You may remember Aaron Clarey — also known as “Captain Capitalism” — as one of the random manospherians interviewed for the cinematic abomination known as The Sarkeesian Effect. I don’t quite remember if he made it into the final cut of the official, er, “film.” He definitely did appear in Davis Aurini’s bootleg version, pontificating about the alleged lack of ethics in American journalism while, for some unknown reason, wearing a cravat.
Turns out that Mr. Clarey’s definition of “ethics” is a rather unique one.
On Monday, Clarey encouraged his blog readers to take advantage of a unique opportunity to earn some sweet, sweet cash — helping students cheat their way through college by writing their essays and term papers for them.
Clarey posted a pitch from his apparent pal Aleksey Bashtavenko, the head of something called Academic Composition, who started off by thanking Clarey for sending so many aspiring , er, ghostwriters his way in the past.
I’d like to personally thank Aaron and all of you who follow his blog Captain Capitalism, you guys have been the main driving force behind the recent growth of our enterprise.
After a slow summer, “Alex” reported,
we’re definitely getting much busier and this may well be our most lucrative semester yet.
Quite a few people have inquired about job opportunities with us and we weren’t able to receive help from all of you. Yet, we could definitely use all of the support we can get. Within a month, we will be entering the busiest juncture of the academic year and it will last all the way through the end of 2016.
As you can see, he’s all about the high-quality prose.
Alex, who claims his “full-time writers earn over $3,000 per month,” also has some job openings in the Craigslist spamming “subcontracting” department as well.
We’re also looking to expand our ranks of Craigslist subcontractors. Many of you have been posting for us regularly and invariably, this helped us get to where we are today. We pay $5 for each lead our subcontractors generate and another $1 for each day your ads have been live.
Presumably Clarey is getting paid for posting this. Is there anyone in the manosphere who isn’t some kind of grifter?
@Scildfreja
(sorry for the delayed response; I got an important phone call midways, and I ended up having to make some myself).
They don’t have a secret HQ or anything, and they don’t walk around with the word “leftist” stamped on their heads. They’re highly disorganized when they’re not mobile, but when they find a cause to mobilize against, you can’t miss them. This level of leaderless organization alternating with disorganization is one of their greatest strengths, and that’s what makes them so hard to recognize; they’re like Whack-a-Mole’s in that regard.
They infiltrate society and places of authority from the lowest levels up to the highest. They cloak themselves in the language of fairness and democracy in order to impose their rules on others; like most totalitarians, they use the strength of democracy against itself in order to subvert it. As it currently stands, one cannot express certain attitudes that they find displeasing without them exposing the person to the world via the internet and costing them their job (but don’t do it to them! Je Suis Allison Rapp!!!) or something else. They use the power of government to tell people what they ought to think in regards to society, and any opinions that differ are labeled “problematic.” When they aren’t busy telling others what to think and whether or not they can eat trans fats, they’re busy shaking down major corporations and bullying them with their endless campaigns to bring about egalitarianism in video games and other forms of media.
@wwth
I took a bite out of a lot bad Mammotheers; you’re all so full of shit, anyone could spend the next few days isolated on a toilet.
Good lord. Nothing like arguing on the internet with anonymous randos…
@Sinkable
Oh shoot I forgot about that golden “penis power” line. Thank you for the compliment.
@Scildfreja
Nah, you’re the better poet, you managed to create an entirely new poem from a math equation limerick.
@Aunt Podger
Thank you for that, it’s always nice to see a new face around here.
@Mig
They live in shadows
to control corporations
How is that bad thing?
Isn’t this just, “My boss fired me just for saying [N-word]. How was I supposed to know that the [N-word] I was talking to was our biggest customer?”
That’s not a new development; people have been getting fired over stuff like that for decades and we-as-a-society are mostly OK with it. The Internet has made things a bit trickier – it blurs the line between public and private conversations – but I don’t see it as a huge problem.
Trans fats are a severe health risk, and safe alternatives exist. Most of the major food manufactures in the US had already started phasing out trans fats before local governments started banning them. Protecting the public health is generally understood to be one of the functions of a modern government.
Anyway, it sounds like you’re looking for a society where you can shout [N-word] at will and eat as much poison as you want? The US might not be a good fit for you. Have you looked at North Korea?
@Nequam
You probably think you’re being clever by showing us those pictures taken of you at a sex party, right?
Miggy, that’s some lovely overblown rhetoric, but can you actually name a specific person who specifically can be tied to the SJ movement, who has done something specifically oppressive?
Why don’t you say what you mean? “Anita Sarkeesian makes videos that make me feel defensive, and I think being made to feel defensive is the same thing as being oppressed.”
So-called SJWs writing think pieces and making video series may hurt your tender little feelings, but that doesn’t make them authoritarian. What authority do you think Anita Sarkeesian has, exactly?
What scares you down to your little neocon boots is that people are reading these thinkpieces and watching these videos, and they are agreeing or at least being intrigued by these ideas. And since these ideas scare you, these people scare you, and you work up some grand conspiracy theory in your head to explain why they are doing something deeply evil just by talking about ideas you don’t like.
Anita Sarkeesian doesn’t run the government, kiddo. She just makes videos. And enough people liked her videos and wanted to support what she does that she collected over $100,000 in willing donations from fans. That’s what scares you.
Free speech is a bitch, huh?
@Mig
No problem! Sorry for assuming.
So that I understand your position I will reiterate it. You don’t see “leftists” as having an organized cabal, but operating more like independent ‘cells’. They are organized, but the organization is diffuse. I imagine the ‘leaders’ you would see as noteworthy liberal politicians and whatnot, with communication flowing downwards informally? With these ‘cells’ they acquire power and, through these informal chains, each group does its best to push the overall ‘leftist’ goals, thought these goals are much like the organization, diffuse and varied.
Do I have this right? Correct me if I’m missing an important part. I have a reply / question, but I want to be sure I have your position properly first.
@Mig
Left-wing
Timeless, faceless, formless,
Nameless, ageless, countless,
Boundless, dauntless, cureless.
@Ktoryx
– This little miggy
Reading comprehension is a bitch, isn’t it?
@Scildfreja
It’s a back-and-forth thing really, the true believers send it up and the politicians execute their will. Leftist politicians are very populist, though the right wing has been copying some of their methods since the days of the French Revolution. The leaders are probably more closely aligned with academia and union bosses than with formal politics, but leftists enter politics in order to further consolidate their power. Mainstream leftists absorb all the various also-rans of society and use them as props in their quest for dominance.
@Miggy
Anita Sarkeesian was a rhetorical stand-in, little one. You could substitute any number of manufactured bogeymen and the question would still be the same: Can you name a specific incident that they’ve done that is oh-so-oppressive BEYOND just writing stuff you don’t like and having people agree with them? And can that supposedly oppressive act be backed up by actual evidence and not just red-line diagrams you found on twitter?
I mean.. you’ve bloviated an awful lot there, sport, but you haven’t mentioned anything concrete. You can… you can name an actual person who has committed these vague crimes you allude to, can’t you?
Union bosses? What decade is Miggs even posting from?
ETA: are the big corporations and union bosses in cahoots in Miggs’ universe? Because that is just too funny.
@All That Migging And Towing
You refer to “infiltration” as if leftists aren’t really part of society or authority, but instead some outside force who are purposefully working as part of a sleeper cell. Isn’t it instead more reasonable to suggest that these are just “normal people who hold left-wing views”?
Again, wouldn’t it be more reasonable to suggest that these “leftists” actually do believe in fairness and democracy like you, they just have a different sense of what it is? I believe Scildfreya mentioned the Principle of Charity in an earlier thread. This is the sort of thing she was talking about. It’s bad thinking to assume that there’s a shadowy conspiracy against you, when it’s just as likely that they’re instead just disparate people who disagree with you.
I’d like to know what Miggs’ idea of actual fairness and democracy looks like.
So far the leftists are bad, organized labor is bad,* corporations are bad, people who are wealthy enough to prefer food more sophisticated than Olive Garden are bad but poor people are bad too.
Which group of people are productive members of society who genuinely care about democracy? I’m dying to know.
*All unions? Can Miggs identify how say, the AFL-CIO and the Wobblies differ?
@Mig, okay! That isn’t so hard to integrate into the structure you’ve described. With the “leader” being another “cell” within the movement, it would no doubt pay attention to the general inclinations of the “cells” and modify as needed so as to maintain motivation, etc. All part of being a good leader.
Right! So, I have an observation and a question for you, if you please.
First, the observation. You’ve described the “leftists” as being diffuse, fractured, amorphous groups, sharing general goals, but with different opinions on what the goals should be and very different opinions on how to get there. They share a common ethos by-and-large, but they don’t have a rigid code-of-conduct, more just a general sense of what they consider right and wrong. Violating those principles can get you strong repercussions, or can get you relatively mild ones, depending on how big the violations are and whether they’re a recurring theme. Leaders exist, but there’s no penalty for ignoring them or critiquing them, so long as you stay within the ethos of the group.
I observe that another word for what is described above is a Culture.
With this observation I have a question for you.
There are two possibilities confronting you, sir. The first is that a) you’re right, and there is a conspiracy of leftist cells infiltrating and subverting western societies for some reason, or b) you’re wrong, there is no conspiracy. Instead, the ethos of culture-at-large has shifted to being more progressive, more inclusive, and more “lefty”. You have not made this shift, and your rationalization for this disconnect is the subversion of society by “leftists”
I’m not even going to ask you to defend your position, a), I’ll take it as a given for the moment. My question, sir, is – how would you recognize if b) were happening? How would you distinguish between the two?
Pfff. Alright, Scildfreja, just say what I wanted to say, only much more eloquently. 😛
Correct! Though, there’s a touch of nuance here. It’s not that it’s bad thinking, as in that’s a meany-pants thing to think, how very dare. It’s bad thinking because it allows the thinker to dismiss the opinions of the “leftists” as being subversive outsiders, instead of being an integrated part of our society with opinions that coincide with what we think of as “good” in some way.
(I’ll also take the opportunity to gently point out that we here at WHTM don’t always extend the principle of charity to the people we’re mocking. That’s fine – this is a mockery site, after all, it’s not a place for srsface discussion, but I think it’s important to remember that the people we’re mocking here are our brothers and fathers and sons, sometimes literally. Not that this makes their ideas less odious – but it does require us to ask how they got there, and what we should do about it. There’s a little gold in the MRA poop, and it’s important to see it, because that’s what attracts people to it)
EDIT
Sorry! You jump in too. I will have to be going for a bit here anyways!
Well, I’ll have a go if I think of anything. It’s a good test of my written communication skills. I’m usually too late to the discussion to chime in anything relevant, but I seem to have caught this one while it’s hot.
But it’s my bedtime soon as well…
@WWTH
Does this guy know where Hoffa is?
@Wwth
Corporations per se aren’t bad, but the leftist interlopers in these corporations are. Poor people are only bad because some of them don’t have the get-up-and-go to go find a job and stop darkening the doorsteps of their local welfare offices.
Those who do not seek to use the government to overpower their fellow man are those who care most deeply for democracy. The electoral college is a good thing, and those who seek to dissolve it are also part of the problem.
IWW is further left-field than the AFL-CIO are; they mostly hold socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist-type views. IWW is international, as the name “Industrial Workers of the World” implies. They used to fight a lot with the AFL because they thought AFL wasn’t radical enough; AFL-CIO is a national organization with views closer to social-democracy and FDR New Deal-type economics. Ginsberg doesn’t feel sentimental about the latter of the two.
@Scildfreja
I was thinking he was basically describing how democracies work, but yeah, it’s even broader than that. He’s on the shrinking side of a culture shift, and he’s mad that he might have to change his behavior in order to fit in.
What’s that? A generic description of a social group that Mig feels threatened by that can have the players swapped out and it sounds like a hundred other conspiracies about people “up to no good”?
And it contains no specific examples whatsoever supporting the idea that it’s just another run-of-the-mill paranoid fantasy by someone who fears social change or it’s potential and has really shitty observation, reasoning and logical skills?
It must be Wednesday.
@ATMAT
What is democracy for if not to change the course of government? What are we meant to do with our opinions if not use them to govern ourselves?
I’m sure you’d agree that a democracy is a government of the people. I’m not sure why you seem to think that “the people” does not include “leftists”. If you thought leftists were doing something illegal, that’d be one thing. But it sounds like you’re saying they’re using the democratic process to achieve their goals, which is what the democratic process is for.
So what do you think “leftists” should do in order to persuade people of their views? If they aren’t allowed to use the avenues of democracy, which avenues are open to them?
ETA: Sorry I keep putting “leftists” in scare quotes. It just seems like a scare word to me, so it deserves scare quotes.