We Hunted The Mammoth
So it’s been a while since I checked in on the heroic Twitter activism of the legendary Men’s Rights Twitter Activist Dean Esmay, formerly the Number Two at A Voice for Men, currently either the “Online Activism Director” or the “online outreach director” for the National Coalition For Men — the first according to him, the second according to the NCFM.
Jennifer Lawrence is, in case you didn’t know this already, an incredible goofball, almost as famous for her hilariously unfiltered comments as she is for her film roles.
“If I don’t have anything to do all day, I might not even put my pants on,” she once confessed to Glamour. “I’m the fastest pee-er ever,” she told Rolling Stone. She’s compared her dancing ability to “Gumby getting electrocuted.” She’s talked about diarrhea on David Letterman.
You may have already heard the story of Canadian journalist and GamerGate opponent Veerender Jubbal, misidentified in the media as one of the Paris terrorists after trolls took a bathroom selfie of his, photoshopped to make it look as though he was wearing a suicide bomber vest and holding a Koran, and spread it around labeled as a photo posted by one of the Paris suicide bombers shortly before Friday’s deadly attacks.
So right-wing garbage site Breitbart has apparently decided to pander to the angry gamer demo even more explicitly with the launch of Breitbart Tech, “a brand new vertical dedicated to coverage of tech, gaming, and web culture.” Naturally, they’ve tapped the unlovely and ungracious Milo Yiannopoulos, Gamergate panderer par excellence, for editor.
Yesterday Milo went to the KotakuInAction subreddit, one of Gamergate’s main hubs, to announce the good news.
One Puckish Redditor gave Milo a little pop quiz to test his knowledge of technology and gaming. Milo, well, failed it.
Bigots of a feather flock together, so it shouldn’t come as a great surprise to any of you that the woman-hating, rape-legalization-promoting pickup artist Roosh V is also a raving homophobe. He’s long banned gay folks from posting in his comments, and in a recent video expressed a weird bemusement at the idea of gay men using his, ahem, teachings to have “buttsex.”
Now he’s decided to take up arms against gay marriage. He’s a teensy bit late on this one — it’s already legal in all 50 states, dude! But that doesn’t stop him from spewing forth one of the most over-the-top, conspiratorial takes on the issue that I’ve ever seen. In a post last week on his blog, Roosh argued that
“They’re called tropes in games or something like that?”
— Brad Wardell, Game developer and Anita Sarkeesian expert
The Sarkeesian Effect, which premiered as a $3.99 “on demand” video on Vimeo yesterday, and which I forced myself to watch all two and a half hours of, is not so much a “documentary” as an object lesson in why it’s never a good idea to hand over tens of thousands of dollars to hateful, incompetent ideologues barely capable of making mediocre YouTube videos and expect them to produce a documentary that looks even vaguely professional.
I‘m going to do something I’ve never done before and that I likely won’t do ever again. That is, recommend that you watch a video by Thunderf00t. That one, up there.
Demonstrating the keen grasp of ethics for which they are so well-known, an assortment of assholes and trolls associated with #GamerGate and 8chan are eagerly sorting through the Ashley Madison data dump in search of people to smear.
The former #GamerGate bigwig formerly known as Internet Aristocrat, now calling himself MisterMetokur, helped to lead the charge on Twitter:
So pickup artist and rape legalization proponent Roosh V has, he says, filed charges against a woman who allegedly threw beer in his face outside a Montreal bar on Saturday night. That’s his right, of course.
But reading the statement he says he gave to police, I was struck by the tone of wounded innocence that runs through it. In the forum post on the subject, sounding a teensy bit like a stereotypical 19th century Southern belle overcome with the vapors, he complains about being “attacked” by the woman and her friends “after I was seduced by a young woman.”
Tomorrow, pickup artist and rape legalization proponent Roosh Valizadeh’s four-country “world tour” comes to Montreal, Canada and it’s fair to say it has hit a few snags.
The first little snag, as you may already have heard, was a petition asking the Canadian government to bar Roosh’s entry into the country as a literal hatemonger. It drew nearly 14,000 signatures, while a counter-petition, demanding that Roosh be let in, has so far managed to get six.
The snags continue. Though the wily Roosh has apparently been able to make his way over the border, he wasn’t able to keep the Montreal hotel originally scheduled to hold his event from cancelling on him, in the wake of complaints from local activists and some less-than-adoring media coverage of the terrible Mr. V.
