Alpha Mail: in which we learn how to criticize women

Szopen tries to claim I have made a logical error by claiming that X-Y is equal to X, for certain values of Y.

Your logic is wrong.  I am not native English speaker so I accept that I may not express myself clearly in English and you might misunderstood me. But I still cannot understand how it is possible that you have misunderstood me.

"Y" is not criticism, is a statement which is considered a priori stupid by readers. In OTOH, it is a statement which is considered so absurd, that no one will even care to listen to arguments.

"and what do women find offensive? Well, from both her comments and our mutual experience at HUS, we know that women find criticism, among many other things, to be inherently offensive to them."

This part is blatantly false.  My experience that you can state criticism in a way that is offensive to females (or males), or in a way that is not offensive....

I rest my case. You, VD, have made logical error, and it seems to me that you are unable to understand this error because you have some assumption (based on selective experiences) that you are not aware that may be false. Hence, you interpreted my statement in a way that fit your assumptions. Just exchange "females" with "males" in my statement and think whether you would think in such a case that I wrote that "males are incapable of logic"

In fact, there is no logical error, there is merely a substantive disagreement concerning the facts in evidence.  I say his distinction is a theoretical one with little basis in reality; most women consider criticism to be a priori stupid, if not evil.  Now, if Szopen wants to defend the position that women are not intrinsically offended by criticism qua criticism, he is certainly welcome to do so.  Perhaps he could put the question to the empirical test and politely criticize every single female commenter at Jezebel or HUS over the next month and see what percentage of them do not take any offense.

Forget taking offense.  I'll imagine there would be numerous threats to never comment again and a general call to have him banned from both sites.

Now, obviously some women can handle criticism without giving any sign of taking offense, but you can rest assured that they still feel offended on some level, they simply have learned to control their emotional reaction.  But light of the possibility that I could be wrong, I welcome any  input from women to explain the magic formula involved in order to criticize a woman in a manner that will never cause her to take any offense.