RichardDawkins@Confused.Com: No one said you endorsed rape, what you did was grade rape and that is appalling!


Watching the downward spiral of Richard Dawkins from a respected scientist and atheist to a cringeworthy tweeter commentator is indeed Richard-Dawkinssaddening.

The latest embarrassing and thoughtless tweets of the Professor has generated yet another media storm and a lot of criticism and not forgetting the usual dose of worship from the “Richard Dawkins can do no wrong” worshippers. What I find amusing and of course saddening is how he refuses to acknowledge the constructive criticisms levelled at his tweets but chose instead to spew bigotry and disdain from his high pedestal at his critiques. To boot, he tries to make himself out as a victim of witch hunts!

The Professor and his apologists are going to ridiculous length to ‘clarify’ the intentions behind his tweets. Richard Dawkins wanted us to know he was not endorsing rape, but who the heck said he was endorsing rape? It is like the man wants to direct our attention away from the major blunder he committed by using an obvious defence, only that no one attacked him with that tool, so using that particular defence is basically pointless. We are no children that can be tempted away from the main issues just because he flashed a candy at us.

Below are the Richard Dawkins’ tweets in question, one can see how the tweets spiralled out of the control of Richard Dawkins.  RD even went on a tantrum when he couldn’t believe that people were even more stupid than he thought. Sighs.

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins · Jul 29

X is bad. Y is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of X, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned how to think logically.

Richard Dawkins

Well, as far as I know, no rational person has problem with this easy to grasp premise.

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins · Jul 29

Mild pedophilia is bad. Violent pedophilia is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of mild pedophilia, go away and learn how to think.

RICHARD Dawkins 8

I can’t believe the Professor is still ranking child abuse, didn’t he apologised for this same thinking some time ago? Or was his apology just an effort to control the damage his ill-thought out tweet was causing his reputation? In that case, one would be right to conclude that his apology was insincere.

Well, the professor followed this disturbing tweet with yet another thoughtless syllogism

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins · Jul 29

Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.

RICHARD Dawkins

Actually Richard Dawkins, you are the one who really need to go away and think. You are actually not as smart as you think and definitely not as smart as many thought you were. Your tweets are a constant reminder of your shortcomings in the ‘smart’ department.

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins · Jul 29

If you prefer to think date rape is worse than knifepoint, simply reverse my syllogism. To say Y is worse than X is not an endorsement of Y.

RICHARD Dawkins

Again Professor, no one said you were endorsing rape, stop shying away from the criticisms levelled at you, which BTW is GRADING RAPE not ENDORSING RAPE.

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins · Jul 29

Yes yes, you rank X and Y differently. Fine. Whichever you rank as worse, it is still illogical to interpret that as approval of the other.

RICHARD Dawkins

Oh RD , still ranting about your imaginary attack?

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins · Jul 29

Whether X or Y is worse is a matter of opinion. But it is a matter of LOGIC that to express that opinion doesn’t mean you approve of either.

Richard dawkins

Oh we know, we know, don’t get your knickers in a twist over this. No rational person is attacking you with this, it is all in your head.

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins · Jul 29

“Stealing £1 is bad. Stealing an old lady’s life savings is worse.” How DARE you rank them? Stealing is stealing. You’re vile, appalling.

RICHARD Dawkins 12

Oh Richard Dawkins, you just don’t get it, do you? What are you gonna do next, compare rape to your jar of honey that was taken away from you? Oh, you already did something similar, after all taking away your jar of honey at the airport was a terrorist win!

Richard Dawkins knows he is wrong again, he even attempted to ‘clarify’ his tweet but ended up not apologising for it and coming across, again,as a bigoted asshole.

There is nothing ‘logical’ about Richard Dawkins attempt to rank Rape or Paedophilia. Even if we were to use facts, his personal opinion or experience of child abuse does not make him an authority to rank how victims should rate their own personal experience.

The professor in his clarification statement, stated:

 I wasn’t even saying it is RIGHT to rank one kind of rape as worse than another

So Richard Dawkins, if you actually agreed that it is not right to rank one kind of rape as worse than the other, why are you still bent on calling those who called you out on your RANKING RAPE as illogical?

The professor tortuously further stated:

All I was saying is that IF you are one of those who is prepared to say that one kind of rape is worse than another (whichever particular kinds those might be), this doesn’t imply that you approve of the less bad one. It is still bad. Just not AS bad.

See Richard Dawkins, you are really losing it. You are constantly contradicting yourself.  Here is just one example. You stated

 IF you are one of those who is prepared to say that one kind of rape is worse than another

RD, are you implying that being “prepared to rank rape” is a brave act?

Does the person deserves a brave hero medal for being brave enough to rank rape?

Yet in the same paragraph you said you were not saying it is RIGHT to rank rape. And in this same breath, also said

It is still bad. Just not AS bad.

If this isn’t ranking rape, I wonder what is! Go home Richard Dawkins, you are drunk. Or better still, don’t use twitter until you clear your head of your many delusions. Seriously, this is a case of richarddawkins@confused.com.

The professor also laboriously tried to pin the ‘condescending’ tag of ‘Emotionalism’ on his critiques in yet another post to clarify his tweets. –

 That, then, is why I chose rape and pedophilia for my hypothetical examples. I think rationalists should be free to discuss spectrums of nastiness, even if only to reject them. I had noticed indications that rape and pedophilia had moved out of the discussion zone into a no-go taboo area. I wanted to challenge the taboo, just as I want to challenge all taboos against free discussion.

Dear Richard Dawkins is now justifying his attempt to rank rape. Wait a minute, did he not say in his previous clarification statement that he was not saying it is right to rank rape? But now, hey, he just came up with another explanation as to WHY HE RANKED RAPE! See it was because he wanted to take us out of our comfort zone and make us jettison emotions so we can be fit enough to sit in his classroom and learn how to think and reason without emotions! Wow, what land is that? A planet of emotionless zombies. What language is he speaking, Klingon?

In his attempt to chastise us mere mortals for being emotional, he further stated:

Nothing should be off limits to discussion. No, let me amend that. If you think some things should be off limits, let’s sit down together and discuss that proposition itself. Let’s not just insult each other and cut off all discussion because we rationalists have somehow wandered into a land where emotion is king.

A land where emotion is King? Where is this land Richard Dawkins speaks of so assuredly? I do know of a land where there can be a reasonable balance of emotions and reason and it is not a bad thing. The attempt by Richard Dawkins to look down at mere mortals who make room for emotions in a debate has been well tackled by Stephanie Zvan in the post Yes, Richard Dawkins, I’m Emotional.  In fact, emotions is integral to our survival as humans. So, is the Professor trying to evolve or is it ‘devolve’ us into zombies with no emotions or zombies who scoffs and scorn at any show of emotions?

It is utterly deplorable that there are people, including in our atheist community, who suffer rape threats because of things they have said. And it is also deplorable that there are many people in the same atheist community who are literally afraid to think and speak freely, afraid to raise even hypothetical questions such as those I have mentioned in this article. They are afraid – and I promise you I am not exaggerating – of witch-hunts: hunts for latter day blasphemers by latter day Inquisitions and latter day incarnations of Orwell’s Thought Police.

Oh Richard Dawkins, stop hyperventilating before your hysteria gives you a heart attack!

People who are calling Richard Dawkins out for getting it wrong are not “just being emotional” , If anything Richard Dawkins is the one who is using his subjective emotions to define RAPE for every other person. This is not a logical act but simply emotion based. His emotional opinion neither constitute a fact nor make him an authority on the subject.

As Ashley Miller eloquently explained in her post  ‘Richard Dawkins on Date Rape vs Stranger Rape’

“In fact , studies abounds that shows that “Victims of acquaintance rape are as traumatized as victims of stranger rape. Specifically, they report equal (and high) levels of depression, anxiety, hostility, and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms…” (http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1997-08362-004) and victims of acquaintance rape are more likely to be unable to reconcile what happened with their beliefs in the world and to blame themselves. (Researching Sexual Violence Against Women edited by Martin D. Schwartz)

 

Richard Dawkins is considered the public face of New Atheism and unfortunately the leader of Atheists. Which quite frankly is embarrassing to many of us. He is like that nutty grandpa who just wants to embarrass us all on Twitter!  Yes he is entitled to his opinion but he is the public face of atheism, and it is a reputation that has made him  loads of money and given him a lot of clout in the society. So yes, he is accountable for his opinions on social media, highly more so than less known persons or more accurately, less known atheists.

Couldn’t he have found some other non-grey area or non-aggravating syllogisms beside Rape or Paedophilia, especially knowing just how there are so many rape apologists out there? Damn, majority of women cannot even come out and publicly say that they have been raped by trusted friend, family member or their lover because the society won’t believe them. Stigma is another reason. Also the society always find a way to apportion a part of the blame to the victim or even fully blame the rape victim for the crime of the rapist. Ranking rape as bad, worse or worst would only make it difficult for victims to gain the confidence and support they need to seek redress.

We do not need this nutty professor further complicating the path to justice for rape victims.

Dawkins knew what he was saying, it was not by accident that he used the Rape comparison. He meant to grade rape or paedophilia based probably on his own experience of child abuse and he thrust it upon the public as a RATIONAL thing thereby grading his own reaction as the standard reaction ALL rape victims or child abuse victims should have. This is factually incorrect as people deal with trauma in different ways. Also, his example was illogical and, this is not the first time he has made such stupid, bigoted and irrational public blunders.

Rape is rape when looked at from every perspective. In court, it is either the rapist is found guilty of rape or not guilty of rape, there is no in-between. There is no Mild rape or half rape, A rapist can also be charged with other crimes like assault, battery or murder however, these are distinct crimes and can stand or fall on their own merits or demerits.These are stand-alone crimes, which does not make rape not rape simply because these were absent. Rape has its own jail term regardless of whether assault, battery or murder were involved. Assault, battery or Murder has its own jail term regardless of whether or not rape was involved. Rape is a crime on its own, it does not need to be graded before it qualifies as rape. And rape victims do not need to be told they could have had it worse!

Does a rapist gets a medal because he did not use a knife or because he first spiked her drink and made sure she was passed out before raping her?

Richard Dawkins should learn to communicate is intention in a better way. Intents aren’t magic, we can only comment on what he wrote not what is intentions were. We read his  words not his intentions. If his words were wrongly worded, it is his duty to take greater care in coming across just as he intended. The professor was wrong he knew this and no amount of disdain bigotry on his part could change this fact.

Yes, Richard Dawkins is entitled to his personal opinion. If Richard Dawkins said his personal experience of child abuse is less traumatic than the experience of another person, THAT WOULD BE HIS OPINION and he is very well entitled to that. However what the professor did was to use his own SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE to grade RAPE and PAEDOPHILIA for ALL VICTIMS and he tried to pass this blunder off as fact and termed people who don’t get it as illogical.  THIS is what we are against.

No matter who you are, you don’t use the perimeters of how you personally dealt with a trauma as a way to grade or tell others just how traumatic their experience is and how they should get over it. His syllogisms were wrong on many fronts and he made it worse by attempting to pass off a subjective experience as grading mark for rape or paedophilia.

I guess somewhere, right now, there is a rapist rationalising- “See, my action was not all that bad, after all I only raped a friend, she could have been raped by a stranger which would be a worse rape, or i could have raped a stranger instead of a friend which would have been a worse rape and Richard Dawkins agrees with me!”

 

Comments

  1. Nick Gotts says

    And it is also deplorable that there are many people in the same atheist community who are literally afraid to think and speak freely, afraid to raise even hypothetical questions such as those I have mentioned in this article. They are afraid – and I promise you I am not exaggerating – of witch-hunts: hunts for latter day blasphemers by latter day Inquisitions and latter day incarnations of Orwell’s Thought Police.

    Ah, let us all enjoy this refreshing blast of coldly logical reasoning, which shows us how online criticism is equivalent to torture and execution!

  2. resident_alien says

    Can Dawkins please stop embarrassing himself?
    Goodness me, if the feminist discourse regarding rape is equivalent to chess,
    Dawkins is playing tic-tac-toe.Badly.
    He is totally obsessed with minimizing sexual violence and harrassment.
    He says he was molested and it didn’t bother him? Well, apparently it is bothering him to this day.
    That is the most charitable explanation for his continued bullshittery in this matter.

  3. Meggamat says

    Whilst his authority regarding the objective is so great as to -rightly- be ALMOST above reproach, the good professor really aught so spend a little more time considering subjective areas of thought.

  4. theoreticalgrrrl says

    Taboo subject, ha.

    I used to be a rape crisis advocate. One of my first cases was accompanying a woman who was drugged at a restaurant bar and didn’t remember anything after being at the bar until waking up naked in her own home. You would think, maybe, that since she had no memory of being raped she would have been less traumatized than assault victims who remember what happened to them
    Not so, not at all. It was heart-breaking. she was completely inconsolable. I was new and was having a hard time thinking I was of any help at all because she was so devastated and experiencing such severe trauma.

    It’s not a brave act to be an ice cold Vulcan and put healthy human empathy aside to dissect rape victims like frogs in biology class. I don’t get what on Earth it accomplishes to play The Trauma Olympics.

  5. hoary puccoon says

    Oh, right. Let’s all think logically here. Writing critical comments on the Internet about an oh-so-famous atheist who said something stupid and cruel is EXACTLY like burning an innocent woman at the stake for witchcraft!

    Did I get that logic right, Richard, sweetie?

  6. samgardner says

    Persecution via online criticism is bad. Persecution by burning at the stake is worse.

    Well, actually that only works if you actually accept the first statement….. which apparently Dawkins does?

  7. Dark Jaguar says

    I don’t user twitter, either by posting or reading any “twits” on the site.

    I’m not succinct, that’s not one of my skills, and frankly Twitter’s main use these days is people self-outing as jerks. I think most people should just stop using it, but especially Dawkins. Hey, Dawkins, don’t you have, um, your OWN web site? With a forum and everything? Why do people feel the need to post to every web site out there when they already HAVE their own? What difference does it make if it’s a twitter feed or a post on his own site, other than the fact he has greater freedom to express whatever nuance he thinks his argument deserves?

    There’s also the matter of how people seem to use twitter just… like instantly, like they wake up in the middle of the night (or they just had time to spare before a movie) and posted some stream of consciousness stuff without actually thinking. Maybe our society shouldn’t be doing that? Maybe randomly saying stuff with no thought to literally everyone at once isn’t a good policy? Hell, part of the reason I don’t drink is because I don’t want to be uninhibited. I want hibition. I must maintain complete control of myself at all times to minimize how much I hurt those around me. Why doesn’t everyone live like that, all the time forever? Chaos is stupid, order is “where it is at” as the kids have never ever said.

    Okay, that said, these are stupid but aren’t just “I randomly said some thoughtless stuff” stupid. It’s more “I put just a little bit of thought into a revealing snippet” stupid. It’s like how Mel Gibbyson said a bunch of antisemetic stuff, and some people said “well he was drunk at the time”. Er, drunk just makes you uninhibited, it doesn’t create an entire very specific belief system for you. Drunk anger would be just saying “Fuck you you stupid pig cop… pig… doody head!”, but it wouldn’t make you start ranting about Zionist conspiracies, you would have had to believe that to start with. To be “fair”, the people making this argument, like most racists, think that everyone else secretly believes the same insanity they do, but just keeps it a secret to be polite (if that were true, people wouldn’t NEED to keep it a secret, because everyone else would AGREE with them, unless racism is like societal sexual repression or something). Point is, this long meandering tirade is why I don’t… can’t use twitter… No wait, point is, Dawkins didn’t just randomly think “blah, I’m going to rate sexual assaults”, there’s something more to it. I’m not saying Dawkins actually does anything like this, or even that he might be defending some colleague who did some of his “lesser” crimes, but that he’s got SOME sense of defending some bad actions just a little bit, trying to “take the edge off” a perceived overreaction, and it’s misplaced.

    However, anyone who’s read his books already read some hints of this sort of thing. For some reason, across 3 books I’ve read, he’s taken the time, for a few paragraphs, to talk about the “witch-hunting” of pedophiles in England. It’s true that there has been some unfair tabloid accusations of pedophilia over there, as on the BBC. That’s not right, and certainly journalistic integrity should have nipped such speculation in the bud. However, there IS actual pedophilia, such as FROM the BBC (specifically that one “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang child catcher” lookin’ dude that was at long last exposed). Further, the BBC covered it up for years. Dawkins has stated that the child sexual assault of the Catholic church is deplorable, but he always seems to use it as a vehicle to jump over to “and also church indoctrination of children is child abuse, and worse!”. It always seems that the child abuse is just being used as a rhetorical talking about to get on to his real concern, mental abuse. Not that children being indoctrinated isn’t a problem, it is, but well, having being a Christian, I can say that it’s a lot easier to get over that than the other thing. It’s a lot easier to forgive someone who actually thinks what they are teaching you is correct than someone who, no matter what their justification, is only doing the abuse for their OWN selfish reasons.

    It makes me wonder if Dawkins wasn’t more damaged by his own abuse than he may even realize.

  8. smhll says

    I’m willing to assume that when Dawkins wants to talk about conflict in Palestine on Twitter (and not read a lot of replies) that his motive is a good one — that he hopes to find a solution to the conflict and bring a halt to the killing (or some of it). I’m not sure if tweeting and talking will lead to thoughtful action, but maybe it’s possible.

    However, when he wants to talk about “mild pedophilia”, I have a hard time being charitable and imagining a positive. Because all I can think of is that he wants pedophiles who aren’t causing the most physical pain to get shorter sentences? Or he wants people to spend less bandwidth talking about sexual abuse by clergy and more about other bad characteristics of religion.

    I realize that once he talked about his childhood experiences in his memoir, the abuse topic was an exciting topic for the media and maybe the topic only comes up when other people bring it up. I don’t know.

  9. Seven of Mine, formerly piegasm says

    What it looks like is that he saw Sam Harris do the “Israel is bad; Palestine is worse” thing and took it as an opportunity to get in one more dig at the people who criticized him for the whole “I don’t think any of us suffered any lasting damage” thing last fall. He very much seems to me to revel in stirring crap up on Twitter and then retreating back to his blog to bemoan the fact that people don’t respond dispassionately when he deliberately pokes them with a stick.

  10. eddiejones says

    My take on this is that RD has a logical fallacy in his initial premise. Rape is not a “mathematical variable” and neither is child abuse. When he posits the argument that “stranger rape is worse than date rape”, I disagree. No, it’s not. Both are entirely unacceptable under any circumstances. And speaking of logical fallacies, RD should not be held as the “face” of atheism. He’s pretty good at evolutionary biology, decent at genetics, but he sucks at any kind of human interaction. I’ve watched his debates on atheism and while his arguments are sound, he has a marked tendency to ridicule, and ridicule is a very poor argumentative tool. I think it’s a hoot, but then I agree with him. If he’s trying sway the atheist community, he’s preachin’ to the choir, if he’s trying to sway Pat Robertson, he’s pissin’ into the wind…. That leaves the interested third party, who is going to leave the debate having watched two buffoons bluster at each other. One of those buffoons is advocating a complete change in the way society views god, while the other wants to leave things as they are. Which of those buffoons is the interested third party is going to support??

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