In attempt­ing to track down the iden­tity of a recent inter­locutor, I stumbled on an art­icle writ­ten by the part­ner of one of my stu­dents. I am abso­lutely appalled at the argu­ment itself, but even more so at the meta­phor he uses. He com­pares the atti­tude of the Left to ‘battered wife syn­drome’ and then says:

A stub­born unwill­ing­ness to accept the pro­pos­i­tion that their part­ners are viol­ent louts plunges these woeful women into a morass of self-decep­tion that spawns only fur­ther violence.

What?! So it’s *their* fault they keep get­ting bashed? And it’s because they’re *stub­born*????? So, that’s why it took me six attempts to leave SB, is it? Because I kept “stub­bornly” going back for more. Not, pos­sibly, because the emo­tional worm of abuse can under­mine the self-con­fid­ence and capa­city for reason of anyone, even a smart, out­spoken, inde­pend­ent person like me.