So it’s been a while since I checked in on the heroic Twitter activism of the legendary Men’s Rights Twitter Activist Dean Esmay, formerly the Number Two at A Voice for Men, currently either the “Online Activism Director” or the “online outreach director” for the National Coalition For Men — the first according to him, the second according to the NCFM.
In any case, Mr. Esmay is actively outreaching on Twitter like it’s going out of style.
Let’s look at some recent examples of this outreachy activism, shall we?
Not that long after accepting his prestigious position — or positions — at NCFM, he offered these thoughts on the delicate subject of murdering judges.
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/657513425212428288
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/657515697942216704
Huh. What other topics, you may wonder, has Mr. Esmay been addressing recently? Well, how about the issue of women in science?
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/679301307002445825
As it turns out, Mr. Esmay has quite a few opinions about feminism and feminists.
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/657555407120891904
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/672751870432182272
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/647477856315031552
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/647476339142983681
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/672752550484013056
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/635284954893656064
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/675058933065732098
But he doesn’t only take on feminists. He has some most interesting thoughts on “feminsits” as well.
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/659268774911156224
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/652137454376370176
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/649229091103608833
Esmay boldly stands up against both “snotty cunts” and “cunty twats.”
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/663334105715617792
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/628955612102172676
And he seems to really hate one poor fellow named “David Futrelle.”
Huh. Turns out he’s actually got a lot more Tweets on the subject of this “Futrelle,” but it might be more appropriate to send them to a lawyer than for me to post them here.
So what issue has Esmay really worked up at the moment? The rapes in Cologne.
I’m sorry, I meant to say the “rape hysteria” in Cologne.
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/685029810523996160
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/685168438835286016
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/686175333628948480
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/686170999621042176
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/687287387148296193
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/686182368521117696
Oh, but looking at his timeline today I see that Esmay has changed his mind. Sort of. What convinced him that there’s more than “hysteria” behind the reports? The sterling reporting of … Breitbart.
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/686638427672936448
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/687311625192214528
Now, we still don’t know exactly what happened in Cologne, and in the other cities in which similar attacks have been reported. And it’s certainly true that racists are actively spreading misinformation and disinformation about the assaults in an attempt to demonize Muslims in general and Muslim refugees in particular.
But it’s one thing to say, hey, don’t believe all of the obvious propaganda put forth by white nationalists and other racist assholes, and another to dismiss what Esmay called the “supposed mass rape attacks” as “classic rape hysteria and no more.”
Again, while there are still a lot of questions that remain unanswered about the attacks, it’s clear that there were multiple sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s. Standing up against racist lies is a good thing, Dean, but hysterically crying “rape hysteria” kind of makes you a rape apologist.
But, hey, for what it’s worth, Esmay calls a lot of things “hysteria.”
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/674956543859757056
It’s weird to find myself agreeing with Esmay about anything. No, I don’t agree that concerns about sexual harassment at work are “hysteria.” But I do think that, yes, it might be better if Mr. Esmay were to work someplace where no women would have to encounter him. Or men, for that matter.
I also found myself agreeing with half of what Esmay seems to be saying here. (The second half.)
https://twitter.com/deanesmay/status/684747720066764801
I think he means that no matter how often AVFM denies that they’ve said violent things, people don’t believe them. (Presumably because they are lying about this.)
But maybe he realizes that AVFM’s endless huffing and puffing about the evils of feminism has accomplished absolutely nothing good for men.
That would be … interesting, huh?
I hope no one will mind if I derail this by asking Alan a legal question. I figure that anything would be better than talking about Dean Emsay. I’m curious about a point that came up in passing on the Bowi thread but which would be a really unfortunate derailing of the profound discussion happening there.
Alan,
Are you familiar with the American doctrine of “felony murder,” and if so, does the UK have anything similar? I was under the impression that we (claim to have) derived the basic idea from English common law, but it may have been a radical reinterpretation on our part, or your lot may have since done away with it.
(For those who don’t know, the idea behind “felony murder” laws is that you are guilty of murder if you commit a felony, and someone dies in any way even remotely related to your actions; in some stats felony murder applies only to a very limited set of crimes; in others it applies to any felony. One memorable example: a man went to Target, filled up a shopping cart, and ran out the door without paying. The stuff in his cart was worth $1,100 [or $1.100 for Alan, I suppose], which made it “grand theft.” A security guard chased him down, tackled him, handcuffed him, then had a heart attack and died. The thief was convicted of felony murder)
Well that’s rich coming from the guy too sexist for AVFM.
Anyway, I just saw that he has 19.7k followers, which disappointed me until I checked twitter audit and it said 14.5k of them are fake.
@ Orion
If you’ll forgive the typical barrister answer of “it’s complicated” I’ll try to answer your question (no doubt leaving the situation even more confused than before :-))
We used to have something called “constructive malice” which pretty much amounted to the same thing.
That arguably got abolished in the 50s in an Act that made a lot of changes to the law on murder.
For a feminist perspective, the Act was a consequence of much public disquiet about the execution of a woman called Ruth Ellis.
The Act effective made it much ‘harder’ to convict someone of murder (which at the time carried a mandatory death penalty) in all sorts of ways (introducing ideas like the defence of provocation which turned a murder into manslaughter for which there was no mandatory sentence)
I say ‘arguably’ because theoretically even under the new regime the law could be interpreted in a way that still allowed a conviction for murder where the killing arose out of another crime. In the 60s an Act was passed that clarified the situation and explicitly ruled out a conviction on that basis.
The theory was that you should only be convicted of murder if a person died as a result of your actions and you had specifically intended they should die or at least come to serious harm.
We still however have something called joint enterprise that allows someone to be convicted of murder if they’re with someone and they know that person *might* do something that would result in another person’s death. As you can see that’s a pretty low threshold and joint enterprise is another controversial subject.
So the simple answer is “No, we don’t have anything like felony murder any more” but subject to the caveats above.
Hope that makes some sense.
An interesting thing in England is, that despite all the statutes about murder, there isn’t one actually making murder an offence, it’s a common law crime.
Oh, and we use the comma to separate numbers into thousands here. The full stop thing is more of a European idea. 🙂
Edit to add: just to confuse the situation more, in England you can ‘intend’ to do an act even if you hadn’t even thought about it if the act is a natural consequence of your deliberate actions.
@Alan Robertshaw
I’ve been known to work for way too many hours at a time, and I actually do hallucinate, although it’s not anything fascinating. I’ll “hear” a faraway radio, even if I leave my office and go for a walk. Also, I keep “seeing” someone or something just out of the corner of my eye.
@ kat
Yeah, very familiar with that scenario. Sometimes it’s almost enjoyable, say when you’re in the passenger seat of a car and you see weird creatures in the road. Not so much fun when you’re the one doing the driving and you’re hoping the invisible people you can hear in the vehicle will attack you before you can get to the next Services for a nap and a coffee!
@Alan Robertshaw
I’m going to take a wild-ass guess here and say that maybe sometimes we overdo it.
Just sayin’.
I hope that soon you can go the f**k to sleep. Like I’m going to right now.
@ kat
Oh, so do I. Fingers crossed my current project will finally be completed by the end of next week. Til then it’s the four hours sleep if you’re lucky thing, but as soon as that’s done I’m hitting the hay for 24 hours straight before moving into the next thing!
Appreciate the hope 🙂
As awful as he is generally, the thing that always pisses me off about Esmay’s Twitter account is that in his avatar he looks exactly like a nice hippy guy I knew in college. It’s been so long I don’t even remember his name. Only that he was a sweetheart, smart as hell and actually put in a good word to help get me a job at one point.
I hate that Dean Esmay looks like that guy. Leave that guy alone, Dean Esmay. Leave him alone.