We Hunted The Mammoth
So over the weekend some enterprising 4channer decided to try to create some mayhem and make a few quick bucks by concocting a fake feminist conference, and selling tickets to it.
He — I’m pretty sure it was a he — headed to /b/ to round up some accomplices.
I suppose I should mention the latest attempt at viral outrage from the always terrible Return of Kings boys: A post by B.R. Crumb with the deliberately offensive title “Why You Should Avoid Dating Girls Who Claim They Were Raped.”
The trolly Crumb is so unashamed of his trolliness that he actually devotes a chunk of his post to imagining an outraged reaction from me (“already I can see David Futrelle’s fourth chin trembling as he stammers his rebuttal in a fit of pique”).
So I might as well give him what he wants, a reaction, though it’s one of weariness rather than “pique.”
One civic-minded fellow has launched an exciting new campaign to better the lives of men and boys by pestering the American Psychological Association with a trolly petition on Change.org urging the APA to declare feminism to be a symptom of mental retardation.
Here’s his plea:
There are people out there who suffer with extreme mental retardation on a daily basis. Sadly, most of these poor souls are left without proper treatment, simply because their symptoms are not recognized as a sign of the severe mental disorder they clearly have. I urge the American Psychological Association (APA) to classify radical feminism as a sign of severe mental retardation and any other associated disorder. It’s time we get these poor, deluded souls the help they so desperately need.
With the help of, er, “activists” from the MGTOW subreddit, as well as from lulz-seekers on 4chan and Facebook, the petition has garnered nearly 1000 signatures in a day.
Human rights activism at its finest.
H/T – r/thebluepill
The We Hunted the Mammoth Pledge Drive continues! If you haven’t already, please consider sending some bucks my way. (The PayPal page will say you are donating to Man Boobz.) Thanks!
Last week, a news story out of Portland Oregon sent the right-wing “anti-PC” brigade into a state of gleeful fury: A student at Reed College was alleging that he’d been banned from class for challenging some commonly cited rape statistics.
“Dissent forbidden at liberal arts college,” a headline at Truth Revolt declared. “Apparently, feelings are more important than facts,” sniffed the National Review.
The New York Post devoted an entire editorial to this alleged outrage, declaring that the “real mistake” of the student in question, freshman Jeremiah True, “was to think Reed College is dedicated to the search for truth,” adding that
That gun-loving gamebro who flipped his car while on his way, he said, to “race” video game developer and GamerGate critic Brianna Wu? It turns out he’s not the delusional and potentially dangerous asshole he seemed to be in the countless videos he’s put online.
No, he’s actually an aspiring comedian in an “extreme” comedy troupe known for trolling everyone from anime fans to TED talk attendees, and “Jace Connors” is just a character he’s been playing, a sort of parody of a basement-dwelling, monster-drink-guzzling gamebro douchebag who can’t tell the difference between real life and video games. His harassment of Wu — what he called “OperationWupocalypse” — was all part of an elaborate comedy bit that he’s been doing for years.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has frankly admitted that his company has done a terrible job of dealing with trolls and abusers. And he’s promised to do better, declaring that Twitter would “start kicking these people off right and left.”
In a remarkably candid note to concerned staffers, obtained and posted online by The Verge, Costolo was blunt about Twitter’s failure to protect its users from harassers:
We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years. It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.
He’s got that right.
Costolo went on to accept personal responsibility for this failure:
Reaxxion, the world’s crappiest right wing woman-hating excuse for a video game site, has now officially responded to my post revealing that a GamerGate manifesto they recently published was literally a repurposed John Birch Society newspaper ad from the mid-1960s, with words like “communist” removed and replaced with their GamerGate equivalents.
Whether the, er, “author” of the post was trolling, or just the world’s least subtle plagiarist, it was a giant embarrassment for Roosh and Reaxxion. And so, in the course of a nearly 1000-word post, Reaxxion “ethics officer” announces that they’ve shitcanned the author – and congratulates the site for its heroic bravery for throwing out a writer who copied his entire post from an old John Birch Society newspaper ad from the mid-1960s, with words like “communist” removed and replaced with their GamerGate equivalents.
Lovers of literary catastrophes rejoice! Some GamerGaters are crowdsourcing a book about what they see as the death of 4chan and the rise of GamerGate, and so far the results have been even more amazingly awful than that even sounds.
So far all the Gaters have managed to produce have been some rough drafts of a lyrical prologue written almost entirely in mixed metaphor, a somewhat plodding first chapter, and a rough outline of the rest of the book. But there is much comedy gold in these rough pages.
And so I would like to present to you The Nine Most Ridiculous Quotes from The Crowdsourced GamerGate Book That Were Actually Written by Real Human Beings Who Thought What They Were Writing Was Awesome.
Sometimes when I post links, they’re simply interesting things I’ve run across. These, though, are essential reads:
Why the Trolls Will Always Win, by Kathy Sierra, Wired
A detailed post by Java expert and game developer Sierra describing the harassment and vilification she’s faced for the crime of, well, basically for being a woman in the tech world. While long and a bit rambling in spots, this is an important piece that, among other things, describes how harassers can sometimes transform slanderous assertions about their targets into “conventional wisdom,” details the damage that “trolls” can have on a person’s reputation (and their life generally), and offers some sobering reflections on the culture of harassment and how difficult it can be to fight.
You know how Men’s Rights Activists regularly resort to insults and invective when they “debate” with feminists online?
It turns out that they’re not just being assholes. No, they’re actually using a super-sophisticated, scientifically tested debating technique to totally PWN feminist slut bitches and mangina poodle-boy pussy-beggars alike.
By acting like assholes.
Men’s Rights Redditor anonlymouse reveals the secrets to debating like an MRA in a recent posting.
