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.
http://www.keepcalmstudio.com/gallery/poster/1qMwSfT
pallygirl, perfect! 😀
kitteh: @pecunium, want me to see if I can unbold that last comment for you
Yes, please. I was trying to bold the name alone, as a way to offset it from the prologue.
Totoro: @ 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…
Care to back that up with yanno, some “valid and formal reasoning” as well as a bit of evidence.
I, for one, am not “pretending” to give Dawkin’s lessons in logic. I am willing to grant that he understands it. It is, in fact, precisely because I am willig to grant that argument that his failures in applying logical argument are so offensive.
BTW, Dawkins didn’t make a logical case, he made a declarative statement, and called anyone who disagreed with it illogical.
Way to almost ruin feminism for this guy by saying something or other in a comment @pallygirl. Lucky for us it sounds like Michiganperson will tough it out and stay a feminist despite the super rude things @pallygirl hurled at him. Good thing @pallygirl wasn’t a suffragette back in the day or women would have never got the vote after @pallygirl told off some pretty nice guy in a waistcoat and curled mustache.
OK, I’m probably enjoying Michiganperson’s hurt feels a wee bit too much.
I also killed off several dozen brain cells watching the Today clip covering #signs against feminism. My patience with complaints about how feminists are doing a poor job selling feminism to the nice young ladies on the internet has officially died. Believe it or not it I don’t consider it a personal failure that young women don’t find feminism so mild, painless, simple and instantly palatable a concept that they embrace it without a second thought. I don’t wring my hands because it gets bad press, because it always has and anti-feminists always eat it up.
Screw it. Pretty ladies of Poland, feminism is about growing out your body hair until it drags on the floor, hating all things that seem even sort of feminine and opening jars by smashing them against men’s heads. Run for your lives!
Yesss! Fixed the bolding.
FEAR ME, HTML
Why can’t feminists stop ruining feminism for condescending dudebros? Think of the dudebros, people.
OT: damn, now I really wish I could comment on Pharyngula. PZ’s talking about visiting the Oxford Botanical Garden and nobody’s told him how dangerous it is (see: Lewis, The Soul of Genius). Oxford’s not as bad as Midsumma but it’s close.
Useful and why I consider Dawkins to be a misogynist. Hint, he has a history of being a misogynist. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
http://freethoughtblogs.com/godlessness/2014/07/30/the-dawkins-cycle-an-infographic/
What Dawkins should understand – and I’m not convinced he’s done much formal philosphy training – is that the results of logical analysis can often result in entirely ludicrous conclusions if the premises were wrongly chosen or badly framed. In this case, he’s not done any logical scrutiny of the premises he based this whole fustercluck on that I can see.
He could have chosen entirely different subject matter for the logical issue he claims to be considering. Even if he decided that rape, assault, molestation, harassment were the right topics for comparison and ranking, he could have chosen different events or different words to describe those events. And I don’t buy any of the excuses proffered that his word choices were merely unfortunate.
He’s been here before and he knows the terrain with all its problems and pitfalls. He’s also an experienced, competent writer. He knows that words have meanings. He knows that concepts have cultural background and some of them have nasty cultural baggage. He also owns a thesaurus or two, any number of dictionaries, along with access to academic journals of any and every possibly relevant discipline.
He made his own choices. They were all bad. They were illogical. They obscured rather than clarified the issue he claims to be considering. All the pushback is due entirely to his own inadequate writing and his choice, nobody else’s, his choice to put his words out in twitter format.
Logic? Fail.
Yes, it is the critics of Dawkins who have been avoiding logic and reason by using those tools to attack this comments and not-pology. Dawkins and his defenders have been using logic and reason by using ad hominem attacks on the critics instead of rationally and calmly pointing out where they think the holes in the criticisms are.
Dawkins and his defenders: re logic. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Wait, wut?
What, “logical thinker” and “has a penis” aren’t basically the same things? You just think that because you’re not a logical thinker.
Dawkins’s premise for this or anything else he bloviates about is that he knows all there is to know about everything, alpha and omega, ego without end.
I just thought of a possible way to shut him up: ask him what his star sign is. Andrew Denton wound him up by popping that in at the end of an interview once. Only time I’ve seen His Assholiness wordless.
If I ever interviewed him I’d do my best to bait him into a frothing sexist rage. Tell him my star sign, twirl my hair around my finger, the works.
I would ask him what his academic qualifications are, and when he graduated with each one. I would then ask him which of those academic qualifications makes him an expert in sexism, racism, sexual assault, anthropology, psychology, sociology, gender studies, cultural studies, logic etc. If he mentions that he knows females, or anything along those lines I would point out that the fact my body contains genes clearly gives me the qualifications to pontificate about evolution and molecular biology. Also, as a female I have testosterone (and the basic body type in humans is female – e.g. males have nipples), so that makes me clearly more qualified to pontificate about male experiences compared to cis males, who don’t actually produce oestrogen.
I come back to my question re morals/ethics. What hard science basis is there to make a moral or ethical call on something. What makes an outcome or behaviour bad, on purely hard science grounds? Answer: hard science doesn’t address these questions.
The reason that society punishes some behaviours and not others is because society has made a judgement call that some behaviours should be punished, and punished harder, than others. In historical times that was on the basis of property rights. Tell me hard science dudebros, what exactly about biology or physics or chemistry fucking explains property rights? Then we started changing sentences (e.g. removing the death penalty, removing hard labour sentences combined with incarceration) because the sentences were deemed to be inhumane and out of proportion to the crime. What bit of biology or chemistry or physics was the basis for that logic? Oh that’s right, none. The introduction of these crimes/punishments and their amendments was on the basis of the fact that the crimes were behaviours that were deemed bad – a moral/ethics decision, not a scientific one. Are laws and sentences suddenly an irrational idea now?
The entire history of law and punishment is deeply embedded in morals/ethics because law and punishment arise out of philosophical theories. Using legal terms necessarily brings those philosophical understandings with them – words have fucking meanings. So Dawkins and his supporters have a complete lack of epistemological understanding as well.
To tell us that we don’t know what we’re talking about, by saying that emotion has no place, is to completely ignore the discourses in which Dawkins tweets occurred. Dawkins comes across as Humpty Dumpty. This is not a compliment.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
Humpty Numpty
Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass. That reference is just perfection, pallygirl.
I should reread the Alice books. I’d probably get a lot more out of them now than I did when I was eleven.
Or they’re already rape survivors.
I think there’s really a gendered component ot his behavior. He and his fanboys treated elevatorgate as some kind of collective feminine overreraction, and his decision to use rape for his comparison this time around strikes me as trying to deliberately upset women so he can once again prove that we’re irrational, emotion-driven, possibly even hysterical creatures.
He’s so boring, I literally just can’t be bothered. But I’ll defer to the will of the community.
Well there aren’t many people above him, and punching laterally might require an uncomfortable amount of self-examination.
@Pallygirl, if it makes you feel better, “out of touch with reality” is often suggested as an alternative to the ableist words around here. I use it all the time.
Which religious people? Because there are some Pagan trads, like Reclaiming and Dianic Wicca, that are explicitly feminist. And feminist theology is a thing, as is thealogy.
Woody is like the spider that’s so small and obviously harmless that even arachnaphobes can’t be bothered to do anything about it.
Wait, so men will stop oppressing women if we’re just nice to them? Why hasn’t anyone tried this before?!?!
I would pay actual money to make this happen.
Both Dawkins and people who defend him on science- and logic- related grounds demonstrate with painful clarity that they don’t even remotely understand logic or reasoning and insert those terms into their discourse as gratuitous and meaningless “bons mots”.
For example, Dawkins’ claim that stranger rape is worse than date rape isn’t an example of logic. It’s a value judgment — and one that doesn’t even take all relevant factors into account (such as the element of betrayal or reflexive victim-blaming that’s much more strongly associated with date rape than stranger rape). This claim isn’t based on science; it’s based on Dawkins’ personal, subjective perception that a penis belonging to someone you were willing to go on a date with is less repugnant than the penis belonging to someone you have never met before. This is a baseless assumption and an arbitrarily chosen criterion. And also, too, the fact that Dawkins isn’t personally affected by rape or the threat of rape doesn’t make him objective.
To borrow Dawkins’ own language, if you can’t distinguish between a logical conclusion and a subjective value judgment, you should STFU about logic for a while and go learn how to think or something.
So here is where I and most of Dawkins’ detractors part ways. I would not even concede that he’s being logical, because he clearly isn’t. I don’t understand why anyone else would acknowledge his “logic”, either. I don’t know, maybe he’s good at evolutionary biology, but outside of that field, he is an irrational, sloppy and undisciplined thinker.
This makes me so mad. Who the fuck are you, Dawkins, to decide which rapes are worse than others? How about instead of judging different types of rape on your imaginary scale of “badness” or going on about “mild pedophilia”, you stay out of the whole thing and let the survivors determine how they feel about their own situation?
Oops, wait a minute. I guess I’m just emoting here instead of being rational and debating. Because the badness of rape survivor experiences is something that should be debated and measured. Silly me.
ding ding we have a winner here
100% of the people who I’ve seen bring up up Mao or Stalin to compare with Hitler were trying to downplay the Holocaust as no big deal or make some sweeping straw-statement about socialism.
100% of the people who I’ve seen trying to scale the relative badness of rape were trying to make an argument for some types of rape being minimally or “zero bad”, and therefore excusable.
What makes anyone think that Dawkins is different?
I’m not sure if dick is playing dumb (“I’m so surprised by this “tsunami”, I just wanted to give a formal logic lesson. I didn’t think it would upset anyone.”) or if he really is dumb.
It looks like other people start to wonder too.