Jack Barnes, a volatile American Men’s Rights activist known for his harassment of feminists on Twitter, is now threatening to unleash a new offensive designed “to strike fear in the hearts of feminists.” In a post on Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men bristling with violent language, Barnes declares that
we have our hands on the throat of feminism. This isn’t the time to ease up. This is the time to squeeze harder.
The ostensible subject of Barnes’ post is a several-weeks-old piece on News.Com.Au by Australian writer Kerri Sackville about a road-raging, red-Jag-driving man who shouted “slut” at her when she honked at him for blocking the road. Barnes adds to the abuse, declaring her a crazy, misogynist (!) “cunt.”
The real source of Barnes’ fury at Sackville is a campaign she launched last December to “name and shame” men who sent abusive and threatening messages to women online using their real names.
And that’s what leads Barnes to what he says is the real “point of this article,” a declaration of virtual war against “Sackville and her fellow feminazis.” He writes:
Here is what we do. We make it hurt. If they want to continue to do this then we make them regret it. They need to learn that their are consequences for doing this. They need to learn that we will extract a pound of flesh, figuratively speaking. They need to learn to fear retribution from us.
Barnes claims that this “retribution” won’t include physical violence, but he doesn’t specify exactly what it will include, merely suggesting that he will soon have the “tools” necessary “to strike fear in the hearts of feminists.” And by soon he means next month.
We won’t use violence. We don’t need to use violence. How do we make these feminists think twice before going all Gestapo on any guy who has the balls to call out feminism or individual feminists on their FemKKK behavior? Well I can’t tell you that right now. Lets just say a plan is in place and being brought into fruition as we speak. Expect it to be revealed before the end of February provided that everything goes according to plan.
Barnes then launches a preemptive strike on any even slightly ethical MRAs who might be “wringing their hand” [sic] over his mysterious threats, bluntly informing them that “this fight is about to get dirty. Deal with it.”
Barnes — using a rhetorical switcheroo common amongst MRAs — frames his threatened offensive as a defensive move. Feminism is dying, he asserts, and like many dying beasts it is lashing out against its enemies in a desperate frenzy. He predicts that
feminists will become increasingly more vicious. … MHRAs with lives ruined, imprisoned and dead is not outside the realm of possibility.
As he sees it, not just Sackville and her fellow Australian ally, writer Clementine Ford, but all “public faces of feminism” are fair game for “retribution” for whatever offenses he’s decided they’re guilty of.
You don’t get a warning. You all have engaged in this despicable behavior. You will receive consequences. Go ahead and whine and cry about the horrible MRAs threatening you. We don’t care. This isn’t a threat. This is a statement of fact. We will not use violence. But we will make you hesitate to ever do these things again.
Barnes apparently believes in some sort of collective guilt, making clear that he will hold prominent feminists “responsible” not only for their own alleged crimes, as he defines them, but for the behavior of what he calls their “mindless minions.”
This is not the first time Barnes has announced his desire to harass feminists into silence. Usually he remembers to put the word “harass” in quotes, as if this will be enough to transform harassment into something that doesn’t sound quite so bad.
Usually, but not always:
Nor is this the first time that Barnes has issued threats that he insists aren’t really threats.
Indeed, I myself have been the recipient of some of these non-threat threats. Last November, after someone doxxed him and his family, Barnes decided that I needed to be held “responsible” for the doxxer’s actions, even though I had nothing to do with that person or persons, didn’t know who they were, and didn’t even know about the doxxing until I learned about it from a video by AVFM head honcho Paul Elam a day or two later.
I made it clear I knew nothing about the doxxing or the doxxer (who later ended up doxxing me). I condemned the doxxing, publicly and repeatedly. It didn’t matter: Barnes declared the doxxer to be a “cult follower” of mine, so anything they did was somehow my fault.
“I promise you David,” he wrote in an AVFM post, “that for the rest of your life there will be nights you cry yourself to sleep in anger and frustration over me.”
Indeed, he wrote, if anything happened to his family as a result of the doxxing, he would literally show up on my doorstep for
a face to face in person discussion … No cops. No lawyers or prosecutors. No judges. No jury. No hiding behind a computer. Just me and you. …
I don’t know of any parent that would blame me for stomping a mud hole in your fucking ass and walking that motherfucker dry for what you have done!
What I’ve “done” is to condemn the doxxing that Barnes blames for putting his family at risk.
Barnes is hardly the only AVFMer who believes in this sort of guilt-by-non-association; assorted others rallied behind him on Twitter, repeating his accusations and defending his threats. The title of Elam’s video on the doxxing declared bluntly that I was “Trying to Get MHRAs Killed.” How? By writing critically about AVFM.
Elam’s bizarre inflation of my carefully documented criticism of MRAs into an attempt to literally “get MHRAs killed” is not only jarring; it’s ominous. By pretending that the writings of feminists leave MRAs, quite literally, in mortal peril, Elam, Barnes and others associated with AVFM can justify almost any actions they might take against feminists, no matter how sleazy or underhanded or even violent, as a form of self-defense.
Abusers who think — or simply pretend — that they are the victims are some of the most dangerous people in the world.
Why do you get to determine the direction of the discussion and expect regulars who are uncomfortable with it to stay out of it?
I’m only speaking for myself here. But no, I’m not the only feminist who gets irritated with this kind of thing. http://www.shakesville.com/2015/08/feminism-101-more-helpful-hints-for.html
Here’s the important bit. Bolding by me.
For the record, I did answer your question, even though the fact that you called it an interrogation (weirdly hostile word choice) and wrung your hands about being called a troll raised red flags for me. A number of other people answered too. You continued to double down on the gamergatish talking point that everybody gets trash talking online, therefore misogynistic targeting isn’t that much of a thing.
If you’re truly here in good faith, you’d maybe understand that feminists are sick of answering the same questions again and again instead of getting defensive.
Again, I did answer you in a neutral tone the first time. I started calling you a troll only after the answers didn’t sink in. If you aren’t capable of sussing out which sources of information are credible when you do a Google search, that’s not other people’s problem. If you’re trying to learn, not troll, maybe pose the question more politely. I suggest something along the lines of “hey, I’m still learning about feminism and the way online harassment harms women, would anyone mind dropping some links on the topic?” as opposed to “I’m gonna be called a troll, but I have a serious interrogation:
How many of the guys who threaten women on the Internet actually act on those threats?” Hostile language and “What I’m getting at is that from my perspective, focusing on women being abused online is like feeding homeless as long as they are white” insinuating that talking about women being the victims of misogyny is just like racism.
If you don’t care if people think you’re a troll, why are you so pissy about it? And no, people don’t always assume people have bad intentions. If people frequently suspect you of bad intentions, the problem is with you. Not other people.
You’re telling me to shoo? Seriously? Why should I leave a site I’ve been a regular on for two years just because you’ve decided you wanted interrogate people about misogynistic harassment in peace?
@kupo:
That’s too bad, because the ressources I got from freja are extremely interesting. If I get banned, I’d like the people who have been decent to know that it will not deter me from educating myself more on these issues. Every movement has its bad apples, even the good ones, but its important enough not to give up over some people’s desire for a fight.
So if I don’t come back, thanks again.
Kupo,
Thanks for the backup. A lot of our best troll busters left in the most recent thread of doom and sometimes I feel alone in spotting trolls right away. A lot of the people here haven’t been through as many troll cycles as I have! Of course, people aren’t obligated to treat someone as if they’re here in bad faith solely on my say so, but I admit, I wish other people would get to the conclusion a bit faster.
Fuck off, Max.
@Scildfreja:
I liked a comment I heard once on this: “People are not rational animals. People are rationalizing animals.”
Once you start reading about neurobiology, action potentials, and the like, you start realizing that yes, what we consider ‘consciousness’ is pretty much just internal post facto rationalization of decisions already made for simpler lower-level reasons. It’s a story we tell ourselves to make ourselves make sense, to serialize what is otherwise a largely parallel machine.
(Granted, Dr. Persinger, who was one of the people who really popularized some of this years ago, is problematic for a whole host of other reasons with regards to his scientific credibility.)
People tend to think in narratives, which is why ‘the Other’ is such a thing in the first place; you slot other people into roles in your narrative. It’s also one of the things that you have to be actively trained to overcome as a scientist, and most of them don’t actually overcome it very well in subjects they have any emotional investment in.
And then, some people just tend to treat any disruption of their personal narrative as a personal attack. You not acting according to their prejudiced view of you means you must be trying to actively fool them. From there it tends to get ugly really fast.
The first thing anybody should have to learn is, “It’s not all about you.” Unfortunately, that seems to be one of the hardest things to learn, because so much of our psychology is constructed around being ourselves.
@kupo;
@History Nerd;
Ohmigosh, you used the word ‘meme’ properly 😮 you are my favourite now.
I am now bottling and pickling a ten page discussion on the propagation of misogynistic memeplexes, because who gots time for that i mean really
(I once developed a set of roleplaying game rules to describe the propagation of associative memetic structures through a population)
@RosaDeLava;
I apologize, i was sort of being saucy and pedantic. You’re using the word right, and I’m just being a dork. Something something consciousness-is-a-construct, something something dark side.
@Max, ref: all dis stuff;
Our immediate reaction to confrontation is to find reasons why we’re the good guy and they’re the bad guy. This is immediate, unconscious, and involuntary. It takes conscious, explicit effort to overcome it.
Brain exercise for you: Spend the next 15 minutes assuming that you are totally wrong, and WWTH is totally right – regardless of truth content. Take a minute or two to center yourself – slow, steady breathing and neutral or mildly positive thoughts – and then read through the replies you got, making the assumption that you’re wrong and WWTH is right.
This should hopefully give you the psychological distance to get past the fight-or-flight reaction that everyone has when they are confronted.
(WWTH is a cool bean, by the way)
@wwth
I feel like I can sometimes be too quick in asking for the banhammer. I don’t want to be disruptive in case other regulars disagree with me, so maybe I’ll stop calling for bans. But I’ll call a troll a troll, and I think I’m usually right. This one I thought was obvious early on.
http://i.imgur.com/kIkbg3V.gif
I don’t, that’s why you can ignore my posts and everybody can. I don’t expect anyone to answer me, and even if I did, what would I do about it? If nobody had answered, I would just have thought about something else.
You’re not the only person who is irritated by people not getting exactly what you mean on the first try. That doesn’t mean you should be antagonizing them for not understanding everything you say.
My native language is French, so I used interrogation as we do in French, as a synonym for question. I did not know it was exclusively hostile. You want to hold it against me as well.
Seriously, you are legitimately scary at this point. How come other posters understood it differently than you did? I “doubled-down” as you say, because I figured that, probably because of my writing skills, I wasn’t getting my point across correctly. In the end my point was to know whether misogynistic abuse is specific in itself or a specific iteration of something more general. Freja and others answered that very well, and I’m grateful that they did. I just don’t understand how you can seriously think that my position is that online misogyny is not a problem. It’s like you’ve decided once and for all and you just don’t want to change your opinion.
I can do both at the same time: I get that it can be bothersome, which is why I don’t expect anyone to reply, and I also have the weird feeling that some posters, you in particular, are arguing in bad faith because you want the enemy to be there.
Should I also add “Your majesty” at the end of my question?
Yeah that was a bad metaphor, I’ll give you that. I was just trying to get my point across.
So far it has only happened here, so I guess the jury is still out on this one.
You do what you want. I’m just asking you to leave me alone. Why do you keep spewing so much bullshit about me wanting to “interrogate” people on misogyny? Other people have understood what I meant and answered, so why do you keep making up stuff? Seriously?
Goddess almighty, you little shit, would you just fuck off already?
@Jenora
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
http://38.media.tumblr.com/8e48b5738c64f22e97fc68f7c2958cd2/tumblr_nkyvmbA7xz1s2wio8o1_250.gif
I want to write a book on the art of rational thinking and self improvement. Heck, I want to write a curriculum of rational thinking and self improvement. For school children. Why don’t we do this? It’s literally the foundation for clear thought.
(Oh, wait, it’s because our school system was designed to make happy little factory workers, and provide babysitting for overworked poor people. My mistake…)
EDIT – I’m talking with Max because I don’t think he’s a troll – he has backed away from the idea that misogyny is a symptom of a deeper problem, I think! So that’s why I’m still talking with him. Hopefully I’m not exacerbating things!
I actually like having trolls around as chew toys sometimes, so I’m not usually on the ban them train. I just miss how some of the departed posters caught on quickly and called a troll a troll right away.
But people are welcome to engage with sealions in good faith if they like. I only truly object if they start siding with the sealions against those of us who have a finely tuned trolldar and don’t play nice. That hasn’t happened in this thread, but it did happen in the thread with Jo.
Scildfreja, if this thread goes on for ten pages and the entire rest of it is simply you telling us about information science, I would bookmark it and reread it daily.
@ scildfreja
Somewhere in my library is a book called something like “Straight and Crooked Thinking” that, if I recall correctly, is pretty good.
Always a market for an updated tome though!
I think there was discussion about making ‘critical thinking’ part of the national curriculum in England. I don’t know if that came in but my mate teaches it at her school.
ETA: seconding EJ
Yes.
@Max:
I’ve just caught up on the thread.
Every single question you’ve asked has been something that can be answered via a google search. Every point you raise is something that can be refuted via a google search (and is often a variant on a PRATT.) Instead of using up other people’s time in answering these questions, you could merely have used up your own time and humanity would have saved some extra hours.
We’d have plowed those hours into Minecraft or Darkest Dungeon or something, but the point remains that this is an inefficient method of transmitting knowledge.
EDIT:
@Alan:
I just assume that’s implicit whenever anyone says anything on the intarwebs.
@WWTH:
We don’t get good trolls these days, do we? It’s sad. I joined the site only after the legendary ones of old were all slain. It’s a feminist Götterdämmerung of sorts.
You are, nonetheless, a seasoned trollslayer and I take my hat off to you.
@EJ
daw, thank you
@Alan,
There are some great books on the subject – some not so great ones, too. Critical Thinking is often sort of alluded to, and taught in a roundabout way (“Here’s some handy tips, kids!”). I’d like to see it taught rigorously, with a deep investigation of how we think and how human biases come about.
I will look for that book! Another good one is Godel, Escher, Bach. Though, I’m not *finished* yet. Maybe it has a bad ending D:
(I think they die in the end D: )
I can ignore mosquitos and let them bite me instead of swatting them away too. But why would I?
What a shock, you didn’t read or absorb what I was trying to say at all.
Part of that whole coming on to a new site and asking politely for education thing is warning people that English isn’t your primary language and apologizing preemptively in case that causes confusion. That’s common etiquette everywhere on the internet, not just social justice/feminist sites.
Also, we had the sockpuppet of a returning troll, Pell come here once and call us mean because he was French and therefore couldn’t be expected to not come off as a troll. So, claiming English isn’t your first language isn’t going to guilt me as much as you think it will. This too, is a common troll tactic.
If you like. I’d settle for you posing questions politely though. That you think I’m saying I’m expecting to be treated with excessive deference simply because I pointed out that feminist women have damn good reason for reacting in a touchy when requests for education are asked for in a way that can be interpreted as hostile, says something about you.
Well hey, if you don’t like my posts, you can always ignore them. That’s what you expected to do with you after all!
@WWTH
I spent some time at The Mary Sue when they decided to stop promoting Game of Thrones because no one on staff enjoyed the show anymore after the umpteenth r**e scene, so I tend to see red flags pretty readily after that. Maybe that’s good, maybe not. I try to hold off at first in case I’m wrong, but I’m not going to put up with them once they start doubling down and then start flat out attacking people.
French? Seriously?
You’re going to tell us all about your doctorate now, right?
Sadly, I came here after the time of NWO Slave and MRAL. But even the PUA trolls and sad boner trolls and gamergaters are preferable to sealioning.
Fair enough. I’m certainly not trying to command others as to how they should engage with someone. I would just think then when discussing a touchy subject like misogyny, someone in good faith would apologize if they unintentionally offended. Plus there’s the whole thing about him responding to the excerpt on why feminists are rightfully suspicious of men who request education on feminism by completely ignoring it, selectively quoting me, and declare me irritated only because I misunderstood him on the first try.
But you’re being meeeeean! And besides, he didn’t intend to upset us, so he’s totally nice and polite and calm, unlike us hysterical feminsits.
Kupo,
The defensiveness of Game of Thrones fans can be just dismaying. I say that as a Game of Thrones fan.
On a fan site I frequent, there was a piece of an interview in which one of the directors said the controversy has made the showrunners a bit more mindful of how they’ll portray rape in the future. This caused one guy to have a meltdown and threaten to move to Japan. Why Japan? I don’t know. I think he must have been one of those dudes who think all Japanese women are anime characters brought to life. This was the silliest reaction but far from the only one who was so upset by criticism of the show.
It’s actually kind of weird how many MRA types are in the ASOIAF and GoT fandom. George R.R. Martin can be problematic at times, but he’s generally on the side of the “SJWs.”
Well you were directly talking to me, but fine, I will.
Je ne suis pas sur de comprendre le lien, tu m’expliques? C’est si rare, les Francais?
Dear, you’re not doing anything new or unusual. Claiming that English isn’t your first language only after you’ve been handed your ass is a very common troll tactic.
So, come on, let’s hear about that doctorate now.