Hmmm. How about: Our REAL problem is that many men have no choice but to rape because they have no opportunities to date attractive women. https://t.co/5EmQlDDvMs
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 26, 2017
Our REAL problem is that many men have no choice but to rape because they have no opportunities to date attractive women.
An interesting “defense”. So if I can’t land a date with Scarlett Johansson, I can justifiably rape someone? If someone finds Ann Coulter attractive and asks her out, she’d better put out, because turning him down means he’ll go on a rape rampage?
It’s also a curious binary. If you don’t get a date, your only alternative is rape?
Maybe she’s also the Queen of Stupid.
Was she not being sarcastic? The tweet to which she was replying was,
I do not think she proposes it as a valid argument, it seems to me like she thinks it is some smart repartee, rebuking the original stamenet about Mexicans by argumentum ad absurdum. Apparently she thinks that by posting an evidently absurd argument about rape she points out the absurdity of an argument about migration. As a conservative of couse she really sees the two scenarios as genuinely equivalent. To such like her the poor are always to blame for their lot and should just suck it up. We have no shortage of such people here in EU too.
I hate to do this since Ann Coulter is evil for so, so ,so may reasons.. but I think you’ve misinterpreted that tweet…
She was responding to another tweet: “Our REAL problem is that many Mexicans have no choice but to go illegally to USA because they have no opportunities at home.”
She’s basically trying show that the same logic applied to rape would be ridiculous. I don’t think her argument really works, but she’s not defending rape.
Charly @3
I wonder if someone should tell Ms. Coulter that we have seen real men apparently argue similar things on the internet with the serious belief that they are owed sex from women by whatever means necessary. Argumentum ad absurdum generally doesn’t work when you run into Poe’s Law head-on. (That is, other people have argued what you consider self-evidently absurd in all seriousness.)
Coulter is just being insulting, which is par for the course. The fact is that there are plenty of jobs in the U.S. that attract migrants, illegal or otherwise, and the real problem is that U.S. immigration laws create illegal immigration. The Republican Party fearmongers the issue for votes from whites, who have no problem hiring Mexicans to roof their house, or work in meat packing to supply their meat, or work in fields to pick their produce, etc., etc., etc.
Bigots always fail at analogies. That is one thing that you can count on them to do.
What would Ann Coulter know about how it is to be an attractive woman or a Mexican?
As an Incel (in the original sense of the word, not those Red/Black Pill creeps) I take umbrage at being used in Coulter’s shitty, racist analogy. Refugees are owed safety as a basic human right. My inability to find a mate is my own damn problem.
Yeah… that’s clever….
Let’s not do that, shall we.
@4:
Her claim fails in large part because rape causes direct harm to an individual. Just coming to the United States illegally to find work doesn’t really hurt anybody, directly (and generally not even indirectly). Besides which not getting laid is not the same as being unsure how you’ll support yourself and/or your family.
The few people who still take Coulter seriously probably won’t get the distinction, though, which is probably her primary motivator.
To the men (of course, it’s men) defending Coulter by claiming that her statement is sarcasm that is simply parallel to the statement she’s replying to. No! Fuck No!
@12 Dean
I don’t know whose comments you were reading because none of the comments here defend Coulter. Coulter made a snarky comment equating a lousy justification for rape with a justification for illegal immigration. PZ writes a post about Ann excusing rape. Several commenters point out, no she isn’t. She’s drawing an albeit crappy analogy. How is that defending her?
Well at least your superior thinking skills shine by comparison with this post huh?
I thought PZ’s cat was the queen on evil.
This is like, advanced stage dogwhistling. To any normal person it’s abhorrent but also visibly her attempt at responding to someone else. Meanwhile, the chuds that make up her actual readerbase just like, nod in agreement completely unironically.
Just coming to the United States illegally to find work doesn’t really hurt anybody,
It’s complicated. The availability of cheaper labor, who will work without benefits, allows labor costs to be kept artificially low. Combine that with union-busting, and you’ve got shit jobs that “nobody wants” because they don’t pay a living wage. The robber baron industrial capitalists liked bringing in immigrant labor to break strikes or weaken unions. When you hear “if we get rid of the migrants, the cost of your orange juice will skyrocket” is the opening bar of that song.
Of course, if the immigrants had the vote, or could legally join unions, that would just break everything.
We shouldn’t blame immigrant workers because the bigger system of oppression that they operate within hasn’t got a nice role for them. I do wish they would help implode the system by organizing and not being one of the axes of “divide and conquer.” If that happened, though, the retribution from the establishment would be brutal.
@chris61
#13
I don’t believe that Dean was talking about men on this blog, but (conservative?) men outside FtB.
Trivializing it isn’t that much better…
I think it’s pretty clear that in the original context* Coulter was not defending rape. There are certainly plenty of other arguments to be made against what she said and how she said it, but I think it’s a gross misinterpretation to cast it as defending rape, as this blog post seems to do.
It’s important that we don’t make unfair arguments like this. Not out of respect for Coulter (I personally don’t think she deserves any) but out of respect for ourselves.
* Note that the original context was not present at all here for at least some people. While on my tablet later on I saw a Twitter-formatted image including both Coulter’s tweet and Garcia’s tweet to which she was responding, on my PC browser (which uses various tracker blocking tools, particularly for sites like Twitter) where I originally read this post I saw only the text of Coulter’s tweet. Only Coulter’s text, and not Garcia’s, was included in the body of the post.
Curt Sampson, first of all, it amuses me you apparently have taken no notice of Azkyroth’s point.
Second, I am also amused that you blame the site for an artefact of your own filtering.
(Yeah, I myself run NoScript, and am currently only allowing [checks] 13 of 23 domains — that’s misleading, too, since allowing some of those will cause requests to additional ones in a horrible cascade. But I am aware that I am so doing)
Third, you are not accounting for all the context available; I refer you to Porivil @16.
@Dean Austin #12
In case you mean me: Pointing out that Ann Coulter appears to be using a different evil and inane argument than the one that is dissed in PZs article is not a defense, but a clarification.
Just to be clear – trivializing rape by using it in a crappy analogy of a “gotcha” argument game is just as morally abhorrent and evil as is actually defending rape. She is evil in either case. I should have written that in my first comment, but I thought that it need not saying because it seemed quite self-evident to me..
John Morales, I did indeed notice and note Azkyroth’s point:
As I wrote that I was thinking specifically about Azkyroth’s post just before mine, as well as other things mentioned in comments here; I’m sorry that didn’t come across clearly.
I’m not clear on what “site” you think I’m blaming for “an artifact of my own filtering,” but I intended the note about what I saw differently for the embedded Twitter quote to be merely informational for those who think that a Twitter embed (or whatever the heck that is) always includes the tweet to which main tweet is replying.
Where the disingenuousness comes in is that immediately after the embed Myers copies the text into his post itself without including the tweet to which it’s replying. I think that’s definitely unfairly removing important context.
Porivil @16 is another argument that I accept as reasonable (I’m not saying it’s clearly correct, just that it’s worth considering), and again, I did intend to take it into account in my statement quoted above. But just because it’s a reasonable argument to make doesn’t mean it’s fair to evaluate it without the context of the tweet to which Coulter was replying. I think it’s also a reasonable argument to make, based on what I’ve seen so far, that Coulter, for all the problems with what she believes and says, doesn’t actually approve of rape.
If you think she really does, present some better evidence for it. If you just want to accuse her of holding bad views, there’s plenty else, even in this very statement itself in context, to substantiate that without resorting to what looks like misrepresentation.
By that logic, we should have the right to steal from the rich and powerful, right???
Has Coulter never heard of prostitutes? A person doesn’t have to be handsome or even particularly decent-looking to have sex with a prostitute, assuming he can afford to do so—and assuming he can find one, no thanks to SESTA/FOSTA. They’re in the business of having sex; no rape needed. (And before anyone makes the absurd claim that “all prostitution is rape,” let me assure them I know plenty of women in that profession, and that’s exactly what they consider it: A profession, not an assault.)
The analogy Coulter is using is stupid anyway. Apparently, she thinks that living, working, and contributing to society in the US without filling out the right paperwork is morally equivalent to raping someone.
We have tons of good people who contribute to the country in numerous ways who can only come here illegally because US immigration laws are bullshit.
It’s even more bullshit to compare these people to rapists who think they’re entitled to sex.