Richard Dawkins opens mouth, inserts foot, mumbles something about “mild pedophilia” again
A young Richard Dawkins contemplates the beauty of the universe.
Apparently Richard Dawkins was worried that people might have forgotten what an asshat he is. So, helpful fellow that he is, he decided to give us all a demonstration of why he’s one of the atheist movement’s biggest liabilities, a “humanist” who has trouble remembering to act human.
Earlier today Dawkins decided, for some reason, that he needed to remind the people of the world of a fairly basic point of logic, and so he took to Twitter and thumbed out this little thought:
However petulantly phrased this is, the basic logic is sound: If I say that Hitler was worse than Stalin, I’m not endorsing either Hitler or Stalin. Unless I add “and Stalin was totally awesome and I endorse him” at the end.
The trouble is that Dawkins didn’t stop with this one tweet. He decided to illustrate his point with some examples. Some really terrible examples.
Yep, that’s right. He decided to do what comedians call a “callback” to some terrible comments he made last year about what he perversely described as “mild pedophilia.” And then he added asshattery to asshattery by suggesting a similar distinction between “date rape” and “stranger rape.”
Anyone seeing these comments as insensitive twaddle designed to minimize both “mild” pedophilia and date rape has good reason to do so. As you may recall, in the earlier controversy about so-called “mild” pedophilia, Dawkins told an interviewer for the Times magazine that
I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.
He went on to tell the interviewer that when he was a child one of his school masters had “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.” But, he added, he didn’t think that this sort of “mild touching up” had done him, or any of the classmates also victimized by the teacher, any “lasting harm.”
Huh. If Dawkins says that a teacher groping him was no big deal, I guess this kind of “mild” abuse shouldn’t be a big deal for anyone else, either, huh?
I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of logical fallacy here.
Given his history of minimizing these “mild” sexual crimes, it’s not a surprise that his crass tweets today inspired a bit of a twitterstorm.
Dawkins has responded with his typical petulance, and has stubbornly defended his comments as an exercise in pure logic that his critics are too irrational to understand.
If you take a few moments to go through his timeline you’ll find many more tweets and retweets reiterating this “argument.” Dawkins is not the sort of person to admit to mistakes. Indeed, he so regularly puts his foot in his mouth it’s hard not to conclude that he must like the taste of shoe leather.
But these recurring controversies can’t be doing much for his reputation. Indeed, they seem to cause more and more people to wonder why anyone takes Dawkins seriously on any subject other than biology. Even his critics on Twitter are growing a bit weary.
Seems like it. I’m beginning to wonder why any atheists — at least those who are not also asshats — continue to think of Dawkins as an ally of any kind.
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Posted on July 29, 2014, in atheism minus, patronizing as heck, pedophiles oh sorry ephebophiles, playing the victim, richard dawkins and tagged pedophilia, rape, richard dawkins, twitter. Bookmark the permalink. 938 Comments.
@kirbywarp:
What.
Whaaaaaaaaaaaat.
Please do not use your special amazing commenting powers to destroy me, oh my new deity!
I humbly bow down before sniper bullet fingers. All hail Kirbywarp, The Typer In The Night, The Clicking Keyboard, The Greater Than Blockquote Lesser Than David.
Ha! In the comments under his ‘but I so logic, why r upset?’ article someone basically says ‘you must have known what you were doing so if this was all for publicity you’ve succeeded’. TBH its either the publicity or he just loves being an arse. Possibly both.
In the comment of dawkins article, there is this commentary :
“The psychological pain experienced by victims of different types of rape has been investigated. Empirically, stranger rape does appear to be more psychologically painful than other other types.
Thornhill, N. W., & Thornhill, R. (1990). An evolutionary analysis of psychological pain following rape:: II. The effects of stranger, friend, and family-member offenders. Ethology and Sociobiology, 11, 177-193.”
And in the abstracts I’ve found of this study, we can read this (http://www.journals.elsevierhealth.com/periodicals/ensold/article/0162-3095%2890%2990009-U/abstract) :
“The importance of victim’s age and marital status as predictive factors in the degree of psychological trauma following rape—with reproductive-aged and married victims showing significantly more trauma than pre- or post-reproductive-aged and unmarried victims (see N.W. Thornhill and R. Thornhill 1990)—is not confounded by the type of rape perpetrator.”
Is it me or the study doesn’t say anything about the difference between stanger rape/rape from someone you know ? I’m french so it could be a misunderstanding on my part.
QFT
Why should it be so horrible insensitive to grade tragedies. Eg, the Great Chinese Famine was probably the worst famine in the 20th century (or maybe of all time), worse than the Soviet famine of 1921 makes sense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll
So fucking awful and totally illustrates exactly how abuse by someone known can be even more traumatic when you have to deal with these sentiments. Oftentimes the actual rape isn’t as traumatic as the fallout and lack of support and rape culture climate that occurs after and contributes to the shame. (Not at all suggesting rape is more or less traumatic for anyone, just something I remember reading once about toxic rape culture and how the trauma of rape would be much easier to survive if we lived in a climate of support and empathy).
My bad, i have totally skipped a sentence : “Rape by strangers is the most psychologically traumatizing of the three rape-offender categories and family-member rape the least.”
Anyway, this study is labelled “Evolutionary psychology” so i’m not sure if its a good sign ^^
“The only–and I mean ONLY–time it becomes appropriate to speak in such relative terms is when you’re discussing how to allocate scarce resources to address the distinct problems. ”
Then it is never appropriate to speak in relative magnitude about historical disasters. and questions such as ” which was the worst earthquake of the 19th century?” is completely verboten.
Besides criminal sentencing involves this horrible kind of grading.
There does exist some good evopsych. It exists only in journals and generally has strong disclaimers in the discussion section about how the information only applies if humans existed under (these) conditions and could be confounded by (a whole ton of) factors.
I’m highly skeptical of even some of the peer reviewed stuff, too, to be honest. Science is not immune from fad, and nonsense papers have made it past peer review before being caught later: see the vaccination leads to autism paper, the GMOs will kill us all paper, and the math paper generated randomly by a computer program.
For starters.
@contrapangloss : Yeah, I think so too, there is too much bullshit in evopsych to take them at face value and I have a hard time thinking that rape by a stranger would be less traumatic that being rape by someone you know.
I’m quite curious to know how do they rank the trauma in this study though.
Arg, I meant *more traumatic –‘
You can rank tragedies and crimes based on various criteria. But you cannot then say to a sufferer of the Soviet famine of 1921 (or people advocating for the same) that the Great Chinese Famine was worse, therefore your suffering is objectively less than the suffering of a person who lived through the Great Chinese Famine, and maybe you should stop talking about your stupid suffering when other people have it so much worse.
@talacris:
Context matters. Grading tragedies can be harmful when the culture is already confused about whether certain “grades” of a tragedy are even a tragedy in the first place. Our culture has enough problems with rape and “legitimate rape,” so it’s at best insensitive to use that as an example in what was meant to be “a purely logical point.”
Not to mention that sometimes there isn’t a strict ordering you can objectively put on traumatic events. Attempting to do so for things like rape just add fuel to the fire for people who try to argue that certain types of rape aren’t “legitimate”.
Probably for the more egregious examples.
@talacris:
You’re choosing events with commonly accepted objective measures on purpose, aren’t you? The Richter scale, number of deaths, etc? Or historical events you’d find in a history book rather than a personal tragedy? Try coming up with a better analogy, and stop purposefully missing the point.
There’s a certain kind of person… and from my anecdotal evidence, they make up the a large and/or vocal part of the skeptic and neo-atheist internet community… who actually believes that they go around being rational all the time (unlike those cavemanlike religious people!). Not only that, they’ve taken this completely asinine premise and wedded themselves so completely to it, they have to create a giant wall of false dichotomies between themselves and everyone else.
Does Dawkins seriously, actually think any human being can ever be unemotional? Does he really not know what affect even is? Does he think that he doesn’t make 95% of his decisions (or even more!) automatically, just like everyone else on the planet?
These tweets are just such an obvious and basic trap, it’s insulting. The entire point is clearly to say something “coldly rational” but obviously hateful in the hopes that people will react with anger, so he can mine evidence for his desperately held theory that everyone who disagrees with him is overly emotional. Does he not know how obvious it is that that motivation is…. emotionally based?
Of course not. Worse means how many were hurt, not usable on an individual scale and certainly not that somebody should up talking about their experiences.
And “advocates for”, shouldn’t that be apologists for. Can advocate be used for something that has happened?
My use of “advocate” there means “person speaking on behalf of a sufferer”. So they are advocating for the victim, not for the crime.
I can’t access the study mentioned above, but I saw part of the abstract and it seems fishy already to me:
Yet nearly all research shows that stranger rape is the least common type of rape.
Yep because
implies that this kind of historical data are totally out of bound, else why the emphasis
contemporary examples like HIV, malaria prevention are probably already exempted under the above.
@talacris:
The context of the discussion was about things like rape. What you’re bringing up as a counter example is just a non-sequitor.
@Ally S : “Yet nearly all research shows that stranger rape is the least common type of rape.”
Maybe they used police files or something like that and the rape by strangers are the one more likely to be reported to the police ? Anyway, even if it’s the case, that skew the sample at the start and it’s effectively the sign of a flawed study.
re the Thornhill & Thornhill article (TW rape):
One of the researchers is Randy Thornhill, who with Craig T. Palmer wrote A Natural of Rape. They argued that rape is an adaptive behavior. So, I don’t know how much I’d trust any research on rape by Thornhill.
Just wanted to check out this site cause Confused Cats Against Feminism is awesome, then I see this irrational shitstorm…
First thought, “Crazies angry Obama said or did something again.”
Is the rest of this site just about harboring grudges and making anything said by anyone they dont like something that has to be pulled apart until something to complain about is found?
Idiots in these comments are literally trying to use the exact opposite of the rape tweet as an argument against Dawkins? So you mean to tell me you think Dawkins is actually trying to communicate the exact opposite of what he communicated?
I get the elevator response was horrible, but these tweets are just a part of logic that people don’t seem to grasp which prevents people from effectively talking about potentially touchy subjects…
Originally yes, however Freemage next lines were about resources for fighting leukemia and common cold, which widens the the scope of the statement and changes context.
@talacris:
It really doesn’t, because it doesn’t change the context of the previous comments. In any case, that was just an off-hand analogy.
@sparky : Ok, so the study is doubly fishy. Thanks for the information sparky.
In any case, whether or not your comment was relevant, people have already responded and clarified that the point is about not telling a victim of a tragedy that their feelings should depend on some objective measure of how bad that tragedy was, so I’m backing out of the meta-talk.
Not the previous comments but that comment, so the context in that comment was different than in the previous.
“that the point is about not telling a victim of a tragedy that their feelings should depend on some objective measure of how bad that tragedy was, so I’m backing out of the meta-talk”
I agree with that so I do the same. Feel free to ignore my last comment
TW: rape
In Lundy Bancroft’s book about abuse “Why Does He Do That?” he cites a study suggesting that partner or acquaintance rape creates longer lasting problems for victims than stranger rape, due to the greater psychological distress that generally follows.
@Okamoto
No one cares about your misinformed concern trolling.
Okamoto:
This site is about mocking misogynists and the awful things they say. Y’know, like Dawkins up there who thinks he can generalize his experience to everyone and can rate how bad rape different types of rape and abuse are. Because he’s, y’know, so much more logical than anyone else.
Dawkins said stranger rape is worse than date rape. That is exactly what he said. He tried to side-step the implications of his words by saying he doesn’t “endorse” date rape. But, of course, both you and Dawkins are completely ignoring the objections to saying something like, “Stranger rape at knife point is worse than date rape.” The objections aren’t because we think that Dawkins is “endorsing” date rape, but that he is attempting to rank rape and abuse in terms of relative “badness.”
Sigh. See above. Your post is one long straw-Vulcan reading comprehension fail.
… What does any of this have to do with Obama?
And, to add, trying to rank pedophilia and rape from what’s bad to what’s worse does absolutely nothing to help the victims of rape and child abuse, but does send the implicit message that victims shouldn’t feel or react they way they do because there’s always someone out there who has it worse.
Okamoto:
Err… Dawkins was apparently explicitly not talking about those touchy subjects. According to him, he was merely making a logical statement. Everyone understood this, but also recognized that he was being pretty ham-handed about dealing with those touchy subjects by using them as examples when he had made such terrible public statements about them in the past.
You… you didn’t actually read anything here, did you?
That’s what I’d like to know, too.
I get that this blog isn’t for everyone.
But I’m always amazed at people who take the time to write long messages about how this site isn’t for them.
If I go to someone’s personal blog and I don’t like it, I just leave. I don’t hang out to tell them how terrible their blog is, and that all the people who like it are also terrible.
But maybe I’m just lazy.
Apparently dood thinks we’re libertarians. Hahahahahahahahahahahahah.
And all Americans.
[CN: sexual abuse]
I’ve experienced sexual abuse in that I’ve been forcibly stripped naked and touched, and I have trauma due to compulsory heterosexuality in the form of invasive sexual comments about me. No matter what I can’t get out of my head this idea that I’m “appropriative” for claiming I’m a survivor of sexual abuse because I know so many people who would consider what happened to me to be “mild” or “nothing severe”. I feel like I’m just a liar and an attention-seeker when I try to talk about my trauma. When people like Dawkins try to define survivors’ own experiences for them, he is perpetuating the same kind of self-hatred and self-neglect that I put myself through as a result of trauma. What he said isn’t just some offensive remark – he is saying things that actively harm abuse survivors.
Ally: I know you know this, but Dawkins is a giant smeghead and all this stuff he says is bullshit.
“Idiots in these comments are literally trying to use the exact opposite of the rape tweet as an argument against Dawkins? So you mean to tell me you think Dawkins is actually trying to communicate the exact opposite of what he communicated?
I get the elevator response was horrible, but these tweets are just a part of logic that people don’t seem to grasp which prevents people from effectively talking about potentially touchy subjects…”
the word “idiots” pretty much gives away the extent to which this comment was made in good faith, and all this stuff has already been said by people you’re summarily dismissing, but just in case…
Dawkins’s point was confused and incomprehensible, on its face. It’s almost never necessary or helpful to compare the relative terribleness of terrible things (i.e. it doesn’t help people “effectively talk about” them).
Dawkins has burned away his goodwill regarding things like this. He’s clearly aware that setting anchors is a way of influencing how people feel about things, because that’s his whole complaint. So why keep doing it, knowing that it hinders understanding? It makes no sense to say that “effectively talking about” something is the point when he keeps saying the same thing that obvious isn’t working.
So, there’s only two possible explainations. Either he wants to keep making the point that Y really IS kinda okay compared to X, but to frantically try to logic his way out of getting criticized for it, OR he wants to manufacture a situation where his detractors are emotional and he is logical, because that supports the worldview that stitches his self-esteem together. Or both. (the correct answer is both.)
Also, Dawkins’s ranking of the terrible things is both smug and arbitrary. There’s no evidence that his Xs are really worse then his Ys, but he states them as if they were objective facts. In so doing, he demonstrates a horrendous lack of empathy and perspective, projecting his own feelings and generally being a dick.
Meanwhile, keeping the universe in balance, megachurch asshole pastor Mark Driscoll’s past has come back to haunt him in the form of a massively long sexist, homophobic rant that he posted anonymously on a message board 14 years ago. Enjoy if you have the stomach for it!
I wonder how much of Dawkins’s behavior is due to an unexamined emotional need to have attention paid to him. That’s the least disturbing explanation I’ve come up with for the persistence of the phenomenon.
This. This is really the heart of the arguments against what he stated. The fact that he and his fans refuse to see this is boggling.
Dawkins is a lot of stupid things, but in this case he is flat out wrong. “Mild pedophilia,” what we call velvet glove abuse, can be far more damaging and traumatic then a violent assault. Anytime psychological abuse is employed, it has the potential to leave scars that last far longer than physical injury ever would.
Haven’t read it, but: I knew it. I knew it. That mealy-mouthed statement issued by Dawkins and Ophelia Benson about what sort of behaviour is unacceptable in the atheist movement means fuckall. Dicky Dawkins is going to get lots more “vulgar epithets” thrown his way, and he’s going to deserve them. Fuck, I loathe that man.
(“Haven’t read it” meaning the thread, sorry!)
emilygoddess, exactly. Remember how he also compared a woman being hit on in a lift with his own distaste for being in a lift with a man chewing gum? He’s a PoS this one, he really is.
@Okamoto
You need to read Fibinachi’s long comment on the first page of the comments. Long comment is long, but it’s also great and far more on-point than anything in your offering (or Dawkins’ for that matter).
Besides being an appalling and dehumanizing way of treating human beings – to tell them where on some arbitrary scale their level of psychological harm must lie – it also fails the fucking logic that Dawkins seems so enamoured with.
Even if the generalisation was true, * it commits the fallacy of division. It’s exactly the same as arguing that if the mean height of a group is 1.8 metres, then all group members are 1.8 metres tall.
*I have bolded this because I don’t think there is a way of measuring psychological trauma that only measures behaviours, and ignores the cognitive/emotional aspects. This means that I think a number of trauma measures used in the sort of survivor studies mentioned here are based on BS scales.
Dawkins has a tendency to say things that are obvious and crass and then get upset when people say yeah that’s true but jeez come on. But he is useful to Atheism as a movement because he knows a great deal about evolution and has spoken eloquently about problems with religion that some of us believe to exist. He did not say that a victim of date rape shouldn’t complain, or even that the suffering is worse for everyone who has been raped by a stranger. He said rape at knifepoint is worse than date rape. No doubt that is a very stupid thing to say, but it would be kind of like saying having both your parents die is worse than having one of your parents die. One could say that without meaning that it isn’t a big deal to have to suffer through the loss of a parent. One would also be demonstrating a huge lack of social feel or competence by choosing that as an example. So yeah this was a dumb thing to say. And yeah Dawkins goes looking for these fights because he seems to believe that anything that is true is also alright to say in any setting (which of course it isn’t), but I don’t think he was trivializing date rape on purpose at least, but also as I write this comment I am having a hard time not thinking he’s an idiot and as an Atheist I have often found myself being like come on man. Run on sentence.
@Okamoto,
We get it. You’re a misogynist ableist Dawkins sycophant, just like so many other asshole atheists who have a shit fit anytime someone dares not to fawn adoringly over your hero.
Tough shit. You aren’t wanted here anyway. Go play with the pitters and splash around in bitter tears with them that people care about social justice.
Notice, too, how “they’re emoting” is exactly like the shit misogynists throw at women – “Don’t get so emotional!
I’m glad to see all the take-downs of “rational good, emotional bad, can’t have both” in this thread. If there’s one thing that I really despise about smugmas, it’s how proud they are of lacking basic empathy. Dead inside is the term that comes to mind, unfair though it doubtless is.
I agree, Dawkins has been horribly insensitive in the past, and he chose bad examples here. But I really don’t think the point he’s trying to make is a bad one: that saying “Y was worse than X” does not mean that “X is not that bad”. Look at his first example – Hitler and Stalin, by almost anyone’s estimation, are both awful. Grading the awfulness doesn’t make either one of them at all ok. He then talks about pedophilia and rape, which are all awful too. In the context of the Hitler-and-Stalin tweet, surely that’s clear?
All the examples that other commentators have brought up all make the same logical mistake that Dawkins is trying to talk about – “You said such-and-such an atrocity was worse than mine, so you mean I shouldn’t be so upset/traumatized/whatever” – but the thing is, it doesn’t necessarily follow, does it? Saying that the 1977 Tenerife air crash was the worst ever plane crash (it had the largest death toll) doesn’t make the passengers and crew on MH17 any less dead or the grief of their families and friends any less awful.
The other issue is of course whether you can say something was worse than another thing – and this is why Dawkins chose bad examples (particularly the rape example) because I’m not sure you can. It’s hard to have an objective scale to talk about it – though maybe some research will show, or has showed, that one is more traumatic than the other, or the trauma lasts longer. But think about it – if research did show mild sexual abuse of children produce more trauma over a lifetime than more severe abuse, wouldn’t the headlines say “worse”? And would that automatically mean “child rape not that bad”? Of course not.
You jeez come on. Dawkins gets called on his BS and then he whines, because he thinks he’s some Special Person(tm) who Is Never Wrong. Just like a bunch of other idiot cis-male, white atheists.
It doesn’t need a bloody professor to take down anti-evolution comments, because evolution is (1) not that hard to understand, (2) data points that fit with evolution are common and can be cited by anyone as the veracity of a fact isn’t affected by the seniority or maleness of the person making the claim and (3) oh yeah, I notice that since Dawkins has been very active there are now no anti-evolutionists. He doesn’t speak “eloquently” about problems with religion – he uses a sledgehammer method just like Sam “torture is okay so long as we like the people doing it” Harris.
Your second sentence does not agree with your first sentence. You’re also factually wrong. What Dawkins actually tweeted was:
“Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.”
He doesn’t get to score “badness” of rape for people. He hasn’t got a fucking clue in that area. He needs to Learn To Shut The Fuck Up. So do you.
Ya think?
No, ya don’t think. FFS, the only reason this type of BS statement is made is that the person making the statement is telling the person to whom the outcome occurred that they are overreacting.
You, Dawkins, etc don’t get to tell survivors that they are overreacting. You just should Shut The Fuck Up. You are not a nice person. In fact, you are a horrible person for telling survivors that their lived reality is wrong. That is what you are saying to people when this type of fucking “you’re overreacting” comment is made.
Fuck off.
That’s exactly why we don’t like what Dawkins said. He is talking over rape victims and telling them how to feel about their experiences. Go away.
Like he’s the only one to do any of that! Curiously enough, some people manage to do all of that stuff without being condescending, misogynistic, xenophobic gobshites who show they know fuckall about anything outside their field of biology. As a not-atheist, not-theist, I’d say he’s one of the worst faces movement atheism could have. Y’all need an oh-so-superior Oxbridge professor telling the plebs How It Is like you need a hole in the head.
Has anyone seen this grid, the Dawkins Murder Scale (via Pharyngula)? It’s an attempt to get it through to Professer Obtuse. Doubt it’ll work, of course, since he’s willfully obnoxious.
He possibly is useful to the atheist movement because he gives me the shits.
/bad pun mode off.
MichiganPerson: So, is Dawkins above criticism because “he is useful to Atheism as a movement?”
pallygirl, LOL!
Were I atheist, or invested in the movement, I’d have to tell him “STFU Richard, I have IBS, I don’t need you!”
You don’t get to rank the relative badness of parental death for other people. People exist in many different circumstances, relate to their parents in different ways, and feel differently when a parent passes away. Some will be devastated by the death of only one parent, while others will cheer when both parents are dead. You don’t actually get to rank that.
You (and Dawkins) don’t seem to grasp that you do not, and cannot, know the inner lives of other people. You assume that my inner life is exactly like yours, but that is only an assumption on your part. One of several problems with Dawkins’ “logic” is that it rests on premises that he does not articulate; one such premise is that he can know, objectively, the suffering of all other people and objectively rank them. This premise is not based in reality.
Fuck, Pigshit Dawkins Doubles Down:
Actually, it’s rather plausible that some people might find date rape WORSE than being raped by a stranger (let’s leave the “at knifepoint” out of it). Think of the disillusionment, the betrayal of trust in someone you thought was a friend. But my logical point remains unchanged
Plausible. Plausible. He’s still treating people’s lives like some fucking thought experiment. Like people’s actual lived experiences are just abstract ideas for his Lord High Logicness to consider.
Via Pharyngula
Of course, in Dawkinsland there are only two types of rape: date and stranger.
I am sadly unsurprised at the fawning over Dawkins by some in the atheist movement, and the leap to support his fucking idiotic (by any measure, logic or EQ) comments. They’ve just replaced one god with another, created in their image (cis-male, white). Dawkins can do no wrong, he’s omnipotent – pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
You know, when Rebecca Watson just commented in a gentle and reasonable manner about the behaviour she experienced in an elevator, there were howls from atheists about how she was so over the top, and wrong, and she must be wrong about her lived experience. Now we see Dawkins, again (he makes a habit of this shit), being misogynistic about stuff that is outside his lived experience, and the atheist dudebros leap to his defence.
And people wonder why atheism has a bad rap. Answer: it’s because the atheist shits are the loudest.
Dude thinks that if he dismisses a rhetorical trick as illogical, then he can use the rhetorical trick all he wants and it’s your fault if you get upset.
His subjective judgment on the relative badness of X and Y have nothing whatsoever to do with logic. Just because the d00d calls his particular brand of bullshit logic does not make it so.
He has had a generous number of teachable moments on the subject of misogyny. You would think he might have availed himself of the opportunities and learned something by now.
Sadly, no.
And at least one of his followers (Robert) takes this as an opportunity to trash-talk psychology, clearly not understanding the discipline at all: https://richarddawkins.net/2014/07/response-to-a-bizarre-twitter-storm/
The social scientist in me is wondering whether some of the manly STEM men are this bad at thinking about psychological harm because social science theories and findings are just clearly assfacts, so they can make up assfacts to support whatever idiot position they write.
Pro tip: if you think that psychology isn’t a valid science then don’t fucking rely on any arguments based on psychology (like, oh I don’t know, maybe psychological trauma for example). To use it as the basis of an argument, and then dispute later that it has any reality because it’s not a “hard” science is scientific fraud.
Mark Driscoll started off as a homophobic, sexist internet troll who targeted liberal Evangelicals? Shocked, I am, shocked! I had to get up and fetch a glass of wine to help me recover.
The sad thing is that, except for the more hostile tone and lack of biblical referents, the troll posts aren’t that far off from some of Driscoll’s Mars Hill sermons. :\