Paul Elam blames me for his alleged ignorance of the blatant fraud on his own site
Thanks Obama! (And David Futrelle.) (For more, click image)
So the mighty Paul Elam has acknowledged — in the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, at least -that there might just be some sort of problem going on with regard to, you know, that whole fake screenshot thing. You know, the blatant fraud that A Voice for Men mangling — sorry, managing — editor Dean Esmay seems to have engaged in to cover up a mistake.
But, Paul being Paul, he somehow manages to turn his sort-of acknowledgement of the problem into an attack on me, bizarrely blaming me (the person who actually pointed out this fraud) for him not knowing about it before today:
As much as I hate to say it, Futrelle does have a valid point. I am looking in to it today, and unlike Futrelle, I will address the results of my inquiry in public no matter where they end up.
I don’t mind looking into problems, even when they are pointed out by such a bald faced liar. I would have actually been aware of this sooner if his blog were worth reading. I had to become aware of it in your comments to even know there was a problem.
Well, Paul, I would have happily brought my findings to the comments section of A Voice for Men, rather than the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, but you may recall I am banned there. And I wonder if anyone there would have had the courage to stand up and say that, gosh, this Futrelle guy has a point, given how quickly people are censored there for deviating from your site’s perverse “conventional wisdom.”
And gosh, Paul, how unfair it is to expect the publisher of a site to be aware of what’s, you know, published on it. Concerns about the story were brought up by your own commenters shortly after it first ran. Esmay referred in an article and an editorial note to my alleged “lies” about the story; it didn’t occur to you to even go look at what I had said? And even aside from the phony screenshot, or anything I’ve written, did you really think that Esmay’s bizarre explanations for the original mistake made any kind of sense?
In other words, are you incompetent, or are you lying about being unaware of the problem until now?
In any case, I await the results of your “investigation.” I am especially eager to see how you will manage to spin things so it becomes someone else’s fault. Will it be some evil conspiracy that “set you up?”
And when exactly have I lied, Paul? Could you offer a citation? When I point out the lies on your site, I fucking back up each claim.
[EDIT: Added some stuff in the "gosh, Paul" paragraph and made a few other changes.]
Posted on June 18, 2013, in a voice for men, drama, entitled babies, lying liars, MRA, paul elam and tagged a voice for men, journalistic fraud, men's rights, MRA. Bookmark the permalink. 275 Comments.
Figures. Oh, metalheads, why must you be such assholes?
@Dvärghundspossen
WOOT! Glad for your husband’s victory, workers don’t usually win over here cause the labor law’s ridiculous and our unions suck. What a weak boss BTW, the /threat/ of a strike got them to capitulate! I hope your husband and his workmates maintain their power!
I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen YouTube metalheads comment on Judas Priest videos and whine about the fact that Rob Halford is gay. And then there are other metalheads who are like “Even though he’s gay, he’s still awesome so shut up!” (implying that him being gay would be wrong otherwise).
It’s truly an unfortunate sight. I wish there were more non-bigoted metalheads. They’re quite rare.
Oh my fucking gods. I hadn’t read the whole thread yet before replying, but about that “this is not fucking harmless” -report, no. No. Nonono. No. Just no. Fuck no. That’s fucking sick. I’m seriously gonna retch. To bleach the brain and appease the furrinati, have an adorable lion cub that’s trying its hardest to roar.
@Argenti: Zie/ze, zir and hir are all okay. Sorry, hadn’t mentioned my preferred gender pronouns earlier, so thanks for being sensitive*.
*Yeah, I know, it’s something that’s sort of expected from a decent person. I’m just in the state of mind right now that I’d rather give positive feedback for the nice and kind things good people do on a daily basis, rather than blow my top over something assholes do. On a daily basis. Fuck this shit.
Yes, that’s exactly it. *eyeroll*
Dvarghundspossen, high fives and whoots to Husband and co-workers!
J - you may be just sixteen, but ferchrissakes grow up. You’ve had good posts here, don’t go blotting your copy book and acting like a troll … or a silly little kid.
j: A serious strike threat about a service the public depends on… not to be taken lightly. When the employer knows it’s at a moral disadvantage for being wrong… the victory for labor was certain, so it’s better to make a tactical capitulation and spin it as putting the interests of the public first.
Of fer chrissake. A nerve? Yeah, I suppose being trollish does strike nerves. Not in the way you think. It’s not like you are going to find people here who like him without reservation, but all in all; he’s a decent guy. I’m not so fond of how he deals with theism, but it’s mostly harmless (because of how prevalent theistic hegemony is in the culture).
But in the decade or so that I’ve read him, he’s said some shit I didn’t like. So what?
He’s not trolling the net, he’s not a raging douchenozzle and you’ve betrayed some basic ignorance; people called you on it.
Trust me, if you “strike a /nerve/” you’ll get a lot more than you got over this. Ask buntzums and harley, or €sobbra, or brz, or Brandon, or NWO, or DKM, or Blackhat, or Tom Martin, or Mr. Mikhail Torvus Butthorn Varpole SteeAL, or Mary Sunshine, or Judgeybitch, or ToySoldier, or Crack EmCee, or any of the other raging assholes who’ve come in here to “tell us how it is”.
Crack EmCee? I missed that one? Or is this another incarnation of Mr. No Name?
Radical Parrot — besides using ze/zir myself, I’m taking lessons from pecunium in “Work like you were living in the early days of a better nation” (which is probably a quote I haven’t bothered to google and am sure he’ll tell us
)
You missed him. he came in, all piss and vinegar in a Thomas Ball thread, and then tried half a dozen ways to get some of us on his side: he played the,”you’re a vet Pec, I expected better of you”; which led to me doing some trivial digging, and him looking even worse.
Then he explained that all cults are based on yoga, and his wife was a murderer; hiding out in france. it was bizarre: Let’s see where it was.
Found it: http://manboobz.com/2011/06/22/arms-and-the-mens-rights-movement/comment-page-6/#comment-32694
There was so much (like which maternal figure it was, and all sorts of inconsistent story).
All in one thread, so that’s the whole thing from there on in
It’s from Oysterband (a great group, british, political, angry, celebratory, kick ass, folk, punk, powerful)
And one which is topical to manboobz, The Oxford Girl
You know how you so much Emily Autumn is apposite?
Same with Oysterband.
(and they don’t re-release songs, when they have one on more than one album, it’s a different recording).
Perfect.
Speaking of metalheads - I totally want to read this book!
What Are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal
What Are You Doing Here?: A Black Woman's Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal
Just want to add to whomever linked to Freethought Blogs… Patheos is a good place as well, Hemant Mehta’s blog is there (The Friendly Atheist) and he’s always a good read.
By the time I catch up on these comment threads, they’ve far surpassed me…
kittehs: not quote perfect, I think (on inspection) this is better:
€sob-brah!
How about €sob-bro?
@ j
There’s tons of legitimate criticism that can be said about PZ Myers, he regularly spouts bullshit (and so do I, and so do you). The problem is, what you wrote doesn’t make any sense. You’re doing the equivalent of people coming here saying “I know you want men to die! You’re all disciples of Valerie Solanas!” We don’t like straw feminists, there’s no need to add to the straw.
We’re loaded with bales from MRAs already. (they think they struck a /nerve/ too btw)
I spout catshit. Less cleaning up afterward.
Oh wow… I 1: completely forgot about The Naïf, and 2:that necroing the CrackEmcee thread was his debut.
That metal book looks all kinds of awesome.
It reminds me of something I haven’t thought about in a long time, back in the 80′s I had a Ronnie James Dio album (vinyl), and on the inside sleeve was a group shot of some fans, maybe they were the official fan club, I don’t know. Anyway as you can imagine the group was mostly white and male, but right in the front row center there was a black girl, and I always used to wonder who she was and how she felt in that crowd. I was intrigued by her.
1) I should’ve googled that quote ages ago, that song’s awesome
2) please don’t summon the boring one
2b) our glossary troll, the one we spent a week+ on, stuck to the glossary but damned did I have fun having a go at him (someone explain how “Assange isn’t a rapist but an activist” and “corsets make one less likely to feel being stabbed” can possibly be part of the same argument?)
2b.1) he’s the cause of Spot That Fallacy!!!
3) …what’s the “I struck a /nerve/” dude’s nym? I forgot already
And I missed an atheism fight! Man, I miss all the good stuff.
I feel… WEIRD about spirituality. In my mind, power corrupts, and relations with high power differentials are something to be avoided, so getting involved with gods would be like, the most dangerous thing ever, unless I was absolutely, positively sure they didn’t actually exist.
So the only gods I’d be interested in doing business with are the ones I’m POSITIVE don’t exist or have any power. Like, I dunno, Twiddledoo of the Kitchen Sink, patron of cooks, dishwashers, and those annoying bits that get caught in the drain. (To appease, clean sink every day.)
@Argenti
“3) …what’s the “I struck a /nerve/” dude’s nym? I forgot already”
It’s “j” - just as forgettable as his contributions.
@Marie:
Yeah, everyone was really surprised about this turn of events, since they’d announced the strike like a week ago and the employers had, during that week, put up a decidedly stubborn front, so everyone was prepared to have traffic standing still for days or even weeks… and then it turns out their stubbornness was just a bluff all along. When the strike was like eight hours away they caved in.
There are plausible theories as to why that is, but I won’t go into that, that would be a wall of text uninteresting to everyone else.
I will tell you something hilarious though. The bus drivers are in a different sub-union of LO, and they had already begun their strike yesterday by stopping various bus lines. Now, there’s this libertarian youth organization that hates strikes and unions because, well, they’re libertarian asshats. They got hold of a bus that they were gonna run to compensate for the standing ones, and they also gave out a message to the press according to which it’s wrong to use the power of the collective to force employers to give way, everyone ought to negotiate their shifts and their pay as individuals, and this doesn’t mean they take sides in the fight between employers and workers (right, totally not), just that they believe in the individual.
Then they ran their bus for a few hours until they got tired of driving and just dropped the whole thing. And that’s the hilarious part.
::flaps hands excitedly::
@LBT
There’s a Discworld Goddess just for you!
Funny thing is, I guess I’m a deist-y-sort - I believe there’s a creator spirit but I don’t think of it as interventionist or personal* - but it’s so far from my interests/concerns with the afterlife that it really doesn’t figure at all. Spirit for me is just domestic, and what little curiosity I had about all that side of it fizzled out long ago. I asked Louis some questions, got a few answers (and he doesn’t pretend to much knowledge on the matter), and left it at that. Capital H Home is what it’s about for me.
That infomercial guy probably shouldn’t eat all those Cheetos anyway.
Oh snap.
love you
Actually, he could salvage the ones that hadn’t touched the floor by sliding a manila folder or a takeout menu between the bowl and the spilled pile. Flip the bowl over, and he’d have a sensible portion.
@theladyzombie:
Yikes, and I hope I didn’t tread on any nerves. I got a fairly mild cult-upbringing, and I tend to try to deal with it by being sarcastic and dismissive. (I think when we compared notes a relatively high number of Boobzers had grown up in a fundamentalist atmosphere of one sort or another)
You’ll all be glad to know that AVfM has now acknowledged their error, by hiding the acknowledgement on an old/dead post that no one is reading and by blaming David, the internet, and Google. It’s Update #3 here: http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/government-tyranny/moral-turpitude-an-open-letter-to-facebook/
p.s. I really, REALLY want to see Dean Esmay unleash his mighty “knowledge” of how Google works in a separate article, because that shit is hilarious. Please, Dean? Pretty please?
I didn’t mean to come across as cult damaged and embittered! Sorry all! It’s mostly that I take objection when people consider JWs as just harmless kooks. Not that any of you here did.
I used to make ex-JW/anti-Watchtower videos on Youtube and would get all sorts of apologists who tried to say “just get over it” or that I was lying because they personally knew or worked with JWs who were nice. It’s like, yes, I understand that an individual JW may be a nice person, but they belong to a cult and it’s their mission to try and convert you.
Howard, I like to employ satire and sarcasm too when talking about cults. It’s fun!
lol. It’s an artifact caused by searching for “violence against”, then adding “men” to the end of the query before you take a screenshot.
That none of the super geniuses at AVfM thought to turn off search personalization before they made claims about the significance of the top google search results does not inspire confidence in their knowledge of search lore.
I’ve got a new post up dealing with their latest literally unbelievable spin.
@Theladyzombie
Word. I’m pretty sure there’s no God, but this is one of the main reasons I don’t feel comfortable in Atheist spaces online, or even like to call myself an atheist. (The other reasons are rampant Islamophobia, and the fact that I don’t give a fuck if other people think there is a God/gods/something)
@Freemage
One doesn’t have to be an atheist to support any of that, though. I got interested in it via Pagan blogs that focused on church/state separation, and I know some Christians who are into it, too.
@Freemage
But is that a religion problem or a transphobia problem?
@Pecunium: Oyster Band is awesome. June Tabor is a great singer.
Oyster Band x June Tabor is my jam.
@Tracy: I posted the Freethought Blogs link, specifically for the Atheism+ advocacy. I don’t read much Patheos, and I should read more, but it seems like for every Mehta they’ve got an Anchoress.
@Kittehserf I like to refer to my MIL’s kitchen drawers as “shrines to Anoia”.
@Etelka
Bah, too much work. Dry foods spilled on relatively clean floors are totally still edible
Wait, wait, Crack EmCee mistook Ami Angelwing’s Magic remix cards for TAROT?!!
… Could he read?
And now he’s basically admitting that he expects to get his way because he can thump people.
I’ve got the god for you.
@Falconer:
Expecting them to actually read what they criticize is MISANDRY!!!!!eleventy!!!!
Falconer: I’m not so fond of the stuff with June Tabor as that without, but that’s me. She’s a fine singer, I don’t care for the way they blend.
Banjo the Clown, God of Puppets is a worthy alternative to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, to be sure.
Oh yes, I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve long since stopped trying to count the number of times a woman on the Internet says something (anything at all, really) and the MRM shows up all OBBLY OBBLY OBBLY.
I often visit FreeThoughtBlogs, including PZ Myers’s Pharyngula. Always entertaining, often informative. I know and love several theists, and am one myself, and have never been offended or insulted by anything I’ve found there.
The Slymepit (as it is officially known) is, by contrast, a big hairy ball of do-not-want.
I’m an atheist. I’ve fallen out of the anti-theist around the same time I realized that being angry all the time and yelling about things online didn’t usually help anything and generally made me angrier, so like 16 or so. Now sarcasm and satire are my beat, and I, like emilygoddess, don’t give a fuck what others believe as long as they aren’t using it to justify harming others or trying to shove it onto me. And given that my family is pretty firmly Catholic, and my best friend is Born Again, I have a lot of leeway/patience when it comes to that last part. It doesn’t even register unless I’m being dragged to church on Sundays, something my family has finally stopped doing and I’ve started doing voluntarily for the “family time” aspect of it (we always go to brunch afterward), or I’m being lectured about how planning on being a single parent and having a not-bf is apparently going to damage me or something by my friend. Then it might get my back up but I’m usually pretty chill.
RE: katz and Kittehs
I always love hearing about little tin gods like that. I’m also rather fond of the Church of Ed Wood. I would quite like to be a monk, just as long as I don’t have to deal with any powerful gods! And I’m more than willing to pay homage to Ed Wood by watching as many of his films as possible.
RE: Falconer
If I didn’t already have my Superman “I AM A MAN!” punch icon covering all my ranty needs on LJ, I would be terribly tempted to make an icon out of that “OBBLY OBBLY OBBLY” image. It sums it up so well!
@Howard Bannister
I checked out the link and read the post and first 50 comments. I’m actually not seeing the Islamophobia. (There could be something obvious that I’m missing… I am a little low on sleep right now. No obligation to explain it to me unless you want to. But I’m pretty sure I’m not, because you cited Ing [and Brownian, who basically said, "What Ing said"].) Ing actually said (comment 38) that he was not critiquing PZ, he was addressing a common human instinct. The only mention PZ makes in the post of Islam specifically rather than religion in general is the title, and I don’t think it would be out of character for him to, say, use the title “Praise Jesus” for an example of Christian violence. (Disclaimer: I read PZ’s blog occasionally but don’t follow him closely, so I could be wrong. Disclaimer #2: A quick Google search says “Inshallah” means “Allah willing”/”If Allah wills”. If this is incorrect, I could be missing something important. Right now, I’m reading it as a reference to the mother’s statement that this was her daughter’s destiny.)
I guess you could argue that it’s really better to just focus on what’s wrong with one’s own culture and not other people’s, and I can respect that viewpoint, but I’m not convinced. (I think I would agree with the “weak” version of that sentiment, that we should focus more on our own culture and/or cultures directly affecting/oppressing us, but not the “strong” version that would say that it’s problematic to write a short blog post about it.)
Ing did have some awesome comments, though.
Oh FFS!: The US just told an atheist she had to join a church, or her application for citizenship would be denied: Because she’s a pacifist.
Yep, the US says the only acceptable grounds for being a pacifist are religious.
Fucktards.
Pecunium, did you use a word with a -tard ending? That’s…surprising.
emily, yes, you’re right,I shouldn’t have. Wasn’t thinking clearly and screwed up.
Wait, pacifists aren’t allowed to become citizens?
Pacifism is UnAmurrican!
Cassandra: Sure they can, if they are using Religion to explain it. If it’s just moral conclusion based on principle and reasoned philosophically, then no.
In short, the Immigration is arguing all morality comes from “god”.
But how is that even relevant? How does it come up?
(They don’t ask you that kind of thing when you apply for a green card.)
According to Pecunium’s post, it came up because they asked her if she would be willing to serve in the armed forces. Which is a valid question for a potential citizen (if you accept the need for armed forces at all).
I can’t find the original story (Pecunium, your source link is dead), but I’d be interested in whether they told her to go to a house of worship, or specifically a church, because there’s, um, a significant difference there.
Wow. I thought it was ridiculous that the Canadian citizenship oath involves swearing allegiance to Queen Elizabeth (as my mother did, in the 70′s, when she immigrated from England). But you have to swear to bear arms… and if you won’t, you need a letter from your church? *gobsmacked*
Given that women are not currently required to register for selective service I’m still confused. Probably unwise to expect immigration policy to make sense, though.
Source
Cassandra — she’s also in her 60s and willing to do not combat service, which is all they’d ask a woman (or anyone else) her age to do. In practice it’s moot but noooo, gotta be religious. FTR, someone saw the anon tweet on it and immediately offered to give her the letter they want.
emilygoddess: Thanks, link is fixed.
This is the money quote:
So I think, for all practical purpose, she said yes.
I’m not up on Immigration policy, but given the ratio of applicants to open slots it wouldn’t surprise me if they tended to fixate on any little thing to rule you out.
Or maybe it’s just a shit test.
emilygoddess: maybe it’s just a bigot in texas.
Bad Machinery is a lovely little comic, I love it to pieces.
Also, maybe it’s just me, but I can just about hear the Doppler effect on those OBBLYs.
Also, I would like to adopt “Ship of Dreams” and I can’t figger out how.