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Men’s Rights subreddit mod blames “Not Me” for Occidental College vigilantism

The diabolical Not Me strikes the Men's Rights subreddit yet again
The diabolical Not Me strikes the Men’s Rights subreddit yet again

Some updates on the Occidental College situation.

First, for those who didn’t see my post yesterday, a quick recap: Yesterday, Men’s Rights Redditors discovered that Occidental College has an online form that allows victims of and witnesses to sexual violence to report the incidents anonymously.

Although the information is being collected to track trends, and no one will be charged with anything as a result of such a report, a number of Men’s Rights subreddit regulars decided it would be a great idea to flood Occidental College with false reports to basically break the system, and they suggested this to much acclaim; others proudly reported that they’d sent in bogus reports.

So what has happened since then? The story has been picked up by a number of sites, including Gawker, Business Insider, RawStory, and LAist. In a followup post, Adam Weinsten of Gawker confirmed that Occidental College had indeed been hit with some 400 bogus rape reports in the past 36 hours — that is, after posts encouraging false reports appeared on 4chan and the Men’s Rights subreddit.

Meanwhile, on the Men’s Rights subreddit, after belatedly realizing that this whole thing makes them look kind of bad, the subreddit’s mods are trying their best to make the whole embarrassing thing go away — and not really doing a great job of it.

The first mod to say anything publicly was sillymod, whose initial reaction to the calls to flood Occidental with false reports of rape was to boldly announce that … the mods really weren’t going to be doing anything about it. In a post titled “With regards to Occidental College’s ‘rape report form,’” Sillymod wrote:

some people are claiming that it violates the Reddit TOS. It is not clear to me that it does, and I have not removed the article yet. But I will assume that Reddit admins will get involved at some point. So be it. At least then we can get a definitive ruling on whether it breaks the TOS.

What leadership! A true profile in courage.

Sillymod went on to note that the headline of the post he wasn’t going to remove was actually completely wrong in implying that people were going to get charged with crimes after being anonymously reported, and then made a few suggestions:

As always, when something gets you outraged – pause, take a few deep breaths, and then think of the most productive action to take. Don’t knee-jerk your response like feminists do. Do you want to be viewed the same as Big Red?

It might seem a tad ironic — or perhaps completely and mind-bogglingly hypocritical — to bring up, as an example of a person behaving badly, a women who was the victim of online MRA vigilantes when trying to cool off the online MRA vigilantes in your own subreddit, but never mind, because a couple of hours later Sillymod returned with a new response to the Occidental College thing.

First, he removed the thread from the subreddit. (Note: removing a thread on Reddit doesn’t make it go away; it just removes it from the subreddit’s index.)

Then, in a new thread entitled “‘Why did sillymod remove the Occidental College post?’ Let me tell you why,” he decided to blame the whole thing on trolls.

So I was reviewing the post and the multitude of reports on it. I noticed a sad trend.

I noticed a lot of very young accounts encouraging bad behaviour, I noticed that the post was made by a self-proclaimed “shitlord”. I noticed that there was a lot of misconception/misinformation about the form in general, whether willfully spread to take advantage of people choosing not to read these things for themselves or not.

In the end, I can’t help but feel that we were trolled, and that is why I removed it.

Sillymod, who apparently doesn’t research anything before posting, added:

Some people have alleged that 4Chan was involved, which would support the idea that we were trolled.

Yeah, the dude who posted the original thread said explicitly he’d found out about it on 4chan, and there are screenshots of the 4chan thread floating around that would take all of 5 minutes to find.

In any case, Sillymod’s “argument” — or, rather, his assertion — that the Men’s Rights subreddit was the victims of “trolls” with “very young accounts encouraging bad behaviour” was quickly shown to be utter nonsense:

johndoe42 40 points 17 hours ago* (123|83)  Bullshit. The biggest comments "encouraging" bad behavior were all long time contributring /r/mensrights members.  /u/blueoak9, whose account basically solely consists of comments in this subreddit, made the 100+ upvoted top comment "The quickest way to shut this one down is to anonymously report random women and let them sweat in the hot seat. This will be over before it begins."  /u/froggymorning, who had a 50+ upvoted comment noting that she filled out a false report is a longtime /r/mensrights member and has had comments with hundreds of upvotes.  /u/muffinizer1 also claimed to have "fun" filling one out. Also a long time MRA member (has had comments with 5-25 upvotes on this subreddit older than 20 days).  /u/whitethrone is also not a new MR member, who made the 20+ upvoted comment "Step one: Get a list of every 'Feminist' at Occidental College who supported this system. Step two: Anonymously report them for rape."  I know this looks pitchforky but you didn't have to lie about members of this subreddit's involvement in "encouraging bad behavior." I fucking hate revisionism and this subreddit needs reform badly. The "a few bad apples" defense is not going to work anymore.

In the discussion that followed, a Men’s Rights regular called oneiorosgrip tried to use another specious argument in order to suggest that the whole controversy had been ginned up by evil feminist trolls. All those screenshots showing terrible comments with lots of upvotes? Those comments were, she suggested, upvoted by feminists to make the subreddit look bad:

So what you’re telling me is that initially, just in time for SRS to post it as “evidence” that MRAs were flooding Occidental with false reports, a comment with less than 60 upvotes was the top comment in the sub… and despite the fact that the comments you cite represent less 0.00002% of the sub’s population, you claim that single moment in time proves MRAs flooded occidental with accusations.

Weird, because by the time I discovered the thread, a number of the comments I screenshotted had been up for 15 hours, and one of the worst had a lot more than 60 upvotes.

SirSkeptic 167 points 15 hours ago (209|45) That's awesome. I'd like to see one sent with the name of every member of the Dean of Students Office as the offender. Hey, it's anonymous and no evidence is required. Sometimes that's the only way fanatics learn.

15 hours is a pretty long “single moment in time.”

But hey, Sillymod and oneiorosgrip have their stories, and they’re sticking with them. Who are you going to believe, them — or your lying eyes?

Men’s Rights Activists: No matter what terrible things they do, it’s always someone else’s fault.

The MensRights mods have begun to try to clean up the mess — or at least remove the evidence of it. They’ve deleted most of the comments I linked to yesterday (Always Be Screenshotting). Has anyone involved in this faced any repercussions beyond having a comment or two deleted? I sent the mods a message to ask if they’d banned any of those who’d made those comments, and Nicemod replied:

I don’t see any reason why we should tell you anything at all.

I’m guessing that means “no.” But I wouldn’t really have to guess if they simply told me. Masters of Public Relations, these guys are not.

There’s more discussion of all this going on in the AgainstMensRights subreddit (which I feel I should mention again is not actually against men’s rights, but against the so-called Men’s Rights movement).

Here’s a discussion of another thread — which I hadn’t seen — in which Men’s Rights redditors talked about spamming Occidental College with false reports of rape. There are screenshots.

Here’s a thread with screenshots featuring our old friend ThePigman, an MRA blogger and long-time contributor to the Men’s Rights subreddit, proudly prooclaiming that he’d submitted a bogus rape report.

And here is a particularly damning screenshot of the entire Men’s Rights Occidental College thread some five hours after it went up. The second comment on the page, then three hours old and with several dozen upvotes, provides two links to lists of names of Occidental College staffers to serve as potential targets of false accusations. (It was later deleted, but SirSkeptic’s original comment was around for me to screenshot it 11 hours later.)

lists

This, sadly, is what Men’s Rights activism looks like.

Oh, and MRB2012 was still posting in the Men’s Rights subreddit as of 5 hours ago, so it looks as though he hasn’t been banned even though he provided his MRA comrades with a specific list of individuals to falsely accuse of rape. And I have no way to check if he has been banned since then because the mods won’t speak to the evil Man Boobz.

Way to go, mods. Great job!

One last thing: Gawker’s followup post included a great quote from Occidental College sociologist Lisa Wade that I think puts the whole espisode in context perfectly:

The men targeting Occidental’s anonymous report form are mad that women are being listened to, that men’s voices are no longer given so much power that they can effectively drown out the voices of women. They’re mad because they’re not the only ones that matter anymore. I get it. To them, it really does feel unfair. Something really is changing. They ARE being demoted — from a superior to an equal — and it feels wrong to them because they’re so used to being privileged …

[The backlash is] a good thing. It means we’re winning the fight. They’re gonna have to get used to it.

I think she’s absolutely right. It’s going to take a few years — well, probably more than a few — and we’re going to see a lot more outbursts like this, but these aren’t the battle cries of a rising “human rights” movement. They’re the tantrums of small subset of the male population that can’t accept that the world has changed.

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Seranvali
Seranvali
11 years ago

You know, I’m finding this whole kefuffle bizarre. We know that only a tiny, tiny percentage of victims actually report rapes, especially where the victims are male. The MRA are propagating the idea that there are vast numbers of men being raped by women who are too ashamed to report it. One would think that they’d be delighted at finally getting some figures to back them up but nooooo they’re still to busy protecting possible perpetrators to care about male rape victims. The initiative is completely toothless, the worst that those reported will face is a “good talking to” and probably not even that. Other than that there will be no action taken whatsoever and I would have thought that the MRAs would have wanted those figures badly enough to encourage the program. But apparently not. We’ve called it the abuser’s lobby and this is just another case in point.

Seranvali
Seranvali
11 years ago

Auggziliary said:

“I guess it’s like grip of sleep then? Or that god’s grip? Well that’s dark.”

Yes, you remember when people used (and sometimes still do) to talk about sleep as being in the “embrace of Morpheus”? I think it’s a similar kind of imagery, except creepy and possibly violent.

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
11 years ago

I’m really not impressed with this Wade person, and delighted that Urooj Zia showed up to shove her nose in some unpalatable truths. Not that she’ll listen.

katz
11 years ago

Actual usefulness aside, the evidence seems to be that the St. Bernard brandy barrels were completely made up by Landseer in this painting, anyway.

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
11 years ago

Also, on the FGM thread, am I imagining things or was Avicenna a former trolly presence here? The combination of condescending bullshit, blithe disregard for facts, and comments like “Chinese brutality is legendary. So there is that…” feels familiar.

kittehserf
11 years ago

No, Avicenna’s a blogger and commenter at FTB. He does get very splainy, though.

Gods, all the “What about MGM! How dare you ignore that!” carry-on that got into that thread. ::rolls eyes::

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
11 years ago

Ah, that’s where he’s annoyed me in the past. He’s one of those “let me explain to you ladies how to do feminism (hint – what’s best for my penis is central)” guys.

pecunium
11 years ago

The warming of the extremities comes at the price of total body heat; in short it increases the rate of total heat loss, and accelerates hypothermic onset.

pecunium
11 years ago

The Oneiroi were the Daimones (daemons) of dreams. One of them would be an oneiros They were the children of Nyx (one of the Protogenoi, or, “Elemental Beings”. Things like Earth, Sea, Sky; which were corporeal and eminently manifest: though Eumenides claims Gaea [Earth] is their mother), and may, or may not, have had a father in the form of Erebos (Darkness, the spouse of Nyx).

In the main they weren’t personified, though Morpheus seems to have been; as the Dream Messenger of Zeus, who took messages to kings (according to Ovid; the name means, “shaper”).

Nightmares (which aren’t the same as false dreams; depending one which of two doorways an oneiros took to the mortal realm [either one of horn, or one of ivory] from the realm of Hypnos (the god of sleep who dwelt in the land of Erebos (another of the Protogenoi) would determine the truth or falsity of the sleeping vision they brought) were called melas oneiros, and came from Epiales (which, to make things confusing is a homonym of fever, and so we see the ancient Greeks had the same concept we have in the idea of, “fever dreams”, mutatis mutandis

None of which makes that name any more comprehensible, though I suspect it would reveal a lot, were we able to see what the intent behind it was.

pecunium
11 years ago

Carp! I missed a translation. Melas oneiros,Means, “a dark dream”.

pecunium
11 years ago

Mind you, the Greeks have some complicated mythos about the Protogonoi: Chronos (time) is both the only sui generis deity, and the son of one of the non-sui generis (Uranus is said to be his father; the dome of heaven, whom Chronos castrated: in a fit of what Freud would probably call Oedipal rage, though Sophocles would disagree): just try to sort that out…

pecunium
11 years ago

And more of the stupid PR management:

Do. Not. Buckle.

Even with bad press it’s still making waves and getting our message out about false accusations. in the future you may want to keep a tight leash on such postings, but the genie is out of the bottle on this one.

The problem isn’t that they did a bad thing, it’s that they did a bad thing which could be traced to them.

Which shows the moral bankruptcy of the “movement”: if you can’t ever admit to the things you think are “activism” because the rest of society abjures them, and so abhors you, it’s not a good cause.

pecunium
11 years ago

And yup… they scrubbed the conversation about how many of them had seriously talked about/advocated filing false claims.

This is why why I’m glad we don’t have the ability to edit our posts.

Bad_dog
Bad_dog
11 years ago

I’m hailing from (north) western Canada and wanted to chime in since it seems we are talking about the cold and that’s a popular winter pastime here, right up there with curling and drinking Tim Hortons coffee. I just flew home to Ontario to stay with my folks for the holiday. I flew away from -25C to here where it is -2C and it feels downright tropical. So far this winter where I live out west has already gotten down to -40… It’s not awesome. The worst I’ve ever beared was -55C, and there’s really nothing that can describe that cold. Your eyes freeze… Seriously I went outside and ice instantly formed on my eyelashes.

As for the post… Despicable as usual. Also since I’ve been home found out budding MRA brother may be full on MRA, so this holiday should be… Interesting, to say the least.

Viscaria
Viscaria
11 years ago

I’m glad you’ve warmed up a bit, Bad_dog ^_^. I’m from Calgary, so I’m south of you, I assume. -20C (-4F) with a windchill of -29C (-20F, if Google isn’t lying to me*).

I was in Orlando last Thurs-Sun and it was lovely! I kept saying that we should never come back.

I haven’t had much to say about the OPs lately because they’re sort of too horrible for me to engage with.

*Are degrees Fehreinheit really that much more precise? Wow.

Viscaria
Viscaria
11 years ago

Trying to read my own comment hurts my eyes. Oh, for an edit button, to remove those paragraph breaks.

Leslie J. Anderson
11 years ago

I thought false rape accusations was their #1 huge No-No.

Bina
11 years ago

As always, when something gets you outraged – pause, take a few deep breaths, and then think of the most productive action to take. Don’t knee-jerk your response like feminists do. Do you want to be viewed the same as Big Red?

Sillymod, you silly mod…you just don’t see the irony here at all, do you?

alternatesteve90
11 years ago

@Cassandra:

“Ah, that’s where he’s annoyed me in the past. He’s one of those “let me explain to you ladies how to do feminism (hint – what’s best for my penis is central)” guys.”

Yeah, that *is* rather annoying, TBH.
For a similar comparison, some self-righteous jerkass(of any color) in the SJ movement goes off and says “let me ‘splain to you priviledged and guilty-ass whites how to do social justice” or, even more accurately, a white racist redneck says to an African-American alt-rock guitarist, “lemme tell you ig’nant [insert ethnic slur] how to acksually play dis shit ri’ hurr.”

I mean, seriously…..People just need to be left alone to do what they do best, you know? And it just so happens that many of the best feminists happen to be female, that some of the best social justice activists are Caucasian(not trying to diminish our comrades of color, of course!), that some of the best rock artists are POC, etc. Nothing wrong with that.

(P.S. sorry if it seemed I was rambling too much)

Biot
Biot
11 years ago

I might be disrupting the discussion here, but my two cents about the situation are this:
Forget about them stepping on Legos or sitting on cacti. I hope they get stung by a bullet ant – an Amazonian ant that packs the most excruciating sting in the animal kingdom.

Perhaps they should be stung after their precious little subreddit is shut down for that extra bit of schadenfreude.

titianblue
titianblue
11 years ago

some of the best social justice activists are Caucasian(not trying to diminish our comrades of color, of course!)

Do you realise how racist you sound?

shameonbetterbirth
11 years ago

I feel really awful for anyone who genuinely filled out a report during this fiasco.

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
11 years ago

@ alternativesteve

Some of these things are not like the others, some of these things are not the same…can you spot which ones stick out? Because everyone else seems to have no trouble doing so.

CassandraSays
CassandraSays
11 years ago

Also, -55, holy crap. I would like to send both sympathetic cuddles and sympathetic fleece undies to everyone who lived through that winter.

pecunium
11 years ago

da fuck is, “some of the best happen to be” nonsense? It implies all sorts of bullshit (such as the idea that POC can’t play music”) since the idea that one needs to be told has the implicit idea that this is something which people don’t know/refuse to see.