So apparently I just had a debate with Vox Day?
A couple of days ago, you see, a Twitterer calling himself RedPillPhil suggested I was a bit of a coward for taking on an “easy target” like A Voice for Men rather than taking on the leading intellectual lights of the so-called “Dark Enlightenment” like … Heartiste, and Vox Day … who I actually write about all the time.
My laughter must have carried all the way to, well, wherever Vox Day lives, because Mr. Day soon appeared on Twitter and challenged me to a debate — on women’s right to vote. The very notion of two dudes earnestly debating female suffrage – in 2014, no less – struck me as beyond absurd, so I sent back what I thought was an appropriately dismissive Tweet:
@voxday @RedPillPhil @heartiste Yes, women should have voting rights, because they, like men, are human. I win the debate! The end.Thanks!
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) July 25, 2014
Apparently Mr. Day saw this tweet as my opening gambit in a debate that was now on, and replied with an attempted gotcha. Against my better judgment, I replied:
@voxday @RedPillPhil @heartiste No. I vote where I live, in the US.. So are you contending that no women live in the countries they vote in?
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) July 25, 2014
He replied, and I sunk deeper into the quicksand of this ridiculous “debate.”
@voxday @RedPillPhil @heartiste There are a few basic requirements for having the right to vote besides being human but being male isn't one
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) July 26, 2014
At this point I realized I needed to shut this thing down as quickly as possible. So I posted a couple of quick tweets:
And then, quite literally, I went and took a nap.
Later I discovered that Mr. Day’s possibly imaginary wife, known only as Space Bunny, had weighed in with her own attempted “gotcha.”
I thought that was that. So imagine my surprise to see that Mr. Day had retreated to his blog Alpha Game to boast about his great success in “exposing a Gamma.” That gamma being me.
In his typically pompous prose, Mr. Day explained that his Twitter encounter with me
should help illustrate why the critics of Game are so hesitant to directly challenge any of the leading Game bloggers; despite their pretensions they know very well that they are overmatched.
Oh, plus I’m a fat loser who can’t get laid:
Critics such as Futrelle and Scalzi are of low socio-sexual rank, which means that they have the usual gamma male’s distaste for conflict that has a clear winner. The reason is that as long as they can avoid losing, they can still claim victory in their delusional gamma style.
“Delusional Gamma Style” was Psy’s little known followup to Gangnam Style.
Notice how Futrelle tries to immediately declare himself the winner. This is normal. It’s all about the spin with gammas; substance is to be avoided to the greatest extent possible because the more of it there is, the harder it becomes to spin the selected narrative. They are undefeated in their own minds, victors in a long series of imaginary encounters.
At this point Mr. Day – apparently oblivious to irony– declares himself the winner:
But even in a short, character-limited exchange such as this, I was able to show Futrelle’s reasoning to be incorrect twice, so it is little wonder he does not dare risk a more in-depth encounter with me or one of the other men. The longer it went on, the more inconsistencies I would have been able to expose. Once he realized this, he promptly repeated his initial position and retreated.
Yeah, I’m sure you would have done a bang-up job showing me that since it’s ok to restrict people to voting only in the places in which they actually live, it is also ok to deny votes to women.
This is why we are winning. This is why we will win. Our critics and our enemies have to run away from us every single time we enter a new arena. All we have to do to continue convincing men of the truth of our perspective is to avoid getting lazy, to keep developing and presenting refined ideas, and to remember that rhetoric is no substitute for dialectic. And every time there is a minor encounter of this sort, more people will see that there is no rational foundation for the feminized dogma our opponents are so ineptly defending.
You just keep telling yourself that.
EDITED TO ADD: Just noticed this amazing comment on Vox’s site, from someone called Doom. (What’s with misogynists and their supervillain names?)
Actually, when women see these debates, they choose the strong side. I don’t think they always understand, or agree, but they instinctively know strong from weak, and generally choose strong. But then fall back into confusion without a steady stream of strength, which most men haven’t been presenting them. Game is changing that, from what I am seeing. There is as much hope as there is time. Then again, as things are setting up, a break will be for the good.
Game isn’t just a sexual struggle, it opens up much else in life. Men who begin to master game aren’t willing to be helpless in other parts of their lives. That bites into the need, and want, of bigger government. Zoom!
Ladies love mansplaining assholes! Soon the governments of the world will crumble before us!
—
rhetoric is no substitute for dialectic
rhetoric is no substitute for dialectic…
*head kasplodes*
Do you think he uses a ouija board to get the big words, or he just throws up scrabble letters?
Vox Day claims to be super-smart with an IQ of eleventy billion or something like that. It calls into question the reliability of IQ testing, that’s for sure.
@pallygirl:
I presume it’s meant to be a play on words related to the old saw vox populi vox dei – “The voice of the people is the voice of God”.
Five minutes reading YouTube comments ought to disabuse anybody of that notion. 😛
LOL re the IQ claim. Anyone who understands how IQ is measured (in its various test forms) knows that it doesn’t measure being smart – because that has too many elements to put in a test, and also has a few definitional issues. IQ also isn’t exact to the integer, it’s more like a p-value where you’re interested in basically what threshold is this (with respect to standard deviations from the mean, in the case of the IQ test).
Anyone who uses “but I have a high IQ” as some sort of basis for why people should listen to them is using the faulty reasoning form of appeal to irrelevant authority. A high IQ (whether this is an accurate statement or not) is completely irrelevant when it comes to whether women should vote (as a for instance).
VD has used other faulty reasoning in his tweets, shifting the goalposts being an obvious one, which is equivocation (the definition of voting rights shifts in one tweet after another by VD). It’s just so amazing that these clever dudebros with their high IQs and logic can’t actually do logic. It must be my ladybrain.
I hope it’s a ouija board. I’d love to think someone on the other side with a snarky sense of humour is helping him look an even bigger tool than he already does.
These dudes apparently envisage a world which is entirely taken up with a massive version of the podium at the Olympic Games, except with a level for absolutely every man on the planet, each with its own classification.
They’d need to raid every alphabetic system that has ever existed to provide the labels, but finally everyone would know exactly where they stood, and somehow that would be good.
Obviously VD would be at the top, but he could probably get a lot of his supporters to police the other ranks.
@strivingally:
I think you should request “Mu”, just because “Mu male” is super fun to say
@kittehserf:
I can’t un-imagine a departed soul yelling over their shoulder, “Hey, Susan B. Anthony, I think you’ll wanna take this one.”
rhetoric is no substitute for dialectic
rhetoric is no substitute for dialectic…
*head kasplodes*
Yeah! I second daintydougal. Out of all that, that’s the one that threw me off the most too.
Just wow.
[blockquote]I presume it’s meant to be a play on words related to the old saw vox populi vox dei – “The voice of the people is the voice of God”.
Five minutes reading YouTube comments ought to disabuse anybody of that notion.[/blockquote]
I do hope God uses a lot fewer misspelled four letter words and crude terms for genitalia.
I never thought of “Vox Day” as being “Vox Dei.” I kept thinking of the normal meaning of the word “day.” Then again, I’m a geek about pronunciation and phonetics, so my mental reading voice tends to enunciate very carefully.
Oh damn blockquotes to hell.
Tagged it mentally as voice day, so he means day of the voice, so he’s voicing on this, his day, so he’s going ti be constantly ranting about his opinion.
Oh? Whattayaknow.
——
Iq is fun. For a given measure of symbolic logic anyhow. I love a good IQ test, personally, since if someone uses their IQ test scores to brag randomly they’ve failed my IQ test (did you mention your score? Fail!)
The only IQ test I have done where I would regard the results as valid was the one we were given in primary school. Never seen any of the question types before, so came at it cold. Of course, we were never told our results cos they thought doing so led to either unrealistic expectations, or premature condemnation.
So much win in those images, Kitteh and Kootiepatra!
As quite a few people I know are fond of saying, IQ tests are a fantastic measure of … someone’s ability to do IQ tests. 😉
True. My point is more that for the first one, I had not learnt the tricks of the questions from experience, rather than the validity of IQ tests per se. Whether or not they are valid, after the first one you are going to score more highly. (Well, most people are. There probably are people who figured out all the tricks at first sight. They are just not me :> )
It’s Mammotheer troll baiting across the veil! XD
gilshalos, thanks!
naira, too late! 😛 Use the > brackets instead of the square ones.
“Our critics and our enemies have to run away from us every single time we enter a new arena.”
The fact that they’re still trying to twist people ignoring their utter ridiculousness into “they just sense our awesomeness, and know that they’re outmatched!” is beyond hilarious. xD
Phoenix Dark Darth Enlightenment!
I read that as Phoenix Dank Darth Enlightenment, which seems apt for these troglodites.
Hey dummies, in case you did not notice futrelle did not allow a debate, he simply made a couple of statements he did not allow with which he did not allow argument and then spiked the ball. How pathetic.
Seriously, why are these people such asstards?
Scarletpipistrelle, portmanteaus of “retard” are still using “retard” as a pejorative. Please refrain from using them here. Thank you.
/mod mode
“Dank Enlightenment” is a winner!
ronehjr
Hey chucklefuck, if you think women’s suffrage is even up for debate, you’ve just outed yourself as a misogynist idiot. Congratulations.
No shit, Sherlock. Hint: a dude-only debate about the basic rights of women is inherently an idiotic concept.
That’s a limitation of Twitter, isn’t it? It’s hard to make a full, coherent argument in 140 characters; you have to kind of write the broad outline and hope that the readers are intelligent enough to fill in the details on their own. Here’s a paraphrase of the debate so far:
– Should women have the right to vote?
– Sure, why not? Voting is a basic human right.
– Should people have the right to vote in elections in places where they aren’t citizens and haven’t established residency?
– No. Allowing that sort of voting is contrary to the general spirit of democratic self-government. The reasoning behind this is way too hard to explain on Twitter, but we could discuss it elsewhere.
– So some people don’t have the right to vote in some elections?
– Yes. Getting back to the original topic, is there any particular reason why women should be denied the right to vote?
– Should people below the legal voting age be allowed to vote?
– Yes. In fact, only children should be allowed to vote, not adults. [Note: This is a rhetorical gambit, not a sincerely-held belief. It’s designed to elicit a broad description of a theory of voting rights, as opposed to a point-by-point list of exceptions and special cases.]
Note that no MRAs were able to attempt rebut the last point; they just declared victory and ran away. (There’s actually a pretty obvious rebuttal, but I’m not going to post it here, so that we can continue to taunt MRAs over their inability to figure it out. I mean, if they can’t successfully argue that children shouldn’t have the vote, how can they expect to convince anyone that women shouldn’t have the vote?)