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The reviews are in! Well, technically speaking, a review is in.
The Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl has posted his review of Cassie Jaye’s The Red Pill, her totally objective documentary about the Men’s Rights Movement that was funded in part by some of the people featured in it and that will be opening in theaters a theater Friday
Let’s just say he didn’t like it:
[F]or two agonizing hours, Jaye tumbles slowly down America’s stupidest rabbit hole, discovering that Men’s Rights Activists are actually just dudes who have been dicked over by a culture that punishes masculinity. …
Jaye acknowledges in the opening and closing minutes that MRAs sometimes spew nasty garbage online, but she never presses them on this in her many interviews. Instead, she lets them moan about how hard it is to be a dude in 2016, endorsing their anecdotal complaints about unfair family courts, incidents of men being tricked into being fathers and — I didn’t quite follow this one — one father’s conviction that the women who had custody of his son were systematically trying to make the boy fat.
One can only assume that they are fattening him up before they EAT HIM.
Confused MRAs, apparently unable to understand how anyone could possibly hate a film they’re pretty sure they’re going to just love, have responded to Scherstuhl’s review by crying “conspiracy.”
In a comment on the Village Voice, MRA David King (presumably the same David King who is the “Chief Information Officer” for A Voice for Men) suggests that “[s]omething definitely stinks, and it’s not the film under review.”
He submits these, er, facts to a candid world:
• September 29, Cassie Jaye tweeted “Events surrounding The Red Pill documentary are getting curiouser and curiouser”, the same day Scherstuhl tweeted that he’d “agreed to review” TRP, the same day Scherstuhl invited a well-known anti-male MRA antagonist to DM him via Twitter.
Just FYI, the “well-known anti-male MRA antagonist” in question is apparently little old me, though I’m pretty sure I am not actually anti-male. I didn’t DM Scherstuhl, though I think I retweeted a couple of his Tweets.
King continues:
• October 4, HP and Village Voice publish this hit piece using present-tense language (“this movie is playing in two American theaters”) strongly implying that the author has seen a film which doesn’t debut for another 3 days on October 7,
HOW ON EARTH DID A FILM REVIEWER SEE A FILM BEFORE IT WAS EVEN OUT oh wait that’s how film reviewing works.
• so Scherstuhl has not seen it at a theatre and cannot have seen it anywhere else unless either a) invited to by CJ (in which case HP and Village Voice, at which Scherstuhl is an editor, have violated the embargo such previews usually carry) or b) he has acquired a copy illegally.
Since both HP and VV have published this review already, since embargoes on unreleased films are the norm, and barring decent evidence of mismanagement on the part of CJ and her team, that rather heavily points at the latter. Whichever the case, violation of contract (best case) or breaking the law (worst case) doesn’t look good for either HP or Village Voice.
Yes, because films are NEVER reviewed before they hit theaters oh wait.
• If the author has not seen it, then he’s lying through his teeth both in the article’s content and about its provenance. He misrepresents the review as being based on an alleged viewing post public release but, owing to an editorial screw-up, the copy got released days before it should have been, proving that his article is a premeditated and contrived attack motivated by political animus.
• There are numerous tells in the language used in this article that strongly hint at an agenda and a prior conclusion (read: closed mind) so it almost doesn’t matter whether Scherstuhl did see it or not because the actual content of the film would make no difference to the content of the article.
King blathers on for a while along these lines, and even mentions me by name once! It’s good to be noticed.
Meanwhile, on Twitter, the lovable Dan Perrins seems to suggest that I might have actually paid Scherstuhl for his review.
A ? for the lawyers.
I'd also suspect some payola for the review as well.
Given @DavidFutrelle lack of integrity— Dan Perrins (@BlackBeard20096) October 4, 2016
Apparently Dan lives in an alternate universe in which men are oppressed and I am filthy rich.
Speaking of films, here is a short documentary about a capybara who jumps into a pool and plays with a pool noodle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=291Bry2FlsU
((posted without editing this time. Any errors or things I should have removed, mea culpa))
Oh dear. Well, this certainly got a little out of hand. I’m not surprised though! I’ve got a lot of work today so will have to be brief. There’s quite a bounty of dumb statements to pick from, though! Let’s see here. I’ll start here, since it seems indicative of a thread in your statements, Roger.
Sigh. As has been said before in the previous thread, no, that’s not what we’re doing, and kindly stop trying to put words in our mouths. We aren’t trying to say “you shouldn’t do anything if you don’t have perfect information,” and we’ve said that numerous times. We are saying that when you are presented with evidence, you should update your opinions. Because you don’t seem to do that, you seem to think that the better choice is to “rationalize away arguments which oppose the answer you feel is right.”
In other words, you say that you want to “I’m saying take advantage of whatever information we have to make the best possible decision,” but in reality you are disregarding information which doesn’t conform to your pre-existing opinion.
That was a nice comfy one. Let’s do another, shall we?
This one’s been piled on to no end by others, quite well. Turns out that immigrants tend to be less interested in crime of any sort compared to the baseline population, actually! They’re less likely to be violent, and more likely to be the victims of violence!
So yeah, your 5%-vs-4% nonsense is just that, nonsense, or you’d actually prefer immigrants living around you.
One more? Then I’ll get to my point, I promise.
The only way you can do this is to live alone, far away from any other human. You’re going around saying that we’re operating from a position of extremity, but here you are slicing off imaginary-percentage-points from an imaginary-index-of-violence, and are happy to cast entire ethnicities aside in pursuit of that sliver of safety.
And yet I bet you still drive a car? Despite the fact that it’s much, much more likely for violence to be done to your person by way of a car accident than a murderous immigrant? Why aren’t you campaigning for tougher restrictions on drivers licences and a zero-tolerance limit for drunk driving? That would make you far, far safer than changing the immigration policy.
(Answer: because it ain’t about safety, it’s about fear and superiority, so you can go ahead and throw all the argument about how it’ll make you safer out of the window.)
Eh, gotta do this one, too. It’s too good.
So if you think it’s fine as long as there’s strict vetting, then what’s the big deal? The US has incredibly strict vetting of immigrants.
(The big deal, obviously, is that no amount of vetting is enough to assuage fears that aren’t based on reality. Because it’s not about safety, it’s about fear.)
Finally, back to the source, the important line that gives it all away.
To paraphrase, “My ignorance is as good as your facts, and you’re a bunch of tyrants for thinking otherwise.”
Two parts, Roger. First part, your “informational node” nonsense. You accuse us of being too intellectual, about talking too much about “facts” and “theories,” while you call yourself an “informational node” by announcing your feelings. You’re as head-in-the-clouds as you accuse us of being.
“Informational node.” Have you ever talked with a real human being about these things without the sour taste of sarcasm in your mouth? Real people don’t talk about being “information nodes” or faff on about epistemology when it’s something they care about. You don’t care about this. This whole line of argument, this Trump thing, is a weapon you’re using to dig into a deeper objective.
Second part. “Is it a failure of democracy to give a vote to people like me” is indicative of a trap you’re trying to set – trying to set up a “gotcha”, forcing us to either reveal ourselves as moustache-twirling authoritarians or admit that your vote for Trump is valid.
To answer specifically, it’s not a failure of democracy, it’s in its design, because while it often serves up sub-optimal decisions and has huge flaws, it’s still better than tyranny.
The fact that you voiced this, and similar sentiments, in this thread is just more evidence that you don’t give a shit about what you’re saying. It’s a weapon and nothing more, a weapon to “hurt the feminist agenda”.
And it’s abhorrent. You and those like you, jaded and cynical, assured only of their own self-righteousness, will get real people hurt. Your fear-mongering, which you don’t believe but desperately want others to (if only for your own vindication) is a driving force that pushes misery and hate into the core of social life in the western world.
Shut it down and go away. Find your entertainment in something less drenched in living misery.
Bigots are rape enablers. I need to use that more often so I don’t forget. Roger is enabling rapists as a rape enabler.
@ Roger
We have all of the information we need to make the best decision.
Trumpeting ISIS’s propaganda for them actually does make us less safe. We should not allow their tactic — terrorism — to so cow us that we simply roll over and hand them exactly what they want.
You and I are not talking about different things. I am simply rejecting your preposterous premise that the mere possibility of any Americans being killed in a terrorist attack by a Muslim immigrant somehow justifies ripping the Constitution to shreds, and creating the kind of hostility and bigotry that scapegoating of this type always does. You are more likely to be killed by your own furniture than in a terrorist attack.
I am rejecting the ludicrous idea that grabbing a megaphone and shouting ISIS’s talking points from our rooftops will somehow reduce the number of terrorists, and make us safer from terrorism.
You think banning immigration by any male Muslims will prevent terrorist attacks.
You are apparently so arrogant that you reject the fact that a male terrorist is capable of lying about his religion on his VISA application. You are apparently so arrogant that you reject the fact that terrorists are aware that women receive less scrutiny, and are taking advantage of this.
There is no way to prevent every attack. The best we can do is fight the information war and the intelligence war in the smartest way possible. You are fighting the information war for the other side.
@ Roger
Would you do something for me? Try and find some information about ISIS and their preferred tactic known as “eliminating the gray(zone)”.
You say you like to gain information in order to make things safer. I’d suggest that’s a good place to start.
See how what you’re proposing feeds into that concept and get back to us.
So now Roger is upfront with not only being unconstitutional, racist against anyone with any amount of melanin AND a rape enabler. This is certainly scraping the bottom of the barrel and into the dirt. I’m kind of unable to properly say words, this shit pisses me off too much for coherent thought.
Roger, dude, I know guys like you who say that. They tend to be friendless and bitter about people living out their lives. Don’t be like them. Trust me, I know.
Also, I just have to say this: the last time you brought this up, Roger, I brought up the disparity between the number of people who lose their lives to terrorism, and the number of people who lose their lives to drunk driving.
Someone very close to me was killed by a drunk driver. And the fact is, in Red State America, drunk driving is as American as apple pie. In many deep-red communities, it’s pretty much a cherished institution to be supremely confident that you are God behind the wheel. In my case, it was very much this culture that killed my friend.
Twenty-seven people are killed by drunk drivers every single day. Twenty-seven families — mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, sons, daughters, or whatever the case may be — greeted with that terrible phone call.
But are our TV screens filled with people talking about how we need to “be careful” and not let in any immigrants who have an ethnic or religious background that is associated with a greater rate of drunk driving?
Are they even filled with people talking about our need to finally tackle this problem? Is anyone ranting about how we need to be careful, because we can’t continue to exist as a country if we let one more innocent life be taken by someone’s selfishness and arrogance?
And, Roger, what if it turned out that the members of one religion killed people by driving drunk at a higher rate per capita than other religions? Should we forego vetting and just disqualify any member of that religion from immigrating and becoming a citizen?
It’s so interesting, watching the trolls modify their persona-of-the-hour based on discussion. Roger showed up, filled with arguments for supporting Big Donny Trumpo, but hit a wall when his arguments didn’t pan out and we boiled them all down to raw fear. So he embraced that and started arguing about ivory towered elitists and the primacy of emotion. Just like putting on a different colour of shoes.
He’s actually adopted a position that Daniel Dennett gives to some sorts of faith believers (He’s talking about bigoted but moderate Christianity in that work, but all my love to the moderate Christians out there, I’m not saying this to attack you or anything).
http://primaryhomeworkhelp.co.uk/castles/images/mb.jpg
He calls it the Motte and Bailey strategy. With this strategy, the bigot states abhorrent (or at least deeply wrong) things and throws out false but reasonable-sounding reasons for it. They’re out on the Bailey, the courtyard. When challenged, they retreat to the Motte – the castle – by declaring that their faith is metaphor and story, and that their God is more like the ground-of-all-being. (not that this view of God is wrong, just that it’s the defense used by the bigot)
In this way, the bigot can go out and claim that God hates gays and believes we should ban all Muslims from the country, but when confronted about the ridiculousness of their beliefs they say that God is mysterious and ineffable, and you need to interpret the bible, and they’re parables for life instead of literal history.
It’s exactly what Roger is doing here. He strolls out onto the bailey and shouts about how they’re comin’ to kill us all and we gotta be safe. When he’s actually confronted, he retreats into the mushy equivocations of “emotions are valid” and “your facts are too fact’y”. No doubt we’ll see it again.
Roger, honey, don’t come out to the bailey like that anymore, unless you’re willing to stand your ground. You’re just gonna get shot up with arrows and then slink back to the motte again.
(P.S. interesting fact! The term “Motte and Bailey” as a rhetorical device is apparently also used in some circles as a snarl word to refer to “SJW” tactics! Only used in the neoreactionary circles of Scott Alexander, an acolyte of the Less Wrong community and an intellectual HBD proponent (AKA smug racist). So, that’s interesting! I’m using the term in the Daniel Dennett sense)
What astounds me is the continued insistence that horrible crimes are committed by immigrants. Terrible crimes are committed every day by born in the USA, raised in the USA people. It’s all noise.
<3 littleknown. We have a similar culture here up northwest. It's considered a rite of passage for a dood to drive drunk when he's young, especially bombing down township and gravel roads, where visibility is terrible and the road surface is loose. Doubly so in the winter, when it's all ice and snowdrifts. The culture encourages kids to get behind the wheel and "have fun", and who cares about the consequences.
Huge trucks with drunk kids at the wheel, but we can't talk about that 'cause we're letting Syrians into the country. Syrians! Some of the most lovely, jovial, warm people on the planet! But they're a useful scapegoat for media magnates to drum up fear and sell it by the barrel, so they get to stay out in the cold while our kids are injuring and killing themselves and others out of a sense of misplaced machismo.
Ugh. I wish we had figured out cryogenic sleep. I'd be happy to popsicle myself for a few decades and come back out when it isn't so stupid.
WTF is this shit.
Refugees are vetted, you dolt. Refugees are vetted to such an extreme degree that only about 5% of them that apply for refugee status are ever recommended to a host country for resettlement. And then in the US another dozen agencies also individually vet the potential refugee immigrant. It takes 24 to 36 fucking months for a refugee to get from “war zone” to “my back yard” and about 1000 pages of paperwork, and none of that is an exaggeration.
Other immigrants are also vetted. Do you think we hand out residency like candy? What the fuck are you smoking? It isn’t two years of vetting (we reserve that for the really dangerous, like people fleeing death squads) but we do extensive background checks on them and compare them to the terror watch lists before we give them legal residency. The US is the most paranoid nation on the planet, but you’re taking Trump’s off-the-cuff witticisms as if they are factual and you are factually wrong as a result.
Talk to me some more about epistemology when your epistemological method is to take whatever Trump says at face value and never fucking check it or question it, ever. Jesus Christ.
One in ten men are rapists. Full stop.
To add to the drunk driving stats; 3 women a day are killed by their partners. Hundreds of people are shot and killed by the police a year. But sure, immigrants are our biggest threat.
@Scildfreja
Sasha: This fuckin Czar guy is terrible
Misha: Inorite! Wish I could freeze myself for a few decades
Sasha: Yeah, 1940 is gonna be awesome! Way less stupid by then…
So let’s lay this out:
1) I don’t think it means you have bad relations with someone just because you don’t give them a visa to live in your country. There are many countries in the world that won’t let me live there, and I could care less. I don’t hate China because I’m not allowed to live there – why would I?
2)I think it may be a good idea to base immigration on how dangerous a driver people are. I’ve known many people killed and injured in car accidents and that sounds good to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
3)Do you really mean all this stuff about not using statistics? When can we use statistics?
4)You keep assuming things like “oh, why not base immigration on women” and “why not stop drunk driving” which I actually think are good ideas, just because you think I won’t like it. So why won’t you address those arguments? Isn’t that a little dishonest?
This convo:
Two characters – Me and the WeHuntedTheMammoth crew
Me –
“I want to donate money to cure ALS”
We –
“Oh no! Why are you trying to cure ALS when cancer exists? You evil hypocrite”
Me –
“Um… actually I donate money to cancer research too…”
We –
“Blah! You actually want MORE people to have ALS and CANCER TOO!”
Me –
“No, it’s just I heard that they could cure ALS so I want to donate to it…”
We –
“I’m not contributing to ALS , where is your evidence that the nano-molecules used in this treatment will be effective”
Me –
“Well maybe if we try it, we can see if it works”
We –
“I’m sorry you are a charlatan and a liar – you come here claiming you have cured ALS and you don’t even have any papers published about it… what a CHARLATAN – you are probably trying to KILL people with CANCER…”
Me –
“Um… ok… I’m still going to donate to ALS…”
We –
“IGNORANT – you didn’t listen to my well explained proof of why you are an EVIL LIAR – this is a failure of rationality and thinking. FOOL!”
etc.
etc.
Did I really just see Roger compare bigotry with donating money to charity?
If 1/10 men are rapists – why are we getting more of them. Seems like a strange policy to me.
But ok – if they already have the strict vetting, then that is ok. Maybe I’ll vote for Hillary if that is what she is for.
haha, Inorite, Axe? :3 In all honesty, these are important times to be alive, cause it means we can do somethin ’bout it.
So your answer to that fact is to support gender-selective abortion and eliminate male births? That’s a position usually ascribed to caricatured feminists. It’s surprising to see you take it.
@ POM
Yes. Yes, you did. Apparently a blanket immigration policy that bans Muslims is just like spending money to research diseases like ALS.
You know, I have this gut feeling that if people like Roger were actually deported, it would make the country a lot safer. I don’t have any proof, facts, or logical arguments, but it surely couldn’t hurt to try, could it?
@Schildfreja
But we need you to help make the future better 🙂
“So your answer to that fact is to support gender-selective abortion and eliminate male births?”
No, because I don’t think abortion is good.
But if there was some way to decide the best ratio of men to women for society, and there was some way to engineer that, then, why not.
As it is, allowing female immigration is the best way to get the benefits of immigration without any potential negative side effects.
By the way – I notice nobody responded to number (1) on the list there. How many of you are concerned about Chinese immigration policy?
Do restrictions on your ability to live in Saudi Arabia make you hate that country? Is it incredibly provocative?
Humans are responsible for 100% of crime, so seems like the safest option is to just kick out everybody.
errr…
1) Care to connect the dots? Are you saying that “they won’t hate America ’cause we won’t let’em in” here? ’cause that’s pretty silly. If America says “no Syrians allowed!” to the Syrians, and the American news is allabout how dangerous and violent the Syrians are, then yes they’re gonna take that as evidence that America hates them! Because a) it ain’t true that they’re especially criminal or violent, and b) the evidence would show that America, as a nation, has an anti-Syrian position. You don’t pick out a particular group of people as verboten and then say “just business, man.” That’s silly.
2) errr…
No one has said that would be a good metric for allowing immigration. That’d be a stupid metric for immigration. The roads in southern India are terrifying and have huge traffic problems, but the culture there is deeply and uniquely gentle, and they make lovely additions to any culture to which they immigrate. They just don’t have a long culture of ubiquitous car-driving like we do here. Why are you talking about this anyways, no one suggested that.
3) Statistics are important to use. They’re also important to understand, so that they aren’t misused. This is a common problem of the pseudo-rationalist. They come to rationalism by way of science specials on TV and science’y books and youtube debates, so are used to understanding things through metaphor. This leads to a belief amongst some of them that their scientific instincts are comparable to that of a statistician, when it couldn’t be further from the case. Add to this mix a number of people who are willfully trying to obfusticate with misleading stats and you get where we are now.
4) You miss the point of us bringing these things up. We’re not doing a “Dear Muslima” argument, knocking down the plight of one person because another situation is worse. We are bringing these points up because you say that your end goal is safety. If that were true you’d be pursuing things that make you a lot safer. But you don’t. This indicates that you aren’t actually pursuing safety at all. You’re pursuing something else.
As for your dialog, it’s the mischaracterization I’ve come to expect from you \o/ so that’s fun.
Anything else?
@dlouwe
http://sd.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/i/the-crime-is-life-the-sentence-is-death.png
@Roger
By your logic all crime makers are alive, so therefore if all those alive are dead, there would be no crime makers, just to be safe.
Nobody cares what you think about abortion.
Aborting all male fetuses is the way to go, it sounds like. We wouldn’t want to deport men to some other country and make them have to take all our male rapists, after all. That would be unfair to whatever country has to take them.
Really interesting that you went down this path. It’s almost like you didn’t think about what you were talking about before you said it.
“We are bringing these points up because you say that your end goal is safety. If that were true you’d be pursuing things that make you a lot safer. But you don’t. ”
How do you know that?
Anyway – If person A says “let’s introduce this new device which will make planes safer” is a good response to this “why are you trying to do this when a device for cars would save more people?”
Can’t we do both?
@Roger
Acting like a group of people are rapists is bad relations.
Still bigoted BS. Not all of any group are bad drivers except bad drivers.
Did I say we can’t use statistics?
*As I read*
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH….
*deep breath*
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Ok, let’s look at this.
Donating to charity =/= acting as if all Muslim immigrants are rapists or terrorists. For one thing you are not actually attacking the real problem like you are when you donate for research addressing the actual disease. In this analogy you are attacking something related to people suffering from ALS that does not actually have to do with ALS.
It’s more like “you aren’t actually helping to cure ALS, or reduce the incidence, and you are hurting all these other people!”
We are the ones actually directly trying to learn about and deal with ALS in this analogy because we are the ones actually working on the problem of rape and rapists. Remember, you are targeting something non-rapist, non-terrorist, and non-murderer.
Oh I don’t think you are a liar or deliberately deceiving. You have been raised and trained by society to be a bigot. It’s more like “You are hurting all of those people unrelated to ALS and your approach does not actually target ALS!”
That’s not too far off.
We are getting more of them from the culture. That is why we want to deal with rape and not scapegoat people. No matter what country we are talking about we would be getting more rapists by your way of looking at things. Might as well stop people from moving from other states to your state, more rapists. Same for your side of town, your neighborhood.
Either this is sarcasm or you have done absolutely no research into something you supposedly care a lot about. You are not competent at dealing with threats. You really need to work on that.