We Hunted The Mammoth
So once again I took a look through some of the weirder search terms that people have used to get to this blog.
There are of course a number of misguided souls who get here by accident while searching, rather incompetently, for porn. Here are a few of their less obscene queries:
So last week I pointed out that several A Voice for Menners, as well as one of #GamerGate’s E-list celebrities, had managed to amass impressive armies of fake Twitter followers — more than 70,000 amongst the four of them. Generally speaking, one does not get that many fake followers unless one literally buy them from the sort of sleazy people who make a living selling fake Twitter followers in order to make oneself appear more popular.
The next day some generous soul bought me well over a thousand fake followers to call my own. When I wrote my post, I had a bit more than 5000 followers. Now I have more than 7000, with most of the new additions obviously fake accounts with Russian names, a tiny handful of spammy Tweets to their credit, and pretty much zero followers of their own. Here are a couple of them:
A Voice for Men’s ongoing campaign to convince the world that “Men’s Human Rights Activists” are a bunch of petty, malicious, sexually insecure douchenozzles continues apace.
I mean, that must be what they’re really up to, right? Because no one who actually had any real interest in human rights of any kind would produce “memes” like the one above and all the rest below, delivered to your eyes straight from AVFM’s Fcebook page.
At their best, AVFM’s memes are merely baffling …
So our old pal Christian McQueen the ALPHA PLAYBOY has a prepared a list of “5 Essentials For Your Bachelor Pad (That Will Help You Get Laid).”
Along with some suggestions that are actually sort of thoughtful (baby wipes, a soft blanket), one that’s creepy (buy an assortment of phone chargers so she can’t use “I have to recharge my phone” as an excuse to not go home with you), and several that indicate a bit of a fetish for seafood (keep your fridge stocked with oysters, calamari and pre-made shrimp cocktails), he made a suggestion that, well, let’s just say it doesn’t exactly imply good things about his readership:
[UPDATE 2: Pogo now says his misogynistic posts were an “experiment.” For my take on this, see here.]
[UPDATE: Pogo has taken down several of the blog posts mentioned in this post. I have replaced the links to the vanished posts with links to archived versions.]
So you know that dude Pogo, who makes all those amazingly perky-yet-somehow-also-ethereal music/video mashups using snippets of old Disney movies and the like?
Turns out he’s a bit of a misogynistic dickbag.
Yep. On his Pogomix blog, Nick Bertke (his real name) has been posting a bunch of tiresome and achingly unoriginal rants about feminism and the alleged privileges of women that might as well have been cut and pasted from the Men’s Rights subreddit or A Voice for Men.
The self-described “Men’s Human Rights” site A Voice for Men is a hate site trying — admittedly not very hard, or convincingly — to pose as a human rights organization. In reality, as I and various other writers have documented in considerable detail, it’s an organizer and amplifier of hatred, directed at feminists and women more generally.
Much of this hatred is directed at specific targets, mostly though not always feminist women who have offended A Voice for Men’s founder Paul Elam. The aim is generally to terrorize feminists into silence.
I’ve written at length about AVFM’s campaigns of vilification and intimidation in the past; for a recent example as well as numerous links to discussions of past examples, see here.
Today I will look at some of the specific tactics that AVFM uses against its targets – providing, in each case, a recent example.
This, in other words, is how AVFM’s Hate Machine functions. [TRIGGER WARNING for abusive language, discussion of abusive tactics]
[CONTENT WARNING: Misogynistic violence, rape apologia]
His complaint was a familiar one:
I think every girl is a type of slut, they are fussy with men nowadays, they do not give boys like us a chance.
You can find nearly identical laments in the profiles of self-described “nice guys” on OkCupid, on Men’s Rights blogs, and on forums for self-described “Incels” comisserating about their “involuntary celibacy” and what they see as the shallowness of young women.
But these words actually come from a video filmed by Ben Moynihan, a British teenager who was convicted of attempted murder earlier this week after stabbing three women in an attempt to take a sort of revenge upon the “weaker” gender he felt had made his life miserable by denying him sex. Another young man trying to punish women with violence for the “crime” of not dating him.
Well, fellow members of the feminist sector, it’s been fun. But we’re all doomed, as this helpful infographic, prepared by Men’s Rights Edmonton, makes clear:
Ok, maybe “clear” isn’t the word I was looking for. Also, I left out the first part of the diagram. Does this make it any clearer?
Today I’d like to share with you two quotations. One is from Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader whose legacy we honor today. The other is from someone who considers himself the leader of a human rights movement that follows in the footsteps of King.
The first quote:
Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
The second:
Noted pussyconomist Roosh Valizadeh offers these sobering thoughts on the rising costs — and decreasing quality — of vagina: