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.
cassandra – got it!
Dear kittehserf,
I would like to please nominate Adam Beach for the role of Hagrid. Also, the new unit assist on my ward (but you don’t know him, so nevermind).
Yours, in all sleep deprived giddiness,
GrumpyOldNurse
I approve of the last sentence in this article:
http://www.neatorama.com/2014/07/31/This-Man-Is-Pushing-a-Brussels-Sprout-up-a-Mountain-with-His-Nose/#!bsOfnf
Niters, GrumpyOldNurse!
Yeah, that’s high maintenance hair. Facial-hair owners, would that be achievable with an electric razor of the time, or would he have had to use a wossname not electric one?
Puts me in mind of the 90 minutes Louis XIV used to put into dressing and doing his hair. Thirty minutes of that was just spent waxing his minimal moustache.
As a kid I used to find my dad’s fussing over his stache so funny. He had tiny little scissors that he would carry around for emergency trimming.
pallygirl, LOL! He could get rid of a whole lot of sprouts that way.
Hmm, I’m nominating Roger Allam as Hagrid. He’s not obviously hot but he is very easy on the eye.
It shouldn’t be too hard, it’s more genetics than anything else. All he has to do is shave below that point, he doesn’t even need to trim. One of the easiest ways to do it is to grow out your beard to the desired thickness and then go to a barber’s and ask them to even out your sideburns to the same thickness and you can even ask them to shape it if you want. Maintenance isn’t too bad because it’s a relatively simple shape, and the thicker the beard, the less precise you have to be.
Yes, I’ve been known to do a lot of things with my facial hair, what gave it away 😛
I don’t think I actually know any men with facial hair that’s naturally thick enough to pull that kind of thing off without it looking wispy and odd.
Nice to hear from an expert! 😀
Bloke I used to see on the train must have had fast-growing facial hair, because I’ve never seen anyone change the style so often or so fast. Beard, sideburns, moustache, clean-shaven, combination, and they always looked well grown in.
Lucky for us blogs aren’t limited to ones that are “theist/agnostic” and ones that are rift with pedantic bores regurgitating New Atheism 101 despite the palpable lack of interest of every poster not named Octo. Dawkins is a turd bucket who knows mocking “rape hysteria” will fill the kiddie pool where his most brainless super fans hang with meaty anti-feminist chum.
Worst wispy facial hair nomination would have to go to archaeologist Phil Harding. Those sideburns, argh.
This picture also shows why he should always, always keep his hat on.
So the really frizzy bits are beard, or..? I am confused by this person’s hair.
@ brooked
I’m also not sure why “theist” and “agnostic” would be grouped together, unless the group is “people who I get to sneer at, yay”.
While I’ve seen pics/videos of the rare White/Brown man who can pull it off, the vast, vast majority of men I’ve seen that really pulled off that look were Black men. I think it’s because of the texture of their hair. I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that it was originally an African American fashion.
Thinking of both my dad (white) and Mr C (Asian), I don’t think that in either case their facial hair grows high enough up on the cheek for that look to work. They’d end up with a line halfway between the cheekbone and the jaw, which would just look silly.
Yep, the really frizzy bits are sideburns/beard. They used to be properly ginger.
This is him with Mick Aston on Time Team’s early days, about twenty years back (you really don’t want to see what Tony Robinson was doing with his hair then).
This is Phil more recently:http://www.insidewiltshire.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/alice04.jpg
He really does have alarmingly neglected hair.
I remember a line from one TT ep that would be most appropriate to Dawkins: Phil was winding up Mick, and said, “Just cos you’re a professor doesn’t mean you know everything.” (Imagine this in perfect West Country pirate accent.)
Minstrels leave both Smarties and all types of M&Ms in a burning heap of inferiority, it’s outrageous how British people get all the good candy. If there was a just God I would be eating a bag of Minstrels right now instead of typing these sad words. So nope on the just God thing.
Is he a nice man? If so I feel like maybe we should perform an intervention involving conditioner.
Maltesers are also vastly superior to the American version.
Shadow, that’s the impression I have with that style, too – I know nothing of its origins but yes, you’d need that hair texture to do it at all well.
Yeah, my anecdotal experience has been that it’s mainly black men that have that horizontalish beard line. Mine is this weird sort of trapezium. It starts off sloping down and then halfway there it drops in a sort of precipice. It’s the kind of beard line that you see movie characters rolling down and then dropping off into an ocean
I did know one white guy who could probably have pulled that off. He didn’t really have any space between his neckbeard and his chest hair, and the hair was very thick, and iirc the beard line ended not far below his cheekbones. With wispy hair it would be too much like the billy goats gruff thing you get when men with not much facial hair attempt a goatee.
declarative statements detected;
activateDawkinsBot;
println(“the kind of beard line that you see movie characters rolling down and then dropping off into an ocean is one type of beard line”);
println(“Maltesers are also vastly superior to the American version”);
println(“If you think that’s an endorsement of beard lines, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned how to think logically.”)
deactivateDawkinsBot;
I only know him from what I’ve seen on telly, so I can’t really say. One thing in his favour, I know he’s involved with Operation Nightingale, which helps rehabilitate veterans through involvement with archaeology. The vet who founded it got through his depression watching TT, and when asked what was so appealing about it, cracked “Phil Harding in those hot pants.”
I have long felt that Phil should be introduced to a bucket of conditioner.
This chap isn’t doing the super-fine cut, but he’s rocking some splendid sideburns. Can’t stand most of Ingres’ female portraits, but he did some niiiice male studies.