UPDATE 10/25/16: If you’ve come here after reading about a petition to cancel screenings of The Red Pill, I ask you to NOT sign any such petitions. It’s just free publicity for them. Read more of my thoughts on the matter here.
Dear Cassie Jaye,
Congratulations. You surpassed your Kickstarter fundraising goal yesterday, more than two weeks before the Kickstarter campaign was scheduled to come to a close. You’ve funded the postproduction work on your long-delayed documentary on Men’s Rights activists, and then some.
But I’m not sure that the person I should be congratulating is you. Last night Paul Elam of A Voice for Men – the central subject of your film – was doing his own victory lap online. And no wonder, because he seems to be the real victor here.
In a post on his site that managed to be giddy and vindictive at once, he offered his congratulations to you, then, well, to himself. “Even though the victory goes to Ms. Jaye,” he wrote, in an awkward attempt at modesty, “I have the need to offer up some thanks.”
And then he spelled out why he thinks your “victory” is really a victory for him.
For the past six years AVFM has had mud kicked in its face by a corrupt, left-wing media. Bottom feeders like Adam Serwer, Jeff Sharlet and Mariah Blake have performed endless unscrupulous acts, directly lying to their readers in order to attack AVFM, this movement and me personally.
Their work was not just to harm me, or to damage a website but to make sure if they could that the message we carry never found its way to the larger public. Their intent was and is to paint an indelible stain on all of us so hideous that we would never be taken seriously by enough people to matter.
They have failed, and I can now predict that they have failed miserably.
In other words, Paul Elam thinks he and his friends in what he ludicrously calls the “Men’s Human Rights Movement” have bought and paid for a feature-length advertisement for them.
And it’s not hard to see why Elam – and the other manospherians who’ve rallied around your film in recent days — think this. After all, they are the ones who have rescued your film from oblivion by pouring tens of thousands of dollars into your Kickstarter.
And all it took for you to unleash this torrent of money was an interview with one of the sleaziest figures in right-wing journalism, Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart.
In the interview, posted on Monday, you complained that “I won’t be getting support from feminists. They want a hit piece and I won’t do that.”
There was more than a little bit of irony in the fact that you were saying this to a man infamous for his many hit pieces on so-called “Social Justice Warriors.”
You also complained about an intern on your film who, you said, “had a lot of crying attacks and emotional experiences. She claimed everything I was showing her was triggering her.”
A young feminist “triggered” and crying. This is red meat to the Breitbart crowd, and I have to assume you knew this when you told Milo this story.
To an outside observer like me, this shameful pandering looks a lot like a Hail Mary play on your part. Having failed to convince most potential funders of the film that you would present anything close to an accurate picture of the Men’s Rights movement, you told Breitbart what its readers – and the broader manosphere – wanted to hear.
And it worked. Men’s Rights activists, self-professed “Red Pillers” and other assorted antifeminists rallied around your film, and the money started flowing.
On Reddit, the moderators of the Men’s Rights subreddit “stickied” an appeal to donate to your Kickstarter to the top of their front page, urging MRAs to open their wallets in order to show skeptics that “we can take part in some actual activism and not just post stuff in here.”
Even the regulars in the violently misogynistic Red Pill subreddit agreed to help bankroll your film.
And it wasn’t just Men’s Rights and “Red Pill” Redditors who organized support for your film. One right-wing Red Pill blogger, notorious for his harassment of ideological enemies, pledged to match donations up to $10,000, describing your documentary as “the Movie SJWs Do Not Want You to See.”
Meanwhile, on her blog, AVFM’s “social media director” Andrea Hardie (an internet bully better known under her pseudonyms Janet Bloomfield and “Judgy Bitch”) not only rallied her readers around your Kickstarter but also set up a gofundme of her own, raising money in hopes that it would buy Breitbart’s Yiannopoulos a producer credit in your film. (I hope that is out of the question, even if she raises more than the paltry amount she’s raised for this purpose so far.)
And then there was Elam himself, on Twitter, calling on his followers to, in his words, “Help fund #RedPillMovie because fuck feminists!”
https://twitter.com/AVoiceForMen/status/658700057311506432
Accepting money from these people would seem to be a pretty clear violation of the principles you set forth in your own Kickstarter video, in which you declared that
in order to keep this film non-partisan, and respectfully show all sides to this debate, we won’t accept funding from organizations that inevitably have biased agendas.
Instead, you have chosen to take money from people who see your film as a chance to say “fuck you” to feminists. You have chosen to take money from the actual subjects of your film.
You are making a film about Men’s Rights Activists, funded to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars by Men’s Rights Activists. You are making a film about A Voice for Men funded in part by A Voice for Men.
Does that not trouble you at all? It should. In your interview with Breitbart, you noted that “films that support one side and act as propaganda do better than those that try to have an honest look.”
You said this, presumably, to set yourself apart from such propagandists. Now you seem to have cast your lot in with them.
Which I suppose makes sense, since the clips of your film that you’ve posted online so far look a lot more like propaganda than they do like any sort of honest look at the Men’s Rights movement,
I felt uneasy about your project from the start, concerned that you had been pulled in by the soothing but misleading rhetoric that MRAs spout when they are trying to sound more respectable than they really are, rather than on what MRAs actually say and do when the cameras are off of them.
But I knew you had a good reputation as a filmmaker, and heard good things from several feminists who knew you better than I did. So I held my tongue and tried my best to give you the benefit of the doubt, even when you posted clips from your film that portrayed AVFMers as heroic underdogs rather than the misogynists and malicious harassers that they really are.
When I wrote you a little over a week ago with some of my concerns, you assured me in the phone call that followed that the clips you had posted were only part of the story, that you were well aware that the MRAs you had interviewed were on their best behavior when talking to you, and that the real story of the Men’s Rights movement is far less rosy-hued. Against my better judgement, I continued to hold on to some kind of hope that you would live up to your reputation in the end.
And now, frankly, I feel like I’ve been played.
Unfortunately, it looks like you have been played too, much more spectacularly than I have. I suspect you are doing far more damage to your reputation than you even know.
One thing I have learned in five years of watching, and writing about, and dealing with, the Men’s Rights movement, is that if Paul Elam is happy about something, that thing is almost certainly terrible.
I suspect, sadly, that you will ultimately learn this lesson yourself, the hard way.
PS: In our phone conversation, you suggested that if you were able to fund your film, you might be able to finally film the interview with me that we originally had planned to do, but which fell through due to financial and other practical obstacles during the original filming of The Red Pill. At this point, I am sorry to say, that is completely out of the question.
“Naughty elephants squirt water”
“Never eat shredded wheat” or “Never eat soggy weiners”
@“I haven’t checked but…” and “I got it from Youtube”.
Actually I got it from the Guardian.
“Naughty Elephants Steal Wealth” – a more “current events” mnemonic?
My favorite acronym is still
PCMCIA (used for “PCMCIA Card” an older laptop standard)
“People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms”
@Kupo
BTW, when I informed David of the personal info in Jerry’s post, I also let him know about your open letter. He didn’t say anything about it. I’m guessing he doesn’t care
I’m not expecting a reply. I’ll distribute the letter online, like David does with his criticism of Cassie. I don’t have the same media reach as he does, but I’ll do my best.
For some strange reason life left me with the need to make sure that I am really saying left when I mean right or vice versa. That’s one of those things I can’t satisfyingly explain with what I read. That Tourette Syndrome cluster of people are at a general OCD level there and I can’t make assumptions. The other shapes in that OCD category are interesting though. Symmetries, number, order, counting, checking, touching, hoarding. I know a person who has to touch his other arm on the same spot as the one where you touch them.
Not only does language have polarity we habitually invent polarity in language. I think a self-bias check is required when reading this stuff and reading about this stuff.
@ brony
I think your summary and analysis is pretty spot on. This is something I mainly know about from a combat perspective. You can see the advantage of giving your opponent a new input to process every <0.2 of a second. Basically you constantly reset the OODA Loop back to the OO stages. That way they can't formulate a response. It's even more affective if you target different areas each time. If you constantly attack one point then that can be processed as a single object and orientation, thus allowing for a decision and an action.
That single point attack is quite prevalent in humans. You'll see it with the classic shirt grab and repeated punches. (see for example ice hockey fights). That's an example of getting stuck in a repeating loop. Basically you're just repeating the A stage, thus eliminating the first 3 steps.
To avoid that we train 'flow drills' and what the Israelis call 'retzev' (that's Hebrew for something like 'continuous movement'). It's a series of strikes that automatically lead into one another. You train it until basically it's just something like automatic pilot. You let your amygdalae do all the work. There's no conscious processing or decision making involving your higher brain, so again your eliminating the OOD stages. You also try to train so that if your opponent does manage to strike you, the orientation and decision stages are skipped. It's like trying to create a reflex. So you'll counter a particular strike in the same way you'd flinch from a hot stove. There's no conscious decision.
Does any of that make sense, or is of some use to you?
@WWTH
No, fuckwit. Yeah, I’m calling you a name. Because you most likely misinterpreted my comment on purpose.
But Berniebros are pretty prone to being more concerned with the feelings and priorities of fascists than you are with the feelings and concern of their targets.
Goodness, I’ve been found out! Yes, I did deliberately misinterpret you, as misinterpretation is the norm here, especially with yourself, so I thought I’d use your language. But don’t worry, I’ll soon have left this site, leaving you all to chatter among yourselves, knowing that your impact on the world will be zero. Oh and some here are keen on links, so I take it you have some substantiation that Bernie’s supporters are “pretty prone” to be concerned with the feelings of fascists.
@WWTH
Hey, has everyone noticed that the Berniebros have a new target? Kamala Harris used to be an acceptable progressive. Now she’s getting buzz as a possible presidential candidate and surprise, surprise they’ve turned on her. Isn’t it just so convenient that their targeted insufficiently progressive and pure Democrat always happens to be a woman. Yet they’ll get so mad if you point that out.
They’re so mad that the rest of us refuse to acknowledge the white male’s rightful place as leader of the left.
Elisabeth Warren is much favoured as the next presidential candidate by many progressive Democrats. Unlike Ms Harris she hasn’t been courting Wall Street, and doing that kind of makes Ms Harris a bit unprogressive, don’t you think? Oh and Ms Warren definitely is a woman, if you require some links to prove that, let me know. I’ll be happy to oblige.
My last comp had French spellchecker and accents (bizarrely in Oz). This one doesn’t…Quebecois has become so different that its not really French anymore. I translated one utube for a French girl but only after watching the Quebecoise vid 3 times (after school we play the other school at ice hocky etc..). But if you watch their TV (Montreal) they’ll have a quiz show in good French then switch to a couple of toothless banjo playing yokels in the backblocks who are totally incomprehensible, Its like 2 languages
I used my flatmates name as I knew I had no chance of spelling it right, I just get sick of being called a liar by people who are bent 9 ways from Sunday and whose ideologies are built on massive lies and propaganda.
Checked the CH Sommers link. Yes exact same maths course. And the Israeli scientist is not a neuroscientist. To form a group of all female, all feminist scientists and state the results you are looking for before you start, to support your own ideological ends, is NOT objective science. Its equivalent to an all blonde haired, blue eyed Nazi race scientist team, saying their goal is to prove Aryan superiority. Also she used non sexual trigger..CAT arh look men and women see cat exactly the same…When they brain scan a female orgasm it looks very different to a males…so of course they got the results they wanted.
My background has largely been in mechanical and electrical engineering
Was the the sentence you quoted, John. Look at it again. Did WWTH say that *Bernie* was a fascist?
I feel like perhaps you were ready for someone to say something like that, which was why you didn’t quite get the intent of this sentence. You did misunderstand what was said.
Maybe you should think about why? What kind of biases this shows?
It’s like that old thing where you don’t notice two of the same words repeated. (Let’s see if I did that right!) First sentence of my reply has a double word in it. Did you notice?
I think it’s sort of like the association thing Scildfreya was talking about in another thread with H1B being a type of visa, but Alan (and myself!) read it as a HB10 kind of thing, which is a manosphere rating system for women. Even though everything is in a different order, it still triggers what you’re primed to think about, thanks to different context cues.
I’m not explaining it anywhere as well as she did though. Hey hey! First comment at the top of this page. That’s easy!
Also, Elizabeth Warren has ALSO had to deal with people telling her she’s not progressive enough, now that she might possibly be running for 2020.
I mean, I know my search terms were ‘Elizabeth Warren not progressive’, but here’s the results.
Also, it is very strange that both you and Jerry start posting at the same time. *side eye*
@Jerry: waita be a jerk to the Quebecois, buddy. It’s almost as if, when two populations of people separate, their languages will go along separate paths? Or something?
Also, you can install keyboards. Here’s how to do it in windows 7. How do you think I get rid of all the accents I don’t need?
Oh good, I’m an electrical engineer, ask me a meaningful question.
Shorter Jerry: “No matter how many times I am proven wrong, I insist I’m right.”
John Devalle,
Goodbye. It was nice of you to stop by and entrall us all with the same-o, same-o. Good luck with your Petal endeavor.
@Jerry Donohue,
Now, I may be an Albertan, miles away culturally and physically from Quebec. But no one slags off la belle province in my presence without gettin’ an earful of it.
Quebec’s a beautiful place, filled to brimming with wonderful, generous, good people. They’re down-to-earth and filled with a joie de vivre that should make any honest person blush to think of insulting them; they love good food and good friends, good music, and casual cheer. They’re where the maple syrup comes from fer chrissakes.
Vive le Quebeç, ya ponce.
That is the stupidest thing I ever did read, and I have edited white papers. She’s produced 76 publications, with multiple teams. Her methodology is sterling and her analyses are excellent. You have zero grounds for rejecting her position.
Know why? Because that’s how science works. If your theoretical Aryan jackoffs decided to try to prove why Aryans are superior (though, well, good luck defining Aryan), they’ll be torn apart – because their science will be bad.
Almost like that’s what happens now, to most articles that the MRA movements take for their support.
Further – where is your proof that she assembled a crack team of feminists instead of, you know, scientists? That her staff selection choices were about ideology and not skill? I’ll tell you where your proof is, up yer butt. You’re assuming it’s ideological because you don’t like the results and want to find a way to disregard them.
You don’t know thing one about – well, anything, far as I’ve seen so far. Oh, wait, you’re not bad with Northern European anthropology, if I remember. Hey, maybe you can get in on that hypothetical Aryan research team, that’d be fun, huh?
Push off, ya clown.
I knew it!
How’re the seagulls out there?
Also, what cool mechanisms or electronics did you work on?
Nah, don’t bother, you’d just make something up anyway.
So you’re not a dead chemist?
Oh, weird, John and Jerry both showed up at the same time again. The darndest coincidences just happen with these two!
@Brony
I have trouble with left/right east/west sometimes. Not too frequently, but my mind sometimes gets into a state where I have to check 2 or 3 times to make sure directions are correct. It feels a certain way, kind of cottony, when this happens. Similar to how it feels after a migraine has passed, when you’re still not back to normal yet, but not quite the “brain fog” I get from triggering an autoimmune response. I’ve even gotten up/down north/south wrong, but only when it’s extra bad. Normally it’s just left/right east/west. Typically I’m very good with directions.
If you put your hands out in front of you, palms facing away from you and thumbs sticking out (as if you’re stopping traffic), the forefinger and thumb of the left hand form an “L”, for left.
Maybe not so helpful if you can’t remember which way L’s face, but it’s a start.
@Rhuu
Was the the sentence you quoted, John. Look at it again. Did WWTH say that *Bernie* was a fascist?
I feel like perhaps you were ready for someone to say something like that, which was why you didn’t quite get the intent of this sentence. You did misunderstand what was said.
Maybe you should think about why? What kind of biases this shows?
It’s like that old thing where you don’t notice two of the same words repeated. (Let’s see if I did that right!) First sentence of my reply has a double word in it. Did you notice?
I think it’s sort of like the association thing Scildfreya was talking about in another thread with H1B being a type of visa, but Alan (and myself!) read it as a HB10 kind of thing, which is a manosphere rating system for women. Even though everything is in a different order, it still triggers what you’re primed to think about, thanks to different context cues.
I’m not explaining it anywhere as well as she did though. Hey hey! First comment at the top of this page. That’s easy!
Also, Elizabeth Warren has ALSO had to deal with people telling her she’s not progressive enough, now that she might possibly be running for 2020.
I mean, I know my search terms were ‘Elizabeth Warren not progressive’, but here’s the results.
Also, it is very strange that both you and Jerry start posting at the same time. *side eye*
Condescending and sarcastic, but by the standards of this site, relatively mild.
I’d described the popularity of Bernie and Trump as ‘people looking for an alternative’. WWTH replied that I’d dismissed the rise of fascism as an ‘alternative’. Clearly she was’n’t reading my message, again! You’re selective in who you admonish. I knew what she meant, that is that she was deliberately misrepresenting me, as she does others who don’t fit into her notion of how we should be.
I stated that ‘some’ progressives support Warren. As you were saying about reading messages, you need a little practice.
Me and Jerry have never met, never corresponded, but as some here have convinced yourselves that we’re a team, I’ll leave you to it.
Holy shit, y’all, this thread.
Mainly what I’ve gathered is that John has a sad? Because David won’t pay attention to him and the commentariat is made up of meanie-pantses? And for some reason he expects us to care about his sad? Am I missing anything?
Before I go, anyone like to tell me if they consider Bernie to be a misogynist as he contested the race for Democratic presidential candidacy, rather then stand back to let St Hilary be anointed.
@Policy of Madness
Mainly what I’ve gathered is that John has a sad? Because David won’t pay attention to him and the commentariat is made up of meanie-pantses? And for some reason he expects us to care about his sad? Am I missing anything?
Common sense?
@John Devalle
No, I don’t think Bernie Sanders is a misogynistic, racist, hypocritical thorn on the side of the Democratic Party. Yes I do admit that the entire primary was just a formality considering that any other candidate other than Sanders was a complete joke, but the people hath spoken and by the popular vote Clinton was elected. And if you’re really for progressive ideals you wouldn’t go against the will of the people here.
Other posters would not be so amiable.
If you got to explain it, it’s not common sense. Policy of Madness pretty much summarized all you did the past few pages, hell, you’re doing those things right now.
You’re totally correct, I’m not getting any of that from you. Good catch!
I didn’t say I was an electrical engineer, my last electrical job was CADing and assembling one off large electrical switch boxes in stainless etc with specs from, and signed off by the engineers, Which blocks of relays iso switches etc. Me and the guy I started with developed a modular system, much more efficient, boss rejected, Ive never seen a place run so badly.
Not taking shots at the Quebecois, we have our own toothless banjo players here too (Ive got 30 acres of wood out west) they are the go to guys if you want wakybaky or moonshine…In my opinion their missing teeth and genes just makes them more characterful, and charming.
Re Israeli scientist. When you are not working in your discipline, admit you are ideologically drive with a pre agenda, and your whole team is of the same gender and ideology as you (totally by coincidence of course) and you cant see anything wrong with that …then I cant help you……. Its like the all female team in the Antarctic trying to prove something…all they’ve done so far is synchronise their periods and complain that they cant piss in the snow like the males, I suppose their internal plumbing is mens fault now too.