abuse the college’s anonymous reporting system. We disagreed with the men’s righters and said we weren’t much concerned about the anonymous reporting system, but the more we read the progressive take on the incident, the more we wonder if we blew the call — maybe we should be concerned..
There was, of course, no reference to his post from the previous day, no acknowledgment that the “activism” he was now defending was the very same “activism” that had led him only one day earlier to decide to quit blogging altogether.
Down the memory hole it went. (But Google cache remembers.)
I guess when you’re a Men’s Rights activist, you have to take what you can get, and incredibly shitty slacktivism is about as good as it gets.
::shudder::
Even worse than Dick Emery.
@Bad_dog and serrana: Well, our illustrious mayor was supposed to announce the locations of “warm-houses” for people with no heat. Given that city council stripped him of all his other powers, he should have plenty of time for that. I’ve been texting my friends to make sure they all have warm places to go. I don’t know what is happening in other cities. I know my family all still have power. We were supposed to be having our big family christmas today–that did NOT happen. Hopefully this doesn’t get to be like Montreal–that was horrible. Ah…Canada. Now I feel bad that I’ve been eagerly awaiting winter…
Thanks for the good wishes! I worry about the city’s homeless–it’s not actually THAT cold yet, but for them…
I think you will like it . I make it good. My supreme for you however would be white tea. But we will save that for after the shots of tequila !(with salt ,lime and beer chasers!)
Canuck ,
(((HUGS)))
We went through that about 2 weeks ago .30 hours no power and teen tempts outside. I was complaining then I thought about the homeless. We had a place to go .(if got below 50 in our house) ..i felt grateful .even though I was inconvenienced its nothing in the grand scheme of suffering .
Serrena ,
You too funny!
South-Central Ontario here…and our outage was 18 hours long. I just noticed the power going off around 2 a.m., and it wasn’t restored until around 7:30ish this evening.
And on that note, I like hydro linemen, bucket trucks with orange flashers, pizza, hot showers, and brandy with a shot of Angostura afterwards.
And ironically, they abused it and failed…their bullshit was in fact easily spotted, and will no doubt be discarded accordingly. At most, all they’ve done was inconvenience the study’s compilers for a short time. The form remains, and once their own little hissyfit dies down, the tracking of campus sexual assaults will continue as it has for the past four years…quite unremarkably.
Power outages…*shudder* I start panicking after an hour — the fish. An hour all but the most sensitive fish will be fine, might want to give the surface a quick blow so oxygen exchange occurs, but no major worries. 1~4 you’re going to need to hand (mouth) aerate the tank, but blowing through airline tubing is annoying, not a big deal…after, eh, 8? hours pretty much all fish are getting cranky, more importantly, your bio filter is dying. More than 12 hours and keeping your fish alive just became a full time job. I do NOT ever want to deal with this.
Transporting them has the perk that car movement keeps the surface moving, so oxygen exchange still happens…still, the 8+ hours between PA and here I always heeded the advice to starve them for 3 days so they have nothing in them to shit in their transport container (a bit of starvation is far less dangerous than ammonia)
Point here? 30 hours no power would have me making cold brew coffee because no way am I sleeping. I really can’t imagine how stressed I’d be. Y’all have my sympathy, I can’t imagine it’s much easier to deal with without fish.
Also, thank you, I keep failing to look into a small DIY solar generator so I have some backup power for my fishies.
Solar power is helpful, no doubt about it! The only electric light that worked here all day was a humble Moonray out on the deck. Even on the shortest day of the year, with an overcast sky raining ice on us, and no sun to be seen, that thing worked. Anyone who thinks Canada doesn’t get enough sun to make solar power feasible can eat my Moonray!
Does it say something about me that I’m just bored with them (and this ‘incident’) now? It’s almost like I had some fear in the back of my mind that some critical mass of average people was at risk of believing a single MRA thing, but now, it’s just gone. Poof. It is just now so painfully obvious to me how fringe and irrelevant their little bowel movement really is.
And if I may, I like computers, the internet, reading and commenting on blogs, going outside EVER, and interacting with other human beings (especially women) at all, EVER.
I hate backing up my opinions with research, citing anything, and thinking about what I say before I say it. 🙂
@ canuck
Loosing power is probably one of the worst things that can happen in bad winter weather. I hope it isn’t out for long and people are able to get help. People underestimate how quickly you can freeze to death. Depressing really, especially considering how many people don’t have the means to keep provisions and back up heaters in case of emergency.
When I was really young our power was out for almost a week. The only reason my family and a few of our neighbors survived the storm (that prevented us from leaving, just to make matters worse) was because we had a wood burning fire place. I remember sleeping huddled around it in sleeping bags. My mom made my sister and I think we were all having fun and ‘camping out’ in the living room. It’s silly, but it’s one of the reasons I insisted on the house I bought having a wood burning fire place that I never use :/
@ canuck
Loosing power is probably one of the worst things that can happen in bad winter weather. I hope it isn’t out for long and people are able to get help. People underestimate how quickly you can freeze to death. Depressing really, especially considering how many people don’t have the means to keep provisions and back up heaters in case of emergency.
When I was really young our power was out for almost a week. The only reason my family and a few of our neighbors survived the storm (that prevented us from leaving, just to make matters worse) was because we had a wood burning fire place. I remember sleeping huddled around it in sleeping bags. My mom made my sister and I think we were all having fun and ‘camping out’ in the living room. It’s silly, but it’s one of the reasons I insisted on the house I bought having a wood burning fire place that I never use :/
PS: Sorry if it double posts, I had been logged out when I posted last and it went into moderation.
Finally got power back here. Large swaths of Toronto/GTA are still without power though. I spent two hours last night de-icing the driveway, only to wake up to a driveway that’s basically just a sheet of ice. Took another three hours to de-ice that only to find out that I’m down to my last little bit of salt and all the stores are sold out. I’m just praying that we don’t get any more ice rain cos I’m screwed if we do (they aren’t predicting much more than ice drizzle though, so I’m clinging tightly to that hope :P). I can’t even bear to think about the homeless out there. It’s fucking unconscionable that we allow people to be homeless in cities that are susceptible to this kind of weather (not that it’s much better that we allow people to be homeless anywhere else). Hope everyone keeps safe and warm tonight, and here’s hoping the winds tomorrow aren’t going to be as bad as they’re fearing.
Feminists like personal hygiene, but they hate lemon juice on paper cuts. (This game reminds me of Fannee Doolee, if there’s anyone else on here who remembers “Zoom”)
We’re getting the ice storm now, and it sucks. Our street hasn’t lost power yet, but driving/going outside is treacherous and I had to delay Christmas travel plans by a couple of days. Hope Santa’s got chains on the sleigh runners this year.
@dallasapple
The system that hit us was supposed to have come out of TX, so it may well be the same one that hit y’all earlier.
Bina — turns out it’s cheaper to just buy battery powered bubblers, but yeah, I’m guessing north of the artic circle in the winter is the only place that doesn’t get enough sun to power solar panels. Because it isn’t the temp or anything, it’s the sun. You have sunlight, you can have solar power. Obviously more sun means more power, but for a low power device like a (LED?) light, a little goes a long way.
On that note, at least online, ikea has a bunch of solar powered lights.
And seriously guys, thank you for reminding me to get that potential problem solved before it becomes a fish crisis. I freaked during Nemo, had everyone else here on orders to wake me if we lost power. We, unlike everyone around here, never lost power. My mother joked it was because I’d have walked through the blizzard to raise hell until it was back on (our phone never went out either and you can damned well bet I’d have become That Person if we lost power but not phones)
Ah aquarists, we’re an odd bunch. I may well go out in a blizzard for my fish.
Our power was out for 16 days after Ike and I was stressing about the fish. It wasn’t cold, though, it was hot. So, so hot. We borrowed a generator that we’d run in the evening so we could charge things up and get cable, and of course, run the filters. We didn’t lose a single fish, thank goodness.
*cable=internet
16 days running the filters for a few hours and no dead fish? What magic filters do you have?
Shadow — it won’t melt the ice, but sand and kitty liter both provide traction. You can also try a fish store, it’s more expensive (probably, I’ve never bought de-icing salt) but they’ll have aquarium salt is large quantities.
Hey, Shadow, how did the trip Down Under go?
MRAs: We hate false rape accusations we’re going to spam a university with HUNDREDS of false rape accusations.
Hey, shouldn’t they all be arrested for perjury right now, like they are always hollering about whenever a woman accuses someone of rape?
Stay safe, Torontonians (or whatever you call yourselves) and everyone else.
<blockquote
@dallasapple
The system that hit us was supposed to have come out of TX, so it may well be the same one that hit y’all earlier.
I think you could be right.
OOPS!!! I have had blockquote monster sex TWO times now!
Could most likely be.