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.
http://allmalepanels.tumblr.com/
I’m going to sit back and wait for Jerry’s no-doubt incisive critique.
She has 76 publications. In neuroscience. Kinda hard to call it “out of her discipline” when she’s got a publication library large enough to make a forest nervous.
http://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/daphnajoel/academicpublications/
Prof. Joel is presently the Chair of the PhD Committee at the School of Psychological Sciences and a member of the Sagol School of Neuroscience.
And since I know you’re gonna say “She’s a psychologist, not a neuroscientist” – neuroscience is a holistic field that draws from neurology, psychology, and a bunch of niche fields. It’s multidisciplinary, and psychology’s one of those fields. Further, you have to accuse the entire Sagol School of Neuroscience of being “feminist impostors” at this point, because they haven’t thrown her out for misconduct.
It’s called having a hypothesis, ya knobbo. The question isn’t whether you are trying to prove something specific, because every single scientist does that. The question is whether you have the intellectual rigour and emotional maturity to accept if your hypothesis fails.
And science even has a backup for this! It’s called peer review. Which is exactly what I asked you to do two pages ago. And which you didn’t do. Because either you don’t know how – or you do not have the intellectual rigour and emotional maturity to test your hypothesis about the differences between women and men.
Sweet maple moses, hun! She has written dozens of papers on this subject, with dozens of people! Many of which are men! And there’s no ideological test for working together! Often you just work with what you have around.
I’d address the rest of your paragraph, but that’s more than enough. Watching some TED talks doesn’t make you informed, sir. Popular science communication is entertainment, not education. Especially when it’s filtered through to you second-hand through online media.
Whew! thank you though. I got to have a nice explore of a very talented doctor’s work, and I have some reading to do! Brilliant stuff. Trans friends and allies, I do suggest you click on through to that link and browse around. A lot of her papers are available, and her stuff on the brain and gender is very interesting, cutting edge stuff!
Yeah, POM, I have no idea what’s goin’ on here either.
Way to prove my point, bro.
And way to conveniently ignore that Elisabeth Warren was heckled by Berniebros at the Democratic convention for endorsing Clinton. Don’t even try to pretend like you all wouldn’t turn on Warren if she were to win the Democratic nomination and have to fundraise billions of dollars like any male candidate would. Don’t try to pretend that you all have similar purity tests for candidates. I never heard this much vitriol from self-identified progressive white dudes directed at Obama. Or John Edwards, Joe Biden, John Kerry or Howard Dean.
I know everyone here isn’t a fan of Shakesville, but I think this piece was excellent and I agree 100%
http://www.shakesville.com/2017/08/sanders-democrats-dont-own-left.html
Here’s the key part
People like John, who would rather see a literal fascist like Trump in the White House if it’ll teach the impure uppity harpy Hillary Clinton and her supporters a lesson are such privileged asswaffles. In some ways they infuriate me more than the in your face Trumpkins because at least they are honest about their racism, misogyny and lack of empathy for marginalized people.
Uh huh.
@John Devalle, thought you were leaving?
Too late to edit. My last sentence was not worded clearly. I was saying that Trumpkins, unlike Berniebros are upfront about their contempt for people less privileged than they are.
Just to be clear to little Johnny whiner here, Berniebros =/= all Bernie Sanders supporters.
Also, did anyone else notice that in some posts Jerry commits terrible acts of ellipses abuse but in some posts he does not. What’s with that? He reminds me of that other faux French troll we used to have. BRZ. Sometimes he would pretend to have shaky English but his poorly written posts didn’t read as Francophone. Then he would sometimes forget he wasn’t supposed to write well in English and would write posts in perfect (but tedious) English. So that’s Pell, BRZ and MRAL/seagull boy that Jerry is reminiscent of. I guess that means he’s just not a terribly original thinker.
Cassie Jaye is a “multi-award winning” documentary filmmaker? Is this that “Cannes” bullshit again?
I have a feeling that these two trolls are (what was it) eleven kilometers apart. But less creative.
Although a 2006 Harvard Crimson article alleged that only 17 women completed the class between 1990 and 2006,[5] in fact 39 women completed 55a (the first of the two semesters), and 26 completed 55b. -Wiki
This is why your credibility is nil, Jerry. This is why you are thought to be a liar. You will notice that the number of women passing is not, as you asserted, zero.
Jerry, they’re not generally modular designs, because they have to meet electric codes, many of which were last updated decades ago. Making them modular, while it might seem a more efficient way of design, is likely to also make them fail to meet electric codes, and be illegal to sell in many countries. Or actually be more difficult to sell, or any number of other requirements that a merely “efficient” design doesn’t meet. Maybe they have an inventory of thousands of parts that need to be sold through, and your new design wouldn’t use them.
If you treat your boss the way you treat the people here, it’s no wonder that you think management sucks. They are tolerating your BS because they don’t want to train new techs. You don’t listen to them, or you’d know why they rejected the design.
Your pattern is to find a preconceived idea, decide it’s true, and then keep saying it’s true despite evidence or logical argument. I have to say I disliked technicians that did that. I expect useful ideas, not dogmatic ideological mule-headed stubbornness.
ETA: Oh, and the insults to women at the end of your latest? You just can’t be nice, can you. You are your own worst enemy.
@ooclyBoggles
other posters would not be so amiable.
I can’t disagree with that!
@Policy of Madness
You’re totally correct, I’m not getting any of that from you. Good catch!
Or anyone else!
@John Devalle
Don’t mistake my comments for sympathy. You seem to have trouble trying to be nice. Sweet talk won’t get you anywhere here.
Awww, I know you want company in your sad, but no regulars here are going to join you, and you can’t ‘splain your way into company.
I’m still trying to figure what John is doing here. What is he trying to accomplish? Jerry seems to be an alt-righter who is here for the lolz and not bright enough to understand just how truly he’s getting his ass kicked.
John on the other hand, seems to be trying to do what? Convince lurkers that feminists and Hillary Clinton supporters are mean? Why?
http://i.imgur.com/XS5LK.gif
I’m not actually convinced that these two are the same. I just think Jerry gets emails when this thread is active and he can’t stand another troll getting attention so he jumps in whenever John or Andy starts posting.
On the other hand, John did get indignant when we were mocking Jerry for citing YouTube and came sweeping in to assure us that he was referencing the Guardian. So, maybe they are the same.
11km apart… I did not get the reference at all. 🙁
Jerry writes the way someone who is trying suuuuuper hard to disguise their natural voice might write. I allow that he might be a non-sock, but it wouldn’t surprise me even slightly to discover otherwise.
eta:
@JS
I presume it to be a reference to an experiment in entangled subatomic particles.
Well well, WWTH, you managed to write a reasoned post in your message of 8.46 pm, apart from the last paragraph. Warren and Sanders both took some stick for endorsing St Hilary after she got the Democratic candidacy. I’ve no doubt both backed her because of their understandable dread at the thought of a Trump presidency. As for raising money, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Bernie would not accept corporate donations. Clinton twice attended fund raising events while campaigning for the Democratic nomination. Bankers funded her campaign, and over the years have paid her vast sums, including since the election. Ever wondered why they give her this cash? And that final paragraph of yours,
People like John, who would rather see a literal fascist like Trump in the White House if it’ll teach the impure uppity harpy Hillary Clinton and her supporters a lesson are such privileged asswaffles.
Ah, you’re return to form. Saying I’d rather see Trump as president, and finishing with an insult. I’ve never expressed support for Trump, in fact I’ve expressed my loathing of him more than once. But when you read others messages you interpret them as you wish, rather than what they’ve clearly stated. For the record, were I American I’d have voted for Sanders, and when he didn’t get the candidacy I’d not have voted in the election. I’d vote for Warren, should she stand.
Here’s Devalle’s initial foray into this thread:
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/10/28/an-open-letter-to-cassie-jaye-director-of-the-red-pill/comment-page-18/#comment-1509067
It seems he thinks he is not only entitled to a personal response from David, it appears the email link worked just fine.
In addition to demand…er…inviting us all to visit his FB page.
Nah.
Not voting is the same as a vote for Trump, so WWTH’s assessment of you has been verified by you. Thanks for your cooperation.
I don’t remember how long ago it was, but we had a thread where two trolls were tag-teaming. David asked if they lived near each other – when they claimed they lived “eleven kilometers apart,” he told them that their IP addresses showed that they were twenty to thirty feet apart. Sort of like it was one person walking back and forth between two laptops . . .
WWTH, I’m not sure either. They sound a lot alike, but most MRAs do anyway.
@{Hippodameia
Cassie Jaye is a “multi-award winning” documentary filmmaker? Is this that “Cannes” bullshit again?
No, she is multi award winning. How many awards have you won? How many awards has the blessed David won?
Yeah – from “Cannes.” But we already know you think lying is OK.
@Ooglyboggles
You seem to have trouble trying to be nice.
I have trouble being nice! I was nice at the beginning, but was hit by a barrage of abuse. Is this nice enough?
@WWTH
I’m still trying to figure what John is doing here.
Who gives a fuck what you think? Nobody outside this forum. I know you won’t take offence at this message, as this is the language you speak. As for me, I’m just amusing myself before I leave. or am banned, whichever comes first.
@Hippodameia
They sound a lot alike, but most MRAs do anyway.
So do you members of this coven of witches. I’m probably going to be banned soon, but I’m really enjoying myself!
@John: You came in here, figuratively put a bunch of posters up, then looked to the regulars for approval and high fives. When the regulars told you that “hey here are the problems with your ideas”, you were angry and tried to tone police them.
You’ve been angry since.
You’ve been tone policing since.
*shrug* I’m always a little unsure how to deal with people who just come in here and scream, because I’m still trying to be okay with just being an ass to people (and not immediately feeling guilty).
So for the record, what you read as condescending wasn’t intended to be so, but (once again) you were probably primed to take it that way.
… John, are you trying to scandalise everyone with your profanity? You know… You know we’re on the internet, right? And we’ve all seen bad language before? Some of us might even (heavens to betsy!) have dropped an f-bomb once or twice?
Oh this thread.