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.
LOL! I hadn’t thought of that.
Since we’re on the topic of awful people supporting rape, an Israeli academic has recently advocated raping Palestinian women as an intimidation tactic against Hamas: http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/politics/israeli-sosaciety/8314-israeli-academic-raping-palestinian-women-for-deterrence
I hate the world.
45 isn’t old at all but it’s adult enough that you can’t write his stuff off as youthful indiscretion.
Yeah, I saw that ” you know, we could just rape Palestinian women to keep Hamas in line” crap. Much like Dawkins, dude is shocked! Shocked, I tell you! That people found his statements reprehensible.
Ah, there’s the coherence I was missing! Thanks, katz.
@Ally: and I made the mistake of starting to read the comments. The relevance of Brownmiller’s Against Our Will is reinforced.
The desire to hurt women and children seems to be a fetish with these sorts of guys. I can’t get my head into the space where people even think this shit up, let alone think it’s a valid premise. Given the context, he is not “merely” advocating sexual violence, he is advocating war crimes.
I think from these statement Dawkins is not even a humanist any more. He is the human embodiment and end result of worshiping logic.From a view like his is word do make sense. Most people I think understand on some level, that logic thinking can only take you so far, Just illogical thinking can only take you so far. Much like every other human deal like politics both of the far ends of the spectrum are harmful.
No! No, no, no! Israel, stop being so awful! Please!
Most Israelis are good folks, just as most Palestinians are good folks, but no! Don’t DO that!
World news continually has me internally screaming. First Ebola, than a flight of HIV researchers, then another plane, then blasting a hospital, and now let’s rape Palestinian women to get back at Hamas, like the British gangs are doing in the UK to get back at each other!?!?
Somebody stop the planet. I want to get off.
*yes, I know it was one intellectual, but those comment boards are awful.
Urgh.
Yanno, I would take that bet. I could use a house. (Just want to point out that “religious people” number in the billions. And a lot of them exclusively worship goddesses.)
I’m really worried about that news, even though it’s just one Israeli academic. Israel isn’t above using rape as a genocidal tactic. Ariel Sharon, an infamous former prime minister of Israel (and, I’d argue, the most evil one), was responsible for the Sabra and Shatilla Massacre, in which thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese women and children were raped and murdered in their own homes. He did nothing to stop the mass rape and murder.
What this man advocates is a way for Israel to sanction the use of rape as a weapon against Palestinians without Israel ever getting in trouble for it; he literally says that the women should be raped as a punishment, and such a punishment could take place privately and without any chance of legal recourse for the victims. This sounds like a very likely state of affairs for Palestinians because Israel has been known to get away with countless war crimes, including deploying illegal chemical warfare (see: white phosphorus).
And of course, there’s the fact that Israel is a colonialist state. All colonalist states I have ever heard of have used rape as a weapon of genocide. European settler men did it to Native women (and white American men continue to venture into reservations and rape Native women with impunity due to the limitations of tribal jurisdictions that are always unable to catch and punish rapists), the Serbian army raped Bosnian women and children during the Bosnian massacre, the Japanese army raped Chinese women during the Rape of Nanking, and today Syrian male soldiers – on all sides – rape women as a military tactic. I’m so scared for what lies ahead for Palestinian women. I wish there was hope for them.
Thank you for saying this. I was bothered by that statement at a kind of subconscious level, and this clarified it.
Speak of the devil! The IDF (or the IOF, as I like to call them) just bombed a school, resulting in 60 casualties (40 injured and 20 dead). This is too much.
Huh. Driscoll is 45. We are very close to the same cohort. That means that back when I was being driven out of evangelical Protestantism by its increasing misogyny, he was being drawn in.
I don’t know if that’s significant in any way, except that it readily explains why I find Driscoll so utterly loathesome.
You know what is making me sad? That Jay Lake isn’t around to comment on this. Because he was one classy atheist.
I’m rather glad I don’t know who this Driscoll character is! Though this means I’ll have to find out.
::girds loins::
@Ally, I’ve been actively avoiding the news this week. I know it’s just burying my head in the sand, but honestly, I just can’t take it. If there are no constructive actions I can take, I don’t want to know right now. I’m heading to the big city next week, and I’m making an appointment to give blood (I have the good stuff, but nowhere local to donate). Maybe after that I’ll be able to peek out of my burrow.
Well, that didn’t take long. What a contemptible character.
Interesting story of some folks targeted by MRAs, or specifically AVfM:
http://kiltsandcocaine.com/2014/07/30/this-is-what-happens-when-you-piss-off-mens-rights-activists/
@Unimaginative
I understand, it’s very upsetting. There is a lot we can do, though. Boycotts against Israeli companies are very effective, and there is a host of ways we can help Palestinians as well. For instance, instead of buying kefiyyehs from Chinese and Israeli companies, you can purchase kefiyyehs online from the only kefiyyeh factory left in Palestine: http://palestineonlinestore.com/shop/kufiyeh-from-palestine/
You can also buy olive oil from Palestine. It’s wonderful olive oil and buying it supports Palestinian farmers in the West Bank and Gaza.
I was at a demo about the Israeli offensive earlier this week. It’s so awful. Schools, hospitals, apparently there is no target that is off limits. Thanks, Ally, for reminding us that we are not helpless and there are things we can do, even if we’re in locations that don’t have demos or other more obvious outlets.
Next time there’s an open mic night at this radical/anarchist cafe close by, I’ll speak about the current situation in Gaza. I did open mic last time there and everyone liked my speech – it was about the coercive gendering of bodies under patriarchy. Hopefully I won’t receive a whole lot of backlash or anything because I can think of a lot of pro-Israeli people who would want to get angry at me while I’m on stage. There is only so much people can do, but I feel that at least speaking about it is meaningful and is more feasible for me than boycotts since I’m not exactly in a financially stable situation these days.
So, stranger-rape at knifepoint is “worse” than date-rape at, I dunno, bottle-point? Well, that’s debatable. Maybe in the immediate moment, stranger-rape might appear to be…and maybe it’s unsettling to know that you can be singled out at random by some dude on the street for a little nonconsensual back-alley wall-banging. But I think I’d be much more disturbed in the long run to know that someone I knew, trusted and liked (or loved) could do that same thing to me; it would make every man seem shady and untrustworthy to me, a lot more than the other kind of rape.
And if that’s “just emoting”, so fucking BE it. It’s still rape, any way you slice it, and Dawkins doesn’t get to decide who is more of a victim, or who has more right to feel what way about it. He forgets that his own subjective biases are not logic.
The only way I can see the idea that stranger rape is so much worse making sense to someone is if they think rape within relationships is just kind of to be expected and that it’s silly of women to have sexual boundaries.
@Ally, That’s awesome, I hope you ROCK at the open mic night.
(Do cool people still say ROCK? Am I outing myself as so totally uncool by saying ROCK? I don’t care.)
I wonder what Dawkins thinks date rape is? A misunderstanding? Not saying no clearly enough? Should have expected it when you went out to dinner/movie/walk in the park? Does he think it can’t involve a knife, or any weapon (apart from the rapist’s body, which is always the weapon)?
Does Dawkins, in fact, think at all?