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.
kitteh: I LOL’d, loudly.
Even if it were possible to remove his sexism and his racism he still wouldn’t be a very good advocate, imo, because the sexism and the racism are part of a general tendency to be a shithead that shows up in pretty much every situation. The smug is strong with him, and it’s offputting. He can’t seem to talk to anyone without talking down to them.
pallygirl, thank you!
I hope your laughter didn’t disturb your Furrinati overlords.
chaltab, cassandra – yeah, I can’t figure it out either, unless it’s just that people loved hearing him mouthing off about how lolstupid religion is?
That is just begging for a Star Wars treatment.
WTF
From Jezebel:
What
The
Fuck
See what I meant earlier? He thinks rape is no big deal as long as it’s between people who have a relationship. He could not possibly be making this any clearer. When he says that stranger rape is really bad he’s talking about the violation of a stranger’s space being a breach of the social rules that apply (in theory) to everyone. The rape part he doesn’t see as a problem.
I’ll ask again – why are we allowing this man to be the public face of atheism?
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:
https://twitter.com/garwboy/status/474496876449107968/photo/1
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.