Some words of thanks, some thoughts on recent events and, oh yeah, 5,000,000 visits to this website.
After several years with no vacations (even the trips I took in the past were marked by looking for internet hot spots and letting my partner know I would be ready to go do things with her “in just a bit”). I finally took two weeks off and almost completely unplugged from AVFM.
Of course, all hell broke loose when I did.
I am going to offer some of my belated impressions of these events, but first some thanks, many actually, are in order.
The only reason I was able to take some extended – and badly needed – time off is because of people who anteed in to make sure that this site ran smoothly, perfectly, without so much as my lifting a finger while I was gone. With that a tip of the hat and thanks to TyphonBlue, who began organizing things in the admin weeks before I left and who has ensured a copious amount of quality content has flowed through these pages, all of it accented with great artwork.
And that is just the part of her work that you actually got to see. There was a lot more going on from her than just scheduling articles and making cool images.
She was also joined in the graphics wizardry by Europa from our forums who added his own style to the visual presentation.
Line editing for articles was churned out like a ma-cheen from Peter Write (Tawil), August Lovenskiolds and Della Burton.
Just for those of you who don’t know, line editing is one of the most mentally arduous, thankless tasks that must be done in any online publication.
And if it is not done, everything looks like shit, regardless of how good everything else is. It is one of the most important functions here, and we are all grateful beyond words for those that are willing to carry the load.
Della Burton also stepped up to join the news team and has been doing a fantastic job posting her work under “AVFM News and Commentary” so that you can have more straight news reporting on what is happening in the world that impacts the things we care about. Della, please take a bow.
Dean Esmay was hard at work the whole time with our new server administrator (yes, we finally have a real server admin!) David King. David and Dean have been busy ensuring that site security and performance will be operating on a level consistent with an online publication this well-traveled. There is more to come on that, but suffice it to say for now that David is manna from heaven in some areas that are badly needed but terribly expensive to address.
It is the stuff you don’t see that can be so costly on websites, and David is graciously stepping up to handle much of that for us.
Tip of the hat to both of these fine gents.
Oh, and by the way, their work could not have come at a better time since Alek Novy and team are now at work on AVFM 3.0! Yes, you heard that correctly, another major facelift is on the way for A Voice for Men, courtesy of Alek, et al, who first put us on the map with the fine design you are currently enjoying. That will not be happening this week, but the work is underway and I will keep you posted as things develop.
Also, shortly before I left for vacation, we were gifted with another major step up with the addition of The Man on the Street (TMOTS), who now does not give a damn if you know his name is Al Martin, a long time MHRA with a great reputation, as the administrator of our forums. Al has extensive experience in this area, both on the technical side of things and on matters of moderation and management.
He has joined our weekly staff meetings and will be working hard to improve the forum and to enhance the interrelationship between the forums and the main site. Kudos to our brother TMOTS for bringing our forums exactly what is needed.
I hope these thank yous have covered everyone (and I apologize profusely to anyone I missed). I worry about that especially given how many quality people are now involved in making AVFM a success well into the future. More on that in a bit, but first some thoughts on recent events.
As most of you undoubtedly know at this point, while I was gone Mary Kellett got a slap on the wrist for egregious and wanton prosecutorial malfeasance, and then had the slap suspended by Supreme Court Judge Ellen Gorman, who has obviously lost sight of any idea of justice in favor of cronyism and criminality. She did this with the helpful assistance of Bar Counsel Scott Davis who was supposed to represent the interests of the people of Maine, not enable their legal abuse by rogue prosecutors.
To be clear, it was a bad day, and a great disappointment. But I refuse to see this as a defeat. For the first time in history a prosecutor in Maine at least had to go through a trial, both by The Bar and by the public. It was a trial that she, and the Ellsworth prosecutors office lost, miserably. They are permanently stained and it is now a matter of public record.
We are early in this effort to take prosecutors to task. It is new ground for a new mentality that we are working hard to foment in the minds of the public. We may have lost a significant part of this one battle, but the war is far from over.
Much of this is because of you. Your letters to politicians and media outlets; your comments at Bangor Daily News. Your persistence forced more of this story into public view than it would ever have seen without you. You gave us a foothold on fighting the larger battle, and we will not squander it.
Then there is Vladek Filler. Fuck, I wish I had this man’s courage. Can you imagine having the corrupt machine of Ellsworth justice hanging over your head every day for years like the Sword of Damocles, and still fighting? And still being defiant, every day, year after year?
It is like standing naked in a hurricane.
They went after this man with everything they had. In my mind, he beat them, on sheer guts. He fought to the bitter end, and today he stands a free man, a loving father with his children by his side. The exact opposite of what they wanted and what those horrible people had planned for him.
If we ever get around to activism awards here, and we should, my vote is for the Filler Award.
Thank you Vladek, I am proud and humbled to know you.
And of course the other big deal around here has been postergate. There is not a great deal to say about that except to issue a thank you to Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton for sparking renewed interest in meme posters that discredit feminism – for making them more powerful than they were before. Suckers.
We will be making parodies of all your future work and have them available for download at this site. If you don’t like it you can sue us instead of just strutting like banty roosters and making empty threats.
Not likely to happen though, bullies and thugs prefer to have targets who don’t stand up for themselves.
And with that I want to return to the thanks I was making for a moment. Actually, I want to offer that tip of the hat also to James Huff, Robert O’Hara, Lucian Valsan and others who reacted to the threats and some of the more sloppy handling of the story by mainstream media, where swill has become salt and subpar is now par.
All the people at AVFM Radio and many on the main site, reacted with speed and precision to rebut the mainstream fallacies, bring the story to you with clarity, and did so as one humming unit.
And that says a lot more about AVFM in general these days than it does just the last two weeks of my vacation. AVFM, thanks to the many talented people running it with nothing more than grit and heart, is becoming.
And so the men’s human rights movement is similarly chiseling out its features and taking shape on the horizon of western consciousness.
This is the most exciting time ever for us.
A little more than a year and a half ago, on November 1 of 2011, our little globe that tracks visits hit the magical 1,000,000 mark. It took a while to get there, and a lot of work. Here is part what I had to say about it at the time.
After 15 months online we are rapidly approaching our first million visits to AVfM. And if current traffic holds or continues to grow we will have at least twice that much after another 15 months. I am betting we do even better than that thanks to the dedicated efforts of all the people who contribute quality additions to the growing library of MRA literature, and the increasing number of men and women who are stepping up to rattle the worlds cage with FTSU.
Now, did I say we would have “at least” twice that much after another 15 months? It appears I was at least a little right. After 20 more months we have four times that much. That globe will hit the 5 mil mark in less than 48 hours.
I won’t bother with prognostication about where we will be in the next year and a half, but I am betting it will be just as surprising.
There will be many rocks in the road. We are used to that and have developed calloused feet. There will be other attempts to censor, demonize, misrepresent and spin us according to feminist desires. Again, we are all used to it. But as most of you know, things are slowly starting to change. And we will continue to feed from and exploit the unfair coverage wherever it comes up.
Because in the end, we know what is going to happen. Here is an article that focuses on an interview with Typhon, in which she not only slammed one ball after another over the fence, the reporter actually printed what she said, in context and fairly characterized.
Groundbreaking stuff, this, and along with what we have seen in the National Post and from Canadian Television, the worst nightmare for feminists, a fair hearing, is starting to trend.
Make no mistake about it, you and AVFM are driving it. And we are going to continue to well into the future.
With that, I am back and ready to get back to my work.
