Salute To the Fallen: Bart van Alphen

Big hat tip to Sovietman for cluing me in to a Manosphere suicide: Bart van Alphen, aka Nomen Nescio on the defunct Return Of Kings website, aka Dr. Caveman. He got doxxed, swarmed and checked out before the SJWs could do a victory lap. Let’s do a revue to a fallen Manosphere long-timer.

Northwestern Neuroscientist, Who Recently Admitted to Operating an Anonymous, Racist Twitter Account, Dies

h ttps://www.chronicle.com/article/northwestern-neuroscientist-who-recently-admitted-to-operating-an-anonymous-racist-twitter-account-dies

By Emma Pettit, 3February 2021

Northwestern U is north of Chicago on the shore of Lake Michigan.

His face (right) is a strong one for modern academia. Good testosterone and grooming. On the left is a scene from the movie Falling Down, very relevant to Current Year.

Bart van Alphen, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University who studied sleep behavior, died on Tuesday after recently admitting to operating an anonymous Twitter account, under the name “Dr Caveman,. that for years had posted a slew of racist, violent, and anti-Semitic material.

Van Alphen died by suicide, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. He was 43.

In an announcement to the Northwestern community, Kathleen M. Hagerty, the university’s provost, directed students, staff, and faculty members to counseling services. .I know this news will be shocking to many of you, and the loss of a Northwestern community member can impact people in many different ways,. Hagerty wrote. .Please do not hesitate to let others know when you need help..

You piece of human excrement, Hagerty. Bart DID. Maybe stop the social justice pogroms on your campus instead of piously reminding their victims that you would have “helped” in the aftermath?

News of van Alphen’s secret identity had spread for months among his colleagues at Northwestern and among others in his field. Students had complained to the university’s Office of Equity, requesting that it intervene, and some felt frustrated that it seemed as if their concerns hadn’t prompted Northwestern to take action.

It must have been Hell, living in Converged academia like that. Yes, yes, cut and run and save yourself, but as a Californian I’m all too aware that the most obvious solution can be much harder in practice than in theory.

On Twitter, Dr Caveman had used the N-word and other racist terms toward Black people, like “gibsmedat.” He’d called President Donald J. Trump “Trumpenfuhrer” and expressed hope for “Generation Zyklon,. a term for young supporters of the far right and neo-Nazism. (Zyklon B, a cyanide-based insecticide, was used by Nazi Germany to kill Jews and others in gas chambers.) On another social-media platform, he’d called Islam a “pedophilia glorifying death cult,. and he had tweeted that Muslims “are either at your feet or at your throat..

Odd that he’s being hated for insulting Trump of all people, and Generation Zyklon? *points at Antifa/BLM mobs, the latest of which ran riot in martial-law D.C. of all places* Then again, he’s being hated *now* when Normies might be looking and not *then* when it was a private SJW swarming.

Some of his posts appeared to endorse violence. One tweet said Chicago could resolve its budget woes if city officials “guillotine every last member” of the teachers union. Another declared, .Free helicopter rides for antifa,. a reference to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of killing political dissidents by dropping them from helicopters. He’d mused about giving the far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik a gun and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, .a five minute head start.” And after a violent protest in Chicago, Dr Caveman tweeted that next time the police should “shoot the ponchos on sight..

Barbie, I don’t care if he “appeared” to endorse violence. I care if he DID, and you had nothing to say about any hate-fueled violent behavior. Unlike the sociology department inventing Orwellian concepts like Office of Equity.

Take notes, lads. These are the accusations that will be flung at you, too. Build that thick skin!

The Dr Caveman Twitter account had only a few hundred followers and had gone mostly unnoticed. That is, until October. On a Saturday night, Dr Caveman posted a photo of a crowd of people on a street, taken from many stories above, and wrote, .Small BLM protest in Evanston, apparently to get the police out of northwestern.. (Northwestern is in Evanston, Ill.)

I suspect that Bart was lonely. We all love to talk about ourselves and it becomes a temptation when you’re hurting for a dose of Normal Life. But it’s also how a lot of doxxing happens.

Another Twitter user . who has declined to be identified . was searching the platform for “Evanston” news, clicked on the profile, and was appalled. At the time, Dr Caveman’s profile photo was from the 1993 thriller Falling Down . in which Michael Douglas’s nebbishy, frustrated character goes on a violent rampage . with the word “Soon” superimposed over the image.

The user was “freaked out” by the Twitter account. In an interview with The Chronicle by direct message, the user described sensing that Dr Caveman’s real name might be discoverable. The user started scrolling, narrowing down the field in which Dr Caveman seemed to work. In time, ample connections emerged between Dr Caveman and van Alphen.

Sure, that’s what everybody does when they find somebody online who “freaks me out”. They hunt the scary man down in real life instead of simply avoiding him. “You must protect my identity! because I’m exposing his…”

Van Alphen, who before his death did not respond to multiple interview requests…

Smart man!

…researched sleep behavior by studying fruit flies in the lab of Ravi Allada, chairman of Northwestern’s neurobiology department. He’d given a couple of interviews to local news outlets about suffering from sleep apnea. Van Alphen had been at the university for eight years and had recently tweeted on his professional account about applying for faculty jobs. Before going to Northwestern, he was a postdoc in Australia at the Queensland Brain Institute. He attended college and graduate school in the Netherlands. Further details of his background were not available.

That’s become a common type: postdoctoral “associate professors” struggling to be recognized. Despite my suggestion that giving up isn’t always a solution, the simple fact is that nobody with any connection to the Manosphere has a future on a tenure-track.

Dr Caveman, too, had said he was on the academic job market. Both had also at some point cited the Great Emu War of 1932 (a wildlife-management operation in Australia), and both had posted tweets, seven minutes apart, with the phrase “Giuliani style law and order Republican,. referencing the former mayor of New York City.

The anonymous sleuth sent emails to the neurobiology department and to Allada, the chair, explaining some of the connections, but didn’t get a response, according to the direct-message interview. (Allada did not respond to The Chronicle’s interview request.)

So the [anonymous] sleuth went public, setting up a Twitter account . Bart_van_Caveman . and tweeting out examples of Dr Caveman’s dark worldview, and the evidence that he was really van Alphen.

The point-and-shriek with a side of Strawman. I cannot imagine why Bart had a pessimistic view of humanity. /sarc

A Northwestern Ph.D. student had also found Dr Caveman’s account when he tweeted about the Black Lives Matter protest in Evanston, and had fallen down her own rabbit hole. (The student, like others who have spoken out about the case, requested anonymity out of a concern for personal safety.)

Bullshit. The anklebiting hypocrites couldn’t take what they dished out. Boxing is fun! until the other guy gets to hit back.

She discovered articles that Dr Caveman had written for the “manosphere” website Return of Kings, with headlines like “This Accidental Experiment Shows the Superiority of Patriarchy.. There he’d written under the pseudonym Nomen Nescio . Latin for .I do not know the name.” His bio said that he had been “born naked, screaming, and covered in someone else’s blood,. but he “overcame those odds, left his cave, and became a mercenary mad scientist, traveling the world and sampling its women..

Another graduate student, who worked in the same building as van Alphen, decided to report him to the Office of Equity after reading one particular tweet: .Where liberals have a whole spectrum of gradually increasing outrage,. Dr Caveman wrote in August, .most conservatives I know only have two settings: 1) vote 2) shoot everything. The more histrionics from the left, the more likely that switch is going to be flipped..

The student said she had reported to the office in mid-October but didn’t speak with an employee until several days after the presidential election, in November. The person was very sympathetic, she said, but she got the impression that the office was limited in what it could do.

“We’re stealing the election right now. Come back in a month!”

Later the office seemed to acknowledge as much. TiShaunda McPherson, associate vice president for equity, wrote in a community-wide email in December that the university had seen an uptick in reported violations and appreciated “the courage it takes to come forward.” The email didn’t name van Alphen. But, McPherson wrote, at times, for .a variety of reasons, our jurisdiction to investigate these matters is limited,. which seemed to be a reference to the Dr Caveman situation.

QED.

Another graduate student continued working alongside van Alphen, over Zoom. The second-year Ph.D. student was a teaching assistant for a course in which van Alphen was a teaching fellow. He’d been nice to her, she said. Once, when she tweeted about being stressed out, he sent her a message letting her know he was available if she wanted to talk.

So it took a little while for her to come to terms with his Dr Caveman identity.

Or, perhaps the feminist herd went to work on recruiting her.

She talked to the professor of the course about her concerns over van Alphen, and the professor said she.d understand if the student didn’t want to attend sessions. But “it was my job, and I would be leaving her alone in the situation,. said the student. So the student, a Hispanic woman, continued working with van Alphen, who, as Dr Caveman, had once written on Gab, .Juan by Juan, the only way to deport them all..

.It was hard to keep trying to do my best job when somebody I was working with literally didn’t see me as like a human being,. the student said. She felt less motivated to participate, she said, which wasn’t fair to the undergraduates. And she lost .a little bit of faith. in academe.

Classic projection. “He was nice to me and willing to work with me… but he didn’t see me as a human being so I betrayed him to the Commissariat. Haven’t we gotten rid of all these badthinkers yet?!”

A Ph.D. candidate in the neuroscience program said he had spoken with a senior equity specialist in November, and felt as if he’d gotten canned responses. He was most concerned for the students over whom van Alphen was in a position of authority. As Dr Caveman, van Alphen had written on Gab that part of the “challenge” in academe is “to train Asians from a rote learning culture into creative, effective scientists.” The vast majority “are only good to use as technicians,. he wrote. .They lack the spark to take risks and be wrong..

Bart was definitely one of us.

In labs, the candidate noted, more-senior postdocs hold certain power. They’re often called upon to teach techniques and will sometimes mentor greener researchers. On the Allada Lab’s website, undergraduates who were interested in research experience were told to contact van Alphen. (That paragraph, which was still there as recently as last month, has since been removed.)

As time passed, and more students complained, their disappointment grew. The university’s silence, said the Ph.D. student who had uncovered the Return of Kings articles, was noticeable, and frustrating.

Doctor Snowflake, maybe you should have filed an accusation with your name on it, if you had wanted to be taken seriously.

That frustration seeped out into the larger scientific community… They circulated a letter, signed by more than 120 scholars, calling on Northwestern to take steps to protect trainees and students. .If your behavior causes your co-workers to be terrified to come to work . that’s not appropriate,. said Josh Dubnau, one of the drosophilists and director of the Center for Developmental Genetics at Stony Brook University, who spoke to The Chronicle before van Alphen’s death. .It’s a hostile work environment.. (In an email, Dubnau said he was saddened to hear of van Alphen’s passing, adding that there was a “missed opportunity” for some kind of intervention in the months since October.)

And on it goes. Pure witch hunt, unnamed SJWs getting the vapors because University Admin wouldn’t do the dirty work themselves because election cycle.

That was Bart’s suicide note. He killed himself the next day. Re the movie Falling Down, white men have one of two responses to extreme stress. One is internalizing it and the other is externalizing it. Depends on whether we’re in “fixit mode” or Viking mode. Falling Down is, like Office Space, a movie about a white man flipping from fixit to Viking. I think what the latter got right that the former got wrong is that white man doesn’t normally go Viking while solo. That’s more an Asian think, methinks: the phrase “run amok” comes from SE Asia. Hence Bart’s turning inward at the end.

I don’t fault him for suiciding. One, he was in SJW Central with not a lot of options. Not when his PhD was in Drosophila sleep cycles. Reinventing your entire life from the ground up at age 43 is traumatic, especially when self-initiated.

Two, Bart had endured a full year of academia-level COVID lockdown. He was surely depressed and isolated at the very start of the witch hunt, thus vulnerable.

And three, the timing of his death deprived the SJWs of their victory laps and Emanuel Goldstein hate sessions. His last act was denying the enemy their reward.

Not that I’m encouraging suicide, mind. There are other ways to deny the anklebiters such as having an escape plan, not being on Twitter or simple, grim determination. But I’ve been a broken man myself. I understand what he was going through last week. No condemnation. Every man has a breaking point and he reached his, that’s all there is to be said.

Well, two things still to be said. One, you need an action plan for getting doxxed if you’re on social media. It can be as simple as unplugging social media until it blows over or as complex as dual citizenship, but you gotta have a plan on the shelf that suits your most-probable needs. You will not be thinking clearly when the time comes.

And two…

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline offers free and confidential support for people in distress, and for those who need to help someone else. To reach the hotline, call…

What a shameful end to the article. “This is how we drove Mister Hater to suicide, now here’s a hotline number he could have called to prolong his suffering at our hands.” Instead, should you the reader face a serious doxxing, may I suggest reaching out to other guys in the Manosphere? You probably won’t get meatspace help but you will find sympathetic allies in Virtual World. You wouldn’t be alone and that’s a major morale counter to SJW tactics. There’s a reason they try to alienate you early in the attack.

This article of Bart’s from Return Of Kings is worth archiving in his memory.

THIS ACCIDENTAL EXPERIMENT SHOWS THE SUPERIORITY OF PATRIARCHY

h ttps://www.returnofkings.com/32053/this-accidental-experiment-shows-the-superiority-of-patriarchy

By Nomen Nesico aka Bart van Alphen, 5 April 2014

Patriarchy has been extremely successful, despite its recent vilification. Most cultures worldwide are patriarchal . to find examples of successful matriarchal societies you either have to turn to ancient history, remote outskirts of the world or feminist fiction. However, this hasn’t stopped the feminist collective from queefing out books and even a hashtag hailing the end of patriarchy in a textbook example of incestuous amplification.

What patriarchy, after its apparent downfall, will be replaced with remains to be seen. Hamsterizations aside, there is surprisingly little data available about what life would be like in a society made up of only men or only women. An enterprising social scientist might want to perform an experiment where groups of men and groups of women are left to their own devices, having to work together to survive against the elements and build a civilization from scratch. However, this scientist would have a very hard time convincing ethical review boards that the inevitable suffering of his participants would weight up against the value of the data.

Luckily, reality television is not bound by ethical constraints and once in a while, in its never ending quest for viewer ratings, reality TV accidentally performs a very interesting experiment that social scientists would never be allowed to do.

Quite a few years ago, I had the pleasure of watching the Dutch version of Survivor (Expeditie Robinson) with my feminist roommate. That particular season would have two islands, one populated by men and one populated by women. My roommate had been promoting that particular series to me and the other students in the house for weeks because it would show us, according to her, what a society run by women . free from the evils of patriarchy . would be like.

And it did. Oh it did.

Here is what happened: initially both groups were dropped on their respective islands, given some supplies to get started and left to fend for themselves. In both groups there was some initial squabbling as people tried to figure out a local hierarchy. The men pretty much did whatever they felt was necessary . there was no leader giving orders. Men who felt like hunting, foraging or fishing did so. Another guy decided he was fed up with sitting on sand and started making benches. Others built a hut that gradually grew and evolved. Another guy cooked every night. Within days a neat little civilization was thriving, each day being slightly more prosperous than the previous one.

The women settled into a routine as well. The hung up a clothesline to dry their towels, then proceeded to sunbathe and squabble. Because unlike men, women were unable to do anything without consensus of the whole group. And because it was a group of at least a dozen women, consensus was never reached. During the next few episodes, the women ate all their initial supplies, got drenched by tropical storms several times, were eaten alive by sand fleas and were generally miserable. The men on the other hand, were quite content. There were disagreements of course, but they were generally resolved.

Eventually, the people running the program decided something had to change. In order to help the women out, three men would be selected to go to their island. In return, three women would take their place at the men’s island. The look on my feminist roommates face during this episode was priceless.

Initially, the three men selected for the women’s island were ecstatic, for obvious reason. But then they arrived at the island and were greeted by the women.

.Where is your hut?., they asked.

.We have no hut.

.Where are your supplies?. they asked, dismayed

.We ate all the rice.

And so on. The three men ended up working like dogs, using all the skills developed by trial and error in their first few weeks . building a hut, fish, trying to get the women to forage. The women continued to bitch and sunbathe. The three women who were sent to the men’s island were delighted . food, shelter and plenty of male attention was freely available. They too continued to sunbathe.

And that my friends, is what patriarchy is. My former roommate, unsurprisingly, is no longer a feminist.

Now this might all be a fluke, a white raven, an exceptional case not representative of society as whole. But that particular season of Dutch Survivor is not unique. CBS broadcast several Survivor seasons in the US, where men and women started off in separate groups. In most cases (the Amazon and One World), the result was the same. The men quickly got their act together, getting access to food, fire and shelter while the women spent a lot of time and energy on petty little squabbles, eating their meager supplies, getting drenched in storms and generally being pathetic. The opposite situation, where men didn’t get their act together while women quickly built a functional micro society, has not yet been observed outside of feminist fiction, and it probably never will.