The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Jay Laze Gets a Lesson in Rhetoric (Or, How NOT to Debate a Feminist)

Posted on | July 13, 2015 | 34 Comments

In 2013, Virginia Beach pizzeria owner Jay Laze gained notoriety by offering a 15 percent discount to customers who were exercising their Second Amendment rights. On his Facebook page last week, Laze commented on an article about an incident in Vietnam, where a water park offered free admission, leading to a mob scene in which “thousands” of men reportedly molested teenage girls wearing bikinis.

A girl is rescued amid the chaos at a Hanoi water park.

Laze compared the park’s error — exposing “80% naked women” to “instinctually driven men with no security” — to sharks in a “feeding frenzy.” And this is just common sense, really.

However, a feminist saw the comment and drew Laze into a debate on his Facebook page. She asked, “can you actually prove it’s human instinct or are you just projecting?” She screencapped the entire exchange and posted it to her Tumblr blog, saying that Laze “stated he’d rape women every time he thought he could get away with it, and that he thinks this is normal male behavior.” Did he actually say that? Well . . .

Laze wrote that this incident in Vietnam was a case of “instinct overriding self control,” and the feminist then asked, “how many times have been unable to stop yourself from raping and molesting?”

This insulting insinuation provoked Laze to respond, “You’re asking the wrong question. Ask ‘how many times would you have raped had there been no consequences?'”

The feminist replied, “that’s a great question. how many times would you have raped had there been no consequences?”

Laze then answered: “Since men have the instinct to ‘put their penis in a vagina’ I’d probably say every time.”

This is not how you win debates with feminists, sir.

Online debate can be a minefield, and many people make the kind of errors Jay Laze made, simply because they don’t have experience dealing with troll tactics of this kind. For the benefit of readers, permit me to offer a few suggestions:

  • You have the right to remain silent — If someone attacks you online, you are not required to respond. We are not accustomed to being mocked or insulted in real life, so when it happens to us online, our natural impulse is to defend ourselves. We are not racists or sexists, we are not ignorant or stupid, so when someone makes these kinds of accusations online — when our character is impugned — it is easy to be provoked into a defensive reaction. However, this will often have the opposite of the intended effect. By defending yourself against an accusation, you are pouring gasoline onto the sparks and, as illustrated by Jay Laze’s unfortunate incident, “everything you say can and will be used against you.” Sometimes, silence is the best defense.
  • Know your antagonist — It is evident to me that Jay Laze began this Facebook conversation without bothering to investigate who he was talking to. She knew who he was, but he didn’t know who she was, and this put him at a disadvantage, because Laze didn’t anticipate her skill in steering him into a rhetorical ambush.
  • Don’t get sidetracked — Jay Laze’s original point was a good one. As someone whose business is in a beach resort town, he is obviously aware of how inadequate crowd control can lead to dangerous situations. Yet the feminist, focusing on Laze’s phrase “instinctually driven men,” sidetracked Laze toward a more general discussion of instinct as a factor in rape, a topic that Laze had originally not intended to address. He was inadequately prepared for the debate he encountered on this sidetrack, where his antagonist expertly provoked him into a rhetorical error.
  • This is not about you — Jay Laze’s antagonist pushed his buttons by accusing him of “projecting” his own personal “instinct to rape girls” onto the mob of men at the Vietnam water park. This kind of insulting insinuation should always be regarded as a flashing alarm in any such discussion. The appropriate response to such an unwarranted insult is to call out the rhetorical foul and terminate the conversation. Clearly, your antagonist is not arguing in good faith. Yet it is often the case that people react to these kind of baseless insults the way Jay Laze reacted, by continuing the discussion as if being accused of criminal behavior was nothing unusual, and then cooperating with the antagonist’s interrogation of his personal motives.
  • Beware of hypotheticals — Having let his antagonist steer him onto a sidetrack and then personalize the discussion by accusing him of being at least a potential rapist, Jay Laze finally sets a rhetorically fatal trap for himself by proposing the hypothetical scenario where rape was possible with “no consequences.” That he proposed this as a devil’s advocate is obvious enough. His original point was about the inadequate security that caused the chaotic free-for-all at the Vietnam water park, and Laze himself is an advocate of armed self-defense because he understands the need to safeguard against such possibilities. Yet Laze also intended to make a point about sexual instinct being one of the unruly human impulses that so often lead to violence, and thus was willing to stipulate that, if there were “no consequences,” he would himself behave like a savage beast.

Oops. We know exactly why feminists love to talk constantly about rape, as Ace of Spades observed: “Minus rape, feminism is rather too obviously a list of trivial complaints by comfortable yet hysterical semi-affluent white women.” This why feminists have employed Statistical Voodoo and Elastic Definitions to gin up a phony “campus rape epidemic.” Feminists deliberately exaggerate the incidence of rape, so that they can treat all men as suspects in a criminal investigation and thus silence critics of feminism: “Shut up, because rape!”

Feminism’s mantra, “The personal is the political,” operates as an invitation for women to tell their tales of being victimized by the oppression of male supremacy. Any man is a damned fool if he thinks he can play this game — trying to make a political point by telling a personal narrative — because however innocent he may be of any Sexist Thought Crimes, the mere fact that he is playing the feminist game will effectively put him on the defensive. Never fight a battle according to your enemy’s plan. Do not surrender the initiative by letting your enemy choose the time and place of battle. When you see that your enemy is attempting to provoke you into battle, always suspect an ambush.

As to the substance of Jay Laze’s comments, we can see that he was speaking of the Hobbesian nightmare of a lawless world — bellum omnium contra omnes, the “war of all against all” — and he is clearly against this kind of anarchy. Speculating what we might do in a hypothetical apocalypse, freed from the restraints of civilization, is one of those dorm-room debates that used to occur in the 1970s when everybody had done a few bong hits and was staring at the lava lamp.

Think about that scene in Animal House, where the Deltas have turned the homecoming parade into complete pandemonium — “Remain calm! All is well!” — and Bluto spies his dream girl Mandy Pepperidge amid the chaos. He swoops down like a pirate, abducts her in a stolen convertible and, we learn in the film’s famous concluding scene, they eventually become Senator and Mrs. Joseph Blutarsky.

Everybody applauds that scene, because when you get down to it, everybody understands what feminists call “rape culture.” We recognize the beastly impulses of human nature. Unless we are complete fools, however, we also understand that the fantasy of unrestrained sexuality is nothing like the reality of what would happen under conditions of lawless anarchy. As Hobbes himself explained, in such conditions, human life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Even worse than Baltimore, perhaps.

OK, so we climb into the Time Machine and arrive at a state university dorm room in 1978. A haze of cannabis smoke fills the air, and the blacklight posters on the wall give off an eerie glow. A Pink Floyd album is playing on the stereo and everybody’s staring at a lava lamp when somebody says, “Hey, man, what would you do if you were in a swimming pool full of Vietnamese chicks in bikinis and there was no security, no rules at all?” Imagining myself at age 18 in that dorm room, presented with such a hypothetical scenario, I am very grateful that (a) there is no such thing as a Time Machine, and (b) there was no Internet in 1978.

Never forget: You have the right to remain silent.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

Comments

34 Responses to “Jay Laze Gets a Lesson in Rhetoric (Or, How NOT to Debate a Feminist)”

  1. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    July 13th, 2015 @ 9:30 am

    http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/clearwater/woman-busted-for-dildo-battering-786902

    You also better make sure they don’t have weapons…

  2. Dana
    July 13th, 2015 @ 9:33 am

    I have lived for 62 years, 2 months and 21 days, and I haven’t raped anyone yet. Apparently, according to the feminists, I have to turn in my Man Card.

  3. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    July 13th, 2015 @ 9:35 am

    That’s okay, there is always the little blue pill…

  4. Jay Laze Gets a Lesson in Rhetoric (Or, How NOT to Debate a Feminist) | Living in Anglo-America
    July 13th, 2015 @ 10:16 am

    […] http://kxm.209.mwp.accessdomain.com/2015/07/13/jay-laze-gets-a-lesson-in-rhetoric-or-how-not-to-debate-a-femin… […]

  5. CrustyB
    July 13th, 2015 @ 10:48 am

    Laze “stated he’d rape women every time he thought he could get away with it”

    Must be true, because if liberals were prone to hallucinations and imagining things they’d dominate Hollywood. Oh, wait a minute…

  6. CrustyB
    July 13th, 2015 @ 10:49 am

    You haven’t raped anyone that you’re aware of, rapist.

  7. WG
    July 13th, 2015 @ 11:08 am

    He could have turned that around and blamed feminists for the kind of Godless communism that rules Vietnam, and they’ve been trying to get here for the last 50 years, for that kind of behavior. He could left her with a final kick in the pants by saying Christian men in Western society know better than to act like that at a public pool no matter the opportunity to do so.

  8. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    July 13th, 2015 @ 11:43 am

    It is really sad if the object of your rape does not realize she has been raped (and she was conscious).

  9. Dana
    July 13th, 2015 @ 12:20 pm

    Well, the woman I’ve been cisheteronormatively oppressing for the past 36 years, one month and 24 days is still there . . . .

  10. PCachu
    July 13th, 2015 @ 12:39 pm

    Like the man said:

    “And I came up with the perfect response! … while driving home from work a week later.”

  11. Scott Walker Lands Coveted Mika Brzezinski Endorsement | Regular Right Guy
    July 13th, 2015 @ 12:41 pm

    […] Jay Laze Gets a Lesson in Rhetoric (Or, How NOT to Debate a Feminist) […]

  12. CrustyB
    July 13th, 2015 @ 1:03 pm

    No problem. I’ll have a feminist stop by and inform her.

  13. Matthew T. Mason
    July 13th, 2015 @ 1:15 pm

    Jay is obviously an amateur when it comes to debate.

    Debate 101: Never allow your opponent to change or shape the parameters of the discussion.

    And never allow them to change the subject to you.

  14. Ilion
    July 13th, 2015 @ 1:17 pm

    The older I get, the less sure I am that women, in general, are as horrified by rape as the average man is.

  15. robertstacymccain
    July 13th, 2015 @ 1:23 pm

    Hubris precedes nemesis.

  16. Fail Burton
    July 13th, 2015 @ 1:38 pm

    What a stupid conversation. An unknown number of young men doing uncertain things at a Hanoi waterpark is not the world nor the gold standard for male behaviors. Year in, year out beaches in Rio de Janeiro are full of women wearing bikinis so small they call them “dental floss” in Portuguese slang and there are no problems. I do not need laws to govern my behavior but morals. Morals precede laws and create them. The idea men would rape women wholesale were rape not codified into law is ridiculous. Many other men – probably a substantial majority – would lynch them. You know, the one’s with sisters, aunts, wives and mothers? These hypotheticals are ridiculous. When has anyone ever stored gold bars in the street or had a society where all women belong to all men at any given time? There are always consequences, unless you believe a criminal syndicate of men have created rules to destroy their own syndicate. That would be like the Mafia outlawing itself. Men are not criminals – criminals are. Even animals protect each other. Lake is a fool.

  17. Quartermaster
    July 13th, 2015 @ 1:41 pm

    My grandfather used to tell tales of what would happen to man out west if he molested a woman of child. He’d better hope the law got to him for the outrage posse did or the perp was the guest of honor at a tree decorating party.
    The west was wild, but only for the criminal.

  18. Quartermaster
    July 13th, 2015 @ 1:42 pm

    You forgot the patriarchy part.

  19. Matthew T. Mason
    July 13th, 2015 @ 1:43 pm

    I have to admit I am unclear on what that means.

  20. Jerry Beckett
    July 13th, 2015 @ 1:47 pm

    Re:
    “Cops Arrest Woman, 57, For Battering Female Domestic Partner With Dildo”

    If dildos were outlawed, only outlaws would have dildos

  21. Finrod Felagund
    July 13th, 2015 @ 1:48 pm

    It’s also been put as “Pride goeth before a fall”.

  22. concern00
    July 13th, 2015 @ 2:20 pm

    “instinct overriding self control…”

    Sounds to me like the primary cause of most of today’s immorality and deviance. You know, because ‘born that way.’ That does apply to heterosexuality, doesn’t it?

  23. DeadMessenger
    July 13th, 2015 @ 2:25 pm

    If only we could return to those days! I imagine modern politics (among lots of other things) would look much different and many hundreds (thousands?) of trees would be decorated.

  24. Trespassers W
    July 13th, 2015 @ 2:37 pm

    When dealing with feminists, one would do well to keep in mind that they subscribe to the “Sentence first, verdict afterwards” school of thought. And the verdict is chosen prior to any evidence.

    Much like. . .

    https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/carroll/lewis/alice/chapter12.html

  25. Dana
    July 13th, 2015 @ 3:24 pm

    After several dozen, people would get the message.

  26. Prime Director
    July 13th, 2015 @ 3:58 pm

    how many times have been unable to stop yourself from raping and molesting?”

    I believe his first mistake was answering this “question”.

    It’s actually a plurum intereogationum or complex question; which is to say, it is a question with “a presupposition built in, which implies something but protects the one asking the question from accusations of false claims.”

    http://www.logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallacies/69-complex-question-fallacy

    He should have responded by asking her If she still does BJs for crack at the truck stop.

    Anyways, yeah, beware of trolls pushing your buttons to elicit an emotional response. You can’t be too sure what you’ll do or say when you’re pissed off. And don’t be overinvested in a trivial rhetorical victory. Shit’ll sneak up on you. It happens to the best of us :^)

  27. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    July 13th, 2015 @ 4:31 pm

    We obviously need extensive background checks, at a minimum!

  28. Zohydro
    July 13th, 2015 @ 5:46 pm

    How do you sleep at night, knowing that pic of the “Boku no Sexual Harrassment Cornbrator HyperWank Device” has so deeply traumatised and scared for life all of us who dared click that link?

  29. Ergo
    July 13th, 2015 @ 6:48 pm

    It’s probably worth pointing out that Asian men, at least, aren’t exactly, um, purely gentlemen when provided w/ opportunity:

    http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/International/story?id=803965

    Yes, I know, I’m a racist for pointing out that not all races/cultures, see eye-to-eye on small things like rape and molestation…

  30. M. Thompson
    July 13th, 2015 @ 9:25 pm

    Our host is a modern, cultured redneck.

  31. theoldsargesays
    July 13th, 2015 @ 11:28 pm

    The patriarchy comes standard with thecisheteronormatively package.

  32. Jim R
    July 13th, 2015 @ 11:35 pm

    I can’t recall that the desire to rape a woman has ever crossed my mind. So, will they cut up my Man Card in front of me?

    SMH

    Two other thoughts:

    1. I always had the quaint ideas that not only did Men (as opposed to males) NOT rape women, it was part of our job to see to it that either they weren’t raped or, failing that, their rapists didn’t continue to use up our oxygen for long afterward

    2. Rape here means violation of an unwilling woman through violence, threat of violence, or deliberate, underhanded efforts to incapacitate her. It DOESN’T mean sex that was consensual at the time but she regretted it days or even months later.

  33. Fail Burton
    July 14th, 2015 @ 3:45 am

    Exactly. Without laws it would not be women raped wholesale but rapists lynched wholesale.

  34. MarthaMGreen
    July 14th, 2015 @ 6:00 am

    WellCome Our Community theothe Get Work Online