Yesterday was a big day for Roosh Valizadeh, pickup artist, rape legalization advocate and would-be philosopher of “neomasculinity.” Some highlights:
Roosh was the inspiration for a demonstration against rape culture in Montreal.
Roughly 100 demonstrators held a peaceful demonstration in Montreal’s Norman Bethune Square targeting rape culture in general and Roosh in particular. It is not known how many of the demonstrators were undercover Roosh operatives dressed as “a homosexual hipster (i.e. male feminist).” Best estimates put the number at zero. The rally was covered by both CTV News and The Montreal Gazette.
The mayor of Montreal weighed in on the issue, declaring in a tweet that as far as he was concerned Roosh was not welcome in his city.
On the Roosh V forum, meanwhile, Roosh’s fans scoured the news footage for identifiable faces of people they could smear, and debated whether or not they WB (“would bang”) or WNB (“would not bang”) various women who had attended the demonstration.
Roosh (apparently) gave his talk, celebrating afterwards by posting a video claiming a “historic victory in Montreal.”
After calling on his followers to spread false information about the super seekrit location of his talk, as part of what he charmingly called “Operation Goebbels,” Roosh apparently gave his talk in a rented room at a Montreal restaurant.
Afterwards, evidently quite proud of himself, Roosh posted a victory video on Youtube. On the Roosh V forum, his fans happily posted celebratory gifs, including this one.
Donning a wig — no, really — Roosh hit the bars in an evident attempt to find a woman in Montreal who was not repulsed by him.
He failed, as this video of a woman tossing a drink in his face suggests.
Roosh went on Twitter to report being assaulted by “a mob,” and apparently reported the incident to police.
He might have undermined his case a little by suggesting it was “worth” it because, well, he got some action out of it, sort of.
https://twitter.com/rooshv/status/630245564983169025
The woman with the “sexy legs” responded, and suggested that Roosh had in fact put his hands on her first.
On the Roosh forums, Roosh’s fans urged him to file charges for assault and to sue everyone in sight. And debated whether or not they WB the alleged beer-pourer.
Meanwhile, Roosh’s plan to smear his opponents online continued apace.
“By Monday,” one Roosh fan wrote, “we’ll have identified every single one of these pieces of garbage and work on decimating their future career options.”
According to this Tweet, Roosh himself was threatening to falsely report one of the organizers to social services as a bad mother.
https://twitter.com/ashleylynch/status/629954266380271616/photo/1
On Twitter, the #IStandWithRooshV hashtag has been having a little trouble getting going, generating all of 3 Tweets as of noon on Sunday.
This does not look like a grand victory for Roosh, unless his aim was to show the world what terrible shits he and his supporters are.
Think if more people start to recognize him (and they will), and treat him like this consistently, he might change his views…? Realize how wrong he really is..? HAHA doubt it. But maybe, hopefully, after some more harassment he might go away? Would be payback for all the woman he has harassed online.
Once again, everyone’s fed on a troll (a, in this case) before I could, so I’m just gonna point out the serious case of period abuse. I think we’ve found where the MRAs have been storing all the extras from those two-dot ellipses.
Oh, I was curious, so I decided to assume that there’s a cop, a prosecutor and a judge in Montreal who are all RoKians. Assuming, then, that they all have it in for the young woman in question, and are just trying to make certain they can justify things later, here’s the pertinent portions of Canada’s criminal codes (IANAL, but I’m good at Google?):
This seems to be the most likely candidate–Disorderly Conduct, Causing disturbance, indecent exhibition, loitering, etc.:
Oddly enough, one might argue that the screaming on the public street would be more likely to get a conviction for disorderly conduct than the beer-sploosh. And even then, she’d have her counter-claim that he was violating her personal space and it was a defensive reaction.
It is theoretically possible that they could go for this one, but it seems far less likely:
Honestly, the real question is if the police are going to bother pressing charges. They look at a number of things, gauging the harm done to the victim against the likelihood of getting a conviction. This guy was told by the mayor that he was not welcome in Montreal and he got a wet wig. In a city with gang wars. They still have an investigation to do- I don’t know how they prioritize that sort of thing but Roosh’s bruised ego and ruined wig doesn’t seem like a particularly pressing concern to me.
Took the words right out of my mouth. Guys, let me save you some fuss and bother: It’s a three-dot ellipsis when you’re connecting two phrases, and a four-dot one when trailing off at the end of a sentence. Anything else is seriously shitty grammar…which, given the general nature of MRAs is, I suppose, to be expected….
I invite Roosh V to a televised debate. ThatChannel Toronto studios. Somebody tell him.
Seems like a is either a Roosh fan taking their anger out on any feminist they encounter here and elsewhere (after what happened to ‘dear old Roosh’)..or just some person who had an off day (in/outside the ‘web) and decided to vent by taking their anger out on feminists here and elsewhere.
I don’t know if we ever had such a principle “in paper”, but many judges still seem to be applying it, even today.
Some horrible cases have come to public light lately, in which women are being charged for murder when their partner (usually abusing the women themselves) sexually abuses and/or kills her children, which are often also his, but not always.
So it would seem that, apart from never being violent against a man, we are responsible for the violence we can’t prevent them from exercising.
Almost all of the most backwards judges/attorneys were assigned during the years of dictatorship, so I’m sure there’s a lot more shit to clean behind those few cases which get to the media 🙁
@ Lux
We’ve actually just (well, few years ago) introduced a law here to make that an offence.
Remember our discussion about “hard cases make bad laws”? It could be an example of that. There was a lot of public outrage that people were being acquitted of child cruelty and murder because either the Crown could not be sure which adult had inflicted the injuries or the non injurious adult had done nothing to stop the assault.
Now the law states that if it can’t be proved which adult inflicted the injuries any adult in the household can be prosecuted for the offence of “failing to protect a child”. Similarly there’s now a duty on all adults to take steps to prevent abuse.
This is relatively unusual in English law where generally there’s no liability for omissions, only acts (so we don’t have a ‘good samaritan’ law for example). It’s perfectly legal under English law to watch someone commit a crime or even stand back whilst a blind child walked towards the edge of a cliff.
It’s probably fair to say that support for the law was as popular with women as men.
Here’s one example of the law in practice:
R v Haskey [2012] 1 Cr.App.R.(S.) 106
Daughter aged nearly two suffered injuries inflicted in the appellant’s absence: burn to the sole of a foot and three toes caused by being held against a hot kettle, and bruises to different parts of her head and body. Guilty plea on the basis that she entered into a relationship with her boyfriend (who was not the child’s father), who abused her. When she returned home, she noticed the burn and contacted the emergency services, but had not previously sought medical attention for the bruises. Had she done so, the burn to the foot would not have occurred. Court of Appeal regarded injuries amounted to grievous bodily harm, held second category applied towards the lower end and accepted significant mitigation. Sentence reduced to 18 months imprisonment.
“It’s really ridiculous how physically assaulting someone is considered OK because they don’t agree with your opinions.” This is a verbatim quote from the Roosh V forum, and my brain can barely handle the irony. These are people who believe it should be legal to rape women, and who doxx and harass feminists as if that’s their only reason for living, but when a rape-legalization advocate has a beer thrown in his face, it’s suddenly “ridiculous.” Fucking wow.
@Alan
And let me guess, so far it’s only been used to prosecute women and will only ever be used to prosecute women… Ugh. –-#
@ SFHC
I only have anecdotal evidence from cases I know about (had a quick look for any stats but no joy) so take this with a pinch of salt:
It seems that when they prosecute under the “we don’t know who it was but it must have been one of you” provision, than that’s obviously both the man and woman (haven’t found any non hetero cases; wonder if that’s significant) who get prosecuted.
In the cases where they know who did it and they prosecute the non intervening partner then that does seem to be mainly women. Presumably because men tend to be the majority of abusers when there’s a relationship.
Part of the problem is that the new failure to prevent’ provision is incorporated into the original ‘active’ abuse section of the relevant statute, so you get charged under the same section regardless, which means it doesn’t differentiate in the published tables. Suspect you’re right though.
Amusingly his twitter claims to have a police report, he posted a photo of it, it was the French biology of montreal police mascot
@Alan & SHFC
The outrage here is growing because in most cases abuse toward the woman is described by witnesses and experts, and ignored by the judge (there are no juries here, even though the Constitution demands them, long story).
The thing is, the justice system developed its own special brand of impunity, so we’re having a lot of trouble making them accountable for much worse stuff.
So we’re mainly focused in a case-by-case support for the victims and mobilizations for justice, and very slowly building a network of victims-survivors-families all over the territory.
Which is pretty much what human rights movements like Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo have been doing for decades with people kidnapped and murdered back in the 70s dictatorship.
Actually, all the work they did is what makes this moment so hopeful, but we still have a long way to go.
And meanwhile, one single asshole of a judge can break an indeterminate number of lives without a single worry about it.
But we’ll win, in the end. No nos han vencido.
So let me get this straight, someone threw beer in a guy’s face because she didn’t like what he had to say and you are OK with this and some of you think she should’ve done worse?
Ya’ll seriously ok with committing violence against people for their opinions or is there something about this story I’m missing?
” By and large, an unarmed woman isn’t going to do any real damage to a large man like you or me, and women trained in martial arts or self-defense probably aren’t going to attack us without good reason”
You realize that ANYONE can get martial arts training right? They don’t do any kind of background checks and there’s no way to insure that the person using it won’t just attack someone for no reason.
@jackknife, you are apparently missing the fact that Roosh is an admitted rapist.
You act as if this is a team dog vs. team cat or House Stark vs. House Targaryen argument. We’re talking about an admitted rapist who put on a disguise so he could go to bars he’d been banned on in order to prey on drunk women.
So fuck off,
Had To Be SaidJackknife.I hope the strikethrough mammoth isn’t about to eat me!
Oh, god, it is Had To Be Said, isn’t it?
Maybe it’s a different sea lion, they are a dime a dozen, but it is awfully coincidental that as soon as he gets banned, a very similar troll appears.
I
hatelove it when people come in and try to paint Roosh’s hate speech as “an opinion”.His “opinion” has a victim count. His “opinion” leads to women getting raped, beaten, and treated like they deserved this kind of treatment. Roosh himself is an admitted rapist on more than one count.
That’s not “an opinion”, that’s hate speech. Come back with this kind of talk when someone gets a beer dumped on them for liking pineapple on pizza or something equally trivial, not when Roosh is advocating for raping women as a means to “make them protect themselves” and is attempting to teach other men how to force women to sleep with them.
Secondly, pretty much everyone here agrees that dumping a beer on someone isn’t seriously battery in the legal sense. And please point out where someone said “she should have done worse”, because you and I are not reading the same comments section.
ANYONE can learn martial arts, you guiz! Well, except for people who can’t afford lessons. And people who don’t live around a reputable school. And people who are physically disabled, or have mental disabilities that make their co-ordination not so great. Or people who have problems breathing. Or people (more specifically women) who don’t want to have to fight in order to just walk down the damn street.
Also, even if someone did have “martial arts training”, most reputable schools I know of go out of their way to verbally beat it into their students that what they do isn’t for hurting people unless it’s in self-defense.
They make it very clear that they are not to use their skills to hurt another person (though I imagine contract fights are an exception to the rule). You aren’t to just go up and punch someone for “no reason”, though, let’s face it, there’s usually a reason, because no one just snaps and punches people with no provocation. Especially someone who’s been trained.
In Roosh’s case, it’s because he drug this woman by the waist into a bar, and she dumped a beer on him because she recognized him and knew he was a rapist skeezeball, despite the fact he made a very sorry attempt to lie about who he was.
Wow! Did he literally get forced back into his hotel by the folks in the bar? Because that’s amazing.
This “It’s just his opinion” argument reminds me of the old Spike Milligan sketch.
*Guys in ski masks turn up at someone’s door*
“We’re Jehova’s Burglars. We’re persecuted for our beliefs”
“What beliefs are those?”
“We believe you have a large sum of money on the premises”
@ Paradoxy
We do a bit of self defence teaching for people who aren’t conventionally able. Often these are people who need it most. It’s just a matter of adaption.
Real self defence teaching does that anyway. Obviously a technique that might be best for someone who’s 220lbs and 6′ 6″ isn’t necessarily the same as one for a 90lbs 5′ tall person.
Of course, that doesn’t invalidate the well justified actions of Beergirl!
Hello there, Had To Be Socking.