The Caymans are Switzerland’s route to the sea


“The former head of Israel’s spy agency criticized Romney’s policy on Iran.”

“[T]he military’s support has shifted toward Obama. Romney has consistently received little financial backing from military donors.”

“She isn’t publicly associated with the U.S. in any other way but she’s now named in this cable. It’s a danger to her life.”

“Syria is Iran’s … route to the sea.” — Mitt Romney.

The Romney ran aground in November 1804 while sailing to join the fleet off Den Helder. She broke up after attempts to float her off failed.”

“It’s been tough finding someone electable who doesn’t make me feel like I’m selling out my own unique vision. Thank goodness for Mitt Romney!

Mitt Romney is running, truly, for a third Bush term.”

“It says, quite loudly, ‘I do not want my tax exemption any more and am also a terrible dinner companion.’”

“We’re going to cut taxes on everyone across the country by 20 percent. Including the top one percent. … I will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income Americans.”

“These rich guys have more at stake because Obama has helped make them richer, which means they have more money with which to try and elect someone who won’t raise their taxes.”

“I’m thankful GM is still making cars. What else would I write about? I’d have no job without that.”

“Really, truly, the last thing we need to worry about is whether the Chinese love our bonds.”

“Coming during a fiscal crisis, that larger political shift, so perfectly reflected in Romney’s lying, should be viewed as a promising development.”

“It’s actually very bad economics to enshrine the private sector as the place from which all good things flow and conversely, the public sector as the evil one incarnate.”

“There is shooting yourself in the foot. Then, there is shooting yourself in the foot, cutting off the foot, placing it upon your head, and then shooting yourself in the foot and in the head simultaneously.”

“While it’s certainly Patriarca’s right to say and write what he likes, the lack of vetting by the Scott Brown campaign, and allowing him to speak for Brown in a TV ad for re-election to the United States Senate is disturbing, as are what appear to be Patriarca’s apparent misogyny, racism, and homophobia.”

“Whatever the case, the obvious conclusion — that the American Right has always contained, and continues to contain, both racist and extremist elements that act out in violent and repugnant ways, and that the current campaign is bringing them back into the mainstream of politics — simply can’t be true.”

“Arizona’s largest county puts wrong date on voter cards. Only in Spanish though. Wonder how that happened?”

“Walsh and Akin start with wanting an absolute ban on abortion, and reason back from that commitment to a world in which rape victims never get pregnant and and mothers’ lives are never threatened by a pregnancy.”

“Mitt Romney is no stranger to shifting positions on reproductive rights, but even for him, his latest move is audacious.”

“Under Romney’s preferred agenda, employers can end contraception coverage for their women employees, and millions of Americans would no longer be able to afford birth control.”

Utah is the most inegalitarian state, with its women earning just 55 cents for every dollar earned by a male Utah resident.”

Bishop ≠ pastor. There’s some overlap, but it’s like saying that a president is a mayor.”

I’m Mormon, and I’m voting for Obama.”

Chronicling Mitt’s Mendacity, Vol. XXXIX

  • Madhabmatics

    Ahh, I see! So if someone says something and I contradict him, we are both hypocrites because we are contradicting each other.

    That is quite an interesting definition of hypocrisy.

  • JustoneK

    It’s like Paul Durant just opened up the mad scientist convention doors and yelled out “PI IS EXACTLY THREE!”

  • Madhabmatics

    I wish he would have as many one on one debates as he wants somewhere else so I could read this comment section without knowing that he is going to try to turn every single comment thread into his personal playbox about how bad feminists are, like he has done on other forums.

    (You know, until they ran him out.)

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2RAPF5V3YPOUWAZGAJ2VCQM76Q Alicia

    I think what Paul is saying is that you have to explicitly attack the other person’s argument. Merely contradicting it isn’t enough to qualify as “object[ing] to the other’s argument at all” unless you start scratching and spitting.

  • Paul Durant


    No, you’re hypocrites because you aren’t actually backing up your position beyond what is required to attack the person you want to attack. Were you not a hypocrite, you would continue to advance this position when it was contradicted by someone who was also attacking the person you wanted to attack. 
    You’re the only one here making those two claims.

    Alicia, just now, said nine minutes before you that obviously misandry exists and nobody can argue it. Invisible Neutrino, thirty minutes before you, dismissed me for even using the word misandry.

  • JustoneK

    You’re still easily dismissed because of that, yes.  I had told you about that – seriously, you can read back.  Because there are a lot of signs of systematic misogyny, as well as racism, transphobia, (dis)ableism, etc. etc. etc.  There are no signs of widespread systematic misandry.

    Alicia did not make the claim that misandry exists and nobody can argue it – she did, however, say that it is frequently and wrongly misattributed to feminist schools of thought.

  • http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/ Invisible Neutrino

    If you were being descriptive and not prescriptive you wouldn’t have implied that it’s fundamentally beneficial and right. Or do you deny doing as much when you wrote, “it is a system created by men and women to benefit and restrict both”? (Bold mine)

    That statement implies that you accept the premises and moreover, believe they are correct prescriptions for male and female behavior.

  • Madhabmatics

    “If I see something I disagree with, I must attack it, come hell or high water, and make every thread about how much I disagree” is exactly his problem, though. A person who does that is pretty insufferable.

    Can you imagine what a message board would look like if every time someone believed something that you didn’t, you had to engage in a knock-down, drag-out argument instead of just going “Well, yeah, me and this dude don’t agree?”

    It would look like this thread. Forever. (BTW this is exactly why he was run off, because he turned every single thread into this.)

  • Paul Durant

    …Do feminists claim that it is fundamentally right when they talk about how men benefit from male privilege? Does it imply they accept the premises and believe them correct? No. So how does saying patriarchy gives men and women different privileges and different oppressions mean I think that’s just a great thing we should keep on doing?

    You’re seeing what you want to see in order to attack me because that is what you want to do.

  • Paul Durant

    Would you stop with this smug posturing “Oh ho ho I know this guy I have the inside scoop he is so dumb and wrong and pathetic”? It is the gooniest thing in the universe. You already did it when you were accusing me of being a penis-worshiping conspiracy theorist, eve though that had nothing to do with anything I’d said or did and you even admitted you only did it because you leapt to the wrong conclusion.

  • EllieMurasaki

    Yeah, I think I’m going to unsubscribe this thread now if it doesn’t bother anyone. Call me when he gets banned.

  • Madhabmatics

    Nah, because your past behavior is extremely relevant to the way you are trying to dominate this board now. The fact that you literally cannot see someone talk about the plight of women without melting down about feminism is extremely relevant.

    Although you got that martyr complex thing going again. “It’s the gooniest thing in the world” – you were a goon longer than I was, but again, you are The One Good One who Knows The Truth.

  • Paul Durant

    By “trying to dominate the board” you mean “defending myself against being attacked and accused of sexism”? That is what you mean, right? Because that’s what happened. I am being ganged up on four on one, and yes I am too stupid and self-hating to cut my losses and accept that you will never ever ever stop being dishonest, but continually defending yourself from attack is not the same thing as “dominating the board”. 

  • Madhabmatics

    By “trying to dominate the board” I mean “Going back to your habit of making every thread about you and how much of a martyr you are for opposing the feminists and the liberals.”

  • Paul Durant

    By “every thread” you mean “the one I was attacked in,” right? Because the thread that’s mostly made up of people attacking me is going to end up being about how I am being attacked. That’s something that you can expect.

  • JustoneK

    Contradiction is not attack.

  • Madhabmatics

     You don’t remember pulling the whole “feminists are conspiring to do evil things?” In a thread on slacktivist six days ago?


    You don’t remember when you melted down about feminism two weeks ago?


    wow it seems as though you have a history of posting nothing but colossal meltdowns about ~the feminists~

  • WalterC

     I’m still a little curious about that gossypium story. I spent a few minutes on Google trying to find any sort of backing for Dr Coutinho’s story besides that Youtube video and a handful of obviously partisan blogs linking to the video and found nothing.

    It’s possible that there just isn’t much online content about it, but I have the suspicion that it is just an unsupported, unverified conspiracy theory that gained traction because it validated the belief by certain people in a feminist conspiracy theory.

    I also noted a distinct lack of 3rd party sources verifying the existence of this story. I couldn’t find a single news article about the drug, or about the conference, or anything about feminist groups shouting down or shutting down Coutinho or any of the other speakers. I couldn’t find any comments by Betty Friedan or other feminist leaders about the boycott (why would they keep it a secret? Boycotts don’t work if no one knows about them!) If something like this did happen, surely someone would have written about it, even once.

    Apart from the lack of external verification or 3rd party, the word choice ascribed to Betty Friedan and her colleagues from the video seemed absurd, almost to the point of sounding like something Mr Burns might say to Smithers (“You fool! Now that we women have gotten control over the reproductive process, why would we ever share this power with the men? Bwahahah!”)

    I’m not saying that it’s definitely not true, but it has all of the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory and I always feel suspicious when someone pushes what looks (to me) like an obvious lie without checking it out.

  • alsafi

    Wow, you guys are still at this. I honor your sheer bloodymindedness, trying to get through to this guy.

    I’m also totally baffled as to what the hell kind of sweet and loving response he expects when he comes in here accusing everyone of being horrible lying idiots who are stupid and dishonest, right off the bat. And now he’s moaning about having to defend himself? Srsly? He started out like a rabid dog, snarling and accusing everyone in sight of dishonesty, he’s kept at it over a thread nearing 400 comments, and we’re supposed to feel pity for him because…? He came in picking a fight. He got one. Talk about shooting your parents and asking the court for mercy because you’re an orphan.

  • BaseDeltaZero

    hey not all the things you said about this person are accurate, but of course he’s still a bad person

    I never said you’re a bad person.  I just said you’re making a fool of yourself.  Which, by coming in here and starting about feminist conspiracies, you kind of are.
    Don’t worry, though, the regulars are making themselves look *worse*.

    I already provided on that subject: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/…    http://www.genderratic.com/p/8…   and the list of 200 studies finding gender symmetry in DV, http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert…  (though they aren’t links). If you are trying to be the honest arbiter type, go back and just look at how much of the responses to me were decrying things I never said.

    Hmm.  It’d be nice to see the data for some of Martin’s individual studies, which I can never seem to find… but that is a *lot* of studies.  Yeah, they mostly use the CTS, but apparently, that’s extremely widespread in any event.  It’s not *impossible* that they’re all wrong (then again, someone kinda has to be wrong in this situation)…
    I mean, 300 studies *can* be wrong… hell, some might be on the same level as giving a truck to a monkey, but right now, I’d lean towards them being at least superficially correct… in  the sense that there is a roughly equal rate of simple assault among intimate partners, but severe abuse is significantly likely to be conducted by males.  Even the cited studies support this (though in the area of 20-30% vs 80-70%, not anything like 2-98%), and it does seem logically consistent.

    Yes, and that was his core mistake. It’s ludicious to suggest that kyriarchy or patriarchy eliminated the risk when these pretty much created the risk in the first place. The risk was almost entirely artificial, caused by giving men not only all the freedom but all the power.

    Well, sort of.  Women were not permitted to take any risk of their own, which, *despite the risk of victimization by their ‘protectors’* amounted to a sum lower amount of risk.  They’re ‘safe’ in the sense that a cattleman’s herd is safe.  Although, of course, this only really works until you start factoring in pregnancy…

    Plus, it really ought to be noted the ‘putting women on a pedestal’ thing is largely an invention of the pre-Victorian/Victorian era.  Before that, they were basically just considered scum that must regrettably be kept around for sex and babies.  The Titanic put women on lifeboats first, a ship two hundred years (let alone five hundred years) earlier would throw them overboard to lower the weight.

    The idea that a woman’s chances of being raped are being greatly exaggerated by feminism is too ludicrous to take seriously. As if women hadn’t generally been treated as male property for most of human history, with rape considered a property crime until recent centuries, and women then and now being wrongly accused of leading on their assailants. Hell, even marital rape was excused on property grounds until the last century.

    This… doesn’t make sense.  How rape was regarded in the past has no actual relation to whether or not the statistics are being inflated presently.  Your evidence and conclusion are both correct, but do not follow from each other…

    You didn’t do that, you came into the thread to say “Guys, did you know that the evil feminist are covering up male abuse?” You aren’t really saying anything substantive about the abuse of male spouses or whatever, you are trying to use it as a cudgel against the great Feminist enemy you see everywhere. The feminists that cover up crimes, the feminists that doctor numbers, the feminists that are “the ally of conservatives” because they ~warn women that a guy might rape them~

    This.  Pretty much this.

     Feminism doesn’t “warn women a guy might rape them”, feminism tells them every man is Schroedinger’s Rapist and they must live in fear at all times and they are a class of victims, by falsifying evidence until it supports their claims and becomes “common knowledge”. 

    I don’t really think that Schroedinger’s Rapist is really *perscriptive*, but rather *descriptive*.  Some women feel threatened by all men because they cannot be certain if they are dangerous – which is bad, not that all women *should* feel threatened by all men…

    That’s gender essentialism and complementarianism, what you just said. It isn’t much of a reach for me to assume that if you believe the above to be true (which you implied with further rationalizations about how it’s Just There and “benefits both”), that you also believe other aspects of gender essentialism including the idea that all women are essentially fungible creatures who behave according to emotion and illogic (as evidenced by people who create memes like “If you’re wrong, you’re wrong. If you’re right, she still thinks you’re wrong; you can’t win.”), and that men are fundamentally straightforward and logical.

    Yes, it is indeed a *description* of a gender essentialist ideology.  He’s saying ‘feminism *continues* to *percieve* women as innate victims of male action.  Not that they *should be*.  This is the crux of his percieved disagreement.  It is a system that restricts both.  It also provides ‘benefits’ to both, in the sense that there are some advantages to either proscribed gender role (active or passive).  Which is great, if you like those benefits!

    Also? Anyone who uses the term “misandry/misandric”? Likely got that from an MRA forum somewhere.

    Or a basic understanding of Greek.

    Because…they’re not incompatible at all?

    Technically not wrong, both he and What About Teh Menz could be wrong for believing in misandry, but… yeah.

  • http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/ Invisible Neutrino

    I’d love to know who else besides MRAs use that term with that frequency.

  • P J Evans

     I don’t think it’s done that way, even in the US.
    Maple syrup has no association with the South, like other syrups (cane and sorghum, mostly). It gets pictures of trees and sleds, instead.

  • BaseDeltaZero

    Not many people, probably.  But at most it only proves he’s been exposed to MRA websites.  That he happens to share some of the same arguments doesn’t necessarily make him the embodiment of evil.  He could afford to dial down the persecution complex a bit, though.

  • P J Evans

     The problem is that he seems to think individuals are the same as and responsible for whatever he hears elsewhere, and he doesn’t then read or listen to the arguments they produce against whatever shit he’s proclaiming.

  • P J Evans

     If he’s going to flounce, maybe he should consider not coming back to see what effect his flounce actually had. Because that’s really making him look like a self-centered fool.

  • Carstonio



    My point was really about what risks women would face in a egalitarian society that they wouldn’t in a patriarchal society. Obviously people face lower risks if they’re prevented from taking risks of their own, but that would apply to both sexes. Our friend hasn’t explained what specific risks women would have faced without patriarchy.


    I was suggesting that the threat of rape for women has been a constant throughout human history because of patriarchy and male entitlement. Our friend implies that the threat has always been rare and that feminists are greatly exaggerating it to bash men.