So I have something of a sad announcement to make today, one that I’ve been putting off posting. I’m not going to be able to continue with this blog. I need to make a living and unfortunately the level of engagement with my latest posts has not been enough to make that possible.
I intend to maintain the blog as a We Hunted the Mammoth archive, and will periodically put up posts highlighting some of the best stuff that has appeared here over the many years of Mammoth’s existence. And I plan on dropping in from time to time with brief commentaries and pointers to other pieces I write, but this will be more occasional than regular.
I want to thank everyone who has contributed to this blog over the course of its run. And not just those who have donated money (but huge thanks to all of you!) but also those who’ve contributed with artistic and technical help and by making the comments here so vibrant. In case you’re wondering, you all have posted more than 800,000 (!) comments here over the years.
I’m proud of this blog, which began chronicling and mocking the growing manosphere long before most people had any idea what it was, and which helped to shape the discourse about it as it metastasized into the monster it is today. When I began I really had no idea what I was getting into, much less that the blog would last as long or get as much attention as it did. I’ve learned a lot doing Mammoth, and a lot of that I learned from you all, especially those regular posters whose comments further illuminated the issues under discussion, and who were willing to call me out when I went wrong. I’m glad I got to know you.
I’m grateful to those who have continued to donate even while I wasn’t putting up new material, and I hope that some of you will keep on donating to help pay for the not inconsiderable costs of hosting the blog and its massive database of posts and comments.
Again, thanks to all of you; you were the ones who made this blog possible.
David Futrelle
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Contact me at dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
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What do you mean by a “landing page for the mammoth archive”?
There’s no need to change the format. Based on this:
it seems we should expect a continuation of the status quo: the blog stays more or less as it is, with new posts remaining infrequent, as they have been for a couple of years now.
Keeping it as an “archive” sounds suspiciously like “closing the comments section, without making any other functional changes”, which would be a shitty thing to do. The hosting costs won’t be materially different as it’s basically the same amount of data and the same amount of traffic either way, so there’s no cost-cutting justification for closing the comments. I don’t think it’s been very labor intensive to moderate them lately either, has it? We’ve only had two or three trolls in the past full year.
Andrew Tate is just a pair of string-backed driving gloves away from morphing into Alan Partridge.
https://x.com/Cobratate/status/1972574484000645407
It’s the Capri Sun that did me in. You could write it for an Alan Partridge sketch but it might be rejected for being OTT.
I will miss this blog and the community it spawned. Thank you David.
Thanks, brony! And Sylvia, I’m not going to close the comments. The landing page will basically just be a pinned post saying hey this is now we hunted the mammoth archives. And I do want to keep the whole thing up including the comments and want to enable people to keep commenting. And when I say want I mean that I will do those things.
Oh, and the landing page will also have links to various of my favorite and the most popular posts that have run on the site and things like that so that’s why it’s going to take me a little while to get it up. If you all have suggestions for posts that I should link to on the landing page, let me know.
Farewell also to Jane Goodall (1934-2025), that pioneer of inter-primate outreach.
Obligatory Far Side comic: http://web.archive.org/web/20251002051601
Thanks for clarifying.
David, I want to thank you for helping to keep us all informed and aware of the goings on over the years and you have my eternal respect and gratitude for the good work you did. I will miss continuing to hear things from the blog but I’m happy and relieved that it will now be a digital archive of sorts; it will be important have the blog now serve as a timescale of how time had passed and how things shaped up.
I send my well wishes to you and any future endeavours.
Stay Frosty out there
Yeah. One thing’s for sure: whoever is tasked a few decades from now with writing the sequel to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich will have a much easier time with their research.
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/26-senate-democrats-help-pass-military
Dems fucked us over 77 votes to 22 on fucking over trans people
How do we fix this?
How do we force the US to have an actually left of center political party?
@Sylvia,
1. Either abolish the Electoral College entirely, or else tweak it so one candidate doesn’t get all of a state’s EC votes in an election. Like, if a state has 5 EC votes, and Candidate A gets 3/5 of that state’s voters, then they get 3 EC votes while their opponent gets the remaining 2. Those would at least make the national results closer to who the majority actually wants to see running things.
2. Ranked voting might help with getting a third, fourth, fifth party(ies) going and getting some serious election wins. Though as I understand things, there’s two ways to set that up, with one of them much better than the other. So that would have to be watched for.
And I’m sorry WHtM is stopping for good. I had some good learning experiences here, and some good interactions. On the remote chance anyone wants to contact me for anything, there’s my inactive blog (linked in my name), and the Mammoth discord. Both work. Just tell me what your name is here so I can remember who you are (Discord names and commentator names aren’t always the same; so….)
Well, the Electoral College vote distribution is handled on the state level, and you’d probably need a constitutional amendment to change that. Otherwise you’d just end up with liberal states (plus Nebraska, which basically does this already, albeit in a sightly wonky way which makes a 2-3 split nearly impossible) splitting their votes, but the conservative states not doing so. Advantage: Republicans.
But if the Democrats at least temporarily had such an overwhelming advantage that they could steamroll the Republicans on this (a constitutional amendment has a very high bar to clear) why would they? At that point, they’d have all the power they need to easily push their agendas through, and then rewriting the rules in their favor for future elections would have a very “tyrant” and/or “sore winner” look to it, even if the current Electoral College is skewed against them. Most of them would refuse to support it just to keep from looking bad.
Only thing one can really can do, at least in the short run and in term of working within the system, is to elect more Progressives and Social Democrats in the Primary races, where possible. (“Where possible” because there are plenty of voting districts where centrists are about the best you can hope for.) It’s currently tilted against that though. The Megacorps and Super Rich throw their money at the centrists, and with a few exceptions the Old Guard among the Democrats try to keep them out. A lot of people vote for moderates and centrists out of fear that anyone else would have poor odds in the General election, though that’s not always true. I’m honestly not sure how to “untilt” that. Even that won’t fix the system, but it would at least help with a lot with Dems holding strong on left-wing principles rather than screwing over parts of their base long-term for short-term damage control purposes.
I guess gerrymandering California and New York, plus maybe a few other states, would help with the House. But that’s gaming the broken system rather than fixing it. Not at all ideal if your goal is to fix things, but if you need more people on your side just to be able to start fixing things…
Also it would be helpful to win over Texas and/or Florida despite the vote suppression. (Not just the EC votes, but also the Governor and at least one Senator.) Texas looks easier currently, though I strongly suspect Governor Abbot might try to vote-suppress extra hard if there was ever a serious risk of a major blue surge in his state, so that might be a mirage. Regardless, that’s mostly up to Texans and Floridians.
You can arguably blame the Iroquois Confederacy for the Electoral College. They came up with the idea.
Or maybe Ben Franklin for suggesting the new ‘United States’ should adopt it.
“It would be a very strange Thing, if [the] Six Nations… should be capable of forming a Scheme for such an Union, and be able to execute it in such a Manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies, to whom it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous.“
The Iroquois even got a thank you from the Senate.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-100shrg83712/pdf/CHRG-100shrg83712.pdf
David and all, thank you for the invaluable insights. The discussions here shaped my personal life and argumentation skills and I like to think, had a broad effect as we’ve probably all brought much of the material for thought into our respective circles. I like to think of you all as family ❤️
And I just discovered this blog site a few hours ago. I am enjoying reading the articles and wish I found this site a long time ago.
It happens. If I had a nickel for every time I found a blog that I thought was worth following, only for it to shortly go on hiatus for a several months to a few years, then to post an “I’m finally back, will be posting regularly soon” only for that to ironically be the last post ever, I’d have
twofivethree nickels, but it’s weird that happened thrice. And another couple times I found one which officially ended, and I was a little too late to have participated in the comments and seen it unfold. I’ve had real-life equivalents happen too; where I planned to finally attend an event or visit a venue only to find that it closed down for good relatively recently (in the case of annual events, the final year was the previous year). It’s a little sad, but my attitude is, there are always new things worth seeing/doing, you just have to find them. (Though with the caveat that IRL things do sometimes have transportation and/or accessibility issues that can make “finding new things” a problem for some people.)And that’s it, folks! I know there’s technically still two whole months left in the year, but after that last sentence from Snowberry I think it’s safe to say 2025’s Understatement of the Year is all sewn up.
For those who wondered who Trump would help among the zillions tweeting their major problems at him, here’s an answer – one of the guys who David’s written about here before:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/02/politics/trump-dilbert-scott-adams-cancer
From what I understand about this drug, it had a radioactive component to it so it needs some coordination among various departments to agree to an appointment time.
Also, breaking news: former US Vice President Dick Cheney is dead.
https://apnews.com/article/dick-cheney-dies-079591b529f048489650e7569bc675d2
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy!
Hi
If anyone sees this would you mind signing the linked petition? Ta.
And see what happens when you press ‘like’!
Oh, I’m sorry that WHTM has come to an end of sorts. I was a regular lurker here for many years but more recently pop back in every once in a while.
I consider WHTM, Pharyngula, Bad Astronomy, and other skeptic-leaning sites part of the internet culture I come from, of not just ignoring trolls, but turning them into rhetorical chew-toys (at least until they just spam, become verbally abusive, or get boring). I really appreciate WHTM for making it more palatable to learn about unsavory parts of humanity.
I notice that it’s something I gravitate towards. As I’m using Instagram more, I notice I follow a lot of channels that make videos that also present shitty news through a critical lens. Some things I feel are akin to WHTM are unexpectedlyfun (on Instagram) and uppitynegress (on various platforms including Threads, FB, IG).
Also, with Mamdani’s recent win, I saw a push for more people, especially progressives to get involved. https://runforsomething.net/
Wishing the David and the commenters well.
RationalWiki went abracapoof three weeks ago; anyone know what’s going on?
@Full Metal Ox
It’s working for me. They were having 503 errors a while back because of bots, but that was supposed to be better now:
https://mstdn.social/@RationalWiki/115600611812893381