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.
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.
😛
What a surprise: a demotivational Dawkins.
http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2013/153/a/f/richard_dawkins_demotive_by_sonicguy15-d67lmch.png
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.