Oy. Scott Adams won’t shut up about that execrable “Pegs and Hoies” piece of his that I (and quite a few other people on the internets) wrote about the other day. Naturally, he’s being willfully obtuse about the reaction his piece caused, and blames it all on the “low reading comprehension” of everyone in the world who is not him and/or one of his sycophantic fans. So he’s decided to interview a number of those who wrote about it. (Not including me. Aww, Scott, but we had such good times together!)
So far he’s interviewed Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon (a great writer and lovely person, by the way) and Irin Carmon of Jezebel. Naturally, the interviewees offer cogent explanations of just what was wrong with his idiotic post, and he responds by completely and utterly missing the point. (Or pretending to; it’s always hard to tell with Scott.)
Scott Adams is so relentlessly irritating – he’s a bit like Eoghan in his stubborn refusal to get the point – that I can’t bring myself to write any more about this idiotic manufactured controversy. So you’ll have to go check out the posts yourself.
EDITED TO ADD: Adams has put up yet another post on the subject, entitled “Maybe it’s me?” in which he decides ” 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.” Scott, your hypothesis is correct.
EDITED TO ADD AGAIN: And … Mr. Adams has now made a personal appearance in the comments below. Be gentle!
Given Adams’ intense narcissism, I can’t help but get the song “Biggest Fan” by the Martini Brothers stuck in my head every time I read any of this posts. Listen a bit, and you’ll see why.
I see this a lot, even on progressive blogs I generally enjoy. If a lot of people are interpreting something a certain way, the problem is prooooobably with the way you wrote it, not the way they read it.
Especially if your name is Scott Adams, apparently.
I used to play a martini bros out years ago, i think it was a remix of a Steve bug, I might be wrong though, either way it was on Poker Flat.
I… I just… I…
I’m not *speechless* exactly, but I just read his reply to Mary Elizabeth Williams, and it’s such a dark dark place inside Scott Adams’ head. I love the way he completely didn’t respond to the jab about his sycophantic alter-ego.
Also, women and their lack of reading comprehension! Dilbert will be pulled from newspapers* because of those wacky feminists (and their lack of reading comprehension)! His revenue will drop by a third!
The horror.
*If only.
His attitude is insufferable. Sorry, but your writing’s not all that wonderful, Scott, and your ideas are worse.
Adams is neither misunderstood nor a genius.
Furthermore, his shtick is tired and play-out.
The things that got me was in his second interview… the, “answer in bullet points please”.
Then, even though she didn’t, he pretended they were. In the Jezebel interview he made a throwaway comment about how many words she used.
Oi.
If you ask complex questions, you get complex answers. Since this was an interview about how they saw his work, trying to get it cut down to “bullet points” was a sort of control measure. Why a control measure? Because bullets are incredibly concise, they don’t allow for nuance, and they require either glossing a lot of information, or leaving it out.
Then the little dig about how “reasonable” people (and the bit about, “many, or most”) is a classic case of, “the lurkers support me in e-mail.” In other words, all the people who didn’t say I was a clueless git… really liked it.
Instead of, “the reaction from people who aren’t my fans already was negative, by and large.”
I don’t care, all things considered, if he wants to be an asshat, but the least he could do is be an honest asshat.
Instead, he’s being a pointy-haired boss and blaming all the problems on people who “don’t get it”. All sizzle, no steak.
http://i749.photobucket.com/albums/xx134/ami_angelwings/Magyc%20Cards/MRSSScottAdams.jpg
There are no words… Honestly… His “phew, wordy” comment was simply abhorent, and his constant goal-post shifting, whining about how he’ll lose money after these debates, and instance that nobody understands him, is just plain sad. I don’t think I can read Dilbert comics after this, I’ll just keep getting reminded of their creator.
Honestly, what does he hope to achieve by drawing more attention to himself? Does he think that its all just a big misunderstanding, and if a bunch of people looked into the matter, they will clearly see he was in the right? It reminds me far too much about Rod Blagojevich and his clammoring for the media spotlight, only to fade away after the courts agreed with everyone else who knew about the details of the case. Hopefully Scott Adams will fade away as well. Its really the smartest thing he could do right now.
What a douche. He finished that second interview with: “Do you support the death penalty for rape, as I do, or are you relatively pro-rape compared to me?” Wtf. Way to conflate things that don’t actually relate…I don’t support the death penalty for ANY CRIME. Doesn’t mean I’m pro-rape compared to Scott Adams. Indeed, I’d venture that I have a much more nuanced understanding of it given that he implies in that post that erections (and desire) are required for men to assault women…completely ignoring the fact that most rapes don’t actually end in orgasm (Sharon Marcus, ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words’). In his logic women can’t rape men because they can’t get erections! No-one has ever raped anyone else with an object or part of the body other than a penis! Bah.
Also – seriously, any time anyone discusses shifting goalposts they should just link to that post. ‘Oh, I was talking specifically about this particular case’…which we were supposed to know by osmosis? Seriously, his ‘bad reading comprehension’ thing should be translated to ‘you can’t magically intuit what I *mean*.’
I am reminded of a line in the first season of True Blood, said by Tara to Jason. If I recall correctly, it goes something like, “My god, you are just one gigantic parody of yourself.”
In his logic women can’t rape men because they can’t get erections!
My friends believed this… back in HS xD
Besides other ways to rape a person with a penis, it’s not even true that you can’t get an erection during rape, just like some female survivors have had orgasms during rape 🙁 Sometimes you can’t control your body in situations like that :
And if you’ve read any of his books (I have unfortunately -_-) he thinks that “are you less pro-rape than me?” thing is the cleverest argument strategy evar xD
er less anti-rape/more pro-rape
Oh totally – the idea that feeling pleasure (which is, partly, a biological response to particular stimuli – bodies kindof like the idea of babies even when the mind is not willing or the body not able!) during rape somehow invalidates the violation is evil. Bodies don’t always do what we want them to do. There’s an acknowledgement of this in the literature about child sexual abuse, where it’s understood that all sex is bad for them, but it’s such a difficult thing to tackle both there and elsewhere where there are all these stories about how ‘she liked it’ or ‘she really wanted it’ even though she said no. Basically it boils down to the fact that so much of patriarchal culture is invested in substituting other things for consent – pleasure, wearing a short skirt, having an erection… Makes me angry.
HBO has this great documentary on On Demand right now about the first Sex Crimes Unit in the US, called (appropriately) “Sex Crimes Unit.” One of the things one of the DAs/ADAs said was that whenever they try a case in front of a jury they totally have to explain the mechanics of it. Like, they’ve done studies and men think that women are BONE DRY all the time, so they expect the physical damage of a rape to be really, really bad, with extreme amounts of bruising and tearing, and most rapes don’t have that.
It’s a great doc for a bunch of other reasons too. I learned a lot about the history of rape statutes, for one thing. In NY, in order for a rape to be prosecuted, there needed to be a corroborating witness until the mid-’70s. Did not know. And a lot of the argument against the statute’s change was EXACTLY THE SAME as what you hear from Pierce Harlan or Harlan Pierce or whatever his name is at the False Rape Society, today.
@Bee: I keep seeing that documentary on the guide, now I have to watch it.
Scott Adams needs to pour a big cup of STFU and go away for a while. He’s gonna open his mouth and fall right the fuck in one day. I hate it when someone says something dickish, issues a non-apology, and then won’t stop.
I wanna see Scott Adams try and interview David now… Am I a horrible person? Its like a natural disaster I can’t look away from…
I’ve never understood why anyone would have much difficulty understanding that rape is ultimately about power. It’s inherent in the definition of the word. Looks like Scott Adams is the one with low reading comprehension.
Which troll do you think is going to dominate this thread?
My money’s on NWOslave. This subject matter seems like it’s up his alley.
@Kirbywarp: Nope, I’d buy popcorn to watch that shit.
Oh, the stupid, it burns.
Now that women are responding to his wooden misfit peg of a post, he’s suffering negative consequences. But he shouldn’t have to deal with those women, because, you know, they’re not supposed to be listening.
“That’s the sort of risk that men don’t have when they engage in a debate with other men.”
Because, you know, the default debater is male. His default audience is male, dontcha know. And if some woman has the temerity to sneak in, she should wear a sign that says “my viewpoint is in no way to be taken seriously, because, you know–female .”
I hate this. Reminds of when MRAL declared that “Asians” are skewing the average height downwards. Because, you know, Asians, not really part of the default demographic of actual people in the US that count. Same with blacks skewing the vote towards Obama. Because they, somehow, after all these years, and lectures on inclusiveness, they. just. don’t. count.
Scott Adams’ world view can go hang.
I wanna see Scott Adams try and interview David now… Am I a horrible person? Its like a natural disaster I can’t look away from…
I only would want to see that if it makes Adams write an angry or whiny incoherent screed, because that would amuse the hell out of me.
Sorry – a very lengthy screed, so people can say “Phew! Wordy.”
FelixBC – word! As if men don’t boycott things they don’t like, anyway? Planned Parenthood – bunch of people (many of them men) don’t like women having access to sexual health care and wow – many are closing because they aren’t funded anymore. But woah – taking Dilbert (which is a tired old cartoon anyway!) out of the papers is a *big deal* and a consequence of doing a series of misogynist, sorry, reasonable and satiric, pieces about women.
He said it himself in Irin’s interview…he doesn’t actually believe half the shit he writes; he’s just trolling us.
He really isn’t much different than your average neck-beard mouth-breather living in his mom’s basement who derives a sense of superiority from pwning n00bs on WoW.
I know a lot of people here love troll-baiting, but honestly, the best way to make a troll go away is to ignore them. You’d think having a widely circulated comic strip would help alleviate his inferiority issues….
Bee – interesting. I’ll have to see if I can get my hands on that doco cos I hadn’t heard of that one and it’s always handy to have more context for what 70s feminists were on about. I’ve heard of the trying to put a sword in a moving sheath thing, of someone trying to put a pen in a moving coke bottle in court (i.e. it’s very difficult to do these things…ergo non-consensual sex is impossible because if the victim was actually resisting properly no-one would be able to rape her). I’ve heard plenty about myths regarding virginity, for example a rapist was let off in the 90s in Australia because the judges could not believe that a hymen can remain intact after penetration…despite doctors testifying this was the case. 🙁