Scott Adams: without access to sex, men can become killers

So if you are wondering how men become cold-blooded killers, it isn’t religion that is doing it. If you put me in that situation, I can say with confidence I would sign up for suicide bomb duty. And I’m not even a believer. Men like hugging better than they like killing. But if you take away my access to hugging, I will probably start killing, just to feel something. I’m designed that way. I’m a normal boy. And I make no apology for it.

Read more: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/133406477506/global-gender-war

I know Scott Adams is a little crazy on the gender topic but wow.

I mean, yeah, it is super lame how a lot of the Arabic countries are horrible and backward when it comes to gender equality. That is a fact. But this is a bit much even for him.

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I gave up on him years ago. He is a horrible person.

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I think there is a point being made here, in a rather messed up way.
Guys get weird over sex. Fair enough.

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Aren’t there studies that show that easy access to porn on the Internet correlates to a reduction in gender violence by men? I mean even if you accept the central premise, thanks to the wonders of the Internet men can get porn to satisfy those urges anywhere on the planet, in every kink flavor ever invented and then some.

(obligatory Avenue Q “internet is for porn” musical video here)

So you would have to become a killer if you can’t get access to real physical sex with a woman only, because porn is not getting the, er, “job” done?

I always dread seeing whatever the latest insane thing Scott Adams is saying. He’s one of those guys who really isn’t very bright, isn’t well educated, has terrible critical reasoning skills, but his popularity means unwitting victims see his dingbat knee-jerk ideas. He’s like ESR when ESR talks about anything but Linux.

He actually sincerely posited that women keep getting interrupted by men because they never shut up. Then he tacks on “My point is that men are assumed guilty in this country” where there was no point to begin with, he just really felt the need to throw out some incoherent misogyny. Then he linked to another page where he explained that women are really paid less on average because on average they’re shorter. And instead of realising he’s babbling incoherently, that magical lack of self-awareness keeps it flowing, from dumb to dumber, until it reached its apotheosis of stupidity, the mutilated metaphor “linguistic kill shot” - “If you kill infidels, you will be rewarded with virgins in heaven. But if you kill your own leaders today – the ones holding the leash on your balls – you can have access to women tomorrow. And tomorrow is sooner.” Scott Adams psyche is a fractal of stupidity.

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How he got there was a crime against human rationality. From the 50,000 foot view, there’s a trace of a point in his conclusion, but where he wound up was completely dense if looked at with any granularity.

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Well, I have been looking for a new pickup line…

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I think there’s an element of this rant that bears consideration; the systemic devaluation of adult male human life in the media is so familiar it’s tuned out as background noise.

In this country, any solution to a problem that involves killing millions of adult men is automatically on the table.

It’s not due to some fever-dream matriarchy though; it’s one of the many shitty consequences of a warlike patriarchy, as well as the fact that adult males are relatively dispensable from a Darwinian standpoint.

Come to think of it, I reckon that same perspective looks kindly on the no access to sex = suicidally violent hypothesis. As for whether porn can fix it, I imagine not so much if we’re considering radical Islamists who say stuff like flying kites is blasphemy.

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I remember that years ago, Scott Adams decided to give up blogging because the negative reaction to his posts was hurting his book sales.

I wish he had the self-awareness to follow through on this long term.

However, if the internet has taught us one thing, it’s that the most obnoxious people are also the ones least aware of it in themselves. Either that or they are totally aware of it and are so convinced of their personal righteousness that they ignore it.

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On gender, yeah, he’s nuts, but I might maybe go along with a “touch deprivation” hypothesis when it comes to violence among men in patriarchal cultures. But this isn’t culturally universal. Arab and Afghan culture both have very accepting attitudes to platonic physical displays of male-to-male affection. Men embrace and hold hands regularly in these societies. So it doesn’t really hold for suicide bombers in these cultures. Also, contrary to popular belief, these cultures do not produce offspring by mitosis. People know what sex is over there.

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Howso? I think I’ve heard murmurs here and there, but I honestly just thought he made relatively boring comics. (OT: Why are newspaper comics so insufferably boring? It’s not like they’re afraid to offend, they publish political cartoons, too.) I’m simply not aware of his horribleness.

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He tries to explain himself in this post (which also includes the original article that was ‘taken out of context’):

But perhaps I can summarize my viewpoint so you can understand why I’m such a misogynist asshole douche bag. Here’s my view in brief:

You can’t expect to have a rational discussion on any topic that has an emotional charge. Emotion pushes out reason. That is true for all humans, including children, men, women, and people in every range of mental ability. The path of least resistance is to walk away from that sort of fight. Men generally prefer the path of least resistance. The exception is when men irrationally debate with other men. That’s a type of sport. No one expects opinions to be changed as a result.

Are women more emotional than men? I’m not sure how you measure that sort of thing. On the emotional scoreboard, does one person’s anger equal another person’s excitement? All I know for sure is that the Men’s Rights group I poked with a stick has some irritable dudes.

He does spend most of the time berating MRAs, but here’s the paragraph that people really didn’t like:

The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.

Even after reading his explanation, it still looks like he’s saying that you shouldn’t let yourself get dragged down to a woman’s level of argument.

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When we get home, access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman. If the woman has additional preferences in terms of temperature, beverages, and whatnot, the man generally complies. If I fall in love and want to propose, I am expected to do so on my knees, to set the tone for the rest of the marriage.

Okay first off, I’m not big on criticizing someone’s “game” in a world where there is such a thing as PUAs, but good grief man, you need to up it. He is, perhaps unwittingly, revealing to anyone who can read that his idea of a fun romantic liaison involves being feckless at someone until they take pity on you and give you charity sex. Second, I think he might still be living in a fifties movie set in the forties or something: You get married to the girl next door and then she just turns into the ol’ ball and chain. I think I literally saw that movie in black and white. WTF.

Personally, I don’t go on dates.

I’m shocked I tell you. Shocked.

Women have made an issue of the fact that men talk over women in meetings. In my experience, that’s true. But for full context, I interrupt anyone who talks too long without adding enough value. If most of my victims turn out to be women, I am still assumed to be the problem in this situation, not the talkers. The alternative interpretation of the situation – that women are more verbal than men – is never discussed as a contributing factor to interruptions.

This guy just need to come out and say what he really thinks: That women don’t have much to say of any value. It boils down to, “Oh you know how women love to talk up a gale. You know how these broads are.” I’m actually struggling to mock him here, because it’s not even low-hanging fruit. That fruit has fallen to the ground, attracted flies, and is well on its way to becoming fertilizer.

The top-ranked men have multiple wives and the low-ranked men either have no access to women, or they have sex with captured slaves.

So wait, they do have access to sex, but they’re killers anyway? I think you failed to keep track of what little point you were trying to make. You’ve got a dimple where your point used to be. You have negative a point.

The photos show mostly men of fighting age. No one cares about adult men, so a 1% chance of a hidden terrorist in the group – who might someday kill women and children – is unacceptable.*

I see a lot of men who are part of a family, actually. But if you look at the numbers, this is manifestly incorrect. It’s pretty typical for certain kinds of conflict to generate mostly women and children as refugees. Also, a 1% chance is unacceptable? So you’re also going to expel every group in this country that has a 1% chance of one of its members perpetrating a terrorist attack? Yeah, that’s not going to happen. Fuck you and your desperate attempts to pass this off as logic.

I don’t recall anyone complaining about leaving millions of innocent adult males to horrible suffering.

Mainly because I was basically unaware of your existence until now, so yeah, fuck you.

If you kill infidels, you will be rewarded with virgins in heaven. But if you kill your own leaders today – the ones holding the leash on your balls – you can have access to women tomorrow. And tomorrow is sooner.

Ah, the ol’ 72 virgin meme. I think I’m starting to understand this doofus. I don’t know where this came from, because it’s not terribly prevalent in theocratic exhortations to violence that I’ve seen. There is a concept of everlasting paradise, in which the enjoyment of sex is a part, but this purported fixation on sex among jihadists as a rationale for sacrifice is vastly overstated. Growing up around people sympathetic to jihadists or otherwise having access to Wahhabist and Salafist religious materials, I never saw it. You want to know the first time I heard about 72 virgins? Watching a bit on Comedy Central. Maybe I just wasn’t exposed to the right reading material, but I feel pretty confident in saying that it’s really not a thing.

There is a reference to “kawa’iba atrabah” which could be interpreted as “voluptuous companions” up in heaven. I’ve heard of that, that is a thing- but not a terribly big one. No one is really harping on this. In places like Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s a lot easier to harp on things like the Haditha massacre, or drone strikes. With the Assad government having rolled out chemical weapons, there is an incredible diversity of causes that serve as great fodder for generating recruits. People do occasionally see past their own nose. Or dick, as the case may be.

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It depends on where you’re counting. Overall, these are the figures for Syrian refugees from the UN report:

These are the 2015 numbers for Germany:

If your asylum policy requires people to take dangerous journeys on overcrowded boats and through countries where people are hostile and where there is a significant chance of death, abuse etc., you are selecting for men of fighting age.

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That was my first thought, actually, but I decided to look up the stats to make sure that the remark accorded with reality and I came up with the numbers from the report I cited. But yes, I think you’re right. This isn’t an easy journey. Enough corpses have washed up on enough beaches to bear testament to that fact.

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It’s not even a bad thing that so many men are coming to Europe (although of course the lack of women is a problem). Considering how low the risk to us is and the fact that we’re helping to drain ISIS of potential fighters, it looks like good value for money. As for the idea that ISIS has that much to do with lack of access to sex, this article is interesting. A few excerpts:

This man is 26, the eldest of 17 children from two mothers (that is, his father had two wives at the same time), from Kirkuk. He completed sixth grade, meaning that at least he was literate, unlike others we were to interview. He is married, with two children, a boy named “Rasuul,” meaning Prophet, and a girl named “Rusil,” the plural of Prophet—indicating the centrality of Islam to his life. He was working as a laborer to support his huge family when he hurt his back and lost his job. It was then, his story goes, that a friend, from the same tribe but only distantly related, approached him with the offer to work for ISIS. The story has been honed through repeated interrogation and the trial, and comes out pat. Life under the Islamic State was just terror, he says; he only fought because he was terrorized. Others may have done it from belief, but he did not. His family needed the money, and this was the only opportunity to provide for them.

During more informal questioning about his family and tribe comes this telling statement: “We need the war to be over, we need security, we are tired of so much war…. all I want is to be with my family, my children.”

This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.”

These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe.

I think it’s easy to claim that men want sex, when what is more important is stability, community and economic opportunity. Not that sex is irrelevant, but it isn’t stopping people from becoming ISIS fighters. In fact, having a family may even be a contributing factor.

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Right, sex is perfectly relevant, but unlike a lot of other biological and social imperatives, it doesn’t necessarily demand immediate satisfaction. I don’t think people really believe that they’re never going to have sex unless they go to heaven. The option to have sex “tomorrow” exists. There’s a convenient answer you can give to a young person who’s never experienced a lot of life when you try to convince them to sacrifice themselves: Offer pie in the sky when you die. But the “fixation/deprivation” theory doesn’t hold up to cursory analysis.

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My shitty little 2 cents?

I always thought the more plausible rationale going through these fighters heads is: “I can either stay here with my family, have no real job and make no living while watching my friends and family and town get blown up by the 18th drone strike this month. Or I could try to join ISIS, and send some money back home.”

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