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.
Click my kitty to see the smash hit new blog!
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 linked this article to a friend who is mega-atheist-Oxford-physicist-“Oh my god I sat next to Dawkins last night whoops there goes my boner!” and all he replied with was “I bet it’s about the twitter thing. I’m not even going to read it, it’s so blah. So many more important things happened this week.”
Dude, seriously? I’ve posted cat videos on your wall in the same week as civilian deaths in Gaza and I’ve never had a “oh that’s not important” passive-aggressive response from you before.
Could it be that your raging Dawkins boner just won’t go down?
(Venting comment, soz)
I used to like Dawkins – and a lot, at that. I still remember reading The God Delusion many years back and how comfortable it made me feel about admitting my atheism, a topic I was scared to bring up with others due to living in a very religious neighborhood. It’s what made me stop giving a shit what they thought and made me feel confident enough to both admit to such and argue as to why religious individuals shouldn’t act so superior to me due to their belief alone.
All that said: I can’t fucking stand the man anymore. Seeing his face and hearing his voice reminds me that all those promises about the enlightenment that came with New Atheism was a bad joke. I mean, this is a guy who raged over the child molestation scandal with the Catholic Church – presumably because such action was simply heinous – but suddenly acts dismissive towards the idea that, lacking a religious bent, pedophilia isn’t a “big deal.” It only gets worse when remembering Christopher Hitchens’ imbecilic support of the War in Iraq and sexism or when Sam Harris tried justifying racial profiling and torture.
I probably should’ve seen it sooner. Even in The God Delusion, when bringing up an anecdote from someone else, that the psychological damage from the belief in Heaven and Hell was worse than a priest making physical advances towards you. At the time, I simply assumed that he was pointing out religion causes psychological abuse as well as physical abuse – rather than as a dismissive attitude towards one over the other.
I mean, for a man who loves acting so “logical” – he throws that same logic out the window when convenient. How can you become so worked up over the scandal with the Catholic Church but then act like any act of child molestation outside of it isn’t as bad. It’s definitely set this unfortunate precedent among atheists in general nowadays where “logic” and “reason” are just used as rhetorical tactics against those who disagree. ‘Cause, hey, if you’re “logical” and they are “emotional” – that must mean you are somehow in the right! The reality, of course, is that one can be logical and emotional. Acting as if they are separate and competing forces is ignoring the fact they are both very human traits that often intersect with one another. I support certain causes based on how I feel about it but nonetheless argue for my position by bringing up the logic behind it. To act as if all your decisions are based in “logic” is ignoring that your appeal to certain position is based on what you feel about them emotionally.
Claiming that criticizing Dawkins hurts the cause of atheism is (to my mind) as fatuous as claiming that criticizing Miles Davis for being an assaulter of women hurts the cause of jazz. Dawkins != atheism. Now, the tendency of some atheist dudebros to start flinging poo the moment anyone DOES criticize him – that doesn’t make atheism look any better.
The coverage of this at Pharyngula is quite enjoyable, by the way.
I’m Canadian. And I don’t see why you want to blather about this.
It seems that abuse has taken more of a toll on Dawkins that he can admit, considering he’s still finding excuses for his molester so many years later.
But why use something that is associated with such shame in the survivors? I am not often that triggered anymore, but reading that tweet shook me hard. Why wouldn’t you play that kind of intellectual exercise with something that isn’t likely to be so upsetting to victims of horrible crime? There are so many other examples and yet he chose something like this?
Sometimes I think if a knife had been used I actually would have felt better because it would have been clearer to me what had happened. I don’t know. And I don’t compare. Now I want a shower.
Thanks again for everyone here for sticking up for the victims.
He’s got a nasty history of making light of harassment and assault. It’s no coincidence he chose to compare stranger rape at knifepoint and date rape. By downplaying the trauma of date rape, which is far more common, he is essentially declaring that rape as it stands is just not that bad, without saying it outright.
The more I read about this, the more I realize I’ve seen the same exact thing percolating up on the internet from the usual suspects. More and more, there’s a smug, condescending type of pseudo-intellectual who really, really wants to convince you that empathy is immoral. The idea isn’t new, of course, but these types of arguments… it’s like people think they’ve stumbled upon a brave new frontier, or something. “Caring too much about rape victims makes you less aware of moral nuance.” That’s his point. Throwing survivors under the bus is secondary; he just is so scared of whatever he thinks emotion is, he hates empathy.
As a person who’s spent more than five seconds reading moral psych publications, and as a GODDAMN HUMAN BEING, it’s hard to think of a more asinine viewpoint than “caring about the feelings of others is bad.” But man, when there starts to be an intellectual backlash against goddamn empathy… jeez, this is a “go lie down for ten minutes” moment.
I would go so far as to say that the people who are whole-heartedly supporting Dawkins, and Dawkins at this point too, are completely blind as to the limits of the science magisterium, as Stephen Jay Gould called it.
Science tells us what is, and what could be, and what was. It has no basis to make a judgement on what “ought” to be because (“hard”) science doesn’t work that way. Morality tells us what “ought” to be. For Gould, he felt that religion was necessary for morality (he had a very positive view of religion). For me, I’m a consequentialist, to a particular point (yes I would divert the train, not sure I would throw the person on the railway tracks, definitely would not harvest the organs out of the person).*
The whole point of moral philosophical positions is that one uses empathy and logic to work out what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. Science has nothing to contribute here, except in specific circumstances (e.g. contributions to better understanding mens rea).
Dawkins and his supporters are well out of their depth and expertise in these areas. They should all just shut the fuck up, after they apologise.
*http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/ I need to have further discussions with the friendly PhD student in philosophy who teaches this so I can work out what to call my philosophical position.
Hugs FortyTwoRose if you want them.
So this is Richard “Religion is the bane of all mankind, it should be destroyed root and branch” Dawkins, complaining that other people have absolute beliefs?
@pecunium: that’s a little unkind towards Dawkins. He only complains when these absolute beliefs are not the same as his absolute beliefs. :P
@Anarchonist:
I LOVE IT
@WWTH:
.
That’s exactly the message his stranger rape = stealing old woman’s life savings / date rape = stealing a little money sends. Someone on a date has low value, she was going to give it away anyhow.
@Michigan Guy:
FAIL. What the fuck makes you think feminists have a united opinion on Obama? Or that feminists necessarily think about the US president? You’re still not getting that women are individuals, are you?
@bluecatbabe:
He had a display like that in his office? Feckin’ gross.
@katz:
Yep. Dismissing other people’s lived experience is a major part of His Assholiness’ attitudes and those of his doucheboy followers.
@saintnick:
It’s even worse than that: he’s sneeringly said that children who were “fiddled behind the altar” (think those were his words) could make big money out of it. It’s not the sexual abuse he cares about, he just has a hateboner for religion.
@FortyTwoRose, hugs if you want them. It’s this sort of thing that makes me think Dawkins is on the malicious side of oblivious when it comes to women, or any victims of sexual assault.
@tedthefed:
QFFT
This is what pisses me off about the intellectwankers of the New Atheism movement – take note, I am not talking about atheists in general – you’d think empathy = religion = bad, with some of them. Straw Vulcans to a man (and I say man advisedly).
His Assholiness. I love it. Alternative for “smugma?”
His Assholiness, head of the church of Smugma.
I love this comment on Pharyngula: “As if we needed anything else to make Dawkins look more like your run-off-the-mill Republican minus creationism.” (For context, PZ posted a pic of Obama’s response to Akin’s “legitimate rape” shit. It applies equally to Dawkins and the post’s called Now look who’s picking a fight with Dawkins.)
TIL that throwing people under the bus for saying stupid, offensive things is bad, but throwing people under the bus for having terrible things done to them is fine. And also that slow-witted, sexist dudes from Michigan shouldn’t be expected to use Google.
I must say I liked the image of Dawkins with his foot in his mouth being thrown under the bus (presumably the one with the “there’s probably no God” sign on it). I’m impressed that he managed to shove his other foot in his mouth while being thrown and while keeping the first foot in place.
Oh, he’s now back to his standard whining about witch-hunts. Quelle surprise.
Nah, professor. Witches were both innocent of wrongdoing and useful to their communities. You’re just an asshole.
I should stop calling him professor, huh? Given the fact that he’s apparently passing out bad 70s porn photos of himself and his ladyfriend/s it probably gives him happy tingly feelings in his dangly bits.
His Assholiness is the best title I’ve ever seen for him.
(Note to professors – do not make your office look like the kind of Anchorman-style sex den that probably has a bottle of Sex Panther stashed under the desk, as it may make office hours awkward for students.)
Dawkins’s latest whine:
Sound familiar?
(@vaiyt, I saw your “I’m being repressed!” quote on Pharyngula and had to do an appropriate pic.)
What I meant when I said Dawkins was no ally of ours was just that he’s not an MRA, if you’ve read his work.
Yeah, you want to be careful of your wording, Woody. Can’t go making Pauly jealous by thinking you worship any other misogynistic dudes.
Holy fucking shit. Read this grotesquery from Dawkins.
TRIGGER WARNING: “rational” detached discussion of whether X action is worse than Y in child abuse. The whole thing is full of him thinking real human beings are thought-experiment fodder, and how reprehensible it is to have any feelings about that or want to be no part of it.
Source
Also, Dawkins’ pop science books are well-writen, and that’s how he built up his reputation, and why he is the “face of atheism”. If he just had his Twitter, he’d be a nobody.
Shut up, Woody.
Well, thanks, Woody, for clarifying that. o_O And I actually thought you might have a small sliver of human decency for a nanosecond, there.
You’d think Dawkins would at least take the hint and STFU about this already.
The more I read, the more I think Dawkins really gets off in his straw-Vulcan way on triggering people. As was pointed out on Pharyngula – about 50% of students don’t want to take part in those
professors getting their rocks off talking graphically about rapehypotheticals, because they get all emotional about them – what’s the odds those fifty percent are the students who face a high chance of being raped at college?“Well, thanks, Woody, for clarifying that. o_O And I actually thought you might have a small sliver of human decency for a nanosecond, there.”
What?
Shut up, Woody.
Unless people are being rounded up by the secret police and/or getting burned at the stake, I believe that qualifies as an exaggeration.
Woody: When you said Dawkins wasn’t an ally of yours, I thought you meant because he was an asshole, not because he hasn’t outright said he’s an MRA.
Hence my mistake.
Hey Woody! Where have you been?
Anyone else see this as a real possibility?
I can easily see him arguing with a swan.
marinerachel: I LOL’d.
Go the swan!
Shorter Dawkins: “Sure, it’s bad that people threaten to rape and murder you every day. But someone TOLD ME TO SHUT UP!!!”
“Woody: When you said Dawkins wasn’t an ally of yours, I thought you meant because he was an asshole, not because he hasn’t outright said he’s an MRA.
Hence my mistake.”
I don’t know very much about Dawkins at all. I’ve read The God Delusion and Unweaving the Rainbow and I thought they were both well-written books and deserved the praise they got.
Woody: Ok. That’s nice.
I really don’t care.
How about STFU until you know what you’re talking about, Woody? You’ve obviously read nothing of what he’s saying, not followed any of the threads, have no idea of his history. You’re making a bigger ass of yourself than usual.
An opinion piece in the Guardian described him as an old man shouting at clouds. Maybe that’s why Dawkins and the swan rumble: the swan refuses to see reason and admit that the big cumulus cloud to the north looks like a bouncy castle.
For a guy so very in love with rationality he sure loves ham-fisted hyperbole. Sadly he needed a Gestapo reference to get Oppressed Despite Enjoying Complete Freedom of Expression Bingo.
Why is Woody still here?
He actually compared being criticised on Twitter with rape threats and innocent people being executed. Yes, Dawkins, you are exaggerating!
Woody’s upset ‘cos Pauly doesn’t love him.
Well, doesn’t that say it all – even the Good Men Project is telling Dawkins to shut up about rape. This comment is oh so true:
Source, via Do Not Link: goodmenproject.com
Maybe if Woody shook his pompoms a little more vigourously?
Yes. Infallible. As in this person is never wrong or incorrect. You know, like how some Catholics regard the Pope. I hope his fanboys know the the defintion of infallible. And I wonder if they know the defintion of Idolatry, a worship of a cult image or idol.
Shiraz, did you see the great title Anarchonist came up with for Dawkins? His Assholiness. Fits him perfectly imo.
On the one hand, Woody is incredibly tedious. On the other, he doesn’t take up that much space.
I defer to the wielders of the banhammer on whether or not that merits punishment or mercy.
I’m still waiting for troll challenges to come back. Woody is so boring he needs something to spice up his posts.
I vote mercy only because I want to see Woody’s fanboy response to the next indefensible, sad, pathetic, nonsensical and/or awful thing Elam does.
I missed it, kittehserf. But yeah, fits him perfectly. :)
Yeah, Woody’s one-line drivel is hardly worth noticing. Dunno when David’s going to be around, I get the impression from the CCAF tumblr he’s buried under a heap of kitty pics at the moment.
Plus, not everyone’s had a chance to say “Shut up, Woody” yet.
There are worse fates than being buried under kitty pics.
… at least Woody’s posting something other than “Paul Elam is the greatest!!!” ? That’s progress, right? Right?
Not as much fun as being buried under actual kitties, though.
BTW I think we all need this top.
OOOH that Maddie is rude.
Mum gives her a few more nibs in her half-empty bowl. Mads looks at ‘em and turns her back.
Mum: You might at least show some gratitude.
Mum and me: loud laughter of the “like that’s going to happen” variety.
Maddie: walks off flipping her tail at us.
***Trigger warning: quoted some of Dawkin’s really bad shite from kitteh’s earlier post***
Cannibalism: not a no-go area for many people, due to the lack of cannibals in society making this fall outside of most people’s threat radar. When I studied (briefly) anthropology, we had a little bit on cannibalism – basically theories why it occurs. It’s in introductory anthropology texts, there are peer reviewed papers published about it. A quick search for “cannibalism” in Google Scholar turns up 105000 hits.
Trapped miners: I have seen this sort of media story relatively frequently (when there’s been a mining disaster) and often these stories have comments sections. In NZ, our last disaster was Pike River, and that’s been in the news quite a bit, in particular with respect to whether the correct people made the correct decision about not rescuing anyone who might have still been alive, criticism of mine safety standards and lack of proper mine safety inspections, culpability of management in the disaster, etc. These are all discussions based on reason, and fucking labour safety practices are all based on the practicable.
Transplant donors: given that there are fucking transplant donor protocols in many countries, and that transplants occur, I fail to see how this is a taboo area. In New Zealand, you’re asked to put your donor status on your driver license. I’m a donor. I made that decision on the basis of reason – I’m braindead or about to be, I don’t need those organs any more.
Aborted poets: how the fuck did this phrase come about? Could someone please point me to any poem that was created by an aborted foetus?
Circumcision: not taboo, and people seem to be coming around to the idea that perhaps wholesale circumcision of little boys is a bad thing. People may have heated opinions on this, but it’s not a taboo topic. The idea that perhaps routinely circumsizing boys is a bad idea has come about due to fucking reason.
Israel and Palestine: I have seen many news items and posts/comments on this topic. How is this topic taboo under any definition when so many people have an opinion on this and feel willing to state their opinions, especially under their real names (e.g. comments linked to real name FB accounts).
Dawkins should get back in touch with reality. They don’t appear to be even nodding acquaintances these days.
I had a comment which was eaten, so I shall try to reconstruct it.
MichiganPerson
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… 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),
Yanno, this sounds an awful lot it, “We all know it’s true, but we can’t say it out loud because we’ll hurt “their” feelings.
. But he is useful to Atheism as a movement because he knows a great deal about evolution
Um…. what? That’s a non-sequitur. Evolution and atheism are neither requisite partners, nor are theism and evolution antithetical. From a philosophical level if “Evlolution disproves deity” is the best atheism has going for it, it’s got nothing.
as spoken eloquently about problems with religion that some of us believe to exist.
I’ve not really seen that. I’ve seen a lot of, “religion is an evil blight on the face of the earth” and stuff about how teaching religion to children is worse than abusing them physically. If that’s what passes for eloquent, you need better spokespersons.
I don’t think he was trivializing date rape on purpose at least,
Then you think incorrectly.
He was making a comparative statement. By their nature the thing compared as lesser is (comparatively) trivialised. Had this statement been made in a vaccuum, than one might be able to argue it was mere infelicity, but it wasn’t. He has a history on this subject; a history of trivialising harassment of women. Given his Elevatorgate comments, and the attendent controversy he caused by trebling down with Dear Muslima, followed with his comments on pedophilia (which are in the public comments he has made about “the problems in religion” to which you alluded), one can’t imagine a person who is intelligent (dare I say it, even Bright?) didn’t make a conscious choice in the examples he selected.
That his rhetorical attack was to say anyone who didn’t see these as blatantly true needed to “go away and come back when they had learned to think”, it’s plain he knew the examples he chose were inflammatory. Esp. because he could have (if he thought violent attack was the correct example) have said, “being mugged at knifepoint is less bad then being raped.”
It still would have been a stupid thing to say, but at least it wouldn’t have been minimising one rape compared to another.
Kitty: 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?
It’s not clear. In fact I think you have it completely backwards; certainly in the example you chose. When one sees “Stalin was worse than Hitler” (which I have seen a lot, but I happent to have studied both the Soviet Union, and WW2, so perhaps I’m an outlier) the implication is that since Stalin was worse than Hitler, all those people talking about how bad Hitler was are morally deficient.
The same sort of implication is present in any such denigratory “you have to admit x is worse than y”. That he followed it with, “And you are stupid if you don’t agree” makes that plain.
Sounds like he’s doing the “How can you possibly have an abortion if it could be the next Great White Dude Poet!” thing. Given his racism, his dismissal of cultural achievements of other cultures (“how many Nobel prize winners” etc), and his misogyny, I’d bet that’s what’s lurking behind his oh-so-intellectual “hypothetical”.
It’s like you said before: wtf is it with supposed ethics professors and their cohorts who have no fucking ethics themselves?
@pecunium, want me to see if I can unbold that last comment for you?
Gah, apologies for the second-to-last sentence. Shit. Can I get my last two sentences deleted?
Why delete them, pallygirl? Do they strike you as ableist? They don’t read that way to me. Dawkins lives in his bubble of wealthy-white-acadmic privilege and shows no inclination to think about things that affect huge numbers of people, all those not-hims. He’s also flat out wrong about so many things, and digs deeper when criticised. I think your last two comments were entirely fair.
Plus, his deliberate ignoring of social contexts, meanings and the consequences of words – especially words coming from someone with the platform he has – is a long-standing habit. He ignores that reality entirely, and goes right on harming people. Punching down seems to be his favourite sport, apart from whining when he’s called out for it. Talking about literal witch-hunts and Orwellian punishment in response to criticism is a pretty good example of being out of touch with reality, too.
Hi kitteh, I didn’t type them with ableism in my head, because I don’t think of mental health in that way. I just happened to re-read the two sentences after I posted, and thought that I might be read that way, and I don’t want to trigger/insult anyone.
MichiganPerson: A few things 1) I’m gonna have to stand by the claim that he’s useful to Atheism because of his knowledge of evolution. He’s an expert in biology. Evolution isn’t simple and easy to understand. It’s actually quite complicated.
Um… no. Because (again) evolution has fuck-all to do with the arguments for/against atheism.
As well there are problems with some of his scholarship; at least as he presents it to the public. His most famous work of popularising biology (The Selfish Gene) has some problems; in that some of the referenced materials… don’t say what he says they say. So it needs to be read with a grain of salt, and buttload of primary sources.
I will say “The Blind Watchmaker” is a pretty good primer on how to argue for evolution, but Steven Jay Gould’s essays do much the same.
The thing is, that “evolution” isn’t hard to understand, nor to explain. I had the basics before I was ten. Can I detail the clades of Colubridae? No. can I talk about how traits of individuals aggregate to affect population survival?
Yep.
Can I talk about how mate selection will favor secondary characteristics, and so lead to speciation? Yep.
Can I pull up papers on how guppies will engage in color shift as the amount of shade/speed of water increase the amount of specular reflection (that is, guppies near the headwaters of a stream are posessed of tails far less gaudy than those downstream), or that sticklebacks have differences in size based on the depth/turbidity of the water they inhabit (so that speciating separation can occur in an aparently non-separated environment)?
Yep.
Because Evolution (what Darwin called, “Descent with modification” isn’t hard to understand. There is a lot of baggage which is attached to it (mostly, it’s true, because of people who don’t want to think they aren’t a special aspect of creation; which is exacerbated by religion), but the core concept doesn’t require a special brain, nor all that much in the way of rarefied education.
A few things 1) I’m gonna have to stand by the claim that he’s useful to Atheism because of his knowledge of evolution. He’s an expert in biology. Evolution isn’t simple and easy to understand. It’s actually quite complicated.
Again, you are wrong.
Those statements are only true in the theoretical. As soon as you have any person who has experience of the subject at hand, you are discounting their experience. It’s also something that (unless one has had both happen) can’t be stated as “true”, because without having had both experiences, no one has an actual basis for comparison.
As to the “trivialising/not trivialising, I’ve already responded to that.
“Heart attacks are worse than broken legs.” You’re not saying, “Don’t complain about your broken leg because heart attacks are worse.” You’re just ranking heart attacks as generally worse.
Context matters. If you say that to someone who has just broken a leg, you are making a direct comparison, and effectively telling them they don’t have it so bad.
It’s an asshole thing to do, because it’s trivalising their problems.
3) The level of rhetoric here is pretty intense. I offered a pretty tepid defense of Dawkins as a person and got a pretty heavy dose of “Fuck you. You’re a horrible person.” I think that feminism gets criticized (wrongly in my opinion) for having divisive rhetoric much like atheism does. As a feminist and an atheist, I tend to think its counter-productive in both cases.
Aw… you defended someone who made an offensive rhetorical choice. Someone who has a history of offensive rhetoric; and doubly offensive against women, and you think it’s mean and nasty for people to take offense.
It could be worse, you could be getting open letters written telling everyone how it’s not so bad you were “harassed” in an elevator when other people are being stoned.
Or cranks calls in the middle of the night.
But you, you are getting replies you don’t like to your defense of an asshole.
After all, it’s not like beiong told that makes it no big deal would trivialise your experience.
Also worth pointing out as atheism seems to be getting called into question. I don’t have data on this, but I would be willing to bet my house to get $5 that atheists are more likely to be feminists than religious people.
How are you measuring it?
What counts as Atheist? What counts as religious.
Most importantly, what counts as feminist.
Because I watched Elevatorgate, and Atheism is soaking in misogyny. You might be a feminist. You might like to think other atheists are feminists… it don’t make it so.
MichiganPerson: He doesn’t get a pass for being an evolutionary biologist. He just remains a good evolutionary biologist. Not the only one, but he does seem to be at the forefront of his field