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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.
@An Impish Pepper
Of course they are. That’s who coined the term in the first place, their intellectual heirs understand that perfectly well. Conservatism is about conserving and strengthening social hierarchies, with an ideal state being one where everybody knows their place and keeps in it under fear of punishment.
@Nequam – Yeah, the news that he wrote an utterly cringe-worthy intro to a swords-and-sorcery anthology (Flashing Swords 6) he edited that caused many authors to ask to be removed from said anthology was what caught my eyes and revealed to me his sad decline into “Old Man Yells at Tree” territory.
And yes, that intro really is that fucking cringe.
@An impish Pepper:
(raises hand at the back of the lecture hall): I believe in that kind of apocalypse-as-wish-fulfillment scenario, women aren’t counted as people, but as a resource: the manly-men survivors will naturally “protect” the good-looking ones in exchange for sex.
@Moon Custafer
This seems to be what a lot of the manosphere thinks, as they are all salivating at the idea of some sort of apocalypse to put women and minorities “in their place.”
@Naglfar
And I am not the first person to say this, but here we are in some value of apocalypse and the tools to fight it are cleaning, cooking, patience and looking out for the vulnerable.
Come to think of it, those work for quite a lot of situations.
I haven’t followed the original story in much detail, but out of curiosity I read the whole comment thread.
Apparently skimmingway thinks everyone who comments here is an authoritarian communist…?
On the surface, that seems an odd conclusion to make, but it’s clearly because our prose stylings are nowhere near as luminously eloquent as his! If we only were able to reach his heights of rhetorical mastery, our messages would be as lucid and limpid as a sparkling stream. Alas, even your humble Mme. d’Incompréhensibilité cannot approximate his raw, breathtaking command of the English language (as befits my status as a lowly woman, forsooth).
@Ohlmann, Naglfar
RE: Linus Torvald: iirc (but cannot find the article I’m thinking of about this which frustrates me), he was told that the culture he was fostering and his attitude in particular created an environment particularly unwelcoming to female developers and to maybe cut that shit out so that they’d be made more welcome, and his response was to spew for a screed about how if you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen and women weren’t meant to be programmers naturally blah blah blah more delicate naturally and can’t take the pressure yadda yadda he doesn’t care of wussies get hurt, the weak fall prey to the strong, puke barf, more of this. He changed his tune only in like the last year or two, I’m not entirely sure why, but reckon it had to do with the Me Too movement, so if I’m guessing, I would guess there’s something in his past he’s hoping doesn’t come up and he’s trying to reform now as a gesture of goodwill. Buuuuuut he’s kind of still a towering asshole.
Re: DIY nature of Unix: Aren’t there like a gajillion (technical term) companies that put out Unix OS though? As well as all sorts of sysadmin tools for it, e.g. Slurm, Spack, Spark (I didn’t realise how many of these were going to start with S when I started) and so forth?
@numerobis
The problem is it’s fast to write code in Python, but it’s not fast code. :/ People just write code that isn’t fast, even when using tuned C++ libraries wrapped in Python, because all their own contributions are written in Python as well. Then they try to compare it to known fast implementations, but of course it isn’t going to stand up well, because it’s in Python, so they re-implement other algorithms in Python and call it their baseline. You end up with around 25% of HPC submissions having the foundational problem of comparing to self-implemented bad baselines (or no baselines, even worse), just because the people who submitted couldn’t program in a high performance language. It’s an automatic reject from any good conference.
Python has almost no use in HPC. I only have the almost because I’m not omniscient and maybe it feasibly has one somewhere that I never heard of, but I never heard of it. As you say, in machine learning it’s used to wrap many C++ libraries in order to make prototyping easier and it’s popular in data mining and such. But not HPC. Begone, foul demon Python from all HPC and parallel programming!
The Linus story is he’s an insufferable asshole. To his credit at some point he wrote a statement indicating he realized it and declared he wanted to do better. I haven’t heard as much about him since so I don’t know if anything came of this.
The sexual misconduct is more likely rms, who’s been creepy for decades and also is insufferable. He got resigned from various positions finally just last year but 20 years earlier women I knew, knew to avoid him — and let me know about it (I was not very woke at all, so if I heard about something, it was open knowledge).
@ A Distracted Medievalist
Exactly. And the right wing can’t do them at all.
@Big Titty Demon
That would be an interesting choice of words for him to use.
I was talking about Linux, which seems to be liked by many programmers because there are a lot of different distros for users depending on what ratio of ease of use to power they want. As for Unix, I’m not really involved with that scene so I can’t say.
@numerobis
Another annoying aspect is that he and his defenders regularly use his (possibly, he denies it) autistic status as a defense. I’m autistic and have never assaulted anyone, so this frustrates me, as assaulting people is not part of autism.
He resigned from MIT and FSF after he defended Jeffrey Epstein, but he’s still head of GNU project.
Big Titty Demon: You don’t put Python in the inner loop, so its performance doesn’t really matter. Essentially all the computation is in native libraries; the scripting languages are just there to glue bits together.
It’s been a while but last I did HPC it was in ruby (with custom wrappers around PETSc because we were too cool for Python) but same thing. The ruby code was about parsing command-line arguments, creating some appropriately-named directories, starting up the system, then check in once per timestep and direct a checkpoint or output the final results or whatever.
Unless you count sending jobs to a render farm as HPC. That was much more recent. I used a mix of Python and .bat files.
@numerobis
No I was talking about supercomputer parallel algorithms research/academic publishing. In this, all computations and loops matter in the search for fastest libraries/routines/algorithms. I guarantee it’s an instant reject from the committee of HPC conferences to submit any code written in Python that claims the object is to be high performance, I’ve reviewed 3 sets of submissions with a committee member and it’s the one rule I can generalize from the experience (well, besides “copyediting your paper before submission is a good idea” and maybe “test distributed systems on a machine bigger than a laptop”).
@Naglfar
Programmers liking Linux is less a function of the proliferation of distros, more a function of the major ones being super modular and easy to extend… At least, until you need a dependency that’s not in your distro’s or your language’s package manager, then it becomes a pain just like in every other OS. Also Mac has stuff like Homebrew and Windows has Chocolatey now, so IDK how much that’s still an advantage.
Anyway the proliferation of distros I think is more of a curse than a blessing at this point, it’s massive duplication of effort and a lot of the distros are terribly maintained. Like, irresponsibly terribly. I would never recommend Linux Mint to anyone after the garbage they’ve done, and just last month or so Manjaro had a kerfuffle among the maintainers about alleged misappropriation of funds, and… yeah, it’s all terrible all the way down. No matter what OS you pick it’s ultimately maintained by far too many bros.
I still use Linux myself because it annoys me the least of all available options. But, also I’m not a real programmer. 😉
@Ohlmann, @Naglfar, @Big Titty Demon
Re Linus himself, let me put it this way: every time I wanted to get involved in kernel programming, his macho attitude was the factor pushing me away. I’d take one look at the stuff he’d say in the LKML, and how he treated other developers and distro maintainers, and be like: “Fuck no, I got enough of that treatment in high school.” Dude is basically the original brogrammer, and also his attitude towards infosec is part of why kernel gets so many vulnerabilities, and yeah I kind of wish he’d step down already.
@Cyborgette
Thank you for adding the context. My experience with Linux is very limited, I used to use Windows but switched to Macs a few years ago and haven’t really explored alternative OSes like Linux.
I did buy the Raspberry Pi when it first came out because I was curious, but the original version was lacking power and was mostly a novelty or for projects, and I didn’t really have any use for it. It ran a scaled down version of Debian that wasn’t very practical.
…Aaaannd now it’s a bunch of programming jargon I don’t understand LOL. And the git still hasn’t shown himself, sadly. Oh well, I can wait a bit, I’m on vacation now.
@Paireon
Well, since this is his second flameout (he started out with a drive by, then returned a few weeks later for the raw meat meltdown), I’d say a third is in the cards some time soon.
I’ve been checking occasionally all day, but I’m not interested in the tech talk and Skimmy hasn’t showed, so I’ve been keeping quiet.
@Snowberry: He’ll be back. Count on it. He’s like a World War II Kriegsmarine U-boat– every time you think he’s gone, he resurfaces for another attack.
Eh, I kinda enjoy watching people reach nerdvana. 🙂
Enthusiasm’s always fun.
@Cyborgette
Yup, 100% with you on that. Ain’t got the time for that noise.
@ Naglfar, general skimmingway discussion
I’ve not yet understood why he only distorts Naglfar’s name into Naglfart. Is it that he can’t think of another “clever” distortion for anyone else, so he gave up? Or he knows there was another troll that did that so he’s trying to be more original? Or he just has a particular spite for Naglfar?
I’ve also not understood why he’s against John Brown when one of his main, er, points, is “Those to whom evil is done often commit evil in turn.” Like the slaves John Brown gave implements of war to, no evil was ever done to them, eh, amirite?
Maybe Skimmingway took the day off? He’s usually on here about now.
@Big Titty Demon
I think it’s this. He’s annoyed that I keep breaking his arguments and making fun of him, and this is the only way he can retaliate. Other commenters also proposed that he might be crushing on me a bit and doing the online equivalent of pulling my hair.
Trolls generally don’t like me much. And that’s fine by me.
@ Skimmingway
No lefties in the military? I’ll raise you the late Lord (Paddy) Ashdown, Life Peer for SBS (think more or less Navy SEAL if you are American) and political service.
There will be other lefties in the Mess, but nobody in our (UK) armed services are allowed to be publicly open about political affiliations until after discharge. I’m sure someone in the know could back me up on this even here.
On another of your assertions, you must be aware different cultures do monarchism differently. Would you want to be a Year King for example? Or maybe an Anglo-Saxon king subject to the approval of aethelings, ealdormen and priests? ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’ especially when your subjects decide to chop it off after concluding you’ve gone too far.
OK, guys, I’m starting to get worried about whether things will ever return to normal here.
The virus itself has, by all reports, been eradicated entirely in my county in Ontario. The numbers show steady declines in active case counts across Canada, with a trend suggesting that the entire province of Ontario could be virus-free around the start of September and Canada as a whole not long after.
Supposedly, we’re in “stage 3 reopening” now in most of Ontario, which is supposed to be pretty much business as usual except with masks and distancing, and no really big events like indoor concerts and such.
But I’m not seeing any sign of it. The last time I was out around town, which was Thursday, though most retail was open the KFC still had a sign up saying its dining room was closed. The local cinema has no showtimes listed at CinemaClock, and so forth.
Things are, clearly, not at “stage 3 reopening” in my town, despite claims made in various places by various parties to the contrary. And there’s no evidence that that is going to change.
This presents a problem because it suggests that the few things I did recreationally outside of my home, particularly, seeing the odd film and having the odd meal out, are not just gone temporarily but gone forever. Indeed, at some point soon I’m going to start missing out on films when they come and go without the local cinema ever being open during their run.
Worse, I’m worried that our neoliberal overlords will take this opportunity to shut some things down permanently and replace them with more expensive and less accessible alternatives. For example, what if cinema showings of films never come back at all and they replace them with streaming? No more going to a local cinema and paying cash. Now you need to move to the big city where there’s fast enough broadband to stream high-def video, and pay $2000+ a month rents, plus some subscription fee for a video service that no doubt requires a credit card (and thus good credit), just to watch new movies when they first come out. Everyone else — everyone rural, exurban, in smaller towns and cities, poor, with bad credit, and/or on a fixed income — will be forced to wait for the DVD, and spend a year in a minefield of spoilers in the interim.
This isn’t just paranoid ideation. It looks an awful lot like the neoliberal overlords were already busily doing exactly that to television even before COVID hit, and one assumes that this is intentional, no doubt because they make more money that way. Lower costs, more control to try to limit so-called “piracy”, and the ability to use more complex and opaque structures to ding people with higher fees. And their buddies in the real estate business no doubt love the idea of punishing people for living anywhere where rents are non-stratospheric by cutting off their access to current entertainment.
I have no defense against this. I can’t possibly ever afford a rent even much higher than the one I’m paying now, since the world has made it clear it considers me “surplus to requirements” vis-a-vis any kind of job that doesn’t pay worse than disability does, and my own conditions make it unlikely I could ever have long-term stable employment in any capacity other than very unstable, low-paid gig work of some sort anyway.
I am becoming more and more cut off from any semblance of a society, other than via online methods like commenting here. I’m not even seen in public anymore except briefly in a grocery store or the bank once a week or so.
And I can’t be the only one who is disappearing like this. What is happening to society? What are the long term consequences of even further atomizing it like this, and especially of driving everyone below the car-ownership-enabling income bracket into a form of online-only pseudo-hermitude like this?
OK, suddenly your name makes sense to me. I also live on my countries equivalent of disability and the cost of living does seem to go up regardless of how the economy is doing. I wish I had something encouraging to say aside from I hear you. I worry about the return to ‘normal’ too but where I live it’s more along the lines of ‘it seems we opened to soon and too leniently and it’s probably more a matter of ‘when’ we’ll shut down again as opposed to ‘if’.’
WHile I do feel for the people who feel they are surplus to requirement, I feel obligated to say a bunch of things :
* our capitalistic overlord overall prefer movie theaters to streaming, and television over internet. Television and movie theaters are *massively* more profitable ; what’s killing them is that the alternative is cheaper and more qualitative, not that nefarious overlords dislike them.
* the virus isn’t eradicated from Ontario, or from anywhere. That’s wishful thinking, something politics will do, but in actual practice you would need a year or so to be sure ; it’s a virus that might have big non-human reservoirs after all !