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.
My jeans go at the hems (bottom leg, and front pockets) and in knees. I don’t use the rear pocket, so those tend to survive.
pallygirl: If you eat all the passionfruits for me, this proposal is acceptable.
This is not acceptable. If hellkell east all the passionfruits I don’t get any.
declarative statements detected;
feminists detected;
activateDawkinsBot;
println(“My jeans tend to show the most wear at the back pockets’ corners and the knees”);
println(“My jeans always wear out on the inner thigh, near the groin”);
println(“If you think that’s an endorsement of jeans tending to show the most wear at the back pockets’ corners and the knees, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned how to think logically.”);
feminists==0;
deactivateDawkinsBot;
OTOH, I have modified my pants hypothesis to: they start to go where friction is most frequent. YMMV. Science! Logic!
I modify my earlier suggestion to hellkell and pecunium get all the passionfruits.
I call this my modest proposal.
I wanted to try passionfruit because I saw Nigella Lawson cover a Pavlova with the guts of a bunch. I saw some in the store and bought one (1) ONE! for $3.50 — it was okay, I guess. Tasted like grapefruit.
I like grapefruit. Slightly chilled, cut in half horizontally, sprinkle over a little table sugar and the eat the segments with a spoon. Goes nicely with marmalade on toast and a cup of tea.
I will call the resulting book An Appetite for Grapefruit.
Wow, the genius of SCIENCE. A bandicoot breeding program here has found they get better results (and bandicoots can have sixteen young a year) if they let the females choose who they’ll mate with.
No Fucking Kidding, fellas.
I always feel sorry for those pandas in zoos. This other panda is shoved into the cage with them, and people start watching them obsessively, waiting for them to breed. It seems to be going a bit better now they have realised that introducing the scent of the new panda to them a bit in advance helps them acclimatise to this stranger…but still, choice ? what’s that ?
It’s like that with so many endangered animals, isn’t it? iirc a tiger was killed not so long ago by the male introduced as her mate.
Ethically, I’m torn about all the animals in zoos. I know that quite a few of them are signed up to trying to replenish the wild populations, but given the poaching and permanent human encroachment into more and more areas, the idea that there will ever be anything other than token wildlife reserves for species (tigers, elephants, not sure about orangutans) seems overly optimistic. Is that an okay result ethically?
I don’t know, I really don’t. I don’t know what else we can do, either. Loss of habitat, poaching, FUCKING RECREATIONAL HUNTERS – all this makes it look like sustainable, safe-from-humans populations are just not going to happen for so many species.
Full disclosure: I’m drunk.
Don’t worry, your spelling and grammar will be better than most MRAs’ when they’re sober, as will the quality of your comments.
It’s to drown the pain of furzoning, isn’t it?
Some animals don’t suffer in zoos. They don’t possess the consciousness and intelligence to appreciate that they’re captive. When I talk about that I’m referring to critters like fishes and lots of rodents. Animals that can respond to all their instincts within an artificial environment without knowing the physical limitations of it due to not being very smart do great in captivity. They’re protected from predators and receive veterinary care.
Then there are animals like bottlenose dolphins who, yeah, receive veterinary care and are free from predators in captivity. They live a long time but their intelligence, emotional and intellectual, allows them to experience the lack of stimulation and choice in their captivity.
Then there are orca who despite veterinary care and being free from predation (not that they have predators) and disease present in the wild live shorter lives in captivity than they do in the wild. Their entire lives are spent in small, sterile tanks. They are entirely aware of their lack of choice. They know every inch of their enclosures very quickly after being introduced to them. THey experience their captivity to the fullest extent and engage in stereotypical behaviour demonstrating the absolute lack of psychological stimulation they’re provided.
I don’t know pandas well so I don’t know where they fit re: the extent to which they’re aware of their captivity.
Look, I realise my toolkit re: coping with furzoning is less than ideal. I know I need therapy and to build upon it. Prior to being furzoned though I didn’t know cats had this privilege, that they could do this to me and it would be deemed totally acceptable. Pussy privilege, indeed. Fuckin’ cats. Society values them over me.
Take the red hairball, sister!
Or maybe the red laser dot. Be less likely to come back.
(“The eco-friendly Red Hairball! We only use one!)
Re: Zoos
Then you have critters like great white sharks, who are pretty near impossible to keep for more than a couple months because they’ll either go on a hunger strike or a “must eat ALL the things” binge, and then start ramming themselves into walls…
I will share the passionfruit with anyone who wants some.
Passionfruit! Aaaaah. Childhood. We had both a peach tree and a passionfruit vine. Which means that summer desserts consisted of Completely Ripe beautiful peaches sliced into a bowl and covered with Completely Ripe passionfruit for a few ecstatic weeks. For peaches that means soft, aromatic flesh but no bruises. For passionfruit that means outside totally dark purple and a little bit crinkled all over.
I’m still amazed every time I go into a greengrocer’s and stand beside a gigantic display of peaches or apricots or nectarines – and there is no. smell. at. all. Stone fruit that’s worth eating has an irresistible aroma – apart from plums that is. They just smell sort of clean. You should be able to smell peaches or nectarines or apricots from yaaaards away.
I’m not caught up but I’m watching my loaches over the top of my screen and …
“Ethically, I’m torn about all the animals in zoos.”
My upstairs tanks contain almost exclusively wild caught fish. I’m always torn on this, given the obvious issues, and the number that don’t survive to make it into home aquariums. But I’m anal about my tanks, so I figure that the since I usually go for popular species where my not buying them will have zero affect on if they’re captured, at least in my tanks they get pampered.
Zoos and animals that are endangered? I’d prefer to save their natural environment, but keeping the species alive in captivity does extend the time we have to do that.
And I should put on some pants (mine go in the ass and knees) and do a water change on the 55g. Going the lazy route — out the window and then climb out on the porch roof to refill from the hose.
In other fish things, the gobies and Puff are getting along, and while last night’s freeze dried brine shrimp went over well with Puff, I ended up giving them live ones. But oh well, they are eating in the 30g, and I reclaimed a bunch of floor space!
Eh, idk if fish don’t know. Some certainly understand “outside here” — a thing that doesn’t exist in the wild. But no way to know if that’s just “hey, what’s this?” or a sign they get that they’re in captivity. They do tend to act differently than captive bred ones about more than just humans and food though (those are expected, of course human hands go over better with fish that have been bred in captivity for generations), but things like paying attention to the glass and watching outside the tank.
Puff definitely has a case of “what is this see through barrier?!” — he swam into the bag with the gobies while they were swimming out, having spent half an hour trying to swim through the sides, up the sides, jump the lip (that was hilarious)…and then he did the same from the inside.
For lulz, picturing a clear floating bag, open top, and a grape shaped fish trying to jump the lip. There was lots of flopping and swimming around like a new angle wouldn’t result in the same silliness. (Grapes are not terribly aerodynamic, he’s like lightening underwater, but his helicopter fins do him no good in the air)
Also, thank you for reminding me that I have one of these and it should be ripe — http://www.naturespride.eu/our-products/product-detail/pepino/
Yummy yum yums! (Seriously, best “wonder what that tastes like” purchase EVAR)
Is that really a young Dawkins in the picture? Because he looks disturbingly like David Tennant.
I think it looks more like Richard Dawkins.
And yeah, it’s him.
No, nothing like David Tennant. More like a young David McCallum.