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.
Yup. Someone upthread asked where all these particularly assholish atheists are coming from, but I really think their atheism is incidental. Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris are white, cishet men with higher educations and some class privilege, so it’s not surprising that they should be incubating some misogynistic, racist, and classist views. I bet they’re no more likely to be *ist than non-atheists in their cohort. Same with a lot of their adamant defenders.
Of course, with academics and polemicists like the “New Atheists”, the slew of people telling them how brilliant they are really doesn’t help. privileged folks who don’t have that reassurance may be more likely to hear and accept criticism of their views.
Well, you can point out that, without religion, he has no reason to believe things that are only justified by religion.
It seems like Dawkins is one of those things, like Rebecca Watson, Anita Sarkeesian, or L*** W***g that you can’t mention online without being flooded by trolls.
It’s almost like said trolls have nothing better to do than vanity web searching.
To pull a Dawkins: notice that I said “it’s almost like” which means you can’t get mad at me for the implication that Anti-feminist new atheist rationalists are largely unemployed white dudebros.
Likening women’s bodies to property is a common tactic of the pro-rape and anti-abortion crowds to confuse the issue of bodily autonomy. Any surprise?
The theft analogy also reminds me of the creepy patriarchal way fundy Christians talk about women’s virginity. That it’s a thing with a specific value attached to it, you lose something by giving it away and are worth less if you don’t have it.
As a woman and an atheist, I’d like to know where I can find my new house.
Women in the atheist “community” have been receiving death and rape threats from atheist men for years now. Rebecca Watson has been sent photoshops of herself covered in semen. When there was a call to implement harassment policies at cons, misogynist atheists lost their shit. ALL. THEIR. SHIT. When rape, assault and harassment victims came forward and told on men in the atheist community, they were called liars and their careers were threatened. Many MRAs identify as atheist. There is plenty of open misogyny in the atheist community, as well as racism, homophobia and transphobia.
Then why are you so happy to throw rape victims under the bus?
Because that’s what you are doing.
As to comparing what Dawkins said to the deaths caused by Mao and Stalin, you did it wrong. What Dawkins said was analogous to telling survivors of the massacres that what they went through was less traumatic that what there survivors of the other went through and calling the murder of their friends and family “mild” while he’s at it.
@MichiganPerson
As someone who has worked extensively with the general public (in the U.S.) I can’t really even agree with that.
I have found that lots of people will be nice to your face and then say and do things that are shitty. I mean, unless it’s just one or two people doing all the trashing of the 38,000 sq. ft. store I work at, at least some of the very nice-seeming people I talk to at the check-out are stealing stuff (and leaving the packaging on the floor), depositing merchandise all over the place, and letting their kids destroy stock that looks like toys that they have no intention of buying (okay, yes, they ARE toys, but they’re MY toys until either you purchase them or I clock out and go home.) I could go on, but I’ve committed enough run-on sentences with too many parentheses.
Or maybe, there’s an invisible pack of baboons roaming around retail establishments on a constant basis, I dunno.
Wow. That theft analogy. Dawkins may as well just have issued a statement saying, “I am an asshole rape apolpogist.”
I think anyone trying to defend Dawkins on this thread needs to answer cassandrakitty’s question:
Actually, dear, the irony is on YOU here. He gave an evidence-free, anecdotal opinion when he extrapolated his own “not much bothered by being molested by a mild pedophile” story to mean that being molested or raped by someone you know being not-as-bad as being violently assaulted by a stranger.
And nobody’s “pretending to give him logic lessons”; people are simply pointing out that his so-called logic doesn’t make any fucking sense, especially in light of ample evidence to demonstrate that date-rape does, in fact, do at least as much harm as “more violent” stranger-rape. There are plenty of documented cases of PTSD, drug/alcohol problems, loss of relationships, education, jobs, etc. resulting from date-rape victims going unheard and untreated. Were he a proper scientist, he would change his opinion when confronted with additional facts that contradict his earlier opinion; he would not go digging his hole deeper, as he has done here.
Also, how is pointing out the flaws in his “logic” an “attack”? Are you by any chance insinuating that impugning the Wisdom of The Great and Powerful Dawkins is some kind of assault? Worse than date-rape, maybe? Hmmmm?
Also, “valid and formal reasoning” is not really possible in 140 characters or less. So there’s another irony on our widdle troll here.
David, you’re getting some link-love from Amanda Marcotte, a long-time writer about the atheist/skeptic community’s anti-feminist tendencies and problems with sexism that @Lea has alluded to.
I read more, and I think Marcotte’s article (and PZ Myers post) was just about perfect. I had failed to consider some things. Then again, I did almost entirely agree with the Futrelle article in the first place. I still disagree that I’m a horrible person, and that I defended Dawkins because he’s a white man, and the fuck yous. But I didn’t see the extent to which his comments were grading rape and intentional and built upon a societal precedent. I was being short-sighted there. Sorry.
PS I like the confused cat thing a lot if that helps.
Also this is unrelated, but what is the opinion in the feminist community on Obama. Could anyone maybe point me to an article or something on his record as an ally for feminism? I would really appreciate that.
@Bina “Apples are bad. Oranges are worse.* If you think that’s an endorsement of apples, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned how to logic”
That is what we call a “non sequitur”, Dawkins might as well had said “Purple is bad. Eggplant is worse. If you think that purple killed my dog, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned logic.
I don’t think logic is Dawkin’s forte. He is really terrible at it.
Why do you keep trying to talk about Obama?
Feminist opinions of Obama greatly vary. Personally, I hate him because, despite not being a conservative Republican asshole, he’s an imperalist like all other US presidents.
@Robert: he also should just stay the hell away from discourses that fall into the social sciences. It find it ironic that the STEM! atheist dudebros, who often appear in comments sections telling everyone how the social sciences are such a fail because they’re Not Science(tm) then leap boots and all into discussions that are firmly social science based and state that they’re the only ones capable of logic in these areas because… STEM!?
It’s not just conspiracy theorists who have strong Dunning-Kruger. It’s like STEM! is the batman costume of superlogic and knowledge, and therefore reading anything at college level gives them the superpowers to know exactly how to argue in fields outside of their experience, qualifications, or training.
Dude, really?
I don’t think you are. It is certainly not OK for dawkins to grade rape and tell people how they are to react, based on only his uninformed and unsolicited opinion, probably intentionally chosing examples to just provoke(smugly telling how logical he is).
But without knowledge of context. it is not that obvious, what he is doing, and that context is somethiing that mostly is not explicitly stated here.
(My first reaction when I saw the tweets and the grading was that he was talking about sentencing guidelines, which swould place him with rape apologist things inlegal system here, Sweden, where rape is graded in aggravated rape, rape, and less serious rape. Courts use the last, which Assange is wanted for, to give rapists minimal punishments, for apologist reasons such as “the rape was very short” “he was interrupted”, ” they had consented to other sexual activities”.
Don’t have anything to add about the ghastliness of Dawkins’ comments apart from an anecdote:
Many years ago (some time after The Blind Watchmaker had been published, because I’d not long read and quite enjoyed it) I got a peek inside Dawkins’ office at Magdalen College, Oxford. I was visiting a friend there who saw the door open and said “go on, have a quick look” – we’d been talking about Dawkins and my friend – also a scientist – did not rate him much.
First thing you’d notice in the office was a HUGE photo (I remember it as bigger than lifesize, but it might have just been rather big) of Dawkins and Lalla Ward (who was fairly famous at the time as a Dr Who companion, and married to Dawkins) lying in an embrace on a white fur rug. Top halves only but they appeared to be naked.
The second thing you’d notice was the white fur rug lying on the floor.
It made me laugh at the time, though since then I’ve thought how unsettling it must have been to have a one-on-one tutorial in that office.
bluecatbabe, that sounds like something out of South Park… I swear there was a scene just like that in the Go God Go trilogy.
It’s not strictly causal, but I don’t think it’s incidental, either. He’s so vocal about atheism because he believes that he holds the only correct view about religion because of his superior logical mind. And if that’s his attitude towards one thing, it’s unsurprising that he also feels that way about other things.
That’s another reason I’m so leery of people who say other people are “irrational” or “deluded” because of their religious beliefs: If that’s zir attitude in that area, what else is zie going to write off as irrational or deluded because it doesn’t match zir personal experience?
…Who at any point said that MichiganPerson was a horrible person?
It was Pallygirl, wasn’t it? (JK of course)
I’m thinking MichiganPerson should do his own research.