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.
Double, double, toil and trouble
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
::cackles::
The newbies aren’t really the problem though, as annoying as newbie ableist comments are. It’s the people who’ve been asked to stop and decided not to, or the people who’ve been asked to stop who’ve turned that into a reason to drama llama.
Tangentially related to the “crazy” talk…I just realized I somehow twisted my bedding 90° while asleep. Now, I am notorious for making my sleeping quarters look like a micro tornado landed on the bed, but this is a new one by me. (My sleep, if it can be called such, is the land of insomnia and nightmares, like, I warned my pharm student before I first stayed over, woke up to “wow, you weren’t kidding!”)
But perfectly 90°?! I don’t exactly think my usual “you try my nightmares, see what you do to the bed” answers this one. Did someone let gremlins loose in my room?
Argenti – I’ve managed to get my top sheet twisted that badly (no nightmares, I just roll over a lot in bed) but not the bottom sheet! It just ends up a twisted mess in the middle of the bed, but not at right angles.
Cassandra – Yeah, the HOW DARE YOU INFRINGE ON MY FREEZE PEACH complainers are the real pains.
Speaking of drama llamas, I just found this pic. We’ve had a few of that kind …
http://i693.photobucket.com/albums/vv297/GothBoyUK/DramaLlama.jpg
My stance on sheets — fitted bottom sheet, no top sheet. Because I can manage to accidentally restrain myself in a twisted top sheet. (You know those smooth fuzzy hotel blankets? Do they have those there? I use one of those instead of a top sheet)
I nearly broke down today after someone insisted on calling me delusional, so I’m in an anti-ableism mood. 🙁
By the way I do think we should make a distinction with regards to ableism. I think that calling people r***** is different from calling them crazy. Both are bad, but the former is more like victimizing an actual group of people with down syndrome (similar to slurs about ethnicity I guess?), while the latter is more like a generic ableist comment not as immediately vile but still very problematic. If that makes sense?
I used to turn my sheets 90 degrees all the time when I was a kid, though it doesn’t happen much anymore. I think I would toss and turn and twist the sheets around, and then I would grab for the nearest corner to straighten them out; but if I had already rotated the sheets a little bit, the closest corner wasn’t the right one anymore.
Misery — I’m not sure I agree with your logic why we should make that distinction, but it does sorta make sense that calling people r*****s, etc, is really obviously wrong, whereas words like “crazy” are still widely used. The latter I can see as an honest mistake, the former not.
And I’m sorry some ass decided to be an ass and call you delusional.
Viscaria — particularly since it was far too hot in my room and I only had my hotel style blanket and one microfiber that gets stuck to it, that’s entirely possibly wtf I did. (Yeah, too hot in New England at Christmas, I blame the 90g~ of 78° water in my room. ALL THE FISH TANKS!)
Brooked, I think this “The real problem with ableism is that equating bad ideas, failed logic, idiotic behavior and social bias with mental illness supports the idea that douche bags who commit fucked up, socially unacceptable and morally wrong acts and the mentally ill should both be judged, ridiculed and stigmatized in the same manner” explains the problem perfectly.
This is what I got from the posters here. I didn’t think about those types of comments much before reading this blog. Now I’ve learned how such statements can do a lot of damage.
Argenti – we may have those blankets here, but I’ve never had to buy blankets so wouldn’t know.
LBT, he is “white” for a given value of white, and I know *I’ve* had enough “Zimmerman’s Hispanic so it wasn’t racially motivated and neither was the lack of conviction” to last me a lifetime. Let me leave it with this. If you can “pass” (like I can), then you are afforded white privilege (like I am). Zimmerman can “pass” regardless of geneology, therefore he is given white privilege. Hispanic is so broad a term as to be meaningless.
And I realise it is not that cut and dry, but the police refered to him as “white” throughout, which gave a huge bias right from the start.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/29/trayvon-martin-case-georg_n_1387711.html
@argenti
Thanks for the tip
@kitteh’s
I had an unbelievable blast in Aus!! Unfortunately Melbourne and Sydney were unseasonably cold and rainy when we were there, but the weather was gorgeous in the Gold Coast, and hot as hell in Perth (which was actually a welcome change all things considered :P)
O RLY???
If we’re talking “teenager who slept with his slightly younger, underage girlfriend, with no Romeo and Juliet provision”, maybe so. But in the case of a father who abused and pimped his own kid to multiple other men, that’s got repeat offender written all over it. In big red capital letters.
Shadow, that’s great!
I was thinking of you on the days you were in Melbourne – I’m sorry coffee didn’t get to be A Thing – and much as I like unseasonably cold weather, I did think the timing was pretty crap!
“after conviction, sex offenders have very low recidivism rates as compared to the general prison population.”
I’m pretty sure, whatever the gender of the perpetrator that this isn’t the case.
I’m sure any UK, US Or CA Government stats database can easily allay this assertion.
So he changes his mind and that’s a big problem? Huh. Me? Anonymous rape reporting is absurd. The reason we have a criminal justice system is to balance the rights of victims against the rights of the accused, while logical search for the truth is undertaken. An individual’s claim of a crime is nowhere near the standard required to assess a claim. Period. And the admin said that she was using it to identify that 4% of men who are serial rapists.
This dialog proceeds as though there already aren’t Star Chamber like proceedings on college campuses where men who are accused have their rights violated, and don’t exist on a continuum with other bizarre procedures like “no contact” orders. I was speaking with two female students at my local college, Keene State, recently about what it was like between the boys and girls on campus and she proceeded to tell me a story about a boy who had been a bit of a jerk to her, as she put. He didn’t threaten her, harass her, stalk her, sexually assault her – but just was rude to her. She went to some person on campus who told her to get a “no contact” order, just to be safe, even though there was no issue of sexual harassment going on. It was quite strange to hear her discuss it. she even said, “He didn’t do anything to deserve it but I did so because the administrator told me I should.” These “no contact” orders are supposed to be only for cases where there has been sexual misconduct of some sort, like a breakup or following or bothering or asking out too many times. Not for any social transgression.
But you see, this power was handed to this 20 yr old girl and she was egged on by someone in the administration to misuse it. This is now on that boy’s college record and can be used against him as part of a pattern – and he did nothing that warranted that action against him. So please, don’t try to tell us that an anonymous rape reporting system won’t be misused – why wouldn’t this be too? It’s just another lopsided privilege granted to women.
Even worse is the motivation for it in the first place. Actual reports of rape and sexual assault are so low at colleges that even if you use a 95% assumption of under reporting, the figures would still be an order of magnitude off from the ridiculous statistics reported by junk “studies” which inflated the numbers of sexual assaults actually occurring in the first place. Feminists are shown to be building their belief system on a foundation of nonsense by what actually happens in the real world, so they seek to juke reality to continue with their BS like “rape culture theory” and all the rest of it.
You want to do the right thing? Encourage women to report every sexual assault and rape to the proper authorities. Cops today are incredibly sensitive to handling the reporting of such crimes with respect and privacy. Although the actual investigation may be less fun as in the real world, corroboration and consistency and plausibility etc all enter into one’s credibility – and goodness, women are too tender to deal with all that yukky reason and logic and fact stuff. Lol, what a joke the entire movement has become.
This anonymous report form isn’t design to replace the criminal justice system. It just allows victims to report what happened to them. And if the perpetrator is named, they are just requested to meet with someone who will just remind them of the college sexual assault policy and tell them that, if the accusation is true, they need to stop their behavior. Nothing beyond that. And of course victims don’t even have to mention the perpetrator’s name.
The reason this anonymous report form exists is precisely because most victims don’t report to the police. Many victims are doubted and accused of lying. And many of those who don’t make official reports still want to report their victimization to campus administrators. Yes, false accusations are possible, but the form actually discourages false reporting because the most severe consequence is that the accused will be asked to stop harming others should the accusation(s) be true.
Scribblerg, stop talking out of your ass.
You posted this:
“Even worse is the motivation for it in the first place. Actual reports of rape and sexual assault are so low at colleges that even if you use a 95% assumption of under reporting, the figures would still be an order of magnitude off from the ridiculous statistics reported by junk “studies” which inflated the numbers of sexual assaults actually occurring in the first place.”
Pretty sure you have no real data to back this up. Especially considering that the rape conviction rate is pretty fucking low.
Then you went on to post this:
“Feminists are shown to be building their belief system on a foundation of nonsense by what actually happens in the real world, so they seek to juke reality to continue with their BS like “rape culture theory” and all the rest of it.”
You don’t know what rape culture is, do you, Sparky?
Have you read this?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9134799/Sexual-assault-survey-80-of-women-dont-report-rape-or-sexual-assault-survey-claims.html
or this:
http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/reporting-rates
Oh, my sides! Are you serious?
Are you thinking of these cops? Or maybe you’re thinking of these cops? Or maybe you can find us some other proof of the existence of these sensitive cops who handle things with respect and privacy?
Read those two stories above, and then provide us with your definition of “fun.” And connect the cops’ behavior to reason/logic/facts. You fucking asshole.
If you mean the MRM, you may have a point.
Super convincing story bro.
Thank you cloudiah. My poor tender self, woman or not, is unable to deal with that logic and reason and fact stuff.
TW: rape (and this may get graphic, we’re entering That Season)
That Season? Rapist ex #1 was St. Patrick’s day, and my mental state will only get worse until after then. And I’m sure pressing charges wouldn’t have been fun, I mean, I was underage and falling down pulling drunk, that alone would’ve had my father, fuck the police, up my ass sideways (actually, at that point he’d have probably been a bigger threat to my safety than That Night was)
“corroboration and consistency and plausibility etc all enter into one’s credibility”
Corroboration — hmm, you mean the other people there either involved or taking photos? Which were supposedly deleted the next day? (To the decent people here — I was told that by the only person there I think has a conscience, so I’m inclined to believe he sobered up and went “oh shit, wtf happened here last night?!”)
Consistency — well, let’s see, I can kinda sorta almost out things in order, but am missing massive gaps of time, cuz, you know, hard to sort out what happened between puking episodes. Or name the other guy when I didn’t know him before that night and couldn’t remember his first name the next day, all I knew about him and told to me by said rapist ex, who, obviously, had reason to lie. Or do you mean the part where I’m unclear just how many people where watching? Cuz, you know, PASS OUT DRUNK
Plausibility — oh yeah, totally never had that questioned, not once. Only like, every time I go into details, and I expect it from you. I mean, who would believe that someone would ply their partner with alcohol until they were drunk enough to be unable to walk, call some buddies, demand side by side blowjobs and then coerce said partner into fucking one of those buddies? I mean, coerce, not like I was held down or anything, nobody threatened my life or pulled a weapon, so I totally fucking consented right?!
Incredibly sensitive? So there’s no way the fact the ex and I had had consensual sex earlier that evening would’ve come up? Nobody would’ve questioned if I was threatened or injured? Not, you know, my psych? Nawh, the cops totally would’ve been more sensitive!
In summary — you are a complete fucking asshole with no idea how the real world works if you think cops are sensitive, or that victims don’t report just because it won’t be FUN. Because wtf they’d be reporting was so fun that the annoyance of reporting it is enough to dissuade people from reporting. Nothing to do with it taking nearly a decade and being COMPLETELY OUT OF PATIENCE to even say that much (oh, and that after nearly two years here being sure that you’ll be torn to shreds by the others here if you come after me for this comment). Nawh, nothing of the fucking sort. Reporting it just wouldn’t have been FUN!
Your utter lack of compassion, or logic, goes well beyond hoping you step on legos, instead I hope you wake up some day and realize just how horrible you are. And then you live a long healthy life, having to live everyday with the knowledge that your views went so far beyond wrong as to perpetuate the very bullshit that keeps people from reporting.
——
Everyone else — well that was carthartic, remind me to go off on trolls more often. Oh and y’all now know more than my psychs since they so clearly don’t give a shit and just want to project their own biases. Now I have a pharm student and mango hater to poke in hopes one or both are still awake to calm me down.
Hey, y’all know what corroboration is – it’s those four reliable male witnesses, because you can’t possibly believe someone identified as female when she says a thing happened.
Argenti, I would offer to help calm you down but I am crashing. 18-hour days at the hospital, plus traveling by bus to avoid $15/day parking charges, are kind of wearing me down. I hope pecunium and/or pharm student are around. Hang in there, okay?
All the non-contact hugs and fishy pictures.
G’night.
To the troll – I hope you someday wake up and realize what a terrible person you are.
Argenti and cloudiah – *adds lots of hugs to hug barrel*
Cloudiah — get some sleep, at least my problem here is long past. I wish you and family well!
Pecunium’s calling it a night too, but sorta helped. No word from pharm student, but not surprised, that whole grad student thing.
And I get better than fishy pics, me, my mother, brother, and his best friend are trekking to the supposedly awesome fish and reptile store tomorrow (brother and his friend co-parent a snake). Idk if I’m getting fish, cuz the 55g is the only one that can really take fish, and I want a plec and loaches, but I don’t have a head count on the baby cories yet. Goal is decor // play things for puff. So yeah, all freaked out, but getting my little dude some toys tomorrow. It’s funny, I got mostly aquarium stuff for Christmas, and am now going to spend Christmas money on them. Because really, what do I need besides the satisfaction of babying my babies?
So thanks guys, troll may be upsetting, but y’all are, as always, awesome.