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.
Or, to put it another way, he thinks that by agreeing to spend time with a man women have already agreed to sex, Notice how in the life savings example there is a clearly named victim (the old woman) but in the date rape example there is no victim named?
He doesn’t think of date rape as being a big deal because he doesn’t think it’s actually rape. It’s just, I dunno, slightly uncouth, bad form, old chap. Not a crime. Not something for the silly little women to get all upset about, the poor illogical dears.
Exactly, his constructions show his value judgements. To then argue that he is not making value judgements or that everyone’s value judgements are the same as his (or should be the same as his) is the height of arrogance.
He doesn’t have any formal philosophical basis for his judgements (e.g. utilitarianism) but it’s correct because Dawkins said it was. I think Dawkins does believe in a god, and it’s him. He certainly thinks he can be an arbiter of all things moral, and anyone who doesn’t agree with him is just a stinky poopyhead who can’t logic.
I’m not allowing him to be the public face of atheism, his damn well near million Twitter followers do that.
Stop following him on Twitter, stop buying his books, stop watching his videos, stop attending his lectures. Let him fade into anonymity.
And the scary part is that lots of prominent male atheists agree with him. That’s why when stuff like this happens they react the way they have in this thread, and that’s why elevatorgate happened, and that’s why Dawkins has been allowed to be the official face of atheism for so long.
The question is what we can do about it.
Here’s a handy flowchart:
The best bit of this whole mess is that someone earlier asked what prompted this latest bullshit? Ego, that’s what. Emotional. The fact that he can’t stand being criticized, and because he can’t stand it he keeps lashing out like this. Logic does not prompt someone to do stuff like this, emotion does.
See, professor, you have emotions too. The problem is that you handle them about as well as the average toddler.
Well, for one I think I shall abandon any hope of redeeming the atheist name, along with any variants. I think the war, as well as individual battles, is lost. But I don’t think this is a huge failure as I really do stick to the dictionary definition of atheist. Atheism doesn’t have an broad philosophical basis where “less bad” and “more bad” definitions can be derived.
I do think that feminism is the best label to use. It doesn’t matter what religious beliefs feminists have, the key point is the striving for equality. I don’t think fighting a war on mutliple fronts (atheism + feminism, and then on subfronts within each category) is helpful.
Illogical thought that hurts people can be fought on factual grounds inside feminism. Atheism doesn’t protect against misogyny, we see all the time that people who want to be misogynistic will claim that whatever belief system they follow supports them (because godsaidit or feministsaresillyemotionalcreatures). One could argue that the atheist misogynists are even worse than the religious misogynists because the former are willfully acting that way, while claiming they are logical and superior thinkers, whereas the latter tend to have a long recorded history that supports their views (and don’t necessarily value logic or independent thinking).
@ magnesium : like many others, you totally miss the point. Logic is not about « anecdotes and evidence-free opinions » ; logic is the science of valid and formal reasoning. That something the persons who attack Dawkins don’t understand. The irony is that those persons pretend to give him logic lessons…
Wow, how on earth did that image embed?
Thanks for that picture Pallygirl! And it was originally tweeted in June. I would say it was prophetic, but it’s really just history repeating itself.
It’s interesting that MichiganPerson is reluctant to “throw” Dawkins “under the bus” by calling him out on Twitter, but refers to Dawkins throwing women under the bus as “putting his foot into his mouth.” What motivates this special, dare I say privileged, treatment of Dawkins? Why is it so important to preserve Dawkins’ precious feels and not at all important to respect the women that Dawkins treats so poorly?
As I said before, your “logic” and Dawkins’ has a serious problem that you have not addressed, namely that you are not articulating all of your premises. That is a common error. Once you start listing all the premises, explicitly, that you are inclined to leave assumed, you may (and probably will) notice that some of them are absurd, which is why your conclusions are absurd. Your use of logic is faulty and not because people are “emoting” at you, or at Dawkins.
And, as Fibinachi pointed out quite eloquently, Dawkins isn’t even articulating his conclusion, but just kind of leaving it out there unspoken, which gives him the ability to deny that he’s saying what he’s saying, and I’m sure that’s not an accident.
[CW: street harassment & related apologia]
This whole mess reminds me of a conversation I recently had on another site. There was a refreshingly clue-ful discussion going on about how women hate getting catcalled, and how it can be not just obnoxious, but frightening. Lots of men were responding fairly openly, going, “Wow, I didn’t realize it was actually scary” (which, duh, but better late than never, I guess). Lots of women were sharing their stories without being told to shut up. …And then there was this one guy, logicking all over everything.
First, he demanded proof that there was a correlation between catcalling and sexual assault. Because after all, if catcallers don’t ever actually attack women, then the fear is silly and unfounded. Several women reported how they had been threatened, followed, or cornered after not acknowledging a catcall. Someone linked him to several news stories of women who were physically assaulted by men who catcalled them.
He fired back about how he didn’t say that “catcalling NEVER leads to violence”. He just wanted to see a peer-reviewed study showing correlation. With numbers. I replied that, if catcalling even “sometimes” lead to assault, as he just conceded, then it should be flatly obvious why women don’t like it.
He then proceeded to argue that not liking catcalling was totally different than being afraid of it, and the latter was thoroughly unjustifiable, therefore we should throw out this whole comment thread as nonsensical.
GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
This sounds so much like what Dawkins is doing here– 1) Say something offensive. 2) Receive inevitable backlash. 3) Nitpick, while ignoring the actual offensive bit of step one. 4) Declare yourself to be His Braininess, the Grand Poobah of Logic.
I really like logic. I like being precise in my arguments. I dislike hyperbole. I value maintaining critical thinking and clear language, even when a lot of emotions are involved (it’s almost like emotions and logic are not natural enemies). But even with all that, I still understand that there is not a friggin’ numerical tipping-point at which you are allowed to be afraid of a harasser. There is not a way to rank whether a rape was only “mildly” bad (???) or really super duper bad. You can’t set up some kind of sliding scale of trauma to sort out who you have compassion on vs. who you tell to get a thicker skin.
Human decency = not that hard.
So, just out of curiosity, why does catcalling have to lead to physical assault for women not to like it or to feel threatened by it? Why is “because we don’t like it” not enough reason for men to stop doing it?
@cassandrakitty – exactly this. It always alarms me that “I don’t like that, please stop” is not seen as an adequate reason to back off.
I want to put something on here for anyone else who wanders by and doesn’t want to read the whole comment thread, especially Fibinachi’s comment: logic and emotion are not actually opposites.
Why do we think that logic is a good thing and we should think logically whenever we can? You can’t use logic to prove that logic is a good thing, because that presumes that logic is good, which is the very thing you’re trying to prove (begging the question). You have to use something outside of logic to demonstrate that logic is something good.
Dawkins claims he is soooooo logical and the people calling him out are just “emoting,” and in doing so he is demonstrating that he doesn’t really understand logic in any fundamental way. Any attempt by a person to prove how logical they are using faulty logic is doomed to failure.
cassandra – yeah, I knew from the get-go that Dawkins really is saying rape date isn’t so bad. I think there’s a strong undercurrent of “slut deserved it” in his attitude, though no doubt the Pure Professor would never use such a vulgar term. Someone – here or Pharyngula, I forget – pointed out that he didn’t make the comparison between stranger-with-knife rape and marital rape, because marital rape is (at least sometimes) treated as a betrayal and serious crime, but date rape – well, that’s not really rape-rape, is it?
Bringing up comparisons with robbery goes straight back to the “don’t flaunt your wallet in a poor neighbourhood” BS that gets thrown at women all the time. Women’s bodies as property, and not even our property – a woman dating is merely the equivalent of a little bit of cash. You dropped a fiver from your pocket, big deal. You
had sex you didn’t much care forwere raped, big deal, you’re not worth much, you’re dating, you’re not labeled as one man’s property, you’re easy.Before the dudebros come in screaming, no, he doesn’t need to put any of it in words. He’s just using tropes and dismissal that are identical to the things said by even more blatant misogynists. He doesn’t have to spell it out to make the implications clear, in this culture.
He’s also insulting our intelligence by either assuming or pretending to assume that we won’t notice, and assuming female submission by expecting us not to call him on it.
@higharka
No, you’re not. You’re trying to make a “gotcha” and it is disingenuous of you.
For example, say Mao killed 50 million people, and Hitler killed 8 million. Is it offensive to discuss those numbers in a history class?
No. But as you very well know, talking about numbers is not the problem and that was not what Dawkins was doing. Now piss off, troll.
All hail, the blockquotes mammoth!
cassandrakitty
There was a video of someone confronting a street harasser, asking why he does it if she says she doesn’t like it, and his response was that women were put on this planet to satisfy men… And well, I think that pretty much sums up their reasoning.
Nah, as ridiculous as it is, that’s what passes for a socially acceptable excuse among men like that. The real reason they do it, and refuse to stop when asked to, is that they like scaring us and reminding us that public space belongs to them, not us.
giulia tonelli
Except he also said it didn’t think it harmed any of his other classmates either. So either he thinks he and his classmates were somehow super hardy folk to not be effected, or that any normal person wouldn’t be affected either.
Psst, mods. Human-shaped trash cleanup on aisle 5.
I am so fucking angry and Dawkins and all the bags of excerement in this thread defending him.
I am so fucking angry.
Kitty, Giulia Tonelli and all the others making excuses for him.
Fuck off.
Otoh, everyone defending this shit could just link to their Facebook accounts, so that everyone else knows who to avoid from now on.
Hey Giulia? Survivors of sexual violence of all kinds are not some theoretical ideas to be tossed around and sliced and diced and ranked by importance.
We are real. Our experiences are real. Our trauma is real.
And it is none of your fucking business.
I stand will all other survivors and I am not interested in having non-survivors, who will use any excuse to treat us like shit, ranking us and trying to divide us.
Stop talking. Apologise.
Yawn. Kittehs, are you around?
BTW, I apologize to perfectly innocent kinds of trash like, say, coffee grounds and pieces of orange peel, for associating them with pedo apologists.
I second the request for a troll clean-up, they keep leaving their droppings.
Particularly when the latest troll clearly hasn’t read the previous comments in this thread, whcih specifically address how Dawkins tweets are problematic and how his later tweets don’t exonerate him.
Gosh, it’s like trolls don’t read as well as not understanding logic.
Emailed the mods account.
Yes, with claws out! Just popped back in between programs and saw this – thanks for the heads up, folks.
Pending David’s return, I’ve deleted the troll’s comments.
Troll: kindly fuck off.
Uh, Totoro, Dawkins did make a claim based on anecdotes and evidence free opinion. Then, when people disagreed with him, he claims that they “can’t think right” and are illogical. It’s a pretty standard tactic for people who aren’t really all that logical “If you disagree with my assertions, it’s because you just aren’t logical like me.” His first comment about X’s and Y’s was correct. But you see how no one is claiming that he is “endorsing” date rape? And yet he has straw-manned everyone who disagrees with his belief that date rape isn’t as bad as stranger rape. He’s basically saying, “if you disagree that date rape isn’t as bad as stranger rape, it’s because you think I’m endorsing date rape and can’t think.” This is poor reasoning. “I’m right because I’m smart, and if you disagree you just didn’t understand me because you’re not smart.”
No dude. Nobody is saying that you are endorsing anything. But you can still downplay the severity of something without endorsing it. You might not recognize why someone with as many followers as Dawkins making statements like this is so serious. But perhaps go on Twitter and read some of the comments from his defenders, and some of their ideas about rape. (ie: claiming that feminists want to make all regretted sex rape, that most date rape claims are lies, etc) Is Dawkins directly responsible for his followers using his comments to justify those opinions? When a religious or political leader makes incorrect comments about sexual assaults, and his followers defend those comments, members of the atheist/progressive community will have no problem blaming him. Why should an atheist leader (who is propped up as a leader by many of his fans) be held to a different set of rules? Because being an atheist is inherently special and puts you above regular people morals?
I don’t like having someone like this as the face of atheism. Ugh. I just hope my pushier religious relatives don’t find out about the things he says, because I’ll never hear the end of it.
” I have already apologized, sorry you haven’t noticed. I am sorry that you can’t even admit that there might be people in the world, some people, who may feel differently from you.
We are all different. We all feel different. I am different. Not all victims feel like you.”
Hum, “I’m sorry you are mean to me”, that’s some weird apologies.
/armchair distance internet psychological analysis mode on
Why, the comments that Dawkins makes about how people arguing against him are just stupid makes it sound like Dawkins has a massive inferiority complex and/or suffers from imposter syndrome.
/armchair distance internet psychological analysis mode off
Why would someone who truly believes they are intelligent, state their relatively higher intelligence as the fundamental premise as to why they are right and their critics are wrong? That’s appeal to authority, using yourself as authority. It’s a logical fallacy because it doesn’t support the premises as being true, or the conclusion as being correct – it tries to convince the reader that the existence of the authority causes these conditions to be true.
Anybody who can argue logically doesn’t do this.
Saying “I am sorry if you were offended.” isn’t an apology. It’s basically blaming people for being offended and apologizing on their behalf. It’s also often called a non-apology.
Dawkins, IntelligentGuy™. Same question applies as with NiceGuys™. If they’re so nice, why do they need to say so? Shouldn’t it be apparent? If Dawkins is so intelligent, why does he have to keep proclaiming it instead of demonstrating it?
Tell me, why do people still consider Dawkins a force for good?
I suspect the only ones who do read his books and want to make allowances because of those – they seem to be of the “he helped me escape religion” variety of gratitude, or the AsshatSmugmatheistDudebros who take his racism and misogyny as endorsement of their own attitudes, or the ones who are just totally fucking oblivious to any sort of social justice issues other than atheism.
* That should read as “the only ones who do [consider him a force for good] read his books” etc. Lackapunctuation didn’t help!
I think the only good thing to come of Dawkins is this Mitchell and Webb sketch. And it would be a lot funnier if they weren’t so gentle with him.
Shorter Dawkins: Apples are bad. Oranges are worse.* If you think that’s an endorsement of apples, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned how to logic, beeyotch.
Personally, I’m baffled by the “endorsement” bit. Where does he get that from? Did someone actually accuse him of it, or is he just putting words at random into the mouths of his detractors to make it look like they’re accusing him of somethiing? A game of wankish Mad Libs that only he is playing against some invisible imaginary being, as it were?
(*or “red apples bad, green apples worse”? I dunno. I’m just a illogical emotiony feeemale.)
And yet, if I told that to a grieving family member of an MH17 flight passenger or crew member, I’d probably deserve the bloody nose.
Ah, so Dawkins uses a theft metaphor to describe the severity of different kinds of rape. Talk about a lack of awareness of male privilege. The problems with his discourses on atheism and feminism all stem from his privilege, as I see it.
I suppose I won’t be surprised by anything Richard Dawkins says these days. Even before I found out about his assholiness (see what I did there? Tee-hee), he gave me a somewhat skeevy feeling with the whole intellectual arrogance thing. Anyone convinced of being the most intelligent person they know is probably going to be written down in my book as an arrogant, self-centered prick who will not receive any Christmas gifts from me.
My brother admires Dawkins, largely because he feels grateful for getting help in escaping the religious environment we grew up in. It’s frustrating to discuss social issues with him, since he still believes in the validity of gender roles and other socially ignorant stuff. Still, at least he was taken aback a bit when I mentioned Dear Muslima to him, so maybe there’s hope.
If Dawkins was my relative, I’d disown him. Glad he isn’t, though. I bet he’d be that annoying uncle who’s convinced of his intellect and excellent verbal skills, when he’s really just in love with his own voice. He’d probably be the overbearing guy oblivious to his privilege, making crude sexist and racist remarks at family gatherings and generally making everyone around him feel uncomfortable.
Which, by the way, isn’t intended to absolve him of any wrongdoing. Men are always responsible for understanding their position within patriarchy, so if he is unaware of his privilege it’s most likely because he doesn’t give a fuck about women.
Dawkins did not make a logical case for why stranger rape is worse than date rape. He just presented his evidence free opinion on the matter and accused everyone who disagreed or was offended of being illogical.
Go ahead, explain how his tweets were “valid and formal reasoning.”
Because Dawkins is a man, a white man at that. Therefore his feelings are important. Women aren’t really truly human and so our feelings don’t matter and are irrational. All the Best Feminists™ know this.
Yup. Someone upthread asked where all these particularly assholish atheists are coming from, but I really think their atheism is incidental. Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris are white, cishet men with higher educations and some class privilege, so it’s not surprising that they should be incubating some misogynistic, racist, and classist views. I bet they’re no more likely to be *ist than non-atheists in their cohort. Same with a lot of their adamant defenders.
Of course, with academics and polemicists like the “New Atheists”, the slew of people telling them how brilliant they are really doesn’t help. privileged folks who don’t have that reassurance may be more likely to hear and accept criticism of their views.
Well, you can point out that, without religion, he has no reason to believe things that are only justified by religion.
It seems like Dawkins is one of those things, like Rebecca Watson, Anita Sarkeesian, or L*** W***g that you can’t mention online without being flooded by trolls.
It’s almost like said trolls have nothing better to do than vanity web searching.
To pull a Dawkins: notice that I said “it’s almost like” which means you can’t get mad at me for the implication that Anti-feminist new atheist rationalists are largely unemployed white dudebros.
Likening women’s bodies to property is a common tactic of the pro-rape and anti-abortion crowds to confuse the issue of bodily autonomy. Any surprise?
The theft analogy also reminds me of the creepy patriarchal way fundy Christians talk about women’s virginity. That it’s a thing with a specific value attached to it, you lose something by giving it away and are worth less if you don’t have it.
As a woman and an atheist, I’d like to know where I can find my new house.
Women in the atheist “community” have been receiving death and rape threats from atheist men for years now. Rebecca Watson has been sent photoshops of herself covered in semen. When there was a call to implement harassment policies at cons, misogynist atheists lost their shit. ALL. THEIR. SHIT. When rape, assault and harassment victims came forward and told on men in the atheist community, they were called liars and their careers were threatened. Many MRAs identify as atheist. There is plenty of open misogyny in the atheist community, as well as racism, homophobia and transphobia.
Then why are you so happy to throw rape victims under the bus?
Because that’s what you are doing.
As to comparing what Dawkins said to the deaths caused by Mao and Stalin, you did it wrong. What Dawkins said was analogous to telling survivors of the massacres that what they went through was less traumatic that what there survivors of the other went through and calling the murder of their friends and family “mild” while he’s at it.
@MichiganPerson
As someone who has worked extensively with the general public (in the U.S.) I can’t really even agree with that.
I have found that lots of people will be nice to your face and then say and do things that are shitty. I mean, unless it’s just one or two people doing all the trashing of the 38,000 sq. ft. store I work at, at least some of the very nice-seeming people I talk to at the check-out are stealing stuff (and leaving the packaging on the floor), depositing merchandise all over the place, and letting their kids destroy stock that looks like toys that they have no intention of buying (okay, yes, they ARE toys, but they’re MY toys until either you purchase them or I clock out and go home.) I could go on, but I’ve committed enough run-on sentences with too many parentheses.
Or maybe, there’s an invisible pack of baboons roaming around retail establishments on a constant basis, I dunno.
Wow. That theft analogy. Dawkins may as well just have issued a statement saying, “I am an asshole rape apolpogist.”
I think anyone trying to defend Dawkins on this thread needs to answer cassandrakitty’s question:
Actually, dear, the irony is on YOU here. He gave an evidence-free, anecdotal opinion when he extrapolated his own “not much bothered by being molested by a mild pedophile” story to mean that being molested or raped by someone you know being not-as-bad as being violently assaulted by a stranger.
And nobody’s “pretending to give him logic lessons”; people are simply pointing out that his so-called logic doesn’t make any fucking sense, especially in light of ample evidence to demonstrate that date-rape does, in fact, do at least as much harm as “more violent” stranger-rape. There are plenty of documented cases of PTSD, drug/alcohol problems, loss of relationships, education, jobs, etc. resulting from date-rape victims going unheard and untreated. Were he a proper scientist, he would change his opinion when confronted with additional facts that contradict his earlier opinion; he would not go digging his hole deeper, as he has done here.
Also, how is pointing out the flaws in his “logic” an “attack”? Are you by any chance insinuating that impugning the Wisdom of The Great and Powerful Dawkins is some kind of assault? Worse than date-rape, maybe? Hmmmm?
Also, “valid and formal reasoning” is not really possible in 140 characters or less. So there’s another irony on our widdle troll here.
David, you’re getting some link-love from Amanda Marcotte, a long-time writer about the atheist/skeptic community’s anti-feminist tendencies and problems with sexism that @Lea has alluded to.
I read more, and I think Marcotte’s article (and PZ Myers post) was just about perfect. I had failed to consider some things. Then again, I did almost entirely agree with the Futrelle article in the first place. I still disagree that I’m a horrible person, and that I defended Dawkins because he’s a white man, and the fuck yous. But I didn’t see the extent to which his comments were grading rape and intentional and built upon a societal precedent. I was being short-sighted there. Sorry.
PS I like the confused cat thing a lot if that helps.
Also this is unrelated, but what is the opinion in the feminist community on Obama. Could anyone maybe point me to an article or something on his record as an ally for feminism? I would really appreciate that.
@Bina “Apples are bad. Oranges are worse.* If you think that’s an endorsement of apples, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned how to logic”
That is what we call a “non sequitur”, Dawkins might as well had said “Purple is bad. Eggplant is worse. If you think that purple killed my dog, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned logic.
I don’t think logic is Dawkin’s forte. He is really terrible at it.
Why do you keep trying to talk about Obama?
Feminist opinions of Obama greatly vary. Personally, I hate him because, despite not being a conservative Republican asshole, he’s an imperalist like all other US presidents.
@Robert: he also should just stay the hell away from discourses that fall into the social sciences. It find it ironic that the STEM! atheist dudebros, who often appear in comments sections telling everyone how the social sciences are such a fail because they’re Not Science(tm) then leap boots and all into discussions that are firmly social science based and state that they’re the only ones capable of logic in these areas because… STEM!?
It’s not just conspiracy theorists who have strong Dunning-Kruger. It’s like STEM! is the batman costume of superlogic and knowledge, and therefore reading anything at college level gives them the superpowers to know exactly how to argue in fields outside of their experience, qualifications, or training.
Dude, really?
I don’t think you are. It is certainly not OK for dawkins to grade rape and tell people how they are to react, based on only his uninformed and unsolicited opinion, probably intentionally chosing examples to just provoke(smugly telling how logical he is).
But without knowledge of context. it is not that obvious, what he is doing, and that context is somethiing that mostly is not explicitly stated here.
(My first reaction when I saw the tweets and the grading was that he was talking about sentencing guidelines, which swould place him with rape apologist things inlegal system here, Sweden, where rape is graded in aggravated rape, rape, and less serious rape. Courts use the last, which Assange is wanted for, to give rapists minimal punishments, for apologist reasons such as “the rape was very short” “he was interrupted”, ” they had consented to other sexual activities”.
Don’t have anything to add about the ghastliness of Dawkins’ comments apart from an anecdote:
Many years ago (some time after The Blind Watchmaker had been published, because I’d not long read and quite enjoyed it) I got a peek inside Dawkins’ office at Magdalen College, Oxford. I was visiting a friend there who saw the door open and said “go on, have a quick look” – we’d been talking about Dawkins and my friend – also a scientist – did not rate him much.
First thing you’d notice in the office was a HUGE photo (I remember it as bigger than lifesize, but it might have just been rather big) of Dawkins and Lalla Ward (who was fairly famous at the time as a Dr Who companion, and married to Dawkins) lying in an embrace on a white fur rug. Top halves only but they appeared to be naked.
The second thing you’d notice was the white fur rug lying on the floor.
It made me laugh at the time, though since then I’ve thought how unsettling it must have been to have a one-on-one tutorial in that office.
bluecatbabe, that sounds like something out of South Park… I swear there was a scene just like that in the Go God Go trilogy.
It’s not strictly causal, but I don’t think it’s incidental, either. He’s so vocal about atheism because he believes that he holds the only correct view about religion because of his superior logical mind. And if that’s his attitude towards one thing, it’s unsurprising that he also feels that way about other things.
That’s another reason I’m so leery of people who say other people are “irrational” or “deluded” because of their religious beliefs: If that’s zir attitude in that area, what else is zie going to write off as irrational or deluded because it doesn’t match zir personal experience?
…Who at any point said that MichiganPerson was a horrible person?
It was Pallygirl, wasn’t it? (JK of course)
I’m thinking MichiganPerson should do his own research.