Last month, I reported that Indian Men’s Rights Activist and marital rape apologist Amartya Talukdar — a regular contributor to leading Men’s Rights site A Voice for Men — was a Holocaust denier.
The evidence? A series of Tweets in which, among other things, he declared that the “Holocaust is a lie of gigantic proportion,” expressed a certain admiration for Hitler and, bizarrely, declared that Hillary Clinton was a “Jewess.”
When I asked AVFM’s then-managing editor Dean Esmay about these troubling Tweets from someone he had published on his site only a few days earlier, he responded … by calling me a “stalker madman” and threatening to call the police if I ever emailed him again. (It was, as far as I recall, the only time I’ve ever emailed him.)
Well, ok, I thought, the folks at AVFM seem to be congenitally unable to ever admit to being wrong, even when the evidence is right before their eyes. But I didn’t think AVFM would be dumb enough to post anything by Talukdar ever again.
I was wrong. Yesterday, AVFM put up a new post by him. No, it contains no Holocaust denial or defenses of Hitler. But the question remains: why is AVFM continuing to post the writings of a Holocaust denier even after being presented with irrefutable evidence of his noxious beliefs?
The answer may be that the folks at AVFM live so completely in their own little bubble that they cannot see the evidence right in front of them.
In my email to Esmay, I not only provided a link to my post on Talukdar’s Holocaust denial but also provided direct links to archived copies of four of his most troubling Tweets. Esmay didn’t have to take my word for anything or even look at my post. All AVFM’s “managing editor” had to do was to click four links and read four tweets in order to see the sort of vile nonsense Talukdar had been tweeting.
It’s not clear if Esmay was able to bring himself to do even this much due diligence of a writer he was responsible for publishing.
Instead, as I discovered when looking back through Talukdar’s tweets today, Esmay’s “investigation” of the matter may have consisted of nothing more than this brief Twitter exchange, in which Talukdar, using a technique popular amongst small children and liars of all ages, simply told Esmay what he wanted to hear:
Talukdar took a similar tack with me, though he took a little more time in getting to the “telling me what I wanted to hear” part. Here’s just one of the rather surreal exchanges I had with him on Twitter (click here for more context).
I got no reply to this last question, but I guess I shouldn’t complain; Talukdar also offered no response, at least not on Twitter, to Esmay’s questions on whether or not his remarks had been “taken out of context” or whether he had been “making intemperate remarks you did not mean perhaps?”
I’m not sure in what circumstances saying that the “Holocaust is a lie of gigantic proportion,” or calling Hillary Clinton “a “Jewess” could be dismissed as nothing more than “intemperate remarks” made in the heat of passion; that would be akin to excusing Mel Gibson’s famous rant on how “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” as just one of those things people say when they’re pulled over for drunk driving.
But I can help Esmay out with the whole “context” thing. Here are some of Talukdar’s Tweets in their original context on Twitter. (Click on the screencaps below to see archived versions of the Tweets.)
Huh. Somehow that doesn’t seem any better in context.
That’s just as bad.
Not only anti-Semitic, but we’re in tinfoil hat territory now.
Dude, “hail Hitler” is not the preferred nomenclature. It’s “heil.”
As far as I can tell, Talukdar has never apologized for or even directly acknowledged his Holocaust-denying Tweets; he’s content to pretend they never happened, as is, evidently, Dean Esmay.
Weirdly, Talukdar’s attempts to cover up his Holocaust denial have been as cursory as Esmay’s quarter-assed “investigation.” Not long after I posted about him, Talukdar tried to clean up his Twitter timeline by deleting the offending Tweets. But he didn’t get them all.
Indeed, when I searched Twitter for his handle and the word “holocaust” today, I found three of his Holocaust-denial Tweets still up, lurking at the bottom of the search results. (I’ve archived the search results, as well as the individual tweets (1, 2, 3), in case he goes back and deletes them today.)
On his Twitter page, Talukdar describes himself as, among other things, a “Humanist.” A Voice for Men describes itself as the voice of the “Men’s Human Rights Movement.”
So I have to wonder: Do Talukdar and his editors think those killed in the Holocaust were somehow less than human?
H/T — Talukdar himself, who Tweeted me about his latest AVFM post
EDIT: Proofreading correction, minor tweak, added the H/T
I also apparently can’t make a post from my phone without getting tackled by the Blockquote Mammoth.
HA HA! I’VE TAKEN YOUR KING, MRAs!
*flips board*
/s
Also, my husband is teaching me chess.
Well, he was.
I keep winning.
This might particularly sting him because I don’t actually have any idea what I’m doing. I just play defensively and wait for him to not notice that he put his Knight or whatever in the line of my Bishop, then wham. Repeat with different pieces until he only has a King and several Pawns left, then circle around and take his King.
^This, especially that last part. Some people who score high on IQ tests make the mistake of thinkng that their opinions are correct by virtue of being “smarter” than everyone else. You see that all the time in manosphere writing: the big vocabulary words, the condescension, the faux-scientific tone – yet none of what they write makes a lick of sense. They lay down a bunch of unsupported assertions and fallacies that contradict one another, and expect the rest of the world to accept it as authoritative because they’re STEM-gifted. IQ tests measure the individual pieces, but they don’t measure the ability to put it all together and think holistically.
PoM – re: the brick test, those are pretty good! The wilder and more diverse the usages, the better. They don’t all have to be realistic or practical. Doorstop, paperweight, boat anchor, toilet tank water displacer, hole filler, burglar deterrent (conk them on the head with it), crumble up and draw with it, play rugby on the moon with it, dress it up and put on a puppet show, recreate Galileo’s gravity experiments, high tide marker, martial arts demonstration, build a house, prop up a bookshelf, worst Valentine’s Day gift ever, pie weight for very large pie…well, you get the idea.
I bet we could devise a totally culturally biased IQ test that would prove Mammotheers are much more intelligent than everyone else.
KATIE is to CHAD as SPINSTER is to
a. the White House
b. the gym
c. living DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH
d. cats
Amber is an HB 7.25 who will be hitting the wall in three months when she turns 25. Her SMV is currently 125 but will go down 16% when the next quarterly earnings report comes out. Exactly how many fucks does Amber give?
a. A lot
b. Zero
c. Minus one
d. Negative a million
…is it bad that I’m actually stuck on the first question POM gave? X_X I’m smart, I promise.
Also, quick job hunting question that would involve analytical thinking so here’s a test for you guys. I have two decent jobs on the books that look promising. One I’ve taken the first interview for, don’t know if I’ll get to the second stage (out of 2) but I feel confident. That job is minimum wage, low hours on the contract but also flexible to full time work. Second job is in the hands of the recruitment agency I’m with, they’re waiting for the vacancy to be official, I haven’t even applied let alone taken any interviews. That job has much better pay plus commission bonuses, with a respectable company in a niche market that could wind up giving me some valuable skills for future jobs. In a hypothetical situation – IF I get offered the minimum wage job (which isn’t perfect but I would take it with no other option), should I turn it down in hopes of getting a better job like the one I mentioned?
*Buttercup gave the question, not POM. I’M STILL SMART OKAY? :p
My opinion? A job which you haven’t applied for is a job which you shouldn’t turn anything down for.
If the best happens and you get the nice job, you can just walk out of your new minimum wage job to go on to the good job. However in the case that you don’t end up getting it, you at least have something to pay the bills.
Thank you EJ for your wisdom. I guess I just feel bad about the prospect of starting a job then walking out after a couple months or less, so I was thinking more black and white. But you’re right, at the end of the day my bank balance takes precedence here.
I suppose i should say more unfunny, then.
To be fair, for a minimum wage job it’s a good minimum wage job. Certainly a fun environment from what I’ve gathered already. My family are against it because “it wouldn’t look good on your CV” but it would look better than a gap, I can tell you that.
@sunnysombrera
If it helps: at minimum wage and low hours, you don’t owe them anything. It isn’t often in our economy that we have the possibility to choose – that kind of flexibility is usually relegated to the employer.
@sunnysombrera
Believe me that your employer will feel no obligations toward your welfare. Don’t feel like you have any obligations toward an employer’s welfare. The two of you are parties in a business arrangement in which the employer has far more power and a far greater opportunity to profit than the employee. Make sure you keep that in mind.
What Bernardo Soares said.
Remember that unless you’re applying for a specialised white-collar profession, having gaps on your CV filled with odds and ends of work won’t hold you back. If anything, it makes you look like the sort of person who dislikes just sitting around. A few years of it may hurt your chances, but don’t be afraid to do it now and again if you need to.
And yes, don’t be afraid to walk out. If it’s a flexible-hours type job you can normally just end it with almost no notice.
@EJ
Thanks. I spent three years at my last job, before that was 8 months of internship and before that was university, with a couple summer jobs in between semesters. My CV has zero gaps until now that have no explanation other than further education. So far so good. I guess one low wage job won’t hurt while I’m trying to get into something like recruitment or PR.
http://rockylouproductions.com/blog_wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Seriously.gif
That hair is glorious. I feel like I should know what that gif is from, but I’m blowed if I can recall.
I’m sure they’ll get their token Jew right on handling the damage control.
@buttercup… Sorry but you looking at Amber’s SMV from the wrong perspective. As far as I can see there are a number of vehicles that can be derived from Amber’s SMV.
First there is the premium which is the next three years of dividends based on the annual reduction of 16% y-o-y at that point the tranche of her SMV will be approaching 50% of current market return. With this point we can approach institutional investors with a mezzanine product pitched at 5-15 years of roi of today’s market value reduced by 50%. This SMV vehicle with inbuilt Synthetic Collateral Obligations will give long term institutional investors a sense if security even though the is the continuing risk devaluation as the SCO’s artificially inflate Amber’s long term net sexual return.
At this point, we can take the instructional investors vehicle an repackage it as a synthetic derived derivative bundled with options and futures.
Thus as you can see from our extended portfolio data on in section 7a of Amber’s Investment Brochure our derived artificial Amber performs exceptionally well in long market.
As a recommendation I would also suggest shorting Ambers SMV and spinning off a number of derivatives of Amber’s SMV. These individual derivatives can be rolled up in to multiparty obligations based on each the derivatives that can be hedged on the up/down trend of that particular derivative depending on its respective markets fluctuations and the reaction of market forces.
We have also pegged Amber’s collateralized return over the long term to a synthetic bond 50 year yield.
So I am confident that by adding Amber to you overall Asset portfolio you will see greater returns over the lifetime resulting in a 350% increase at the maturity point based on Today’s SMV.
I assure you Amber’s present SMV offers no present ir future risks and will give you exceptional long returns.
@Autosoma: You’d make a great con-man … er, sorry, I meant financial adviser.
If anyone is interested, he’s describing what caused the meltdown of 2007. Financial instruments to complicated to understand. People thought they were eliminating risk when they were actually shifting it to someone else who might well go broke when the excrement hit the ventilator — which is exactly what happened.
@grump… Thanks for your vote of “con”-fidence in my asset risk “skills” I’m having a job interview soon where I have to display my Domain knowledge, I reckon if I can spin PUA SMV twaddle into something that sounds credible… I’m half way there.
@autosoma that made my head spin, so I’d say you’re as good as hired 🙂
@sunnysombrero* I don’t know what sorts of jobs you’ll be applying to in future, but you can always present a more skills-focused resume if you’re worried about the impression the min-wage job makes? I say this as someone with some… interesting jobs in my past. Had to get creative with ‘transferrable skills’ and resume presentation.
*I am 99% sure I’ve screwed up your nym – my apologies, your post is a page back or I’d check