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Debating Men’s Rights Activists can be a lot like arguing with a kid who puts his hands over his ears and shouts “la la la I can’t hear you!”
During my abortive debate with Paul Elam on Domestic Violence, I had a hard time getting him to respond to my arguments; instead, he devoted much of his energy to arguing against experts I never cited and arguments I never made.(EDIT: See all my debate posts and some commentary here.)
Now the blogger “Dalrock” has decided to weigh in on the debate — despite the fact that by his own admission he didn’t actually read the whole thing. Not surprisingly, he completely misrepresents my argument:
His argument was that since he could point to more studies showing the orthodox feminist view, his perspective must be right.
Either he didn’t read more than a paragraph or two of what I wrote, or he’s incapable of understanding logic, or, well, he’s a lying liar.
At the moment I’m leaning towards the first explanation; I’m being generous here.
But it’s hard to see the next bit as anything but, well, that lying liar thing.
Mentioning my post responding to Elam’s disgraceful “Bash a Violent Bitch Month” post, which was not even part of the debate proper, Dalrock ignores Elam’s obnoxious provocation and brings up a similarly obnoxious, similarly disgraceful Jezebel post from several years back, in which several Jezebel staffers and a host of commenters there gleefully admitted to beating up boyfriends. (Elam and I both mentioned it in our posts; it was Elam’s excuse for writing his post in the first place.)
According to Dalrock, my response to the Jezebel post went roughly as follows:
The feminist looked like he might come to just in time to avoid the count. He started mumbling incoherently that the link didn’t prove anything, and there weren’t that many women eagerly recounting tales of abusing their boyfriends. Besides, the women were probably lying and had really just been defending themselves. And none of the comments looked that bad to him anyway. Most of those guys probably eventually recovered with proper medical treatment.
Even aside from the dopey boxing metaphor, this is simply fiction. Let’s break it down.
He started mumbling incoherently that the link didn’t prove anything, and there weren’t that many women eagerly recounting tales of abusing their boyfriends.
I didn’t say that.
Besides, the women were probably lying and had really just been defending themselves.
I didn’t say that.
And none of the comments looked that bad to him anyway. Most of those guys probably eventually recovered with proper medical treatment.
I didn’t say that. He’s simply making shit up. Or, as some might put it, lying.
If you want to know what I did say, you can see it here.
When I pointed all this out in Dalrock’s comments, he responded with:
You mean you weren’t really unconscious in a boxing ring knocked out by a commenter, and came to just before the final count?
Yeah, the fact that you made a dumb boxing joke means it’s totally ok to lie about what I said.
To my regular readers: Sorry about all the drama here. To paraphrase Bob Dole, I’m just trying to get these guys to “stop lying about my record.”
Also: Elam himself poked his head up in the comments to Dalrock’s post to offer a response of sorts to my final debate post; needless to say, it’s pretty feeble. You can read it here, and if you skip down a few posts you should be able to read my response to it; I will also be appending it to my original post.
