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.
(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?
http://cdn.someecards.com/someecards/usercards/1333576695414_4115508.png
All we need to do is remove the thinner one’s facial hair and we’re all set.
That’s an idea! 😀
Your wish is my command:
http://i.imgur.com/Q0cvtC9.png