At this point, after five plus years of observing his shenanigans from my roost in We Hunted the Mammoth Manor, there’s very little that Paul Elam could do that would really shock me.
But I have to admit that I was a bit shocked last night when I discovered a little bulletin on the internet garbage heap that is Elam’s A Voice for Men website with the title “Plagiarism discovered and removed from AVFM.” I was even more shocked to discover that Elam actually credited me with this discovery:
Recently, David Futrelle posted a piece on his agitprop site regarding an article published here which was written by Amartya Talukdar. Futrelle makes the allegation that part of Talukdar’s content was plagiarized.
AVFM staff investigated the claim as soon as we became aware of the allegation and found Futrelle’s claim to be true.
That last sentence is a sentence I never would have expected to see on AVFM, quite possibly the first acknowledgement of objective reality I’ve ever spotted on the site.
But evidently Elam is unable to keep up this level of truth-telling for long, and his “bulletin” quickly turns to damage control, minimizing the plagiarism itself and patting himself on the back for thinking about ways to try to keep from being humiliated like this again.
Indeed, even the brief portion of his note I just quoted downplays the extent — and the obviousness — of the plagiarism by now-former AVFM contributor Talukdar.
And the only “investigation” that AVFM would have needed to do to verify the plagiarism was to read my carefully documented post on the subject and click on some of its links.
I mean, the plagiarised post in question was full of paragraph-length, word-for-word “borrowings” from other sources, many of which I quoted verbatim, at length, with links back to where Talukdar got them. They basically had a solved case handed to them, with a little bow on top.
Elam continues, doing his best to downplay the extent of Talukdar’s plagiarism:
Without a doubt, there were passages in Amartya Talukdar’s piece that were directly lifted from the works of another writer or writers.
Not just “passages.” Practically the whole thing.
Elam also neglects to mention that Talukdar’s previous post, as I also showed in detail, was also heavily plagiarised.
Now, Elam, who describes himself on the AVFM masthead as its “Chief Executive Officer as well as its “Founder and Publisher,” is the person who is ultimately responsible for everything that runs on the site.
But instead of accepting the responsibility for posting numerous pieces by a brazen plagiarist on his site, and/or offering his readers an apology, Elam decides to attack me, first for noticing that he had taken down the posts without explanation and second … for being a fat fatty.
“In his fervor to blow this story out of proportion,” the thin-skinned Elam sniffs,
Futrelle followed up his initial piece almost immediately after I removed Talukdar’s material. He was so quick with his follow up assertion that Talukdar’s work had “mysteriously vanished” from AVFM that it appeared as though he was sitting there with a bucket of fried chicken, refreshing the site every ten seconds with a single greasy finger until he saw that the content had been removed.
Dude, if I were refreshing the page every ten seconds while eating fried chicken, I would have carefully kept that one finger grease-free.
Futrelle does his best to make it appear as though our intent was to remove the content and act like it was never there to begin with. In other words, the implication is that we sought to mislead our readers.
I dunno, dude, normally when a reputable media outlet takes down posts due to some egregious violation of basic journalistic ethics, they post a little note saying why. In this case the plagiarism was blatant and extensive, and there was no need for a long investigation. I provided you with all the evidence you needed.
Seems like maybe you should have posted a note.
Ah well, there’s always next time!
And I can only assume there will be a next time After all, this is the third time that AVFM has published plagiarised work in the last two years. In 2014, while apparently digging up dirt on former AVFMer John “The Other” Hembling, the site’s crack anti-plagiarism squad discovered that Hembling had plagiarised big chunks of one of his posts for AVFM.
Then last year, Voice for Men’s fake WhiteRibbon.org spinoff site proudly reposted an article on domestic violence that included some stolen material from other sites, including — irony alert! — a chunk plagiarised from feminist writer Amanda Marcotte, who’s been on AVFM’s enemies list from the start. In this case, AVFM almost certainly knew that it was posting plagiarised work — because the plagiarised piece in question had just gotten its (ostensible) author fired as a columnist for The Australian.
Maybe after another half-dozen plagiarism scandals AVFM will finally get it figured out.
But I don’t hold out much hope for them on the whole Holocaust denial thing. .
What, you ask, what Holocaust denial thing?
Well, as it turns out, AVFM’s latest disgraced plagiarist is also a bit of a Holocaust denier, given to posting Tweets like these here. Well, exactly like these here, since these are a couple of his (now deleted) Tweets. (Click on the screenshots for archived copies of the Tweets.)
When I first presented Elam with evidence of Talukdar’s Holocaust denial Tweets last year, he responded by blocking me on Twitter; AVFM’s then-managing-editor Dean Esmay, meanwhile, freaked out about the polite email I sent him on the subject, calling me a “sociopathic sadist” and a “stalker madman,’ and literally threatening to call the police.
So apparently Holocaust denial isn’t enough to get you canned at AVFM, but really really really blatant plagiarism is — provided that someone outside of their ridiculous website does all the work in ferreting it out and announces it to the world in a way that makes AVFM’s “staffers” look like the incompetents they are.
I guess that technically counts as a plagiarism policy, huh?
Now I’m really hankering for some nice greasy chicken.
@Josh
Ummmm, we’re talking about wives, here, in an apparently mostly matriarchal/matrilineal society, who likely might be leaving behind children and family members, not slaves.
@Alan
Also, I check the sources, and both links go to 404 pages.
@ pandapool
See if this works
https://books.google.no/books?id=ubRkhPM0ETMC&pg=PA173&hl=no#v=onepage&q&f=false
Wilberforce and Carey reported somewhat higher numbers when they were investigating in India, but this was a couple of decades before the universal ban. There had been local bans by regional governors before that.
ETA
Don’t forget it was seen as a high honour for the woman in certain groups. They got temples and all sorts dedicated to them. Some of the campaigners against the ban were the women at risk themselves!
That may seem odd, but if you believe in an afterlife then that might skew things.
@Alan
As a widow myself I just can’t even. That bit of information physically hurt for me to read.
I’m confident that India was never a matriarchal society. It only takes the most cursory reading of the most easily accessible Hindu scripture to realize this. The stories of Vishnu’s incarnations have recurring themes of women captured by demons and then being considered effectively worthless afterward, because there was a nonzero possibility that they were raped in captivity. Also, the vast, vast majority of characters in Hindu scripture are men, and the women only exist in relation to one of the male characters, which kind of says it all.
Hello.
So, I’m a fairly longtime lurker, and I’m Indian.
Sati (not suttee, by the way) was definitely an evil, and it did happen. But India was and still is very different depending on where you are. There were communities that did this. There were communities that didn’t.
I have a problem, however, with anybody British patting themselves on the back for banning it because I’m quite sure that we would’ve managed to do that ourselves without being colonised, thank you very much. Why, if women’s legal rights hadn’t been drastically reduced by the British Raj, we might’ve managed to do it before ’87 after independence! We had to make up a lot of lost ground by then. Plus, I know 500 is a lot and it shouldn’t have ever happened, but, well, it’s a huge country. There’s at least 500 of everything, even worse and more horrible things. I mean, how we treated our widows was incredibly horrible, but if sati was as widespread as all that, there wouldn’t have been any widows to mistreat. (Also something that has changed, of course.)
Which brings me to another pet peeve I have here – making fun of the Indian MRA who wants to legalise marital rape. Well, it’s legal here. What he says is all law. So it doesn’t seem like a joke to me at all. By all means, make fun of everything else he says, but ridiculing an Indian MRA in India for what he says about legal marital rape does make me very angry. Ridiculous, sure, but not a joke for us. We’ve been trying very hard to get that changed, and there do seem to be signs that it might change. But it’s a long and hard road. That’s part of the reason why he keeps talking about it. He’s scared of Indian feminists, and he should be. We are strong and damn right we’re scary.
There’s also no point romanticising matrilineal communities. I was from one before the missionaries got to my ancestors and got them to convert to Christianity. Practically, it meant that women were expected to marry within the extended family to keep all property within the family. It wasn’t like a woman married a man and he became absorbed into the woman’s extended family. In practice, men still held most of the power, including over what was done with the property held in the woman’s name.
MRA’s bleating about David being fat reminds me of this clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0Vv9wReLKM
It’s about as coherent as the MRA’s (I’d argue perhaps more so)
@Alan
Is there someone from India that can confirm or deny this because I don’t have the best faith in the words of white, British men from 200-300 years ago about India, if I’m honest.
@PoM
True, but India is still a big place considering there’s claim of around one million people who identify to tribes and villages which are matrilineal in India. There’s also Sikhism plus Buddhism from nearby Sri Lanka. Not to mention other non-India created religions that have been there for hundreds of years. Again, it would be nice if someone from India commented on this.
@ POM
A Sikh friend of mine tells me that Sikhism, whilst not matriarchal, has always been quite keen, in theory if not always practice, on equality for women.
Supposedly Guru Nanak said some very positive things about women as leaders and rulers.
ETA
Oh, seems she was right. So it’s not just goth music she’s an expert on!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Sikhism
@ pandapool
Ah, ninja’d on the Sikh thing.
Yeah, I’d be interested in an Indian viewpoint; although I don’t think someone like Wilberforce would have any particular axe to grind.
There’s a huge difference between matriarchy and matrilinear descent.
And, considering that this is in the context of whether widow-burning was a thing, the reality of whether it happened in general is unrelated to whether some villages had/have matrilineal cultures. If the majority of people have Culture A, and 1% instead have Culture B, the argument that Culture B would not have dreamed of burning widows does nothing to comment on whether or not Culture A did it.
I’m not even looking at Indian culture today, just the very ancient scriptures that were written long, long before the Indians and the British ever met one another. These writings are not matriarchal. It’s not a huge leap of logic to believe that the culture that produced them was not matriarchal either.
@ pandapool
A cursory search of Google books throws up a few Indian writers on the practice. I suppose the best Indian history books will be written in one of the Indian languages though.
Did find references to this chap
http://www.culturalindia.net/reformers/raja-ram-mohan-roy.html
He was quite the social reformer generally.
@Alan
Yes, I see now. And it turns out sati was a Hindu practice, so, yeah, it would be in a large portion of India.
Okay, so sati probably wasn’t something British people made up to justify taking over India. Alright.
@ pandapool
The British relationship with India was certainly a complex one, not least because ‘India’ is as much a convenient label as a homogenous nation.
You may enjoy this. Not only does it address the direct subjects we’ve been chatting about (and thank you for a very stimulating discussion) but it covers a few other topics that I believe you’re interested in, and it’s a great tv programme generally.
I’d better snatch some sleep now! Night night, and thanks once again for the really interesting chat)
http://youtu.be/GcGN_UxLQ_0
@pandapool
I meant to ask, is that Shigeru Miyamoto?
@Alan
I’m not a fan of dramas but I’m half way through and it’s pretty interesting.
@kupo
Yes it is.
@Pandapool
Yeah, this practice is well known (and, with any luck, gone). Webster’s says this about suttee (the more common spelling of the word, at least in the United States):
And this is the derivation:
Here’s an article about it from 2009, “Why Sati Is Still a Burning Issue”:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/4897797.cms
Yeah, the pun in the title is unfunny.
@Pandapool
Love that man. 🙂
Wow, that’s actually pretty recent practice.
@kupo
It’s the people that don’t like Shigeru Miyamoto you have to watch for.
Anyone interested in matriarchal societies might also be interested in woman-centered societies, discussed by Riane Eisler (The Chalice and the Blade) and Marija Gimbutas (The Language of the Goddess).
There are also Monica Sjoo (The Great Cosmic Mother) and Elizabeth Gould Davis (The First Sex). I believe that these authors, however, discuss matriarchy more than they discuss woman-centered societies.
These four authors are perhaps the most well-known feminist writers of the late twentieth century on the status of women in ancient societies.
Riane Eisler — who, along with her family of origin, fled Nazi Germany — and her husband, David Loye, head up the Center for Partnership Studies in Northern California, which does lots of education about the partnership model (as opposed to the dominator model). Go ahead and sign up for Riane Eisler’s newsletter right here!
http://rianeeisler.com/curriculum-vitae/
Note to manospherians: Is this the first you’ve heard of Riane Eisler? Take some deep breaths and have a nice, strengthening cup of tea before you read any more about or by her. You’re laughing? Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
@ kat
Cheers for that info, I’ll take a look.
Must confess, I’m not totally convinced by all of Eisler’s hypotheses. I tend to agree with her analysis of those societies she uses as examples but I’m not convinced that represents a universal attitude.
People here know of my admiration for women like Boudicca, and there are plenty of examples of war goddesses and similar in cultures round the world.
I could ramble on about this topic but I’ll spare people. I’ll just add that I find the bit about celebrating child birth interesting. As you may know, the only way in Spartan society to earn entitlement to a marked grave was to be killed in battle or die during childbirth.
I’m catching up on this thread and enjoying the interesting diversion into discussions of sati and Indian culture(s) more generally. Just wanted to shout out Very Scary Indeed’s contribution, which went to moderation as it’s their first. They are from India and have some interesting things to say. Their post is currently around halfway down this (the third) page.
@Very Scary Indeed:
Thank you for joining in and for giving us that information; I’m always much more comfortable when Indian people are leading the discussion about Indian matters rather than us white people. Welcome to the site.
I would be extremely interested to hear you talk about what you see as the future direction and coming challenges for gender equality campaigning in India. I’ve been told by other Indian friends that it intersects with the traditionalism vs modernisation discussion in complex ways, and that there’s a heavy regional aspect to it, but I have no information except from my Indian friends and am uncomfortable with my ignorance.
To add to the plagiarism issue, it seems to me that there is an issue at the AVFM site that is bigger than plagiarism. Are they publishing fiction and presenting it as journalism? The article “My Lady Lump” on the current page bears all the marks of a short story. The stilted dialogue, the way all the details always support the “moral”, the little literary fluorishes, all that. But the commenters aren’t being corrected when they take it as a real event. They go away thinking some guy was treated discriminatorily when he went in for a breast biopsy. When you can’t tell fact from fiction looking at a site you can’t beleieve anything you read there if you ask me. It reminds me of that anti-Jewish propaganda piece about the Elders of Zion. The Lady Lump article looks like it may be a propaganda piece about men being treated badly, meant to be mistaken for truth. The site ought to tell people when they are reading fantasies. This is just my opinion, I don’t know for sure it’s fiction.
@pandapool
I was just thinking about how similar practices exist. And as others have mentioned, there’s a huge difference between matrilineal and Matriarchal. And I highly doubt that a society that encouraged this practice was matriarchal.
@PoM,
Very Scary, please correct me if I’m mistaken about any of this:
The statement posted upthread was that most of South India was traditionally matrilineal.
Most of what White Americans think of as “Hinduism” is specifically North Indian in origin. Varnashramadharma — the system that codifies 4 classes, untouchable people outside the 4 classes, 4 stages of life, and a specific set of sacrificial animals to be offered by brahmins in codified rituals — originates in the North, and the Varnashramadharma-following groups tend to be patrilineal.