Pastabagel tries to dig Scott Adams out of the hole he's made for himself

This is from Partial Objects:

Adams wrote a post called “Pegs and Holes” that pissed off all the wrong people. That is to say, it pissed off exactly the right people all at the same time. The post muses on why “Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world.” These men would include Weiner, Strauss-Kahn, Schwarzenneger and many many others. Here is what he wrote in that post:

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable.

This block-quoted excerpt is the thesis. That single sentence is what Scott thinks, and that is what he wants to talk about.[1]

Here is where the writers of Jezebel, Salon, Change.org, and their commenters all went wrong. They took the first sentence I quoted (“Powerful men…”), and mated it with the excerpt I quoted, even though they are separated by five sentences.

Oh well then, he's off the hook.

Maybe not. Whenever anyone says a quote is out of context, we need to test that by putting it back into context. Lets put the two sentences into context with the five sentences in between and the sentence that precedes the first one Pastabagel quotes.

Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems right. Obviously we shouldn’t blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society’s tools for keeping things under control.

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. 

 That is not quite so clear-cut as Adams and his defenders would have it. There are really only two possible things going on here:

1. Adams thinks that "tweeting, raping, cheating and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world" are natural instincts of men, or
2. Adams has wasted our time digressing about these things before introducing a dogmatic assertion completely unrelated to his introductory paragraph and for which he advances zero evidence.

And the sentence before the bit about powerful men, is much more significant than the five that come afterward: He starts off with "Now consider human males." That is, as Miss Grundy taught us all back in grade school, the topic sentence for that paragraph. And then he talks about how (some) powerful men have behaved. The people whom he claims have misread him, have not. Adams has told us he is talking about men in general and then he has told us that these recent misbehaving powerful men have something to do with human males in general.

Okay, let's move onto the next paragraph:

The part that interests me ...

The part of what that interests you Mr. Adams? He doesn't start this paragraph off by saying, "Never mind all that, lets talk about something else that interests me." No he starts off saying "the part that interests me". That refers back to the previous paragraph, it does not start anything new.

Sorry, Pastabagel and other Adams defenders but there is no wiggle room here. The great man wrote something incredibly stupid. He needs to explain himself or shut up. At the very least, he needs to stop accusing the people who read him in the most plausible way of not knowing how to read.