Good news everyone! “The Red Pill,” Cassie Jaye‘s long-promised documentary about A Voice for Men that was partly funded by people involved with AVFM and also to a much greater degree by Milo Yiannopoulos fans who want to stick it to feminism, will soon be hitting theaters!
Well, two theaters, in October.
CHECKMATE, FEMINISM!!!1!
The feeling of excitement is palpable at the We Hunted the Mammoth headquarters, though admittedly all of it involves one small cat who for some reason likes to RUN AROUND THE APARTMENT AT BREAKNECK SPEEDS after she poops, and none of it (the excitement, not the poop) involves the A Voice for Men Promo Reel Red Pill documentary at all.
But I can only imagine how excited the general public will be about the film. I mean who wouldn’t be THRILLED by the prospect of seeing a film centered around footage of a three-year-old total failure of a men’s rights rally that seems to have involved a little more than thirty people, with maybe half of them being rally organizers and other AVFM “staffers.”
FUN FACT: In the three years since that “historic” RALLY OF THE CENTURY most of the better-known AVFMers at the rally have ceased to be AVFMers. They quit the band, in other words, and are now pursuing highly unsuccessful solo careers.
In case you can’t read my SUPER LEGIBLE pic above with all the red text on it, here are the highlights, going from left to right, with some helpful links to posts of mine on them.
Nick Reading of Men’s Rights Edmonton … seems to have nothing to do with AVFM any more. I don’t know the details.
Dean Esmay quit AVFM, for reasons that are still unclear, and since then has kept quite busy on Twitter and on YouTube, calling women the c-word; calling feminist women of color “Aunt Jemimahs” [sic]; threatening to literally spit in the faces of some of his MGTOW enemies, and offering helpful gardening tips.
Paul Elam, seen in the pic modeling a very fashionable “I Heart FTSU [F*cking Their Sh*t Up]” t-shirt, just up and quit the men’s rights movement, stepping down as AVFM’s publisher (sort of ) and declaring himself a “former MRA” (kind of). He moved on to his next moneymaking venture, A Near For Men — sorry, An Ear for Men — which involves charging dudes $90 an hour to talk to him on Skype. No, really. His Ear for Men videos and posts, which all seem to end up on AVFM, are pretty much the same sort of crap he used to post there.
And then there’s Attila Vinczer. Hoo boy. Vinczer, formerly AVFM’s “Activism Director,” quit the site in a huff, sending fellow MRAs what I described at the time as “a bitter 8-page ‘Dear Paul’ letter full of accusations and invective and enough self-pity to fill a conference hall.” Then, logging back into his old “editor” account on AVFM, he posted a 4600-word screed attacking Elam, on Elam’s own site. It was deleted, but not before someone — who might have been me, I don’t remember — archived it!
Good times.
Actually, if the Red Pill film gets into this stuff, it might end up being worth watching.
If not, well, it should be a very exciting documentary about people who don’t actually do anything about the problems they claim are all-important, and then give up because activism is hard even if you don’t actually engage in anything that could really be called activism.
Over on AVFM, though, the locals are feeling pretty chuffed.
MGTOW-man has high hopes for the film and some thoughts about my underpants.
For most of my life I have wondered why can’t just one person, or one group, or one voice in mainstream television/communications with the real truth to tell make it into the big mainstream discussion to blurt out the lies being told? Why is it that every single time those speaking never are one of “us” who have nothing but truth to tell?
I hope this movie changes this. No wonder Futrell nearly soiled his undies. He knows the feminist bullies may have just shyt and fell in it …with it finally being in plain sight for the larger population to see.
Ray24, leaning heavily on the Milo Yiannopoulos catchphrase “Feminism is Cancer,” has more measured expecations.
[C]ancer has proven difficult to cure and I have my doubts that the societal cancer of radical feminism will be any easier to get rid of. Still, we have to keep working to find cures for killer diseases like cancer and feminism. I wonder which has caused the most pain & suffering & death, cancer or feminism? :-/
Shrek6 is a bit more confident about the feminism-slaying capabilities of the as-yet-unseen documentary:
I bet the bitches or was that ‘witches?’ Nevertheless, the bitches of East-wick, will do all they can to disrupt the public viewing of this movie.
Seriously though. If this movie is 100% balanced, level, fair and dinky die honest smack down the middle, it will still be a mortal blow to feminism.
On the Men’s Rights subreddit, the reaction has been a bit more mixed, but some of the regulars have given themselves permission to dream big.
Imnotmrabut thinks the film could have a big impact on the presidential election — and beyond!
I’m sure that it’s release prior to November will Stir up quite a set of questions for All Presidential candidates, in the media and leave many voters wondering about new questions.
It will also act as a Thorn in the next US president’s side for their first term, and I’m sure it will be delightfully painful for all in politics. Why worry abut just an election when you can have 4 years of the best show in town and some real ass kicking all for free!
EricAllonde, meanwhile, is looking forward to what he sees as the inevitable FEMINIST RIOTS.
If you remember the feminist riots on campus that we saw for people like Warren Farrell, Milo or even Christina Hoff Sommers – the level of violence by feminists trying to block a screening of this film would be multiple times greater. That would provide fantastic publicity for the film.
Note to anyone thinking about maybe blocking a screening of the film, please don’t. It would provide fantastic publicity for the film.
I, in turn, will do my best to ignore the film. After all, there are more important things to focus on between now and November. We have a Trump to beat.
H/T — r/againstmensrights
@Catalpa
“I suppose CPS should just magically KNOW when the kid is in actual medical danger and only interfere then.”
That would be why it’s so important to get these kids into public school, so they can be monitored by teachers.
What, exactly, is your solution? Should religions with controversial beliefs be barred from having children? Should they behave in ways that they believe endanger their children’s souls? Should doctors be looked to as the experts on the immortal soul?
Or, let’s take religion completely out of this. Should parents be allowed to disagree with their children’s doctors at all? If so, when?
@Axe, I see I missed you. I’ll get to you after/if Catalpa responds, as my answers to both of you will likely be related.
This is what I get for taking Mrex off my mental block list for five minutes.
Well, that is a good point, but I was referring specifically to being pagan, in comparison to the idea of religious persecution. Which does smack of Oppression Olympics, but I think this gets a pass for how pants-on-head nonsense the idea of “I can’t put my children in danger of easily preventable diseases! But my religion says it’s okay!”
Who said she didn’t? I was mentioning her because her fetus can’t get vaccinated. A fetus can get sick while still in the womb, and it’s the reason we don’t vaccinate people while pregnant.
I never said “send sick kids to school”, nor suggested that you did. I said that if a child isn’t vaccinated, there’s also a chance that they could be carrying a disease that has a non-zero chance of infecting even the vaccinated kids, or a greater chance of infecting the other non-vaccinated kids.
And even if the chances are very, very low, why should we even allow a very, very low chance? Why take a gamble with people’s lives, even if it’s a very, very low one, and we have a very simple, easy way of preventing it?
Source on the CDC stuff, please.
And that’s just from a one-time contact. In schools, these kids are going to be in contact with other people for about eight hours a day, five days a week, for a majority of the year. Far more chances for spreading a disease than a day or two trip to Disneyland.
Good thing I already did that then, isn’t it? And it’s a good thing I’m encouraging other people to do it as well, and it’s a good thing I never said that we only need to vaccinate school children and was simply discussing that because it was one particular area of concern and related back to a previous comment I made about California’s new vaccination law. And it’s a good thing that happened to be the topic of discussion.
Nice assumptions you have there.
Then why the fuck are you waiting for one? Or, better yet, what prompted you to even say this? What the fuck made you think that this was appropriate to say, if I’m not an asshole who would make xenophobic rants?
If the kid isn’t at risk to infect others, sure. People who bring their kid with congenital problems to faith healers shouldn’t be banned from sending their kid to public school, that would be frigging stupid. There’s no risk to anyone else, and it would only be helpful for the child.
(Of course, most of the extreme religions I’ve come across do homeschooling anyway, because it’s a better way to isolate their children from any other influences, so this point is a bit moot.)
If “protecting their children’s immortal souls” means abusing or neglecting them? Yes, they should be banned from doing that. There are plenty of religious people who send their LGBT children to conversion camps or subject them to other inhumane treatment in order to “fix them” and “save their souls” and it’s FUCKING WRONG.
If someone demonstrates a belief that makes them likely to deny their children’s basic needs of food, shelter, safety, and medical attention, then they should at the very least be monitored regularily to make sure that they are not doing that, whether or not the belief is religious.
When the risk of serious harm from ignoring the doctor is negligible, or when the treatment suggested carries significant risks and other options are available to consider.
Well, you know, better your child be unhealthy, slowly dying of a disease that could have been caught earlier, and/or than full of chemicals or autistic, like their god(s) intended, I guess.
And about “negotiable risks”:
I brought this up before and I’ll bring it up again: We don’t have polio in the US any more because of vaccines. Literally we eradicated that shit in a few decades.
Now that people aren’t vaccinating as much as they should, we’ve got several preventable diseases increasing in outbreak sizes. Literally the less people vaccinate, the more people get sick.
Now tell me, why should any chance of sickness and/or death be negotiable when we can literally obliterate the chance of getting sick or dying at all with vaccines?
I’m back here kinda late after the thread blowed up, but…
@Fruitloopsie:
And @Kat:
Thanks! For a few months there, I was definitely on pins and needles. I had the lesion (not even a lump, just a speck of microcalcification) out in July. And thanking the Powers That Be that I live in Ontario, where public health insurance covers the tests and treatments, rather than right across the lake, where Aetna is throwing shitfits at not being allowed to gobble up even MORE money. If MRAsshats want to compare something to cancer, a lack of coherent public healthcare would certainly come close.
From Catalpa’s helpful links:
When I was a kid, a friend of mine was in an accident. If she’d been given a blood transfusion, she would’ve been up and running the next day, but her parents were Jehova’s Witnesses and refused it. She died an hour later.
Can I request a banhammering for Mrex? I don’t think she’s ever posted anything worthwhile – mostly endless whining about how much she hated parenting her kids – and I have zero tolerance for FUCKING CHILD MURDER APOLOGISTS.
@AsAboveSoBelow:
Thanks! Best part is, I had a good-looking surgeon, and a very competent lady anesthetist. MISAAAANDRY!!!
And yeah. There’s bound to be a lot of good evolutionary explanations for the kitty-post-poop wildings. Dating back to when they all were wild things, no doubt.
Although it’s my unhumble opinion that we didn’t domesticate cats, but rather the other way around. At least that’s the impression I get, judging by the way my kitty has me trained. Just the smallest, most pitiful “mwowwww” out of her gets me hopping!
@theseventhguest:
All of the above, plus the fact that women feel confident enough to talk with their doctors, instead of cowering in shame and denial over a disease that threatens to “rob them of their femininity”, as they used to do in the Bad Old Days, when “female” cancers (breast, uterine, ovarian, cervical) were barely whispered about, and considered something of a scandal or an aspersion on a woman’s character.
And the fact that more women ARE doctors now, which makes a huge difference too in terms of patient confidence. My primary-care physician is a woman, for instance…as is the one who performed my first manual pelvic exam, when I was 14. All those things have had a huge positive impact on my own ability to confidently navigate my own health care.
All in all, I’d say that feminism (in medicine and in general) has SAVED lives. Women’s lives, in particular. No wonder MRAsshats hate it.
@mrex
What a bunch of utterly dishonest questions. Denying life saving medical attention to someone under your care is not legal, regardless of one’s excuse for doing it. The addition of religious beliefs to the equation doesn’t make a difference. It’d be like advocating for anti-trans bathroom bills on the grounds that you’re concerned about assault: assault is already illegal. There’s no reason for bathroom bills other than to persecute trans people and there’s no reason for you to frame it this way unless you’re trying to insinuate that people here are motivated by similar desires.
With regard to disagreeing with doctors: as a defense of neglect charges, caretakers should be required to show that they have a scientific basis for their disagreement.
If I, hypothetically, believed with absolute, genuine sincerity and conviction that vaccinations were to be condemned and avoided on political grounds I wouldn’t get an exemption from getting my kids vaccinated. If I believed with absolute sincerity and conviction that vaccinations were contributing to the loss of my cultural heritage, I wouldn’t get an exemption from getting my kids vaccinated. So why on earth should I get an exemption on religious grounds? It makes no sense to me.
Politically, culturally and religiously we are,, quite rightly, free to think what we like and to engage in any behaviour we like within the law, including putting ourselves at risk and potentially harming ourselves. We are not necessarily entitled to break the law, or to put others at risk or harm others.
I guess I don’t really get why there are religious exemptions from vaccination :-\ (mind you, I also think that parents should never be allowed to subject their children to body modifications that are not medically required, and therefore that only when people reach whatever is the agreed age of adulthood in their society (such as, when they can vote/drive/etc.) can they then decide for themselves whether or not they want pierced ears, genital modification or tattoos etc.)
OH wow, this thread seems to have wandered into antivax land, something I care very much about.
I was taking notes on specific things I wanted to reply to specific people about, but I’m late to the thread, and the last time I tried to do that, the result was a massive wall of text that left some people thinking I was ignoring them, and others thinking I held positions I don’t actually support, so I’ll not reply to anyone specifically for now.
Also, you all seem to be doing a wonderful job discussing the specifics. I’m not sure if mrex is a weak antivaxxer or simply over impressed with religious freedom. I really don’t. However, someone mentioned Jehova’s Wittnesses, and we do permit them to refuse transfusions on religious grounds, even if it t is the only way to save their life (I saw a patient just like that on Hospice two weeks ago). The difference is, in that case, it is only the patient at risk. By not vaccinating a child, the entire community is at risk. Even the mmr vaccine requires a 90% vaccination rate to protect those who cannot be vaccinated.
I do have a few things to add to the overall discussion.
1) the cdc now recommends that adults over the age of 60 receive the TDaP vaccine (tetanus, diphtheria, and acellular pertussis) instead of just the tetanus booster. The reason for that is that pertussis (otherwise known as ‘whooping cough’) has started to crop up again, and the elderly are much more vulnerable for this particular bug. Also, the ‘acellular’ part of ‘acellular pertussis’ means that the pertussis vaccine loses effectiveness after about fifty years or so.
2) in case anyone runs into people arguing, ‘but vaccines don’t work’, I would like to point out that we have had to start giving a new vaccine to the elderly for pneumonia. Why? Because the strains covered by the older vaccine are no longer the most prevalent strains. Most likely, that’s because we’ve been vaccinating against them for the past 20 years. These things work.
3) Measels was eradicated in the US in the 1990’s. Now it’s back. If I believed in Hell, I would believe it holds a special place for Andrew Wakefield.
4) fun historical note: I’ve read that at Valley Forge, General George Washington forced all of his soldiers to get the smallpox innoculation. Although that innoculation killed something like 1/100 people who got it, the fact that the remainder were immune to smallpox gave the continental army a huge advantage when they faced the Hessians. If anyone reading this who is an actual historian would fact-check me, that would be great. But if it’s true, it’s a quite persuasive story.
Finally, the man who developed the MMR vaccine grew up just outside Billings, Montana. He’s still celebrated as a local hero.
My apologies if this ran on a bit.
One last post so I can click, ‘notify me of follow up comments by email’. Frack ADHD.
@mrex
If you push your kids into the road every day, like you say you do, with a 0.3% chance of getting hit by a bus, your kids will be dead within a year. But I guess that’s fine, since your “controversial beliefs” are more important than a child’s life.
@IP amen, I say again, amen.
The mind boggling thing is, when similar situations show up in healthcare in the states, such as when a child is denied a lifesaving blood transfusion because of the parents beliefs, or when parents refuse to vaccinate, it almost always winds up in the courts.
Sorry, this is from a while back now, but everyone covered everything I’d say about anti-vaxxers as well as I could, I think. The most important point being, to me, that the more people refuse to vaccinate their kids, the higher the chance of people getting, say, measles is; even if the rate is 0.3% now, that number goes up with each child who isn’t vaccinated.
Anyway.
Ohlmann:
I like to go for the direct quote from Tim Minchin (or maybe he’s quoting someone else, it’s possible):
“Do you know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work?
“Medicine.”
It’s from a short animated movie/comedic beat poem of his, “Storm”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U
It’s also very atheist and anti-supernatural as well as anti-alternative medicine, though, for anyone that bothers.
Technically the 0.3% was only the chance of dying from measles once it was already contracted. Because apparently death is the only factor that matters when it comes to health. If the child is only suffering, or is going to be permanently affected by a weakened immune system or other consequences of the disease, then it doesn’t matter and people shouldn’t interfere because all parents know their children’s bodies best. /Sarcasm
On the topic of herbal remedies vs. medicine, it’s not true that all herbal remedies which have been proven to work are called drugs. Perhaps the active ingredient can be extracted and sold as a drug, but sometimes the plant form is more pleasant although probably more variable. If I eat pineapple for its anti-inflammatory properties it still works even if pineapple isn’t classified as a drug or regulated by the FDA.
@Kupo: Well, that’s part of why I prefer the “What do you call alternative medicine that’s been proven to work? Medicine” formulation of the idea. Nobody (well, nobody we’d consider to be rational participants in this discussion) would argue that it’s not perfectly valid medical advice for a doctor to suggest I eat more vegetables and fewer fried foods, for example. Whereas “alternative medicine” is literally, even with its very name, setting itself up in opposition to “Westernized”, empiricism-based medicine.
Although since I didn’t use the word “drug”, I guess you may have intended it to be obvious that you weren’t replying to me. 😛
I’d argue that once there are enough rigorous scientific studies that prove the anti-inflammatory effects of pineapple, then it IS included inside “mainstream medicine”. My Melatonin has the “Has not been evaluated by the FDA” notice on the bottle, but both my psychiatrist and my primary care physician recommended it, and neither classed it as “alternative medicine”. Nor has any doctor of mine suggested that ingesting ginger is a medically unsound way of dealing with mild nausea.
Also, does anyone else find their computer crashing constantly when on We Hunted the Mammoth? It’s a huge reason I don’t post very much– it constantly crashes when I’m trying to post (I had to write this in a word processor and copy/paste and even the copy/paste has taken several tries).
@Catalpa: Whoops, missed that bit! But yeah, three in a thousand children dying from something 100% preventable is still deeply horrible.
@Anisky
It might be the graphic overload (or whatever technical term). Depending on your device, there should be a plug in/add on/I’m no good with computers that lets you stop gifs from cycling unless you want em to. Just an example. Look around and see
@Anisky: thank you. You reply was exactly what I was thinking, and phrased appropriately.
People have this image of ‘Western Medicine’ as something that is static and resistant to change, and I’m sure that there are many physicians long out of training who are resistant to new ideas. However, modern medicine is science-based, and we do change our practice habits in response to new data. There was a saying going around when I was in medical school: ‘in ten year, half of what we teach you here will be proven false. Unfortunately, we have no idea which half’. There is significant truth to this, in that medicine is always changing. That is why physician are required to pursue CME (which has its own flaws, which I’m willing to discuss more if anyone is interested).
Some examples:
Cranberry juice for urinary tract infection: now well validated, and I advise it to all of my patients with recurrent UTI’s. However, you have to drink the unsweetened stuff: most of the ‘cranberry juice’ in the supermarket has enough sugar in it to rot your teeth, and the bacteria that cause urine infections love that sugar.
Tai Chi: We’ve had data for several years that Tai Chi is excellent for fall prevention in the elderly, and there was a recent study showing tai chi is ‘non-inferior’ to routine physical therapy for management of degenerative arthritis of the knees.
Antioxidants: Someone mentioned on a prior thread that antioxidants were once considered ‘alternative medicine’. It’s a notion that floored me, as I was taught about these as part of nutritional science and biochemistry in my first year of medical school.
@Kupo: I differ from many other physicians regarding ‘herbal’ remedies: I don’t mind if my patients take these things, but I want to know what they’re taking.
There was another saying in medical school: ‘if it works, it has side effects’. Any treatment that has a real effect alters a patient’s physiology, and anything that alters a person’s physiology can do so in unanticipated ways. While pineapple probably won’t hurt you (although it is acidic, so I’d minimize intake if you have issues with stomach ulcers or heartburn), a lot of these ‘herbal’ medications come with their own list of side effects. Because of the overall poor research supporting many of these (people marketing herbal meds generally have far less research funding than the pharmaceutical companies, and the FDA requires far less study of ‘supplements’ than ‘drugs’), many of these side effects are not found out until long after they hit the market.
Also, many herbal meds, such as St. John’s Wort and grapefruit juice, interact with many of the medications we give patients, and can either make them ineffective, or make them more likely to cause side effects of their own.
tl/dr: Herbal medications are, in fact, medications (at least, the ones that work are). They are generally less well studied than the rigorous process pharmaceutical medications are put through, but the ones with real effects are just as likely to have side effects as anything else. They should be treated with caution and respect, and a persons physician needs to know what herbal medications they are taking to minimize the potential for harm.
^ Do vitamin supplements count as medication? /curious
@catalpa: yes they do, and thank you for asking! You’d be amazed how many people forget to tell their doctor about that vitamin K containing multivitamin they’re taking when the doc tries to start them on Coumadin, and then gets frustrated that the Coumadin is taking forever to reach a therapeutic level.
I got my undergraduate degree in biochemistry, so I could say a great deal more on the subject, but I met my wall of text limit for the day in another thread :). Is there anything in particular you wanted to know about?