By David Futrelle
Here’s an interesting little exchange on Tumblr between a woman discussing how common it is for creepy older dudes to catcall girls in their early teens and another woman who thinks it’s no big deal. Because it doesn’t involve alligators.
No, really.
Hey, men’s rights lady, sorry you got chased by an alligator. That would indeed suck. You’d think that the experience might have made you more sympathetic to teen girls having to deal with large predators, but I guess not.
Having conversations with you must be a treat.
“Oh, fuck, I just got robbed at gunpoint.”
“YEAH WELL LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE TIME I GOT CHASED BY AN ALLIGATOR.”
“A guy just stuck a gun in my face and took my wallet and phone!”
“WAS HE BY ANY CHANCE AN ALLIGATOR?”
As logical fallacies go, this is one of the more inventive ones I’ve seen of late. “What about the time I got chased by an alligator” is a form of whataboutism, I guess, but it really needs a name of its own. Argumentum Ad Alligator, perhaps.
Here’s the most effective rebuttal:
H/T — r/TheBluePill
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Good riddance.
Man he sure wrote a lot for someone who didn’t care what I said or thought of him lol. Their so easy.
But now how will I find out how an actuary is apparently a regulator of regulated capitalism?
I get such fun nicknames from trolls here! This one still doesn’t top Chief Manatee though.
O/T, but since the current open thread is far more somber in character I think I’ll leave this here. Some semen retainers are very proud of learning to make eggs which is apparently incompatible with masturbating.
@WWTH
Since I wasn’t witness to that incident, what was the context for being called chief manatee?
Naglfar,
A troll was contending that because no one was taking his side over me, that I must be the ruler of WHTM commenters. The manatee part was a fat joke.
It’s somewhere in this very long and troll filled thread
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/10/28/an-open-letter-to-cassie-jaye-director-of-the-red-pill/
@MansVoice
I believe you mean “words.”
Your nym indicates that you speak for all men (MansVoice, not OneMansVoice or AMansVoice). Could you let the other guys know to check their spelling, dropped words, mangled syntax, grammar, and everything else they find challenging?
Oh well, too bad. I wanted to test again how much I had to rebut him before he decided to pretend I didn’t exist as an out so he could keep claiming he was “winning”, as in other threads where I responded to him.
And frankly, opening up with an ad hominem as puerile as “gut like a slug”? That’s not helping much him being perceived as an immature edgelord.
In his first post here, in the ‘When you find out you have a hot dog’ thread, in the very first word he used – “Fatrelle” – @MansVoice showed us all we needed to know about his intentions and approach to David and to this site and to us.
Juvenile name calling and being contradictory for the sake of being annoying have already been covered, much more entertainingly, by Monty Python and Co in their Argument sketch. I recommend rooms 12 AND 12a to @MansVoice.
@ lizzie
He should develop the art of the bon mot.
Ah and I wanted to point out to him that spellcheck will happily accept “band” because it’s a word.
(I’m honestly not a fan of spellchecking because it tends to transform easily-spotted typos into hard-to-understand word substitutions. Though I am in favour of checking actual spells.)
@Covered in Cat Hair:
Altering weather maps, too.
@SansVoice:
Ha! Muphry’s Law strikes again! (And hits a deserving target.)
You sly devil.
Because you’re terrible at explaining what an actuary does.
1) It’s not “just a white-collar job“. It requires a bachelor’s degree, several years of exams, and a complex certification process. In the US, the starting salary averages $160K. If you were making that kind of bank, it’s 100% certain you would have bragged about that to own all the unemployed welfare-mooching feminists that you believe frequent this site. You certainly weren’t hesitant to brag about HAVING A JOB. (Pretty tone deaf of you, by the way, to do that in the midst of a pandemic where 1 in 5 people have lost their jobs).
2) You claim to “police the capitalists”. An actuary’s job is to calculate the odds of a particular event happening, place a monetary value on it, and set premiums accordingly. Helping large insurance companies hedge their profits against disaster is the very definition of capitalism.
3) Actuaries are experts in high-level math, statistics, and computer science. They’re analytical. They’re comfortable with data. You didn’t display any facility with numbers. You kept linking to the same bogus opinion piece/pseudoscientific study over and over, and were unable to defend it when us laypeople poked holes in it. You never did provide examples of looksmatches to back up your assertions. All you had were ad hominems.
So no. I don’t believe you’re an actuary. Maybe you’re training to be one. If so, better study harder.
@Amtep
Well, it’s certainly important to make sure you have the right one. Other wise you might turn yourself into a newt or summon a herd of bison when you meant to turn on the lights.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
(impressed applause)
@ buttercup
After the Napoleonic Wars a lot of women were left widowed. A couple of actuaries in Scotland realised that by calculating how long a widow was likely to live after the event, the various women affected could all chip in a sum to create a pool of money that could be divided up between them based on that. And that’s how Scottish Widows (a famous life assurance company here) came into being!
We also use actuarial calculations here in some types of court cases.
Say I injure you so your earning capacity is reduced. Rather than pay you £X every year to make up for that, the court calculates a lump sum payment that, taking into account interest you can earn by investing that and the drawdown of the capital sum over time, the money will run out at the moment you keel over.
We use something called Duxbury Tables; so you just look up the claimant’s age in one column and the annual payment equivalent in a row and that gives you the amount to hand over. Magic!
(It’s even easier now as there’s just calculators you put the figures into.)
https://www.iclr.co.uk/knowledge/glossary/duxbury-tables/
Bother. I kept missing out on MV because of my ten hour a day job as a letter carrier. You know, an actual job with actual responsibility and actual physical labor. Oh, but that doesn’t count because I’m a woman and women don’t do physical labor.
Disclaimer: The above was said to piss off the troll. It’s true, but I don’t believe that having a job makes me superior in any way to the unemployed people in the world. Unemployed people deserve respect. I’m mostly lucky.
@Alan:
I was always suspicious of those Scottish widows. The advertising always featured an attractive young woman in mourning gear. Ok, that happens, but she always looked so pleased with herself. I mean, look at this icon from their front page:
Tell me that’s not the face of a woman who persuaded her new husband to take out expensive life insurance, days before his car’s brakes mysteriously failed.
@ moggie
I once got a fatal accident case referred to me by a solicitor friend. She actually knew the family. So, putting on my most sympathetic tone, I made the initial phone call to the bereaved. It was slightly less traumatic than I’d expected. After I put the phone down I said “Wow, talk about the merry widow.”
“Oh, she never liked him.”
It’s funny though how iconic the Scottish Widows imagery has become. There’s even music about them.
Regarding dubious rock album covers I’m surprised no one mentioned the cover to Blind Faith’s self titled release. The topless model used for the cover was 11.
But don’t you dare show some topless adult men on an album cover, that’s icky! The cover to Waking and Dreaming, the 1976 album by Orleans, features the members of the band standing together with no shirts on. I’ve seen it turn up on more than one “terrible album cover” list. (It’s the album that contained Orleans’s biggest hit, “Still the One.”)