We Hunted The Mammoth

I pointed out that some MRAs may have bought tens of thousands of fake Twitter followers. Then some kind soul bought me a thousand of my own.

Fake Twitter followers Also not such a great gift

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:

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Paul Elam and his followers respond to Buzzfeed's devastating profile with evasion, excuses, and attacks on Elam's ex-wife.

A Voice for Men’s embattled Grand Wizard Paul Elam and his followers have responded to Buzzfeed’s devastating profile of him in some predictable ways, and in a few less predictable ones.

If you’re read the Buzzfeed piece – and if you haven’t, you really, really should – you know that it devoted a lot of time to the sad and sordid history of Elam’s three marriages and the even more sad and sordid story of the daughter he abandoned.

In a long and rambling post on Buzzfeed’s piece, Elam – all too predictably – goes after “Susan,” his first wife and the only one of his three ex-wives who was willing to talk on the record, trying his best to destroy her credibility by portraying her, essentially, as a lying slut.

Elam miraculously, and probably with considerable effort, managed to avoid the s-word – a favorite of writers on his site. But his attempts to slut-shame her are as transparent as glass.

off topic open thread

Open Thread for Personal Stuff: February 2015 Cat Wearing Box in a Sink Edition

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date February 7, 2015
327 Comments on Open Thread for Personal Stuff: February 2015 Cat Wearing Box in a Sink Edition

An open thread for personal stuff.

As usual for these threads: no trolls, no MRAs, no I’m-not-really-an-MRA-buts, no being jerky.

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Attention Buzzfeed readers: Here's more, much more, about the charming Paul Elam

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date February 6, 2015
140 Comments on Attention Buzzfeed readers: Here's more, much more, about the charming Paul Elam

Paul Elam, saying something terrible, probably.

For those coming here from the excellent Buzzfeed article on Paul Elam, here are some posts of mine that will give you an even fuller picture of this not only sleazy but dangerous man and the little army of fanatical assholes he has assembled to pester and often outright harass (mostly) women online.

Start here:

Paul Elam of A Voice for Men: In His Own Words

Aside from some of the information Buzzfeed found out about him, nothing is more damning to Elam than his own words.

Here are some posts on Elam’s peculiar approach to “activism,” which generally involves harassing individual women.

7 Tactics of Highly Effective Harassers: How A Voice for Men’s Internet Hate Machine works

Elam falsely accuses a random woman of trashing applications from white men while working for a college admissions office.

Elam Launches a Hate Campaign Against a College Student for Attending a Demonstration and Making Twitter Jokes

Paul Elam, you’re no MLK: A Voice for Men offers a $100 bounty for a clear photo of its latest feminist foe

Here’s a post on the phony “offenders registry” Elam and company put up in order to demonize feminists and other women they don’t like by posting unflattering profiles of them alongside actual female murderers and sex offenders.

Register-Her was a Fake “Offenders Registry” Run By Misogynists, Designed to Vilify and Intimidate Women

And here are a couple of posts on AVFM’s attempt to co-opt the name and the reputation of the White Ribbon anti-domestic violence campaign:

A Voice for Men has set up a phony White Ribbon website to coopt the international anti-violence campaign of that name — and raise some money using the name.

Some posts that quote Elam’s perverse justifications for violence against women:

Paul Elam: “If a woman five feet tall and 110 pounds soaking wet hits me, I am going to hit her back.”

She deserved the ass-kicking of a lifetime: Elam justifies violence against women in a disturbing short story

Paul Elam, you’re no Jonathan Swift

And then there was this:

Paul Elam, alleged human rights champion, tells me to kill myself

And a few, er, lighter reads on the man:

Elam to A Voice for Men conference goers: Don’t say terrible things about women in public, because someone might hear you

A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam and Dean Esmay explain the proper slurs to use for “nasty women.”

Elam: “This world deserves a jerk on the collar and a slap across the face and the flying spittle of rage.”

Elam on “stupid lying whores,” Rebecca Watson, and how he never claims to be a victim even though he totally is one.

(This last one is about a post he wrote attacking Skepchick founder Watson in which he used the word “whore” literally two dozen times.)

And there are more in the archives if you want to search for them.

I guess I kind of write about him a lot, huh?

Well, for better or worse, he’s the most prominent and influential Men’s Rights Activist out there. For now.

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Stop what you're doing, and GO READ THE BUZZFEED EXPOSE OF A VOICE FOR MEN'S PAUL ELAM. (SPOILER: He's even worse than you think)

Paul Elam quite literally in the middle of explaining how the media treats him so unfairly. — Paul Elam complaining that the media treats him like the terrible person he is.

If you’re a regular, or semi-regular, or even just an occasional reader of this blog, you need to stop reading this post right now and read Buzzfeed’s astonishing expose of A Voice for Men’s Paul Elam instead.

SPOILER ALERT: He’s an even bigger hypocrite than you think he is.

Here’s the link. Right here. Click on it now. Click. Now. Click.

If you need a bit more convincing: Buzzfeed’s long and meticulous examination of alleged “men’s human rights” activist Elam, written by Adam Serwer and Katie Baker, delves deep into Paul’s often sordid personal history, including his drug use, his numerous failed marriages, and the alternately depressing and infuriating story of the daughter he abandoned, who forgave and reunited with him as an adult, and who is now estranged from him again.

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Alex Jones, Men's Rights Activist: We Hunted the Mastodon to Feed You!

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date February 5, 2015
121 Comments on Alex Jones, Men's Rights Activist: We Hunted the Mastodon to Feed You!

Here are some things that Alex Jones, the bellicose conspiracy theorist behind Infowars and Prison Planet, actually believes:

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Twitter CEO on trolls and abusers: "We're going to start kicking these people off right and left."

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date February 5, 2015
62 Comments on Twitter CEO on trolls and abusers: "We're going to start kicking these people off right and left."

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:

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Has pickup guru Heartiste ever actually been in the same room as a human vagina?

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date February 4, 2015
149 Comments on Has pickup guru Heartiste ever actually been in the same room as a human vagina?

Not pictured: Human vagina. — Pitcher plants. Not pictured: Human vaginas.

There’s a famous scene in 40 Year Old Virgin where Steve Carrell’s character inadvertently reveals his complete lack of sexual experience with women (not that there’s anything wrong with that) by suggesting that a women’s breast “feels like a bag of sand.”

I sometimes find myself wondering if some of the guys I write about here have ever actually been in the presence of a naked woman. I mean, sure, it’s not really that surprising that a committed vagina-avoider like the legendary Man Going His Own Way known as Christopher in Oregon would write about women in general, and their vaginas in particular, as if they were stinky alien creatures from Planet Yuckygirls.

But it’s a little weirder when someone who claims to be an expert on the female mind and body describes, for example, the human vagina in ways that seem to suggest that he’s never actually been in the same room with one.

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Did A Voice for Men's @deanesmay and @Jackbarnesmra buy thousands of fake Twitter followers?

Post author By David Futrelle
Post date February 4, 2015
94 Comments on Did A Voice for Men's @deanesmay and @Jackbarnesmra buy thousands of fake Twitter followers?

Are Dean Esmay and Jack Barnes of A Voice for Men following in the fake footsteps of Superbad's McLovin? — Are Dean Esmay and Jack Barnes of A Voice for Men following in the fake footsteps of Superbad’s McLovin?

If you’re on Twitter, and have any number of followers at all, you’re going to end up getting followed by some bots — usually spambots looking for people to pester when certain keywords get used.

But when Twitter accounts have more than a relatively small percentage of fake followers, it’s almost certainly because they went out and bought them in order to make themselves look more influential than they really are.

Well, it looks like two of the most active members of A Voice for Men’s Twitter squad have done just that.

Twitter users @BlutalTheDog and @UnseenPerfidy recently ran “Twitter Audits” of a couple of AVFMers who are especially active on Twitter — AVFM “Managing Editor” @deanesmay and @Jackbarnesmra, co-host of AVFM’s Blue Collar Red Pill online radio show. The results weren’t pretty:

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Someone could probably write a Master’s thesis about the sexual insecurities on display in A Voice for Men’s "memes."

Classy, A Voice for Men, very classy. — Why are so many MRAs and PUAs so invested in the notion that women who reject them will end up miserable?

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 …