Today Dawkins is angry about an article in the New Statesman titled I was raped when I was drunk. I was 14. Do you believe me, Richard Dawkins?
He’s angry that the New Statesman didn’t call him. But after all, he did tweet last week, hours after Mark Oppenheimer’s article appeared,
“Officer, it’s not my fault I was drunk driving. You see, somebody got me drunk.”
And a later one:
Raping a drunk woman is appalling. So is jailing a man when the sole prosecution evidence is “I was too drunk to remember what happened.”
But as I pointed out, jailing wasn’t the issue.
But the odd thing here is that in his tweets about the New Statesman article he’s claiming that his tweets about rape were explicitly hypothetical.
In my tweets I explicitly stated that I was considering the hypothetical case of a woman who testified that she COULDN’T REMEMBER.
Do those two that I just quoted explicitly state that they are hypothetical? No they do not.
Who even cares if it was hypothetical? It’s still sending the message that he wouldn’t believe a rape victim if they were drunk.
There is plenty of real rape, why use examples of hypothetical rape?
Yes Richard, it’s just total coincidence that those tweets came out right after someone publicized Shermer’s tendencies. Total. Coincidence.
Does… does he think everybody is incapable of critical thought?
Well… He also used the totally not hypothetical case described in the article to ask if she had unreliable memories would I believe her. In response to me tweeting that it was lucky she did have memories or he wouldn’t have believed her!
https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/513009372830900224
sick
That’s literally the opposite what “explicitly” means. If those tweets were meant to be hypothetical, then that’s implicit.
(Did he make some other tweets leading up to them that said “consider the following hypotheticals:”?)
You know, if Richard deleted the limitation of “in some societies”, this would be a decent tweet.
A better word than “hypothetical” would be “general. ” He was making the general statement that if a woman– any woman– was too drunk to remember what happened last night, she wasn’t raped.
It appears his objection to the New Statesman article is that in that case, the victim remembered. Kinda.
I need to go bleach my brain now.
It’s a variant of “and I promise you I am not exaggerating”.
Dawkins has a speaking engagement in Australia next year – he plans to get there by digging.
Well I don’t agree with Dawkins, but the last tweet makes sense: he’s saying that he was considering the case of a person who says in court “I don’t remember what happened”. Since in the case presented by the New Statesman the woman basically says she remembers being raped, Dawkins refuses the implication that she shouldn’t be believed according to him.
What Dawkins fails to grasp is that
a] he isn’t as smart as he thinks he is
and
b] we aren’t as stupid as he thinks we are.
If he honestly fails to spot the rape apologism in his tweets
then he cannot think from noon to mid-day.
Anyone else bothered by the fact that, even if he had explicitly stated that he was considering a hypothetical, he thinks that a hypothetical woman who can’t remember what happened but has reason to believe (i.e. evidence) that someone had sex with her shouldn’t merit investigation into the fact that she was almost certainly raped?
#1, @Seven of Mine: Shrieking Feminist Harpy:
Exactly. Even if Oppenheimer’s article hadn’t been published, even if none of the shit with Shermer was out there, even divorced of all the current history and context, those quotes are still replusive enough on their own.
Of course, the history and context is there. Dawkins comes off even worse for trying to use that feeble “hypothetical remarks” excuse.
I think it’s also worth pointing out that his tweet is necessarily hypothetical because no one has every been convicted of rape solely on the testimony of a victim who says, “I can’t remember anything.”
That wouldn’t even make it past the first line of police (who often talk victims with very clear memories and very detailed stories out of pursuing charges). How does Dawkins imagines it would go?
A: I would like to report a sexual assault.
Officer: Ok, what happened?
A: I have no memory of anything.
Officer: Uh, ok. Surely you remember something.
A: Nope, nothing.
Officer: Is there any physical evidence?
A: Nope, absolutely none.
Officer: Witnesses?
A: Nope.
Officer: Makes sense to me. Let’s randomly pick a dude and throw him in jail.
Obviously, the Shermer situation was the impetus for his tweet, and there was a great deal of evidence as well as a victim who remember a good deal, if not every moment. I’ll grant Dawkins his claim that his statement was hypothetical if only because it is more or less impossible in reality.
And still wrong even the imaginary world of his hypothetical, as others have pointed out.
Wow. Dawkins is a particularly incompetent liar.
The evidence mounts that he’s not nearly as smart as he and most people think he is. A smart person, a critical thinker, would do better.
Yeah, I read it again. Dawkins’ entire point here is, ridiculously, that the victim in this case had some memories of being raped, even if she wasn’t awake for all of it, whereas he was talking about a person with no memories of being raped.
Which is extra fantastically horribly not-funny when you consider that most of the trauma experienced by the woman in the New Statesman article happened because her rapist told everyone he had sex with her. And those people incessantly bullied her about it. In terms of that, it matters not at all what she remembered or didn’t remember or partially remembered.
Gee, Richard, do you think you might have considered that for, I dunno, maybe five seconds before popping off that you of course weren’t talking about her when you made those victim-blaming statements?
No, of course it didn’t. Fuck off. Seriously, Richard, fuck off.
I’m most surprised that apparently Dawkins hasn’t yet learned the lesson that he ought to stay way the hell away from Twitter. He’s been running around turning former fans into disdainful critics; if he wants that to stop, there’s a simple (and easy!) solution.
From Dawkins’s response tweet:
So, had she been entirely unconscious and unable to form memories at all (and thus, necessarily, unable to consent) and woke up to discover clear evidence that she had been raped, she shouldn’t testify about that? Dawkins is a straight-up rape apologist. I, too, am completely done with him.
@15 John Horstman
That’s why Dawkins added, (“& no other evidence”). In his mind I think it helped his case, but it just makes the entire project sillier and more frivolous (in addition to insulting).
I guess we’re coming close to “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it territory,” but if there’s no memory of an assault and literally no other evidence, then I think it’s pretty safe to conclude there won’t be a conviction.
Of course, there is always evidence. Whether it’s enough to establish a crime is a different question, but I sincerely doubt that Dawkins thought about what he was saying for more than a heartbeat. He was just pissed that someone was speaking ill of Shermer.
Apologies for the weird grammatical typos. For some reason a script at FTB is causing a weird delay on my keyboard. You know that thing where you type a sentence or two and it takes a ten-count for the words to actually appear. When I backspace to correct something, all hell breaks loose.
+35 to those saying it doesn’t matter if it was supposedly hypothetical. Even if it did, it should be easy enough for Dick to take a screenshot from his Twitter screen showing him saying that. Problem is, he can’t. He didn’t. Which means he doesn’t have a problem with lying when he’s finally pressed into seeing that he “misspoke”.
I am really tired of Dawkins. He does more harm to atheism than good. He is constantly used as an example of how all atheists are evil because after all if Dawkins said it every atheist has to agree with him. And he is constantly saying some truly awful things lately.
Again, he wasn’t saying he explicitly stated that he was making a hypothetical statement (people making hypothetical statements generally do not explicitly state that that’s what they’re doing). He was saying he explicitly stated that he was talking about a woman who couldn’t remember. The part in all-caps is what he’s claiming he explicitly stated. And he did.
That’s not the problem. The problem is that what he explicitly stated was a) bullshit, and b) applies to the woman who wrote the essay in New Statesmen whether he wants to acknowledge it or not.
Even if his tweets were about a hypothetical situation, Shermer’s situation doesn’t meet the criteria for the hypothetical, since his victim has memories similar to the woman in the article – fuzzy, unconnected, sure, but memories nonetheless.
I wonder what it is that Dawkins thinks might make a woman who doesn’t remember having sex or being raped and has no evidence of having sex or being raped think that she was actually raped. Hypothetical or not–and we know the answer is not as his tweet was part of a defense of Shermer–his tweet was utterly ridiculous if taken absolutely literally. Women don’t go around thinking they were raped with no memory or evidence. No one claims rape, no one prosecutes rape, and no one goes to jail for rape in that case. You’d think a guy who claims to have concluded that gods don’t exist because there’s no evidence for them would understand this.
If not taken quite literally, if read as a possible scenario rather than an impossible hypothetical, if read as “Raping a drunk woman is appalling. So is jailing a man when the sole prosecution evidence is ‘I was drunk and have fuzzy memories of being raped and some physical evidence that someone had sex with me when I was too drunk to consent,'” then Dawkins’s tweet clearly applies and clearly is rape apologetics.
@Gretchen
When Dawkins says, “In my tweets I explicitly stated that I was considering the hypothetical case of a woman who testified that she COULDN’T REMEMBER” (caps lock mania in the original), he is, in fact, stating that he “explicitly stated” it. Which? He didn’t. If he’d come back saying, “Well, obviously, my example was meant to be hypothetical” or whatever, I wouldn’t have quite as much heartburn about it now.
Poor Richard Shovelhands. Everything he touches turns into a hole.
Such an obvious tactic. The implication wasn’t that it was hypothetical. The implication was that it was a problem. Something that was common. Something we need to worry about. It’s setting the theme for the proper starting point when the subject of a rape involving alcohol comes up. The victim should be suspect because their are soooo many accusations of rape with absolutely no evidence. So when someone is raped, they must wonder if they have enough evidence or memory to satisfy Dawkins, since he was brave enough to shine a light on all those sex regret false accusers.
This is my “most important Richard Dawkins quote”:
“I apologize. I was wrong. I was wrong in becoming involved in an particular very emotionally charged discussion. I was wrong because I was arguing from the perspective of a disinterested party though I have friends or acquaintances involved in the events which form the back story to the discussion. Had I no personal interest in the discussion, I would have still been wrong in becoming involved as an authority, as I have no expertise in the matters under discussion. I was wrong to impugn or to defend the characters of the involved parties as regards the event, as I was not present. I offer my sincere apology to those I have wronged and to those I have offended.”
Mr. Dawkins… please… I need to hear this.
You are going to remain disappointed, eddiejones. There’s a better chance that a 10,000 foot tall Jesus statue will spontaneously come into existence above and then fall onto the Vatican, killing everyone there, than that you’ll get that apology.
Dawkins is a giant piece of rape apologist shit who can’t admit that he’s FUCKING 100% WRONG on this.
Dawkins tweeted:
Alison Smith has clear and convincing memories that she did not consent to sex with Michael Shermer while sober enough to give consent. She stated that to a friend as soon as she was able to escape Shermer’s room. She also relayed her clear and convincing memories to other The Amazing Meeting organizers shortly thereafter, and she has not changed her story in the years since. Shermer has also admitted that he had sex with Smith. So, is Dawkins unequivocally stating that, because of the evidence of Smith’s memories and Shermer’s admission, he believes that Shermer had sex with Smith without her consent? Why would he not?
The thing that upsets me is that from their words, it sounds very like the level of memory evidence is the same! Alison Smith said her memories were “blurry” (if I recall correctly), and the New Statesman writer says “I drifted in and out of consciousness” and refers to “vague memories”. There was also some further evidence in each case. Alison was dismissed and Shermer protected – no wonder the New Statesman writer thought Dawkins wouldn’t believe her!!!!
At this point, Dawkins has graduated from the Glenn Beck school of idiots and arguing with Dummies. Dawkins is JAQing off about rape and rape hypothesizing.
Fuck you, Dawkins, you fucking fuck!
Sorry for the language. I did not realize whose page I was on. Feel free to edit or delete. Sorry.
Malachite, your first sentence is spot on: the level of memory evidence is identical within our ability to measure based on what we’ve been told. The motivated nature of Dawkins’s “reasoning” is quite obvious, and about as close to explicit as it could be without an admission on Dawkins’s part.
And when I said I wouldn’t have as much heartburn about this, I mean the whole was it/wasn’t it a hypothetical. Which, in the end, doesn’t matter re: the discussion at hand, I just dislike lying/gaslighting.
Well, I’m pretty free with the fucks myself. No porcupines up bums, no die in a fire, but fucks are allowed.
We have considerably more evidence that Michael Shermer raped Alison Smith, than we have evidence to believe the woman in the The New Statesman article. (Thanks to Stephanie Zvan for the post.)
Dawkins “of course” believes the woman in the The New Statesman article, so “of course” he must believe Alison Smith, given the greater quantity of evidence, right?
I concur (and endorse) Morgan @5.
We™are never going to live that down.
The Internets is Forever.
[OT]
chigau above, I don’t need to live it down, though I was there when the discussion occurred, and remember how the consensus was that it should be a dead porcupine (since such can’t be harmed).
(Looking back, I see it as a transitional phase in the nature of the commentariat there)
John Morales
Yes. I particpated.
I’m glad We™ have stopped.
That’s what I couldn’t get over – where is this big rape accusation supposed to start, then?
I think I love you forever for that. 😀
I am also glad for the stopping of the porcupine comments, but it was what, five years ago now? And we stopped because we realized it was wrong and apologized and everything and never did it again? And yet that’s the well they always go to, even as they continue to spew hateful things.
I also hate the whole “I’m making a hypothetical situation” nonsense. There are all kinds of rapes. Lots of kinds. Take your pick for your example, you’ll find it. So if one finds oneself still needing to make up a hypothetical rape to fit one’s preferred narrative, that should be a huge red flag that one’s narrative is entirely divorced from reality.
Oh yeah, he was only being “hypothetical.” That seems to be the standard excuse for blathering on and on and on about rape without having to listen to people who have actual experience with it.
Pretty disgusting to see Dawkins acting more and more like “professor” Landsburg.
Best thing I’ve read today.
Since Dawkins is in favour of sexual equality, opposed to rape, and opposed to false accusations of rape, why do some people have it in for him?
Actually, after reading his latest tweets, Dawkins seem to be a massive hole.
Ooops, naughty me. Michael Nugget, sorry Nugent, will not like that one.
Dawkins idea that ‘she didn’t remember?!!?’ to me has a striking resemblance to the creationists response of ‘were you there?!!?’.
Both are completely besides the point as there is plenty of evidence that something happened.
And what happened should in both cases have consequences for what we think and do.
Seconded!
Team Dawkins needs to explain how and why Alison Smith is totally unbelievable and shouldn’t be allowed to tell her story while the woman writing to the New Statesman is OBVIOUSLY believable.
It’s not just that Dawkins believes one and not the other, it’s that one is so obviously bullshit that they’re committing an immoral act by talking while the other is so uncontroversially believable that it’s impossible to understand why anyone could think Dawkins would doubt her story.
These are very common scenarios. Some lead to convictions some don’t, but they’re all on a continuum. Dawkins seems to think they’re a difference of type.
Of course, the difference is that one accused Dawkins’ buddy, Shermer…
@Doubtthat Part of it, conscious or not, is that by saying *this* case is believable while *that* case is not, you can claim to be reasonable. “See? I believed her, it’s just that I don’t believe her. Sadly, in Dawkins case, I think it’s totally a conscious decision.
Personally I’m betting Dawkins has some version of the story directly from Shermer and he believes that because penis.
I think he means it was implicitly hypothetical, explicitly about someone who “couldn’t remember”. He’s implying that his rational, clear-headed position is that a woman who can’t explicitly remember anything, wasn’t raped. Yes, it’s implied that rape is a wonderful topic for him to discuss from his twitterchair in implicitly hypothetical ways. He’s explicitly not sexist at all and against all rape, but implicitly hypothetically thinks those silly girls shouldn’t have drunk so much. Silly them! Because he explicitly notes their rapists will never go to jail because they’re like trains, implicitly hypothetically not raping the women that can’t remember it.
*vomit*
I’d like to ask a simple question, I’d be genuinely interested in any responses. Ignoring anything to do with Shermer or Dawkins and purely hypothetically: A woman says she has been raped, but acknowledges that she was drunk and can’t remember what happened. My question: does there need to be other evidence before the man can be convicted? This is a yes or no question.
No, that is not a yes or no question, because it depends what is meant by “can’t remember what happened.” If it means can’t remember anything, then obviously there needs to be other evidence. If it means something short of that, then it’s a different conversation. In short your question isn’t as simple as you claim.
What man? If she doesn’t remember anything, how can she accuse anyone specific?
I’m not just being pedantic. Your question clearly implies that she does remember something. Until we know what that is, how are we to judge if any further evidence is necessary? We can’t judge a testimony if you deliberately refuse to tell us what it is.
OK. Fair enough. Glad to hear that you acknowledge that if she can’t remember anything there needs to be other evidence. Would you also agree that her drunken state and inability to remember at least a great deal of what happened (agreed I didn’t specify how much she remembered but implicit in my question was her remembering very little at best) would almost certainly lead any competent jury to conclude that they couldn’t place much reliability on her evidence?
Don’t be silly. As I said, it’s obvious that if “she” can’t remember anything, there needs to be other evidence. Nobody needs to learn that from you, whoever you are.
What evidence are we talking about now? Seriously, why do you keep asking us to evaluate evidence that you then also refuse to tell us about?
Look, this is all very simple. Two things are relevant:
1) Did sexual intercourse take place?
2) If yes, did she give meaningful consent?
If the answer to question two is anything other than a clear, unequivocal “yes”, then rape has taken place. Any person who is inebriated to the point of impaired memory is not able to give meaningful consent. So, if her memory is impaired (and assuming that sex has taken place) I would count that as a point against the accused.
@ JJM
And now you’re assuming that a case where there was no evidence except a victim’s spotty memory would even find itself being deliberated upon by a jury. There are endless cases where there is video of the assault itself and we still can’t manage to call it rape. Nobody is interested in helping you masturbate over an impossible hypothetical.
@JJM #57
JJM, if your hypothetical woman was incapacitated to the point that afterward she couldn’t clearly remember what had happened–
–how could she have given informed consent to what happened?
If she was in that state and a man–say, a man who hadn’t drunk very much, a man who’d been shoving his drinks aside, or hiding them under the table–fucked her–
he raped her.
Would prosecutors be able to convict him in a criminal court? In the U.S., the standard of evidence for conviction is very high–the accused is granted presumption of innocence. Add to that well-documented biases against rape victims, and conviction would probably be difficult. But your hypothetical doesn’t have much to do with the implicit subject of Dawkins’ tweets, Michael Shermer, who isn’t on trial in a criminal court.
And here comes dudebro Coyne. Stop being mean!!!!!!
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/adam-lee-has-lost-it/
Goddamn Coyne is a pathetic sniveling shit:
“If you cheer [Adam Lee’s article], you shouldn’t be reading this website.”
Noted. Bookmark deleted. I guess I’ll try to function without the daily updates on your friend’s cat.
Yes, I’m getting to Coyne’s post (and Dawkins’s comment on it).
No point commenting on his blog. He censors comments he doesn’t like and bans people.
What if terrorists had nuclear weapons set to detonate all over the city, and the only way to prevent them from going off was for you to answer a series of increasingly bizarre hypotheticals? But what if you could see that your answer to the hypotheticals would inevitably be twisted and used as a justification for non-hypothetical real-world atrocities? Would you still agree to answer the hypotheticals?
This is a yes or no question, but sometimes the only correct answer to a yes or no question is, “You should be ashamed of yourself for asking that!”
After this disgusting individual called Ophelia a c**t, I decided to check his account a bit more. He really is a true believer.
https://twitter.com/Vodkaninja/status/513477165753843712
dereksmear @65:
And interestingly, I’ve never heard any of the Freeze Peach crusaders complain about that.
Lol @ Richard Shovelhands. I’m think I’m going to just start calling him that.