So I was idly perusing Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield’s Twitter yesterday, and I came across an alarming tweet. It seemed as though Bloomfield had somehow penetrated the 47 levels of security protecting the Feminist HIgh Council to discover incontrovertible evidence of Operation Wicked Succubus. You know, the feminist plan to eliminate all men (except for me).
https://twitter.com/BloomfieldJanet/status/523458962704699393
Her followers were aghast:
And naturally one of them brought up #GamerGate.
There were a few others, but you get the idea.
It never occurred to any of them to, you know, try to find out just who the bald man advocating killing all men was. Or who exactly he was talking to.
So I decided to do some serious investigative journalism to see what I could uncover. I typed out “‘eliminate men as a gender’ security” into a little known internet “search engine” called Google, and boldly clicked on the first result.
This led me to a Tweet with a URL in it. Bravely, I clicked on that URL and found myself looking at a video of a presentation at something called Monitorama PDX 2014 — clearly the code name for one of the Feminist Conspiracy’s conventions.
I looked it up in Google and discovered a web page for the event, which had been held in May. It was described as an “An Open Source Monitoring Conference & Hackathon.”
Ah, clearly a clever Feminist code name.
And then I decided to look up the name of the speaker: James Mickens. Turns out the guy works at Microsoft, one of the companies at the center of the Misandrist Conspiracy. Mickens is also the author of a number of papers, with titles like “Pivot: Fast, Synchronous Mashup Isolation Using Generator Chains” and “Mugshot: Deterministic Capture and Replay for JavaScript Applications.”
Obviously, some high level feminist theorizing.
Then I decided to watch the video. And I was shocked!
Because it wasn’t a speech about killing all men after all. It wasn’t even a feminist speech. No, it seemed instead to be a highly technical talk about internet security issues, illustrated with a lot of silly slides. Like this:
And this:
I must confess that I didn’t get the overwhelming majority of his jokes. But he audience seemed to find these slides, and much of what he said, hilarious. So if you ever need to hire a comedian who can joke about Synchronous Mashup Isolation Using Generator Chains, Mickens is your guy.
So where does the whole “kill all men” thing come from?
Well, I skipped ahead a bit in the video until I found a section in which Mickens talked about the dumb things people do that can undermine even the most sophisticated security setup.
His example: gullible, horny men who are tricked into “friending” hackers on Facebook posing as hot babes — even when there are pretty obvious indications that the hot babes aren’t really hot babes at all.
Things like: saying they graduated from Central University, even though there is no school by that name in the US, or spelling the name of their profession wrong.
These are all good clues, he said, that the hot babe you just friended on facebook was really this guy:
Given that men are regularly duped with simple tricks that play on their horniness and gullibility, Mickens joked, maybe the real goal for people trying to design secure systems should be the elimination of all men.
So that’s where the slide comes from.
And by the way, that whole bit of his killed — not as in “killed all men” but as in “got giant laughs from the mostly male audience.” Expecially the part about killing all men.
If you want to see the whole bit, starting with Mary and ending with “eliminate men as a gender,” it starts at around 20:40 in the video.
Men’s Rights Activists: more gullible than guys who friend Mary from Central University on Facebook.
NOTE TO EXTREMELY LITERAL-MINDED MRAS: That bit about the feminist plot to kill all men (except me) at the start of this post was a joke. Feminists don’t really intend to kill all men (except me).
Or do they?
The counting is the WHTM Number Ninja game! We just keep counting until there’s a number repeated, then it goes back to the last save – 1, 10, 20, etc are the save points.
Nuuuuu, my post disappered!
@SittieKitty:
I don’t know if the skep tickle was already known. I think that you can dox someone even you just collect information they’ve given out into one place, but it’s still a difficult thing to nail down for me.
For the blockquotes, HTML codes! < becomes < and > becomes >
7
Come on! We’ll hit 10 in record time at this rate!
I was thinking short black dress or skirt and knee boots, yeah. It’s a short, fitted kind of cardigan, and I get annoyed with pulling sweaters on and off and ending up with fluffy hair, so I need to buy more cardis.
6
Dammit. 1.
@Chockanga:
You can’t really say that an author’s work is what inspired the author to perform an act.
8? or 1? I don’t know which.
Damn. Neither.
1?
“Also, I’m still confused as to how PZ Myers doxxed someone who was actually allegedly doxxed by someone else…”
PZ Myers knew of the doxxing, wrote about it in his blog and encouraged his readers to complain to Skep Tickle’s employers.
Chockanga – you’re such a righteous person, going around pointing out everyone’s moral failings. You must not have much free time, since obviously you must spend a lot of time on Reddit and MRA blogs pointing out all their moral failings to them too. You must have a massive body of work built up if you’re finished critiquing all of them and you’ve gotten around to us.
So here’s a thought. If you have a gripe against Myers, maybe go talk to him about it? Run along now.
2.
I think the cardie sounds great!
3
4
“You can’t really say that an author’s work is what inspired the author to perform an act.”
In my original post about the thought experiment I didn’t say that it was the SCUM manifesto that inspired the act, just that Futrelle uses some words from the SCUM Manifesto, that the SCUM manifest is the product of someone who used it to justify an attempt on someone else’s life, and that (in the thought experiment) wrote that I was worried that the words of the SCUM manifesto used by Futrelle might inspire someone else to act.
If I wrote that piece, I’d be as unethical and sleazy as Futrelle has been.
Is this the point where we start talking about bras?
5
6
Probably! 7
“You must not have much free time, since obviously you must spend a lot of time on Reddit and MRA blogs pointing out all their moral failings to them too. You must have a massive body of work built up if you’re finished critiquing all of them and you’ve gotten around to us.”
I don’t think that the MRAs would listen to me. I give this site the benefit of the doubt, since its purpose is one I agree with. The MRAs are a lost cause for anyone who has read their screeds.
Have you a link to that cardie btw?
Cassandra, why not?
8
@Chockanga:
Stop. Wrong context. I asked if the SCUM manifesto had ever inspired someone to do violence, and you provided the author as an example. It didn’t involve your original hypothetical.
However, since you wish to be repetitive, I’ll just repeat my response again. You haven’t provided enough information to say if the comparison was actually unethical or not. You assume it is, but then you carry that assumption over to say that David’s language comparison is unethical in the same way. You haven’t given enough info to show the two situations are parallel.
Try again. Or don’t. I’m fine with either.
9.
Lies, damn lies, and holy crap someone do something exciting before I fall asleep.
8
*ahem*
“situation,” not “comparison.” Sloppy editing on my part.
1