Category Archives: gross incompetence
That fake screenshot on A Voice for Men? It wasn’t faked. A correction, and its implications
Mistakes were made.
So you remember that dubious screenshot (see the bottom of this post) that appeared on A Voice for Men, and that I wrote about last week in several different posts? The one that looked like the most obvious fake in the history of obvious fakes, but that AVFM’s managing editor Dean Esmay insisted was the result of some sort of weird computer glitch?
Well, it looks like he was actually telling the truth. And I owe him — and A Voice for Men — an apology for suggesting otherwise.
[CORRECTED] Dean Esmay’s Pile of Lies: How A Voice for Men Destroyed its Last Remaining Shred of Credibility
Dean Esmay: You can close your eyes, but it won’t go away.
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here. I have left the text of this piece as is.
Those who have been following the ongoing saga of man’s rights hate site A Voice for Men’s stumbling attempts to explain away the fraudulent claims — and the blatantly faked screenshot — that they used in order to cover up an embarrassing error in one of their stories may have been wondering how on earth they were going to respond after I confronted them directly with the evidence in the comments section of the blog of AVFM contributor Girl Writes What.
The answer is: with a whole new batch of lies. And they are even more dumbfounding than the last batch.
Keep digging: A Voice for Men ready to triple down on dishonesty in order to cover up mistake? [CORRECTED]
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here.
So the other day I showed you all in detail how someone at men’s rights hate site A Voice for Men fabricated evidence — in the form of a faked screenshot — in order to cover up an embarrassing mistake on their part. The person responsible for the fabrication appeared to be AVFM’s so-called “managing editor” Dean Esmay.
Well, now it appears that they’re going to triple down on their dishonesty and concoct more screenshots. In a “news roundup” from Esmay today I found this remarkable passage:
And going back to the story with the error I found a new “editorial note” from Esmay:
I can’t wait to see what on earth they’ve come up with this time. I encourage readers to take screenshots of all this in case AVFM decides to do any retroactive ninja editing as part of its plan to pretend it was right all along.
Meanwhile,those of you who have been following this story may be wondering: who is this Joshua Thompson? Well, it appears that AVFM — or at least Dean Esmay — can’t even get the name of the post’s author right. That’s right, AVFM’s MANAGING EDITOR can’t get the name of one of AVFM’S OWN WRITERS RIGHT.
The author was first identified on AVFM as Jason Gregory — and if you look at the bio for Jason Gregory on any of the other articles he’s written for AVFM, like this one, it points to American Idiocracy, the blog where the problematic Facebook post originally ran. (It’s now been replaced, on his blog, anyway, by a completely rewritten version.)
At some point, apparently by accident, AVFM changed the byline of the author to Jason Thompson, who appears to be someone else who wrote something for AVFM a long time ago. And now Dean Esmay is calling him Joshua Thompson.
Or maybe Joshua Thompson is his real name, and Jason Gregory was his pen name, and Esmay has accidentally doxxed his own writer. Who knows?
I suspect we have not yet plumbed the depths of AVFM’s dishonesty -or incompetence.
Worse than Wrong: A Voice for Men resorts to phony screenshot and outright lying to avoid admitting embarrassing error [CORRECTED]
CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here. I have left the text of this piece as is.
When reputable publications, online or off, make a mistake, the editors grit their teeth, swallow their embarrassment, and run a correction. [EDIT: I've even got a little one at the end of this post!]
Men’s Rights hate hub A Voice for Men has somewhat more lax standards than reputable publications, or even not-so-reputable publications, and generally prefers to deal with its errors by pretending they never happened. But sometimes the errors are so obvious, even to their own somewhat credulous readers, that they have to acknowledge them in some form.
In the case of one egregious recent error AVFM has tried something a bit more audacious: resorting to a phony screenshot and outright lies in an attempt to prove that they were right all along.
Sorry, dudes, but you’re not going to get away with it. You guys are so grossly incompetent you can’t even lie convincingly.
Wrong Again: Comically inept A Voice for Men makes bizarre, bogus claims about “violence against men” search engine results
A Voice for Men has a little Google Challenge for its readers, and I’m going to invite you to take part in it as well. In the midst of yet another post trying to gin up outrage over Facebook’s banning of violent rape memes and other such repugnant shit, new AVFM contributor and “former feminist” Jason Gregory sets forth this challenge, which he originally posted on his blog several weeks ago:
A Voice for Men activates its activists to make asses of themselves over this Facebook thing
For MRAs, driving in circles IS the plan.
So if you’ve ever wondered what sort of activism that Men’s Rights, er, Activists do when they do do activism, take a look at this little ACTION ALERT from A Voice for Men.
You may recall Paul Elam getting all worked up the other day because Facebook, responding to a campaign launched by a coalition of feminist activists and groups, announced it was going to try to do a better job removing “gender-based” hate speech from its site. You know, like this [TRIGGER WARNING] sort of thing.
Naturally, Elam and other MRAs interpreted Facebook’s announcement as the first step in the End of Male Speech on the Internet, or something.
Anyway, now the MRAs are ACTIVATING! AVFM has announced that it’s going after the groups that signed onto the feminist Facebook protest. Because, well, I’m not sure I get why exactly.
Here’s their explanation:
It’s time for action. The AVFM community has scrambled to look beyond the fine print of WAM!’s ultimatum to Facebook and into the signatories. We are finding that some of them are tax-exempt, and even government funded. We now know that government funded institutions have endorsed a harmful double standard that results in the censorship of men.
But, if we discover that even one cent of government money touched WAM!’s campaign, we will be exposing a whole new dimension of hypocrisy.
Uh, ok. I’m just really having a hard time finding the hypocrisy here. If you look at the names of the groups that signed onto the open letter, you’ll find a number of general feminist groups, groups concerned with the representation of women/gender in the media, and groups organized against sexual assault and other forms of violence.
They didn’t sign a petition demanding that all men posting on the internet be banned or, I dunno, kicked in the balls. They signed onto an open letter demanding that Facebook remove
groups, pages and images that explicitly condone or encourage rape or domestic violence or suggest that they are something to laugh or boast about.
That doesn’t seem hypocritical to me. It seems rather in line with what these groups promote.
And the only men who will be censored will be men posting this sort of hateful shit. If women post this sort of shit, they’ll be banned too.
Apparently, AVFM and its “activist” fans are so divorced from reality that they think they’re going to be able to publicly embarrass rape survivor support groups … for standing up against crude, hateful rape jokes on Facebook featuring images of brutalized victims.
Still, at least this sort of surreal, self-defeating activism is better than firebombing courthouses and police stations, as that infamous manifesto posted in AVFM’s activism section so enthusiastically recommends.
EDIT: I forgot the link to the AVFM alert; added it inthe first graf.
Why haven’t Men’s Rights Activists turned on Paul Elam for falsely accusing Arianna Pattek of civil rights violations? [UPDATE: Elam retraction]
Graphic from SAVE Services, whose press releases regularly run on A Voice for Men. Why doesn’t this policy apply to Paul Elam?
UPDATE: Elam has retracted his original story. See the end of this post for more details.
Men’s Rights Activists often insist that false accusations of rape are literally as bad as rape itself, and that false accusers of rape should spend as much time in prison as actual rapists.
Presumably they feel the same way about false accusers of other crimes, from murder to check kiting.
So in the wake of Paul Elam’s reckless false accusations against recent Georgetown graduate Arianna Pattek, one would expect other MRAs to rise up en masse to demand that Elam turn himself in.
Elam, you may recall, accused Pattek of serious violations of civil rights laws, claiming that she, as an employee of Georgetown’s admissions office, showed clear bias against white men. Indeed, Elam didn’t even qualify his accusations with an “alleged,” as journalists routinely do when writing about those accused but not convicted of crimes. Here’s what he wrote about her:
Lazy Libel: A Voice for Men “doxes” an alleged misandrist blogger — and ID’s the wrong woman [UPDATE2 w/ Georgetown response, notes from neo-Nazis]
A Voice for Men: The Gang that Couldn’t Dox Straight
As I finished up my last post about Men’s Rights Redditors attempting to dox a so-called “conservative feminist” blogger who had confessed to trashing male applications when working in a university admissions office, I saw that A Voice for Men has run a post by Paul Elam identifying someone they’ve convinced themselves is the blogger, apparently using the information dug up by the Reddit doxers.
Their alleged culprit? “Arianna Pattek, a Georgetown grad student.” Other Men’s Rightsers have taken up the case, and the Conspiracy Subreddit is all aflutter about a post identifying her by name.
They’ve got the wrong person.
