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.
I’m really worried about that news, even though it’s just one Israeli academic. Israel isn’t above using rape as a genocidal tactic. Ariel Sharon, an infamous former prime minister of Israel (and, I’d argue, the most evil one), was responsible for the Sabra and Shatilla Massacre, in which thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese women and children were raped and murdered in their own homes. He did nothing to stop the mass rape and murder.
What this man advocates is a way for Israel to sanction the use of rape as a weapon against Palestinians without Israel ever getting in trouble for it; he literally says that the women should be raped as a punishment, and such a punishment could take place privately and without any chance of legal recourse for the victims. This sounds like a very likely state of affairs for Palestinians because Israel has been known to get away with countless war crimes, including deploying illegal chemical warfare (see: white phosphorus).
And of course, there’s the fact that Israel is a colonialist state. All colonalist states I have ever heard of have used rape as a weapon of genocide. European settler men did it to Native women (and white American men continue to venture into reservations and rape Native women with impunity due to the limitations of tribal jurisdictions that are always unable to catch and punish rapists), the Serbian army raped Bosnian women and children during the Bosnian massacre, the Japanese army raped Chinese women during the Rape of Nanking, and today Syrian male soldiers – on all sides – rape women as a military tactic. I’m so scared for what lies ahead for Palestinian women. I wish there was hope for them.
Thank you for saying this. I was bothered by that statement at a kind of subconscious level, and this clarified it.
Speak of the devil! The IDF (or the IOF, as I like to call them) just bombed a school, resulting in 60 casualties (40 injured and 20 dead). This is too much.
Huh. Driscoll is 45. We are very close to the same cohort. That means that back when I was being driven out of evangelical Protestantism by its increasing misogyny, he was being drawn in.
I don’t know if that’s significant in any way, except that it readily explains why I find Driscoll so utterly loathesome.
You know what is making me sad? That Jay Lake isn’t around to comment on this. Because he was one classy atheist.
I’m rather glad I don’t know who this Driscoll character is! Though this means I’ll have to find out.
::girds loins::
@Ally, I’ve been actively avoiding the news this week. I know it’s just burying my head in the sand, but honestly, I just can’t take it. If there are no constructive actions I can take, I don’t want to know right now. I’m heading to the big city next week, and I’m making an appointment to give blood (I have the good stuff, but nowhere local to donate). Maybe after that I’ll be able to peek out of my burrow.
Well, that didn’t take long. What a contemptible character.
Interesting story of some folks targeted by MRAs, or specifically AVfM:
http://kiltsandcocaine.com/2014/07/30/this-is-what-happens-when-you-piss-off-mens-rights-activists/
@Unimaginative
I understand, it’s very upsetting. There is a lot we can do, though. Boycotts against Israeli companies are very effective, and there is a host of ways we can help Palestinians as well. For instance, instead of buying kefiyyehs from Chinese and Israeli companies, you can purchase kefiyyehs online from the only kefiyyeh factory left in Palestine: http://palestineonlinestore.com/shop/kufiyeh-from-palestine/
You can also buy olive oil from Palestine. It’s wonderful olive oil and buying it supports Palestinian farmers in the West Bank and Gaza.
I was at a demo about the Israeli offensive earlier this week. It’s so awful. Schools, hospitals, apparently there is no target that is off limits. Thanks, Ally, for reminding us that we are not helpless and there are things we can do, even if we’re in locations that don’t have demos or other more obvious outlets.
Next time there’s an open mic night at this radical/anarchist cafe close by, I’ll speak about the current situation in Gaza. I did open mic last time there and everyone liked my speech – it was about the coercive gendering of bodies under patriarchy. Hopefully I won’t receive a whole lot of backlash or anything because I can think of a lot of pro-Israeli people who would want to get angry at me while I’m on stage. There is only so much people can do, but I feel that at least speaking about it is meaningful and is more feasible for me than boycotts since I’m not exactly in a financially stable situation these days.
So, stranger-rape at knifepoint is “worse” than date-rape at, I dunno, bottle-point? Well, that’s debatable. Maybe in the immediate moment, stranger-rape might appear to be…and maybe it’s unsettling to know that you can be singled out at random by some dude on the street for a little nonconsensual back-alley wall-banging. But I think I’d be much more disturbed in the long run to know that someone I knew, trusted and liked (or loved) could do that same thing to me; it would make every man seem shady and untrustworthy to me, a lot more than the other kind of rape.
And if that’s “just emoting”, so fucking BE it. It’s still rape, any way you slice it, and Dawkins doesn’t get to decide who is more of a victim, or who has more right to feel what way about it. He forgets that his own subjective biases are not logic.
The only way I can see the idea that stranger rape is so much worse making sense to someone is if they think rape within relationships is just kind of to be expected and that it’s silly of women to have sexual boundaries.
@Ally, That’s awesome, I hope you ROCK at the open mic night.
(Do cool people still say ROCK? Am I outing myself as so totally uncool by saying ROCK? I don’t care.)
I wonder what Dawkins thinks date rape is? A misunderstanding? Not saying no clearly enough? Should have expected it when you went out to dinner/movie/walk in the park? Does he think it can’t involve a knife, or any weapon (apart from the rapist’s body, which is always the weapon)?
Does Dawkins, in fact, think at all?
(If anyone in the Bay Area wants to come to the open mic, email me and I’ll let you know the address and time of the event.)
I personally feel that I would be traumatized equally by stranger rape and non-stranger rape, because the sexual abuse perpetrated against me by my father was as traumatizing as the sexual abuse perpetrated by men I didn’t know well. I would go into detail as to why I felt those experiences were all equally traumatizing, but it’s very graphic and I don’t feel comfortable disclosing.
That’s just how I feel, though, and I have no right to tell others how to feel about their experiences of rape/sexual abuse.
@ Kittehserf
That’s the thing, when you start asking questions like “so, why do you believe rape would be less traumatic if you knew the rapist?” then you very quickly realize that the only way someone could think that would be if they thought that a certain amount of sexual coercion in relationships was normal and to be expected. It only makes sense if you think that man and woman going on a date is a scenario that’s always supposed to end in sex at some point.
Or, that date rape doesn’t exist and it’s silly females changing their minds after the fact. Hey, buyer’s remorse is a thing when it comes to sex where no money has changed hands and there has been little cognitive engagement by the female over deciding to have sex. Let’s see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyer%27s_remorse oppps, no, buyer’s remorse doesn’t occur under those conditions. Gosh, it’s like date rape apologists don’t understand terms like buyer’s remorse. And weird how people who think social science is crap are so wedded to using a social science (economics, psychology) term as though it gives their opinion objectivity.
@Ally: good luck. You are helluva brave doing open mic, just standing up in front of people and talking, let alone talking about emotive topics.
I will look out for olive oil that doesn’t come from Israel. Sadly, that is such a small fiscally punitive action when put against the huge money/arms contributions that Israel gets internationally.
The UN is really stuck because the person who pays the piper calls the tune. The US funds 22% of the UN budget: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations which suggests there will be positive bias in the UN to support US decisions. :(
@ pallygirl
Yeah, that’s the thing, if you actually believe that women always have a right to say no to sex then why is date rape less bad? If you believe that women’s right to say no to sex is determined by the situation, though, you end up with the kind of crap that Dawkins is spouting.
MichiganPerson
Just for fun, can you come up with a possible real life example in which you would actually rank the two items with absolutely no intention to either enhance or deminish the severity of one or the other?
That’s the whole purpose of ranking things. Perspective. Either “it could be worse” or “at least it’s not”.
Hey, let’s have some fun with this. I think telling a troll to STFU is less bad than telling someone who’s a regular and who is generally known to be reasonable most of the time to STFU. Why am I pointing this out? Oh, no reason. You think I’m pointing this out to make it clear that I think trolls should stop complaining about being told to STFU? Really?
Gosh, why are trolls always so emotional? They should be more logical, like me.
I’m seeing a Confused Cats response to this …
Yeah, the rabbit hole of asking a dude who says this shit “Why is date rape less bad?” ends up with “Would you trust him on a date?” If he has assumptions like that it’s a bad sign, because you never know if it’s just all talk, and you can’t know until it’s too late.
***date rape trigger warning***
@cassandra: that seems to be the point, to tell date rape survivors that they are less harmed than stranger rape survivors. How dare date rape survivors feel traumatised, it could have been so much worse. How much worse? Well, we silly feminists just needed good old Prof Dawkins to come over and explain to us that assfact psychological trauma scales matter because… he’s the arbiter of how much psychological trauma one has objectively suffered. Isn’t it wonderful how we have an old, privileged, white, colonial cis-male to come along and tell us.
The issue isn’t that the construction “X is bad. Y is worse. If you think that is an endorsement of X, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned how to think logically.”
The fucking objection is that Dawkins thinks he gets to stipulate that Y is worse than X.
We feminists can fucking logic. We logic that Dawkins has a fucked-up view of the world where the survivor’s perspective – the person who experienced the trauma – is completely ignored.
He didn’t endorse date rape, i.e. say it’s okay to go out and date rape. But he fucking minimised how bad that behaviour is. His construction, from the tweets, is that date rape is always less bad than stranger rape. I can give examples that counter this proposition, which means his fucking statement fails at logic as well as becoming completely dismissive of date rape survivors.
Fuck that shit.
Dawkins may be good at biology but he fucking fails at social science and philosophy (ethics as well as logic).
Any atheists who fucking support Dawkins on this: may all your floors be covered with lego bricks. And only the ones that stick to your foot even when you think they’ve dropped off.
I’m now waiting for the multitude of typos in the other thread to show how many males are now not feminists because of me.
Dawkins fails at basic human empathy. He really is a privileged shitbag. Only white het dudes like himself are at all worthy of consideration, and only until the first time they disagree with him on anything.
The power of typos! Or the Great God Tpyos, if you prefer.
Yes, completely agree on the lack of empathy front – which he continues to display and get excused for by the atheist fedorabros. I was using ethics as in “it is unethical to promote ideas that are not based in reality and hurt people”. My definition of ethics includes empathy, but I realise now that I possibly have a wider definition of ethics than most people.
Sam Harris also fails at empathy. What is it with these white atheist dudes? Is there some factory where they just kind of do aesthetic alterations to the mould, but the cognitive implanting is exactly the same each time?
The other reason that everyone knows that this is about telling women who’ve been date raped to shut up is that it’s a response to another situation where he told women to shut up and they objected that he’s still pouting about years later.
This is one of those moments where I’m glad I chose this nym, btw. Just a few days ago I was mocking Dawkin’s habit of giving himself a pedicure with his own teeth and right on schedule, here he is doing it again. You could set your calendar by him.
Just like somegreybloke’s comment! Watching Dawkins make disgusting comments would be like playing number ninja, but not as fun.
I was thinking of your pedicure comment when I saw this post. The image of Dawkins rage-chewing his toenails is one that lasts.
Well, hey, at least it saves him some money, and some poor woman from having to trim them for him.
On a lighter note, did you guys see ReaganBook? Conservatives tried to make their own Facebook clone, but literally everyone on it is a troll.
Do they think Facebook was invented by some person whose last name was Face? Sorry to be pedantic, but…
LOL.
Can someone link me to some funny feminist/liberal trolling. I need a good laugh. :)
I’m on a mission. I must, must do a picture of Dawkins eating his foot.
Toejam and marmite on toast. Breakfast of champions!
Looking for pics, and how fitting is this?
All we need to do is remove the thinner one’s facial hair and we’re all set.
That’s an idea! :D
Your wish is my command:
LOL, very nice.
@Ken L.
I think it’s dangerous to cede ‘logic’ to Dawkins-style Anti-feminist Atheists. It plays into their self-image as being cleverer than other people and their opponents as being driven by faulty, emotional thought patterns – none of which is true.
Logic is necessary, but not sufficient for valid conclusions. Lots of arguments for the existence of God are logically sound, they just rely on false premises and symptoms, like Dawkins does when pronouncing on the trauma of other people’s rapes.
“Symptoms” = “assumptions”. Autocorrect did a Dawkins.
It’s not that they’re logical in a positive sense, it’s that they lack emotions and/or the ability to relate to the emotions of others in a negative sense. So hey, that’s nice that you aspire to be Vulcans and all, guys, but to the rest of us it doesn’t make you look more clever than anyone else, it just looks like maladaptive behavior.
Pallygirl:
I don’t want to come off as defending Dawkins, because I really loathe pointless empathicaly vacant logic games like this.
But in a dishonestly named blog post (it’s called “response to a bizarre twitter storm”, does he really think the response is bizarre?):
Of course it still ignores the fact that any conversation that tries to rank such things is still giving a big fuck you to other victims. So while he isn’t saying one thing is always worse, I still don’t understand how it’s useful to ever tell someone that their rape is worse or less bad than someone else’s? What’s the point?
I’m confused–for which actions are we allowed to grade severity, and for which are we not?
For example, say Mao killed 50 million people, and Hitler killed 8 million. Is it offensive to discuss those numbers in a history class?
He’s missing an obvious point: If X and Y could be reversed, then any conclusion reliant on ranking them relative to each other is meaningless.
I don’t think Spock would approve of Dawkin’s tweets and rants. Vulcans are peaceful and ethical as well as logical. Being an asshole to abuse and rape victims doesn’t cut it.
His construction was, and I repeat “X is bad. Y is worse.” He is the one that did the ranking. Where there are two ranked items, it is not possible from a logic perspective to reverse the order. Reversing the order, as katz points out, assumes that the ranking wasn’t done in the first place.
The only way this works would be to say something like “Hay fever is bad. Asthma is bad. If you think this is an endorsement of hay fever, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned to think logically.”
Dawkins is claiming that was the formulation of his argument. As you can see, it doesn’t make any sense at all. Also, he is emphatically not claiming this was the argument he was actually trying to construct in the first place.
Dawkins really shouldn’t be lecturing anyone on logic.
Gah, taking a break during writing and then posting to help medicate a cat has meant my third paragraph makes no sense.
Dawkins is – on the one hand – claiming that my hay fever/asthma example is what he meant, because in my example the two conditions can be logically reversed. However, it is not possible to see how this was the intention when the construction was, and I repeat again, “X is bad. Y is worse.” X and Y cannot be reversed and have the premises retain the original meaning.
It’s like saying 2 is smaller than 4 and this statement is reversible (and still be factually true). It’s not.
So… he was making a purely abstract point about ranking and judging. How was he to know that his completely randomly chosen examples would cause so many irrational responses? They were just used for the sake of argument. He could have used cupcakes as an example, why should he be criticised just because he used rape and child abuse instead?
Keep digging that hole, Dick Dawkins.
I found a cupcake scale: http://thecupcakehunters.wordpress.com/rating-scale/
It must be objective because it’s in writing, on the internet.
:P
What a surprise: a demotivational Dawkins.
So much this. They’re lacking/repressing something – empathy, emotion – but they decry its existence in other people.
Tessa – yeah, I linked to that comment of his upthread. It’s the “plausible” shit that gets me. How. Fucking. Dare. He. It’s like it’s an entertaining new game, something he might just take into consideration, not the lived experience of who knows how many thousand people.
If ranking things makes no statement about the acceptability of either and is a neutral act then why does nobody go around saying things like “cuddly toys are worse than sunscreen” or “love is worse than water”? Dawkins must understand that every statement has context and it is through this meaning is interpreted.
I think it’s worse than that. They’re denying that there is any emotional content or judgement in the premises that they’re arguing from.
The claim to be logical falls at the first hurdle if the person has ignored, dismissed or pretended that there was no evaluation of their own emotional responses, reactions or feelings about the issue before the logical process even got started. It surprises me that Dawkins is using this particular formulation about logic.
It’s generally linked to scepticism and any sceptical view about scientific and academic matters always emphasises that it is impossible for an individual to be reliably objective and/or sceptical about their own thoughts or work or published papers. It’s the whole body of scientific/academic work on a topic that can be relied on when everybody has applied their sceptical skills and logical filters so that the joint conclusions can be relied on.
No individual can confidently rely solely and wholly on their own knowledge and skills and analytical abilities. Dawkins ought to know that.
Kittehserf:
Yeah and in this game he seems so completely focused on the endorsement aspect that he’s oblivious to everything else. It makes no difference what’s in X and Y, he just wants it absolutely clear there’s no endorsement of X. Has anybody ever said that ranking “bad things” is an endorsement of the lower ranked one? Because, I’d never think endorsement. I’d say it’s dismissing the importance of X, or downlplaying X, but not endorsing.
So not only is he being a giant insensitive ass-hat to rape and abuse victims, but he’s doing it in order to build a strawman.
Tessa, yes, his “endorsement” bit is weasel wording, isn’t it? Not least that what he’s doing comes perilously close to endorsing date rape, same as he came perilously close to endorsing pedophilia with his “mild” crap and saying how a religious upbringing is So Much Worse. For someone who’s supposedly so good with words, who “writes like an angel” (yes PZ I’m looking at you), Dawkins seems to spend an awful lot of time writing abhorrent things then pretending to be all surprised when people are disgusted, and issuing notpologies and mansplains. Which, if he were actually a great communicator, he wouldn’t have to do. (Never mind that if he were a halfway decent human being he wouldn’t be saying these things in the first place.)
I seem to have missed it, but what was the trigger for this? It’s unlikely that he just randomly decided the twitter world needed to be taught a lesson in logic. Does he have a book coming out?
@MichiganPerson At one point I would have defended Dawkins as well. I enjoy reading his books on evolutionary biology and he’s had some interesting things to say about, for example, animal welfare and the role religion plays in the oppression of other species. But I can no longer write off his obnoxious comments with ‘well, perhaps he didn’t really think this through’ and ‘maybe he’s sometimes lacking in empathy but he’s still a decent person’. He had to know what reaction these comments would trigger. He’s deliberately manipulating people to make them angry, so he can then pretend superiority over the ‘emoting’, ‘not logical’ people who object to what he says. So I’m going to have to say that Richard Dawkins is more of a liability than an asset to atheism.
The fact that he recanted afterwards(‘it’s rather plausible that some people might find date rape WORSE than being raped by a stranger’) doesn’t change my opinion.
His response to this is just petulant and childish, honestly. Wah, why won’t people let me make stupid comment without pointing out how stupid they are? Wah, why do people keep calling me out on my misogyny? Why won’t they just let me be myself, ie. a complete shithead?
But he’s being non-emotionally petulant and childish because of his privileged manbrain.
Checkmate feminists!
sugarvonmurderertits – I don’t know; maybe he felt nobody’s paid him enough attention lately?
Professor Dawkins takes a quiet moment to compose his next tweet.
Dawkins is complaining about the “twitter storm” because he receives several angry tweets. Meanwhile, Anita Sarkeesian received death and rape threat on twitter for her videos so I guess, by his own logic, he shouldn’t complain because is suffering is less important ?
I wonder why it never work that way…
Honestly is it just me, or is Dawkins like, not actually even a good exponent of atheism even before you factor in the gross sexism? Like how the hell did he get popular enough to get a platform on which to perform the asshole dance in the first place?
I wonder what the reaction would have been if a female atheist had said:
Randomly hitting on a disinterested female in an elevator is bad. Doing so after she’s said she doesn’t like that behaviour is creepy. If you think that’s her calling the first person a rapist, go away and learn how to think.
Except I don’t have to wonder. That one got Rebecca death threats and the most appalling name calling by the atheist dudebros who do logic and don’t do emotion.
And, funnily enough, that construction works well. So yeah, atheist dudebros, any excuse to display overt misogyny. Keep up the behaviour guys, you make atheism look so attractive to non-atheists by demonstrating that atheism is a safe space for vulnerable people, and that atheists can do logic, and incorporate empathy into it.
Oh wait, no it doesn’t.
kitteh: I LOL’d, loudly.
Even if it were possible to remove his sexism and his racism he still wouldn’t be a very good advocate, imo, because the sexism and the racism are part of a general tendency to be a shithead that shows up in pretty much every situation. The smug is strong with him, and it’s offputting. He can’t seem to talk to anyone without talking down to them.
pallygirl, thank you!
I hope your laughter didn’t disturb your Furrinati overlords.
chaltab, cassandra – yeah, I can’t figure it out either, unless it’s just that people loved hearing him mouthing off about how lolstupid religion is?
That is just begging for a Star Wars treatment.
WTF
From Jezebel:
What
The
Fuck
See what I meant earlier? He thinks rape is no big deal as long as it’s between people who have a relationship. He could not possibly be making this any clearer. When he says that stranger rape is really bad he’s talking about the violation of a stranger’s space being a breach of the social rules that apply (in theory) to everyone. The rape part he doesn’t see as a problem.
I’ll ask again – why are we allowing this man to be the public face of atheism?