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.
TW: rape
In Lundy Bancroft’s book about abuse “Why Does He Do That?” he cites a study suggesting that partner or acquaintance rape creates longer lasting problems for victims than stranger rape, due to the greater psychological distress that generally follows.
@Okamoto
No one cares about your misinformed concern trolling.
Okamoto:
This site is about mocking misogynists and the awful things they say. Y’know, like Dawkins up there who thinks he can generalize his experience to everyone and can rate how bad rape different types of rape and abuse are. Because he’s, y’know, so much more logical than anyone else.
Dawkins said stranger rape is worse than date rape. That is exactly what he said. He tried to side-step the implications of his words by saying he doesn’t “endorse” date rape. But, of course, both you and Dawkins are completely ignoring the objections to saying something like, “Stranger rape at knife point is worse than date rape.” The objections aren’t because we think that Dawkins is “endorsing” date rape, but that he is attempting to rank rape and abuse in terms of relative “badness.”
Sigh. See above. Your post is one long straw-Vulcan reading comprehension fail.
… What does any of this have to do with Obama?
And, to add, trying to rank pedophilia and rape from what’s bad to what’s worse does absolutely nothing to help the victims of rape and child abuse, but does send the implicit message that victims shouldn’t feel or react they way they do because there’s always someone out there who has it worse.
Okamoto:
Err… Dawkins was apparently explicitly not talking about those touchy subjects. According to him, he was merely making a logical statement. Everyone understood this, but also recognized that he was being pretty ham-handed about dealing with those touchy subjects by using them as examples when he had made such terrible public statements about them in the past.
You… you didn’t actually read anything here, did you?
That’s what I’d like to know, too.
I get that this blog isn’t for everyone.
But I’m always amazed at people who take the time to write long messages about how this site isn’t for them.
If I go to someone’s personal blog and I don’t like it, I just leave. I don’t hang out to tell them how terrible their blog is, and that all the people who like it are also terrible.
But maybe I’m just lazy.
Apparently dood thinks we’re libertarians. Hahahahahahahahahahahahah.
And all Americans.
[CN: sexual abuse]
I’ve experienced sexual abuse in that I’ve been forcibly stripped naked and touched, and I have trauma due to compulsory heterosexuality in the form of invasive sexual comments about me. No matter what I can’t get out of my head this idea that I’m “appropriative” for claiming I’m a survivor of sexual abuse because I know so many people who would consider what happened to me to be “mild” or “nothing severe”. I feel like I’m just a liar and an attention-seeker when I try to talk about my trauma. When people like Dawkins try to define survivors’ own experiences for them, he is perpetuating the same kind of self-hatred and self-neglect that I put myself through as a result of trauma. What he said isn’t just some offensive remark – he is saying things that actively harm abuse survivors.
Ally: I know you know this, but Dawkins is a giant smeghead and all this stuff he says is bullshit.
“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…”
the word “idiots” pretty much gives away the extent to which this comment was made in good faith, and all this stuff has already been said by people you’re summarily dismissing, but just in case…
Dawkins’s point was confused and incomprehensible, on its face. It’s almost never necessary or helpful to compare the relative terribleness of terrible things (i.e. it doesn’t help people “effectively talk about” them).
Dawkins has burned away his goodwill regarding things like this. He’s clearly aware that setting anchors is a way of influencing how people feel about things, because that’s his whole complaint. So why keep doing it, knowing that it hinders understanding? It makes no sense to say that “effectively talking about” something is the point when he keeps saying the same thing that obvious isn’t working.
So, there’s only two possible explainations. Either he wants to keep making the point that Y really IS kinda okay compared to X, but to frantically try to logic his way out of getting criticized for it, OR he wants to manufacture a situation where his detractors are emotional and he is logical, because that supports the worldview that stitches his self-esteem together. Or both. (the correct answer is both.)
Also, Dawkins’s ranking of the terrible things is both smug and arbitrary. There’s no evidence that his Xs are really worse then his Ys, but he states them as if they were objective facts. In so doing, he demonstrates a horrendous lack of empathy and perspective, projecting his own feelings and generally being a dick.
Meanwhile, keeping the universe in balance, megachurch asshole pastor Mark Driscoll’s past has come back to haunt him in the form of a massively long sexist, homophobic rant that he posted anonymously on a message board 14 years ago. Enjoy if you have the stomach for it!
I wonder how much of Dawkins’s behavior is due to an unexamined emotional need to have attention paid to him. That’s the least disturbing explanation I’ve come up with for the persistence of the phenomenon.
This. This is really the heart of the arguments against what he stated. The fact that he and his fans refuse to see this is boggling.
Dawkins is a lot of stupid things, but in this case he is flat out wrong. “Mild pedophilia,” what we call velvet glove abuse, can be far more damaging and traumatic then a violent assault. Anytime psychological abuse is employed, it has the potential to leave scars that last far longer than physical injury ever would.
Haven’t read it, but: I knew it. I knew it. That mealy-mouthed statement issued by Dawkins and Ophelia Benson about what sort of behaviour is unacceptable in the atheist movement means fuckall. Dicky Dawkins is going to get lots more “vulgar epithets” thrown his way, and he’s going to deserve them. Fuck, I loathe that man.
(“Haven’t read it” meaning the thread, sorry!)
emilygoddess, exactly. Remember how he also compared a woman being hit on in a lift with his own distaste for being in a lift with a man chewing gum? He’s a PoS this one, he really is.
@Okamoto
You need to read Fibinachi’s long comment on the first page of the comments. Long comment is long, but it’s also great and far more on-point than anything in your offering (or Dawkins’ for that matter).
Besides being an appalling and dehumanizing way of treating human beings – to tell them where on some arbitrary scale their level of psychological harm must lie – it also fails the fucking logic that Dawkins seems so enamoured with.
Even if the generalisation was true, * it commits the fallacy of division. It’s exactly the same as arguing that if the mean height of a group is 1.8 metres, then all group members are 1.8 metres tall.
*I have bolded this because I don’t think there is a way of measuring psychological trauma that only measures behaviours, and ignores the cognitive/emotional aspects. This means that I think a number of trauma measures used in the sort of survivor studies mentioned here are based on BS scales.
Dawkins has a tendency to say things that are obvious and crass and then get upset when people say yeah that’s true but jeez come on. But he is useful to Atheism as a movement because he knows a great deal about evolution and has spoken eloquently about problems with religion that some of us believe to exist. He did not say that a victim of date rape shouldn’t complain, or even that the suffering is worse for everyone who has been raped by a stranger. He said rape at knifepoint is worse than date rape. No doubt that is a very stupid thing to say, but it would be kind of like saying having both your parents die is worse than having one of your parents die. One could say that without meaning that it isn’t a big deal to have to suffer through the loss of a parent. One would also be demonstrating a huge lack of social feel or competence by choosing that as an example. So yeah this was a dumb thing to say. And yeah Dawkins goes looking for these fights because he seems to believe that anything that is true is also alright to say in any setting (which of course it isn’t), but I don’t think he was trivializing date rape on purpose at least, but also as I write this comment I am having a hard time not thinking he’s an idiot and as an Atheist I have often found myself being like come on man. Run on sentence.
@Okamoto,
We get it. You’re a misogynist ableist Dawkins sycophant, just like so many other asshole atheists who have a shit fit anytime someone dares not to fawn adoringly over your hero.
Tough shit. You aren’t wanted here anyway. Go play with the pitters and splash around in bitter tears with them that people care about social justice.
Notice, too, how “they’re emoting” is exactly like the shit misogynists throw at women – “Don’t get so emotional!
I’m glad to see all the take-downs of “rational good, emotional bad, can’t have both” in this thread. If there’s one thing that I really despise about smugmas, it’s how proud they are of lacking basic empathy. Dead inside is the term that comes to mind, unfair though it doubtless is.