We Hunted The Mammoth
Lovers of cinematic catastrophe, rejoice!
Facing accusations of fraud, douchebaggery, and skull abandonment in the wake of a split with his estranged “filmmaking” partner Jordan Owen, the formerly bald film auteur Davis Aurini has released a 38-minute “Rough Draft Preview” of his version of The Sarkeesian effect.
As you may recall, the recent week of hate and abuse directed at Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, which led to her becoming ex-Reddit-CEO Ellen Pao, was triggered by the firing of a popular admin Victoria Taylor, one of the few people on Reddit’s staff who actually seemed to respond to user concerns. The firing was said to be an example of Pao’s supposed “incompetence,” a sign that she didn’t really understand Reddit or Reddit culture — and that she needed to go.
One problem with this line of argument was that there was never ever any proof that Pao was responsible for firing Taylor.
And now it seems pretty clear that she wasn’t. Over the weekend, Reddit co-founder and Chairman of the Board Alexis Ohanian seemed to admit, albeit somewhat obliquely, that he was the person responsible for the firing, commenting on Reddit that
More signs of desperation over at A Voice for Men, the Men’s Rights/Lady Disparagement site that has apparently ceased to be the cash cow for its founder, the unlovely and untalented Paul Elam, that it once was:
So Reddit is in a tizzy again. This time, surprisingly, it’s not because Redditors are outraged that the site admins have hired a woman, or shut down one of dozens of subreddits devoted to, I dunno, stolen pictures of dead celebrity babies, or some other typically Reddity thing for Redditors to get outraged about.
No, this time Redditors are angry because Reddit seems have fired the one staffer who was genuinely liked by a wide swath of Redditors — that staffer being Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s Director of Talent, perhaps best known for keeping the site’s mega-popular Ask Me Anything (AMA) threads running smoothly, which extended to relaying questions to famous guests and transcribing their answers.
If there are any stray British MRAs reading this blog, have I found an opportunity for you! How would you like to serve under the political whiz-kid who triumphantly led the Justice for Men And Boys (and women who love them) Party a landslide victory in the UK election this May, unexpectedly winning 216 seats in …
Oh, wait, the party didn’t win 216 seats. It got 216 votes. Out of 30,691,680 total votes cast, for a stunning 0.0007% of the total.
That’s one-fortieth the votes received by the Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol party, one-eighteenth of those won by the old school classic Monster Raving Loony Party. (Note to non-Brits: those are both real parties.) 153 of these votes were for J4MB leader and A Voice for Men friend Mike Buchanan; 63 went to the party’s other candidate.
Anyway, fresh off this magnificent triumph, Buchanan has just announced that he’s now taking applications for an assistant — that is, for the prestigious post of Deputy Leader for the party. He’s looking for someone who will help to “enable the party to move to the next stage of its development.” which presumably involves getting more than 0.0007% of the vote next time.
Last month, I reported that Indian Men’s Rights Activist and marital rape apologist Amartya Talukdar — a regular contributor to leading Men’s Rights site A Voice for Men — was a Holocaust denier.
The evidence? A series of Tweets in which, among other things, he declared that the “Holocaust is a lie of gigantic proportion,” expressed a certain admiration for Hitler and, bizarrely, declared that Hillary Clinton was a “Jewess.”
When I asked AVFM’s then-managing editor Dean Esmay about these troubling Tweets from someone he had published on his site only a few days earlier, he responded … by calling me a “stalker madman” and threatening to call the police if I ever emailed him again. (It was, as far as I recall, the only time I’ve ever emailed him.)
Well, ok, I thought, the folks at AVFM seem to be congenitally unable to ever admit to being wrong, even when the evidence is right before their eyes. But I didn’t think AVFM would be dumb enough to post anything by Talukdar ever again.
Do you remember that alleged case the Honey Badger Brigade was allegedly planning to bring against the Calgary Expo?
In case your memory needs refreshing: the Honey Badgers — a mostly female antifeminist “brigade” closely associated with A Voice for Men — were tossed out of the Expo earlier this year after they showed up flying the banner of GamerGate. The Badgers threatened to sue, and somehow managed to raise a little over $30,000 to pay for their possible legal expenses.
Then they went silent on the whole suit thing for a looong time.
Today they announced (archived here) that they’d hired a fellow named Harry Kopyto as their “legal council” [sic], paying him a retainer of $3500. As one of the Badgers — apparently head Badger Alison Tieman — explained on their web page:
If their reaction to the widespread mockery of The Sarkeesian Effect trailer is any indication, the two biggest critics of the “critic who cannot be criticized” cannot handle much in the way of criticism. Davis Aurini, the Nazi-er of the two Sarkeesian Effect auteurs, has been blocking the critics on his Youtube channel, evidently oblivious to the ironies. Jordan Owen, the one with the hair, has been yelling into his computer and putting the results up on Youtube. (See above.)
Never let it be said that the Men’s Rights movement does nothing to help men. Earlier this week, A Voice for Men’s CEO Paul Elam announced the launch of a new service for men. That service is that Elam, a noted former psychology major in college, will listen to you talk shit about women for an hour over Skype for $90.
Elam’s fans are excited to have a new talking point.
