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.
What I have learned today is that there are people on Twitter who think in absolutist terms, to an extent I wouldn't have believed possible.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 29, 2014
.@mikester8821 Yes, it is so obvious it is painful. But they aren't debating, they are emoting.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 29, 2014
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.
https://twitter.com/somegreybloke/status/494045464308629505
https://twitter.com/markleggett/status/494044606342782977
https://twitter.com/endorathewitch/status/494071064008597504
Good lord. Look at Dawkins feed. Like every third tweet (or sequence) is something deplorable.
— 🦇VaginoplASCII🦇 (@nataliereed84) July 29, 2014
It seems that no matter what point Richard Dawkins tries to make, he only ever ends up proving that Richard Dawkins is a tosspot.
— Steph. 🏳️⚧️ (@EccentricSteph) July 29, 2014
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.
I’m amused in a way. After he just recently put out that co-statement with Ophelia Benson and people in the comments who basically said “yeah, this doesn’t really make up for what hes been doing all this time” and got tsked tsked at for not accepting it on its face.
Shocker.
And here I didn’t think I could hate Dickey anymore than I already do.
He’s speaking from his perspective as a victim of child molestation here.
I mean, it’s not clear that “shut up” is quite the right message here.
@davidgerard and yet he doesn’t speak for ALL of us. If he has processed what happened to him, fine. It doesn’t make it any less a terrible offense. There are no levels to this sort of thing and saying so is something we have every right to tell him to play hide and go fuck himself over.
How can someone so smart be so bad at logic?
He’s arguing that people who disagree with his assessment of what constitutes no-big-deal sexual assault and what constitutes “worse” sexual assault are claiming that he is endorsing one and not the other?
Uh, no, there, Dickey. Your assertions are based entirely on anecdotes and evidence-free opinions. Labeling everyone who disagrees with your assessments as dumb-dumb meanies is, well, pretty goddamned illogical.
Example: he claims that “date rape” is apparently not as bad as being raped by a stranger. What metric is he basing this on? Because everything I have read on the subject suggests that being assaulted by someone known and trusted results in more psychological damage than an attack by a stranger. Legally and socially, a woman who is attacked by a stranger with a knife will see loads more support than a woman who is attacked by an unarmed friend or family member.
In fact, one could easily argue here that Dawkins is perpetuating the “legitimate rape” myth, but insisting that it is somehow worse to be raped by a stranger with a knife than by a trusted acquaintance, but why bother? He’ll only retort by telling you what a stupid-head you are for disagreeing with the Great and Powerful Dawkins.
There’s a parody account, https://twitter.com/RlCHARDDAWKlNS, and every so often I wonder if it and the real Dawkins are slowly melding into one, really wacky person.
His logic is sound but his premise is unsupported.
It’s bizarre how often people who claim to be super logical forget that you can have perfect logic and still be wrong.
In fact, from a logical point of vue, Dawkins is perfectly right ; but this is an illustration that we don’t use logic to think, and even that it is impossible to think only in a logical way.
“Hitler wasn’t as bad as Stalin, so let’s try to think less negatively about Hitler.”
“Child labor isn’t as bad as slavery, so let’s try to think less negatively about child labor.”
“Christianity isn’t as bad as Islam, so let’s try not to think so negatively about Christianity.”
“Dawkins isn’t as bad as Hitchens, so let’s try not to…” I can’t even find wish that one.
Disclaimer: I do not think these sort of comparisons are valid. Trying to balance tragedies against each other on a scale is probably one of the most callous and pointless acts of faux-intellectualism.
Why doesn’t he think that ‘mild’ pedophilia (e.g. groping children) is, by its nature, violent? Doesn’t he understand what violence is?
Crap crap crap. I meant to delete the religion one. I wrote it then thought better of it. I meant for it to sound of me some of the bullshit the “New Atheists” would say but realized it would be dumb.
I am very sorry about that. I in no way support that statement. Please excuse me while I chew on my shoe.
The trouble is that he’s also claiming to speak for others as well. In his initial comments, he concluded that the school master’s abuse of other children didn’t do THEM any “real harm” either.
How does he know this? Has he even spoken to any of these people? Even if he has spoken to them, he’s not a trained psychologist and is in no position to evaluate what harm there may or may not have been.
Regardless of his own experience, there’s considerable evidence that child sexual abuse is damaging. He’s using anecdata — and his assumptions about his classmates and other victims of “mild” pedophilia– trump actual science.
What on Earth is even “mild pedophilia”. Pedophilia that he wants to compare favorably to something?
I AM LOGICBOT 3000. I AM HERE TO TEACH YOU THE LOGIC SCALE OF BADNESS. YOU CANNOT DISTRACT LOGICBOT WITH YOUR PATHETIC HUMAN NOTIONS OF NUANCE AND NOT BEING AN INSENSITIVE ARSE.
The only–and I mean ONLY–time it becomes appropriate to speak in such relative terms is when you’re discussing how to allocate scarce resources to address the distinct problems. If you have a limited budget to address both leukemia and the common cold, it’s legit to say, “Well, leukemia is worse, research there gets the lion’s share of the money.”
But that is so very, very not what we’re dealing with here. The only resource feminists are calling for in addressing rape culture is empathy and human decency, which are not actually scarce–except, of course, in Richard fucking Dawkins.
There is no “mild” pedophilia. There is nothing positive about the person who rapes you being known to you. Dawkins is a piece of shit and any atheist organization that still pays him to speak is one that I want nothing to do with. He’s a misogynist asshole and he’s emboldening his fans who are rapists by telling them that what they do to other people isn’t so bad. The man is a blight.
You are personally more afraid of violent sexual abuse. Ok, that’s none of my business. You think everyone should feel the same way you do because logic and reason? Fuck you.
He’s reiterating his “Dear Muslima” and this time he’s applying it to children too. He’s already said that teaching kids there is a hell is worse than molesting them, because as a kid he says being afraid of hell was worse than being molested and it’s clear that his feels are the only feels that matter.
So is he retracting “dear Muslima”? Because by this logic, the fact that the oppression of Saudi women is worse than being hit on in an elevator doesn’t mean being hit on in an elevator is OK. Or is it different when women are talking?
Feh, he’s a misogynist either way.
emilygoddess: He’s not so much retracting “Dear Muslima” as doing the Mansplain Two-step around it. He’s claiming that people who say that DM was a piece of insensitive, callous and demeaning claptrap were misreading it–that he wasn’t trying to claim that street harassment wasn’t bad, just that it’s not as bad as the various forms of persecution that occur in the Middle East these days. He’s still not grasping, of course, that while this is very true, it’s even more irrelevant to the situation he was addressing at the time.
Lurker surfacing for the first time here.
I think some of the commentary about what he said does a disservice by focusing on whether what he said is “true,” “valid,” or “sound.” There are lots of things you can say that are true, but just aren’t worth saying, because human communication involves more than just relaying facts.
It’s like last year, when Dawkins had the blow-up about his comment to the effect of “Fact: There are more Nobel Prize winners at Trinity College than in the entire Muslim world,” and then was surprised that people took offense to it, because after all, he was just innocently relaying a fact. But the issue is that Dawkins was actually communicating, and intending to communicate, a lot more than a fact (by his tone, and things he’s said before, he was implying that Muslims were stupid, or something to that effect). It was the “more” that people were taking offense to.
It’s the same here. Even if what he were saying were true (and the sexual assault one isn’t true, for reasons pointed out above but also because every victim reacts differently to their assualt and you can’t just lump them in categories), the problem is the context. What Dawkins is really saying is “I’m not sorry for the ‘mild pedophilia’ remarks I made a few months ago” and “I’m willing to use sexual assault victims as an example to explain why I’m not apologizing.”
Yeah, I didn’t think he was retracting it, because that would requite admitting he was wrong, which he seems constitutionally incapable of doing. But I thought the two arguments looked pretty contradictory.
The “Dear Muslima” incident was so disappointing. Not just because of his decision that it’s apparently wrong to even discuss harassment of women in the western world, but because, by his line of reasoning, western atheists need to stop being so cranky about fundamentalist Christians trying to teach creationism in school, because there are countries in the world that literally execute atheists. The whole “There’s a bigger problem somewhere else, so these little problems shouldn’t matter, and you’re a crybaby if you bring them up” philosophy ruins everything, because there’s always going to be something worse.
Just taking his argument on their own terms, I don’t think you can easily declare that date rape is less bad than stranger rape at knife point. At a minimum, we know a horrible breach of trust is present in the former and not present in the latter. The emotional damage from the breach of trust could easily outweigh whatever additional horrors are present with the stranger scenario.
I had some lovely personal anecdotes to dispell Mr. Dawkins’ assertions about what kind of abuse is worse (even light pedophila), but then I thought better of it (TMI). I am far too angry right now.
Richard Dawkins, why can’t you shut the hell up about things other than biology? Also, your general asshattery is being used by my creationist relatives to try to disprove evolution (they logic bad). Please don’t help the cause anymore.
Sorry if that was rambly, but I am very cross just now.