Here’s an example of the kind of thing that the statement Richard Dawkins and I posted last week opposes.
John @JohnTheSecular
So tell me, @RichardDawkins, what is “modern art” the result of, then? Your fuckwittery?
Description: it’s a photo of Dawkins talking next to a passage in quotation marks:
“Too many so-called ‘great works of art’, from the Sistine Chapel to Bach’s Masses, were inspired by the Christ myth and therefore, despite their beauty, come from a place of anti-intellectualism and refusal to confront empirical reality.
The only pure, untainted art form left is the Japanese RPG.”
Richard Dawkins
That’s a shitty trick because it’s too plausible and people are passing it around and taking it seriously. It looks real. It’s not marked as satire.
That’s dirty pool.
I am mystified as to why some people dislike Dawkins so intensely.
I’m indifferent to the man.
But that isn’t the point; the point is that dislike doesn’t justify dirty pool.
Meh. It seems pretty obvious to me it’s not a real quote.
For a moment I was taken in by it.
And for sure dislike doesn’t justify defaming someone in such a dishonest way.
But it won’t be pretty obvious to everyone. Believe me, I have wide and deep experience of this – people believe completely absurd things that get said and photoshopped about me. There will always be some who believe it.
It would probably not be obvious to anyone who has not read quite a bit of Dawkins, especially his essays.
It was not “pretty obviously a parody” to me, either. Ophelia’s right to point that out. It is dirty pool.
It is not as though there is a shortage of stupid and idiotic things Dawkins really has said.
So had JohnTheSecular offered any explanation as to why he is posting dishonest material about Dawkins ?
I just assumed it was a sarcastic remark deliberately taken out of context until learning it was a hoax. Dawkins shits on women, not art.
Yep, Dawkins the cultural Christian wouldn’t say something like that, and I’d be surprised if he knows what an RPG is. But that’s irrelevant to what is both important and (I would’ve thought) obvious: You don’t make up shit people didn’t say and attribute it to them, bad or good. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to straw man them or make them look like a Brave Hero (TM); it’s insulting and wrong either way.
What Gretchen said.
I’ve been sensitized to it by the huge amount of it that’s been done to me. It’s just not an ok thing to do.
I guess the only real tell is that Dawkins seems unlikely to be familiar with, much less like, modern videogames.
Oh, come on — there’s no way in hell Dawkins knows what a JRPG is!
I don’t know how much Dawkins knows about modern video games, but he clearly had some experience of them in the early days.
Someone calling herself Little Lioness (@kelsthesecular) is claiming it was all satire and she and John never thought anyone would think it was not.
Either she is a bit thick, or she is lying.
Well, you could focus on the bigger crime: tain’t funny.
“Talked” to her some more. She is both stupid and dishonest.
Well it seems Little Lioness (who would seem to be JohnTheSecular’s partner) thinks showing the meme exists on Tumblr and FB is evidence Dawkins said it.
How do you deal with someone so dishonest ?
Yeah, this falls into that middle ground of “stuff that is just silly enough to make Dawkins look ridiculous, but not silly enough to be an obvious parody to those who aren’t sufficiently familiar with his opinions.”
Those of us who know that Dawkins is actually ok with “cultural Christianity,” and in fact remarkably blase about things like Ten Commandments monuments and public prayers compared to most atheists, can easily spot that it’s a fake. But if all you know of Dawkins is “he’s that militant atheist guy who hates religion” — and there’s plenty of folks for whom that pretty much sums it up — then this gets taken at face value and ends up being another reason why that Dawkins guy shouldn’t be taken seriously.
I wonder if the person responsible has always hated Dawkins, or has turned on him in the wake of Dawkins announcing that he thinks being an asshole is a bad thing. (just because if he starts getting more blowback from former admirers, he might suddenly start to understand the extent of the situation)
I took it as an obvious joke.
:shrug:
(not even as a joke slamming Dawkins necessarily. Could have been by an admirer for all I knew.)
For mine, here’s another: Richard Dawkins takes a quiet moment to compose his next tweet.
I don’t expect everyone else to get that it’s a joke. If you know little about video games and little about Dawkins you could very easily take this attribute at face value. As someone who knows both, this one’s actually pretty funny. It makes me think of the troll movie quotes meme somewhat. http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/88733-troll-quotes and http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/757469-troll-quotes are some examples of troll quotes.
Jafafa Hots, cf. #2.
Again: Misrepresenting someone by knowingly attributing a false quotation to them without a disclaimer is an epitome of a dirty pool tactic, and that it may be jocular doesn’t change that.
(Quoth Jafafa Hots: “It is bad if done with a disclaimer, but worse when done without.” 😉 )
Matthew @25, I refer you to #2 and #26.
I just want to clarify, it’s not okay to use something like this to spread misleading information about someone.
I agree with Screechymonkey when they wrote:
“Yeah, this falls into that middle ground of “stuff that is just silly enough to make Dawkins look ridiculous, but not silly enough to be an obvious parody to those who aren’t sufficiently familiar with his opinions.” ”
It is always a shitty trick, no matter who is the target, when the material is such that there is a reasonable expectation it could be taken seriously (when aimed at an individual or an organisation – Poeing a set of beliefs or an ideology I think is fair game).
I will be honest, even being familiar with RD since childhood, I was taken in by this and assumed it was more than likely something taken massively out of context (like the creationists do on his panspermia-esque comments) than a total fabrication.
Not so sure he is “remarkably blase about things like Ten Commandments monuments and public prayers compared to most atheists” though. His standpoint on such issues seems very much the norm in my part of England and I’d assume Oxford is little different from Lincolnshire in that regard (and probably only that regard!)
PS: Ophelia, below ‘post comment I am offered three options. What the hell is the difference between option 1 “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail.” and option 2 “Notify me of follow-up comments by email.”??
I have only read Dawkins on science, and have no interest in video games. And, frankly, the statement didn’t sound any stupider than his “witch hunt” comment.
So, yeah, I assumed it was real.
I find the idea that everyone who is anyone knows about video games– so we’ll all see it’s a parody– is even more clueless and arrogant than the clueless and arrogant statements we’re currently ticked off with Dawkins for.
Definitely dirty pool; given recent history in the atheoskeptisphere, the false statement comes across as entirely plausible.
Ruchnoy Protivotankovyy Granatomyot?
Mistranslated as Rocket Propelled Grenade.
Dawkins IS a smart fellow, satirizing him successfully would require at least enough knowledge or clarity to catch his cringe-worthy statements and extrapolate them into counter-arguments.
Yeah, that is pretty clueless and arrogant. However, who has said anything like that?
What’s artistic about Japanese rocket propelled grenades?
Unhappily, the mentions of Dawkins I have seen in media have been mostly negative over the last three years. He’s not making mainstream news for benevolent or activist events. If I ran across this online (where most of my cultural updates come from) I’d not have the context to doubt he said that as a joke. I would doubt he said it in seriousness, but the main problem is that I don’t have the time to indulge in verifying attribution.
I was just reading about someone who pranked wikipedia by editing the Amelia Bedelia entry. I am so over juvenile bullshitters intentionally screwing with facts ‘because it’s funny’. It’s dishonest, and so are the creators. People do tell white lies – usually to spare someone’s feelings (no, it doesn’t smell dirty in here! I love your earrings – you are so talented to make your own jewelry! Of course, I have no problem watching your kids on short notice – have fun!) This is dishonesty to either make the viewers look bad, or make Dawkins look bad. Both are malicious.