I cannot do a facepalm big enough.
After that last post (and now that I’m home from Winnipeg), I discover that Richard Dawkins has joined in the chorus of right-wing loons, like Sarah Palin, accusing Ahmed Mohamed of some kind of nefarious scheme. Dawkins claims that the kid was lying and committing fraud and exaggerating his accomplishment…when last I heard, Mohamed had only said he put together some circuit boards in 20 minutes before school. What did Dawkins imagine, that he’d built his transistors from scratch, etched the circuit boards, and invented The Clock?
That this was some wild Wile E. Coyote scheme, where he’d ordered parts from Acme in a brilliantly convoluted plan to get invited to the White House?
This is nuts.
People are noticing that self-proclaimed leaders of atheism are targeting a 14 year old boy — for being enthusiastic about electronics?
I’m fast learning why “movement” is a synonym for “shit”.
The Far Right is wanking SO HARD to try to spin the story as the kid’s fault, to the point of pulling random images off Google Image Search and sloppily pasting them together to make up “facts.” This shit is already going around on FB, and the first I saw of it was when it was posted by one of my atheist friends. I made sure to comment that it’s already been debunked, not that this will stop anyone.
Profilable™ kid shows his smarts and uncountable heads explodes. What fools these mortals be.
Oh damn! Sorry for re-posting that comment in this thread, I see that my comment got approved in the last thread, which I though had been disappeared as a glitch.
The stupidity is rolling out in grand fashion. So much energy and thought being leveraged toward precisely the wrong side of the fight. Ineffectual teachers and bad cops couldn’t have build a better team of defenders than that crowd that is utterly fixated on the behaviour of a fourteen year old boy.
I actually have run out of words.
Dawkins has sort of apologized since http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/sep/20/richard-dawkins-questions-ahmed-mohamed-motive-backlash
Still, his apology is on the basis that he was afraid of being duped by the boy… Gee, he could have been more afraid to be duped by the right-wingers nuts, or of his own idea that Ahmed’s intention was to gain notoriety in the first place.
Rational thinking and skepticism FAIL.
This “fraud” is up there with every teenager who declared their life being over after some minor and quickly forgotten incident, or pledged their undying love to someone they met a few minutes ago, or any of the other million exaggerations teenagers engage in at that age. Learning about the actual scope (rather than your assumed scope) of things is part of growing up, and exaggeration is part of that ignorance.
I guess Richard Dawkins popped out of the womb a fully grown adult?
It’s amazing how Dawkins is so deeply uncomfortable with the mere idea of a prevalent racial stereotype receiving pushback from the community that he felt the need to balance the playing field through the character assassination of a little boy. Even the mere acknowledgment of Islamophobia is so caustic to him that he has to find some cause for suspicion somewhere to sanitize the debacle.
So he has forgotten all his science training? Don’t make claims when you are unsure. Test other people’s claims. Ask questions, real ones and not just JAQing off.
Imagine you were concerned that some kid might be planning to bomb the school. What would you look for? My top priority would be to check every back pack and mobile phone. No kid is going to wire up a bomb with its own timing circuits.
So frustrating when people assume Dawkins speaks for all atheists. Hasn’t anyone asked what Sam Harris thinks of all of this?
There’s no reason to think about or talk about the level of invention nor the motives for presenting the clock. These are all normal school behaviours and issues. The only story is the stupidity of arresting and suspending a kid for it.
Dawkins’ handlers need to keep him away from Twitter.
KevinKirkpatrick #10
Given Harris’ well know Islamophobia, Ahmed should be profiled and searched every day he comes to school.
The alleged atheist leaders all have a bit of paranoia toward Islam.
I’m more concerned about the local Xian haters than the Jihadists.
Tl;dr version: Dawkins proves yet again that, outside of his immediate field, he is a blathering idiot.
It’s time to remember that Richard Dawkins is in no way a scientist. He is a well trained technician who knows fuck all about logic, evidence, and how to string them together to draw reasonable conclusions about modeling the world.
With the caveat that parody accounts can be truly awful… this is one of my favorite things EVAR. A sample:
And there’s more where that came from…
Jesus fucking christ.
Let’s say, for a second, that yes, the kid is lying. Amed cheated at building his clock; he’s a lying cheater who lied.
So fucking what? You think a 14 year old isn’t being truthful about his most recent accomplishment. So fucking what? “14 year old brags unjustifiably” isn’t remotely worth commenting on. You don’t need politicians and famous authors bearing down on the kid. That’s not even overkill: that’s being a bitter petty douche upset at the notion a child might get praise he doesn’t deserve.
Fuck these people.
@R Jonston #15: Dawkins is a great writer and a great scientist. His discussions with Gould on evolution are epic.
He’s also an asshole. Deal with it.
After reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, I think I am starting to understand this reaction playing out in real time. There is a huge smear campaign underway against this kid.
Those of you who have read the book, please correct me if I haven’t grasped things correctly – Coates referred often to “The Dream” – a state of mind of white people (or “people who believe they are white”) that believe they live in a society free of racism. So, anytime a clear-cut event occurs that shows that belief to be false (Eric Garner, Ahmed Mohamed) cognitive dissonance causes some people, instead of abandoning this just-world hypothesis, to not just deny that racism exists, but to outright fabricate a narrative that turns the victim into a perpetrator. There are so many people who have propagated complete fabrications about this case. It’s dismaying, but I guess no different from what’s been happening for a very long time. I feel ashamed to have not caught on sooner.
Gregory in Seattle @ # 14: … Dawkins proves yet again that, outside of his immediate field, he is a blathering idiot.
Our very own Ben Carson…
I’d say that the campaign is more against the social support behind him rather than Ahmed himself, his character assassination being just the means by which people like Dawkins and Palin indirectly condemn the push against blatant stereotyping as nonobjective. Were it not for the involvement of some prominent figures it probably would’ve been the end, but people like Obama and Zuckerberg had to go and make people feel guilty by acknowledging institutional racism.
The least comfortable way to absolve guilt in this situation? Social change on a large scale. The most comfortable way? Finding some glimmer of hope in a broken system, some way to discover that it had been working all along thereby making any change gratuitous.
So the 3 “famous” people the ThinkProgress article names for criticizing the 14 year old kid are:
1) Sarah Palin
2) Bill Maher
3) Richard Dawkins
Awesome. I’m glad we atheists have advanced so far that our most prominent “advocates” tend to find themselves on the Sarah Palin side of the debate.
TBF, the first time I heard of this, Dawkins’ twitter feed was an endless string of “I feel stupid for being fooled by this.” And “I’m sort for being a douche”. And then he retweeted the POTUS tweet.
In my opinion Dawkins might as well do that each time he opens his mouth on twitter..
What Dawkins meant to say when he brought up the positive consequences of the affair for young Master Mohamed was that it didn’t do any lasting harm — the most notorious cases of racism may involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with “just mild assumptions of guilt.” No one could seriously believe that he defended false arrest. /snark
Islamophobia is when you cannot for a second assume that a muslim boy was the innocent victim of racism and anti muslim bigotry but always need to ascribe some sinister motive and wrongdoing on his part.
It’s a prime example of victim blaming. Oh, Dawkins isn’t saying it was right to arrest the boy, but look, he’s not perfect! Let’s stop talking about the police and the teachers and the principal and talk about whatever minor wrong the kid may have commited in his life.
@op
Afaict the linked article doesn’t show evidence that Dawkins claimed he lied.
@25 giliell
He directly states it was wrong to arrest him, so obviously he was’t saying it was OK.
Eric333
And that contradicts me how exactly?
Dawkins is doing standard victim blaming. It’S the same as the usual “of course rape is wrong, but look at what she’s been wearing”
i DEEPLY APOLOGIZE FOR HAVING
“movement” is a synonym for “shit”.
couldn’t have said that any better
uncle frogy
He also speculated that Ahmed did this to deliberately get arrested.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/richard-dawkins-accuses-ahmed-mohamed-of-committing-fraud_55fed260e4b08820d918fe9b?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592
You know, like a lot of people here, I had dismissed Dawkins as not worth bothering with anymore, but I actually still expected better of him than this. Is he just trying to be spitefully contrarian?
The absolute worst tweet he sent in all of this was this one:
Many took it seriously (myself included). With the result that this “kid” is now doing very nicely, invite to White House etc.
That is some pure racism there, and one of the most dangerous manifestations of it. Notice how he’s straight-out redefining Ahmed as not a real kid, judging by the scare quotes on kid. A big element of racism is in stripping way the childhood of people of that group, of assuming adult-like threat one would never dream of assigning to children of their own race. This is an academic paper (pdf) describing perceived innocence of differing ethnic groups showing that. That’s how you end up with police shooting a 12 year old who is playing in a park. (Tamir Rice).
And Richard Dawkins jumped right into it. He’s not just a kid who maybe used some words incorrectly (like “invent”) and didn’t think to notice his clock might look weird to people; in Dawkins’ mind, he lied and tried to fraudulently claim credit for achieving something, no, wait, he masterminded an attempt to get arrested for the publicity in order to garner worldwide sympathy and worldly goods. A 14 year old. A 14 YEAR OLD. That’s a prime example of racist thinking eliminating the possibility of innocence for a brown-skinned child. That is some grade-A bullshit right there, and no matter if Dawkins wants to walk back some of what he said, he can’t explain that away.
Even if the whole conspiracy theory that this was done on purpose is true, namely that his dad hatched a nefarious scheme to expose islamophobia, does that make this story actually any better? Because the school administrators, the police department, and the howling right wing masses sure did a good job of proving that islamophobia is alive and kicking. Mission accomplished I would say.
Jesus fuck, they just seem to assume that adults overreacting to nothing, and police officers handcuffing and arresting a kid for nothing, is the normal course of business, while a 14 year old is immediately suspect if he seems to have slightly exaggerated certain things. The right wingers sure live in a bleak and desolate world. Me? I actually have higher expectations from adults and police officers. Call me an idealist.
I must offer my most sincere apologies for sharing a nationality and lack of belief with the unutterable ass-hat and bigot, Richard Dawkins. Luckily for such denials my atheism did not depend upon Prof. Dawkins and his books, mine came from Bertrand Russell, GBS and an the inimitable Dave Allen. Perhaps because of this I object to having to spend so much time on line having to explain that #notallatheists are like Dawkins (or Shermer or Harris)
I have also spent a lot of time on my Disqus (Playonwords) account pointing out neither the police nor the school believed it was a hoax bomb or any sort of a threat. I have spent many words trying to explain to lily-livered chicken littles that;
no. the pencil box was not briefcase sized or;
that pencil cases have not always been and made of fabric (back in my youth they were made of metal or wood) or;
that the breadboard circuit rig looked nothing like a bomb fuse or;
that bombmakers do not include convenient digital displays or mains leads or stepdown transformers with their bombs.
The Godzilla facepalm?? You use this for the ultimate facepalm??!!?? Sure, RD did some lame comments, and sure he doubled-down a bit, but c’mon. Now you can’t use The Big One while the Republicans are ‘a campainin’.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls @13:
Oh, no, not at all, you’ve got it all wrong, good sir.
It’s anti-profiling y’see!
Everyone but Ahmed gets profiled less, and the remainder goes… well, never mind all that.
(/snark)
Good morning PZ,
You conclude: “I’m fast learning why “movement” is a synonym for “shit”.”
Perhaps the time has come to stop thinking of Atheism, or being an Atheist, as anything more than a simple refutation of all things (including gods) supernatural.
There is nothing is such a refutation that says the person taking that stance is intelligent, rational, kind, thinking or in possession of any other particular attribute, positive or negative.
I’m uncertain as to whether or not any simple term can encompass that which makes up you. Humans are complex.
I think that what you say and do–your stances for decency and the rights of individuals to be treated with respect–speaks much louder than any term of association might do.
There is no club.
Do, as I believe you always do, all that you can to make today a better day,
Jeff Hess
Have Coffee Will Write
Oh my gods,
Dawkins is now linking to Breitbart’s take on it. Approvingly.
(Breitbart the site, of course, not the person. Because that would be spooky.)
@Carlie
Linking to Breitbart the site approvingly is no less removed from being a rational than is believing in ghosts.
Dawkins is a rational being the way a mule is a printer cartridge.
Hence why the term “brights” never caught on.
I suspect PZ may be trying a FTB systems stress test. Having tested getting the attention of the Harrisites, and the flag waving rethuglican atheists, he’s now trying to summon a horde of dictionary atheists and dork fans. I imagine this is all connected to some plan to siphon their life energy to release Shub-Niggurath. Can’t decide if I want it to succeed….
The Dawk has become a scared imperialist shivering away at the thought of the scary brown people. The only thing sheltering him from complete irrelevance is that the atheist movement will continue to kiss his ass for those sweet, sweet Dawkbucks.
Dawkins is not aging well at all.
He lost the plot several years ago.
Carlie @ 37:
Oh, the glory of rational thought. This is beyond embarrassing.
Warney @ 43:
Please, don’t do this. It doesn’t have jack shit to do with age.
@10
Harris may be a douchecanoe, but he’s not stupid. He was pretty quick to tweet #IStandWithAhmed. He’s much better than Dawkins when it comes to PR, which is probably why he seems to have a better slavish-defender-to-detractor ratio. Whether or not it’s genuine, this supports an appearance of moderation.
In the interview about profiling, you can actually see how he does it. Get an interview with a friendly source. Keep retreading shit so you can make sure you have a chance to construct a favorable context for it.
Dawkins is not good at any of that. Which is why he appears to be a bigger jerk, while actually probably caring more about basic human rights than Harris does.
hyphenman:
The term I use for something more or less like that is “naturalism.” Theism is about those things directly related to belief in theistic deities (which may involve angels, demons, souls, etc.), not every sort of supernatural thing. You may not be a theist if you believe you’re haunted by a ghost, that you have a psychic connection with your dog, or that there is a wizard with magical powers. But a naturalist thinks none of that stuff is true.
But the way you phrased this is at least a bit confusing. “Atheism” is an ideology or -ism, not a description of a person like “atheist.” They’re not in fact used interchangeably, because they do mean different things to people.
Also, a “refutation” is an argument showing another argument or claim is false or invalid. That’s not the same as having an ideology, nor is it describing an individual. Strictly speaking, we haven’t (and perhaps can’t) actually refute such things definitively, just one argument at at time … or you do something less than a full-fledged refutation, like saying the argument probably isn’t right.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the idea that gods don’t exist, or any claims/arguments to that effect, themselves have no implications about how we ought to behave. It’s not an unusual thing at all that beliefs about the world (or whatever there is) do have implications about how we should act. That’s a very different thing from saying that anyone (much less everyone) who has such a belief follows through on it to also believe all of the appropriate conclusions.
To make it a bit too simple, saying that atheists (or everyone) ought to think or act like X is not at all the same kind of claim as saying that they are caused, by virtue of their atheism, to be like X. They don’t have much at all to do with one another, so we should avoid conflating them. Of course, you’re right that atheists aren’t all nice intelligent people, etc., but that already should’ve been immediately obvious a long time ago, before my lifetime at least. If there ever was a time or place in which people could’ve reasonably suspected that to be true, it would have to be very remote and very different from life as we know it. I don’t think anybody here does believe any such thing, and if they do … well, it won’t need to be a very long conversation.
Why would we be looking for any terms like that here? Maybe it’s not what you’re looking for, but in a literal sense, the word is “matter,” no? You’re made of different kinds of matter in constantly-changing configurations.
@hyphenman
Are you saying there is no atheist movement? But there is. Are you saying there shouldn’t be? But, similar to the gay rights movement, there are many many atheists who have common group concerns that they feel (rightly) need to be corrected through activism and organizing.
erik333:
Oh, of course he never directly said “he lied” but he sure did “ask some questions” and “posit some theories.” Oh but of course he never *directly* said anything. Of course. Right.
What a load of fucking bullocks.
Remembering myself as a high school freshman, the only thing surprising about Ahmed is that innocent and relatively trivial actions on his part turned into a media (including blogosphere) storm of amazing size. When a bright kid uses some specialized knowledge and off-the-shelf components to assemble a harmless device, and wants to show off a little, nobody should be surprised even a little bit. And law enforcement, I presume, has better ways of using resources.
The most important lesson I have learned from blogs and news websites is that before I develop a case of outrage, and especially before I comment my outrage, I need to collect all the information I can. Fortunately, I have more often learned by observation than by making myself look silly in public. I’m also thankful that, as a totally insignificant person, I can occasionally look pretty silly without generating any media reaction.
I’m thinking of joining a church, just so I’m not associated in the slightest with the blithering fool known as “Dawkins”.
@Caine:
Why should I not state what is obvious? The quality of his commentary has deteriorated alarmingly with time, and he is finding himself in positions where he to backtrack and issue nonpologies. This was not the case with him in the past. He has become more strident, angry and contrarian with time.
I never prticularly liked him when he was at his peak – as a standalone atheist I hate even even passively adopting the role of spokesman, but in the last few years he has shown serious weaknesses in his relationship with the internet. That has been a disastrous relationship for him. It’s also one from which he shows zero signs of learning lessons.
warney @ 51:
Because you aren’t stating the obvious. Dawkins’s thoughts about all manner of issues have nothing to do with his age. They do have to do with typing egregious shit on twitter, and having all his fans shore him up, and applaud his right thinking. Don’t excuse what he’s doing by putting it down to old age. It’s a case of privilege and entitlement.
marcoli wrote:
It’s still only a single facepalm. Surely there must be a double facepalm out there, and for the most extreme situations, we’ll have to pull out the Cthulhu facepalm.
warney – twitter is not a very old medium at all. For all we know, this is what Dawkins has always been like in person. It’s just that now he’s showing the world.
@ No. 46
Good morning CR,
Refute: to deny, from the Latin refutare: to rebut. Granted, this usage is in contention as noted by Collins English Dictionary (page 1667 in my 12th edition).
Atheist: noun, a person who does not believe in god or gods; adjective, of or relating to atheists or atheism. (ibid.)
Do all you can to make today a better day,
Jeff Hess
Have Coffee Will Write
@ No. 47
Good morning Brian,
First, allow me to say that I admire your decision to not use an internet handle. I wish more people would follow your example. You asked:
Second, no, I don’t think there is an Atheist movement. I think, and am very glad for the reality that, the number of people who identify as Atheists, as I do, is growing rapidly in the United States, but I don’t think of this as a movement because there is no uniting cause across this group other than that they reject belief in a god or gods and the supernatural in general.
The struggle for gay rights, on the other hand, is very much a movement because, despite internal disagreements, those involved are fighting against discrimination and for equal rights under the law.
While I have no doubt that a segment of Atheists do engage in activism and organizing in support of some common group concerns, I’m not convinced that this engagement rises to the same level as that of feminists, the LGBTQ community, indigenous peoples, &c. My experience is that Atheists are making a choice to say that religion, and belief in the supernatural in general (James Randi and Brights comes to mind) have no place in their lives and while they might actively oppose the interjection of religious beliefs into public discourse—Kim Davis being the perfect current example—they do not care if individuals practice their beliefs in their private lives.
In short, I think that the growing number of Atheists is not because of opposition to religion, but rather a disregard for religion.
Do all you can to make today a better day,
Jeff Hess
Have Coffee Will Write
Oh yes, the dictionary atheism derail.
Good luck getting this one back on track.
@ No. 57
Good morning Saad,
I’m more than happy to entertain alternatives. You would suggest…?
Do all you can to make today a better day,
Jeff
FUCK |fək| vulgar slang
verb [ with obj. ]
1 have sexual intercourse with (someone).
• [ no obj. ] (of two people) have sexual intercourse.
2 ruin or damage (something).
OFF |ôf, äf|
adverb
1 away from the place in question; to or at a distance: the man ran off | she dashed off to her room | we must be off now.
• away from the main route: turning off for Ripon.
I will only comment here that I built my first ever radio transmitter at age 12. I glitched one of the circuits, so it didn’t actually transmit on the frequency I wanted — that of my handy talkie — but my voice came out quite clearly on the television set. Live and learn. No doubt had I taken it to school I would have been
handcuffed and taken to jailgiven an award by my science teacher and probably been written up in the school newspaper. But then, I lack a good bit of looking middle-eastern, am not a Muslim and have a “regular” name. Oh well, I strongly doubt that President Ford would have invited me to the White House anyway.Oh, and : could we take up a collection or start a gofundme page to get Richard Dawkins to retire ? Sort of quietly fade away, so that we can remember the man who wrote The God Delusion and not the fellow who has been planting his feet in his mouth on Twitter and in the papers ?
Why do you consider that to be admirable, and, given that you do, why do you not do it yourself?
hyphenman #55: noun, a useless comment.
I knew I should have just stopped reading your comment right there…
Oh well. It still rises to the level of a movement, which is all that matters. This isn’t the Movement Olympics.
Well sure, maybe. But also irrelevant.