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.
And Dicky’s having a baw about the “Tsunami of hate,” poor fellow. He has his army of sycophants to shore him up though – including the lovely Janet Bloomfield who has taken the opportunity to compare Women Against Feminism to “logical thinking”.
No, atheism isn’t getting called into question. Just Dawkins.
Here we go again.
Atheism is not being called into question. It’s the fuckshites who are the big names in movement atheism, the ones who shape the public perception of it, who are being talked about here. There are plenty of atheists, theists and everything in between on this board, all feminists, and nobody has a problem with that. It’s smug misogynist gobshites like Dawkins who are the problem.
If having her defend you doesn’t tell you you’re Doin It Rong, nothing will!
I suppose it’s too optimistic to hope that the comparison went “These two things have no similarities at all.”
Waaaay too optimistic, katz! 😀
Oh good, you’ve come back and doubled down.
If you can’t explain a topic in plain English to an audience who is of average intelligence and just not qualified in that topic, you don’t understand the topic. Countering bible-based arguments against evolution do not require advanced biology degrees because it’s not necessary to get into that level of detail for debunking. There’s lots of scientifically credited information on the internet now that can be used to debunk anti-evolution claims. My key point: Dawkins is not necessary. If you really think that the main reason we have problems with some elements of religions is their continuing disbelief in evolution, you really don’t understand the fucking fundamental problems that these religious elements are causing. Hint: their lack of belief in evolution is really not the driver behind the social justice issues they cause.
Oh that’s right, Dawkins’ comment occurred in a complete social and cultural vacuum where society treats all rape, let alone date rape, as objectively as it treats car theft, burglary, and Ponzi schemes. Oh wait, no it doesn’t. Females who say they have been date raped are treated as though they have “buyer’s remorse”. The only really real rapes are the ones committed by strangers where the female has experienced physical trauma to areas other than her genitals.
The use of this particular analogy by Dawkins shows he has no fucking clue when it comes to culture. The way that society has situated date rape, the analogy in many people’s minds can be reinterpreted as:
“Rape by a stranger at knifepoint is worse than a female who falsely accuses a guy of rape because she changed her mind after the fact.”
That is the actual structure of the analog as people will read it. Conversely, nobody disbelieves people who say they have broken their leg. Failed analogy fails.
The question is: Is Dawkins so idiotic that he doesn’t know about this strong cultural interpretation of date rape, or did he fucking actually mean it that way? There is a world of difference between how people act towards physical problems (a la your heart attacks and broken legs statement) and how people act towards psychological problems/rape. Also, your physical example fails because you assume that the heart attack is always more severe than a leg fracture, which is not always the case. So even with this supposedly simple example, your attempt to use a comparison scale fails. This is because you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
I’m not using rhetoric. I have used logic.
And again I’ll say fuck you, you’re a horrible person for continuing to act like this is all our fault for not understanding the Truth that Dawkins states. You fail at logic and you fail at being a sympathetic human being.
He doesn’t get a pass for being an evolutionary biologist. He just remains a good evolutionary biologist. Not the only one, but he does seem to be at the forefront of his field. More importantly, though, I don’t think it’s valuable to tell me to fuck off. Worst case scenario for me, I have defended someone who said something offensive and I’m totally wrong. But I’m not a horrible person. I’m a pretty nice guy, and a feminist for what it’s worth, and we would probably agree a lot and learn from each other if we had a more calm interaction. In atheism, there are those who would tell religious apologists to fuck off, which I think is bad for atheism. I wonder if the same thing happens in feminism and might be occurring as we type.
@pallygirl
But it’s not important that all heart attacks be worse than all broken legs in order for that statement to be generally true. Nobody restricts themselves to only making statements if they don’t have any exceptions. I think your point about society’s treatment of date rape victims is a very good one, and I totally agree, and if I were friends with Dawkins that’s what I would say. Please don’t hate me.
Hey dude, you just jumped in and possibly triggered a bunch of rape survivors here with your comments. But heck we won’t worry about that because the worst case scenario is that you might be wrong.
You’re not a nice guy (why do the Nice Guys(tm) always explicity say that they’re nice guys?) and you’re not coming across as particularly feminist either.
Don’t come here, throw in emotional handgrenades, and then whine about how we didn’t have a calm interaction.
Probably because most people are nice people.
Oh, goody, another person who’s going to be driven away from feminism because we’re soooooooooo mean here.
“(A)gree and learn from each other if we had a more calm interaction.”
Go fuck yourself with a cactus.
And what the fuck do you think you have to teach about feminism?
I am a feminist. I believe in gender equality and a lot of the issues that matter a lot to me as a voter are women’s issues. I just happen to believe we should be careful about throwing people under the bus when they put their foot in their mouth. There are a lot of people who don’t believe in god who don’t want to be called atheists because of people like Richard Dawkins, and there are a lot of people who believe in gender equality who don’t want to be called feminists because of people like @pallygirl.
o_O O RLY?
Yeah, your a nice guy putting up a half-assed defense of an asshole. Your a nice guy who truly appears to believe that you and Dawkins can objectively rank other people’s experiences of rape and abuse on some kind of scale. Your a nice guy who’s talking over the heads of rape and abuse survivors by telling them who should feel worse than who, because that is what this attempt at ranking is really doing.
As has been pointed out, no one here is criticizing atheism. We’re criticizing Dawkins. Unless you believe Dawkins is atheism.
Foot in mouth? More like their heads are so far up their asses that they’re sucking on their tonsils.
MichiganPerson: It’s generally considered to fall under the label of “asshole” to say anger-inducing things and then to condescendingly tut-tut the people who get angry as a result, as if their close-mindedness is the problem and not the shit you said.
When a feminist says hateful things in the name of feminism, it’s appropriate to attribute that to that individual being an asshole and not to the ideology. The same goes for atheists; the same goes for anything. Atheism is orthogonal to assholeness, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a particular kind of asshole who seems drawn to neo-atheism movement skeptic whatever. Dawkins’s cult of personality probably isn’t unrelated to that. And the very fact that this cheesehead saying horrible things on his twitter apparently causes you such immense cognitive dissonance kind of implies that he… or his hateful views… really are part and parcel to how you see the ideology.
@MichiganPerson
Summary: I am a feminist. Sexist dogwhistle.
Dude, if you really want to be an ally to feminists, then you should actually pay attention when they point out that you’re doing something shitty. Also, pallygirl is awesome, and the fact that you don’t like her for calling you out says a lot about you.
Also Emmierae: You are right about Lundy Bancroft and intimate partner rape; several studies show that survivors of partner rape experience longer lasting trauma than survivors of stranger rape due to trust issues etc; also partner rape tends to involve the highest levels of physical violence. As well, battered women experiencing rape are more than seven times more likely to be murdered than women experiencing battery only.
Having had more than two decades supporting survivors of rape in every context imaginable, it is often thought that knifepoint would be worst. However, that’s not always so for the survivor; the worst part might be something the rapist said to her.
The research of Thornhill and Palmer has been acknowledged for years to be highly problematic.
Richard Dawkins is an ivory-tower ignorant ass
And there are a lot of women – like me – who are inclined to say that men shouldn’t adopt the label “feminist” for themselves because of men like you.
If you aren’t ready to face backlash for saying something hurtful to a community comprised mostly of women, then you aren’t ready to be an ally of women, either.
@Ally /blush we could have a mutual admiration society going if you like. 🙂
I am finding it hard to believe that anyone calling themselves a feminist would back Dawkins on his misogynistic BS. And call out feminist responses as being emotive and therefore we’re not doing logic right.
There aren’t any bridges to be built with Dawkins, he is not a feminist ally.
Wow. Even Woody, our resident Elam cheerleader, is distancing himself from Dawkins. That oughtta tell you something right there.
The people getting thrown under the bus here are rape and abuse survivors. The person doing the throwing is Dawkins. And yourself, at this point. Which would make you the asshole, not pallygirl.
Holy cats, Mark Driscoll is forty-five years old? For some reason I had him pegged around my age (mid-thirties), probably because he reminds me so very much of the Christian patriarchy dudebro I dated in college.
That does explain why his trolling so closely mirrors some of his sermons, though. Sigh. I feel badly for his congregants.