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.
You all would have liked her. She was very droll. The other thing I learned from her was the useful skill of how to talk to computer programmers which she was really good at (and which I am sort of better than average for non-programmers but not as good as her at).
I should recommend Pratchett to her the next time I see her — bet she’d love him.
p.s. I want to get a “seemed like a good idea at the time” tattoo.
“At least it can’t get any worse!”
-And-
“It sure is quiet around here.”
Those two phrases seem to presage disaster in my experience.
XD
Yes, exactly. I never had much benefit of the doubt to spare – I could never stand the man – but he’s a slimy internet troll these days.
Witness as Octo demonstrates what it is about the whole New Atheist, look I’m a New Atheist, see how clever I am! movement that annoys a lot of other atheists. Oh, look, an opportunity to splain! Which I know I’ve been asked to stop doing, but imma do it anyway, because I can! See how these exclamation marks indicate the fact that not only do I know that I’m ignoring people’s clearly stated boundaries, I’m reveling in doing so! See how much fun I’m having making other people uncomfortable!
It’s, like, meta or something.*
(Juvenile phrasing intentional, because everyone who disagrees with the behavior described above is just dumb and overly emotional, you see.)
Well, *I* didn’t. If you don’t want debate on this, which I can understand, you’d have to nip it in its bud… and not allow arguments from one side to pass but not the other. This would be understandable in a theists/agnostics blog, but this doesn’t seem to be what this blog is about.
Well, that Dawkins is an asshat is something that has indeed been sufficiently established. But concerning his atheism… well, the thing is, since he assumes there is most likely no god, the consequence is that theists are (most likely) wrong in his view. And he tells them that to their faces. Some people do find this to be incredibly rude. But personally, I find this no different than, say, a libertarian saying a socialist is wrong or vice versa.
Likewise, yeah, he’d assume you’re erring in the interpretation of your inner life. And maybe be an asshole about it and attribute that to your gender. But simply assuming somebody errs, as long as one isn’t an asshole about it, is no big deal. You’re also assuming he is erring. We all err on certain matters; none of us infallible.
Though, yeah, for the last two, three years, Dawkins maybe thinks he is…
Also, simply +1 to pallygirl’s last post.
“What happens if I press this button?”
Ah, the button… That’s one of the best.
Saying “I am an atheist” already lets people know that you don’t think there is a God, Octo. Going past that into “you’re wrong! let me tell you how wrong you are!” is basically “neener neener”, which is unlikely to make people like you even if they agree with you about the initial point, as you are demonstrating here.
I’m an atheist. I don’t go around saying “so you know I don’t think God is real, right? totes not real. not a thing that exists” not because I feel apologetic about it (I don’t), but because doing so would be pointless. It’s the same baseline good manners that I expect my religious relatives to exhibit by not reminding me that they think I’m going to hell at the dinner table.
Nobody said otherwise. That’s the whole point: that the ‘splainy assholes are the ones getting on everyone’s wick, regardless of the subject, and for me, that I do not appreciate some man telling me my emotions or interpretation of them is wrong, because he’s the Great Professor and I’m some irrational type who can’t Logic (and his fanboys would throw in “mentally ill” as well).
Oh, fuck you, you disingenuous blowhard. You’re not debating, you’re having yourself a good old-fashioned ‘splain.
Sparky: never say the “Q” word! That totally invites clusterfucks.
So I was talking to a guy about his cooking hobby, and how he wanted to learn how to make marshmallows using the original ingredients, which apparently involved beating an ingredient (not gelatin) for about 20 minutes to make it transmogrify into something else. We had a lot of fun thinking of other things that you could do that do: cream to whipped cream, egg whites to meringue. And then speculating about the number of times that same impulse ended well versus the number of times it ended badly. “Let’s just try hitting that thing for 20 minutes.”
Basic human impulses 101. XD
The takeaway is that I got to sample his caramels (get your mind out of the gutter, these were actual caramels!) and a jasmine tea-flavored candy he is thinking of marketing. It was pretty good.
Side note – there are people/environments where arguing about this stuff is welcomed and everyone loves doing so. It’s OK to have this argument in those environments, because everyone involved has agreed to do so and is enjoying themselves immensely. I have religious friends with whom I can have those arguments. Mr C’s family does argue about this stuff at the dinner table, and that’s OK because everyone involved is OK with it, and we all have fun debating (often drunkenly) until it’s time for everyone to go to bed.That doesn’t mean every family is like that.
Social skills, people! It’s really not that hard to figure out who (or which space) welcomes this sort of discussion, and who doesn’t. If you choose to ignore the “nope, this is not a welcome conversation” signals then you’re being a jerk.
Sigh… While I was thinking about caramels an argument about atheism broke out.
Can we argue about caramels instead?
p.s. What cassandrakitty said. Not the space for this.
Life-or-death arguments about caramels, however, totally welcomed. Come at me bro.
I had a perfect image of a dinner table with a trapdoor under it then, like the Dave Allen sketch where the priest in confessional shouts “No! I can’t forgive that, and neither can God!” pulls a lever and the guy confessing disappears.
It wasn’t me who made the first arguments. You’ll note that entire post of mine consists of quotes of what other people have said. I merely responded to arguments others made. Besides, *all* arguments are basically “let me tell you in what ways you are wrong”. I mean, literally so. Now sometimes people don’t want discussions and that’s fine. If we don’t want discussions about atheism, then let’s not have any… but people had already made arguments about atheism. It wasn’t me who started this discussion.
Also, except for that one quote about “who created the creator”, I didn’t even speak about god’s existence or non-existence at all. I was merely defending what I perceive to be the core-points of New Atheism. Is that suddenly a crime, while decrying New Atheism isn’t? Funny, has this blog become being about bashing New Atheism instead of mocking misogynists while I wasn’t looking?
@ cloudiah
Tell me more about this tea-flavored candy you speak of.
Especially when a person ignores it after kicking this shit up before.
cloudiah: salted caramel 4 lyfe!
Ah, so what you’re saying is “no, I have no social skills, nor do I do nuance”.
@cloudiah
:: giggles ::
“She started it” doesn’t really fly around here. Feel the temperature of the room, and adjust.
No. In fact, the pushback you’re getting right now is from a couple of atheists.
But please keep feeling oppressed or whatever.
And yes, let’s talk about caramels. Please.