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.
So fucking awful and totally illustrates exactly how abuse by someone known can be even more traumatic when you have to deal with these sentiments. Oftentimes the actual rape isn’t as traumatic as the fallout and lack of support and rape culture climate that occurs after and contributes to the shame. (Not at all suggesting rape is more or less traumatic for anyone, just something I remember reading once about toxic rape culture and how the trauma of rape would be much easier to survive if we lived in a climate of support and empathy).
My bad, i have totally skipped a sentence : “Rape by strangers is the most psychologically traumatizing of the three rape-offender categories and family-member rape the least.”
Anyway, this study is labelled “Evolutionary psychology” so i’m not sure if its a good sign ^^
“The only–and I mean ONLY–time it becomes appropriate to speak in such relative terms is when you’re discussing how to allocate scarce resources to address the distinct problems. ”
Then it is never appropriate to speak in relative magnitude about historical disasters. and questions such as ” which was the worst earthquake of the 19th century?” is completely verboten.
Besides criminal sentencing involves this horrible kind of grading.
There does exist some good evopsych. It exists only in journals and generally has strong disclaimers in the discussion section about how the information only applies if humans existed under (these) conditions and could be confounded by (a whole ton of) factors.
I’m highly skeptical of even some of the peer reviewed stuff, too, to be honest. Science is not immune from fad, and nonsense papers have made it past peer review before being caught later: see the vaccination leads to autism paper, the GMOs will kill us all paper, and the math paper generated randomly by a computer program.
For starters.
@contrapangloss : Yeah, I think so too, there is too much bullshit in evopsych to take them at face value and I have a hard time thinking that rape by a stranger would be less traumatic that being rape by someone you know.
I’m quite curious to know how do they rank the trauma in this study though.
Arg, I meant *more traumatic –‘
You can rank tragedies and crimes based on various criteria. But you cannot then say to a sufferer of the Soviet famine of 1921 (or people advocating for the same) that the Great Chinese Famine was worse, therefore your suffering is objectively less than the suffering of a person who lived through the Great Chinese Famine, and maybe you should stop talking about your stupid suffering when other people have it so much worse.
@talacris:
Context matters. Grading tragedies can be harmful when the culture is already confused about whether certain “grades” of a tragedy are even a tragedy in the first place. Our culture has enough problems with rape and “legitimate rape,” so it’s at best insensitive to use that as an example in what was meant to be “a purely logical point.”
Not to mention that sometimes there isn’t a strict ordering you can objectively put on traumatic events. Attempting to do so for things like rape just add fuel to the fire for people who try to argue that certain types of rape aren’t “legitimate”.
Probably for the more egregious examples.
@talacris:
You’re choosing events with commonly accepted objective measures on purpose, aren’t you? The Richter scale, number of deaths, etc? Or historical events you’d find in a history book rather than a personal tragedy? Try coming up with a better analogy, and stop purposefully missing the point.
There’s a certain kind of person… and from my anecdotal evidence, they make up the a large and/or vocal part of the skeptic and neo-atheist internet community… who actually believes that they go around being rational all the time (unlike those cavemanlike religious people!). Not only that, they’ve taken this completely asinine premise and wedded themselves so completely to it, they have to create a giant wall of false dichotomies between themselves and everyone else.
Does Dawkins seriously, actually think any human being can ever be unemotional? Does he really not know what affect even is? Does he think that he doesn’t make 95% of his decisions (or even more!) automatically, just like everyone else on the planet?
These tweets are just such an obvious and basic trap, it’s insulting. The entire point is clearly to say something “coldly rational” but obviously hateful in the hopes that people will react with anger, so he can mine evidence for his desperately held theory that everyone who disagrees with him is overly emotional. Does he not know how obvious it is that that motivation is…. emotionally based?
Of course not. Worse means how many were hurt, not usable on an individual scale and certainly not that somebody should up talking about their experiences.
And “advocates for”, shouldn’t that be apologists for. Can advocate be used for something that has happened?
My use of “advocate” there means “person speaking on behalf of a sufferer”. So they are advocating for the victim, not for the crime.
I can’t access the study mentioned above, but I saw part of the abstract and it seems fishy already to me:
Yet nearly all research shows that stranger rape is the least common type of rape.
Yep because
implies that this kind of historical data are totally out of bound, else why the emphasis
contemporary examples like HIV, malaria prevention are probably already exempted under the above.
@talacris:
The context of the discussion was about things like rape. What you’re bringing up as a counter example is just a non-sequitor.
@Ally S : “Yet nearly all research shows that stranger rape is the least common type of rape.”
Maybe they used police files or something like that and the rape by strangers are the one more likely to be reported to the police ? Anyway, even if it’s the case, that skew the sample at the start and it’s effectively the sign of a flawed study.
re the Thornhill & Thornhill article (TW rape):
One of the researchers is Randy Thornhill, who with Craig T. Palmer wrote A Natural of Rape. They argued that rape is an adaptive behavior. So, I don’t know how much I’d trust any research on rape by Thornhill.
Just wanted to check out this site cause Confused Cats Against Feminism is awesome, then I see this irrational shitstorm…
First thought, “Crazies angry Obama said or did something again.”
Is the rest of this site just about harboring grudges and making anything said by anyone they dont like something that has to be pulled apart until something to complain about is found?
Idiots in these comments are literally trying to use the exact opposite of the rape tweet as an argument against Dawkins? So you mean to tell me you think Dawkins is actually trying to communicate the exact opposite of what he communicated?
I get the elevator response was horrible, but these tweets are just a part of logic that people don’t seem to grasp which prevents people from effectively talking about potentially touchy subjects…
Originally yes, however Freemage next lines were about resources for fighting leukemia and common cold, which widens the the scope of the statement and changes context.
@talacris:
It really doesn’t, because it doesn’t change the context of the previous comments. In any case, that was just an off-hand analogy.
@sparky : Ok, so the study is doubly fishy. Thanks for the information sparky.
In any case, whether or not your comment was relevant, people have already responded and clarified that the point is about not telling a victim of a tragedy that their feelings should depend on some objective measure of how bad that tragedy was, so I’m backing out of the meta-talk.
Not the previous comments but that comment, so the context in that comment was different than in the previous.
“that the point is about not telling a victim of a tragedy that their feelings should depend on some objective measure of how bad that tragedy was, so I’m backing out of the meta-talk”
I agree with that so I do the same. Feel free to ignore my last comment