Crazy On The Web Left: Samantha Allen / Feminists Against Free Speech Edition

Possibly the most nauseatingly dumb thing you'll read on the web all...well...I was going to go with 'month'...but then I remembered: the web...

...so...day?

Anyway: this is godawful.

Web feminism is just eaten up with this kind of crazy. Rabidly anti-male, illiberal screeds.

This is not worth my time, nor yours...except insofar as it's a token of a really crazy type.

In it, we do hear the unhappy story of one Redditor who discovered that her bf is a pathetic, evil troll. We're told that he seems/seemed like a nice guy (note: 'nice guy', incidentally, is now a derogatory term in the WebFem lexicon...but here the term is used straight). If true, it's another tiny little punch in the gut to humanity...people who are nice in their normal lives sometimes turn into psychos when they logon to the Web of Gyges...

But that's really just an occasion for the author's real points, which are:

1. All trolls are men

2. Men who like Seth McFarlane are horrible and are probably "mean" to women on the internet

3. Men who disagree with Anita Sarkeesian are horrible

4. Supporting certain parts of the Bill of Rights is verboten. E.g. the Second Amendment, of course. If your bf is pro-Second-Amendment, you should "run." And then there's the First:

This could be a huge warning sign. Trolls cite the First Amendment as frequently as college application essays cite “The Road Not Taken.” They think that it gives them the right to verbally harass, stalk, and threaten whomever they want without any consequences. If your man picks the First Amendment, just ask him to explain what it means. If he thinks it means that “it’s a free country” and “people can say whatever they want,” tell him to go back to the playground he learned his politics from and find a new boyfriend.

The mind, it reeleth...

5. Women should suddenly ask for their bf's laptops, and make sure said bf does not log out of his accounts first, the purpose being to snoop into the dude's online habits, because:

If he spends thirty seconds meticulously logging out of his email and social media accounts before handing it to you, there might be something going on with him and trolling is definitely on the table. It’s 2014, after all. Men don’t just cheat on you and watch too much porn anymore. They also obsessively track down and harass people who are different from them in order to feel the fleeting sense of control and superiority that defines their particular version of masculinity.

Wow.

That's a whole lotta crazy right there.

lessee...just for the record:

1'. According to one commenter, there is evidence that a significant number of trolls are female. (I don't know whether that's true. Can anyone confirm or disconfirm that?)

2'. Seth McFarlane is lame.

3'. Anita Sarkeesian has some good points, but, overall, I'm not a fan. She frequently uses the method of cherry-picking and free-associative interpretation so beloved by the left. If anything can be interpreted so as to support her thesis, then that's how she interprets it. Obvious counter-evidence is typically ignored.

4'. "Favorite Amendments"? Really? What childish drivel. Though, of course, I'm pro-Second, and very extremely pro-First...so there's that. It's really, really creepy how anti-First-Amendment the WebFems have become. It's a kind of meme with them. Appeals to the First Amendment are commonly met with shrieks of "FREEZE PEACH!" (Note: I am not making this up.) No arguments, really: just the "freeze peach!" mantra, which is intended to deride...but just sounds really stupid...

Remember: these people are not liberals. They are illiberal--in fact anti-liberal--in the extreme.

5'. At that one, I can only shake my head in disbelief. If I had a gf who did something like that with the intention of snooping on me, that would be the end of the story. (Wonder what the author thinks about NSA spying? Is it permissible to support the Fourth Amendment, one wonders?)

Oh and, incidentally:

Samantha Allen is a doctoral fellow in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. In addition to writing regularly for the feminist gaming blog The Border House, her writing has also appeared on Salon, Jacobin, Kotaku, and First Person Scholar. 

Let me just say: I cannot imagine anyone being surprised by that.

Ok.

Sure, it's just one stupid piece of clickbait.

But eventually that excuse for failing to take this stuff seriously fails to hold water. Just one crazy post...just one crazy post...just one crazy post...eventually, you see, it's not just one anymore...

There is a trend here, and it's not a good one. Rabid sexism prevails in a certain very vocal sector of web feminism (and academic feminism...that is, in the vanguard of feminism...). Feminism in particular and liberalism in general are insufficiently critical of this stuff. Feminism has already been dragged toward the crazy left, and liberalism, typically helpless/feckless when confronted by illiberal threats from that direction, is easily dragged there-ward.

It's not like the Brown Shirts are marching down Pennsylvania Avenue or anything...but this idiocy has become a real force on the web. If you can't get yourself to criticize it, at least--or so I suggest--refrain from making excuses for it.