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By David Futrelle
In 2010, men’s rights lawyer Roy Dean Hollander wrote an inflammatory piece for the men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men declaring that men might be forced to take up arms to defeat what he saw as the tyranny of feminism.
Several weeks ago, Den Hollander took his own advice, gunning down the son and husband of a female judge he had tangled with in the past; the son died of his wounds. Several days earlier he killed rival men’s rights attorney Marc Angelucci.
If you thought Den Hollander’s murders would have occasioned some soul searching on the part of the folks at AVFM, you would be dead wrong. Site foinder Paul Elam and others associated with the site offered no apoligies for publishing Den Hollander’s screed (or for a later post by Elam effusively praising him as a “real man”); instead they insisted to anyone who would listen that Den Hollander wasn’t a real men’s rights activist at all and had nothing to do with them.
On Tuesday, AVFM published a post by Gary Costanza referring to Den Hollander’s murder of Angelucci which somehow managed to avoid mentioning both his name and his previous connection to the site, referring to him only as a “demented person.”
Down the memory hole he goes.
Den Hollander – who killed himself shortly after his assault on the judge’s family – was not the only “demented person” in AVFM’s past.
You may be familiar with the name Chris Cantwell – he’s perhaps better known as “the Crying Nazi,” infamous for a teary video he put out after hearing that there was a warrant out for his arrest for several counts of assault at the notorious Unite the Right rally in 2017. Before going full Nazi, you see, Cantwell wrote a number of pieces for AVFM on such topics as IQ, the evils of gun control, and feminists “who demonize men and white people.” When, at the time he was writing for AVFM, I criticized his online harassment of some of his many enemies, Elam wrote a post defending Cantwell and advising me to kill myself.
Cantwell, not only a political activist but quite the gun enthusiast, has been a busy boy in the last several years; his rap sheet is too long and complicated to easily summarize here, but he’s served time for assault and currently sits in jail awaiting trial on charges of threats and extortion against a fellow neo-Nazi. Given his love of guns and his utter lack of impulse control, I think it’s kind of a miracle he hasn’t shot anyone yet.
Over the years, Elam has befriended and published several other men’s rights activists who frankly seem as unhinged as Den Hollander and Cantwell; thankfully none of them have acted out in the same way.
In Constanza’s post today, he urges fellow MRAs to “redouble our efforts” in the wake of Angelucci’s murder.
I would suggest that fans of the site do some serious self-reflection first. Is there a reason their side – and their site — attracts so many “demented” individuals? Perhaps this is not simply bad luck? Perhaps it’s because, to paraphrase a famous comedy routine by Mitchell and Webb, they are the baddies?
H/T — to Twitter’s @TakedownMRAs, who inspired this post.
Skimmingway mentions “manly vim” – my mum used to use Vim ( it’s a scouring powder) to clean the sink. I quite liked seeing him use the word “hag”, you don’t see that much these days. But the Plain English movement does seem to have passed him by.
I really love Proust, and it’s abundantly clear that skillingway hasn’t a clue what concerned Proust.
@Lizzie
For me, the phrase conjures images of the Unix text editor Vim. Given that Vim (and Unix in general) has historically been most popular among technology enthusiasts and programmers, and less so in the general public, Skimmingway would probably write it off as for “nerds”.
Judging from his last episode, I’m guessing Skimmingway will be back in a few hours. He usually seems to be active between midnight UTC and 5:00 UTC (8 PM-1 AM EDT/7 PM-12 AM CDT).
…Wow, I come back to find I’ve missed a silly AnCap/Monarchist git. Sucks to be me I guess…
Also, as someone who lives in a monarchy (Canada’s head of state is still the reigning monarch of the UK BTW), lemme tell you, it ain’t as different as you’d think. And if you actually mean a feudal or absolute monarchy, then… I don’t think you’d be much happier in these, unless you think the average person’s living conditions in North Korea would be nice (although a Muslim petromonarchy would be at least materially better, as long as you’re a Muslim man).
Also, Marcel Proust was actually of Jewish ancestry – would knowing that actually affect the git’s opinion of him? People of his persuasion often are affected by such knowledge.
It’s amusing to see right wingers try to use the Japanese interment under FDR as a club against the left, when they have advocated similar policies. Of course not all of them think the interment was wrong. Just ask Michelle Malkin.
My late high school history teacher Alvin Cox was an aircraft gunner with the RAF in WW2. He certainly seemed to be a left winger of some type.
The “soyboy” trope is silly. The Japanese have long been consumers of various bean based products such as tofu. It doesn’t seem to have stopped them from waging war on each other, and on other countries during their imperialist periods. The same can be said for the peoples of China.
Something tells me part of skimdude’s reading diet is Ayn Rand. He sounds like the long winded turkeys she was fond of.
Man, yesterday I had my hands full with work and personal stuff, and I missed the return of skimmingway! His garbage prose reminded me of two of my favorite quotes:
(Notice that Godwin managed to be eloquent without his prose turning purple.)
When speaking of efficiency in English literature, my mind gets a bit Popish:
Totally OT: Yesterday I found out that not one but TWO of my old teammates will be my co-workers again! I’d recommended they apply to the new company, and they’ve both been hired! Best of all, I get along with them AND they are both very reliable.
Does skimmingway have a correct grip on anything? Also, is this right, it’s ok to use violence against people you think are too left-wing but it isn’t ok to use violence to try to free people from slavery? I get that right? Also, he’s still really tedious.
Just finished reading this entire thread and I applaud your patience with that pretentious troll-boy. Unlike his verbal diarrhea most of your responses were a joy to read. Kudos.
@Naglfar
I’ve been using vim all morning, so this is naturally what I thought of as well.
Isn’t Unix generally considered like… I hate to phrase it this way, but given the massive preponderance of sausage-festiness in computers… the manliest OS, though? I definitely get the feeling that people who use vim from the command line of unix are considered to have more manly mojo as programmers than people who use IDEs in Windows, for example. There’s a definite sense of hierarchy.
I personally have no preference because it’s always easiest to use whatever you were trained on first, there’s no sense in boasting about it. The only thing I thumb my nose at is people who try to publish high performance papers where the experiments are all done in Python.
@Paireon
I’m sure he’ll be back. You live in or near Montreal IIRC, so expect him back around 8 or 9 PM your time zone.
That’s usually what self professed monarchists want.
@Tim Gueguen
I do wonder if there is a connection between the “soyboy” stereotype and the stereotype of Asian men as weak.
@Big Titty Demon
In my experience Linux is seen as more so due to the open source DIY aspect. Then again, I’m not much in contact with the Linux community so I could be wrong. Plus, IIRC the creator of Linux has multiple accusations of misconduct so of course the dudebro crowd has to rally around him.
I used to use text editors more, but now that there are many IDEs I find those easier to use for most languages. Now I only really use text editors for my older systems or for HTML.
*shakes head*
Python? I’ve got nothing against Python and it does have its uses, but that is not one of them.
Naglfar: you should look into SciPy. Python is very commonly used in simulation. It’s fast to write code, and it’s easy to optimize the heck out of certain modules where all the compute time is being spent. Basically all machine learning work is done in Python.
At least skimmingway has nothing he can say to me. He ran away like he should.
He acts like he’s really masculine but I can tell by how he acts that gross creep skimmingway really isn’t that manly (at least by my standards).
@Stacey
He’s probably very insecure about his masculinity. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with being non masculine, but part of how the far right works is by exploiting insecurity. He’s fallen in and thinks this is a way for him to prove his masculinity.
@Big Titty Demon : while there’s some people that attach manliness to OS just like people that attach manliness to baby gears, in actual practice it have more to do with the kind of software engineering job you do.
If you do system administration, vim and linux are by *far* the easiest tool you can have, because they are everywhere and much more friendly for thoses tasks than windows tools, or even non-command line linux tool.
If you do front-end engineering (layout of pages, user interface, etc), Mac is often used because it work pretty well with the graphic tool. Linux is used a lot too, but not via vim, more via more traditional IDEs.
In the end, practicality tend to win. Turn out rich IDEs can be mightily handy for some task and very cumbersome for other.
The linux community have some rotten part of it. Linus Torvald is someone that should be avoided at all cost. He improved, which mean he is still a massive asshole defying any description, but less so than before. I didn’t hear of sexual misconduct or direct misogyny but A – I may have missed them and B – he didn’t needed to do that to register as a black hole of assholeishness to me.
@Ohlmann
I use Macs because it gives me both the graphical/IDE functionality and I can also use Unix command line tools in the Terminal. I also prefer the Macs because they are good for multimedia editing.
I don’t know what the accusations are, but I remember a few years ago all these random right wing grifters jumped out to defend him against supposedly being “framed by feminists”. A google search just brings up right wing rags.
As always, I’m amused that skimmingway thinks that people not getting his point or not understanding his writing means that everyone else is stupid, and not that he has failed by not adjusting his communication to suit his audience.
I mean, he’s here to educate us and to impart something important to us, right? He wants us to understand it, right? He knows we’re all dum-dums and that it’s hard to get through to us, right?
But instead of breaking it down to us in terms he could expect us to understand, he flails his, er, eloquence all over the place and then mocks us for not understanding. Truly the mark of an intellectual. Truly a great educator in our midst.
And I know one when I see one, seeing as I was taught something about the basic tenets of Islam by a person who refused to believe what someone with actual muslim family members told them.
I’m just amazed to find out that I don’t exist. I joined the US Army at 19 and I was quite leftist at the time (I’ve become even more so as I aged, but that’s a whole ‘nother story)
@Naglfar
I apologize if it seemed like I was saying there was something wrong with not being masculine or not being a certain gender or expressing gender in some way.
I was just trying to say something similar to what you are I think. I mean like he’s set up this expectation about hard-bodied physically strong men as the ideal for everything. But he sure doesn’t act like the men I know and select to serve me who have those physical attributes and are manly in that way. The same things in them that give them the inner drive to work out and be strong and muscled and ripped are what makes them sweet and able to be what I want in a guy. Those are very select ones though.
No lefties in the military? Has he ever talked to anyone ever about anything in person? Cuz…
What I am sure that Linus did is emotionaly abusing other linux contributors, cultivating an extremely toxic culture of one-upmanship, and having a quasi-extatic way of insulting and belittling people. He also seem to lack any control over his emotion, especially his wrath. So of course right wing rags would defend him to death : apart from openly hating women and PoC he is pretty much the parangon of toxic masculinity.
@Naglfar: Ooo, nice, maybe I’ll get to start my vacation by laughing at him along with you folks. Also, I already suspected most European-derived monarchists are like that (whether Russian, Latin-American or anywhere in-between), so I was kinda half-sarcastic, so it’s all good. *thumbs up*
@Ohlmann: Wow, no idea Torvald was such a douche. I didn’t exactly know him besides “dude who kinda created Linux, maybe” (my programming-fu is weak).
OT: Recently suffered from a broken pedestal myself recently, RE: Robert M. Price, noted atheist and scholar on both HP Lovecraft and the historicity of Jesus. I mean, I knew he was right-leaning, but… FUCK, he really went down the rabbit hole in the past five years… I mean, “Atheists for Trump”!? REALLY!?
@Stacey
I didn’t think you were saying that, I was just clarifying for my own statement. You’re fine.
@Some Chick in Texas
Probably not. The reason right wingers don’t know the first thing about leftists is that they’ve been garnering all their “information” from Chan memes to the point that they think leftists sound like that, then are confused when they don’t.
@Paireon
Regrettably, a lot of “New Atheists” fell down the hard right rabbit hole.
As much as this meathead sounds like a culprit from case 2 of an Ace Attorney game, I do feel like a lot of people are mostly monarchists in practice. Most are not as openly aware of it, but I think a lot of people, especially when they’re younger, think of presidents and prime ministers as temporary rulers who are supposed to be left largely unchecked, with elections being the main check to their power. Based on the civics class I had in high school, civics classes are supposed to get kids to dispose of such a notion. I’ve become more convinced of the idea that modern conservatives are by and large ideological heirs to the monarchists of the times of the French and American revolutions. It explains quite a lot of things.
I think the thing that sticks out to me the most, at least out of the stuff that hasn’t been picked out for mockery already, is the rant about an apocalypse that kills off everyone except the (implied to be cis) manliest of (implied to be cis) men, who will survive and continue civilization. (Given what’s implied) I’m not sure how to imagine such a scenario. Maybe something like this:
@Paireon: Yeah, that was pretty ghastly.