A little back story - Sock Puppet master and Dilbert creator Scott Adams, he of "arguing with women is just like arguing with four year olds and mentally handicapped folks" (because when he writes bullshit, women have the audacity to call him out on it) fame decided to pontificate of the sad sate of American males, and how they want to be all rapey and shit because that's their natural instinct but they can't because society set up the rules to favor women's natural instincts, which I guess comes down to not being rapey because he never really describes what he means by that, which means "society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness", because they can't rape people or cheat on their wives, which is totally the same thing.
Basically what I'm taking from this post is that we should probably just chemically castrate males (his suggestion) because Scott Adams has urges to rape people. I mean, you really have to wonder about folks that argue these things as "natural instincts". To me, it's just screams "Hey, I want to do shitty things, so I'm going to assume everyone else does too BECAUSE OF TEH BIOLOGY so I can convince myself I'm not a shitty person". And no, Scott Adams, we aren't going to castrate every male just because you want to rape people. The men in my life are fine. Leave them alone and get help dude. Seriously.
Now, like pretty much all his femimist-trolling posts, the standard response here is that this is not what Scott Adams meant at all, and if your little ladybrainz would just understand Teh Logic, you would realize that he is telling it like it is, sorry about your hurt feelings and all. Yet note that he never really provides any evidence to his claim that men are all rapists, his argument is instead that rape is merely a product of horniness, men are horny, therefore they all must want to rape, they can't, so they are sad. Leaving aside obvious examples such as the use of rape as a war crime or the use of prison rape as dominance and just looking at the horniness factor - rape is not a product of "I am horny, I want this, I rape". It has an extra step - I am horny, I want this, it is for some reason denied to me, but I am for (insert reason here) entitled to this, I rape". To conflate the two (horniness/desire to rape) is just creepy, full stop. As is his notion that sex (and all gender issues) are zero sum and about "winning" and "losing", that just screams "sex is a way to dominate" to me. I'll take a detour into jackass speculation land and venture a guess that Adams probably really sucks in bed. Unless she's into it, I suppose.
But I'm not going to go too deep into his failed arguments, because Mary Elizabeth Williams covered them quite well, and pretty much the only thing he's arguing here is "But hey, wouldn't these goal posts look so much better if I moved them over here by a few hundred feet? Also too people at the HuffPo agree with me so there and women that disagree with me are crazy". It's an amusing read. It's quite amazing how quickly these fuckers fall apart and cling to their logical fallacies. Scott Adams is under the impression that those less then him can't see this. Scott Adams is wrong. I mean, the strawman is pretty much the most well-known fallacy there is, and he humps it as if his life depended on it - his latest post whining about how mean women are (no, I'm not linking to it, google it) presents a "reading comprehension test" which contains gems like this:
If I say Dutch men are the tallest in the world, which of the following facts have I implied?
- I'm a racist.
- Every Dutch man is taller than every other man.
- I have a low opinion of women because I didn't even mention them.
- None of the above
Because empirically observable traits such as height and jackass musings about the hard-wiring of men's brains being all rapey from the guy that created Dilbert are equally on par in terms of scientific validity. Yeah. So now you know what we're dealing with.
Adams is one of those guys that builds himself a shield of logic and then cowers behind it. And by that, I don't mean that he uses arguments based in logic, just that he claims his arguments are based in logic, because he's just one of those logical guys, he's a certified genius, so the only way you could possibly disagree with him is if you lack basic common sense. He's already stated that he's logical, you dig? So if you disagree, you are not. QED.
I used to see these guys quite a bit back in my Duty Calls days, they usually take the handle of "Common Sense Mike" or "Rational Thinker" or some other such nonsense*, and they are always amusing as hell because they are usually the one person on the thread that lacks those traits. And I think that's the point. There's really no reason to put that sort of label on yourself, because the quality of your argument is going to be judge based on just that - your argument. Not how awesome, realistic, or intelligent you claim you are. If you make poor arguments, sure, perhaps you do have to attempt to paint yourself as some sort of unbiased observer that's just going off of the hard cold facts. But the same people you are trying to appeal to with that sort of self-labeling are the same people that are actually going to judge you based on the content you provide. If you are awesome, realistic, intelligent, a rational thinker, or someone chock full o'common sense, well, that's going to come out based in the arguments that you make, isn't it? And if not, that label isn't going to convince anyone otherwise.
I actually take these sorts of labels as a warning sign at this point.
*I feel the same way about people that claim political labels such as "Independent" (sorry mom), "Moderate" or "Centrist". A buddy of mine still has my favorite political label on the Facebook - it simple says "Partisan". And I'll trust his viewpoint over most "independents" any day.
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