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
What PoM said. I should’ve added that IQ correlates with other factors as well. And with IQ being culturally influenced, the conclusion is also that intelligence can correlate with other ways to operationalise intelligence. An intelligent person from a culture that highly values horse riding would be perfectly validated in answering “horse”, despite that being very alien to us. Too bad for us.
@sunnysombrera
Yes, they won’t like it when you use biological determinism against them. Even though I haven’t seen specifically MRAs argue that women should be baby making housewives, but sure as hell I’ve seen red pillers, PUAs and other manosphere trash argue that. As we know, MRAs have absolutely nothing to do with red pillers or PUAs (even though AVfM published an interview with Roosh V and Karen Straughan did an “AMA” on Reddit’s red pill thread, but let’s just pretend that didn’t happen).
As for the IQ, I’m not informed enough about it so I can’t say anything about arguments you guys presented. But I do think there is more to intelligence than the one type of intelligence measured on IQ tests and there is much more to success and than just intelligence.
Unfortunately, the “six million” figure is one I’ve heard a lot more frequently than the “twelve million” figure, and it’s usually talking about six million Jews, so he’s probably ignoring the Slavs, Roma, gay folk, Hitler’s political opponents, and others.
We should probably work on that.
IQ tests generally prize convergent thinking, which dovetails nicely with the manosphere’s fetish for simple, decisive, black-and-white answers, so it’s not surprising they put so much stock in them. But that’s just one slice of the pie when it comes to intelligence, creativity, decision-making, and solving problems.
I’m great at divergent thinking – name 100 uses for a brick in 2 minutes! come up with 50 brand names for toothpaste! – but when it comes to “what is the next thing in this obscure and arbitrary number sequence” I’m kind of a dumbass, not because number patterns aren’t fascinating and beautiful, but because I’m not all that interested in guessing what someone else thinks should come next after 2 15 17 64 599 4. It feels too much like an ESP test.
A lot of variables come into play in how intelligence manifests itself. When MRAs make value judgments about intelligence (and, of course, exalt “their” type of intelligence as the only worthwhile kind), it’s just another way they tilt the playing field in their favor.
I don’t think I could name 100 uses for a brick in 2 minutes, but only because I can’t talk or type that fast. In about 5 seconds I came up with:
– freestanding stake: tie a rope around the brick, tie the other end to a tree, and it keeps the tree from falling over (only works for certain weights of brick and tree)
– put under a pot full of strawberries to keep the strawberry runners from reaching the ground
– lay in ground under a fence door to make a door jamb to deter rabbit incursion
– put under a pot with a tree in it to permit free drainage
Talukdar himself tweeted David? Why? To say, “Look, I wrote an article without any Holocaust denial in it, gimme a cookie now?”
As for judging the article on its own merits… well, I was just tutoring a student in assumption questions for a program-entrance test. One way to view an assumption is as a gap between evidence and conclusion. Here, Talukdar presents evidence that 1) there was a law passed that allows for harsher sentences for juvenile criminals and 2) more homeless teenagers are boys than girls. He concludes that Indian boys are discriminated against, but not girls, in addition to it all being feminists’ fault.
This assumes that boys are discriminated against for gender and not age, that discrimination against boys precludes discrimination against girls or women, and that feminists are behind the change of law.
His call to action to spend more on boys’ welfare in order to keep them off the streets, which in turn may reduce crime, isn’t a bad one; it’s that he suggests the problem is money being spent on girls. For evidence, he puts in a link to UNICEF that describes a program specifically targeting the state of Gujarat where women’s literacy rates are significantly behind men’s (http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/india_21919.html). Evidently, spending money on girl’s education (part of it from an international organization and not the government, BTW) means that no money at all can be spent on housing boys. Logic!
Also, I’m finding the discussion of IQ tests really interesting. There are plenty of ways to divide intellectual capacities. My cousin did it at 13, when she told me, in her characteristically blunt way: “You’re intelligent, but you’re not very smart.” 😛
ignorantianescia, in particular, I appreciated your example of a biased question, and where the bias occurs. As a privilege lotto-winner, I’ve come to accept that the IQ test is biased because a lot of experts I respect have said so, but I have had trouble locating an example of a biased question, and I usually can’t see it myself. this makes it harder for me to be an amplifier when I’m talking to other privileged folks. That was a beautifully succinct explanation, though, and makes it clear where the bias enters into the picture.
This is OT, but is very, very applicable to the general topic here:
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/manning-threatened-men-compensate-disavowing-feminine-preferences
It’s a study on men who were caused to believe they had come out lower than average on either a psychological study of masculine traits, or on a physical test (squeezing a grip-handle). The men who had been artificially ’emasculated’ proceeded to respond to questions in a follow-up survey of stereotypically male traits by exaggerating their numbers. (So, a guy told, “Hey, you got the 25th percentile on that grip-strength test,” would frequently claim a higher than average number of sexual conquests, claim to be more physically aggressive, and would even add an inch to their height, all to compensate.)
@epitome
Yes, Talukdar is a bad writer and not very good at drawing conclusions. In one of his recent articles on AVfM he said that female infanticide is not a thing in India because women live longer than men. That doesn’t mean there is no female infanticide, it just means that women who don’t get killed live longer than men. He also said that the government provided girls with free bicycles for school in 2006 and 2007 and when I opened his source, I saw that free bicycles were also handed to boys in 2007 and 2008. Lol.
As for the Paul Elam’s article, I think he let his misogyny slip through a bit. Not because he wrote there are more men then women on top of the IQ scale, but because the conclusion of the article is pretty much “men are more likely to be intelligent and innovative than women so we don’t need women in STEM.” I think that it has more to do with interests men and women have and careers they choose to purse. I’m pretty sure that women who decide to go into STEM are brilliant. And also, one doesn’t have to go into STEM to be intelligent or creative.
But yeah, not that I would expect anything better from him lol.
freemage:
Not directly related to IQ tests, but another nice example of how there can be hidden biases in tests that won’t be immediately obvious to privileged people:
Apparently the test in question focused more on socialization and ethical behavior in kids. Among the questions were some along the lines of “You find a wallet full of money in the street. What do you do?”
Among the multiple-choice options, the kids were supposed to choose “I take the wallet, with everything inside it, to the police.” And for a white upper-middle-class kid, that would have likely been jumping out as the “right” choice.
The thing is… if you are, say, an black kid from a poor neighborhood, you may not just worry about the possibility that, if you take the wallet to the police, instead of being thanked you may instead be suspected of having stolen the wallet in the first place, of having taken out some money before bringing it in, etc. – you may indeed already have multiple real-life experiences of just that kind of thing, of getting in unfair trouble for doing “the right thing.” And so you may pick the multiple-choice option “I leave the wallet where it is and walk away,” not because you’re unethical, but because based on your life experience it is objectively the best thing to do.
Not something that a privileged person would necessarily catch, and not something that would require any intentional bias on the part of the test-writers. Just an example that if tests are written predominantly by specific types of people, those people’s life experiences and expectations will unintentionally influence those tests and lead to unexpected skews.
epitome of incomprehensibility, Hypatia:
Yeah, as for Talukdar’s issues with logic and drawing conclusions, I noted that in his article he complains about a law passed that allows for harsher sentences for juvenile criminals who commit “heinous crimes,” and how that supposedly effectively discriminates against boys – and then goes on to ask: “Recently a teenage girl murdered a two-year-old in cold blood. Should this girl also be treated as an adult just like boys who commit rapes and be hanged as demanded by feminists?”
…uh, yes? I mean, I personally don’t want anyone hanged because not a fan of the death penalty, but as far as I can tell the law he’s complaining about applies to all juvenile criminals, and so the teenage girl in question would indeed get treated as an adult as much as male teenage offenders. So why is he parading this as some sort of “checkmate feminists!”?
Wasn’t Esmay just talking about how racist feminists are?
Yup…and ethnically, German.
I pretty much assume that if you take whatever they say and rotate it 180º, you will get a reasonable approximation of the truth.
Sorry, late to the party again, but I have to thank Bernardo Soares above for refuting the libel by AVFM of Simone de Beauvoir. Her book, The Second Sex, is of inestimable significance to women, which is why AVFM attacked her.
Look at Dean Esmay’s Twitter feed. He’s not even addressing his #SpankAFeminist Tweets to anyone. He’s talking to himself, addressing questions to imaginary feminist enemies. It’s bizarre.
The problem with Beauvoir and Sartre isn’t so much what they did or didn’t do during the Occupation so much as how afterwards, they set themselves up as morally superior persons entitled to judge everyone else in France, and led the charge against “collaborationists,” many of whom had collaborated no more than they had. Camus at least had the honesty to say that while he had done a bit of Resistance work, it didn’t amount to much; Sartre and Beauvoir insisted that they had done a great deal in the Resistance, which they hadn’t. Lots of people didn’t; Jean Cocteau, for instance, was so happy to socialize with the upper crust no matter who was in charge that after the war many people wouldn’t stay in the same room as him. Lots of people also ended up claiming that they’d “done something” against the Germans, all very hush-hush don’t you know, but Beauvoir and Sartre went beyond that and decided that they got to decide who had been a worthy anti-German and who hadn’t, even though they didn’t do a damn thing during the war (except write No Exit and get the Germans to let it be put on, and then insist it was an anti-Nazi allegory). That is what sticks in the craw.
None of this, of course, diminishes the importance of The Second Sex.
Thanks, Rabid Rabbit, that is a very fair assessment. What a terrible historical period it was. That an incredible book like The Second Sex came from it is all the more amazing. I do treasure this book.
Miss Andry, boy Deano is really pounding out those tweets today, boldly setting straight all those imaginary people he’s addressing.
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/613839437940654081
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/613839046024933377
Uh, Dean, there’s no one there.
Maybe it makes sense for him to address imaginary people, given that most of his followers are fake ones, at least according to Twitter audit.
He;s also offering highly nuanced critiques of various feminist websites:
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/613848981555146756
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/613832089570553856
He’s even recycling some of the ones I put in my #spankafeminist post.
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/613835019002494976
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/613836222859862016
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/613836700448526336
And then there’s this.
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/613832964649156609
The fuck? He’s starting to sound like Jack Torrance. Is he tweeting from the Overlook Hotel?
Reminds me of George Lucas denying that Han ever shot first.
We are witnessing a man who is terribly threatened by women, fighting with disenfranchized men for the right to continue oppressing women. Esmay is a psych case. Excuse me, I don’t mean to offend anyone. But he needs psychiatric care.
All I have is this one from early May. Spoiler alert, it’s another one of Dean’s rape jokes.
@Bazia
Not personally offended, but please for the love of God, can we not go there again?