UPDATE: Elam has belatedly posted an acknowledgement of (some of) the plagiarism. Then he called me fat. See my take here.
Earlier today, I pointed out that two recent posts on A Voice for Men were plagiarised, constructed almost entirely with cut-and-pasted chunks of text from an assortment of sources ranging from Wikipedia — the classic plagiarist resource — to weird little right-wing blogs.
Both posts — by marital rape legalization advocate and Holocaust denier Amartya Talukdar — have now disappeared from A Voice for Men, along with the rest of Talukdar’s posts on the site.
In a new post, AVFM head cheese Paul Elam took full responsibility for publishing Talukdar’s brazenly plagiarised posts and …
JUST KIDDING! Elam deleted the posts with no explanation or apology. And he hasn’t sent me a note of thanks for uncovering his site’s journalistic failure.
Reports of Elam stomping around his condo with steam coming from his ears have not been confirmed.
This isn’t the first time I’ve brought Talukdar’s, er, problems to AVFM’s attention. Not that they did anything about it; AVFM kept publishing him even after I informed them that he was a Holocaust denier. Indeed, Dean Esmay (who was still on “staff” at that point) declared me a “stalker madman” for pointing him to evidence of Talukdar’s troubling views.
But I guess Talukdar’s blatant cut-and-paste plagiarism was harder to ignore than his numerous Tweets suggesting that the Holocaust was “a Russian fabrication to hide allied war crimes.” (He is also, for what it’s worth, under the impression that Hillary Clinton is a “Jewess.”)
I’ll continue to check the site and Elam’s Twitter account to see if he posts anything about the deletions or the plagiarism.
But as of right now the only interesting things I’ve seen on Elam’s Twitter feed recently are these tweets (recently pointed out by the indefatigable @TakeDownMRAs).
https://twitter.com/AVoiceforMen/status/686762096965496836
https://twitter.com/AVoiceforMen/status/686761056987787264
Ew. God Elam is a revolting person.
Is there a “Godwin’s Law” equivalent for citing “1984”?
No?
Cool, insert reference to “memory holes” here.
Elam wil never admit any wrongdoing; he’ll just pretend like the article was never on the site in the first place. He’ just a big baby.
Oh, MRAs. Even when they do the right thing, they do it spectacularly wrong. It’s good that they took down the plagiarized posts, it’s bad that Elam isn’t acknowledging the plagiarism at all. It just makes him look like he knew it was plagiarized and is trying to cover it up. But I guess he’s incapable of ever admitting to a mistake.
Those tweets on the other hand, nothing right or good about them. The second one is basically just telling fathers to abuse or neglect their daughters so they’ll come prebroken into submission. That way, MRAs and other misogynists won’t have to go through the trouble of breaking them as adults. Fucking disgusting.
As I said on the other thread, either AVFM and Paul Elam are so incompetent that they have to rely on a site dedicated to mocking them to give them any sort of journalistic integrity of their own, or they are trying to cover their tracks. Either way its really pathetic.
Though, scratch that- they’ll never have any, and they certainly don’t now. I mean, the link goes to a page saying the article no longer exists- which means, to anyone with half a brain, that it existed at some point. How long d’yall think it will take for AVFM to deny that it happened. Bet its crossed their minds already.
Oh, and its not going to convince anyone except the MRA crowd, who are nowhere near as intelligent than they think they are.
I’d find it all so funny, if it wasn’t sad as hell.
Those tweets are also sickening. I don’t use the word hate often, but it feels right about now- I really do hate this man.
I would submit that the ENTIRE Voice for Morons, oops I mean Men, site is an Error 404!!!!!
Ethics!
Way to victim-blame, Paulie. I wonder what your daughter must be thinking right now, seeing shit like this.
"Drive a man": classic, classic batterer speak.
Nothing is ever the batterer’s fault. The batterer was driven to it.
Paul Elam: Your own words indict you.
Well, a lot of the manosphere believes schools are anti-male, so even a writer on AVFM doesn’t bother writing an article himself. Way to go, guys.
Those tweets by Elam are simply variations on the old theme “She must have done something to provoke him”, which has been used to excuse many an abuser.
Soon no doubt Elam and co. will be suggesting that Talukdar’s time at the Voice for Men was never anything more than a feminist fiction. “Never heard of him”, they ‘ll say. And they’ll say that any and all talk of him is nothing more than attacks on their glorious human rights movement by horrendous feminist hordes.
Hello.
I’m a long time reader and this is my first post.
I thought some here might appreciate the google cache link for the suddenly missing article: (since this is my first post and linking/hot-linking might not be allowed, I’ll ask the moderator for instruction for my future reference. Thank you.)
This is for “Feminism and Destruction of Humanity” (sic)
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LLfixtVhRrsJ:http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/feminism-and-destruction-of-humanity/%2B%22feminism+and+destruction+of+humanity%22&gbv=1&sei=LyyYVozJL4jUjwPk94H4BA&hl=en&&ct=clnk
I’m an “old school” internet poster who remembers when we tried to maintain “netiquette” so my apologies if I come off a bit stilted for starters.
A short bit about me: I’m a life-long feminist and former feminist activist, i.e., involved in organizations and marches, letter writing campaigns, monthly meetings, the whole thing. I’ve worked in two male-dominated careers and I’m currently semi-retired.
I’ve enjoyed reading David’s blog since it was manboobz and I’ve especially enjoyed many of the regulars and their responses.
I hope all are doing well and that 2016 is what you hope and need for it to be.
See you around in the comments.
AbigailGen
Things don’t just vanish from the Internet. It got deleted, but there are screenshots of it.
The Holocaust denier and plagiarist Amartya Talukdar will forever be remembered as a great contributor to A Voice for Men.
This makes me giggle. I assume the take-down was because it’d been pointed out that the posts also made the ‘editing’ staff look horrible at their jobs, let alone revealing the entire staff to be misogynistic shits.
Well that’s the closest AVFM can ever get to an admission of guilt.
These guys are such losers in real life that the only way to feel important is raging on the Internet. Hard core losers who can’t maintain normal human relationships like an adult.
I think they must be fine with being misogynistic shits – isn’t that their whole raison d’etre?
But editors who can’t or won’t edit – or read – just looks lame.
What’s the betting they’d rather look evil than incompetent?
(I’ve just noticed that this post is full of misandry – implying MRAs can’t multitask).
Great work, David. I’ll say it since MRAs won’t. I have a feeling that loads of cutting and pasting without permission goes on at MRA websites. When all you do is hate, you have little time to perform your own research.
Ugh, those tweets. Yet Paul will still argue ’til he is blue that he doesn’t condone domestic violence. Pull the other one, mate. Making excuses for it (and for rapists) is just as bad.
Miss Andry called it on the other thread:
Well done, David.
@WeirwoodTreeHugger:
Actually, I thought that was a canonical example of MRAs taking a notion that actually has a core of feminist good sense and thickly coating it in their own special misogynistic abusive bullshit. As they do.
In fact, it is generally a bad idea for fathers to consistently treat daughters as their “little princess”, in the sense of spoiling/infantilizing/overprotecting them so they’ll always cling to Daddy instead of becoming well-grounded independent adults. Of course, it ought to go without saying that that sort of poor parenting choice is not equivalent to actual child abuse, much less an excuse for a future relationship partner to actually abuse Daddy’s “princess” on the grounds that she “drove” him to it.
@Kimstu
Considering that Elam considers equal rights for women to be feminazi oppression, I imagine that what is “treating your daughter like a princess” to him is actually basic good parenting. So I get where you are coming from, but never would I be willing to view his words in any sort of positive light. Because 10/10 times what he means is exactly as awful as he implied.
EDIT:: Let us remember that this is coming from the man who abandoned his daughter when she was little. He has no fucking right to comment on parenthood.