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Sparkle (6)
If I have Dilbert comic strip artist Scott Adams to thank for anything this week, it's for causing me to reflect on a few important questions:
Where is my attention going? What gets my time? Who deserves my outrage, and why?
Adams has a blog. Earlier this month, he posted (what I thought as soon as I read it was) a rambling diatribe about men's rights, that included what could have been construed as incendiary comments about women and people with disabilities and, to a different degree, incarcerated men.
He pulled the post, but lots of people read it anyway, cached and copied it, and sent it about the Internet.
Here's the part where he explains that men's rights are for pussies who are not cats:
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.
Charming. People reacted angrily, as people of the Internet will do. Feministing responded, and Adams commented on the post, saying that the people on Feministing couldn't read very well, and that he wrote what he wrote for the specific, very astute (read: they think like he does) readers of his blog, and therefore others couldn't be expected to understand it. Seriously.
As emotion increases, reading comprehension decreases. This would be true of anyone, but regular readers of the Dilbert blog are pretty far along the bell curve toward rational thought, and relatively immune to emotional distortion.
Yesterday, he wrote another post, responding to people who he says referred to him as a misogynist, asshole douchebag, rehashing and adding to what he said on Feministing. He mused on how basically everyone who responded to his original post emotionally just took it out of context, but thanks for the traffic.
The short answer is that I write material for a specific sort of audience. And when the piece on Men's Rights drew too much attention from outside my normal reading circle, it changed the meaning. Communication becomes distorted when you take it out of context, even if you don't change a word of the text. I imagine that you are dubious about this. It's hard to believe this sort of thing if you don't write for a living and see how often it happens. I'll explain.
I write for a living, and I don't believe this.
He then claims to be "trying to add diversity" to my "portfolio of thoughts," which he just said was impossible, so I don't know. I'm thinking that Scott Adams is playing with my mind now. I was also told there would be no math.
Let's consider this comment:
But part of being male is the automatic feeling of team. If someone on the team screws up, we all take the hit. Don’t kid yourself that men haven’t earned some harsh treatment from the legal system. On the plus side, if I’m trapped in a burning car someday, a man will be the one pulling me out. It’s a package deal. I like being on my team.
If I interpreted this as a ridiculous expression of white male privilege by someone who has (to my knowledge) never been incarcerated or stuck in a burning car? I'm distorting his words. If I think he's insinuating the irrelevance of the true public sphere as I understand it from communication theory, I'm just not in my right mind. It's Scott Adams's genius world, we're just living in it. Also women can't be president because of PMS, and damned if I didn't just get an excuse to leave rants all over the place that can't be helped
