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.
Shiraz, did you see the great title Anarchonist came up with for Dawkins? His Assholiness. Fits him perfectly imo.
On the one hand, Woody is incredibly tedious. On the other, he doesn’t take up that much space.
I defer to the wielders of the banhammer on whether or not that merits punishment or mercy.
I’m still waiting for troll challenges to come back. Woody is so boring he needs something to spice up his posts.
I vote mercy only because I want to see Woody’s fanboy response to the next indefensible, sad, pathetic, nonsensical and/or awful thing Elam does.
I missed it, kittehserf. But yeah, fits him perfectly.
🙂
Yeah, Woody’s one-line drivel is hardly worth noticing. Dunno when David’s going to be around, I get the impression from the CCAF tumblr he’s buried under a heap of kitty pics at the moment.
Plus, not everyone’s had a chance to say “Shut up, Woody” yet.
There are worse fates than being buried under kitty pics.
… at least Woody’s posting something other than “Paul Elam is the greatest!!!” ? That’s progress, right? Right?
Not as much fun as being buried under actual kitties, though.
BTW I think we all need this top.
OOOH that Maddie is rude.
Mum gives her a few more nibs in her half-empty bowl. Mads looks at ’em and turns her back.
Mum: You might at least show some gratitude.
Mum and me: loud laughter of the “like that’s going to happen” variety.
Maddie: walks off flipping her tail at us.
***Trigger warning: quoted some of Dawkin’s really bad shite from kitteh’s earlier post***
Cannibalism: not a no-go area for many people, due to the lack of cannibals in society making this fall outside of most people’s threat radar. When I studied (briefly) anthropology, we had a little bit on cannibalism – basically theories why it occurs. It’s in introductory anthropology texts, there are peer reviewed papers published about it. A quick search for “cannibalism” in Google Scholar turns up 105000 hits.
Trapped miners: I have seen this sort of media story relatively frequently (when there’s been a mining disaster) and often these stories have comments sections. In NZ, our last disaster was Pike River, and that’s been in the news quite a bit, in particular with respect to whether the correct people made the correct decision about not rescuing anyone who might have still been alive, criticism of mine safety standards and lack of proper mine safety inspections, culpability of management in the disaster, etc. These are all discussions based on reason, and fucking labour safety practices are all based on the practicable.
Transplant donors: given that there are fucking transplant donor protocols in many countries, and that transplants occur, I fail to see how this is a taboo area. In New Zealand, you’re asked to put your donor status on your driver license. I’m a donor. I made that decision on the basis of reason – I’m braindead or about to be, I don’t need those organs any more.
Aborted poets: how the fuck did this phrase come about? Could someone please point me to any poem that was created by an aborted foetus?
Circumcision: not taboo, and people seem to be coming around to the idea that perhaps wholesale circumcision of little boys is a bad thing. People may have heated opinions on this, but it’s not a taboo topic. The idea that perhaps routinely circumsizing boys is a bad idea has come about due to fucking reason.
Israel and Palestine: I have seen many news items and posts/comments on this topic. How is this topic taboo under any definition when so many people have an opinion on this and feel willing to state their opinions, especially under their real names (e.g. comments linked to real name FB accounts).
Dawkins should get back in touch with reality. They don’t appear to be even nodding acquaintances these days.
I had a comment which was eaten, so I shall try to reconstruct it.
MichiganPerson
Dawkins has a tendency to say things that are obvious and crass and then get upset when people say yeah that’s true but jeez come on… And yeah Dawkins goes looking for these fights because he seems to believe that anything that is true is also alright to say in any setting (which of course it isn’t),
Yanno, this sounds an awful lot it, “We all know it’s true, but we can’t say it out loud because we’ll hurt “their” feelings.
. But he is useful to Atheism as a movement because he knows a great deal about evolution
Um…. what? That’s a non-sequitur. Evolution and atheism are neither requisite partners, nor are theism and evolution antithetical. From a philosophical level if “Evlolution disproves deity” is the best atheism has going for it, it’s got nothing.
as spoken eloquently about problems with religion that some of us believe to exist.
I’ve not really seen that. I’ve seen a lot of, “religion is an evil blight on the face of the earth” and stuff about how teaching religion to children is worse than abusing them physically. If that’s what passes for eloquent, you need better spokespersons.
I don’t think he was trivializing date rape on purpose at least,
Then you think incorrectly.
He was making a comparative statement. By their nature the thing compared as lesser is (comparatively) trivialised. Had this statement been made in a vaccuum, than one might be able to argue it was mere infelicity, but it wasn’t. He has a history on this subject; a history of trivialising harassment of women. Given his Elevatorgate comments, and the attendent controversy he caused by trebling down with Dear Muslima, followed with his comments on pedophilia (which are in the public comments he has made about “the problems in religion” to which you alluded), one can’t imagine a person who is intelligent (dare I say it, even Bright?) didn’t make a conscious choice in the examples he selected.
That his rhetorical attack was to say anyone who didn’t see these as blatantly true needed to “go away and come back when they had learned to think”, it’s plain he knew the examples he chose were inflammatory. Esp. because he could have (if he thought violent attack was the correct example) have said, “being mugged at knifepoint is less bad then being raped.”
It still would have been a stupid thing to say, but at least it wouldn’t have been minimising one rape compared to another.
Kitty: I agree, Dawkins has been horribly insensitive in the past, and he chose bad examples here. But I really don’t think the point he’s trying to make is a bad one: that saying “Y was worse than X” does not mean that “X is not that bad”. Look at his first example – Hitler and Stalin, by almost anyone’s estimation, are both awful. Grading the awfulness doesn’t make either one of them at all ok. He then talks about pedophilia and rape, which are all awful too. In the context of the Hitler-and-Stalin tweet, surely that’s clear?
It’s not clear. In fact I think you have it completely backwards; certainly in the example you chose. When one sees “Stalin was worse than Hitler” (which I have seen a lot, but I happent to have studied both the Soviet Union, and WW2, so perhaps I’m an outlier) the implication is that since Stalin was worse than Hitler, all those people talking about how bad Hitler was are morally deficient.
The same sort of implication is present in any such denigratory “you have to admit x is worse than y”. That he followed it with, “And you are stupid if you don’t agree” makes that plain.
Sounds like he’s doing the “How can you possibly have an abortion if it could be the next Great White Dude Poet!” thing. Given his racism, his dismissal of cultural achievements of other cultures (“how many Nobel prize winners” etc), and his misogyny, I’d bet that’s what’s lurking behind his oh-so-intellectual “hypothetical”.
It’s like you said before: wtf is it with supposed ethics professors and their cohorts who have no fucking ethics themselves?
@pecunium, want me to see if I can unbold that last comment for you?
Gah, apologies for the second-to-last sentence. Shit. Can I get my last two sentences deleted?
Why delete them, pallygirl? Do they strike you as ableist? They don’t read that way to me. Dawkins lives in his bubble of wealthy-white-acadmic privilege and shows no inclination to think about things that affect huge numbers of people, all those not-hims. He’s also flat out wrong about so many things, and digs deeper when criticised. I think your last two comments were entirely fair.
Plus, his deliberate ignoring of social contexts, meanings and the consequences of words – especially words coming from someone with the platform he has – is a long-standing habit. He ignores that reality entirely, and goes right on harming people. Punching down seems to be his favourite sport, apart from whining when he’s called out for it. Talking about literal witch-hunts and Orwellian punishment in response to criticism is a pretty good example of being out of touch with reality, too.
Hi kitteh, I didn’t type them with ableism in my head, because I don’t think of mental health in that way. I just happened to re-read the two sentences after I posted, and thought that I might be read that way, and I don’t want to trigger/insult anyone.
MichiganPerson: A few things 1) I’m gonna have to stand by the claim that he’s useful to Atheism because of his knowledge of evolution. He’s an expert in biology. Evolution isn’t simple and easy to understand. It’s actually quite complicated.
Um… no. Because (again) evolution has fuck-all to do with the arguments for/against atheism.
As well there are problems with some of his scholarship; at least as he presents it to the public. His most famous work of popularising biology (The Selfish Gene) has some problems; in that some of the referenced materials… don’t say what he says they say. So it needs to be read with a grain of salt, and buttload of primary sources.
I will say “The Blind Watchmaker” is a pretty good primer on how to argue for evolution, but Steven Jay Gould’s essays do much the same.
The thing is, that “evolution” isn’t hard to understand, nor to explain. I had the basics before I was ten. Can I detail the clades of Colubridae? No. can I talk about how traits of individuals aggregate to affect population survival?
Yep.
Can I talk about how mate selection will favor secondary characteristics, and so lead to speciation? Yep.
Can I pull up papers on how guppies will engage in color shift as the amount of shade/speed of water increase the amount of specular reflection (that is, guppies near the headwaters of a stream are posessed of tails far less gaudy than those downstream), or that sticklebacks have differences in size based on the depth/turbidity of the water they inhabit (so that speciating separation can occur in an aparently non-separated environment)?
Yep.
Because Evolution (what Darwin called, “Descent with modification” isn’t hard to understand. There is a lot of baggage which is attached to it (mostly, it’s true, because of people who don’t want to think they aren’t a special aspect of creation; which is exacerbated by religion), but the core concept doesn’t require a special brain, nor all that much in the way of rarefied education.
A few things 1) I’m gonna have to stand by the claim that he’s useful to Atheism because of his knowledge of evolution. He’s an expert in biology. Evolution isn’t simple and easy to understand. It’s actually quite complicated.
Again, you are wrong.
Those statements are only true in the theoretical. As soon as you have any person who has experience of the subject at hand, you are discounting their experience. It’s also something that (unless one has had both happen) can’t be stated as “true”, because without having had both experiences, no one has an actual basis for comparison.
As to the “trivialising/not trivialising, I’ve already responded to that.
“Heart attacks are worse than broken legs.” You’re not saying, “Don’t complain about your broken leg because heart attacks are worse.” You’re just ranking heart attacks as generally worse.
Context matters. If you say that to someone who has just broken a leg, you are making a direct comparison, and effectively telling them they don’t have it so bad.
It’s an asshole thing to do, because it’s trivalising their problems.
3) The level of rhetoric here is pretty intense. I offered a pretty tepid defense of Dawkins as a person and got a pretty heavy dose of “Fuck you. You’re a horrible person.” I think that feminism gets criticized (wrongly in my opinion) for having divisive rhetoric much like atheism does. As a feminist and an atheist, I tend to think its counter-productive in both cases.
Aw… you defended someone who made an offensive rhetorical choice. Someone who has a history of offensive rhetoric; and doubly offensive against women, and you think it’s mean and nasty for people to take offense.
It could be worse, you could be getting open letters written telling everyone how it’s not so bad you were “harassed” in an elevator when other people are being stoned.
Or cranks calls in the middle of the night.
But you, you are getting replies you don’t like to your defense of an asshole.
After all, it’s not like beiong told that makes it no big deal would trivialise your experience.
Also worth pointing out as atheism seems to be getting called into question. I don’t have data on this, but I would be willing to bet my house to get $5 that atheists are more likely to be feminists than religious people.
How are you measuring it?
What counts as Atheist? What counts as religious.
Most importantly, what counts as feminist.
Because I watched Elevatorgate, and Atheism is soaking in misogyny. You might be a feminist. You might like to think other atheists are feminists… it don’t make it so.
MichiganPerson: He doesn’t get a pass for being an evolutionary biologist. He just remains a good evolutionary biologist. Not the only one, but he does seem to be at the forefront of his field
Why does Woody insist in clinging to The Woody Delusion, which is that people here want to talk to him and are interested in what he has to say?
pallygirl, I reckon if anyone thinks they’re ableist, they’ll let you know, and you’ve already apologised in case of it. I don’t think David would okay mods post-editing people’s comments here. I only zap trolls’ stuff because the editor status in WordPress doesn’t allow me to just put the troll in moderation. Said it before, sait it again: Stoopud WordPress!
cassandra, I’d probably read The Woody Delusion if it was a choice between that and The God Delusion. Both written by assholes, but TWD is much shorter: “I love Paul Elam and you should all listen to me say so over and over again! The End.”
Sait? I can’t even blame autocorrect for that one. 😛
MichiganPerson: More importantly, though, I don’t think it’s valuable to tell me to fuck off.
Well, no, you wouldn’t. So, tell us, why are you special? What makes it so that your giving offense ought not merit being told to fuck off?
What else have you brought to the table? Nada. You’ve not earned any slack.
. Worst case scenario for me, I have defended someone who said something offensive and I’m totally wrong. But I’m not a horrible person. I’m a pretty nice guy, and a feminist for what it’s worth,
It’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. If you are a nice guy, you will take the fuck off as read; a response to being aggressively wrong, when you are an otherwise unknown.
IF you are so feminist as all that, you will understand that Dawkin’s misogyny means those who enter feminist spaces and defend him are gonna get some pushback.
we would probably agree a lot and learn from each other if we had a more calm interaction.
Are you accusing me of not being calm?
What have you got to teach me? It ain’t gonna be how Dawkin’s was misunderstood, because I don’t think he was, and I can’t see how you are in any place to make it seem so; for all the reasons I’ve detailed.
. In atheism, there are those who would tell religious apologists to fuck off, which I think is bad for atheism.
I don’t think it is. The people who drag, “and religious people are all deluded morons who don’t accept they are the root of all evil” out and introduce it into places were it’s not relevant, those I think hurt the rhetorical space, and the ability to persuade, but telling theists who are being apologist in offensive ways to fuck off… perfectly merited.
(nb, I do think there can be reasonable, and justified apologia, most of which has to do with putting religious ideas, teachings, doctrine, dogma, and history, into perspective)
there are a lot of people who believe in gender equality who don’t want to be called feminists because of people like @pallygirl.
Bullshit. The people who don’t want to be called feminist are that way because of people like Dawkins, and Elam, and TAA, and JB, who go around talking about straw-feminists. When the public idea of feminist is ball-busting, man-hating, sex-hating, baby-killing monsters… and to call oneself a feminist is to get things like, Dear Muslima witten about you… people refrain from self-identifying.
I will point out that Bar Ilan is the sort of place I would expect such a sentiment to be expressed. It’s a reactionary (even by “right wing Israeli” standards) place.
And as Mme Pecunium said, ‘sometimes there aren’t enough shovels ready to hand when you want to hit someone on the head.