In the wake of the Portland train stabbings that left two men dead and one seriously wounded after they tried to stop a white supremacist from harassing several women, Paul Elam — still probably the best-known Men’s Rights Activist online — posted a tweet that spoke volumes — not about the incident itself, but about the utter moral bankruptcy of the Men’s Rights movement.
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/868917239143178240
When other Tweeters objected, Elam doubled down and began spewing insults — aimed not just at his critics but at the murdered men themselves.
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/869066210964631552
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/869068999577006080
In one tweet, he suggested that the victims themselves were the cause of the violence that left them dead.
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/869064408252772354
In his capacity as a leader of what is essentially a hate movement, Elam has said many terrible things over the years — from his post suggesting that women who go home with men without wanting to have sex with them are “damn near demanding” to be raped” to a short story offering an apologia for — indeed, a glorification of — domestic abuse. These tweets, I think, rank up there with his most reprehensible writings, for two main reasons.
First, as many observers have noted, it was not “chivalry” that killed these men. It was an angry and hateful man with a knife who was harassing women on a train.
Elam thinks it unfair that the tenets of chivalry call upon men to protect women — why should men have to serve as unpaid bodyguards for women, he has often asked? What he doesn’t like to talk about is that these volunteer bodyguards aren’t protecting women from bears — there aren’t a lot of those in my neighborhood — but in the overwhelming majority of cases from other men.
There are a lot of problematic things about “white knights,” as Elam insists upon calling them, but the plain fact is that the “good men” that Elam castigates as terminally stupid would be out of a job if there weren’t so many bad men around harassing and abusing women.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, Elam is essentially declaring war on the very thing that sets us apart from brute nature — our ability to feel empathy for others, including people unlike ourselves. A man standing up for a woman who’s being harassed may or may not be engaging in an act of chivalry but it is certainly an act of altruism and basic human solidarity. It’s driven by the same empathetic and altruistic impulse that led so many non-Muslims here in the US to rush to their nearest airports to protest Trump’s Muslim ban.
This sort of cross-cultural solidarity is pretty much the only thing that can save our country from the hatred and meanness that is Trumpism. We need more empathy, not less.
Elam would rather we raise our sons not to feel this sort of empathy towards women. That’s bad enough. But he’s not the only MRA with an empathy problem. And it isn’t confined to his feelings about women.
It’s not just that MRAs are indifferent towards, if not actively hostile, towards women; they lack empathy towards boys and men as well. Indeed, in one notorious post (archived here; I wrote about it here), Elam literally told the “troubled men” who have turned to A Voice For Men for help to ““go fucking bother someone else with your problems” if they weren’t donating money to his site, which is to say him, as he keeps the donations for himself.
Even though he seems to have taken in literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations over the years, he’s never bothered to even try to set up, say, a hotline for men. Instead, he’s set himself up as a sort of ersatz internet therapist for men — he has no actual training as a therapist — literally charging the “troubled men” he claims to be an advocate for $90 an hour to talk to him on Skype.
But he’s not the only MRA who combines a hatred for women with an utter lack of interest in doing anything altruistic for their fellow men.
In the first few years of second wave feminism in the late 60s and early 70s, feminist activists set up shelters and women’s centers and countless other entities designed to benefit women in desperate need of help. In the seven years I’ve been covering the Men;s Rights movement, MRAs haven’t even set up a single hotline, much less a functional men’s shelter. The only notable MRA, er, victory? Being so obnoxious they’ve convinced numerous media sites to shut down their formerly MRA-infested comments sections.
It’s no wonder MRAs feel such hostility towards real heroes. They’re only heroes in their own minds.
im going off the witness account…you’re going off … what you want to be true? i guess well see what happened when the video comes out… interesting you guys always respond with verbal aggression and bullying as your main “argument”… perhaps you could benefit from learning some tolerance toward those who are different from yourselves… it might improve your communicative skills….
@Chessman, so it’s okay to respond to a “small push or shove,” assuming that’s correct and you’re not lying yet again, by stabbing two people to death? Glad to know.
Edit: Also….what’s…with this….?
@Checkmate
I read your post even though it wasn’t addressed to me.
Does this mean you’re gonna fight me in real life now? D:
Because, you know, Chessman thinks we should respond to small societal infractions with excessive violence. That is his thing.
Middle school aged boys talk like that when they’re feeling awkward and want to seem tough and like they fit in.
The AAVE, throwing gang signs when they’re really white kids from the suburbs, bragging about all the sex they’ve had that they haven’t and drugs they’ve done that they’ve never even seen are all a part of standard uncomfortable young teen boy performance of what they think masulinity looks like.
@dreemr
Anything for the chirrens
@Troubelle
Sinnerman. Nina Simone’s Sinnerman is the correct answer to that question. If you can do Propane Nightmares in that style, you’re golden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn5tiuZU4JI
@Fran
Have you by chance seen Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai?
@Trollman:
Oh, fuck RIGHT off. I owe nothing to stabby Nazi schmuckleheads. They are the ones with the shitty communication skills, and you’re not far behind.
Can we get a banhammer here, please?
I think defending a murderer is ban worthy.
isn’t punching people who say something you don’t like the new liberal “cool”? hey, you know what, if you are so sure of what happened… how about we wager on it… i will be willing to bet the white knights were the first to escalate to physical force…
@ Francesca, probably. I accept duels with trout.
@Axe
I have, yes, many moons ago. I’d like to say I was surprised by your mentioning it, but I would expect nothing less from a gentleman with such impeccably refined taste.
I should re-watch it.
@Checkmate
Welp, that’s it for me, I’m dead.
@Chessman
For fuck’s sake, you impossibly dumb bastard. A violent white nationalist stabbed two men to death and your best defense is that a liberal punched someone somewhere?
Why are you even mentioning that in response to anything? It doesn’t remotely pair with the murders mentioned in the OP.
Hey Trollman, does this sound like a meek, mild, nonaggressive Nazi to you?
He is a MURDERER. He is not someone we should ever have to tolerate. Especially not coming on trains with a knife, harassing non-white girls, and stabbing anyone who tries to intervene to keep him from stabbing said girls.
Now go fuck yourself.
So, story I never get tired of telling BECAUSE IT COMES UP SO OFTEN.
Long ago, when the earth was a molten mass, in 1988, there was a game called Wasteland. It was the first of many firsts for PC RPGs.
In that game, the player controls a party of 4-7 Desert Rangers, with body armor and guns and explosives and training and everything like that. One of the early locations, Highpool, needs you to find parts for their water pump.
The parts are in a cave. The cave has a rabid dog. You encounter the cave very early on, when ignoring the dog isn’t an option or it might kill one of your people. You need to kill the dog to get the parts.
The dog is a pet. It’s owner, a 15-year old boy named Bobby, is angry at your party for killing his dog. So he takes a BB gun, and shoots at your party whenever you enter or leave town. Most players shot back, killing him instantly because he’s a fucking kid. This locked them in an escalating chain of events that ended with confronting a legendary defender of children and the destruction of the town of Highpool.
Players were angry, and the developers were not sympathetic. The player was four to seven badass desert rangers. They had the gun, they decided what justice was. They should have been the adult in that situation, and ignored the kid firing pellets that might hurt but would never kill an armored ranger.
There is another game, from all the way in THIS FUCKING YEAR. Expeditions: Viking. During the invasion of Perth, a small boy with a knife runs out and tries to stab your main character in defense of the place he’s lived in literally all his life. Characters with enough strength or finesse can stop him. So I stopped him, and the game let me choose between letting him go or killing him. And because I’m not a fucking monster and wasn’t roleplaying a monster, I didn’t kill a kid too fucking young and weak to even have a statblock in this game.
Why do I think Chessman is one of the people who would have witnessed the end of Highpool? Or would have murdered a small child with a kitchen knife who charged the Viking warrior in chainmail with a sword that will never break?
It’s always on the person with the best weapon in a situation to de-escalate it.The terrorist never should have harassed those girls. But even if he did, he should have allowed himself to be removed from the train. His life was never in any danger whatsoever, and that disqualifies you from attempting murder. Period.
Another real world event: At one point, at least one Israeli tank suffered rocks thrown at it by kids. It fired back. That’s solely on the tank crew, YOU FUCKING JACKASS.
Calling for genocide is an act of violence. It isn’t “just saying things”.
All you can do is lie. I bet you suck at chess. You sure as fuck aren’t good at anything else.
See yourself out Nazi sympathizer.
@Lea
I prophesy that Chessman will respond with “but interracial sex is le white genocide and lefty libruls endorse interracial sex so you are actually the nazis, herp derp blerp”
Lessthan,
I’m going off one of the girl’s accounts; you know, the one who was being harrassed, you ugly White Supremacist apologist.
As she described the three men getting their throat slit by the asshole YOU, a White Supremacist enabler, are defending.
Are you happy with the climate you created and agree with? Of course you are. You are shameless.
Keep using these heroes deaths to foster hate and ugliness, you brave warrior, you. For you will be relegated to the dustbin of history with all of the Nazi losers, while these men will be lauded for years to come for the bravery you lack, unless you’re screeching anonymously behind a keyboard.
Cowardly Lessthan.
@Bina,
My autocorrect changed your name to Nina in a reply to you, and I didn’t catch it. Apologies.
@Ignore, I remember the wasteland example, and my brother and I would get into all sorts of fights over that. He was, at least when he was a kid (he’s matured since), the type who would fire back. The difference between him and our resident troll is that my brother matured.
i don’t condone bullying of any sort
BTW, here’s the guy the FUCKING NAZI MURDERER didn’t kill:
See that slash wound across his neck and jaw? That bastard did that to this unarmed 21-year-old (who is also autistic) ON PURPOSE.
He came on that train MEANING TO FUCKING KILL PEOPLE.
I don’t know what part of this we’re meant to tolerate, but if I have to, I damn well WILL punch out a Nazi to save two teenagers of different colors, because I’m German and my people have had to live with this bullshit long enough.
And if you don’t like MY opinion, Trollman, you can shove it where you pulled all your ideas about this MURDER out of. YOUR ASS, YOU BASTARD.
@Axe
…Yeah, I could think of this. Except generally “louder,” so to speak. Something good to keep in mind.
@Fool’s Mate
Fucking lol.
LOL so, trying to contain a belligerent, ranting, abusive asshole, trying to calm him and remove him from the situation is now a physical attack and bullying?
Then put me firmly on the side of those “bullies”.
What a “gotcha”. /eyeroll/ you really showed us, Pissman.
@ Bina, the kind of mental gymnastics defenders of this monster will make is incredible. “Slashing up 3 people and killing two; it was a heroic move to save the race and protect himself! Liberals punching an actual nazi? Monsters who need to die!”
@Fran
And I’d expect no less from such a worldly and erudite lady *tips hat, adjusts monocle, harrumphs snootily*
You really should. It gets better with repeat viewings 🙂
Well, I must say. It was certainly wonderful communicating with you wonderful ‘ladies’. Such a happy, welcoming environment. I felt as though I reached a safe space, free of triggers and over-the top-toxic-masculinty. Didn’t you, bishes? I think so – cause I told you so.
Every now and again, I come here to sample ‘the currents’…which are always so No Means Yes. Ever been on a wine tasting tour? So much joy. So much happiness. All the various aromas. All the various flavors. Oh yes. All my creations…so small and insignificant, matching wits with their creator. Bless you, bishes. Bless you. Never forget. I truly, deeply love you. The deeper I love you, the more you like it. That’s right. I’m deeper and deeper in love with you., all the time, every day, more and more.
As always, parting is such a relief. It takes but a few, tender, heart felt moments to induce the inevitable, metaphorical coronary that crushes our life force. Hopefully, me sharing with you opens your eyes to how God like men truly are, with me of course as their one and true God…and you as my sex slaves.
I’ll stop by again in another few weeks…if for no other purpose than to sexually lubricate my dear, sweet Princess Lea. One way or the other, her poody will be mine…even if I must eventually force myself upon her…as I oft times do…which she’ll of course secretly and most thoroughly enjoy…at some future point in time…possibly…but that’s not important. As I invented all things, I of course invented ‘date rape’. I named it ‘date submission’, but somehow that got lost in the translations. It’s tough getting a good apostle these days…what with the second coming approaching.
So farewell dear, dear contributing bishes. May my thoughts and actions invade your darkest nightmares with great force. Never forget. I’m always about you. Everywhere you look. Everywhere you turn. There you’ll find me.
Me be with you.
Didn’t Chessman express some pro Trump sentiments in the other thread? Or was that a different troll?
Because Trump at one of the NATO meetings literally shoved his way up front to get the best photo op spot.
I’ve yet to hear the alt-right calling for his murder over that.
more verbal abuse… why am i not surprised…? i go off the evidence… there’s nothing to suggest he was physically threatening those girls… he was harassing them and bullying them but is that enough to justify a violent intervention…? i respect your opinion… but are you willing to return the same level of coutesy… the thing is once liberals have sufficiently “othered” and dehumanized their target… they can rationalize any act of verbal or physical aggression…
(w:cm no im not alt righter or trump supporter)