I finally unfollowed and blocked Richard Dawkins on Twitter. He retweeted this, and that was just the final straw.
It’s two photos, one of Matt Taylor and his inappropriate shirt (and I suspect Taylor would rather his pals would stop showing it), and the other is of a Muslim woman being executed by a roadside, which is why I’m not posting it directly here, and why you may not want to follow the link. It has a caption: One of these two pictures upsets Feminists. The other one shows the execution of a woman.
It’s a lie. It’s a patently dishonest misrepresentation of feminist views, and it uses the murder of a woman to make a phony criticism of feminists. I can’t imagine how someone could be so insensitive to the crudity of the message and so oblivious to its rank deceit to consider it a worthwhile contribution to any discussion. He’s taken “Dear Muslima” and amplified it with a graphic image and an even more odious comment. And he’s still completely unaware of what’s wrong with it.
Done. No more.
At least it settles one thing: I won’t be attending the Reason Rally. Any movement with that man as its figurehead does not represent me.
Ouch.
Not to self: read all of PZ’s post before I click on the link.
That was just brutal. It does unfortunately seem par for the course here with Dawkins. I don’t know, I’ve liked some of his videos, and I did enjoy his books and old interviews, but the more I heard from him over the years the less confident I was that I wanted to be part of his movement. I guess familiarity does breed contempt.
What.
The.
Fuck.
You’d think that after Dear Muslima Dawkins would be at least vaguely aware of the blatant *logical fallacy* that it constitutes.
Jesus holy christ rollerblading what.
Well… I guess I’ve used the words “to be fair to him” with regard to Dawkins for the last time.
This is what comes of glorifying offence above reality. His new audience is much smaller than he thinks it is… although, fair enough, they’re also much more tolerant of irrationality in their heroes, so he’ll do fine with completing his descent into gibbering without criticism from the base.
I honestly don’t get it. Dawkins is obviously not stupid. He *has* to know this is a misrepresentation. Why does he do it? I don’t get it.
When Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich are on your side, it’s time to re-evaluate what you’re doing.
At least he seems to have realised it was an… unwise post – it’s not on his feed anymore so far as I can see.
“Tricksy feministses say nothing when it’s Mooslim that oppress women! If I say it often enough it will be true! I iz rashunal. I can haz speaking engagement nao?”
Dawkins doesn’t realize he’s been infected by a mind-virus.
Now, if Dawkins could show that women are the equal to men in pay, status, privilege, etc, at all stages of their lives here in the west, including zero rape/sexual harassment, then he could have a sliver of point. But the evidence says he has no point, other than he is chicken to have to give up what he considers his privileges. Except it really costs him nothing to do so. He is too arrogant to see that.
Knowing almost nothing about Twitter, I ask: When you unfollow and block someone, are they automatically informed?
@Nerd #10: but but but IT DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE PEOPLE ELSEWHERE HAVE IT MUCH WORSE!!!!! /s
Oh, but it’s satire and meant to be offensive, so that means everything is justified and perfectly good and fine and well!
Regarding it not being on his feed:
It may not be on his feed retweeted, but he did, in the linked “thread”, chime in to say:
And, if anyone dares to actually read that thread, have brain bleach ready. And, if you do, and you take a moment fully comprehend the quality of thinkers that are the ones swarming to lick his boots, feel free to read the following if you ready to feel the additional burning sensation of pure irony.
Richard, from the ivory tower, looking down:
Dawkins is just an unending font of farce at this point.
Serves absolutely no purpose other than to offend. A lot of those execution photographs are fake. Anti-Muslim hate sites are full of them. Those that aren’t fake, most Muslims are horrified by just like most right thinking Christians are horrified by the atrocities committed in the name of their religion.
So I’m not allowed to write — what, a sentence? — objecting to offense A without including an objection to offense B? How about C? And D? And how can I ensure that Pope Richard has read all my political complaints before I make a new one?
I really wonder, using Dawk logic, how Dawkins can justify himself. All this time and energy and effort, on the part of himself and his followers, vehemently objecting to people being offended by satirical videos and shirts, spending so much time fighting rabidly over the loss of speaking gig. All when he really should be spending all of that on being concerned about terrorism, AIDS, children starving to death, etc. I mean, really. If you are going to assume that objections are a finite resource, and that silence on subject means you don’t care about it, and that you can legitimately criticize someone for having fucked priorities if they focus on smaller local/personal issues instead of far more impactful and/or global ones, Dawkins fails by his own standards. Hell, with the petty little things he obsesses over, he probably fails worse than feminists do. According to his own half-assed logic and arbitrary metrics.
Because when feminists get “offended” by a shirt, it is because they are discussing and debating a larger issue, the implications involved, what it illustrates. When Dawkins gets offended at the “offense”, though, he invokes a “bigger issue” too, but ultimately it is an excuse so that he can lazily defend the status quo and lash at feminists he doesn’t like. And he spends most of his time doing this, instead of speaking out against the execution of atheists abroad, or against anti-vaxxers like Bill Maher, or against child soldiers, or against the modern slave trade.
He’s just a petty little shitlord who pretends to have standards and principles, but actually has none. The Rules are for everyone else to tie themselves up with, while he snickers and prances away.
@anteprepro #16: Indeed. Why the hell is he complaining about angry feminists, when people in Saudi Arabia are jailed and lashed for speaking ill of the royals?
The thing is, the thing is…
I absolutely don’t speak very much about how feminism can change the lives of women who face violence from Muslim extremists. You know why? Because I am a white lady in the US from a Christian background and I do not want to steamroller over the feminists that actually know how to help women who live under that kind of tyranny.
But, you know, whatever. I must not be a very good atheist.
This is a little off topic but I feel it’s related. Last week in the supermarket checkout line the clerk gave me some nice compliments (she was new and I was patient and polite to her while she was still learning – you know being a decent human being). I honestly couldn’t tell if she was flirting with me or not. I’m too old, overweight, inexperienced, used to being single, etc to act on it. I thanked her and went about my business. Last weekend I’m with some of my RPG friends (a married couple) and I told them what happened. They “blamed” it on the latest wave of feminism and how it made people like me scared to ask women out. For the record, I wasn’t “scared”. I just didn’t think it was the right time/place to ask.
The topic of conversation went to video games and they mentioned Feminist Frequency and how she portrays gamers and how they liked watching Thunderfoot. They claimed the criticism against him was mostly people taking things “out of context”. Since they were friends I considered watching one of Foot’s videos to see if they had a point. The next day I see one of his videos on my YouTube page. It’s his response to FF’s newest video about how butts were covered up in video games. He had a bad picture of her as well as a comment that oversimplified the point of her video so much that I’d say he was the one taking things out of context. I didn’t watch the video.
My point is when it comes to criticizing feminists and understanding feminism, some people just don’t seem to get it.
So, the account that made this image: Not only did Milo and Cernovich show up in that comment thread there with Dawkins, but this Ezekiel Rage person regularly shares vids from Sargon of Akkad (creator of the video that Dawkins originally shared), has some banter with/towards Teh Thunder Fool (regarding Feminist Frequency, of course), and two other random people who also are gamergators:
https://twitter.com/sammytancl
https://twitter.com/MrRepzion
So, yeah. Dawkins is pretty much dead in the center of Gamergate at this point. Not really surprising, but still a little disheartening.
(Ironically, Ezekiel Rage doesn’t seem like a bad guy for a gamergater. Not particularly raging on twitter, even if that image he made was terrible.)
There comes a point where simple arrogance and refusal to introspect no longer adequately explain such serial misrepresentation. This is nothing short of unapologetic dishonesty. I challenge Dawkins to find a feminist who is not upset by the image on the right. I challenge him to find feminist who finds the image on the right less upsetting than the image on the left. “Strawman” doesn’t even do the concept justice. This is building a strawman out of other smaller strawmen, then setting it on fire with a torch made of strawmen. Dawkins has shown that there’s no level of dishonesty he won’t sink to when it comes to the topic of feminism.
anteprepro has done an excellent job of curating Dawkin’s Twitter feed the last few days. Reviving ShirtStorm is but one of many things he’s done, like…
– Retweet Janet Bloomfield, part of A Voice For Men and known for inventing quotes to smear feminists.
– Retweet Mike Cernovich, GamerGate’s favorite lawyer.
– Retweet the video he deleted from his feed.
– Retweet someone named MGTOW_FTW, with an image of red/blue pills as their avatar, complaining about echo chambers.
– Retweeted pretty much every anti-feminist meme I can think of. Banning? Can’t take a joke? It’s just satire? Over-sensitivity? Cults? “Harpies” and “hysteria?” Even third-wave hate? It’s all there.
Hell, I even think 4Chan is running an op on him. “Meltdown” doesn’t seem to cover it anymore.
Whoops, there’s an extra character in that last link. Delete it, and the tweet will show itself.
I’m embarrassed to have any of Dawkins books on my shelf now.
HJ Hornbeck: Well, I guess great minds think alike in regards to Dawkins and gamergate. I think its a coincidence, because even though you wrote this first, I only read it just now!
https://sinmantyx.wordpress.com/2016/01/31/the-most-prominent-member-of-gamergate/
tmink128:
I had actually been embarrassed to have The God Delusion since the start. It was only around a year ago that it became significantly more embarrassing enough that I decided to just rip the thing up and recycle it. Probably a pointless move, but it did mean one tiny less thing to deal with when I moved.
Sweet zombie Jesus. What an asshole.
fuck sake… ALWAYS PREVIEW!
I was about to talk about Dawk’s stated views on child abuse. Then I realized there isn’t a sensitive way to trumpet that hypocrisy without collateral damage.
God, as a public figure he is a fucking mess.
@22
I always find it rich when he pulls this line, since it greatly describes his attitude. He sucks at taking criticism from anyone that can piece together a sentence. Sure, he laughingly read off hate mail on a video, but it was all written with misspellings and poor grammar. Make a reasoned but sharp criticism of him and you may as well shit in his tea.
Oh, and satire? What does Richard think of satire? Oh, yeah.
I am embarrassed too. I’m remembering this principle though:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BpXAZGuCMAA21xA.jpg
Although really, it probably shouldn’t say “don’t pay attention to Dawkins” since it’s more important to point out the awfulness of what he’s saying on social media than pretend it isn’t happening. It should be “don’t treat Dawkins as an authority.” I’m happy enough to have read his books on evolutionary biology…but I’m ashamed that he’s such a well-known figurehead of the atheist community.
Ew. Dawkins is really a creepy ass weirdo.
I can’t imagine being so rich and being so conflict oriented on Twitter. I mean, holy shit, dude. There is nothing but maybe health standing in your way, get a fucking life. With his much money, he could probably actually improve the lives of the Muslim women he is pretending to care about.
The craziest part to me, is that this guy apparently thinks he’s the good guy. He has to imagine future people will look back on what he is doing and think he did a good job. Of course, it’s also possible he thinks he’s making a heroic final stand.
@#30, falcon:
That link is terrible, you should stop using it, and whoever made it should be ashamed.
[Wait for it, wait for it…]
That’s not how to draw a flowchart correctly.
I will soon be 61. I have seen ‘cultural Icons’ come and go. But rarely have I seen one go with his shoe firmly entrenched in his mouth and still try to convince people that his speech isn’t impeded in the least by that confounded shoe. What a maroon. I used to respect this guy also, but damn dude, you make it hard for me to do anything else but hope you learn to shut up. SMFH.
@Alverant,
I think you were perfectly correct in that assessment, and it certainly sounds like you did the decent thing. FWIW. If it’s feminism’s fault that men no longer feel obliged to proposition friendly female service employees on the spot, then yay feminism!
As for Dawkins, I don’t know why he even enjoys constructing strawmen this flimsy. I imagine Donald Trump would be upset if he saw a picture of a random roadside execution, for Pete’s sake. How little respect does Dawkins have for the feminist community that he doesn’t credit us with that minimal level of empathy?
Remember when Dawkins was very concerned about his honey and the TSA?
Look, I know it might be upsetting to bring up such a serious issue as this in the context of this light-hearted thread, but whenever we talk about silly distractions like harassment or execution, I think it helps to keep some perspective on the human tragedies and suffering a man like Dawkins can truly get righteously angry about. Before sweating all this small stuff, imagine the brave man of science and his firebrand rhetoric invoking 9/11 over lost honey. These petty distractions might feel overwhelming sometimes, but take heart. One soul is still fighting the important battles.
If anyone cared to bother, it would make a fun blog post to compare and contrast the wit & wisdom of Richard Dawkins and James Watson. I don’t know if they ever met, but they have so much in common, although a Nobel does outrank a bestseller. Apart from their attitudes to the many varieties of inferiors they share a species with, Watson had dreams of winning a second Nobel — for literature. And made a very respectable living out of textbooks.
That is literally the very first thing I think of when I hear this guy’s name.
I think he’ll be pretty lucky if that is what his legacy ends up being at the rate he is going.
I’ve already tweeted the Reason Rally that they can forget about any further cash from me until he’s disinvited.
Since Dawkins is now the Trump of atheism, I’m really starting to wonder what kind of statements or actions he has to perform to get taken off the roster of future events, and to be shunned by his fanbase? Or perhaps I’m finally realizing there’s no limit.
PZ, why disengage? Just take him on. That’s how most everyone else does these things.
There’s a perception out there (not mine, so let’s wet down that straw man before she catches fire) that some feminists pile socially clumsy but otherwise relatively harmless male gaffes – whilst there’s literally an emergency happening to a substantial proportional of the planet’s females. Of course, that’s wrong, but I think with someone like Dawkins your best bet is to tell him he’s wrong and why.
We’re not all tuned to the exact same wavelength. He sees the dire plight of woman in much of the Muslim world as an emergency. Once you’re looking at the world through that lease, some social infractions appear trivial, and can even seem to amount to fiddling whilst Rome burns.
The answer surely is to engage and explain to him why he’s wrong. Not throw in the towel.
When you’re adored for being a bully, bullying results in adulation. Atheist Trump indeed.
@tmink128I #24
Tell me about it. I bought “Ancestors Tale” after I got over the fremdschämen “Dear Muslima” has caused, but Dawkins says something embarassing since then on such a regular basis, that I might not be able to read that book ever. I used to enjoy his science books, but now I cannot get over a bad taste in my mouth whenever I see his name.
Is the man totally oblivious? I’ve got his books and videos – I think I’ll give them away…
PZ
I am quite certain that RD knows exactly what is wrong with his recent crop of anti-feminism tweets. He doesn’t care about women, so why should he care about offending them or worse? He has been disinvited from a speaking engagement, therefore of course he should redouble his twitter misogyny to punish the women who keep pointing out his misogyny.
So Dawkins now behaves like Marine Le Pen?
I wish for the sake of his now disgruntled erstwhile fans I could say that I’m shocked… But I’m not.
The correct term for twitter users are twits. Which Dawkins has amply demonstrated.
I’ve got one or two of his books on my shelf. Since I don’t believe in burning books unless one is freezing to death and donating the books to the library could spread his ideas I think I will write comments about his misogyny in sharpie on numerous pages. Whoever inherits my books will understand my distaste for him and his views.
Whiskey? Port?
I have to wonder exactly how bizarre his posts are going to get, now that he appears to have bought into the idea that, if it’s offensive, that’s evidence that it’s true? He could probably even get into holocaust denial without losing many more fans at this point, and the number of offended people would push his truthiness score ever skyward.
When Dawkins was at the height of his fame as an anti-religious campaigner, he was quite unfairly portrayed by many religious commentators as an angry agitator who raged away without showing any real insight into the subject. And now, here we are.
He has completed his transformation into self-parody in the very image his opponents created for him.
anteprepro:
It totally was a coincidence, I thought of that argument yesterday and kinda isolated myself a bit today to do the research. It has an obvious counter, of course: Dawkins is just a patsy in all this, those GamerGaters are just the love-bombing you’d expect from any other hate group, hoping to prey on his ignorance.
I’m not buying the “ignorance” defense.
Remember that “Feminism is poisoning Science” video? It doesn’t sound that bad on the face of it, Dawkins is just poking at a crackpot who’s masquerading as a feminist. It gets a bit more worrying when you realize Dawkins first developed that material in 1998. It gets rather alarming when you realize there are two different clips of the same speech running around; one dates from around that time (“I recommend two recent books…”) and another which has much better audio quality and sounds like a much older Dawkins (“I’m just going to quote from…. uh… I forget which book of mine this is, actually…. oh yes, it’s a book review…”). Some snooping suggests the second one was in 2012, while he picked up his “Emperor Has No Clothes” Award from the FFRF.
For fourteen years, Dawkins has been railing against post-modernism and repeatedly bringing up Sandra Harding and Luce Irigaray as examples of feminist thinkers. It’s preposterous to think that, in that span of time, no-one sat him down and explained those two are crackpots, or pointed to any of the benefits triggered by post-modernism. This isn’t compatible with honest ignorance.
The same could be said of his endorsement of Evolutionary Psychology. Look around on YouTube and you’ll find an interview he did with David Buss back in 2010, but Dawkins is such a hipster he was a fan back when it was known as sociobiology. Again, on the surface this doesn’t seem like that big a deal.
But as our Tentacled Overload has pointed out, EvoPsych clings to a caricature of evolution. It’s hyper-adaptationalist, almost devoid of attempts to search out the genes tied to behavior, and promotes sharp-edged behavioral modules which are unlikely to arise via gradual and messy evolution. A layperson would have no idea about these flaws, it takes someone well versed in biology and evolution to spot them.
So either Richard Dawkins has a layperson’s knowledge of evolution, all the way back when he was publishing scientific papers on the subject, or he never thought critically about the subject because he wanted to believe it. He wanted those sexist results to be true, and had no problems shutting out people who tried to set him straight. In the span of 25+ years, it’s almost certain someone tried.
It’s no smoking gun, but it suggest Dawkins has been opposed to feminism for decades now. Nobody noticed because he took the Christina Hoff Sommers route, by calling himself a feminist yet endorsing only a tiny subset of it. Since no-one tried probing what his feminism meant, and he’d regularly name-drop it (remember the “consciousness-raising” thing from The God Delusion?), we just assumed he was like any other liberal on the subject.
So it seems less like Dawkins is being drawn to anti-feminism, and more like Dawkins has found his people.
Dawkins must know the difference between the mean and the median right? right?
If I remember correctly, didn’t that whole issue blow over pretty quickly when Taylor realised he fucked up and apologised for wearing that shirt? And yet the misogynist hordes still want to bring him up as some sort of martyr for their cause? Lads, it’s over. Guy was sorry, feminists accepted the apology and both have moved on. But these arseholes are like a pitbull, if they perceive of some wrongdoing by wicked feminists they will hold onto that instance with all their might and will never let it go. They genuinely cannot perceive of a man being sincere when he apologises for upsetting people. I have rarely come across a group of people so obsessive in their hatred. Can’t be good for their health.
So PZ, think you might remove Richard Dawkins links from the sidebar here?
^not to tell you how to run your show, but those have felt out of place for a long time
You know, I’d never noticed that link? I only saw the one, but I skimmed, and I’m not usually one to look at siderbars on sites, especially when they’re left-justified like this one – my eyes are just drawn to the right.
Still, I clicked on the RichardDawkinsNetwork link – https://richarddawkins.net/profiles/366 is the one. That page no longer exists! I don’t suppose either PZ (or the Dawks himself) removed Pharyngula from the ‘Network’ once the gap between them became too great?
My theory on Richard Dawkins: I think whenever he posts one of these racist sexist Tweets, he gets a flood of approving comments from sycophantic Gamergate dudes, giving him the illusion that his views are more popular than they actually are. Meanwhile, I think he will be surprised how many supporters he is losing. I just quit his Foundation page and I can’t bring myself to read his autobiography (I used to run out and buy all his books the very day they were released). I will still use The Ancestor’s Tale in my class, however, as I think it is a very fine book.
@clevehicks, 55
That would probably explain why he thinks that those of us who
have allied with Islamists in order to subjugate the westdon’t want to support such entirely randomly selected hypothetical events as children being assaulted by groups of grown men in train stations as punishment for the crime of being refugees, or shops owned and run by Sikhs being trashed to teach the Muslim owner that they’re not welcome are the minority, while the majority are him, CH Sommers, and the anti-feminist pseudo-horde of the manosphere.It’s been subsequently deleted, but Dawkins tweeted a mock book cover of The Social Justice Delusion with an awful back cover text. We can presume it wasn’t made by Dawkins himself, because if you scan the QR code, you get a classic white power slogan:
https://twitter.com/LightheartedDan/status/694086032594079744
So he’s actually pulling a “si down little ladies and let the smart men do the thinking”?
w00dview
The only people still going on about Matt Taylor’s shirt are the anti-feminist haters. Because yes, actually, feminists have better things to do than to go on about something that happened a year and a half or so ago, especially since it was resolved.
Which actually shows why it makes more sense for western feminists to complain about Matt Taylor’s shirt (I’m sorry, Matt Taylor. I do not hold any grudges against you.): Matt Taylor was there to listen and he obviously cared. I don’t think Daesh, Saudi Arabia or Iran are concerned about my disapproval on the internet.
AndersH
He’s now siding with actual fascists. Totes rational the man.
I actually see Matt Taylor turn up on the TV pretty often over here, usually on things like Stargazing Live or The Sky At Night, and I think, “hell yeah! You rock.”
Because that’s the kind of bitter, twisted, grudge-holding feminist I am!
Richard Dawkins, DPhil, FRS, MRA
I think i see why Dawkins falsely beliefs that feminists are ignoring things like women being murdered in other parts of the world*, and making a big deal about sexism in their own culture. For a start, he knows fuck all about any feminist efforts that have to do with other parts of the world. It’s not that they don’t exist, it’s that he doesn’t know they do. At the same time, he is aware of feminists in his own culture almost exclusively through events like Taylor’s mistake, elevatorgate, etc. So to him, it probably (possibly genuinely, i don’t know) does look like feminists are only and disproportionaly protesting about things he is exposed to but doesn’t give a fuck about, and thinks don’t deserve protestation, while not doing anything about things that happen outside of his own experience, that he considers worthy but knows absolutely nothing about. This is helped by the fact that “the bad things happening somewhere else” are kind of nebulous, brutal and ominously generic, while the specific things happening here that he gets any exposure to whatsoever are much more specific and trivial in comparison.
Shieve that through an unsympathetic mind that is incapable of recognising how something like Taylor’s shirt or Elevatorgate could in any way be a problem itself and a symptom of a much larger problem, and what you get is the mentality that feminists don’t give a fuck about murdered women but loose their shit about a shirt or a video (completely missing the fucking point). Since this, to him, seems utterly ridiculous, it must mean that the people who protest about such things must be ridiculous, and since those are the only people he gets any exposure to, he imagines these are a discrete grouping he can classify in his Big Book of Irrational Peoples under the name of “feminist”**.
The final straw (intentional) comes from his past fixation with fringe individuals who claim the title of feminists while spouting utter non-sense. These people are indeed fringe examples, non-representative and certainly non-influential to feminism in any significant scale, but there’s one thing they absolutely are: conspicuous. Oh, people notice them, alright. The hundreds, thousands of feminist activists doing real work, fighting for an entirely reasonable, rational, moral cause, nobody notices…but the one buffoon talking about amazonian utopias…that one gets paraded around like it’s an 1880’s freakshow. And that’s the curse of feminism, i think…almost all of the good and hard work passes virtually unnoticed, but every single, little bit of non-sense that taints it, gets far more exposure than any of its achievements. This isn’t unique to feminism, by any means, but i do think it suffers from this very heavily. Fucking sensationalism…
*Because women are only murdered or experience violence in other parts of the world. And Dear Muslima teaches us that complaining about anything else is evil.
**Warning: may contain nothing but straw.
From the OP:
Remarkable.
Still, it has the most minuscule sliver of sort-of-plausible deniability (for the IQ impaired): the claim is still congruent with both pictures upsetting feminists — as in: “One of these two pictures upsets Feminists [but doesn’t show the execution of a woman]. The other one shows the execution of a woman [and upsets feminists].” — because the contrast is implicit.
(Yeah, I know. A pretty desperate rationalisation only a fool would accept… but technically true.)
Well I still think that White Wine in the Sun is one of the best Christmas songs around, but along with Greta Christina, I to would rather break bread with Desmond Tutu nowadays
I forgot to mention that being an evolutionary theorist, he is used to thinking cladistically and no doubt, in his mind, all those people protesting about shirts and elevator coffee are more similar to Irigaray than to what he imagines is actual feminism therefore it makes perfect sense to classify them in the Feminiscidae (also known as Harpy Birds, False Red-faced Feminists or Thurd-wafe Feminists), understood as all those feminists closer to Irigaray than to Tru Feminists (Eufeminiscidae), represented by an imagined, idealised revolutionary, fighting Daesh while breast-feeding a baby (which is tastefully covered with a blanket, of course).
Guess which one of those clades he imagines he is a part of.
Linnaeus would be proud.
PZ:
This is just like the pit and Tchiya Amet, it’s all about the now, and neither they or Dawkins gives a single damn about who they use and exploit in pursuit of said gotcha. Their behaviour is beneath contempt.
I disagree. I think Dawkins is completely aware of what’s wrong with it. It’s interesting to me, just how much people still stretch to paint Dawkins as somehow innocent in all this. It’s either “oh, this group is leading him about by the nose”, or “he’s unaware” or “he’s old, and…” I’m tired of such excuses, and I don’t buy any of them.
The irony is that the picture of the execution of the woman comes from RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a feminist organisation that was one of the best sources for how awful the Taliban are, before Sept 11 and the West finally caring (you can see the end of the ‘rawa.org’ credit, and an image search shows it was a woman being executed in a Kabul football stadium in 1999 (they have the story AP wrote on it here – again, pictures of it being done: http://www.rawa.org/murder-w.htm )
So Dawkins is using, without credit, a picture obtained by a feminist organisation (possibly at personal danger to someone) to say feminists don’t care about what it shows. And despite his whingeing, he didn’t say ‘some feminists’, just ‘Feminists’ (with a capital F for some reason). He is repeating a generalization.
Wow. And when I saw the headline, I thought it would be about him retweeting the nazi link.
Based on prior examples, I’m sure that if someone points this out to him he will at most say that’s an exception and he’s talking about the majority of feminists so his point still stands. He is completely immune to facts.
@gondwanarama: the spread of IQ scores is adjusted so that they form a normal distribution around 100, with a standard deviation of 15. So both the mean and median are 100, and that comment was accurate, and not even a tautology. Though it’s still horribly condescending, and given the amount of crap his tweets cause him now, I can’t see that I’d call him ‘intelligent’ any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
So I guess this means Dawkins has decided to completely and explicitly ditch any pretense that his claimed concern for women wasn’t just a cover for his epic battle against the great Islamic boogeyman.
If violence against women in Islamic countries is such a big and important deal to him, why is he wasting any time complaining about feminists he doesn’t like? Isn’t that doing exactly what he’s claiming to criticize, spending time going after the small fry instead of the big fish?
Bleigh. Once I get home, I shall consider rearranging my bookshelves, as well.
Maybe Dawkins is trying to force the divorce of A- and A+, so he doesn’t have to concern himself with what he perceives as tiptoeing around topics he has no moral compass to navigate. Maybe he sees reactionary MRA types as the new demography and hedges his bets that their following will be more numerous and thus profitable than those pesky SJWs’.
Whatever the reason – whether deliberate and cognizant of the implications or not – he is an asshole for it. Privilege incarnate.
@513 anteprepro
So by extrapolation he is saying that the other 50%, the smart ones, are the people agreeing with him…people like Bloomfield and Cernovich, whom, incidentally, are both christian, i think?
I was a volunteer for the last Reason Rally. I received an email asking me to volunteer this time around, since I’m local. I’ve been mulling it over, waiting to see how things were coming together. It’s now an easy decision. I will respond that I can’t support it if they insist on having a speaker that has gone so far off of the rails. I doubt it’ll change anything. But, it’ll be another voice.
When the CFI merged with the RDF, I was done with the CFI, unfollowed them on Facebook and unsubscribed from their emails. It’s a shame, because CFI always sends out good action alerts. But I’ve never been a fan of CFI, they used to be a very insular group, out of touch with non-rich, non-white, non-male people. Well, their merger with the Dawkins Foundation put them back into the Ivory Tower of Atheism, and I want no part of that.
I also want no part of the Reason Rally, which, if you know me and my activist history in the secular movement, you know was something I worked very hard for from 2005 to 2007, trying to convince the “Freethought Heads” group leaders to stop bickering and come to an agreement on all of them co-hosting a large rally. It took them 5 more years after I left national-level atheism before they finally held the 2012 Reason Rally, 10 years after the first “Godless Americans March on Washington.”
I’m sure that Clark Adams is spinning in his grave now, because when he died, he thought the secular movement was in good hands and would prosper well without him. Instead, it became… this.
I’ve BEEN done Dawk. Got rid of all my books a few years ago. Never liked them, anyway.
So now that he’s hanging around with a bunch of white supremacists, are we taking bets on whether he’ll become one too? While declaring himself to be passionately against racism, of course.
Consistent standards of behavior are only for the peasants. The noble Dawkins is exalted above such petty concerns.
It’s deliciously hilarious that Dawkins’ tweet is coming from a guy who prattles on about atheism while ignoring all other world crises, like starvation, AIDS, lack of vaccinations, etc. Yes, we can focus on more than one situation at a time. Where are the feminists speaking out against women being raped and murdered in the Middle East? You’re not listening to them. You’re ignoring them because it hurts your brain from all the cognitive dissonance, Dawkins.
Oh for fuck’s sake, Richard.
A slide under a microscope. A human being. One of these is interesting to scientists. The other is a human being.
Not all scientists, just the humourless, emotionally repressed ones.
A giraffe. Corruption.
Ethologists believe one these exists. The other is corruption
Not all ethologists, just those dishonest ones taking bribes.
People called Richard… etc
sheila:
Oh god, I see it already.
Future Dawkins: “Why, it isn’t white supremacism or racism! So simple, I can’t believe I need to explain myself a thousand times on this issue. It is as if people don’t understand simple English words. Most people lack the understanding of even the basic and most simple logic. This is elementary. It is not racist to be proud of your race. Yet those who don’t see it that way, who simply disagree with that opinion, are already preparing the noose for me. They fail, perhaps deliberately, to understand that I don’t declare the white race supreme when I simply declare that they were integral to the success of the Enlightenment, to the creation of the scientific method, and to the many successes of many European countries, as well as the U.S. This is incontrovertible history, and that such countries were and still are superior to countries such as Somalia or Afghanistan would also be a matter of little controversy. And yet many on the left still try to manufacture a controversy because they take offense at the simple historic fact that white people were responsible for all of this, and by people like myself and my good friends who are not ashamed to be proud of these facts.”
Libruls: “Fascinating series of 26 tweets, but how does that explain retweeting ‘around blacks, never relax’? ”
Dawkins: “Obviously, I wasn’t referring to all non-white people with that statement. It was simply satire. Do you understand how satire works? It was supposed to cause offense. Why, if it weren’t the censorious political correctness of the left [Tweet 1 of 362]”
A sick part of me wants to place bets on something like this happening.
I made a silly meme about Dawkins, feminism and Taylor’s shirt in 2014, thinking it would be topical for, like, a day. Guess not.
That settles it. The Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype are going straight into the fire pit tonight. I can’t believe I ever saw this man as a way to learn about biology.
anteprepro @82: does my memory do me a disservice, or didn’t Dawkins already go full white supremacist once? Something about how Nobel prizes were concentrated in Oxford, not Muslim scientists?
CaitieCat: Yup. That happened. I forgot about it. Holy shit.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/08/richard-dawkins-twitter-row-muslims-cambridge
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/08/richard-dawkins-tweets-islam-muslim-nobel
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/09/richard-dawkins-anti-muslim-tweets_n_3732678.html
His bloviating defense of himself in the aftermath:
https://richarddawkins.net/2013/08/calm-reflections-after-a-storm-in-a-teacup-polish-translation-below/
And this, posted about him in the aftermath, showing how shitty he was even in 2013:
http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/08/short-history-richard-dawkins-vs-internet/68149/
Holy crap, he RT’ed a white supremacist / white nationalist / whatever they are calling themselves these days, but then deleted it. Screenshot of RT below and the “book”. It was of a book called “The Social Justice Delusion”. Obvious spoof of “The God Delusion”.
https://twitter.com/amcuckmag/status/694079501127409665
Image of RT from the white nationalist’s timeline: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CaHdTLMVAAEwY16.jpg
Image of the “book”: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CaHdV4vUkAATmaE.jpg:orig
Yes, the tweet is insensitive and way over the top, but the Ben Affleck crowd needs a shock to the system when it comes to their ridiculous defense of Islam as a viable religion and culture. Calling Sam Harris a racist because he thinks Islam is “the mother lode of bad ideas” is just blind to the truth.
Thank you, proof1required @88 (coincidence?). You’ve opened my eyes and I will now become a ranting Islamophobe.
So as I understand it, and mind you, I don’t understand much, Dick does kind of a reductio ad absurdum thingy because he doesn’t think complaining about a shirt is feminist enough and he would like for people to have the same outrageous reaction when a covered muslima walks by with her designated male. On the other side we have “how dare you minimise my suffering by showing me the real suffering! Every offense needs to be countered!”
It’s sad; like-minded people quarreling about the nuances of their extremism, this is not progress, this is squandering energy that would be best used in fighting the real problem. No matter who is “more” right…
Maybe for the world to get better, it’s not enought to “raise awareness” by telling some gamers “guys don’t do that” or by shaming someone on twitter because he had an offensive t-shirt…, maybe we should do something that people can take seriously, like opening a shelter for the oppressed, arranging legal support for victims… or even by baking some brownies and erecting some placards at school, or by asking the DoE to start self-worth/self-control classes or to ask the police to train officers to respond to sex crimes with more competence, or to vote for a government that treats religion for what it is…. If your only battles consist of twitter-shaming over offensive t-shirts, exploitative games and creepy flirting attempts, few people will take it seriously and even fewer will follow. Pearl-clutchinggly calling Dawkins a racist MRA must be one of the dumbest things I read in a long time on FTBs. Words obviously do not mean much anymore…
DAWKINS, THE BIG ENEMY OF FEMINISM…. gimme a break
He isn’t called a bigot because he promotes prejudiced policies that discriminate against people of Islam. Why are YOU so blind to the truth?
Dawkins lost me when he reposted some crap about teaching unions supporting radical islamism – because they didn’t agree with the UK government’s policy of using teachers to keep an eye on every school kid.
Gad, took the hard of thinking crew long enough to show up. Perhaps you could impress us all, proof1required, and fffabio, with how quickly you can leave.
Nope, there are those who see the shirt as inappropriate in the context of a world-wide TV broadcast from the ESA, and those who are too stupid to acknowledge the inappropriateness of the shirt in that situation, which required at minimum “business casual”. The shirt is resort wear, not suitable for that broadcast. And Taylor acknowledged it was the case.
proof1required:
Blind to the truth, much like implying that Islam has a monopoly on “bad ideas”, bringing up a random Sam Harris quote to avoid talking about Dawkins, and specifically avoiding the more contentious things Sam Harris has said well doing so (to further imply that Sam Harris has always been about Ideas and has never, ever gone as far as advocating for discriminating against Muslims based on visible characteristics….or advocating nuking them and torturing them….).
I think the Dawkins crowd needs a shock to their system. Shock them out of keeping their heads up their asses, so that they can finally see the reality of racism and sexism in the world, for one, and can actually start listening to the actual, real words of their critics, instead of what they just imagine the critics are saying, for two. But sadly, as shocked as the fans are whenever their god-king is challenged, it does not seem to be providing quite enough of a shock to ever reach those lofty goals. As it stands, the Dawkins brand of atheism will fail to be a viable culture until the disciples of the Great Sage manage to finally loosen their sphincters just enough to squeeze out part of an eye and see a fraction of the world outside of their own colon. Some day, perhaps.
It’s not in appropriate at all. If “feminism” were a logically consistent movement based on the principles of reason, individualism and equality, then most of “feminists”‘ efforts, their fire, their vitriol, their energy, most of their bandwidth, would logically and morally have to be directed at stopping the murder-of-innocent-Muslim-women type things, and by comparison, the dude-in-the-shirt type things would merit nothing more than a chuckle or a snort of mild derision, hardly worth even a comment.
But because “feminism” is based on a Marxoid analysis of society in terms of peoples’ membership of oppressor/oppressed groups, defined by their closeness to or distance from “power” (arbitrarily defined – usually gender, race, etc.), then it’s necessary for them to direct most of their energy, their fire, their vitriol, their bandwidth, at dude-in-the-shirt type things, because:-
a) they need to stay consistent with their own gender-based analysis based on Marxoid principles, because sticking with that analysis is what earns them kudos and money, whereas peeling away from it earns them the baleful gaze of the heresy-hunter, and nobody likes being called names;
b) they need to stay aligned with the “oppressed” group of Muslims against the “oppressor” group of the West; and
c) dudes-in-shirts are easier targets than dudes-with-Kalashnikovs – there’s little likelihood of any actual, life-threatening blowback from criticizing dudes-in-shirts.
What’s not to like? It’s a win-win all round – except of course for the dudes in shirts and the innocent Muslim women who continue to get raped and murdered.
fffabio:
And here you are, shitting on people for daring to care about shit, telling them to go fight a problem you don’t specify, with solutions you will certainly never come close to providing. Silencing BOTH SIDES is the real activism, isn’t it?
Interesting merge of Elevatorgate into Gamergate. Rather telling if it was accidental.
Your ability to accurately restate and then logically refute the arguments of feminists is second only to Dawkins himself.
What a RWA loser. Equal results with men isn’t Maxist, and is a democratic ideal. Funny how you MRA types keep lying to yourselves, then lying to us.
Calling out dawkins on his racism and misogyny= a ridiculous defense of Islam as a viable culture and religion? Islam has been around for a few millenia, so unless you are complaining about the time traveling feminists mucking up the proper order in abrahamic religions, I don’t see what it has to do with RD and his latest asinine behavior.
… or commenting on a blog. Oops! WAIT! No, guys! It’s obviously okay when I do it. Not petty at all. Feminists, though… gimme a break!
Wow, deluge of shitlords
Here, let me just fix this one:
I am still utterly baffled that you assholes can continue to have the gall to spew out histrionic screeds about the evils of feminism, for focusing on allegedly trivial things instead of Important Things, and then continuing to hyperventilate and pontificate about the priorities of what feminists post on social media, without thinking anyone will notice the utter hypocrisy of it all.
If any of you fuckwits were sincere, you would not be here right now. You would be off working in soup kitchens and spending all of your free time trying to communicate with people to get them to donate to various charities. You would not be using your internet activism time telling feminists that they are shitty people because their internet activism time should be focused more on opposing Muslims. You aren’t helping, you aren’t creating a convincing illusion that you actually care about this shit. It is clear that what you really want is to bash two of your “enemies” at the same time, and this is just a convenient opportunity to do so. It isn’t that fucking hard to figure out. That you all are too stupid, or too arrogant, to care that we know exactly what you are doing doesn’t make it all any less of a charade.
So is this like one of those Hovind-Student invasions?
You really could have stopped right there.
There is no “real” and “unreal” suffering, except in the minds of people who think the first instance isn’t a societal problem in any way, shape, or form, and which needs no redress.
And pray tell, what would that be?
Feminists already do and support this.
Feminists already do and support this.
Feminists already do and support this (especially students at said schools).
Feminists already do and support this.
Feminists already do and support this.
The scientist who was “shamed” was not angry about the tweets questioning his choice of shirt. On the contrary, he apologized. Read the thread. Feminists generally seem to like the guy. Strange, huh?
Considering the highly abusive reaction of a certain large section of the gaming community to criticism of sexism within games because of a perceived threat that game companies would stop catering to their desire for sexism within their games, I’d say this turned out to be kind of a big deal, actually.
You’re the ones who made a relatively small deal into The Most Important Thing Ever by insisting that there was absolutely nothing creepy about it and that it was misandry and a declaration of war on socially awkward men to say that there was.
Dude just retweeted a Neo-Nazi (apparently he missed the “cuck” in the user’s Twitter handle). Every time he tweets something negative about feminism, his feed fills up with GGers lauding the post and repeating anti-feminist talking points. Yeah, keep trying.
Unsurprisingly, that makes fuck all sense. What is it about the principles of reason, individualism and equality that says that you can only focus on the most extreme examples of sexism and that you must ignore those that people like you have deemed trivial?
It is entirely consistent with reason and equality to tackle all aspects of sexism, prejudice and inequality, the big and the small.
Why, because you say so? Fuck off. All this time and still people don’t understand why people pointed out the problem with that shirt in that context? Fuck me…these people are thick…
You think that’s trivial, others disagree, get out of their fucking way.
@99 Travis
Indeed, what fine examples we’ve had in the last batch of posts.
His thinking that is not why anyone calls Sam Harris a racist.
Speaking for myself, I generally try to pass on questions framed as “is [person X] a [Y]” rather than attempt to honestly characterize the person’s stated positions.
Is Sam Harris “a racist” is too loaded and too subject to the defense that he is not personally prejudicial in his relations with individuals regardless of ethnic identification, which is too often what people mean or what they construe others to mean when they say “he is a racist”.
Rather, let’s see if the positions Sam Harris holds show a lack of regard for the role systems of oppression based on ethnic or racial identities play in the events he comments on. Let’s see if Sam Harris makes broad generalizations about particular groups that he would reject about his own or another, favored, demographic. Let’s see if Sam Harris resorts to rhetorical dodges and “thought experiments” of dubious utility when confronting accusations of racism. Let’s see if his rhetoric is similar in tone and content to that employed by past, avowedly racist groups and individuals. (I could go on)
These sorts of things are why many believe that Sam Harris is at the very least a race-baiting fear monger. Not because he criticizes Islam and Islamist extremists.
littleknown @ 104:
Well said. :applause:
So basically Richard Dawkins is to Feminism as Ray Comfort is to Evolution?
Seriously, nobody is still thinking about Matt Taylor’s shirt except the dudes who keep being offended by the fact that women dared to criticise a guy. Don’t you folks have anything better to do? Maybe take a leaf out of your own book, will you?
And the latest:
Nugent again sucks up to Dawkins, and also manages to work in pot-shots against PZ and Rebecca Watson. He is a creature of habit: http://www.michaelnugent.com/2016/02/01/necss-reconsider-dawkins-decision/
Dawkins retweets a cartoon that was incidentally also addressed to thundrousfool and Sargon of Akkad (again, the Gamergate is strong here): https://twitter.com/nadine_feiler/status/694126315545427968
And he also says:
Oh my word! Why has nobody ever considered these things before this very day? My gob has been thoroughly smacked in this moment. I’m suddenly deathly afraid that I’ve made a terrible waste of my entire life!
Ugh. Second sentence was mine.
Giliell:
Truth. That shit was over a year ago. The Rosetta landed on November 12, 2014, and Matt Taylor apologized, sincerely, on November 14th. The actual controversy was incredibly short on the feminist side. It yet it lingered, and still apparently does to this day. And the people constantly bringing it up? Well, it ain’t the feminists…
Dawkins tweet from anteprepro’s #110
This doesn’t even make any sense. He’s clearly addressing this to people who don’t live under sexist Islamic cultures and yet is telling them to fight to change those Islamic cultures thousands of miles away. How?
anteprepro enunciated:-
“histrionic screeds about the evils of feminism, for focusing on allegedly trivial things instead of Important Things”
LOL – so ok, is the dude-in-the-shirt type of thing only “allegedly” trivial in relation to the “Important Thing” of actual human beings being actually brutalized – or is he REALLY trivial, in comparison?
Anyway, my histrionic screed wasn’t about that, it wasn’t about “feminism” being inconsistent or hypocritical, it was about “feminism” being based on a totally different set of principles that are NOT reasonable, not liberal, not individualist, and not egalitarian. In light of that, it’s quite easy to understand why “feminists” and “liberals” focus on things that are trivial from a reasonable, liberal, individualist, egalitarian point of view.
Whether someone who does have reason-based, liberal, individualist, egalitarian principles works in soup kitchens or goes out and tries to do something concrete to ameliorate the situation for Muslim women, is totally up to them. There are all sorts of possible responses to what’s happening in the world, of varying degrees of intensity and commitment, that are quite consistent with holding reason-based, liberal, individualist, egalitarian principles.
However someone who has reason-based, liberal, individualist, egalitarian principles is hardly likely to waste bandwidth on a dude in a shirt, regardless of whether their contribution to the greater good involves them actively getting involved in soup kitchens, or just despairingly trying to knock some sense into vain, gullible idiots on the interwebz.
Dawkins
iswas a rational scientist. He should be able to detail a feasible method by which culturally and geographically foreign never-Muslims can cause actual change in the sexist cultures on a different continent.But who does he think he’s fooling? How can someone who is against the equality of women in his own niche and his own culture genuinely give a rat’s ass about women far away?
So
a) The photo is a lie – it will upset anyone with even a slight moral compass – Liberals , Feminists, Conservatives, Atheists , Muslims , Christians . The worst you might hear is someone pointing out the hypocrisy involved in getting upset over a single murder while keeping mum on various state sanctioned murders / wars – which isnt the same thing.
b) I wonder how receptive Dawkins would be towards
A teacher teaching the Earth is 6000 years old v/s the same pic – One offends atheists , the other shows an execution of a woman
A photo of 10 commandments/A nativity scene outside some government building – One offends atheists , the other shows an execution of a woman
A photo of a juicy burger next to the pic – One causes assholes to salivate , the other is the photo of a burger
Yet you haven’t demonstrated with evidence you are right. Just repeated MRA talking points.
Wrong MRA breath. Microagressions, which keep those not privileged under constant attack. They must be squelched, and the shirt was a microagression. You want women, POC, etc., to be microagressed into submission….
Once again, asshole antifeminists declare themselves to be The True Liberals. Riiiiight.
@george, 114
I’m not going to respond to your silly misrepresentation of a long resolved issue… instead, I’m going to ask a question:
Assuming that the issue of human beings being actually brutalised is fixed, will all be right in the world, at least as far as gender equality is concerned?
Ah yes, all those feminist microaggressions that people foolishly waste time quibbling about when they could be focusing on actually important things, like Ten Commandment sculptures or people that say “God bless” when you sneeze. Why, even managing to get “In God We Trust” off of the money is a more worthwhile pursuit
/sarcasm
Dreaming of an Atheistic Utopia belched:-
“Unsurprisingly, that makes fuck all sense. What is it about the principles of reason, individualism and equality that says that you can only focus on the most extreme examples of sexism and that you must ignore those that people like you have deemed trivial? It is entirely consistent with reason and equality to tackle all aspects of sexism, prejudice and inequality, the big and the small.”
Hmm, so is the dude-in-the-shirt type of thing only “deemed trivial” (or “alleged trivial”, as antepropro alleged) in relation to the actual-living-Muslim-woman-getting-raped type thing, or is he REALLY trivial, in comparison? And is there perhaps a difference between “big/small” on the one hand, and “horrific/trivial” on the other? It’s certainly consistent from a liberal, rational, individualist, egalitarian point of view (as I pointed out to antepropro), to tackle both “big” and “small”, but is it consistent to prefer to tackle “trivial” in comparison to “horrific”?
“Why, because you say so? Fuck off. All this time and still people don’t understand why people pointed out the problem with that shirt in that context? Fuck me…these people are thick… You think that’s trivial, others disagree, get out of their fucking way.”
There might be a “problem” with dudes-in-shirts, but is it AS IMPORTANT as living human beings getting raped and murdered – you know, from a rational, liberal, humanist, individualist, egalitarian point of view?
Of course I understand perfectly well how the dude-in-the-shirt might seem more important from the point of view of a Narrative-based analysis. That’s precisely why I’m saying that “feminism” (and you apparently) obviously seems to hold to a Narrative-based analysis, in terms of which dudes-in-shirts CAN appear to be only “allegedly” or “deemed” trivial, in relation to actual living human beings being raped and murdered; because, from a rational, liberal, individualist, humanist, egalitarian point of view, dudes-in-shirts are REALLY (not “allegedly” or “deemed”) trivial, in comparison to actual living human beings being raped and murdered.
So which is it? “Allegedly” or actually?
I am still baffled. The people who are fervent, frothing worshippers of free speech, allegedly, are essentially telling feminists, and really any activist at all: “Stop talking about A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H, and only talk about X, Y, or Z, because you are immoral and ignoring the REAL atrocities if you don’t. (And no, this rule can never be used against me)”. It’s a blatant silencing tactic. And the richest part of all is that it is all happening because of a video which, among other things, was saying that calling something “problematic” or “unquranic” is a silencing tactic, and both are inherently similar, for that reason, enough to mean that feminists and Islamists were basically identical.
I guess these fan boys are also Islamists. What a twist. Thanks, anti-feminist logic!
TL;DR: Shut up women, other people have it worse!
Dawkins
#113
In and of itself it makes perfect sense. Are you saying that there is no way to fight for cultural change in distant lands? If a westerner on here, in another context, stated that “We who don’t live in repressive African regimes that burn children as witches, stone gays, or practice genital mutilation should check our privilege & fight harder for those who suffer such oppression” would you tell them that what they said made no sense? Maybe you would, but I’m guessing not.
Smells like: Whatever this man says, I will take exception and call it stupid. Which is a pretty dumb approach.
Except your idiocy smacks of liberturdism, and not any true end of the day equality.
You aren’t, and can’t make your point, until we are totally equal in results here in the West. Otherwise, your idiocy is misdirection, so you can continue to microaggess people and keep them submissive here in the West. You lose.
gurugeorge continues to lecture us about the finer points of the ethical issues involved in writing online about “trivial” issues rather than “horrific” ones, all while AIDS continues to be an epidemic and children continue to starve. War, rape, and murder happen across the globe, while gurugeorge frantically writes again how feminists should stop writing about feminism and write about more things, like….complaining about feminists don’t write about important things! Something like that.
@proof1required
All of your nonsense is debunked in this article and the comment section:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/9211
Thanks for adding evidence to the hypothesis that delusions about islam being special are the real cause of all of this, and that possibly these people like Dawkins and you don’t care about feminism, just islam bashing.
*and feminist bashing, of course.
Nerd of Redhead blurted out:-
“Yet you haven’t demonstrated with evidence you are right. Just repeated MRA talking points.”
I could demonstrate it by showing a history of the Marxoid memeset, from Marx himself (whose “oppressor/oppressed group” analysis was of course based on social relations as defined to their closeness to or distance from the means of economic production – i.e. socioeconomic “classes”), through the mutation of that memeset to accommodate concerns about racism (where the analysis is based on which race holds the power), through to the mutation where the same type of analysis was first applied to gender in the 60s, through to its use today. I could, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t make any difference :)
And what is it with you people and this “MRA” obsession? As a rationalist, a liberal and an egalitarian, I wouldn’t dream of concocting special rights for a gender.
“Wrong MRA breath. Microagressions, which keep those not privileged under constant attack. They must be squelched, and the shirt was a microagression. You want women, POC, etc., to be microagressed into submission….”
Is that “attack” in the same sense as being surrounded by large groups of people, molested, mugged and raped?
Is that “submission” in the same sense implied by: “Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded; and (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them; then if they obey you, do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great.” – Koran 4:34
A rational, liberal-minded person could certainly use words like “attack” and “submission” in a metaphorical sense, or to exaggerate a point – but you don’t mean those terms in a metaphorical sense, or to exaggerate a point, do you?
@126
You’ve discovered the endless spiral of complaining about complaining about complaining, from which there can be no escape.
“Hey you feminists, stop complaining about me complaining about you complaining about minor things. The only valid stance is me complaining about you complaining about minor things.”
Bill Buckner, #124
True. By itself it’s fine. I was responding to Dawkins specifically saying it, keeping in mind his position on feminism and Muslims and, more importantly, why he chose to say it now.
Maybe my #113 and #115 should have been written together in one post.
But that tweet is stupid, because it is dishonest and a reaction to the opposition he’s getting to his anti-Muslim and sexist views.
Dude, learn how to blockquote. Common courtesy if you want people to read what you write.
I mean those terms in the sense of residual institutionalized racism and misogyny asshole. Which you would be aware of if you weren’t so tied up in hearing your own voice.
I can effect things here in the US. They are important things to achieve real equality. I have no mean to effect any change half way around the world. Only somebody with an agenda of keeping people here at home down would think otherwise. Have us ignore the problem at home and concentrate elsewhere. Ass backwards….
@121
You realise the Dear Muslima horseshit is fucking old, right…?
No, it’s not actually trivial. It’s not trivial, negligible or unimportant if equality and fixing sexist biases and norms is something that maters to you. It’s smaller, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. And the single data point may be small, but it’s a symptom of a much larger problem that is by no means trivial or small, it’s fucking huge, and it’s sexism in western culture.
Saying that the smaller problems can be safely ignored, is not reasonable, nor rational and it certainly doesn’t further equality. And since people lime you have decided that the “big stuff” is only happening somewhere else, thousands of miles away where western people have virtually no influence, the “big stuff” is out of reach. Meanwhile the “smaller stuff” is happening to them, it’s their lives and their day to day. Who the fuck are you to tell people to not do something about the things that affect them and they can do something about?
I hope you never get an infected wound, because you know, there are people dying of AIDS in other parts of the world, which is a very serious, very difficult problem to tackle, and even though your problem could have been preemptively solved with some iodine, and in it’s current state, with some antibiotics, don’t you fucking dare do anything about such a trivial, little thing, even if it’s infecting your body and spreading and threatening YOUR fucking life with lethal septicemia.
Like others have pointed out, though, the levels of irony here are mindboggling. You are spending ” your energy, your fire, your vitriol, your bandwidth” at people on a blog’s comment section. If a scientist wearing a shirt on national TV that objectifies women and perpetuates a long standing atmosphere that is unwelcoming to women in STEM , sending a message to thousands of viewers, is “trivial”, what the fuck is what you are doing?
You don’t know what reason, rationality, liberalism or equality mean.
I wonder if the troll guru george is the same loathsome slime as banned georgi ?
So when are people like gurugeorge going to attack all those atheist microagressions groups waste time on? I mean, is a 10 commandments sculpture even comparable in severity to violent religious fundementalism?
Surely they wouldn’t focus specifically on feminism for any underlying reason, right?
Athyrwren spelled out:-
“Assuming that the issue of human beings being actually brutalised is fixed, will all be right in the world, at least as far as gender equality is concerned?”
No, since from a rational, liberal, individualist, egalitarian point of view, the tendency to bigotry comes partly from biology, partly from traumatic experiences in childhood, and partly from peer/cultural reinforcement, it’s more of a constant vigilance that’s required, even if the major problems are sorted out. But you probably don’t need an entire army to maintain the vigilance at that point.
I don’t know about you, but I have half a dozen mad, vile crazy thoughts that bubble up from the machinery of my brain every day. But I don’t act on them – that’s the point of civilization and culture, isn’t it? You tame the beast and get the lion to voluntarily lie down with the lamb without eating it – but also without the lion ceasing to be a lion (lamb eating not being definitive of lionhood, after all).
Jesus fucking christ gurugeorge, even if you trully think people are focusing on things that you, in your supreme ignorance and privilege, have deemed trivial, will you fucking get out of the way and let them do something about it?
If these things are so trivial, they should be very, very easy to fix and move on to something more important, and yet, arseholes like you keep getting in the fucking way and making it impossible to fix the little things. let alone the bigger ones. A thousand little problems are not trivial, they make one big fucking problem.
What kinds of things are you doing for equality? Seeing as you deem things like fighting sexism in western culture to be trivial, i expect it must be something pretty big, and possibly abroad. I await eagerly to find out about all the real good you are doing for humanity.
gurugeorge @ 114:
He is, however, likely to waste bandwidth on repeating the words “reason-based, liberal, individualist, egalitarian principles.” Perhaps if you repeat yourself enough, it will actually be true.
I was introduced to the RAWA in 2000 by a high-school teacher. At that time, the only people who gave a shit about them were feminists. You are a disgusting opportunist, preying on the brutal oppression of women in other countries to justify your relatively “better” oppression of women in your country. Your motives are truly revolting. What you are really saying is that those women facing brutal oppression in Afghanistan should have some rights, but they should never actually be equal to men (certainly, they should not complain if they feel unwelcome in STEM fields; if they are propositioned by a stranger while they are alone in an elevator in a foreign country at 4 in the morning; or if they are told that the way that they dress makes them getting raped more or less likely). Take your faux concern for the suffering of those women and shove it in the blackness that is your soul.
Weird how gurugeorge spends so much time complaining about western feminists when there are so many less Trivial things happening overseas…
Except that they haven’t been sorted out in the West. Fuckwitted idjits like you don’t want to lose the last of your privileges, and are fighting tooth and nail, and with misdirection, to maintain those privileges. You don’t believe in true equality, you believe in the pretense of equality. Which is the status quo.
You make no sense. You reek of privilege…
antepropro regurgitated:-
“I am still baffled. The people who are fervent, frothing worshippers of free speech, allegedly, are essentially telling feminists, and really any activist at all: “Stop talking about A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H, and only talk about X, Y, or Z, because you are immoral and ignoring the REAL atrocities if you don’t. (And no, this rule can never be used against me)”. It’s a blatant silencing tactic. And the richest part of all is that it is all happening because of a video which, among other things, was saying that calling something “problematic” or “unquranic” is a silencing tactic, and both are inherently similar, for that reason, enough to mean that feminists and Islamists were basically identical.”
The reason you’re baffled is because you haven’t noticed that nobody’s asked anybody to “stop talking” about anything. The “stop talking” thing is you guys’ schtick.
What’s being done here is pointing out that there’s an inconsistency IF you hold to rational, liberal, individualist, egalitarian principles
Whereas if you DON’T hold to such principles, but instead hold to a philosophico-socio-political analysis that divides human beings into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups based on their closeness to or distance from “power” (arbitrarily defined apriori), then yes, you’d be perfectly consistent in paying more attention to, and getting REALLY REALLY ANGRY about dudes in shirts, and being merely embarrassed by, and wanting to deflect attention from, actual living women in Cologne being surrounded by actually-rapey mobs and being mugged, molested and raped.
Because of course the REALLY important thing in all this is to have such a broad definition of “rape” that eventually anything anyone does anywhere can be defined as rape, and you can feel perpetually chuffed about yourself for condemning “rape”.
Right, that’s enough from me for now – ima play videogame. Those monsters don’t kill themselves.
Saad @ 113 and Bill Buckner @ 124:
Judging by the link Hj Hornbeck posted @ 49, I think Dawkins still subscribes to the idea behind the Sokal hoax that simply by using the “coded language” of feminists and post-modernists (“check our privilege”), inserting it into meaningless sentences, you can show the ideas behind the language to be hollow.
This is just my guess, but he may be attempting to make the point that if “check your privilege” can apply in one situation of disparate privilege (and perhaps justify something like affirmative action policies), then it must apply in every situation of disparate privilege (and hence no one should fight sexism anywhere if there is worse sexism somewhere else they could conceivably fight). He fails to understand, over and over and over again, that it’s possible to care about more than one instance of privilege (including your own) at the same time.
Also: that simply recognizing your privilege does not dictate the best way to alleviate the suffering of the oppressed.
BB: It is quite clear from the context that Dawkins is using “check our privilege” to assert that one must devote the majority of one’s energy to fighting the worst example of oppression, even if one is not the best suited for that particular job, if one is to be a moral individual. This is patently ridiculous.
You don’t say. Do you mean “little things” like relatively small sexist microaggressions? Maybe objectification of women? Maybe societal norms? Gender roles?
Well, then thank you for your priceless advice, but do forgive us for continuing to allocate our energy in a way that we see fit. Might I suggest you seek out a community more amenable to your values? I hear slymepit, twitter, or reddit would be more proper venues.
@143
Oh, but he absolutely does not fail to understand that at all. He knows that there are atheist elsewhere being murdered for their lack of belief and that doesn’t stop him from campaining against “trivial” little things like not identifying little children with their parent’s religion. He understands that it is entirely possible and useful and worthwhile to tackle the small and the big, he just doesn’t give a fuck about women’s equality any further than letting women vote.
Ah, so that’s why you and Dawkins and other fan boys aren’t hypocrites: because you actually don’t hold those principles. I get it now.
I can see your concern regarding women being raped is completely genuine and not at all driven by anti-feminist spite.
Jesus Christ. Seriously, you are a disgusting human being.
Yes, as we knew from the start, as we knew from gamergate: Videogames are the most Important Thing of all. Far more than a silly little thing like women!
Go fuck yourself.
That may be, I have no opinion, and wouldn’t know how to fold-in his tweet corpus into the evaluation of that one tweet. I meant nothing beyond the fact that the tweet in question is, in my opinion, not at all senseless.
BB @ 148:
It’s true that if someone who was not anti-Islam and anti-feminist, and who had not just re-hashed “Dear Muslima” had made that same tweet, it would mean something different. But if you mean to tell me that you stumbled into this thread completely unaware of the context…I’m a bit dubious.
And even so, it’s still a little strange: “Check your privilege” is normally used in the context of asking a privileged group to listen rather than immediately respond when an underprivileged group is lobbying for something. It’s rarely used in the context of: “Check your privilege: sell all your possessions, give all of your money to the poor, and go seek out the worst of human suffering and do everything in your power to stop it.”
Bill Buckner, context matters. Maybe if it was just that one tweet it would be fine and sensible. But once you know that it is just another flavor of Dear Muslima argument, used to lash out against feminists while furthering several other arguments that feminists don’t criticize Islam enough….it seems bizarre just to consider it as if it were said in a vacuum.
In addition, you went too far in dismissing Saad’s initial point. You both were right: You can change a culture without being in that country necessarily, but not being from there, especially being from a completely different culture, is itself a rather large barrier to causing cultural change. It is hard enough to change the culture one was born in and lives right in the middle of. It is even harder to convince a completely different country to change their culture from across the ocean. Unless you are an incredibly influential celebrity or you have your finger on The Button. And furthermore, the best way to change other cultures involves leading by example: fixing your own shit and then encouraging others to follow in your footsteps, fostering change because those countries want to emulate and actively try to do the same things.
And, of course, even that is simplifying it and is kind of idealistic. Change is fucking hard, if that is actual goal.
Maybe we would have more spoons and time and energy to support Afghani feminist if dudes didn’t insist on keeping talking about Matt Taylor’s shirt…
gurugeorge #142:
The problem you have there is twofold:
1) Most people who complained about the shirt complained about both (which, contrary to the beliefs of some, is actually possible and actually happens). The predominant group who don’t complain about both are people who imply or outright say that nobody should have complained about the shirt because what happened in Cologne happened/Muslim women in Islamic countries routinely face worse discrimination/[insert whatever other worse thing here]. You know, people like Richard Dawkins and yourself.
2) To pretty much everyone who complained about the shirt, that’s a done and dusted situation – mainly because the person concerned acknowledged his error and apologised. The only people who seem to keep bringing it up are people who keep wanting to argue that nobody should have complained about it. You know, like Richard Dawkins and yourself.
I’m confused by the resident guru’s repetition of “power (arbitrarily defined)”. I take him to mean that the term has been idiosyncratically (re)defined in an arbitrary way among certain groups to prop up a set of progressive ideologies that he doesn’t like. Because, a) all mapping of meanings to strings of phonemes is arbitrary in the first place, so in a basic sense it’s trivially true at best and b) power can be concisely defined as “the ability to bring about advantageous or valued outcomes in social interactions where there are competing interests”. That is what is meant by the term in social justice discourse, and as far as I am aware it’s what everyone else means when they use it. So… WTF are you on about, gurugeorge?
(Not going to touch “Marxoids”. Methinks george acquired his rhetorical tics at the knee of Rush Limbaugh.)
1) Why do the irrational illogical sexists think that I need to stop picking up the litter that people are dropping in my yard because people in the next city over have property damage?
I don’t think they would accept being told that we have to stop addressing creationism because there are people committing genocide in the name of religion elsewhere.
2) When choosing their examples of “really bad sexism/other problem that you should stop solving your problem for”, why do the irrational illogical sexists mostly use an example of a “really bad problem that needs solving” that is geographically far away?
3) Why do the irrational illogical sexists never seem to accept that we can address proximal small problems and help others with their large problems at the same time?
4) Why do I have to ask obvious rhetorical questions when the irrational illogical sexists are pretending to be the reasonable ones?
Brony:
Because all they really want is another excuse to bash muslims.
“gurugeorge .”
Doing this
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
Results in this
It makes comments with quotes easier to read.
It will not improve the content.
shoulda refreshed
Only if we see them from your toxic privileges. Equal means equal pay for women, POC, LGBT, and the protections that you as a cis-white-male have. Oops, I have them too. But I saw the problem years ago, and you can’t/won’t. Says a lot about your lack of priorities. They are to keep your privileges…..
@CJO
I don’t know about that being all they want, but as a secondary objective in a social conflict that would harmonize well with preventing feminists from addressing problems in their immediate vicinity in the mind of someone who is also racist. Good example. I think that social munitions like fallacious reasoning motivated by social issues are often meant to impair their opponents along multiple social dimensions. The simple fact that it takes more time and resources is also useful. It also keeps the resulting argument farthur away from anything that might be functionally useful to feminists here. There are probably more.
gurugeorge . lectured:
Huh. So basically, you’re saying that societies do not actually have groups that can influence people of other groups in that society in negative ways?
What exactly do you imagine is happening in the image of the woman being executed by a member of the Taliban? The woman is not being oppressed, according to you, but is just a victim of a one-off, completely isolated event? There’s nothing happening to women in that society in general that can be described by a common term? What does someone with “rational, liberal, individualist, egalitarian principles” say is even going on in Islamic societies with respect to women and non-Muslims? There’s no oppression, according to you; there is ___________. The Taliban or Saudi Arabia government do not actually have any social power, according to you; they have ___________ .
What fills in the blanks above?
Yours for linguistic clarity.
@George, 137
And do you accept that the average human being is capable of thinking about and doing multiple things? If not at once, then over the course of a day or week?
I can’t understand how Dawkins can do this with a straight face, or how others in these comments can stick to the story line. Let me lay it out:
1) Dude Shirt. Many people point out that its inappropriate. Its true that they did that, there was good reason to do that and its fairly well known incident.
2) Execution. Dawkins insists feminists don’t care about this. Its false, the two concerns are not mutually exclusive. The reason he can get away with this is that most of the online controversy about this is remarking about evil fundamental muslims. The feminist context is subsumed in the larger discussion. That does not mean its not there. Dawkins is assuming that talking about evil fundies is not a feminist discussion, only a dude discussion.
In addition to that the Dude Shirt problem is fixed by social pressure for which the internet is a useful tool, the Execution problem cannot be so easily dealt with and the resources of entire nations are going to be required to deal with it.
You fail at rationality. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as
Why should we care about homicides in Western countries when there are bloody wars all over?
Thank you, PZ. Thank you.
I’m so tired of the Taylor shiRt controversy.
The dress code for a World-Wide-TV-Broadcast BY ESA was “business casual”. Which means anything more than khakis/chinos and a nondescript polo shirt/establishment logo tee/polo shirt was acceptable.
Anything considered more casual/resort than that is verboten (yes, I as a chemist, took German in college), like his girly shirt, wasn’t acceptable.
Taylor was on World-Wide_TV in a non-appropriate shirt. He later appeared in an appropriate shirt, and apologized for his initial transgression shortly thereafter. At that point, situation was over as far as I was concerned.
Only those who object to any male being criticized by women (MRA fuckwit, including Dawkins), is showing their true colors of MRA FUCKWITTERY. (That means YOU DAWKINS.)
Gurugeorge has been liberated to play video games elsewhere.
Oh yeah also his G+ account has a linked youtube account and it’s just like subscribed to every prominent youtube MRA, along with a nearly 300 video MRA playlist including such classics as “muh sexbots”, “try not to laugh ahallu akbar edition” and the ageless classic, “feminists love islamists”
Which makes this statement
all the more funny.
@johnm55 #64:
I saw Tim Minchin perform a few years ago now, and he said the same, having met Dawkins since writing the song and finding him very posh.
This reminds me of how frustrated MLK was with white moderates; that frustration finding vent in “Letters from a Birmingham Jail”.
grungeboy @142:
except the entire theme of the image of the astrophysicist wearing the tacky sexist shirt next to the one with the woman being executed is that we should shut up about the guy with the shirt.
reason, logic, reading comprehension…
you fail them all.
congrats!
Bill Buckner, #148
Yeah, it isn’t senseless, but we’re not pretending to not know what’s going on.
Saad,
Fair enough. But out of curiosity, if #113 is meant to be understood in the larger Dawkins context, why the comment about “thousands of miles away” and the final question of “How?“. Those do not appear to be Dawkins specific, but rather give the impression that the Dawkins tweet you refer to is, on its own accord, senseless.
Good point. Maybe it was the “check our privilege” and “fight harder” parts that I actually objected too. A general statement like “people in non-Islamic nations who have it better should fight to help the Muslim women facing oppression” would have been fine (but not from Dawkins of course). Even then, that statement is unhelpful without suggestions on how to actually help change the cultures over there from an outsider’s perspective thousands of miles away.
Agreed.
Ichthyic @169
I’ve started refering to them SQWs, Status Quo Warriors. They keep talking about how a lot of the issues brought up by feminists (or in MLKs case the civil rights movement) are trivial but they’re still so wedded to the way things are they’ll fight tooth and nail to keep those trivialities in place.
I could do the exact damn thing to Dawkins by replacing the picture of Matt Taylor with one of a teacher in a classroom (with maybe Intelligent Design written on the chalkboard). Or with a picture of missionary kids helping rebuild a home torn down in Katrina.
WTF is wrong with this guy?
(A joking post-script)
Uh oh, fffabio, gurugeorge, and other such fanboys should be outraged at Dawkins’ betrayal of their stated principles!
Gallingly, after Dawkins perfectly managed all of this and spoke daring iconoclastic truths to the feminist mobs, after boldly empowering those who vehemently oppose people who focus on petty first world problems whilst atheists are executed in Saudi Arabia, he done and went Full Social Justice Feminazi Keyboard Warrior, RightThink Censorship Faction Number 1984:
Horrible foreign people are out there murdering innocents in the name of ideological purity, and here is Dawkins, wanting to censor, stifle, and silence a bunch of stupid kids and a swath of teachers who have a shitty understanding of science! Unbelievable! Patently immoral! What an outrage, this must be, to people who allegedly think this way!
Found this. Seemed like a good way to end this thread.