Doug Henwood and the cowardly anti-feminist radical chic brigade

I had an unpleasant run-in on Facebook with Doug Henwood and his merry band of feminist-hating sycophants the other day.

Who is Doug Henwood, you may ask. Well not nearly as well-known as he feels he deserves to be, since Henwood apparently thinks that Paul Krugman stole all his best ideas.

Henwood is one of these radical chic types who thinks that Sheryl Sandberg is the Great Satan. Katha Pollitt addressed that idiocy in The Nation.

It's clear from Doug Henwood's personality that he is a true Social Justice Warrior, even if he is much older than your average SJW - he enjoys attacking actual feminists out of some bullshit holier-than-thou double standard and he cannot tolerate criticism - like any standard SJW he much prefers to smear and then censor critics as you can see him doing in the debate I had with him. He blocked me and then he and his gang continued the "debate" without me. Much like Clint Eastwood arguing with invisible Obama in the chair.

 He even posted the K. Tempest Bradford/Mikki Kendall smear against me to try to make me shut up about his idiocy concerning Sandberg and "bourgeois feminists."

What really bothers Doug Henwood and others who attacked Sheryl Sandberg is that Sandberg has the nerve to address female career aspirations, while radical chic purists like Henwood and some freelance Philistine named Abby Tallmer believe that women need to wait until all the problems of the third world are solved first before they worry about their own lives. You know, they should address important issues, not insignificant little women's issues.

UPDATE: Henwood appears to be part of the same cadre of self-important leftist quasi-anarchists as David Graeber, with whom I tangled some months ago. And Henwood was actually in on the Twitter war known as Jacobinghazi.

Holy mother of reality

Queen Mother of Reality by Pawel Althamer

So much for that resolution - I have so much to do to get ready for my JULIA & BUDDY production, as the author/director/producer/costume designer/music director (yes it's because I'm an egomaniac control freak, but mostly because I work cheap) I swore I was going to stop writing about Social Justice Warriors for the duration.

No sooner had I resolved that then I started to get massive hits on my post about Pollitt vs. Kendzior, and then I was sucked back in. I do realize it shows a horrible lack of self-control on my part, but when I saw the sleazy rhetorical tactics used by David Graeber and Sarah Kendzior against Katha Pollitt it just made me so damn mad. And I'm not the only one, as you can see by this fellow's blog. But I know damn well that battling SJWs is ultimately futile - they are a many-headed hydra of irrationality and incessant smearing.

But at least I got nice feedback from someone on Twitter who said:

"Your 6/12 post on SJW & the linked piece to your fight with Kendall are the clearest things I've read on toxic twitter. KUTGW"

And I got a nice note from Pollitt herself. So it wasn't a total waste of time.

Last I checked I've gotten 842 views on the 6/12 post. Which is waaay more than most of my blog posts get - the average is like 20 views. Although to my surprise (I finally checked individual blog post view rates) that's only the fifth most popular blog post.

Here are the top 5.

1. Damn my accursed principles!!!!

Jun 3, 2008

3396

2. Intact Gallery

Aug 28, 2010

1986

3. Six Questions for Arthur Schopenhauer

Nov 13, 2011

1769

4. Don't Let Me Down

Oct 18, 2011

1150

5. Social Justice Warrior smear campaign: Sarah Kendz...

Jun 12, 2014, 6 comments

842

The second and fourth aren't a big surprise - #2 is about a blog that focuses on uncircumcised penii, illustrated by a pretty explicit male nude drawing by Paul Cadmus, and #4 is about the Beatles and is illustrated by a nude photo of John and Yoko.

But #1 is just me ranting about being contacted on a dating site by some Nazi, and #3 -  I had no idea Schopenhauer was that popular - that bodes well for my play.

Anyway, I will try to do better going forward. To get the bad taste of SJWs out, let us contemplate art. I blogged about the sculpture Queen Mother of Reality currently installed at the Socrates Sculpture Park down the street a few weeks ago. I mentioned there that you could go in the sculpture but I hadn't. Well I went in today. It's quite a little hang out in there. It has seats and everything:

So capacious others were in there the same time as me -
I don't know those people though. I wonder if I'm supposed to blur
that woman's face like Google maps

Peeking out from the entrance - I don't think there's room enough for
you AND the baby carriage and me and these other two in here, lady.
Those red things aren't sales tags - they're wishes that children (I assume) wrote.
I didn't get a good clear photo of one, unfortunately.

Bonus - you can spy on the free yoga class from inside - they were packed today. The weather was pretty great.

David Graeber makes me Google his TinyURL

A hallmark of your typical Social Justice Warrior is that they are cowardly little weasels, which is why they don't contact you directly with their complaints - or say, when they wish to hint to their Twitter followers that you have defamed them. They just whine about you on Twitter.

Starting this morning my blog post from a couple of days ago entitled Social Justice Warrior smear campaign: Sarah Kendzior, David Graeber and friends edition was blowing up in my blog analytics. I didn't have time to investigate until now, I was running the Brooklyn Pride LGBTQ + Family 5K this morning and then had brunch, and then I had to do my weekly NYCPlaywrights emailing duties, and then had to nag an actor about a production issue relating to my play JULIA & BUDDY.

So I only finally had time to find out what's going on this evening.

Most of the traffic coming to the blog post is from this TinyURL   http://t.co/BSPNKny2rX, so I did a search on Twitter and found David Graeber talking about me. (Although oddly the link seems to be different, perhaps created from another URL shortening service?)

He didn't contact me. He just talked about me on Twitter. As I said, that's what SJWs do. Because they're cowardly little smear-mongering weasels.

My response:

I included @KathaPollitt - if you aren't familiar with Twitter, it's basically like I cc'd Pollitt in my response. I felt it was appropriate since the reason I got into this kerfuffle is because SJW Sarah Kendzior was smearing Katha Pollitt. Again.

I assume that what Graeber is referring to is Item 3 on the blog post:

So to recap:

1. Joshua Foust falsely claimed that writers at Salon and Jacobin were sending rape threats to Sarah Kendzior.
2. Sarah Kendzior apparently did not correct Foust although she was often on Twitter during that time.
3. David Graeber accepted Foust's false claim.
4. Katha Pollitt questioned David Graeber about it.

Now the reason I said he accepted Foust's claim is because Katha Pollitt seemed to think he did. And I certainly have no problem making that explicit. So I changed it to:

3. David Graeber seemed to have accepted Foust's false claim, according to Katha Pollitt.

But that is such a typical SJW move - deliberate obtuseness used to attack someone. Although admittedly you do have to wonder sometimes if it is truly deliberate.

David Graeber and Sarah Kendzior are both anthropologists, so I assume that's how they know each other. An anonymous commenter informed me that Sarah Kendzior's number one Twitter sycophant "Perfectly Cromulent" (mentioned on the "smear campaign" post) turns out to be Kendzior's husband Peter J. Blackwell. Now I didn't even think to question the possible personal connection between Perfectly Cromulent and Kendzior, but then, I'm not a professional journalist. Certainly Blackwell and Kendzior don't bother to make the connection plain.

And that's the point I've been making about SJW Twitter wars - it is so easy to create false accounts, or sock puppets, or in Kendzior's case, a pseudonymous cheering section, and journalists seem to be very unconcerned about investigating the identities of SJW celebrities and their allies. Very disturbing.

Now Katha Pollitt seemed to think that David Graeber had accepted Foust's claim, but didn't have evidence because, allegedly, he deleted the Tweet. Unfortunately it is not possible to recover deleted Tweets anymore, (but if anybody out there knows different please let me know) but certainly Twitter still has them somewhere, so if David Graeber wants to get all litigious I'm sure somebody's lawyer can subpoena Twitter. I tend to trust Katha Pollitt, a well-known writer who works for media that actually bothers with fact-checking, over the SJW Twitterati.

I'm no more a professional anthropologist than I am a professional journalist, but I know several anthropologists thanks to my interest in Marvin Harris. I was going to write a bio of Harris but that project has sadly been back-burnered with nothing but an almost-never-updated web site to show for it. If only I had the time. Maybe after I retire from my day job, or hit the lottery. Sigh.

Anyway, I'd never heard of David Graeber before. I'll have to ask some of my anthropologist friends about him. He appears to be of the postmodernist branch of anthropology, though, something I thought had pretty much died since Harris documented their doings in his Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times in 1998.

But the SJWs seem to get their theories of human cultures via postmodernists, and we see Flavia Dzodan name-dropping Jacques Derrida here.

Will Shetterly makes some amusing observations about "Jacobinghazi."

Social Justice Warrior smear campaign: Sarah Kendzior, David Graeber and friends edition

I think that Social Justice Warrior Sarah Kendzior has serious ethical problems - she appears to work as a journalist, but she has no qualms about misrepresenting others as I talk about here.

She is supported, without question, by a cadre of SJWs including anthropologist David Graeber, and some Twitterer named Perfectly Cromulent, along with a random sampling of other zanies who together attempted to smear feminist writer Katha Pollitt.

The mind-boggling shamelessness of SJWs can best be understood in these tweets by Perfectly Cromulent:

What does this anonymous Tweeter think that Katha Pollitt should apologize for? Well therein lies a classic tale of SJW bad faith, hysteria, lies, stupidity and witch hunts.

Sarah Kendzior claimed that she received rape threats online. This would surprise nobody who has been paying attention - women get abuse and rape threats all the time on the Internet. But Kendzior's spin on it was this:

For the past few weeks, I have been receiving rape threats and constant harassment from people who describe themselves as leftists or communists, and apparently want to rape their way to revolution. I have attempted to handle these threats privately. I mentioned them on Twitter twice: once to violentfanon, whose podcast I nearly had to cancel on because of the intensity of the threats, and one to Kenzo Shibata, in a Twitter conversation.

And then later...

The left has a rape problem. Someone should write about it. But it is not going to be me. I have had enough threats this year.

However, it appears that neither Kendzior, violentfanon nor Kenzo Shibata want to come forward with the names of the self-described "leftists" and "communists." But without providing any kind of evidence that the rape threats are by leftists and communists, should we be expected to believe Sarah Kendzior without question?

And the answer is  YES, we are expected to believe Sarah Kendzior without question. That is the SJW way. And if you dare NOT believe Sarah Kendzior - or her friends - without question, you will be accused of being out to get Sarah Kendzior. 

We will get to "that vile Nation article" in a moment - but just so you know, Pollitt didn't write it.

Really you have to almost admire Sarah Kendzior for her absolute and perfect lack of shame, calling Katha Pollitt "Soulless and cruel" for simply asking a question related to Kendzior's claims.

Now it's true that Kendzior herself did not claim that people at Salon and Jacobin were sending rape threats to her. She mentioned Salon and Jacobin in various places in her blog post on the subject and then said this:

So in one day, two leftist publications used rape threats to me to belittle me, humiliate me and defame me. And then others accuse me of wanting attention.

And then her friend and fellow Atlantic contributor Joshua Foust took that and ran with it, tweeting this:

Over 48 hours later he finally tweeted this:

The responses to his tweet are pretty amusing, including this:

billmon ‏@billmon1  3h

.@joshuafoust @JoshuaHol Translation: "I was totally wrong and slanderous, but FUCK YOU ANYWAY!!!!"

Reply

• 4Retweet
 
• 12Favo

What I find fascinating is that during those 48 hours between Foust's claim and retraction, Sarah Kendzior was actively tweeting and knew of Foust's claim and appears to have neglected to inform Foust of the error. 

Meanwhile, David Graeber, someone that Katha Pollitt followed on Twitter, posted something in reference to Foust's claim. He has since deleted the tweet that Pollitt had responded to:

So to recap:

1. Joshua Foust falsely claimed that writers at Salon and Jacobin were sending rape threats to Sarah Kendzior.
2. Sarah Kendzior apparently did not correct Foust although she was often on Twitter during that time.
3. David Graeber accepted Foust's false claim. David Graeber seemed to have accepted Foust's false claim, according to Katha Pollitt (see this for an explanation of the change.)
4. Katha Pollitt questioned David Graeber about it.

And on that basis, Kendzior, Graeber and others prosecuted a smear campaign against Katha Pollitt - you can witness for yourself the deliberate obtuseness and bad faith. 

"Shameless" does not begin to describe the black hole where SJW ethics should be.

Now back to "that vile Nation article." Kendzior is referring to "Feminism's Toxic Twitter Wars" by Michelle Goldberg. As I've documented here many times, the Social Justice Warrior Mikki Kendall division are absolutely besides themselves with rabid hatred for Goldberg and the Nation for simply telling the truth: Mikki Kendall is a bully who has no qualms about smearing people.

And I can confirm this myself from first-hand experience. I first became aware of who Mikki Kendall was when I found her smearing me by name as a "racist" in my Google search results. Kendall knew nothing about me except that people she knew on the Internet were calling me that. And she didn't bother to find out anything about me. She just mindlessly reblogged the smear with her karnythia Tumblr. And when I asked her to remove it she refused, and instead invented reasons for why the smear showing up in Google results was my own fault. 

But Social Justice Warriors don't always come right out and call you a racist, sometimes they just imply you are, as Kendzior does by claiming that Pollitt was "mad" that she defended black feminists.

Anybody who knows anything about Katha Pollitt realizes what utter bullshit this is. 

But fortunately for Kendzior, the world of Twitter is full of stupid and ignorant people out hunting for witches. Kendzior has power through them - for what stupid people lack in brainpower, they make up through sheer force of numbers. And if you are a shameless demagogue like Sarah Kendzior, that's exactly what you want.

A second fascinating aspect of this controversy is how quickly Kendzior turned the issue of rape threats into an excuse to attack Pollitt for the Goldberg article in the Nation. It's almost like she was waiting for the opportunity.

I do find it odd that Kendzior refuses to provide evidence of the claimed leftists and communists who are sending her rape threats. When Rebecca Watson was the target of rape threats and death threats from fellow atheists thanks to Richard Dawkins-instigated outrage she was not at all shy about naming and shaming the perps. In fact she even put up a Page o' Hate.

If Rebecca Watson can name and shame the perps I see no reason why Sarah Kendzior can't do it. If there are communists and leftists making rape threats, the world should know who they are. 

And until Kendzior does name them, people have every right to question her claims as to the identity of the perps. Being the target of rape threats does NOT mean that every single thing you say from that day forward must be accepted on faith.

But of course in the SJW utopia, belief without critical thinking is the ideal.

For more on Social Justice Warriors check out Will Shetterly's web site.

UPDATE 6/14/2014: David Graeber makes me Google his TinyURL.