Scott Adams' Blog

Death by Hypnosis. Or Not.

Posted June 30th, 2011 @ 5:21pm in #General Nonsense

The story on WCTV’s website says, “Florida police are investigating a high school principal who hypnotized three students who later died.” Several of you sent me a link to the story and asked my opinion on the bullshit quotient.

By way of explaining my credentials, most of you know I once trained to become a hypnotist. The field is fairly shallow, in the sense that an expert wouldn’t know that much more than a person who went through hypnosis training and did some reading on the topic.

Let’s jump right in. Researchers have studied hypnosis to see if it’s possible to make a person act against his best interest in any meaningful way. There has never been a documented case of hypnosis causing a person to hurt himself. But it would be fair to wonder if such a thing can be studied, since a hypnotized subject knows on some level that the researcher isn’t really going to hand him a loaded gun and ask him to blow his brains out. Even a hypnotized subject understands that he’s safe. It’s a tough thing to study in the lab.

Obviously a stage hypnotist can get subjects to do some interesting things on stage, but part of the secret is that in any large group there are always people willing to do just about anything. The illusion for the audience is that the people on stage are as shy as you imagine you might be in that situation. They aren’t.

In my own experience, both as a subject of hypnosis and as a hypnotist, I’ve never seen a hint that hypnosis might be harmful. Contrary to popular understanding, the hypnotized subject is always aware of his situation in exactly the same way you are right now. The difference is that the subconscious shows up at the dance at the same time. Your conscious mind has the option of being somewhat of an observer, like a driver’s ed teacher, while your subconscious causes your arm to feel cold, or whatever the hypnotist suggests. But like a driver’s ed teacher, your conscious mind always has the option of intervening. A subject can snap out of it anytime he wants. Indeed, he is never asleep in any common sense of the word. It’s more of a relaxed state in which the subconscious is less dominated than usual by the conscious mind.

That’s the quick and dirty explanation of what’s happening. I think you could have a debate about whether there is really such a thing as a subconscious mind. It might be more accurate to say that a deeply relaxed mind functions differently than a non-relaxed mind, and in predictable ways, and leave it at that.

Now, about this principal in Florida - I don’t think he is the first hypnotist in the world to discover some sort of hypnotic death spell that accidentally kicks in when he tries to help a point guard increase his free throw percentages.

So how do I explain the coincidence? One word: coincidence. I’ll bet somewhere in the United States is a man who has had a cup of coffee with three people who died within the year. It doesn’t imply causation.

Also, if you sort the world into two groups, with the people who feel their lives are just fine in one group, and the people who think only a hypnotist can help them in the other, I think the latter group might be a bit more suicidal on average. That’s just a guess. The point is that the 75 people who got hypnotized probably aren’t a representative sample of the students.

The wildcard in all of this is whether the principal was using the hypnosis sessions as a smokescreen to get private time with minors. There’s no allegation of the sort, and he reportedly did lots of sessions with adults, so I’m guessing he was just trying to be helpful and it didn’t work out.

When you combine the topics of hypnosis, suicide, children, and the Bible Belt, it’s a perfect storm. There’s no surprise that this story got attention. But my verdict is that death-by-hypnosis is bullshit.

It’s an Epidemic

Posted June 29th, 2011 @ 8:02am in #General Nonsense

This is an odd little coincidence. Check out Paul Krugman’s blog for June 26th on bad reading comprehension. It seems to be an epidemic.

I sense a startup opportunity.

Suppose you start a company that administers a basic reading comprehension test and issues a password to people who pass it online. Then imagine that the password would be needed to sign up for commenting on blogs and other online forums. The startup would sell its password services to websites looking to filter out people with bad reading comprehension.

As a consumer, if you pass the test once, your password is yours forever. You can use it as many times as you like for as many blogs and forums as you sign up for. You would be a certified “good reader.”

I suppose you could extend the concept to include tests for history, politics and economics. Each time you pass a new test module, your lifetime password is given new rights that match the test you pass. Websites could determine what sort of test success they want to make a requirement for participation on their sites.

One problem with this idea is that it would severely limit the traffic for comments. But a website could allow everyone to comment and simply indicate which commenters are “good readers.” That way you have the benefit of knowing who has a minimum set of qualifications to comment on a topic and who doesn’t.

Author by Relocation

Posted June 27th, 2011 @ 8:04am in #General Nonsense

Yesterday I was watching a comedian on HBO doing a routine that was both politically incorrect and hilarious. The audience seemed to enjoy it, which is not surprising, since they self-selected to be there. If any in the audience were offended, I’m guessing they blamed themselves for not doing their homework before buying tickets to the show.

Now imagine if someone recorded the comedian’s act and decided to play it at the next church meeting. All hell would break loose because the x-rated material would be offensive in that context. My question is this: Who is the author of the material at the moment it is replayed at the church meeting? Is it the comedian who created it, or is it the person who moved it to a new context? I say it’s the person who moved it to the wrong audience.

I believe authorship - at least in terms of responsibility, not copyright - should transfer when a person moves material from one context where it is appropriate to another where it is not. The same should be true whenever moving material from one context to another changes the message.

Tracey Morgan recently got in trouble for saying in his act that if his son announced he was gay, Tracey would stab him. If we presume that this was one of fifty outrageously inappropriate things Tracey said on stage that night, all within character as the absurdly ignorant and selfish guy he likes to portray for laughs, it means a comedian was trying to be outrageous and funny and missed the mark. That’s all it means, since no reasonable person believes Tracey would stab his own son or love him less if he came out. But reported out of context, as it was, one has trouble seeing the statement as anything but the worst kind of hate speech.

I would argue that Tracey was 100% responsible for whatever psychological or social harm he caused to the audience that heard his remark live, and zero percent responsible for the harm that was caused when others spread the story. The spreaders became the authors (as far as responsibility) when they changed the context. They became the Authors by Relocation, a term I just made up.

Most people would agree that you shouldn’t shoot the messenger. But that rule only applies if the messenger delivers the right message to the right person. If the king’s messenger stops at the local inn to share the king’s message before delivering it, someone is going to get beheaded.

Prior to the Internet, this transfer of authorship was a smallish problem. An unscrupulous or clumsy newspaper journalist could take out of context something from a book or a speech and write it up to make the original author seem ridiculous. But most professionals would be aware that moving material from one audience to another will change the message, and they would self-regulate to maintain the reputation of their publication.

Then along came the Internet. Now any idiot with a computer can move material from one context to another and totally change the meaning. Sometimes this is done by taking quotes out of context. Sometimes material is paraphrased incorrectly. Sometimes the person moving the material has low reading comprehension and makes an honest mistake. Sometimes a problem arises because an author has taken shortcuts with his regular audience, leaving out information that would be necessary for a new reader.

As a writer, you recognize that a huge part of your job is choosing your words to fit your intended audience. When a third party introduces a different audience to your writing, it destroys the audience-matching element of your craft. In a real sense, it changes the product.

An author has no legal recourse when his work is changed by the act of moving it. Libel laws are intentionally weak, and we’re probably better off if they stay that way. But I recommend a solution that makes sense in the Internet age. I propose that responsibility for the impact of content (but not copyright or royalties) should be with the person who delivers material to an unintended audience.

By this model, you can blame the author for anything objectionable if you see the work in the channel he or she intended. But as soon as that work appears on some other website, including a link to the original, any anger it sparks should be directed at the person who invited an audience that the original author did not intend.

On the Internet, anything written for a particular audience is instantly available to the entire world. That’s a wonderful thing, but it makes it too easy for the author and the audience to become accidentally mismatched.  Pay walls would be a solution, but they aren’t generally economical. And we don’t want authors writing to the least common denominator, trying to please everyone while offending no one. We want writing that is appropriate for the intended audience.

My proposal is that we leave things exactly as they are, technology-wise and business model-wise. We need no new laws. All we need is a name for the phenomenon: Author by Relocation.  It’s the literary version of “You break it, you bought it.” If a piece of writing causes little or no harm for its intended audience, we can assume the original author did his job. But if the work is relocated, and/or carved into quotes out of context, that becomes a case of Author by Relocation, and the carver/mover takes on responsibility for the message at that point.

This model maintains complete freedom of expression, including freedom to quote material and to criticize. It simply recognizes that moving and changing a message makes you the Author by Relocation.

Reading Comprehension Test

Posted June 25th, 2011 @ 7:48am in #General Nonsense

Here’s a reading comprehension test for readers of Salon, Jezebel, and Change.org. (I borrowed this idea from a comment.)

Reading Comprehension Test:

If I say all men have a natural urge to eat, and some men are cannibals, have I implied that all men are natural cannibals? Did I condone the practice of eating people?

Discuss

[Note: Readers of The Huffington Post are exempted from the test because most have already passed it.]

Update: I’m adding two more questions.

If I say Dutch men are the tallest in the world, which of the following facts have I implied?

1. I’m a racist.

2. Every Dutch man is taller than every other man.

3. I have a low opinion of women because I didn’t even mention them.

4. None of the above

If I say I invented a robot that can be used to help feed babies, quadriplegics, and some mentally handicapped people, what else have I implied?

1. Quadriplegics are mentally handicapped.

2. Babies are quadriplegics

3. Mentally handicapped people are a bunch of babies

4. I’m a socialist

5. None of the above

Maybe it’s Me

Posted June 24th, 2011 @ 7:57am in #General Nonsense

The fascinating thing about being batshit crazy is that often you’re the only one who isn’t aware of it. That’s why I sometimes like to take a step back and seriously consider the hypothesis that the reason people disagree with me is that I’m an idiot and I don’t realize it.

To that end, I would like to invite some experts to render their opinions of my sanity, based on my interviews with my detractors, below. Any of the following professionals would qualify:

Judge

Lawyer

Debate coach/teacher

Logic professor

Psychologist (professional)

Scientist

If you have an expertise that seems relevant, please read my original offending blog post, Pegs and Holes, and the interviews directly below with Irin Carmon and MaryElizabeth Williams. Give each of us an overall grade that is relevant to your particular expertise. If you’re a judge, issue a verdict. If you’re a scientist, let me know who had the best grasp of the objective facts. If you’re a debate expert, let me know who “won” the debate. If you’re a psychologist, let me know who is suffering from cognitive issues.

Please describe your qualifications and your (brief) evaluation in the comments below. Please also specify your gender, since we would expect some bias in that regard.

Interview with Salon.com Writer MaryElizabeth Williams

Posted June 22nd, 2011 @ 6:20pm in #General Nonsense

Update: Final update added 8 PM PST 6/23/11

In round two I interview Salon writer MaryElizabeth Williams on the topic of what was so objectionable about my blog post Pegs and Holes. (See prior posts for more background.)

MaryElizabeth Williams is a senior staff writer for Salon.com, an author, and has written for The New York Times and other publications. She recently wrote this about me.

Let’s jump right in.

MaryElizabeth: Why did I object to your post? Perhaps you meant it humorously, but let’s start with the way you lump “behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world” together. Cheating is “behaving badly.” Raping is a crime. Right off the bat, you’re working off fuzzy logic, in which a consensual affair and an act of violence are somehow on the same plane. You do so again later when you suggest that if men were to “lose the urge for sex,” there’d be “no rape, fewer divorces,” as if rape was all about the “urge for sex.”

You state that “society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable…society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness. No one planned it that way.” Your presumptuousness over the natural instincts of men is surpassed only by your wild second-guessing regarding those of women. And society, by the way, is plenty planned. Ours here in America, in fact, was planned by, and its government and businesses are still largely run by, men. So instead of going on about the “instincts” of men and women, consider what our culture deems acceptable behavior from all its members, of both sexes. I would furthermore submit that if our society is “a virtual prison for men’s natural desires,” you’ve never been to Vegas.

Now let me ask you - do you believe that rape is a “natural” instinct, or that our culture doesn’t differentiate between the “urge for sex” and forcible violation? 


Scott: I’ll start by answering you closing question. I think sex is a natural instinct, and it manifests differently in different people. A person who is simultaneously horny, prone to violence, and has sociopath tendencies might act in the worst possible way. That person would be abnormal, and I favor the death penalty for rape. Violent behavior is natural in the same sense that cancer and hurricanes are natural. Natural doesn’t mean good. Everything I just explained was obvious to many if not most readers of my Pegs and Holes post. You can verify that claim by reading the comments on this blog and on Huffington Post.

On your other points, let me see if I can break them down to bullet points and get your agreement on what you are saying before I respond to them individually. I believe you are saying…

1. Men who have no sexual desire and no erections will still rape because it’s not about the sexual urge.

2. If an author lists three things that are bad, he means all three things are equal to each other. For example, if I say blizzards, ulcers, and head lice are bad, I am implying that they should be treated the same way.

3. Society didn’t evolve as the result of millions of people making millions of independent decisions. It is mostly the result of planning by men who successfully designed society to meet their needs. 

4. Men can get their natural urges satisfied by, for example, traveling to Las Vegas. Their wives and girlfriends won’t mind. There’s no real downside. 

5. You can’t tell when I’m trying to be humorous. 

Did I accurately summarize your points?

MaryElizabeth: So to be clear, you’re saying do believe that “horniness” is a factor in rape. I wonder, have you ever known someone who was raped? Are you aware that rape is used as a weapon of war? Men who have “no sexual desire and no erections” do rape, Scott. Ask someone who’s experienced it. Ask Abner Louima, as just one example.

Further, I wonder why you’re backing off from your own use of “tweeting, raping, cheating" and "no rape, fewer divorces” in the same lines of thought. You may facetiously compare your post to saying “blizzards, ulcers, and head lice are bad,” but I would argue that if that had been your original statement, you’d have been rightly accused of posting utter gibberish.

Instead, you referred, in the most blanket-like of terms, to the “natural instincts of men” as “shameful and criminal.”  You’re the one who called men “square pegs” and referred to “males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges.” You made no such distinction, as you do now, for the more “prone to violence” and “sociopathic.”

And let me see if I understand you correctly - society has evolved from “millions of independent decisions”? I guess the Constitution can go suck it.

Finally, just because someone can tell when you’re attempting to be humorous, it doesn’t follow that you’re succeeding at it. Likewise, just because people disagree  with you, it’s not always a sign they’re just not as smart as those HuffPo commenters. Perhaps if there weren’t so many of us with what you deem poor reading skills, you wouldn’t have the need to create imaginary defenders. (http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2011/04/19/scott_adams_sock_puppetry_scandal) I’d like to believe that you’ve reached out to your critics because you have a genuine curiosity to understand why your remarks were so offensive to so many, Scott. Or is that one more thing I’m apparently all wrong about?

Scott: If you’re lumping together every type of rape from war crimes to date rape to child rape to prison rape, most generalizations fall apart. I will grant you that when rape is used as a weapon of war, horniness is not the inspiration for the act. And I will grant you that if an erect penis is not used in the crime, horniness is probably not involved. And I will grant you that if someone who is seriously insane commits rape, it might not involve any horniness. And I will grant you that there are probably dozens of other twisted motivations that don’t start with horniness.

My original reference in my Pegs and Holes blog involved the IMF chief and his alleged rape of the hotel maid. In that case, I don’t think he first had an urge to do some violence and decided that his penis was the go-to weapon of choice.

Chemical castration drugs already exist, and have proven extraordinarily effective in reducing recidivism rates among sex offenders. The science is on my side. If you have a link that shows otherwise, I am happy to look at it.

And yes, I’ve known a number of rape victims. I don’t draw conclusions from anecdotal evidence, but horniness was obviously a factor in those cases.

If we can set aside for a moment the clarity, or lack thereof, in the writing of my original blog post, can you tell me what view you think I hold that is different from your own? And please put your answer in bullet point form if you can.

MaryElizabeth: Let’s look at how you’re changing your narrative here. “My original reference in my Pegs and Holes blog involved the IMF chief and his alleged rape of the hotel maid.” Your original post about “tweeting, raping, cheating” declared that “the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male?"  That’s not a specific reference to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who, by the way, is not accused of "horniness” taken to an extreme, but of orally and anally assaulting a woman.  A refusal to take no for an answer may be a “factor” in some sexual assaults, but “horniness” does not lead to rape, Scott.

You go on to state, “Chemical castration drugs already exist, and have proven extraordinarily effective in reducing recidivism rates among sex offenders."  Yet in your original post you said, ” Society is organized as a virtual prison for men’s natural desires…“ and whimsically imagined that  "science will come up with a drug that keeps men chemically castrated for as long as they are on it."  You didn’t say, "sex offenders.” You said “men.” The entire tone of your post    suggests the two are indistinguishable in your mind, and that   “ if a man meets and marries the right woman, and she fulfills his needs, he might have no desire to tweet his meat to strangers” ie, the burden of responsibility falls upon women to keep “bad behavior” in check. It’s a very cynical and incredibly depressing way of looking at the world.

What views do I think you hold that’s different from my own?

-      That, as you stated earlier this year,  “women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently.” I don’t regard my sex as differently abled subset of society.

-      That society forces males to exist  “in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness” (Perhaps you could clarify what society you’re speaking of. Is there an Unhappiness Island I’m not aware of?)

-  That “It’s a zero sum game. If men get everything they want, women lose, and vice versa.” I’m not convinced this general “men” you speak of all want the same things. The men   right now fighting for the right to marry their same-sex partners in New York want something very different than the men of the National Organization for Marriage. Hugh Hefner, whom you claim never got “a round hole for his round peg” likely has damn near everything he could want, if whatever he does want, it’s probably not indicative of what Justin Bieber wants. And I don’t believe in a world where one gender always has to win and another has to lose.  I think better of humanity.

Here are few questions for you: What are you hoping to communicate with posts like “Pegs and Holes”? Is it means as strictly satire? And if so, why bristle when people take the bait? 

Scott: On your first bullet point, you are making my point for me. The actual point of the earlier blog post you mentioned was that men don’t argue in situations where the cost of doing so is greater than the gain. The world is watching you make that true for me right now. This debate will probably reduce my income by a third, as feminist forces have already mobilized and started to ask newspapers to drop Dilbert. That’s the sort of risk that men don’t have when they engage in a debate with other men.

The exception would be when anonymous men on the Internet debate with women. In that case they have no downside risk and are willing to fully engage. But nothing is gained by it beyond entertainment.

On your second bullet point, regarding men existing in a state of unfulfilled urges, I’m referring to the fact that men (gross generality alert) have hearts that want a relationship with one person and penises that want a thousand different women. Neither marriage nor single life can satisfy that condition. And our current society discourages any other sort of arrangement.

Woman (gross generalization alert) are biologically less inclined to crave continuous sexual variety. That’s a statement about evolution. If you have a link that disproves that notion, I’m happy to look at it.

Someone will mention that men and women cheat at about the same rate. But research has shown that cheating isn’t about sex for either gender. Cheaters generally just want someone to treat them the way they want to be treated.

Obviously it wouldn’t be a point of disagreement if you were to say that many people differ from my gross generalizations. I said the same thing in Pegs and Holes: “Everyone is different.”

On your third bullet point, you argue that life is not a zero-sum game for the sexes. That’s probably true for economics. But my blog post was about natural urges. If a man you barely know wants to have sex with you, and you’d rather not, you can’t both be winners. Society has to pick sides, and you won. I think we both agree that is the best solution. Even the man who wants to have sex with you is glad he lives in a world where his mother/daughter/sister can safely say no.

You asked what I’m hoping to communicate with posts such as Pegs and Holes. My only goal is to be interesting. Ideas are society’s fuel. I drill a lot of wells; most of them are dry. Sometimes they produce. Sometimes the well catches on fire.

My next question: Do you support the death penalty for rape, as I do, or are you relatively pro-rape compared to me?

MaryElizabeth: First of all, Scott, your continued assertion regarding the risks “that men don’t have when they engage in a debate with other men” is a stellar example of why people find your views offensive. It’s insulting, it suggests that talking to a woman isn’t worth your time and effort, and when you stoop to do so, you face retribution from the “feminist forces.” Here’s a thought: if as you claim anyone is asking for your strip to be dropped (and for the record, I am not among them) can you consider that maybe it’s because of the things you say, rather than because you’ve so benevolently deigned to engage in a conversation with a female?

Now, let’s consider your idea that “If a man you barely know wants to have sex with you, and you’d rather not, you can’t both be winners.” So much to unpack! What if it’s a man you know well? It gets back to what you wrote about how “the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal.” You’re not making the distinction between wanting to have sex with someone and wanting to force her to have sex. And to couch sexuality in terms of “winning” and “losing” just sounds really juvenile. If a woman says no to sex, the man “loses” and the woman has “won”? I will however cop that for a man who views the world that way, the burden of male “unhappiness” you spoke of earlier must be great indeed.

You say, “My only goal is to be interesting. Ideas are society’s fuel.” I think that sums up the essential difference in where we’re coming from. I don’t write to be “interesting” (go ahead, peanut gallery, take the straight line). I’m not bored or jaded enough to write just to get a reaction. My Irish firmly in the “up” position, I’m here because I care passionately about these issues, and about the world in which my two daughters are growing up. I don’t want their ideas and opinions dismissed as too troublesome for a man to squander his energy on, or to have to put up with what you refer to as “gross generalizations” about their sex.

Now, regarding your question, “Do you support the death penalty for rape, as I do, or are you relatively pro-rape compared to me?” Oh Scott. Oh really. You’re just messing with me now, aren’t you? What’s next, you going to ask when I stopped beating my wife? You can’t honestly believe that being opposed to capital punishment is tantamount to be in favor of sexual assault, can you? Where’s that great logic you pride yourself so much on?

Scott: I think this would be a good place to stop. I’d like to thank MaryElizabeth for being a good sport and for trying to make the world a better place in her own peculiar way.

I feel as if this has been an Internet-wide conversation, with many websites joining in the debate. I leave it to readers to decide whether it was wise for me to engage in an honest conversation on this topic or whether it would have been smarter to apologize for any alleged offenses and slink away. Here’s a link that should help you answer that question.

To the women who are not batshit crazy, and fortunately that is most of you, I apologize for any lack of clarity on my part was deemed offensive. I’m reasonably sure we agree on all of the important stuff.






 

 

Interview with Jezebel.com Writer Irin Carmon

Posted June 21st, 2011 @ 7:15pm in #General Nonsense

Update: Newest material is at the end. Updated 6/22/11

My recent blog post titled Pegs and Holes caused quite a stir on the Internet. One of my harshest critics, feminist website Jezebel.com, accepted my offer to be interviewed about whatever it is that they find so objectionable about me. Jezebel’s Editor-in-Chief, Jessica Coen, asked writer Irin Carmon to represent the common viewpoint at Jezebel.

Let’s start with some background on the participants to give you some perspective on the bias that each brings to the table. I’ve been a long-time financial supporter of women’s causes, particularly in the abuse realm. I have a long history of promoting and mentoring women in my own businesses.  And I’m pro-choice.

My mother was a strong woman who raised three kids, worked most of her life, taught me to play baseball, and was the first member of the family to get a motorcycle license. She kept a loaded rifle in the kitchen and often used it to gun down rabbits and other assailants to her vegetable garden.  And she didn’t take shit from anyone.

My first career, in banking, came to an end when my boss told me there was no potential for a white male to get a promotion until the company did a lot of catching up in the diversity department. My second career, at the phone company, ended the same way, although I stayed around while I worked on my cartooning career on the side.

Irin Carmon has been a staff writer for Jezebel for about two years, during which time she has been covering politics, reproductive rights and health, sexual assault, workplace discrimination, and more. Irin is a 28-year old woman who reminds me that she does not deign to speak for all women.

We begin…

Scott:  Irin, your editor volunteered you to discuss your objections to my recent blog post titled Pegs and Holes. What in particular did you find objectionable?

Irin: Even seen as hyperbole or intentionally incendiary rhetoric, the piece does a disservice to men above all, and to women too. You start out by referring to men in the public eye who are “tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world,” and suggest that this happened because “society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable.” Leaving aside for a minute the implied equivalence of that laundry list (breaking your marriage vows versus raping someone), this is a bleak perversion of biological determinism. By that reading, the presumed majority of men who don’t rape (or cheat, or tweet) are simply better at managing their innate desires to violate someone else, which I’d wager isn’t true to the lived experience of most non-raping men. What you deem the “natural instincts of women” isn’t defined, but I’m going to assume you mean stereotypes about nurturing and nesting. In fact, history, recent and otherwise, is full of examples of women who were treated as “shameful and criminal” for following their own natural instincts for how to live their lives, whether it was whom to sleep with and when and how often, what jobs women “should” do, how many children to have and when, etc. etc. Until very recently, those strictures were on the books and enforced by men, full stop. Men and women are both better off that all that’s no longer official, at least in this country. 

You write, “Society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness.” In fact, what’s evolved is that women are now politically and, to a greater extent, socially recognized as full human beings. In contexts where women were seen as men’s property, rape, or any non-sanctioned sex was (or is) punished as such, and often the women were punished too. We now have a legal and social model that formally recognizes women as people. That changed because some men and women didn’t see the world as, in your words, “a zero sum game. If men get everything they want, women lose, and vice versa,” and who saw the harm and dehumanization implicit in that model. Incidentally, though women were historically told they are too volatile or emotional to run the world’s affairs, you suggest it’s men who are unable to cope. 

You cite Hugh Hefner as an example of a man who has “lost,” or implicitly, been societally shamed. (“Society didn’t offer him a round hole for his round peg.”) But by every possible measure, Hefner’s no victim. He is a very rich man. He has a robust sex life with women who look like the ideal upon which he made his fortune. He’s an icon. I’d say society has offered him quite the round hole. It’s hard to think of a woman who has experienced anything comparable, but then, I don’t agree this is a zero sum game. 

My question to you: What do you get out of posting these incendiary commentaries on gender? And why accuse others of misrepresentation when they’ve mostly stuck to directly quoting you?

Scott: Phew! Wordy.

As for your question, I write what I think will be interesting and thought-provoking. I stake out positions that I haven’t seen - whether I believe everything I write or not - because unique viewpoints interest me most. My blog is about inviting readers to wrestle with unique points of view strictly for fun. My regular readers understand that. When my writing is taken out of context, the way Jezebel and others did, it sometimes looks like a crazy rant and it pisses people off. That’s more of a bonus than a main goal.

I don’t understand most of what you wrote in response to my question. Can you try it again without the history lessons? I agree that women had it worse in the past. My offending blog post was about today and the future.

I think we can skip the question of whether I offended men, since that is not what is bothering Jezebel or Salon, just to name two. And most men correctly interpreted the post as saying that male sexual urges manifest differently in different men. The men who complained imagined I was saying all men are repressed rapists. That’s a simple case of bad reading comprehension, or maybe it is because the post was carved up by bottom-feeding websites until the meaning was distorted to fit an agenda. At Huffington Post, where the average reading comprehension is high, you can see that most commenters can’t understand how anyone would be offended by the post.

You say that the natural instincts of women can lead them to shameful and criminal behavior. I have a higher opinion of women than you do, in the sense that I think men are genetically more prone to bad behavior. If your point is that women suck just as much as men, I’ll take your word for it. But you’ll need to explain why our jails have so many more men than women.

I’m still confused why my blog is more offensive than what you just wrote. Can you try again, in simpler terms, and without the history lesson, to explain your objection to my post?

Irin: Not sure what’s left to say if all you can say about my good-faith critique of your piece boils down to TL;DR. (Sorry, “Phew, wordy.”) Surely a “certified genius” such as yourself knows how to read English when strung together in three paragraphs.

But I’ll boil it down anyway. Feminism is not about women being better than men. It’s about creating a world where gender and sexuality don’t stand in the way of each of us pursuing our individual rights, including to autonomy over our own bodies, whether that means who we have sex with, how many children we have, if at all, or what jobs we have. This might be a “history lesson,” but for thousands of years, that hasn’t been the case. Men ran things for most of that time, and by and large they still do; feminists and allies happen to believe that full participation will be better for everyone. Unfortunately, the transition is still incomplete, including on your blog, but we’ll keep at it nonetheless.  

Scott: If that’s your point, we’re in full agreement. I’ll leave it to my readers to decide if the bottom line is you’re unwilling or unable to defend what another writer on Jezebel has written on this topic. You simply explained some history and made some generic points about equality.

My readers should know that I requested this interview with Lane Moore, the Jezebel.com writer who characterized my opinion, with manufactured quotes, as “All men are rapists.” That is the ridiculous view I was expecting your employer to defend. I assume that in preparation for this interview you reread my blog and realized there is no defense for Jezebel’s position, and so you smartly retreated into history lessons and generic statements about the goodness of equality.

To be fair, you were assigned this interview by your boss. It’s clear to me that you’re too smart, and probably too ethical, to defend Jezebel.com’s grotesque interpretation of my writing.

So we’ll end here, and I’ll take this up with Salon’s writer, MaryElizabeth Williams, assuming her offer still stands. Stay tuned.

[Update: Jezebel.com is linking to this post. That’s why the voting changed direction so abruptly.]

Open Letter to the LRC Community

Posted June 21st, 2011 @ 8:44am in #General Nonsense

A Stupidity Tax

Posted June 20th, 2011 @ 7:13am in #General Nonsense

Tax policy has two purposes. One goal is to collect money to operate the government. The other goal is to promote public policy. For example, mortgage deductions are meant to encourage home ownership. Tax incentives are a proven way to change behavior. This makes me wonder if we could have a tax on stupidity and thereby reduce its prevalence over time. Seriously. The nation has a great interest in reducing stupidity.

Arguably, we already tax stupidity. When the government subsidizes student loans and helps fund colleges - that’s a transfer of wealth from non-students to students.  Okay, it’s not exactly a tax on stupidity, but it’s certainly a proof of concept.

One big obstacle to taxing stupidity is identifying it. We generally believe that anyone who has an opposing opinion is stupid. So we’d have to ignore politics and religion when designing our test for stupidity. That still leaves plenty of practical knowledge that can be tested for.

Suppose we developed a general knowledge test that had clear and indisputable answers. The questions could range from parenting skills, to healthy living, to how to apply for a job, to basic science, and perhaps some other school skills. The test could run thousands of questions long. And it would be entirely optional. If you choose to not take the test, you can simply pay a stupidity tax instead. If you take the test, and score 100%, you pay no stupidity taxes at all. And if you take the test and miss a few questions, you pay a stupidity tax that is prorated by your test score. You can take the test as many times as you like to improve your score.

I know that you libertarians object to government activism. I get that. I’m just curious as to whether tax policy could make a huge difference in the effectiveness of society by directly taxing stupidity. Suppose science is applied to the task of identifying the most important knowledge that an adult should possess.  Could you find a few thousand bits of knowledge that successful people generally understand and unsuccessful people do not? If so, that could be the basis of the stupidity test. You might also want to include any information about science or economics that an involved citizen needs to make informed voting decisions. That might help the government become more effective over time.

As with most of my ideas, this one is thoroughly impractical. No elected official could support a tax on stupidity. And you’d create a cumbersome bureaucracy if you tried to implement such a thing. I’m just thinking ahead to the day I create my own principality, perhaps on some island, and design the tax system from scratch. I’d have to give some serious thought to a tax on stupidity. I think it might help to keep the nation out of a death spiral.

Fake Vacation

Posted June 18th, 2011 @ 12:11pm in #General Nonsense

For the Wall Street Journal I expanded on my post about simulated vacations.