Skepchick: May the Farce Be With You

Ok, I'm being lectured on twitter about a few things. As an aside, I'm now aware of something called twitlonger, which allows full thoughts to be expressed. Nifty. But I have a blog, so there.

This discussion is between myself and @antitheistangie, who earlier tonight posted a tweet saying, in essence, whaaaaaaa she didn't know how to express her current whine.  I tweeted in response something along the lines of that she should contact Rebecca Twatson; she's excellent at engineering a whine out of nothing.

Angie responds:

Funny, I don't see being sexually approached by a strange man late at night in enclosed space as "nothing".

This was news to me, so I tweeted in response:

I don't recall hearing a story of such an incident. Someone propositioned her for sex at night? Holy shit! She ok?

And now we're off to the races. Angie responds:

Elvatorgate - a strange man asks her to go with him to his motel room for "coffee" at 4 am. Sounds like a proposition to me.

 I respond that I was unaware she had access to information I didn't. Alas, I went on to say, I didn't account for her psychic powers. My bad.  It's then that I learn the rate of rape is like super uberhigh such that women should actually be in fear.  I go on to note that the rape statistics aren't alarmingly high, and ask her if she's in mortal fear of driving to the coffee shop. It's worth noting that several thousand people have died or been seriously injured in a car crash since I started writing this post.  Yes, thousands of them. About 50 million a year - that's all of California and all of Texas combined.  And this isn't an "alarmingly high" rate of injury/death.

So, she responds that "1 in 4" female university students are raped. This statistic is absolutely meaningless with respect to Rebecca Twatson as she's not a university student and thus unaffected by those statistics.  Never fear though, I our steely-eyed statistically retarded activist has an answer:

Women are told:
- Don't talk to strange men
- Don't be alone with strange men
- Don't be alone at night
- Be scared of men at night
- Don't get drunk
- Watch your drink so no one slips drugs into it
- Don't walk your dog at night
- etc, etc, etc.

There you have it. Women are told to be afraid of men. There you have it - it's completely rational now:  someone told them it's OK.

Not to be swayed by reality, she goes on to point out that I've strawmanned her argument, when I said that pointing out their xenophobia isn't, alas, sexist. But implying half of the human population is a rapist-in-waiting is actually sexist. You know, Schrodinger's Rapist and all that.  Somehow, responding to that and her assertion that the rape statistics are alarmingly high (and then she cites statistics not applicable to Rebecca Twatson to boot) is a strawman of her position.

I've asked her what feature of the argument I've distorted and then argued against. I'm waiting on her response right now.  Ok, now I have it: once every 2 minutes a man, woman or child is sexually assaulted in the US. Let's forget that US crime stats don't hold up in Ireland, how do the statistics of anything done to a group to which Rebecca Twatson isn't a member apply to her in the first place?

So, you can read the twitter conversation yourselves.  Apparently, being unable to answer how US crime statistics are an argument for what happens Ireland confused her. Further, it confused her that Rebecca Twatson, by definition, didn't fit into any of the stats she quoted:  she's not a university student, man or child.

The answer, such as it was one, to how US crime statistics matter in Ireland is that because of how Rebecca Twatson was raised in the US, she's allowed certain liberties in Ireland. I never did get the answer if that included the right to vote there.

And, apparently, if you say that someone can make up something to whine about over nothing, what you've actually said is the thing in question is something you're against. For instance, my saying she finds a reason to whine over nothing means that she's not allowed to find something creepy. See how that works? When asked if that would include other things, I was labelled a troll.

It's amazing how the feminist mind fails to work. :(

And thus ended my twitter discussion with a mentally deficient half-wit. Angie, if you do read this, I highly suggest you take a class in statistics and set theory before mentioning either again; you are profoundly uneducated in both areas of mathematics. Were it not the case the shit you spout can actually do damage, it would have been funny to see on display such a near perfect ignorance of statistical modeling.

Pathetic.