Oy, not another one.
Someone called Jaclyn Glenn, who I’m told is hugely popular among Teh Atheists, did a manic YouTube video echoing the much-echoed complaint about those filthy feminists exploiting that nice Elliot Rodger tragedy for their own filthy selfish self-centered how dare they ends. I could watch only a short bit of it because she’s so annoying. By way of refreshment I found her on Twitter, and lo, only five or six tweets down, who should appear but –
She talks sense faster than most of us can think, says Dawkins, and goes on to call her “the ever rational @JaclynGlenn” while linking to her video – right, because obviously trashing feminism is the epitome of rationality and sense. Or could it be that Dawkins just slaps the label “rational” on any opinion he happens to like? Especially if it’s uttered by a hawt woman?
PZ doesn’t find her claims quite so ever rational and sensible, in fact he finds them to be kack.
I am disappointed. Jaclyn Glenn makes an incoherent rant.
Her point: it’s terrible for feminists to
take an issue like this [the Elliot Rodger murders] and try to twist it around, and tells everyone tolook at the problems for what they are. It’s not misogyny, she says, it’s because Rodger was mentally ill. And then she reads a paragraph from is manifesto that is melodramatic, self-aggrandizing, and totally over-the-top, and announces that itproves that he is mentally ill.The standards for psychiatric diagnoses have really gone to the dogs, haven’t they?
So a guy writes a 140-page raving rant about how women owe him sex, how he hates them, and how he wants to lock them up in a concentration camp and starve them to death, and it’s not misogyny — it’s just random insanity, completely unconnected to the culture around him. OK. So much for looking at problems for what they are.
Not to be a broken record or anything, but if a Muslim shot up a bunch of people at a Jewish cemetery, having left a long manifesto about his hatred of Jews, would Jaclyn Glenn be saying very fast and loud on YouTube that he was MENTALLY ILL nothing to do with anti-Semitism shut up? I don’t think she would.
Here’s what she did say about the reaction to Rodger (minimal punctuation because she talks very fast with no real pauses):
Whenever a tragedy happens, and this is something that happens every single time and it annoys the shit out of me every single time, people like to hop onto these types of issues like vultures, they see something and they think it’s gonna help them with their movement or their political agenda and they use it to their advantage, which is disgusting – and they like to downplay, in this case, mental illness.
So, given the Jewish cemetery scenario I just mentioned, would she say it was disgusting for Jews to talk about antisemitism after that incident? Or what if it were an EDL type who shot a bunch of people in a mosque and left a long manifesto ranting about hatred of Muslims? Would Jaclyn Glenn say it was disgusting for Muslims to talk about the anti-Muslim bigotry and hatred in the manifesto? I doubt it.
But maybe she would, and then she would be wrong.
I suspect, though, that she wouldn’t, because the bigotry and hatred there would be obvious to her, while for some reason they are not obvious to her in the case of Elliot Rodger. Misogyny seems to be a special case in that way for a hell of a lot of people. I’m disgusted that Dawkins is one of them.
My opinion of that honey-lovin’, self-proclaimed leader, anti-feminist gets lower every day.
WTF is up with Richard Dawkins? I don’t understand what happened to him.
“They see something and they think it’s gonna help them with their movement or their political agenda and they use it to their advantage, which is disgusting.”
What advantage, what agenda?? Stopping violence against women is some horrible agenda? Examining beliefs that make hate and violence against women so goddamn prevalent on the entire fucking planet?
And Dawkins says anyone who disbelieves in evolution is akin to a Holocaust denier.
When he says that, is he using a tragedy to help his movement or “agenda”? Is that disgusting?
theoreticalgirl- It may just be social media that happened to him. Stupid things he says just get out to a wider audience, and get there much faster, than they used to, and there is a more reliable record that he actually did say these things.
He’s probably always been an ass, it’s just easier for us to see it these days.
As for Rodgers- he wasn’t seeing women as literal demons that need to be destroyed to stave off armageddon, he was able to choose his actions, he seemed to understand that they were considered wrong by society. While we might not be able to rule out mental illness entirely as a contributing factor, he knew what he was doing and appeared fully capable of choosing to do something else. If it was all mental illness, at least one of these would not be true. Misogyny though- I can’t see how people can deny it as the primary factor, not if they are looking at things rationally anyways. Maybe other things were going on too, but seriously… people need to accept the facts in front of them.
Maybe she seems to Dawkins to talk sense because she’s spouting her trash faster than he can think.
At this point I really have to say: Fuck Dawkims.I never found him terribly interesting, but he sure has provided plenty of annoying, stupid bullshit over the last several years, even if it is only to point at some asshat and suggest they are so damn amazing for some oh so clever thing they said. Dime store zombie fuckwit.
What if every time LGBT Rights groups talked about homophobia and marriage rights in the U.S., they were scolded with “Gay people are being murdered in Uganda, so shut up with your first world problems, you narcissist!.” Would you actually believe people who say this care or are doing anything about third world violence against LGBT people, or is it more likely that they are using it to silence and stop LGBT people from any progress in their own country?
Oh, that’s what Dawkins said. Not the worst thing he’s ever said…which doesn’t exactly speak well of Dawkins.
How can this guy have so little problem with being molested by older boys, but so big a problem with women who never did him any comparable wrong?
I was impressed by Dawkins when he was – to me at least – the only one saying what he was saying. Much has changed since then; he’s at best a footnote now. And, as examples like this illustrate, a painfully embarrassing one.
Would it be too cruel to wish a Flew-like conversion upon him, just for the howls of anguish it would prompt from the douchebro community?
It would make more sense if it was just “she talks faster than most of us can think”. That’s how con artists work.
Alternately, she might be talking faster than she can think, and therein lies the problem.
If it had been an attack on atheists by a fundamentalist religious person, how fast do you think Dawkins would be politicizing it then?
“take an issue like this [the Elliot Rodger murders] and try to twist it around”
Interesting the way that “quoting his words verbatim” is considered to be “twisting it around.” Bizarre bizarre bizarre defense of misogyny.
Maybe she can talk faster than DAWKINS can think. I saw him here in Seattle; I saw an entitled asshole performing for the rubes. Like his books, but totally over him.
This is spot on. Quoted for truth and well said.
What’s up with Dawkin’s and so many others that they fail to see and understand that point even though its really very clear?
ut if a Muslim shot up a bunch of people at a Jewish cemetery, having left a long manifesto about his hatred of Jews, would Jaclyn Glenn be saying very fast and loud on YouTube that he was MENTALLY ILL nothing to do with anti-Semitism shut up?
Yep. Fundamentalist religious people must be all insane – their religion has no bearing on their actions – and the broader cultural deference to religion has no bearing on any issue whatsoever.
Except that these same hypocrites will say the exact opposite when it comes to religion.
I’d never heard of Jaclyn Glenn either, so I had a look at some other videos, basically to see what side of ‘the Rifts’ she’s on.
There’s one called Sexist Atheists?. Primed by Dawkins’ endorsement, I sort of expected it to be denying any sexism in the atheist movement. But actually, no. It’s about how she gets much more hate from within atheism than from theists; how because she’s (to use Ophelia’s term) “hawt”, she gets a lot of sexually objectifying comments; treated as if her only value is as a sex object, etc., etc., the familiar story. So I thought, OK, she is on board with feminism. But then came this jarring bit:
(timestamp)
(my emphasis)
How weird is that? It’s like, ‘Please treat me as human, with my own agency and intellect, not as a sex object – but don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not like I’m a FEMINIST or anything!!!’.
It’s kind of like “I don’t believe in God, but… I’m not one of those atheists!”
Jaclyn Glenn:
You mean like how 9/11 has often been used by the atheist/ secular movement as the perfect illustration why the power and influence of religion in society should be minimized?
Re: ‘How weird is that? It’s like, ‘Please treat me as human, with my own agency and intellect, not as a sex object – but don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not like I’m a FEMINIST or anything!!!’.’…
There’s been a drumbeat of demonisation of feminism, across culture, some time now. She’s internalized it, I figure, is all.
(Semi-related: I figure doing so, if you do little else, only makes anyone pretty standard issue human. I tend to qualify my disparagement on finer nuances than this, now, this one being so common. But it _is_ kinda hilarious, considering this, seeing ‘skeptics’ imagining themselves so independent, such freethinkers, just for parroting this trope. It’s a script about as interesting or original, in the current context, as last year’s boy band.)
If I can wake up this Sunday morning to Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra – BBCr4 Today 7.10: he’s on wikipedia – saying very clearly that the mistreatment of women has nothing to do with morality, religious or other, but is the evil which happens in a patriarchal society and needs to be stopped, then surely Glynn can grasp it.
Let us, perhaps, set up a committee of the great and good to re-examine the writings of Anders Behring Breivik and then perhaps under the guidance of Dawkins we will discover that he wasn’t protesting a racially mixed Norway at all, nor trying to kill teenagers, but in fact just wanted a better deal for small furry animals. It’s just that the unenlightened were scuppered by their failure to know Absolutely Everything™.
/snark
Only that of course when there’s a clearly homophobic murder you mustn’t talk about this, because you’re exploiting the tragedy.
Yes, i can clearly see Dawkins telling people to shut up after a religious mob lynched an atheist blogger in Indonesia.
@IGiliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
it’s not about religion, the lynch mob are just mentally ill individuals.
Sane people don’t lynch atheists!
theoreticalgrrrl
Probably bad indigestion from all the foreign food they eat there….
+++
This is also why I don’t believe people like Dawkins a word when they talk about the oppression of women around the world. They show me time after time again that they don’t give a fuck. Their concern for women in other countries is white saviour plus using those women as bargain chips to score political points.
Silentbob@14:
As AJ Milne alluded to @17, “feminist” has been a dirty word for some people for a while now.
I certainly felt that way back in the 90s. Which I think is partly due to my own ignorance of feminism, partly due to feminism’s bad P.R. efforts in those days, and partly due to problems with feminism itself as it existed in those days. The exact percentages are a complicated question and likely not of interest to anyone other than me — the point is, to me as an ostensibly educated person in those days, feminists were the women who were trying to censor pornography, and denouncing logic and mathematics as tools of male oppression. (Note: I’m just relating my perspective, not stating a fact. I expect my views at the time were rather distorted ones of feminism as it existed then, and in any event I don’t care. I like today’s feminism, and whether it’s the same old feminism as before and I’m just not as dumb a schmuck, or whether feminism has changed for the better, is probably a topic for another day.)
It’s funny. Back then, I would have denied being a feminist because I felt it was an ideology I opposed. (I almost edited “felt” to “thought” — but I realized that it was the right word after all. That was more an emotion than a logical conclusion.) Today, I don’t claim that label for myself because I’m afraid I can’t measure up to it.
Am I the only person disgusted by the way mental health fanatics rush in to throw their pet issue onto these tragedies?
Smokey – please clarify what you mean by “mental health fanatics” and “pet issue”
It’s not surprising, she promoted what looked like a PUA service (learn how to get women to go home with you) in one of her videos. I unsubscribed from her YouTube channel when she did that, and that was months ago.
More and more I think that Rebecca Watson was right in her denunciation of Dawkins.and her refusal to buy his books, attend his lectures, etc. He’s the past and I feel he knows and resents that point. He’s a well-off, white, cishetro, male academic who refuses to acknowledge his privilege or even admit the concept of privilege exists.
Sorry, Dick to the Dawk, but your 15 minutes happened a long while ago. Have a nice rest of your life.
@Al Dente,
Privilege does exist to Dawkins, but only Rebecca Watson and all Western feminist women have it.
Or what if it were an EDL type who shot a bunch of people in a mosque and left a long manifesto ranting about hatred of Muslims?
In fact, such a scenario occurred 20 years ago in which an extremist named Baruch Goldstein shot up a mosque in Hebron, killing 29 people before being subdued and beaten to death by survivors.
I’m imagining a scenario in which a young Muslim fails out of school. He subsequently surrounds himself with extremists, going to an extremist mosque and hanging out on a site which is filled with hate about Westerners and secular education. He writes a 140 page manifesto raging about atheists and unbelievers, fantasizing about killing as many as possible to get back at them for corrupting the world and spreading false knowledge, talking about putting all atheists in concentration camps so he can watch them starve to death. He does a video talking about how he despises how the atheist liberal university system is trying to destroy his commitment to Allah and that atheists deserve to be annihilated because of their infidelity and desire to draw people from true religion. He can’t stand moderate Muslims who accept evolution and want to assimilate into Western culture. Then he announces that he’s going to go to the next meeting of the Secular Student Alliance at the local university and kill as many of those kafir as he can. A day or so later, he stabs his roommates, fellow Muslims but moderates & students, and then goes on a shooting spree (though unable to get into the SSA meeting) killing two atheists and another Muslim and wounding a bunch of others. Does Dawkins scold people for focusing on this person’s ideology? Or the toxic religion he fed on which supported and buoyed it up? If people said “Don’t politicize the tragedy, atheists, this was all about mental illness and the religious ideas were irrelevant to what happened,” would Dawkins agree? Yeah. Right.
Not uncommon.
Personally, I can’t help thinking that the desire to make this about anything other than gender is yet another expression of our culture’s problematic attitudes on that subject. It’s as if it’s completely unthinkable that misogyny could be responsible for such actions.
Historically, people have killed each other over skin color, language, religion, sexuality, place of birth and, yes, gender. Why is it suddenly different when this guy does it? It’s quite uncontroversial to state that cultural pressure can cause a sane person to commit atrocities, so why is this explanation suddenly off limits here?
Maybe because the conclusion is quite upsetting. We like to think that we’re oh-so enlightened and civilized, so this goes against our self-image. If Rodger was crazy, then it was all about him and it doesn’t reflect on the rest of us.
Please don’t compare anti-Semitic terrorism to what Rodger did. It’s wrong and offensive. Rodger lashed out because he was spurned by women, NOT because he thought they were vermin and must be eliminated. Anti-Semitism is not based on rage. It’s based on cold rationalization of hatred aimed towards a “competing” ethnic group, thus the aim is annihilation.
Rodger’s aim was to get laid. When his insanity led him to believe that he had no chance he lashed out. No sane person argues that all Palestinians are to blame, when a Palestinian kills Israelis, like feminists like to blame men. No sane person thinks that Muslims should be banned from seeking equality under the law, when a deranged Muslim terrorist strikes. Yet so many feminists are pointing their fingers on MRM as the new hate group, despite the fact that not all angry-at-women men on the internet are MRM. Feminists ARE using this tragedy to undermine their opposition and that is simply disgusting.
Personally, I don’t know why people like Dawkins politicize the Islamic suicide attacks. Twisting them to their anti religion agenda. Clearly mentally ill.
And anyway, why isn’t Jaclyn Glenn blogging about some suffering muslima out there, instead of getting worked up about this irrelevant trivia?
@Mark M
Doesn’t seem like you read Elliot Rodgers manifesto.
One couldn’t find a clearly example of misogyny, and to compare it to anti-Semitic terror is wholly appropriate.
He wrote: “I cannot kill every single female on earth, but I can deliver a devastating blow that will shake all of them to the core of their wicked hearts. Females truly have something mentally wrong with them,”
I find your response ignorant of the facts and obnoxious.
@ 31
Then why did he write that he thought they should be eliminated?
Also what’s this “spurned” shit? No woman has any obligation to welcome or accept or fuck any particular man. A man isn’t “spurned” because he can’t get a woman to fuck him.
Also why are you implying there’s some morally significant difference between trying to kill a bunch of women because some women “spurned” you and because you think they are vermin and must be eliminated? It’s pretty much the same kind of thinking.
Bullshit. No doubt some antisemitism fits your second description, but the claim that none of it is based on rage is utterly absurd. I’ve known some irrational ragey antisemites myself.
Your second paragraph? Every word of it is wrong. You have things completely wrong, top to bottom.
In the dead-tree days, he liked to come up with an unusual idea and write an essay about it just to trigger discussion. In the discussion, it invariably turned out that he hadn’t thought the idea through.
On Twitter, he doesn’t get to write an essay…
You’re contradicting his manifesto. It’s completely explicit, all the way to borrowing the term subhumans.
Not “competing”. The claims are “they want to kill us all”, “they want to impurify our precious bodily fluids”, “they want to make us helpless and dependent as a people” and the like; antisemitism sees itself as self-defense against a weird mixture of parasite and oppressor.
That’s scarily similar to how Rodgers viewed women.
Whoa. Read again, this time for understanding.
Assumes facts not in evidence. It has not been established that he was insane, or if he was, to what degree his mental problems affected these specific actions.
I don’t agree. Why don’t you head over to Ashley’s and read what some racists are saying. There’s certainly a lot of emotional expressions for people who are supposed to be coldly rational.
You know, if you’re trying to convince me of something, it’s a good idea not to talk complete nonsense. Feminists generally do not blame all men. I know because I am one, as are many others around here.
So, you’re clueless on mental illness, racism and feminism; all in one post. You must be very proud.
So, writing that you think women are beasts, incapable of human cognition and emotion, and that you would love to see them starve to death in concentration camps is different from thinking that women are vermin and must be eliminated how?
@SallyStrange:
No, no, the concentration camps Rodger described so lovingly were metaphorical. Totally not like the ones evoked by anti-Semites. Plus, Rodger wanted to keep some around for breeding purposes, so it’s not really elimination. Surely you can see the difference?
/snark
Did anyone catch this?
Is the European Jewish Congress President someone who “likes to hop onto these types of issues like vultures, they see something and they think it’s gonna help them with their movement or their political agenda and they use it to their advantage, which is disgusting – and they like to downplay, in this case, mental illness.
I haven’t seen any accusation of “only a mentally ill person could do this.”
Jaclyn Glenn’s video isn’t a ‘rant’ or ‘incoherent’ or in fact, ‘manic’, just repetitive.
I disagree. She talks very fast and very loud, and her reasoning isn’t very good. There’s more wrong with her video than repetition.
I made it less than half-way through. When she said there was no “rule code book” that men read I actually laughed out loud.
Maybe that was harsh. I suppose it’s partially true. Women also read them.