longstanding choreography back to AVFM and maybe before
Just to clarify, I did contribute eight articles to AVFM a few years ago, owing entirely to a serviceable rapport between me and its former managing editor. I was never a fan of the venue, never became a “member” whatever that means, and was subsequently banned from commenting not once but twice.
That process was not altogether dissimilar from Comrade Engineer’s being fired from Google. AVFM is not necessarily categorically useless to any one man’s cause in the world, but close. It is largely a hybrid of personality cult and a manufacturer of petty celebrities-in-their-own-minds. Its atmospherics, which I tend to pay more attention to in any organization than to its rhetoric, were clearly so similar to any other personality cult from Moonies to Bolsheviks, that I actually pushed its ideological boundaries as far as I could on purpose, to see where their outer limits were. They actually enacted a policy during that time which amounted to “don’t criticize AVFM on AVFM”. I did. They booted me. Sound familiar?
So yes, now and then AVFM and its various offshoots have some good points to make. Good for them. So do Moonies and Bolsheviks. Heck, Hare Krishnas and Jehovah’s Witnesses can be some of the friendliest folks you’d ever meet. But a cult is a cult.
Svetlana Voreskova and I actually had become acquainted prior to those publishings by me, at the old now-defunct Antimisandry.com site out of the UK. That was a sad experience over the long term: in 2011 when I first signed on, it was the most wide-open, freewheeling, no-holds-barred online discussion forum I had seen or have since. There were moderators, and later on Sveta was one of them for a time, but mostly the venue was self-regulating, with a core group that had a way of butting in and saying, “hey, brother, don’t be such an asshole; your mate there has a point….”
AM was always struggling financially, and over time, long-story-short, it went through some changes of hands and eventually just closed down. It had already become a skeleton of its former self within those two or three years that I thrived on it, and when I used to go back through the archives that had begun in 2007, could see that the skills and manners that were so unique about it had once been even more impressive before my and Lana’s time (she joined just a few months after I did.)
Here on Medium is the only place online that I still know of, where the discourse is anything but that old ventriloquist’s gag: “you’re the dummy”; “no, YOU’RE the dummy”; “NO, YOU’RE THE DUMMY”, etc, etc…. ad yawnum, ad whateverum.
And that result for me, has only been attained by blocking out literally hundreds of people, as a daily chore, for months. Leftist ideologue at a glance? STFU. Feminist? STFU. Got like 11.7K followers? STFU. Too stupid to form a complete sentence or use capitals? STFU. Anything to do with startup-marketing-entrepeneur-personal-brand? STFU. Alt-rightist asshole? STFU. You just get on my nerves? Give them a week or two, and usually, STFU.
What is left, is a couple dozen or so people worth talking to and reading their stuff.
But here’s my output on AVFM if you’d like to see it:
And from LinkedIn:
I’m also gone from there, but for the most bizarre chain of interpersonal events involving an ex I never cared to retell, so I won’t, but essentially she hacked a shared email account and changed all my security questions and made it impossible for me to relog onto LI, and some other nuisances I had to deal with. LI had outlived its utility to me anyway, but that’s more long stories not worth retelling just now.
Sadly, as one of the faithful hangers-on during the crash and burn at AM, I had placed probably (not exaggerating) a hundred times more content there than on both the above combined, and it went down with the ship. That was a blow, but shit does happen.
Much of it was redundant, or just everyday discussions, or by now out of date, and much of what I learned doing the research for some of it, I could reconstruct in hours online if I cared to. One doesn’t keep all one’s homework from high school either, but what one retains, one retains. I gave myself quite an education on some topics just trying to be a good contributor, and it’s mostly still right up here in the ol’ noggin’.
