Richard Dawkins, I think it’s fair to say, is a bit of a dick. Though he’s an expert popularizer of science he seems to be a bit of a blithering idiot on every other topic he tries to address; his broadsides on religion are patronizing and profoundly ignorant, and his forays into gender politics are even more cringey.
He puts his foot in his mouth so often on Twitter that it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between his real account and this absurdist parody.
In a recent interview, he doubled down on some of his most appalling earlier remarks, reaffirming that he believes there is such a thing as “mild pedophilia” and that pregnant women who discover that they are carrying a Down syndrome fetus should probably “abort and try again.” And in that interview he reminded us all again just why so many feminist atheists have turned against him, telling his interlocutor that
I occasionally get a little impatient with American women who complain of being inappropriately touched by the water cooler or invited for coffee or something … .
ELEVATORGATE – NEVER FORGET!
Given how often he comes down on the wrong side on gender issues — heck, he recently suggested to his fans that they follow “Based Mom” Christina Hoff Sommers on Twitter — you might assume he would have a certain degree of fondness for the upside-down-and-backwards politics of the Men’s Rights movement.
But you’d be wrong.
At a recent event at Kennesaw State University – yep, the same place where a student organization tied to A Voice for Men held a little conference not long ago – Dawkins offered a surprising, if somewhat limited, defense of feminism. And he reacted with puzzlement when he was asked about the Men’s Rights movement.
“I didn’t, I hardly knew — is there a men’s right movement?” he commented. “If there is discrimination against men, then that’s bad too,” he conceded, only to add that “I haven’t heard of it.”
The audience responded with laughter.
To AVFM head boy Paul Elam, this was the equivalent of shots fired. In a post today, Elam excoriated Dawkins for not having heard of his little movement, and not being aware of the terrible gynocentric injustices being heaped upon the world’s men.
Richard Dawkins has not heard of discrimination toward men? Really? Sorry, Richard, but please tell me this is because you have invented human teleportation and have managed to remain in an academic setting constantly for the past several years. Tell me that you have so successfully avoided the real world that you are unaware of the ongoing problems of fathers and children in family courts, the egregious and blatant discrimination against men in criminal sentencing, and the transparent sexual double standards applied against males in the domestic violence and sexual assault industries. Perhaps you have actually done so well with insulating yourself that you have managed to exist completely within the walls of interdisciplinary studies departments, lest you may have actually heard of the loss of due process for young men now rampant across college campuses. Or maybe it was harder to notice, even for the great scientist-skeptic, because there are so few young men left?
Yeah, I’m sure that’s it, Paul. Dawkins can’t find any male students to talk to.
That is the problem with living the insulated life. Not only do you end up making foil-hat-worthy observations that translate to ideology being good for science, but eventually the insulation becomes so thick, so protective and muffling, that whatever tiny spark remains in the wire is of little use to science or to society.
Says the man who lives in an ideological bubble of his own making. The irony, it burns.
My problem was that I was almost positive I had only put in three dots. I glanced, thought I had counted 3, and hit post. Sigh. My version of the blockquote monster.
Well, allman’s post gets a +1 for using paragraphs!! But it’s still a teel deer, so I didn’t really read it. Just enough for my impression of it to be ‘MRAs are awesome cuz I don’t have to pretend to be a decent human being!’.
Yeah, it’s like dealing with fundies (of any stripe). The ones who have all the talking points memorized and just pivot to the next pre-loaded contextless verbal vomit are no fun, what you really want is to engage with a true believer, because they are the ones who will really start shaking the wingnut tree until the good stuff falls out.
I recently took a completely unexpected trip down the rabbit hole when I got to chitchatting with a fellow volunteer about palm oil. Twenty minutes later we’d been over the river and through the woods from clearcut rainforest plantations to industrial agriculture toxins released into groundwater when sound weapons are secretly deployed for rural mind control to antivaxing to chemtrails, coming to rest on how homeopathy and regular enemas would heal every health problem facing modern society.
It was quite illuminating, let me tell you.
Puddleglum, just think of it this way:
You are storing up companions for the lonely 2 dot ellipses so that they may be completed in comment heaven.
I love conspiracy theorists, at least when they’re willing to really share all the hilarious details.
The thing I love about conspiracy folks is that they always have an answer, and if you just pull the cord and let them go, it’s worth HOURS of entertainment!
And this is why we need our new Antz/Owly.
gillyrosebee said:
Regular enemas? Do…do they know what an enema actually is? I mean, I guess if a person believes in antivax and chemtrails, they’ll believe in anything, but still.
I see christopher allman is still trying to drum up traffic to his blog.
Oh, she did, sparky. She even had a theory about what you need to put up there to “leech out” the particular bad stuff you were afflicted with. Homeopathy for both ends, you might say.
So, just out of curiosity, what did she have in mind for the, um, non-talking end?
Awww, Christopher “so insecure he has the screen name All Man,” want to try and play psychological games, poor ickle diddums.
I get so pissed off by people claiming that rape is a non-existent problem. Over many years I have found that if you talk to people and listen to them a few will admit that they have been the victims of sexual assault and/or rape. Of course you have to be trusted by the person concerned, which (I suspect) is completely alien to the experience of the deniers.
I have a few Infowars/Prison Planet DVDs that my mom’s old coworker gave her for some reason. They are a whole lot of fun. My favorite was the one that asserted that George W Bush had JFK Jr. assassinated by turning someone on his plane (a flight instructor IIRC) into a Manchurian candidate.
The only evidence they had for this was that Bush took a campaign break around that time and was unaccounted for and George H. W. was the head of the CIA and they killed President Kennedy. That’s it.
I wouldn’t tell these guys I’d stubbed my toe, they’d probably stomp on it just for fun.
Whoops, forgot to mention the Dawk …
There’s a guy who knows what privilege is, he has benefited from it for his whole life. Of course he cannot recognise the problems facing women or that the global nature of misogyny means you must work against all of the oppression – not just concentrate on the most serious instances
Well, she insisted that, although she’s heard all the talk of mint and apple cider vinegar, she herself swears by a chamomile tea concoction, which was way more information than I really wanted already, and my brain shut my ears down pretty hard somewhere in the middle of the range of things that call for treatment with coffee (black, of course, only the seriously mislead would put a dairy product up there, and those folks who use yogurt? Well…)
Couldn’t one insert the coffee in the other end, as is traditional, or is there a reason why searing pain* is necessary to the whole cleansing experience?
*An assumption, as I’ve never attempted to put coffee up my butt because seriously, why?
@gillyrosebee, but I thought for sure the only true choice was coffee…
(please let there be three dots only!)
@cassandrakitty, *drinking* coffee is evil, doncha know!
No, no, no! If you DRINK the coffee, you might get addicted to the caffeine! If you “cleanse” with the coffee, you will stimulate the liver and rid the body of fungi that cause cancer.
(okay, she actually said “funguses” but I am not going to type that)
(oops)
Funguses! They’re good for your kidneyses, presumably.
One rationale for coffee enemas is that the caffeine is in some way beneficial to the bum. I have heard about people getting serious caffeine ODs that way, because the colon is really good at absorbing stuff.
I was going to say, if the goal is not to absorb the caffeine that might not be the way to go.
(Nope, I’m not going to make a “preciouses” comment. Not going to do it. Not even going to think about typing “preciouses”)
(oops)
Yeah, too much credit for rational thinking being given giving there, cassandrakitty!
I remember reading how some shamans in South America make a tea out of tobacco and ingest it via enema. This enabled them to use tobacco in psychoactive doses without calling Ralph Buick on the porcelain telephone. Haven’t had the nerve to try it myself.
Regarding sound weapons – one of the SF elements in Atlas Shrugged was the Thompson Harmonizer, a sonic weapon that could destroy buildings at a distance. Curious how little we’ve heard from Randroids about it becoming science fact.