Dean Esmay tries to decide whether to call someone a “hatemongering bigot” or a “bigoted hatemonger.”
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.
In any case, Mr. Esmay is actively outreaching on Twitter like it’s going out of style.
Let’s look at some recent examples of this outreachy activism, shall we?
Not that long after accepting his prestigious position — or positions — at NCFM, he offered these thoughts on the delicate subject of murdering judges.
And when it happens, I will say "we tried to tell you, and you mocked." It'll be tragic, but I'll sleep just fine. https://t.co/uQDDPhs4et
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) October 23, 2015
.@TicklishQuill They call us terrorists. No. We sounded the alarm. They'll reap the whirlwind sown by their mocking & indifference.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) October 23, 2015
Huh. What other topics, you may wonder, has Mr. Esmay been addressing recently? Well, how about the issue of women in science?
If you discover a woman in #STEM is a #Feminist, you should assume her to be an incompetent, dishonest, abusive bully til proven otherwise.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) December 22, 2015
As it turns out, Mr. Esmay has quite a few opinions about feminism and feminists.
If you're a feminist, you're a disgusting excuse for a human being. And you reformist feminists are useless, dime-a-dozen, shallow twats.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) October 23, 2015
The people running #endviolenceagainstwomen are fascist hatemongering thugs and liars,.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) December 4, 2015
Feminist whore screaming "liar liar" at me. The lady doth protest too much I think. Blocked.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) September 25, 2015
I notice a feminist whore is screaming I'm a liar. Why would anyone care what a feminist whore thinks?
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) September 25, 2015
The #endviolenceagainstwomen people aren't just fascist thugs and liars–they equate taunting with violence. Pathetic privileged bigots.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) December 4, 2015
Or did I mean cunty? Well it's a very cunty cult isn't it? #Feminism I mean.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) August 23, 2015
This sentence cannot be said too many times or in too many languages: "Harriet Harman is a cunt." Please pass it on #HarrietHarmanIsACunt
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) December 10, 2015
But he doesn’t only take on feminists. He has some most interesting thoughts on “feminsits” as well.
Which is the main way women bully other women, as it happens. And feminsits are the worst bullies alive in America. @Hopekuma
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) October 28, 2015
What it's like to be an MRA: defend yourself from any false allegation, and you're a "whiner." It's not just feminsits who do that.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) October 8, 2015
.@DarkCityUK The mistake those destroyed by feminsits make is in assuming it's all just a misunderstanding. No. She's a bully period.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) September 30, 2015
Esmay boldly stands up against both “snotty cunts” and “cunty twats.”
@VirginScoot Are you always a snotty cunt? What's that question even have to do with what I just said?
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) November 8, 2015
.@LauereliMeyer @petpanther0 @LouiseMensch Well maybe she'll grow up and learn some more and stop being such a cunty twat here.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) August 5, 2015
And he seems to really hate one poor fellow named “David Futrelle.”
Huh. Turns out he’s actually got a lot more Tweets on the subject of this “Futrelle,” but it might be more appropriate to send them to a lawyer than for me to post them here.
So what issue has Esmay really worked up at the moment? The rapes in Cologne.
I’m sorry, I meant to say the “rape hysteria” in Cologne.
I call bullshit on the supposed mass rape attacks in Cologne. Go ahead and put me on record. It's classic rape hysteria and no more.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) January 7, 2016
,@vonRomberg Not kidding even one tiny little bit. Rape hysteria looks the same everywhere. Can't handle it? Easy: Unfollow.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) January 7, 2016
So they've had days now and the #Cologne hysterics can come up with no evidence for the vast majority of their claims. No surprise.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) January 10, 2016
Why am I not shocked? There was never evidence to support the hysteria. Just a desire to believe. https://t.co/AfMgAo2Qeg
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) January 10, 2016
@naughty_nerdess It's hysteria when you see unsubstantiated reports (there was more than one) and inflated numbers (ditto).
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) January 13, 2016
@G_Cstnza @icefire99 @MisterMetokur The media reports are rape hysteria and being used to lie by liars. You're an easily misled stooge.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) January 10, 2016
Oh, but looking at his timeline today I see that Esmay has changed his mind. Sort of. What convinced him that there’s more than “hysteria” behind the reports? The sterling reporting of … Breitbart.
Okee doke, now we have something that looks like evidence not hysteria: https://t.co/JrwU8nqwSU
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) January 11, 2016
.@naughty_nerdess @prisonerben1 @Rib0flavin Please drop me, I consider the evidence released by Breitbart enough to say there were assaults.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) January 13, 2016
Now, we still don’t know exactly what happened in Cologne, and in the other cities in which similar attacks have been reported. And it’s certainly true that racists are actively spreading misinformation and disinformation about the assaults in an attempt to demonize Muslims in general and Muslim refugees in particular.
But it’s one thing to say, hey, don’t believe all of the obvious propaganda put forth by white nationalists and other racist assholes, and another to dismiss what Esmay called the “supposed mass rape attacks” as “classic rape hysteria and no more.”
Again, while there are still a lot of questions that remain unanswered about the attacks, it’s clear that there were multiple sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s. Standing up against racist lies is a good thing, Dean, but hysterically crying “rape hysteria” kind of makes you a rape apologist.
But, hey, for what it’s worth, Esmay calls a lot of things “hysteria.”
When I read this I just think I want to work in an office with no women in it. Talk about hysteria. @mum61e https://t.co/XJ9PIphnYs
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) December 10, 2015
It’s weird to find myself agreeing with Esmay about anything. No, I don’t agree that concerns about sexual harassment at work are “hysteria.” But I do think that, yes, it might be better if Mr. Esmay were to work someplace where no women would have to encounter him. Or men, for that matter.
I also found myself agreeing with half of what Esmay seems to be saying here. (The second half.)
.@KevinWeinberg1 AVfM is strictly antiviolence except rhetorical violence, but, nothing they do or say ever seems to matter.
— Dean Esmay (@deanesmay) January 6, 2016
I think he means that no matter how often AVFM denies that they’ve said violent things, people don’t believe them. (Presumably because they are lying about this.)
But maybe he realizes that AVFM’s endless huffing and puffing about the evils of feminism has accomplished absolutely nothing good for men.
That would be … interesting, huh?
I hope no one will mind if I derail this by asking Alan a legal question. I figure that anything would be better than talking about Dean Emsay. I’m curious about a point that came up in passing on the Bowi thread but which would be a really unfortunate derailing of the profound discussion happening there.
Alan,
Are you familiar with the American doctrine of “felony murder,” and if so, does the UK have anything similar? I was under the impression that we (claim to have) derived the basic idea from English common law, but it may have been a radical reinterpretation on our part, or your lot may have since done away with it.
(For those who don’t know, the idea behind “felony murder” laws is that you are guilty of murder if you commit a felony, and someone dies in any way even remotely related to your actions; in some stats felony murder applies only to a very limited set of crimes; in others it applies to any felony. One memorable example: a man went to Target, filled up a shopping cart, and ran out the door without paying. The stuff in his cart was worth $1,100 [or $1.100 for Alan, I suppose], which made it “grand theft.” A security guard chased him down, tackled him, handcuffed him, then had a heart attack and died. The thief was convicted of felony murder)
Well that’s rich coming from the guy too sexist for AVFM.
Anyway, I just saw that he has 19.7k followers, which disappointed me until I checked twitter audit and it said 14.5k of them are fake.
@ Orion
If you’ll forgive the typical barrister answer of “it’s complicated” I’ll try to answer your question (no doubt leaving the situation even more confused than before :-))
We used to have something called “constructive malice” which pretty much amounted to the same thing.
That arguably got abolished in the 50s in an Act that made a lot of changes to the law on murder.
For a feminist perspective, the Act was a consequence of much public disquiet about the execution of a woman called Ruth Ellis.
The Act effective made it much ‘harder’ to convict someone of murder (which at the time carried a mandatory death penalty) in all sorts of ways (introducing ideas like the defence of provocation which turned a murder into manslaughter for which there was no mandatory sentence)
I say ‘arguably’ because theoretically even under the new regime the law could be interpreted in a way that still allowed a conviction for murder where the killing arose out of another crime. In the 60s an Act was passed that clarified the situation and explicitly ruled out a conviction on that basis.
The theory was that you should only be convicted of murder if a person died as a result of your actions and you had specifically intended they should die or at least come to serious harm.
We still however have something called joint enterprise that allows someone to be convicted of murder if they’re with someone and they know that person *might* do something that would result in another person’s death. As you can see that’s a pretty low threshold and joint enterprise is another controversial subject.
So the simple answer is “No, we don’t have anything like felony murder any more” but subject to the caveats above.
Hope that makes some sense.
An interesting thing in England is, that despite all the statutes about murder, there isn’t one actually making murder an offence, it’s a common law crime.
Oh, and we use the comma to separate numbers into thousands here. The full stop thing is more of a European idea. 🙂
Edit to add: just to confuse the situation more, in England you can ‘intend’ to do an act even if you hadn’t even thought about it if the act is a natural consequence of your deliberate actions.
@Alan Robertshaw
I’ve been known to work for way too many hours at a time, and I actually do hallucinate, although it’s not anything fascinating. I’ll “hear” a faraway radio, even if I leave my office and go for a walk. Also, I keep “seeing” someone or something just out of the corner of my eye.
@ kat
Yeah, very familiar with that scenario. Sometimes it’s almost enjoyable, say when you’re in the passenger seat of a car and you see weird creatures in the road. Not so much fun when you’re the one doing the driving and you’re hoping the invisible people you can hear in the vehicle will attack you before you can get to the next Services for a nap and a coffee!
@Alan Robertshaw
I’m going to take a wild-ass guess here and say that maybe sometimes we overdo it.
Just sayin’.
I hope that soon you can go the f**k to sleep. Like I’m going to right now.
@ kat
Oh, so do I. Fingers crossed my current project will finally be completed by the end of next week. Til then it’s the four hours sleep if you’re lucky thing, but as soon as that’s done I’m hitting the hay for 24 hours straight before moving into the next thing!
Appreciate the hope 🙂
As awful as he is generally, the thing that always pisses me off about Esmay’s Twitter account is that in his avatar he looks exactly like a nice hippy guy I knew in college. It’s been so long I don’t even remember his name. Only that he was a sweetheart, smart as hell and actually put in a good word to help get me a job at one point.
I hate that Dean Esmay looks like that guy. Leave that guy alone, Dean Esmay. Leave him alone.