Something weird is going on.
Yesterday, A Voice for Men’s Facebook page was temporarily suspended. I’m not sure how long it was down, but by the time I discovered Paul Elam’s announcement of the suspension late last night, it had been restored.
Elam — who apparently decided to come out of retirement for the occasion — declared that the suspension
appears to be the work of censorious feminist ideologues working in a modern Facebook environment that favors their agenda.
Mike Buchanan — the head of the UK’s ludicrously unsuccessful Justice for Men & Boys party and a longtime AVFM pal — declared in a comment on AVFM and in a post on his site that the censorious feminist ideologue responsible for this dastardly deed was a woman named Rose S Garston, a self-described “thorn in the side of MRAs” who had taken credit for the suspension in a post on her own Facebook page.
As proof, she posted a screenshot of the note she got from Facebook informing her that her complaint had led to AVFM’s suspension. Garston also took credit for getting the Exposing Feminism Facebook page taken down.
So, case closed then, right? Well, not exactly.
Because “Rose S Garston” does not seem to exist.
True, a Google search of the name shows there was a woman of that name born in 1903 in New Haven, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this almost certainly dead person is not the one posting on Facebook.
The rest of the Google results link to “Garston’s” Facebook page, to several comments “she” made elsewhere using “her” Facebook account, and to and assortment of MRA and Alt-Right sites that picked up Buchanan’s post.
“Garston” scrubbed “her” Facebook page of most of its contents sometime last night, but an archived version of the page — linked to in Buchanan’s post — raises even more red flags.
The page portrays “Garston” as a “fat acceptance” activist as well as a feminist. But to my eyes it doesn’t look like the page of a real feminist or fat acceptance activist. It looks like the work of a troll.
For one thing, there’s the matter of the picture purportedly of Garston that sits atop the page — showing a young woman holding a sign explaining why she supports fat acceptance. I don’t doubt that the person in the photo is a real fat acceptance activist; a Google image search shows that the photo was originally posted two years ago on a Tumblr blog devoted to fat acceptance.
But it’s also appeared on a zillion other pages since then, including a number mocking fat acceptance. It’s on Know Your Meme. It was used in a Youtube video called “The Fat Acceptance Movement is Bullshit.” Internet-famous fat-shamer (and fat person) Matt Forney used it in a post on “Fat Acceptance, Cultural Marxism and Identity Politics.”
It’s literally the first image that shows up if you do a Google image search for “fat acceptance” — making it the obvious pick for a lazy troll looking for a picture of a fat activist to pretend to be.
Then there’s the Facebook post from “Garston” in which “she” sets forth “her” views on the subject.
Stop the fat shaming. Fat is beautiful. Fat is healthy. It is the patriarchy that has dictated women must all be skinny as rakes for the viewing pleasure of men. Fuck that. You want that donut? That chicken burger and fries? That 15inch pizza? Then, go for it. Get it down you. Enjoy 🙂
Word of advice though. Being fat wont stop men catcalling you. At my heaviest I was 717lb and men would still catcall me when I was in my mobility scooter buying groceries.
Really? Really? If this was written by anyone other than a troll, I will eat my cats.
Assuming “Garston” is not the honest-to-goodness feminist fat acceptance activist “she” purports to be, then who is behind the account?
Could it be Elam himself or some other AVFMer trying to gin up some attention and sympathy?
I doubt it. Not that Elam wouldn’t stoop this low. He would. But I don’t think that Elam has the imagination to come up with something like this. And I doubt he would risk getting his Facebook page permanently banned in order to stir up a fake controversy.
No, I suspect it’s the work of someone who doesn’t much like feminism, or fat acceptance, or AVFM.
Could it be the work of some longtime fat-shamer like Forney or Roosh? In addition to using the same picture that Forney used for his post dissing fat acceptance, “Garston” also posted a screenshot from a Dr. Oz show about a 700-pound woman. As you may recall, Roosh made a bit of a spectacle of himself during an appearance on Dr. Oz to discuss his own fat-shaming campaign.
So … maybe? Probably not, though.
Regardless of who did it, if the point of this apparent trollery was to cause a headache for AVFM and to stir up animus towards feminists, well, it’s succeeded at both.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddt, the regulars worked themselves into a self-righteous frenzy over what proved to be a very short-lived suspension.
Someone called NixonForBreadsident got 97 net upvotes for a comment decrying what he saw as
a co-ordinated effort to render anything against feminism on Google, Facebook and other social media. As in they’ve literally had meetings to push this agenda.
This is a major fuckup on their side though, the world has been steadily getting pissed off by feminism and the one thing that unites people is when you censor content.
NOTHING is too big to fall. Remember that.
Our old friend ThePigmanAgain declared that
this is very bad news. The hammer is starting to fall all over the place and one has to wonder how long it will be before the PC fascists who run FB start to ban ordinary members who also happen to be MRAs.
r4ks4k was a bit more succinct, saying only
Well then f**k facebook.
The original comment did not contain the asterisks, of course.
I have no idea how this whole thing is going to shake out.
Your move, troll. I guess?
@PoM
Ah, so you did. Apologies.
I was referring to the morality of the death penalty. I didn’t mean to imply you were trying to change my mind on it, I was just sort of ‘speaking’ out loud. Again, I apologize.
ETA: Thr name of the study is ‘Getting off Death Row: Commuted Sentences and the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment’ for anyone interested.
POM,
I guess I still don’t get it. It looks like it’s just detailed correlation and doesn’t get into causation. And I’m still not seeing anything to suggest that having the death penalty at all is preferable to not having one at all, just that if you have the death penalty you should carry out the sentence.
It annoys me that this stuff is always behind a paywall. Laypeople are sneered at by scientists and academics for getting all their knowledge from lazy scientific reporting from the media, but then they make all their knowledge expensive or time consuming to access, so where else are people supposed to get their information? I think any study that was at all funded by institute that gets public money should be accessible to the public. But that’s another issue.
I’ve got access past the paywall and am finding it rather unconvincing. In particular, it’s got a graph showing executions, overall homicide rate, and homicide rate in states where the death penalty is legal, and both homicide rates do look inversely correlated to the number of executions with the rate consistently higher in states where the death penalty is legal. Also they’re counting commutations twice:
Plus, that’s from 2003; number of executions has fallen drastically since while violent crime rates have continued to decline.
Economic legal theory is similar to other kinds of economic theory, namely that people are rational actors that base their plans on expected outcomes. The definition of an “expected outcome” is the price of that outcome x the probability of obtaining that outcome (as opposed to others). So if you put money into an office pool and there are 20 people in it, with $100 at stake, your expected outcome is 1/20 x $100, or $5. This is the average outcome that you would get per trial if a sufficiently high number of trials took place.
It’s good theory, economically. For instance, large companies absolutely choose to settle vs. insist on a trial on the expected outcome. Large companies experience enough lawsuits that the averaging-out effect is relevant for them. They base their estimates of how much they could reasonably expect to lose, and their likelihood of losing, on data collected from past lawsuits, both their own and those of other, similarly-situated companies. Large companies usually settle because the settlement amount is less than the expected cost of the suit, so averaged over time they are spending less on frequent settlements than they would spend on infrequent but very large jury awards.
So therein lies the whole concept of deterrence. I mean, what does deterrence mean? It means that someone sees another murderer punished for murder, and chooses to avoid that punishment by avoiding the crime.
In economic terms, the idea behind deterrence is that a potential criminal (who is a rational actor in this scenario) will weigh the expected cost (the probability of being caught, convicted, and assigned the death penalty) verses the expected benefit of the murder. This theoretical person is called the “rational criminal” in this field. Increasing the probability of being caught/convicted/assigned the death penalty (or the perceived probability thereof) and the expected cost goes up. If the cost gets high enough, it outweighs the expected benefit, and the crime does not take place.
Obviously there are problems here. Even if we stick entirely within our framework and don’t bring in outside factors like racism, we have the problem that tons of criminals do not behave rationally. Many are teenagers whose brains are not yet fully developed. Others are poor at managing their emotions and they act without thinking things through.
However, even if only a small fraction of potential murderers are rational criminals, that is potentially a small fraction of murders that can be prevented.
You won’t get an argument from me there. Journals have overhead and that overhead needs to be covered, but what they charge, especially the top-quality ones, far exceeds their costs. There’s no justification for it than to keep knowledge from the public.
No, they aren’t. They’re using a variant of economic language, that of marginal returns. They looked at total removals from death row, with each one yielding 1 additional homicide above the base rate. Commutations, when considered alone, resulted in 5 additional homicides above the base rate.
They’re not saying you get 1 additional homicide for the removal and an extra 5 for the fact that it’s a commutation, for a total of 6.
Yeah, it’s really common for people to claim that, because homicide rates are higher in states with the death penalty, that must mean the death penalty isn’t working, but logic alone doesn’t prove that, and I haven’t seen anything to indicate that the causation arrow points that direction. There are other potential reasons that correlation might occur. For instance, the causation arrow might go the opposite direction, with a high murder rate (because of whatever reason) causing a state to implement or retain a death penalty. It might also be a spurious correlation, with both things caused by one or more other factors. Maybe states that have a cultural disregard for the value of human life (because of whatever reason) both view the death penalty as OK, and generate a populace that is more likely to commit murder due to that disregard.
That doesn’t rule out the possibility that even fewer murders would have taken place if executions had been carried out. Also: this isn’t concerned with the “violent crime rate” as a whole. Crimes other than homicide weren’t found to be affected.
Freemage –
“The action itself was still dangerously risky, and could’ve easily destroyed her, which is why we have statutory rape laws in the first place. And I agree with those who say he changed, having realized he did get lucky and how close he came to triggering a real tragedy.”
It sounds like it DID trigger a real tragedy, though, because it triggered her “relationship” (captivity) with Jimmy Paige, who (according to Maddox) basically sent for her the day after Bowie raped her because he’d heard about it and considered her exploitable.
Thanks for explaining further. I’ve got to say that it sounds like they’re making quite a few assumptions. As you said, that the criminals are rational and also it sounds it like it’s assuming a potential murderer knows about it when a death sentence is commuted. I suppose I could see a rational criminal with prior knowledge of commuted death penalties acting accordingly though. Overall, it’s definitely not enough to convince me that the death penalty is a net good. Not that you’re trying to convince us of that or anything 🙂
What it implies is that executions do not appear to have any impact on the murder rate. If they did, it would be expected that executions would only cause the murder rate to fall in states where the death penalty was a factor. Which would manifest as the murder rate falling noticeably faster in those states rather than at approximately the same rate as the average. The correlation appears spurious.
People usually don’t hear about commuted sentences, but they hear about executions quite a lot. That would have the same effect.
And the effect is pretty small. 5 murders? That’s not nothing – that’s a hell of a lot different from nothing for the victims – but it’s 5 out of thousands of murders every year. In 2012, the most recent year for which I can find data, there were 14,827 murders in the US. That’s almost 15,000 murders that were not deterred by anything.
No. My whole objective is to make sure that folks know the literature and are prepared for it if someone brings up this topic. We know that MRAs operate fact-free, and I want WHTM to work differently.
What you’re saying is the equivalent of “I have an umbrella but I’m getting wet anyway. Some other person threw their umbrella away and they are dry. So umbrellas are clearly useless.” This ignores numerous scenarios in which your umbrella is working fine and that you would be a hell of a lot more wet if you threw it away. Maybe the other person is sitting under an awning, or in a different area where it is not raining. Maybe you’re getting upsplash from the pavement. You being more wet with an umbrella than someone else is without one is not proof that umbrellas don’t work because there is no reason to think that the two situations are exactly identical.
Let me repeat myself:
Logic alone doesn’t prove that, and I haven’t seen anything to indicate that the causation arrow points that direction. There are other potential reasons that correlation might occur. For instance, the causation arrow might go the opposite direction, with a high murder rate (because of whatever reason) causing a state to implement or retain a death penalty. It might also be a spurious correlation, with both things caused by one or more other factors. Maybe states that have a cultural disregard for the value of human life (because of whatever reason) both view the death penalty as OK, and generate a populace that is more likely to commit murder due to that disregard.
Re: deterrence
It’s quite a while since I did ‘penal policy’ so things might have changed in the meantime; but all the stuff we looked at suggested that whilst deterrence was a factor on ‘acquisitive crime’ it had little effect on sexual and violent offending.
Some studies looked at sentencing, but the key ones were based on situations where law enforcement had been suspended for various reasons (withdrawal of police, breakdown of civil government etc).
In those cases things like theft shot up but the number of murders and assaults stayed pretty constant. The theory was that in the case of assaults rationality isn’t really an issue. Most assaults/murders are spontaneous and driven by things like anger or rage. People will commit violence even if the police are present, whereas thieves will be deterred at even the thought of police presence (just putting up pictures of the police can bring thefts down)
As to sentencing for rational criminals it seems that fear of detection and capture is more of a factor than severity of sentence. Very few people have an accurate understanding of likely sentence anyway.
That of course is about deterrence generally rather than the death penalty specifically. It does seem to be borne out by the UK experience though. The abolition of the death penalty had no measurable effect on the murder rate here.
No, they don’t. Journal publishers do. Scientists and academics want their work to have the widest possible visibility. They do not profit in the least from it being behind paywalls – they do not, indeed, get paid by any reputable journals I’m aware of for publishing in them. They get kudos for publishing in good journals – where “good” means “journals where high-quality work is published” – and that helps them in their careers; but they are, largely, “captives” of those journals with good reputations – if you don’t publish in those journals, your career suffers. There are, in fact an increasing number of open-access journals, and places like arxiv where “preprints” are made available – but most open access journals charge the academic or their institution to publish their work, and many journals refuse to accept papers that have been made available in advance for free, and insist on the authors transferring copyright to the journal.
@Alan Yeah, I don’t think murder and sex crimes are deterred by the severity of the sentence. With sex crimes there’s usually a pattern of behavior starting in adolescence that people seem to act on regardless of how severe the penalties are. Sex offender treatment is based on the idea that you can’t really change desires but you can make motivated people averse to acting out. I’d guess people need more motivation than not wanting to be punished.
Any brain scientist-types in the house (not picky – neurology, psychiatry, whateves) who know if there’ve been studies on lizard brain impulse control issues vs old mammal brain impulse control issues?
In asking, I’m assuming that explosive anger = cerebellum (mostly based on the fact that a half-assed Bing search [don’t judge – I’m playing into their desperation and getting points for stuff] turned up that damage to it results in marked increases in irritability and impulsivity…at least according to the abstracts ;p ) and that the acquisitional crimes (or at least their germ) = more of a limbic system thing.
From way back (*waves to high school human anatomy and physiology course taken* -soft sobbing- *nearly 20 years ago*), I remember that cerebrum / frontal lobe damage can do a number on impulse control, but I was wondering why (neurologically) there’d be a variation in a population (or, hell, person) in the efficacy of the threat of punishment (that is, in the ability of a subject or subjects to exhibit impulse control) for different types of action.
Impulse control is just one out of several things that might go wrong. Murderers often don’t have a particularly high level of frustration or anger. They’ve let go of the “breaks” that keep most people from acting out in that way. Fear of punishment and impulse control are only two “breaks.” There’s also morality, shame and guilt, not wanting to disappoint your family, etc.
@ history nerd et al
This is from a UK perspective obviously but generally over here most murders are pretty spontaneous.
In fact, in the UK, in 60% of murders it’s the murderer who calls the police.
I could see there being a slight increase in murders due to prisoners not being executed for the simple reason that, if they’re not being kept in solitary confinement, there’s someone who has been convicted of a very serious offence in prison instead of in the ground. So there’s a higher chance of them murdering a fellow prisoner or them being murdered by another prisoner.
Regardless of whether or not there is a significant deterrent effect, I really don’t agree with the death penalty. There are enough innocent people who are executed to give me pause, not to mention the racial issues facing the USA prison system.
Leaving aside that, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty says that the annual costs of the present death penalty system in the states is about $137 million per year. (Costs of the present system with reforms recommended by the Commission to ensure a fair process would be $232.7 million per year.)
Alternatively, the cost of a system which imposes a maximum penalty of lifetime incarceration instead of the death penalty would be $11.5 million per year. That’s $125.5 million dollars of difference, on the conservative side of things. The cost of a human life, according to a couple sources, like the environmental protection agency and the department of transportation, is estimated to be between $6-9.1 million. Rounding up to 10 million, that’s the value of 12.5 human lives, which is more than double the 5 murders that are deterred by this measure. Funnelling the budget from the death penalty system into healthcare, welfare, safety standards or infrastructure would be far more likely to prevent loss of human life than the deterrent effect of the death penalty, from a purely economic perspective.
Catalpa: Yes, but that would help the… *drop voice to whisper, furtive look around* undeserving poor, and we can’t have that, now can we? [Switch off GOP mode]
PoM’s analysis of the study seems to indicate that the deterrent effect is best in a Cardassian-style legal system:
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Cardassian_Articles_of_Jurisprudence
These ‘AARG! We’re being Censored!!’ things by MRAs are starting to become really repetitive. However, I imagine that there’s more to this fledgling saga yet…
@paradoxical intentions
what annoys me about people who complain about trigger warnings is that if you’re dealing with a work that needs the trigger warnings is that you kind of need to acknowledge the thing in that work that would make it necessary for it to have a trigger warning. I’ve been in an English classes where we were reading works that dealt with sexism and rape and racism and other societal issues and in the classes were the teacher didn’t acknowledge that the book was about difficult subject, the discussion was so much more awkward than in the classes that did. Also, there’s a lot of literature where the author’s purpose is to express what it’s like to experience something awful so not acknowledging the author’s purpose in writing is misguided, to put it mildly, or are works like Huckleberry Finn where there’s controversy around it that you can’t just ignore
@Alan Robertshaw
I agree. I feel like when people say victims should forgive, (at least most of the time) it’s not because they think the victim would benefit from forgiveness but because they don’t want to deal with the issue and if the victim forgives the perpetrator then they don’t have to deal with the issue and when you’re dealing with a situation where the perpetrator might go on to victimize someone else, even if the victim has forgiven them, the general public doesn’t because I think society has a responsibility to ensure public safety that the victim doesn’t.
Overall, I feel like people rush to assume that an abuser has changed because it means that they don’t have to deal with the issue so I’m suspicious when people go “yeah but they changed” because I’ve heard that so many times when the person hadn’t actually changed, it was just easier for the third party person to assume that they had changed. As someone who has been abused, when I hear “but they changed” it usually means the person saying that is denying/excusing what happened (it means that they are basically saying that they don’t care about what happened to me and can’t pay me the courtesy of being honest) so when people say that about celebrities it just annoys me