By David Futrelle
Australian podcaster and putative leftist Aimee Terese has annoyed a lot of people on Twitter with her bizarre attack on freelance journalist Talia Jane for going public with the gross DM she’d gotten from a male journalist, suggesting to Jane that she was so ugly that she should feel flattered that anyone would even “contemplate ejaculating on [her face].”
No, really.
Turns out that Terese is not quite as thick-skinned as she expects her targets to be, and she was evidently herself annoyed by the post I wrote yesterday about her anti-Talia-Jane tweetstorm.
First, she responded with a flurry of buzzwords:
I have no idea what she’s going on about either.
Then, perhaps realizing that calling someone excessively “discursive” was not quite the killing rhetorical blow she had hoped it would be, she tried again:
Now this tweet I understand, because I have seen so many different variations of these, er, arguments used against me by so many Men’s Rights Activists over the years.
I’m a White Knight? I’ve certainly heard that before.
And apparently when I’m not white knighting women I am “step[ping] on the necks of dissenting women” like Terese. Never mind that I only wrote about her because she viciously attacked a women for reporting apparent sexual harassment; clearly I’m being the hateful one here.
This, again, is the same sort of nonsense I’ve heard from MRAs every time I’m said anything critical about antifeminist women — often with a bogus “gatcha” attached: You say you’re a feminist, yet here you are criticizing a woman!
Fans of Cassie Jaye, the director of the Red Pill documentary, widely panned by feminists as a whitewash of the misogynistic Men’s Rights movement, tend to be the most enthusiastic about this particular rhetorical strategy. They also like to conflate writing about someone on a blog with harassment — just as Terese turned “mentioning someone in a blog post” into “stepping on someone’s neck.”
Once wound up, Cassie Jaye fans — her white knights? — just can’t seem to stop. Last month, one of her admirers on Twitter demanded to know “how many lies about Cassie Jaye have you posted this morning?” At that point i hadn’t written a word about her for nearly two years.
Terese doesn’t just ape the rhetorical tricks of the MRAs; she also seems to agree with them about certain things. Or at least to agree with Jordan Peterson, something of an idol for many MRAs. Last year, as Terese reminded me yesterday, she took issue with my suggestion that incel forums, breeding grounds for violence and misery, should be shut down if possible.
Her solution to the incel problem? Aside from vague talk about ending capitalist alienation by ending capitalism itself, this is the only specific suggestion she offered:
Now, I don’t think she’s literally suggesting that every incel in the world be awarded an “attractive, eligible” Palestinian woman of his own; she later clarified that she had offered this suggestion “not as an answer in itself, but more as an example of creative thinking.”
But this “creative thinking” isn’t really so creative after all; it sounds an awful lot like Jordan Peterson’s “enforced monogamy” and/or economist Robert Hanson’s “sex redistribution,” ersatz “solutions” to “sexual inequality” that would require imposing some sort of sexual tyranny on the women of the world, some of whom would have to be cajoled or threatened or coerced into having sex with the sort of guy who thinks shooting up a mall is an appropriate response to not being able to get laid.
If you’re a socialist who sounds this much like an MRA, you really need to start rethinking your socialism.
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@Weird Eddie
She’s a Youtube babbler. Her entire LIFE is “look at meeeeee!!!”
I submit that W.C. Fields’s all-time greatest line is:
“It’s a funny old world. A man’s lucky if he gets out of it alive.” (from THE MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE)
I am also fond of “Bringing a pie to a golf course! Why, that’s like bringing… something or other… to…somewhere or other.” (from “The Golf Specialist”)
“projectively splitting” sounds uncomfortable, and also likely to disturb the cats.
@Great American Satan
Soooooo is there like a Canadian Satan?
A favourite WC Fields quote of mine is, “what contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch?” ?
I actually see this talking point a lot up here in the hinterlands of Canada too…
“Justin Trudeau is clearly a fake feminist because he dismissed Jody Wilson-Raybould, a WOMAN!!!”
I’ve got issues with Trudeau’s mushy brand of feminism, but JWR still strikes me as an opportunist who was bad at her job as Attorney General.
The irony is that is exactly the “identity politics” that these clowns always bag on about being terrible. “How can you say Candace Owens is a white nationalist? She’s BLACK!” “How can you say Ben Shapiro is a member of the alt-right? He’s JEWISH!” And so on and so forth….
Well, I read the article, and she wasn’t kidding about “materially-based”.
So, basically, not only was there additional (including monetary) incentive, they gave them families they could hold hostage.
I had only heard of “splitting” in the context of Borderline Personality Disorder, but apparently it’s a general thing that is just extremely common in BPD. So I can’t prove that Gaylordio Felchero is trying to say anyone who disagrees with him has a personality disorder, but I’m still suspicious.
Also splitting is about your opinions of other people so how do you do it projectively?
@ Silly-bollocks:
You could achieve the same result by eating the dictionary and barfing
I am a long time reader, sometime donor and first time commenter. For starters, I applaud the work this site and its moderator does. I appreciate that you weed through oh so much negativity in the communities you monitor so that we don’t have to. I find myself with the need to comment so I can share something that only this community would understand (and see the humor in). To wit, I got my haircut yesterday. The gent who cut my hair was named Chad and the lady who shampooed my hair was named Stacy. I find this funny, but there is no way any one other than this group would actually understand why this was so funny to me.
Anyway, something on a lighter note from a supporter.
Carry on.
I submit that these MRA talking points are not “warmed over”, but just still warm from being held in an MRA’s sweaty fists.
I think the past four years have pretty thoroughly proven that “Give the Nazis a platform, surely everyone will see how bad their ideas are.” isn’t really a great strategy. Sure, maybe she’s not specifically thinking about the Nazis in that bit, but the Nazis are indicative of just how poorly too many people make decisions about whether an idea is good or bad.
So, while silencing speakers with bad ideas may not solve (many) political problems, it sure as hell can prevent certain ones from being (re)created.
Not that it really makes her remarks more intelligible, but I think the definition of “discursive” she was using was the primary one of “passing aimlessly from one subject to another; digressive; rambling,” rather than “relating to discourse,” or “proceeding by argument or reasoning rather than by intuition (archaic).” If you look at all his blog posts as one treatise, then yes, it could be seen as hopping around various subjects, but then who looks at blogs that way?
>>>>>>Oh, and as for my “creative thinking” on the incel problem: give them at least a full month of hard labor, it’ll force them to think about something other than themselves.
Two weeks of basic training would be better.
The MGTOW defenders aren’t really proficient in reading comprehension, I see. What lies were posted? Aimee really DID attack a woman for posting about sexual harassment! Lol
@Aran Bloom – lolololol! I understand the sadness of a great joke that no one around you would understand without an hour of explaining, so I’m glad you were able to share it here!
Welcome, I think the welcome packages are on the right in a link, make sure you pick up your scented candles. The hard chairs might be on backorder, has anyone seen any recently?
*sits down while thinking*
HMMM. Y’know what… You can have mine.
*Stands back up*
😉
@Anonymous – I’d rather they weren’t given any sort of military training, please.
@Anonymous
If you think military training makes assholes not assholes your very sadly mistaken. My fiancé puts up with assholes all the time. those assholes also end up getting power to miss use as well. to many times for my liking my fiancé has called me with black eyes, bruised ribs and busted lips because of hazing and other bullshit.
@That’s a Moray
I think the “splitting” they’re talking about is like that scene in Monty Python, Life of Brian where they are sitting around the coliseum while their subversive political activist group split in to smaller and smaller groups based on minor differences in ideology while yelling “Splitter” scornfully at anyone who doesn’t agree with them.
I don’t know how you would do that projectively either.
Her tweets read like they’ve been google-translated though a couple different languages before posting. It doesn’t lose a whole log going through 3 steps of translation
(3 step)
Futrelle’s maximalism liberal discursive brand. When you think of the idealists, the good and the bad, the Cricket cattle idea politic is solving this problem.
I am not.
Is this a big problem for my policy?
Lainy –
I meant merely that it would be more beneficial to society. But while I 100% agree the military doesn’t make a-holes into non-a-holes, it does, or at least used to, make the immature more mature. Hazing and other such stuff is, at least in the IDF, very severely frowned upon and quite rare. Perhaps things are different in the US Army.
She writes her tweets the way I write my papers for class. She uses confusing and circular language to obfuscate the fact that she doesn’t really have a point.
Her tweets remind me of the time as an undergrad when we dared a friend of mine to put a list of ridiculous words (including gnome and defenestrate) into his next film studies essay. It’s like she’s throwing a year’s worth of words of the day into everything she writes.
I think I can smell a tankie.
@Prith kDar:
I thought about that, but I couldn’t make heads or tails out of her criticism using that definition either. (You stated this as well, I’m merely expanding on your point, not contesting it.) I mean, when she makes this statement:
are the subsequent sentences actually subsidiary sentences? Do they expand the point made in the in the intro/topic/thesis sentence? Or are these simply multiple, random criticisms strung together without connection?
Because here’s the thing: If these criticisms aren’t related to each other, if they are just multiple things about David she dislikes, listing one, then another, then another, then, well, isn’t that the very definition of discursive you mention? And if she thinks being discursive in that sense is so bad,
Truly, she is a puzzlement.
@Crip Dyke
I assume she wanted to say “rambling” as a way of being dismissive (which, of course, is still inaccurate) but wanted to sound smart, so she checked a thesaurus and this is what she cane up with.
@Talonknife
As someone who marks papers, I’m afraid I’m now contractually obliged to hate you. Unless I can shame you out of the behavior by pointing out it’s Jordan Peterson’s favorite tactic too…