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.
Ok…. public declarations time.
I am a male survivor of intimate partner rape. (I guess that counts as a trigger warning). It wasn’t violent, it was persistence. She wanted to have sex when I didn’t. The repetition of that is a large part of why we broke up. Part of it was that I was too young/inexperienced to know better (I was 18, she was 22).
It has, for going on the past 30 years, affected my romantic life (as opposed to my sex life). I have some pretty strong ideas about consent (I’m all for it), and things which feel, to me, that they press against my boundaries– put me right out of the mood.
Which means (TMI) some of my partners are afraid to initiate sex, because they worry it will be seen as an encroachment/pressure. That sort of fucks up spontaneity. Was it, “bad”? On an abstract level, no. I don’t feel scarred from it. I don’t have obvious trauma from it, but the after effects of that, “benign” abuse (what Herr Dawkins would call, “not as bad” are still with me.
So when one makes the comparative claim, with it’s trivalising of those who think all rape is really fucking bad (i.e. not “mild), (be it sui generis or as the lickspittle fanboy of some more visible asshole (yes, Woody, I’m counting you in the category of people who need to wipe off their chins, as well as their noses), they sure as hell deserve the “fuck-off” responses they get.
Because nothing exists in a vaccuum, and Dawkins may be able to present his argument in the form of Symbolic Logic and show it to be valid, that doesn’t make it true.
@katz, shit that’s my learning for the day. I knew about chocolate (theobromine).
In compensation:
http://youtu.be/ehkiMQQmsKw
Now that is adorable. Smart mouse!
I put bells on the door for the cats. Big loud bells. A whole string of them. Oh my dear paws and whiskers I took the bells off the door and put in a cat door. Criminy!
@pecunium: not sure if you need or want a response to your post. Sexual assault and its consequences are not something I would wish on anyone. I wish people wouldn’t experience it – I can’t stop it, but I can:
– ensure I don’t do it myself,
– support people who wish to be supported,
– speak out against this behaviour and any attempts to minimise it,
– provide financial support to organisations that assist survivors.
pecunium,
I’m sorry someone did that to you and I’m sorry people like Dawkins minimize your rape just because your rapist was known to you.
Because if you didn’t you’d go the fuck away. And shut up.
I just had a hilarious image of him punching himself in the nose! 😀
The fun thing to do with his star sign would be tell him how exactly he fits the pattern of whichever one it is.
I’ve emailed David asking him to put Troll Spoonwood on moderation. Anyone want me to wipe out his comments in the meantime?
I just feel icky with his way too much levels of detail in his sexual assault examples.
For people who feel that feminists are too emotional, they really do enjoy going into way TMI when typing out “hypotheticals”. The hypotheticals often contain way more detail than people’s lived experiences.
Kittehs: I’d leave them up. If he gets malleted, enh, but what he said has responses, and they would seem strange if they weren’t connected to the parent comment.
It’s almost like they’re trotting out their fantasies, isn’t it? Nah, that couldn’t possibly be the reason. /s
It alarms me how much time they’ve put into thinking through their (very explicit) scenarios. Like, why would anyone do that, given it’s a hypothetical and none of us are in philosophy class.
Thanks for reading my comment right, I should have ended with “way more detail than how people in this blog tend to talk about their lived experiences.” Of course, lived experiences themselves contain oodles of detail.
It’s a bit like my dad’s friend making his hypotheticals increasingly more complex as I add complications to his scenario. “So, what if it was a jaguar, and it was holding a shotgun, also the floor is laced with barbed wire… exploding barbed wire!”
Fear not, you were perfectly clear, pallygirl.
Even in the philosophy classes His Assholiness was talking about, it sounded like those lecturers were deliberately choosing topics to distress women – things that overwhelmingly harm us, and members of the classes might well have already suffered. The whole thing sounds less like “let’s look at the ethical implications of this hypothetical” than “let’s see how much of a boner I can get causing distress and disgust in people I have power over”. The trolls are trying the same thing here, without that degree of power.
I’ve always hated hypotheticals anyway. They never seen to be anything but a tool for men who like doing this fucking straw-Vulcan thing and showing how superior they are to anyone who actually cares about others.
Speaking as a moderator, I wish we had a virtual gun-wielding, exploding-barbed-wire hurling jaguar to deal with the trolls.
Laser eyes wouldn’t be bad either.
As to comments about the perspicacious comments of Dawkins: https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/324171554491596803
I read a bunch of the comments, to see if that inspired any conversation of merit.
Nope, or at least not in the first few hundred. The few people who put forth comments of actual inquiry are (more or less) shouted down with ridicule, as opposed to being treated as intelligent human beings.
And that is the real problem with Dawkin’s school of Atheism: it denies that people can be non-atheists and without being stupid.
Kind of like a fundy-preacher, who says, “It’s All TRUE, and I have shown it to you. Denial is wilful refusal to admit what you know (now) to be true.”
Me, I’m a weak theist (or perhaps an agnostic). The framework of my belief/theology is based on Roman Catholicism (because there’s no such thing as an atheist baby (nor a theist one). But if pressed, I don’t know if there is a god.
And, all in all, I don’t care. My moral framework is, actually, independent of deity (I realise this is in no way true for all theists, perhaps not even most).
Dawkins (and his ilk) refuse (sometimes with great hostility) to accept the idea of a critical theist. Some even refuse to accept a moral theist. And then (having insulted people) they pretend to be surprised when someone calls them on their shit (and some of their shit is crap like this).
/soapbox. Sorry for the rant, I got sidetracked.
I’ve taken/read philosophy, and a well built hypothetical is a boon.
You don’t really want to be talking about something like the morality of mass-killing if all you can use is real world examples.
Why, you ask, would you want to talk about it? So you can then apply the ideas/realisations/conclusions you came up with to real world examples: because they do exist, and how to react to them; individually, or as a group, is important; so that you can take a stand (or not) when the next one comes up, and that stand can have reasoned arguments to throw in the face of douchecanoes who say one is being “too emotive”.
@vaiyt: I’m visualising a mass of seething piranhas, under the floor. And the other lesson for me today was I had no idea how to spell piranha.
@kitteh: one interesting point raised in one of the Pharyngula threads was that these “hot zone” hypotheticals never address things that might upset white cishet males. I can’t recall the thread or the specific examples, but they were along the lines of (things not used as hypotheticals):
– females have higher earnings power than males
– females tending to be in jobs that accrue more respect, compared to males
– more crimes and harsher sentences for white collar crimes
“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)?”
Are we using fish examples to explain evolution? Finally, a topic I could discuss all day! (If I wasn’t in a lull between being Pavlov to my brackish babies. I think the gobies are FINALLLYYYYY going in Puff’s tank, once I feed him, but he’s still miffed about being caught for their most recent play date [Unsupervised! Everybody played nice!])
On topic, zebra danios and leopard danios are the same species, different color mods, bred for aquarist aesthetics. Why are they capable of a wide range of stripe/spot patterns? Gonna guess the answer here is “cuz they’re inch long omnivores, not exactly not on the menu for larger fish”
More interestingly, some loaches look more like plecos than loaches — they can suction onto things with their fins. Wanna guess where they live? Rocky, fast flowing streams, where suctioning into rocks means not getting bounced downstream. (Note, should you ever see anything for sale as a plec that does not suction with its MOUTH, it’s a loach and requires a hell of a lot more dissolved oxygen than most aquarium fish…this is a sore spot of mine, as they don’t tend to survive in captivity when not given special care)
…I’m done rambling about fish, I have ones to feed 🙂
…I didn’t hit post? Oh. Well then! Puff’s no longer mad at me, and I’m thinking tomorrow on the introductions, seeing how it’s lights out soon. Also, DANCING LOACHES!! I have clowns again as of two days ago and I have no idea what evolutionary purpose their dancing could have, but it’s entertaining to watch (and probably to do, so maybe that is the point of it?)
“Me, I’m a weak theist (or perhaps an agnostic)… But if pressed, I don’t know if there is a god.”
I’m probably a slightly weaker theist (or stronger agnostic) than you are. But like you, I don’t know if there is a god. (I don’t even have an idea what a Supreme Force would be like if there is one.) And Dawkins doesn’t know either. What has always annoyed me about him is that he does not understand that “I do not believe that there is a god” is a reasonable position but “There is no god” is not. There could be a Supreme Force which is beyond the ability of human intelligence to comprehend. Dawkins is implicitly claiming that he possesses the supreme intelligence in the universe, which seems like rather dazzling arrogance. This is the same arrogance that leads him to believe that his way of thinking is the only valid one — that, say, his analysis of the relative turpitude of rape at knife-point versus date rape must be valid because he is pure logic not distracted by irrelevant emotions. His total disrespect for the emotional reactions of rape survivors is one result of this disrespect.
Prior to reading this thread, I would have agreed with Dawkins that knife-point rape is clearly worse. Having read the thread and listened to other people’s stories, I realize that my former views were lacking in empathy, so I have changed my views. I like to believe that that is what intelligent people do, but I doubt that Dawkins is capable of making that sort of modification. A bit of intellectual humility makes it easier to function as a human being,.
pecunium: see what pallygirl said below re the choice of topics for these hypotheticals.
Mind games, treating people – or anyone not a straight white dude – as abstracts, or fodder. It screams “I have no empathy”. I loathe it.
“I’m visualising a mass of seething piranhas, under the floor. And the other lesson for me today was I had no idea how to spell piranha.”
But can you spell pacu? (Their close, vegetarian, cousins)
Also, can I have an underfloor fish tank and a transparent floor? Maybe with a porthole so I can go swimming? (Yes, “swim with the fishes” is nothing like an insult to me 🙂 )
On topic! Blarg, thanks Dawkins, you asshole. I really needed to be reminded that since I wasn’t threatened with a weapon it didn’t count. So I already texted pecunium a snip of this, because arg, and TW: all the rape apologia and fucked up psych attitudes…
Thanks Dawkins, I preferred thinking meds psych from hell was just a horrible person. Not that her inquisition about the exact nature of wtf happened, her BS about not knowing if I was malingering, deciding ON FIRST MEETING ME that I’ve got a personality disorder, her discounting that I could ever possibly be disabled…I really preferred thinking it was a combination of biases about what she said (I *am* young and smart, these are true, if completely irrelevant, so bias about young people and mental disability? Totally a thing she could’ve been having [that sentence made more sense in my head])
But thank you Dawkins, and the discussion you started…no, I was threatened with a weapon, no, I didn’t need medical treatment, yes, rapist EX’s does indeed mean I was dating them…so, not as bad as if I was held at knife point by a stranger. Then I’d have a cause for PTSD, as it is I must have a personality disorder and be exaggerating.
END TW
Thankfully, I found a lightening fast French proxy to watch QI. Less thankfully, I’m running out of ones I haven’t seen.
Pecunium, this could pose a problem, you may need to find something else to get me hooked on. Also, the pen from the guest book at your wedding, see your email, R keeps asking if you’ve gotten back to me, he REALLY wants to get himself a pen like that!
meant, “result of this arrogance”
Also, the fact that some religions have done tremendous damage and caused great suffering does not prove that there is no good; it just proves that bad people will claim that they know what god wants in order to advance their skeevy objectives.
“What has always annoyed me about him is that he does not understand that “I do not believe that there is a god” is a reasonable position but “There is no god” is not.”
Huh. Thank you for that. I’ve long felt like both a bad pagan and a bad atheist for going “idk, but if there is/are god(s), then I believe they’re like…”
But no, that makes sense. Because you’re right, I can’t know. Not the way I know I have ten fingers, and that trimming my cuticles and then playing in a brackish water tank was a Bad Idea (in non-aquarist — don’t put open wound like things in salty water), or that coffee is gooooooood. More like the way I know what my fish like, and how certain species tend to be “personality” wise (not just the empirical “territorial” type things, but that, f’ex, clown loaches are aptly named goofs)
And upside down catfish are weird. One just came up out of nowhere, if I didn’t know better I’d say that was catfish for “hey, I’m goofy too!”
GrumpyOldMan, yes to all the above!
For me, God/creator spirit/whatever is background. Years back, when I was first in contact with Louis, I asked him, and the best term he could think of was “a consciousness but not a personality”. That settled my questions on the subject; it was never of overrriding importance. Contact with those who’ve passed is much close to my heart.
Strikes me that the Great God Dawkins would be a seriously crap deity.