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!
—
I first read ‘lambda’ as lambada, so now I’m going to see if I can find that scene from Lion King 1.5 on youtube.
Despite my degree in mathmatics, my delicate ladybrains cannot handle these guys maths…
It’s like they’ve taken mathy terms and tossed them for salad. It looks like it’s supposed to be meaningful, but all the work is missing or scrawled sideways in the margins, the steps don’t flow, and the conclusions are ridiculous!
Is there an MRA textbook out there? Because it really feels like they’re accidentally copying down the answers for the next chapter of misogyny in answer to the current chapter’s questions.
I know exactly where Vox was intending to go. He probably wanted to say that because we don’t let children vote, women shouldn’t vote because they resemble children cognitively because of “biotruth” and evo psych. He would then pull out a study from the prestigious Alpha University from the state of Alphafornia, or some article in the extremely reputable scientific journal “Psychology Today.” I’ve seen this happen whenever people try to “debate” Red Pillers. If you call them on this, they’ll accuse of denying truth.
Did somebody say Lambada?
I’d rather a Lambada guy than a “lambda” guy…because Lambada guys can DANCE.
@Bina: I guess Teddy-boy just has to do SOMETHING to feel…adequate, considering what a bobble he’s made of his professional (?) life thus far.
As best I can tell, Dipshit’s background is this:
i, He has a noted religious wackadoodle of a father who made a few million in telecommunications, and who then went to jail for saying he was a sovereign citizen and didn’t have to pay taxes. I’ve seen him rant bout the unfairness of the government for jailing dear old Daddy.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Robert_Beale
ii, His mother turned his father in for tax evasion. That must make family reunions a hoot.
iii, Apparently, Daddy stashed a lot of cash outside the US. Apparently, someone in Daddy’s family was sought by the US IRD for helping him with this cash. Dipshit lives outside the US, and seems to have a reasonable family living in Milan with no real means of support – unless you can make a middle-class lifestyle in Italy by selling a few thousand dollars of self published fantasy drivel annually to other loons. Draw your own conclusions.
iv, He’s never really succeeded in ANYTHING, despite the boasting. Seriously – check it out – “game designer” – one and a half games that sunk without trace. “Musician” – band that sunk without trace. “SF writer” – only known for being a public ass, in a field where even successful writers usually need day jobs.
His best gig ever seems to have been being paid to write opinion columns on World Nut Daily – which dear old Daddy helped set up and was a board member.
v, He sets a lot of store in being a self-proclaimed “alpha”, picking fights with people more successful than himself, and in enticing equally idiotic fools to rant on about women, Jews, blacks and liberals while kissing his ass. It’s his only real form of validation.
@Phoenician, thanks. That’s about what I figured was the case…
@mnemosyne: I know exactly where Vox was intending to go. He probably wanted to say that because we don’t let children vote, women shouldn’t vote because they resemble children cognitively because of “biotruth” and evo psych.
I believe it’s because “Girls voting ruin everything”.
Currently two countries allow men but not women to vote – Saudi Arabia and the Vatican City. The latter is a special case – only 199 guys in dresses have the vote. The former is, presumably, Dipshit’s role model of a well-run society.
RE: cloudiah
The ones I least like to debate with are the intactivist crowd, because even though I agree that routine male infant circumcision is wrong, I apparently never think it’s quite WRONG ENOUGH.
I have never met a more joyless lot. I had TWO people pop up and go, “BUT” when I posted on tumblr about how hilarious Foreskin Man was. My critique of the comic for being a sloppy piece of racism was REALLY about how much I love circumcision.
*eyeroll*
RE: seraph4377
I suspect a lot of people – and this goes double for MRA’s, PUA’s, etc. – never quite get over their teen years
I agree with this entirely. Seriously, a lot of these things just read like the wangsty poetry guys subjected me to in high school about how the pretty girls never looked at them and SO TORTURED.
@LBT
Besides, it’s obviously G’nort. 😛
Is there something wrong with men wearing dresses? Or with men wearing garments that are considered masculine in their culture but which happen to resemble dresses in ours? Maybe we should just keep our criticisms of the Vatican to things that don’t involve gender policing or mocking other cultures.
Seems like the main argument for why women should not have suffrage is always that they aren’t smart enough to vote intelligently, so the menfolk will take care of it.
Are people like VD aware that this was more or less the same argument made by the British Parliament, as to why the people in the American colonies didn’t need representation in Parliament?
For some weird reason, I doubt it.
The manospherians really do talk like cheesy cartoon villains.
@emilygoddess: Is there something wrong with men wearing dresses? Or with men wearing garments that are considered masculine in their culture but which happen to resemble dresses in ours? Maybe we should just keep our criticisms of the Vatican to things that don’t involve gender policing or mocking other cultures.
Ever worn a lava-lava? I have no problem in saying that I have, while I was visiting Raro.
In making fun of the College of Cardinals, I’m commenting on the irony of a hierarchy that friggin’ preens like a bunch of medieval peacocks while congratulating themselves on speaking for the poor and preaching that women can’t be priests because they’re not serious enough.
Seriously – the Papacy, the College of Cardinals – they’re goddamned hangovers modelling themselves in style on the days of feudalism. Fuck them.
You weren’t really commenting on any of that, because you didn’t actually say any of that. What you said was “guys in dresses.”
Yeah, unless what you meant to say was “dresses made out of GOLD”, Phoenician, I’m not really seeing it.
To be clear, I don’t think “men in dresses in the Vatican” was meant as a gendered insult, but I don’t think the doubling down response is particularly helpful either.
Also, because I have feels! Equating the wearing of dresses with preening and vanity does hit women with some splash damage, even if that wasn’t the intention, so if the preening frivolous bit is what you intend to critique then using dresses as a shorthand for that is unhelpful to women as a group and thus best avoided.
Agreed that there’s nothing intrinsically mockable about wearing dresses (or garments that can be read as dresses), but I don’t really get how the Vatican is “another culture”.
Mainstream Western Christianity, for most of Western Christianity’s history, surely? – and with dress codes in the hierarchy followed also by other churches.
Maybe it’s just me: an excommunicate cradle Catholic.
Virginia Woolf wrote that when men (in her culture at the time) wanted to worship god or dispense justice or open Parliament – things women were prohibited from doing – they had to dress in long robes, stockings, wigs and so on, which otherwise were items confined to women.
Which is pretty bizarre, though I think she was exaggerating about the wigs.
Same here, sparky! Plus humour, another thing MRAs lack.
I was thinking that too, Aerina. Plus of course Scalzi has an actual real wife and daughter and they obviously all adore each other.
Okay, this made me snorfle.
The cake (of soap) is a LIE!
(And the deodorant is shifty as fuck also.)
Plus clerical robes are a fucking uniform. They’re required to wear the things whether they like them or not. (I would not be happy at having to wear cerise or white, let me tell you.)
She was being a bit ahistorical if she didn’t specify that those things were mostly limited to women in her time. The whole point of all those robes is that they’re fossilied fashions from earlier times. Doing that is nothing new, either: when you see portraits of members of the Order of the Garter in full robes, like George I here, they’re wearing trunk hose, which had gone out of fashion nearly a century before, in this case. It’s nothing to do with feminisation or appropriating women’s clothes. Clerical robes refer back to centuries in which long robes were the fashion. Calling them dresses is just ignorant and meaningless.
By the same logic the thobes that men wear in the Gulf states would be dresses too, and I’m pretty sure there’s no way to spin that as them something something frivolous and womanly.
That’s a fair point. To me, the Vatican has always seemed like an insulated cultural island, where new fashions are resisted when they’re encountered at all (there doesn’t seem to be much interaction or exchange with the rest of humanity), and change can take centuries to sneak in through the cracks. We’re talking about people who routinely used Latin until the 1960’s. The manner of ritual/official dress is clearly a holdover from earlier times. But I was raised Protestant, so maybe this is normal to other people. Certainly you can make very similar arguments for judges, with their robes and their Latin and their similarly archaic traditions.
I think I went with “another culture” because I don’t see a clear distinction between mocking residents of the Vatican for their “dresses” and mocking, say Maasai men for their “dresses”. But maybe I’m conflating things. I know there’s a vast power differential between a Bishop and a random Maasai dude, and maybe I shouldn’t be eliding that difference. I’m open to being corrected on this one.
I don’t think it’s so much “another culture” as ignorance of how fossilisation of fashion works in creating official clothing in Western cultures. It’s been going on a long, long time. Nor does it reflect power: look at servants’ livery. Fashion being turned into uniforms, that’s what it is.
RE: Myoo
Besides, it’s obviously G’nort. 😛
Well-played.
RE: Kittehs
Plus clerical robes are a fucking uniform. They’re required to wear the things whether they like them or not.
Hubby goes to church with a bishop, who’s mentioned how much he LOATHES wearing the collar. Apparently it’s uncomfortable as hell. I can’t imagine what the full ensemble would be like; the papal hat collection ALONE…