Last year, Carla Ciccone went on a bad date, a really bad date, and she wrote about it, while protecting the obnoxious handsy fellow’s identity with a pseudonym. Apparently, there were enough clues at the time — “Canadian radio celebrity”, how many of those can there be? — and people figured out who she was talking about. That’s where it got weird.

The guy she described got uncomfortably physical with her on a concert date, and later pursued her with text messages that assumed a degree of interest that she plainly disavowed, asking him to leave her alone. This is creepy behavior. It’s patently rude, inconsiderate, and possessive, and you’d think everyone would agree that this is stuff guys shouldn’t do.

But that’s not the response she got.

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I’m sure that one of the great joys of being an opinion columnist for Breitbart is that you are completely unbounded by reality — you can just float on the clouds of wishful thinking, and even internal contradictions are irrelevant. Milo Yiannopoulos, right-wing non-gaming gamergater, was interviewed on NPR. Here’s the first bit of wafting non-reality:

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You may have heard the latest MRA talking point, the claim that more men are raped than women in the US. Echidne of the Snakes takes that apart beautifully: it turns out it’s only true if you compare a bushel basket full of apples and oranges to a handful of grapefruit that you’ve pulled out of another basket containing a bunch of avocados and bananas.

An organization out of Canada, White Ribbon is running a campaign to end violence against women, largely by educating men. Note: whiteribbon.ca, not whiteribbon.org. whiteribbon.org is a copycat site trying to leech off donations to the real whiteribbon organization. It’s blatant and shocking. Why would anyone try to undermine the fundraising and popularizing of a legitimate charity like that, unless they’re simply scam artists?

It turns out that they’re much more than scam artists: it’s A Voice For Men, trying to siphon off donations to an anti-violence campaign into the pockets of Paul Elam, only they claim they’re trying to help. Look at this lie:

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I have never seen an own goal as dramatic as GamerGate — it has exposed a whole vast collection of unpleasant characters. Here’s a list of the “bad apples” of gamergate, who are categorized as a ridiculous mob of d-list right-wingers. In particular, take a look at Mike Cernovich, who we’ve encountered before — what a piece of work. What we’re learning is that it has always been this way, and i’s alway been a misogynistic movement with a lot of overlap with the same harassing atheists.

They’re an ugly bunch. It’s good to see them expose themselves like this.

That’s one of the surprising revelations from her new book of essays. It caught me by surprise; I’ve seen her speak and I’ve read her books, and she always seemed like a woman, but her point is that she was born in a time when women were subsidiary to men, and the goal was always to be manly, even in ersatz way. It’s a strange twist on a familiar stereotype, and Le Guin goes out of her way to force me to think, which is clearly a very manly thing to do.

I enjoyed her characterization of that manly paragon, Ernest Hemingway, who was everything a writing man should be. She’s really bad at being Hemingway, and she knows it.

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