So there’s a LIVE debate tonight between Matt Binder of the Majority Report with Sam Seder and a fellow you may have heard of by the name of Paul Elam. Since Elam evidently refused to debate on the Majority Report — for some reason he doesn’t like to debate people when he doesn’t control the venue — Matt Binder agreed to debate on A Voice for Men, with Dean Esmay as the, ahem, neutral moderator. It’s at 6 PM Eastern.
I expect some shenanigans.
Here’s the video that inspired Elam’s debate challenge:
Here’s Matt’s video accepting the challenge:
Check out Matt’s other videos on Men’s Rightsers and our dear friend Stefan Molyneux.
I can totally believe AVfM doesn’t know about Stop and Frisk. Since their isn’t any direct connection between the rationale for the policy and “women”, there’s no reason for it to come up on their radar.
@WatermelonSugar
That truly was an excellent, thoughtful article. I wasn’t wild about this, though:
Media-savvy??? That’s laughable. The idea of it becoming a “considerable social force” is ludicrous, IMO. It would be alarming if there was any chance of that.
@Auntie–
I thought it sounded a lot like Jessica Roy’s article, to be honest. The moral was the same: these men have a valid need for help and they are not finding it in A Voice for Men.
On Paul being media savvy, eh. He’s definitely more so than AVFM’s resident PR maven, that’s for sure. And he is, to his credit, really good at branding his bullshit across the Internet–he is visable, he has his fingers in the cookie jar of most major MRAs, and he is profiting. He has to be at least a little savvy to do that, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that he is still just the most savvy of a group of really not-savvy people.
As far as the “social force” or whatever, I doubt that Paul will ever lead his brand of hate off the Internet and into the real world. His brand of “savvy” sort of limits him here–he is a viable online persona, but shrinks when other people or real life social settings are envolved. At least, I seriously hope that is the case.
dvarghundspossen,
I’m sorry those women were so horrible to your friend. That’s unconscionable.
Watermelonsugar,
Don’t sweat it. Dyslexia happens. 🙂 Hubby, eldest and I all have it to different extents.
@Lea–
Thanks! Sometimes dyslexia is fun, spelling errors aside. It makes reading–or rather, misreading–MRA article titles really fun.
Also, fun fact: dyslexia is carried on the mother’s genes. Misandry!
He would have come out looking *better* had he done that.
Elam’s savvy is limited. He knows how to rile up a base. That base is reactionary, and somewhat self-limiting. Their passions get the better of them. It’s not that people such as Elam can’t be dangerous (they laughed at Il Duce, when he started) but they need someone to prop them up as then enter the wider world (Mussolini was paid to break up striking farmworkers, that gave him a band of armed, violent, and practised thugs).
Absent someone with money and leverage deciding Elam is a useful tool, he’s pretty much contained. He’s crap at organising. and not all that charismatic. That doesn’t mean his ideology can’t spawn terrorism, it can. The entire point of, “The Turner Diaries” is on how to create a decentralised terrorism, so that it can’t be tracked down in toto.
The idea is to change the zeitgeist to the point the “Lone Wolves” no longer need fear the wolfhounds, and the Black Shirts can be worn in public.
I don’t see AFvM, managing that level of political change, not with their leet skillz working the press. They are a dangerous echo-chamber, something of a pressure cooker, but not yet likely to explode.
And the know it. That’s why Elam has been scrubbing the archives. which started some time ago, when he finally took the Ball Manifesto off the, “activism” page,and continued with the cleaning up of the more egregious evidence of misogyny; the stuff even they can’t convince themselves will be overlooked.
WWTH — launch the video, watch them fail miserably at setting ground rules and getting the tech working, skip 3 min when Elam starts talking. It’s pretty much the first thing Binder says, and those four minutes are a great example of Elam’s inability to be rational (you need to see the discussion of ground rules to see how bad he really is)
@WatermelonSugar: adding my voice to the ones that have said it was not acceptable to have that happen to your friend.
WTF gets into the heads of people who do that kind of thing? It has just reminded me of something long forgotten: an acquaintance when I was a teenager who had low IQ and couldn’t read social situations well, but was completely fucking harmless, who told me that his co-workers had pulled a joke on him by mixing some sheep shit into his drink and then telling him later. I felt so sorry for him on two levels: (1) that it had happened and (2) that because of the way he had been treated by so many people, he didn’t see that there was anything wrong with it, and was telling me as though it was funny.
Some people just seem to have taken points out of their empathy tree and put them into improved cruelty.
” It was much like Esmay on Fox. ”
Wait. What?
@WatermelonSugar
Just saw this, much lulz.
@WatermelonSugar, imagine if your dog debated Elam. I know who’d make more sense and be more entertaining! (And think of the headline – Dog Bites MRA.)
@ Dvärghundspossen : Late to the conversation, but I had to log in to say that sucks that someone did that to your friend!
I’m definitely not anyone’s gay muse. I don’t think I’ve spoken directly to LBT, although I remember them from Pervocracy comments. I would change my user name and add an initial or something, but I’m posting from wordpress so I’m not sure if I can. Orion is my birth name and I’m rather attached to it.
Yes, orion with a lowercase ‘o’ was the asshole who proclaimed to be LBT’s “gay muse”. Orion with a capital ‘O’, by contrast, is cool.
I’m pretty sure muse is a role that someone else has to choose you for, rather than you choosing yourself.
As a red-headed step-child, I wouldn’t know.
“Woody! Please say something to prove that you are a real boy and not made of wood. Consider it a personal challenge.”
What do you mean?
Shut up, Woody,
What do you think Cassandrakitty is saying Woody? All you ever do is pop in an profess your undying love and devotion to Paul Elam. Can you do anything but parrot (or perhaps rather puppet) statements of how great Elam is?
Know what’s funny? Not child abuse or animal abuse. I know those are preexisting sayings, but frankly, the stepchild one in particular has always made me a tad uncomfortable and as the blog is full of both animal
servantslovers and abuse survivors, maybe…don’t?In the interest of greater clarity:
This particular Orion is a University of Chicago student in literary and religious texts, a former sex worker, an occasional essayist (ethics, mainly) and an amateur tabletop RPG designer. Also home-schooled, and ten pages into a novel. And desperately impoverished when I’m not living with my parents. I was a developer on After Sundown, and a playtester on Darkest Night. Contrary to popular misconception, I am not the editor of Ideologies of War.
TW: abuse jokes
You are so gross. Fuck off.
A rented mule…A meringue…A red-headed stepchild…The Brazilian Soccer Team…Paul Elam
What do these all have in common?
Worst mangling of the lyrics to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” ever.
Wait… was the answer about beating them?
Right the fuck out. Asshole.