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
Sorry David, but MRA writers being all sorts of awful and hypocritical? Not exactly news (although, Christ, this was a doozy…)
I think these lot should stop denying themselves a shower too, while they’re at it. Might chill ’em out a little.
@weirdwoodtreehugger
I don’t know if there is correlation between IQ and leadership position, but I don’t think that having a high IQ is enough to attain a leadership position. And yeah, the question is do corporate bosses really have high IQs or they are in that position for other traits they possess. I don’t really have a problem with more men being very intelligent, but the thing is that there are also more extremely stupid men (tbh Paul did mention that).
What I have a problem with is that this data is often used by male supremacists to show that women are intellectually inferior. It’s particularly apsurd when it’s used by men who are of average intelligence and haven’t accomplished anything of value in life.
MRAs: Here’s a copypasta of a bunch of horrible quotes from feminists (many of which are misquoted, out of context, and decades old) this discredits the entire movement!
Later…
MRAs: The quotes from MRAs cannot be used to discredit the movement (no matter how horrible or high profile the MRA) because #NoTrueMRA, Feminism is just as bad, indeterminate reasons.
Honest MRA sounds like an oxymoron
@WWTH, I believe I remember reading somewhere that how rich one’s family is is a much better predictor of ‘success’ than IQ.
“Honest MRA” is an Oxymoron. Proof?
I presume your idea of Simone de Beauvoir’s failings comes from this AVfM article:
http://www.donotlink.com/fo6x
Ok, so, three charges:
1. Nazi:
First of all, working for the Vichy régime is not being a Nazi. At worst, its collaboration. But granted, that would be bad. Except that AVfM is extremely disingenuous in its quotes.They write that “even feminist authors” such as Ingrid Galster, who analysed the broadcasts SdB had produced for Radio Vichy, admit that this was a “subtle collaborationism”. Except that neither Galster nor the article AVfM quotes say such a thing. What the article says is the following:
In a paragraph that talks about how SdB got the post at Radio Vichy, the article quotes SdB as having written in her memoirs that “by whatever intervention” (Orig.: «Par je ne sais quel truchement») she got the post, and continues:
Original:
The article doesn’t give a source for this term, although it’s placed in quotation marks.
So, two steps away from Galster, who actually wrote in an academic article:
Original
2. Pedophilia:
The article charges that Beauvoir had a “sexual interest for children”. This is based on three relationships she had with pupils (the reason she was ousted from her job as a teacher and went to Radio Vichy) and that she “forwarded” them to Sartre. First of all, we are talking about 17 year old girls. This is surely not ok, certainly not today, and the problematic relationship between the political left, sexual libertinage, and acceptance of such imbalanced relationships is actually right now being critically analysed by historians.
But in an environment that defends the interest of older men for girls and boys this age, it’s more than just disingenuous to construe a sexual interest for children out of this. AVfM just recently defended a man who campaigned for lowering the age of consent to 12 years. No moral high ground there.
3. Misogyny
That’s just a random collection of quotes they mined from Beauvoir’s books while taking literally as her opinion what she actually framed as an analysis of how society views women. That’s just bullshit, and I don’t need to take it apart, it’s obvious to everybody outside the manosphere.
Source for Galsters article:
Galster, Ingrid (1996): Simone de Beauvoir et Radio-Vichy. A propos de quelques scénarios retrouvés, in: Romanische Forschungen, 108: 1/2, pp. 112-132, here p. 131.
sorry for the teel deer; and yay, I tamed the blockquote mammoth!
One could just as well use the same bell-curve argument for sociopathic traits and business leadership. Or wealthy connections and business leadership. Or extraversion and business leadership. Or height and business leadership. Just because there’s a bell curve, that doesn’t mean society’s plum jobs should automatically be assigned to the people at the skinny end. Just because there are two bell curves, that doesn’t mean one should automatically be given preference over the other.
Because there’s also this:
“Jonathan Wai found that among female Fortune 500 CEOs, the frequency of giftedness was even higher, an astonishing 59%. If 59% have IQ’s of 128+, then, assuming a Gaussian distribution with an SD of 15, that implies that the average female elite CEO is brilliant, with an IQ of 131. This makes sense because sexism and other cultural barriers make it harder for women to rise to the top in a male dominated world.”
Hmm, that sounds like a pretty good argument for giving leadership positions to women.
(source: https://brainsize.wordpress.com/2014/07/18/the-iqs-of-fortune-500-ceos/)
Oh, also: What Beauvoir produced for the radio were 12 features (a number that had been agreed upon her starting the job), about music and Italian theatre. Pretty standard cultural programming.
Galsters whole point is to criticise other writers, including feminists, who had “uninformedly” charged Beauvoir with collaboration.
And even if the AVfM type would be right about the IQ distribution, so what? IQ is a social construct. Education is an important factor for IQ and there are plenty of privileges that interact with the chances one has in education. Not to mention other aspects of upbringing.
Unsurprisingly, AVfM type moves into Richard Lynn territory.
How is IQ a social construct?
I have read an entirely unsourced claim that approximately five percent of the population has what could be called inherent leadership traits. Unfortunately, there is no positive association between those traits and competence. If true, this does explain some things.
In the USA, there’s a tendency for some people to mistake being a tall white man with an authoritative personality with leadership. That explains even more things.
Also, using this logic, men are also generally physically stronger than women so MRAs shouldn’t complain about more men than women being in combat or more men than women working difficult physical jobs.
“Honest MRA” — now THERE is an oxymoron if ever I saw one.
(Or just a plain moron. Same diff.)
@Hypatia:
IQ is a measurement, not the thing being measured. That measurement has pretty much always been rooted in culturally-specific questions, despite the efforts to make it generalized.
Also, speaking of “honest” MRAs: Funny that Deano says this site (which quotes him and others verbatim, even screenshotting their tweets) is “dishonest”. I’m pretty sure that the handsome guy in his profile pic is…NOT HIM.
Oh sorry, “not trustworthy”. As though anything Dean Esmay says would be…
@Hypatia
Hah. I’m gonna use that argument when MRAs preach that wimminz are for staying at home and making baybees because uterus. If physical traits determine your life’s role, then that means they shouldn’t complain about more men than women working the physically demanding jobs.
Because not painting them in a completely flattering light is lying, no matter what they actually do or say? I dunno. I can not comprehend how these guys’ minds work any more.
Also, Bina, out of curiousity…in my mind I’ve been trying to remember where individual Mammotheers are from. Mostly for
sciencefun. You are Canadian, I believe?IQ measures things that you are much more likely to be taught if you are a white male. It doesn’t measure intelligence – it measures how good you are are doing white male.
It doesn’t directly ‘measure’ intelligence, it is a culturally specific attempt to operationalise something that correlates with a form of intelligence.
Especially questions that depend on categorisation can strongly reflect cultural beliefs.
So in this from the top of my head example (not from an actual IQ test), which one is the odd one out:
– Rabbit
– Trout
– Lion
– Horse
The ‘correct’ answer would be “trout”, because the other animals are mammals. But from a practical perspective instead of a pure knowledge one, someone might say “lion”, because that could be the only one that may not be consumed in his/her culture. Or “horse” because that is the only animal that can be used as a mount. Etc. It’s one way in which IQ tests reflect social values. You could also argue similarly about conventions for questions that depend like on classification.
One of the things that is in some IQ tests is the ability to do mental spatial manipulation. I actually rock those portions, but I don’t preen at my inherent spatial awesomeness. Instead I thank my dad, who taught me a bunch of basic woodworking as a kid, and got interested in astronomy at the same time I did so we did a bunch of astronomy-related things together. “Spatial intelligence” is a learned skill, and if you don’t teach it to girls, you get girls who do poorly on that portion of the IQ test.
A note on the “denial” of Holocaust denial: The estimated total count of victims of the Nazi extermination system is in the vicinity of twelve million. Jews make up around half of that.
So when he says Hitler was bad because he killed six million, is that ignorance of the non-jews or ignoring the jews? Either way, it’s not strengthening his case…