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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.
The alternative is certainly not cheaper for me! To use that alternative my occasional $8.75 cinema tickets and $150 satellite TV package would become $7.99 a month to each of several streaming services … and a roughly $1300 a month rent increase to move to somewhere with fast enough DSL for streaming.
I said the virus was gone in the county I am in. No active cases. The big non-human reservoirs are bats in a mine somewhere in Yunnan province in China.
And …
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-zuckerberg-what-if-trump-disputes-election-results
Disturbing. What can we do about this?
@Surplus
One thing to note is that the Supreme Court seems to be very fed up with Trump lately, with even the justices he appointed ruling against him regarding his taxes and LGBT protections. So if he tries to have the Supreme Court invalidate the election like Bush did, he could be in for a surprise when they don’t.
O/T: Dictionary.com has added a definition for TERF. Given that TERFs love using this website to define “woman” as “adult human female” (ignoring that it says trans* women are women), expect a meltdown soon.
@Surplus to Requirements:
There are a lot of trends going on right now which are bad or mixed. None of them are new, and have been slowly going on for a few decades, but the coronavirus is accelerating some of them.
Costs of living are going up due to inflation, but pay (whether employment or disability aid) largely static. A very large part of this is due to increased automation reducing the number of jobs formerly done by humans, and not always being replaced by something else. This leads to increased numbers of people chasing after fewer open positions, which in turn skews the employment market heavily in favor of the employers, which depresses wages. And when wages don’t go up, there isn’t more tax money to fund disability aid, so that doesn’t go up either.
Non-grocery stores at all levels, from the lowest Mom-and-Pop to the biggest department stores, are going under. These jobs are largely being replaced by internet-sales warehouses. In the short run, this is a good thing for some people, and bad for others. In the long run, the trend is toward corporate supergiants like the world has never seen before (definitely Amazon, probably Alibaba and Ebay, maybe a few others) dominating nearly all of the world’s non-grocery commerce if it continues unabated. (And Amazon is trying their hand at groceries, too) Oh, and eventually those warehouses will be largely automated as well…
Movie Theaters and Cable TV are largely on the decline, and being replaced with streaming services. Again, good for some people, bad for others. While Netflix will probably remain #1, the fairly rapid proliferation suggests that, unlike the commerce consolidation mentioned above, there will probably be healthy competition even if some of them end up crashing and burning. I’ve heard that this isn’t some sort of plot by “neo-liberal overlords” but the result of cable companies accidentally sowing the seeds of their own destruction.
Air travel is way down. People don’t have as much spare income for vacations due to cost of living increases but wages not rising to match. This is hurting bars and restaurants and movie theaters and similar sorts entertainment/recreation sites too, to a lesser extent. And of course the coronavirus messed up a lot of those pretty badly.
Churches, temples, and other religious organizations are going under. Regardless of what one thinks of religion in general, this causes community disruptions in the short term, and the remaining ones tend to concentrate and empower extremists, as the moderate/liberal religious people largely aren’t looking very hard for new ones, not that they’d much care for what’s left when it’s filled with extremists.
But probably most pernicious is that in some cities there’s a weird sort of super-gentrification going on – instead of the poor and minorities being driven out of their communities, it’s often middle-class whites which are being driven out. Houses are being snatched up, and some abandoned communities or formerly empty areas are being filled with luxury condos… mostly inhabited by no one. That’s because they’re not homes. Some have a secondary use of effectively being a “company-owned hotel room” for corporations which have traveling agents (which is incidentally messing up the hotel industry), but the main use is as wealth sinks, as pseudo-trade-goods, and as money laundering tools by the megacorps, the super-rich, and the crime syndicates. And then there are also some weathy landlords buying up homes for using as temporary housing through sites like AirBnB…
A lot of cities are trying to make up for that by building more “affordable housing” using whatever funds they can scrape together to incentivize developers, but it tends to be going not quite fast enough to keep up with the displacement and is often well away from where most of the jobs are.
It’s unlikely most of that will go back to “normal”. There will be a new normal, though probably not until at least a few years after the coronavirus dies down. The current trends cannot change on a dime, but neither will they last, if for no reason other than the global economy will completely tank if almost no one has homes or income. It’s hard to predict what that new normal will look like, since whatever comes next will be the result of people trying to force this train onto a different track. It might even look different in different places.
That being said, I highly doubt that you need a $1300 rent to have decent enough internet for streaming. Maybe Canada really is that unpopulated between big cities, but that’s about three to five time what it would cost to inhabit a small french city, the kind that have good internet but not high speed fiber. It’s also *significantly* higher than what it would cost to inhabit in the heart of Paris. Which is strange given how cheap movies are apparently.
Outside of that, it’s really not the work of any nefarious agent. Current trends are certainly accelerating, but they more come of existing trends. The TV will die sooner or later given that Internet litteraly do the same thing but better, and move theaters have so much jacked up their price that at some point they will disappear out of pricing themselves out of reach of everyone.
No, that’s a pretty reasonable rent for a one-bedroom apartment in any major Canadian city (it’s probably considered an absolute steal in Toronto or Vancouver). If you get roommates, it can be cheaper, and if you live in a smaller town, it can be cheaper, but that amount is hardly outside of the realm of possibility for rent in Canada.
O/T: I would encourage all if possible not to do business with Teespring. In addition to their past issues with bigots, they have now banned T-shirts from antifascist organizations with the words “Antifa” or “anti fascist”, but allow alt right T-shirts that encourage killing Antifa members, as well as shirts with homophobic or misogynistic slurs and violent messages to remain up. This company has made it clear what their views are, and as a result I would recommend avoiding them.
– I used to be a member on ‘A voice for men”. For quite some time – More than 7 years.
– I left that website a few years ago, but unfortunately, my toxic masculinity did not leave me.
– Until a short while back
– Today as I write this, I am a changed man.
– Unfortunately, I was a visitor to this very website as well, several years ago. At that time, as you can understand, I did not know better. And I apologize for the things I posted at that time, that disrespected women and might have hurt women’s feelings.
– I hope to stick around and learn more about how to fight misogyny, respect women, and how to be a feminist. (I am a little confused about feminism’s actual views about certain aspects. With me being on the opposite side all my life, the reader can understand why.)
– Thank you for reading. Cheers.
@Snowberry – Very nice, concise summary, methinks. In any case, I’m not very conspiracy-minded (getting most of the people who get singled-out by these to all work together in the same way, aiming for the exact same goal, would be an exercise in cat-herding the likes of which the world has never seen), so I’m more apt to consider most of those things to be Hanlon’s Razor in action (yes, I’m aware this requires a depressingly ludicrous amount of apathy and stupidity, but here we are).
In any case, the two biggest actual conspiracies in contemporary history are probably the Holocaust and king Leopold’s Congo Free State atrocities, and we got FAR too many proofs of both being the real deal (following the Auschwitz Memorial Museum’s Twitter feed is both depressing and enlightening) to consider them merely “theories” (that said “hypothesis” is a better word to describe them IMO, given that a theory needs more than mere say-so to be considered such, unlike a hypothesis; methinks people are mainly too lazy to say/write the longer word).
RE: Canadian rent: 1300$ (in Canadian funny plastic money, that is) a month would get you a pretty nice apartment here in Montreal depending on neighborhood, and in the suburbs where I live you could actually rent a house for that much. Probably not for much longer though.
O/T: I missed this until today, but it looks like William Shatner has decided he wants to be the next Glinner. He’s spent the last few days QTing and sending harassers to small accounts after being called “cis”, then doubling down into a tantrum when people pointed out it wasn’t a slur.
@Snowberry:
A few years?! And what am I to do in the meantime when a movie comes out that I want to see, or if I want to vary my diet in the slightest? It’s been six goddamn months since I had a cheeseburger … Why are decisions like these constantly being made without my needs being taken into consideration?
@Catalpa:
Nonstarter, in my case. With my sleep disorder, we’d mutually drive one another mad. Not to mention how would I guarantee against irreplaceable stuff being tampered with or stolen? It would require getting a two bedroom apartment with lockable bedrooms to each safeguard our stuff so the other couldn’t go and sell it out from under them in a moment of desperation for cash, or similarly, and then the rent would be even higher … and then I’d largely be living in a smaller space, to wit just one bedroom, since I couldn’t then keep anything of value in the common areas.
It just doesn’t seem workable, short of trusting someone to the degree that one normally associates with married couples. And that’s before taking account of the sleep disorder.
But then your internet speeds aren’t enough to stream video well, and we’re back to square one.
@Naglfar:
He’s spent the last few days whatting?
@Surplus
Quote Tweeting. It’s when you link someone else’s tweet within one of your own as a way to respond or share it on your timeline. Graham Linehan infamously did this to attack people and inform his army of transphobes about new targets. Now Shatner has followed suit. I really thought JK Rowling was going to take over as new leader of TERFs on Twitter, but Shatner seems to be giving her a run for her money. He has far fewer followers, so his impact might not be as dangerous, but still not ideal.
Shatner being bigoted isn’t really new, he has a long history of harassing autistic people, so it’s not that surprising he’s pivoted to transphobia (with the usual undertones of racism etc).
He what?!
@LindsayIrene
He has supported and defended Autism Speaks multiple times over the past few years, then each time has lashed out when autistic people tried to explain to him why he shouldn’t. On the heels of that, this isn’t terribly surprising.
That incident also prompted this meme:
@Surplus
I actually wasn’t trying to give you advice on your situation (I’ve finally learned my lesson and completely given up on speaking to you on that topic), I was just trying to give Ohlmann a bit of perspective on the housing/rental costs in Canada, and some of the options Canadians have available to us.
But thanks for taking the time to take a big shit on my points anyway.
What meme?
Iirc Shatner was posting some red pill nonsense before, too. I blocked him long ago for being a horrible person.
@Surplus
The people making these decisions are weighing your needs. And the needs of immunocompromised people. And the needs of healthcare workers. And the needs of businesses who want to open. It’s still possible to get a cheeseburger to go, or make one yourself. And movies are being made available on demand. It’s not possible for so many people to see their loved ones again. To hold their hands or kiss their cheeks or hear their laugh.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to diminish the difficulty of feeding oneself during a lockdown like this, but compared to the alternative, it’s simply not the highest priority problem going on right now. Frankly, it’s disgusting that you’re complaining about essentially being bored with your food and entertainment choices when a thousand people are dying every day.
@Surplus
The image embedded in my comment. Can you see it?
@kupo
I didn’t know that before, but it doesn’t surprise me.
You don’t actually need high streaming speeds to watch movies online, since Netflix has a download option.
You also don’t need to subscribe to all of the streaming services all the time. If there’s a specific movie you want to see on a specific service, you can join them for a month.
Surplus:
This is outright offensive.
Those are not needs. They’re luxuries. Having working lungs: that’s a need.
It’s not *you* specifically that is being targeted, it’s a shared sacrifice that we’re doing society-wide because, though you deny it, there’s a virus out there that will pop back up the second we loosen restriction too much.
The word “cis”: How anyone thinks it’s insulting is beyond me. It’s a neutral descriptor. If someone objects to being called “cis” I can pretty much assume they’re transphobic at this point.
I wonder if people reacted this way to the word “heterosexual” a few decades ago?
Re movies and stuff: YouTube has some movies available (a few dollars each to watch). If you don’t want to give business to Google, there are some free ones available on Vimeo. I remember I saw Bunuel’s l’Age d’or there.
I know, in the large scheme of things it seems petty to complain about missing entertainment*, but it can affect mental health and exacerbate other worries. I get that. For me, I really miss spending time in libraries. They’re one of the main places I use to write (too many potential distractions at my place)**. In the Montreal area, the libraries I know of are only open for pick-up/drop-off.
And yeah, the Toronto area seems to be reopening more slowly. When I was there in July, no one was allowed inside restaurants. But many had take-out. Restaurants are allowed to be open in Montreal, with spacing precautions (but many can’t afford to be).
*though what kupo & numerobis said makes sense as a reality check; I’m not trying to “subtweet” anyone here (evidently I think this is Twitter now – I need more sleep :P)
**I did manage to finish chapters 1-3 of my novel, mostly, and a draft of chapter 4 now, so it’s not like this makes it impossible – just harder
Not for me it’s not. Anything I get “to go” will be soggy and cold by the time I get home with it, and I don’t have the necessary tools here to make one myself, they wouldn’t fit in my backpack if I tried to obtain them, and if I did somehow lug them all home and use them I’d give myself carbon monoxide poisoning, because I don’t have a balcony or anything like that here.
I don’t deny it. However,
a) This “shared sacrifice” doesn’t seem to be being shared all that equally, now does it? I have less to begin with but seem to be expected to sacrifice more than middle-class people living in larger urban areas.
b) The experts themselves don’t seem to agree that it would be “loosening restriction too much”, in that they’ve given the green light for “stage 3” reopening in most of Ontario. But for some reason that “stage 3” reopening doesn’t actually seem to be happening, at least not in my town.
c) This is all glossing over the real issue, which is what I said before: I’m not even seen in public anymore except briefly at a store doing something essential, usually buying groceries. I’ve basically disappeared, except online. My isolation was already unusual before and now it is extreme. Other people have been limited to “social circles” of 10 people. I seem to have been singled out to be limited to zero. And I think I am well within my rights to ask why.
Thousands of seafarers have been trapped at sea for more than a year. More than half are over their contract and dont know when they go home. Food on board is only what can be supplied in this pandemic depending on what countries the vessel calls. People like this, who are struggling trapped at sea, they are who is supplying medical equipment, masks, electronics that you use for entertainment, food you eat. In a few days, two people on my ship will go home, they have been on this ship since July 2019. What are you doing in July 2019? I honestly dont think cheeseburger and streaming are the issue here. It upsets me to hear this, the suffering right now is so great, most people do not see this. Some of the stories I heard about other ships, the people trapped there will NEVER recover from the trauma they experienced there. Not just a few years before they return to ‘normal’, their life is changed forever. The breakdown of mental health and support will effect them for the rest of their life.
@epitome
I’d imagine so, since they’re still doing it now. Similarly, many object to terms like “able-bodied” or “neurotypical” or “allistic.” I think the reason is that allocishet white men in particular (though some other groups do it too, it’s mostly a cishet white guy thing i.e. Shatner) are used to being seen as the default, and so they get angry when they are referred to as cis or a similar term, as that reduces the idea of cishet white male as the default (which is the point, no one type of person should be seen as default).
A theory I’ve seen thrown around is that they think it’s insulting because they use “trans*” (or the related slur) as an insult, so they assume “cis” must also be an insult (projection). When confronted, they usually either repeat some tired nonsense about “gender is a cult” or “I don’t conform to all stereotypes so I’m not cis,” both of which don’t actually explain anything.
As a cis/het dude myself. I sure as heck don’t find being called that particularly insulting (except if you say something like “fuck cis people”; someone decided that particular aggressive categorism was apt on a r/shitredditsays post about transphobia, clearly implying all cis folks were inimical to LGBTQ+; my reply, which included my own positive experiences with trans people, somehow got me banned, and when I asked a mod about it, even asking if I’d done something wrong so I could correct it, their response to me was, and I quote, “fuck cis people”).
*AHEM* Sorry or the rant/tangent. In any case, Shatner has long been divorced from reality, as his rather …inconsistent (understatement, I know) relationship with former co-star George Takei has been proves. In his case, degrading into randomly right-wing “Old man yells at tree” territory was completely expected on my part.