Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

jfc the strawmanning

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bin-laden-has-won-they-confiscated-my-honey-outspoken-academic-richard-dawkins-in-airline-security-twitter-row-over-jar-of-honey-8919618.html

Thankfully, Twitter is full of people pointing out how easily he could have got round the problem. Which he did know about, being such a frequent flier and considering how long the rules have been in place.

he used the phrase "Bin Laden has won" not once but twice. Predicting that he'll be in a straight jacket saying that over and over by the end of the day.

blaming bin laden won't bring back his precious honey

"Dawkins thought the honey just appeared from nowhere. Imagine his surprise when he found out it was created by Bees."

I would have once said that criticism of his style was just 'ad hominem' and not addressing his arguments, but now I think that the way you choose to express yourself is in itself an actual part of your message and if you come across as a twat that is definitely a real problem.

about 75% of my twitter feed right now consists of people trolling dawkins on the topic of honey. i approve.

cool friends

http://oi42.tinypic.com/35bfgp4.jpg

criticised what he called ‘dundridges’ - his word for petty jobsworths

not helping, man

Dawkins has spoken in support of Pat Condell hasn't he? I want to be sure of this though, may be confusing with Myers

I would have once said that criticism of his style was just 'ad hominem' and not addressing his arguments, but now I think that the way you choose to express yourself is in itself an actual part of your message and if you come across as a twat that is definitely a real problem.

Well, his choice of strong adjectives when describing religion – a lot of 'barbaric', 'backward' and so on – is both a matter of style and message, in that 'barbaric' implies there is something called barbarism and 'backward' implies there is something called progress.

Pretty sure that The Dawk and Pat Condell are bffs - the Dawkins Foundation site plugs Condell's bullshit. Also they - a foundation for "Reason & Science" gave Bill Maher (vaccine denier and fellow shithead) an award of some sort.

Aha, so it really is like that.

I wonder what conversation is like between those two. Does Condell sit there rubbing his hands at having convinced a useful rube, or is he like a true believer himself

thick ignorant cunts probly enjoy each others back-up i wd guess

the whole honey matter is second rate compared to this tweet: https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/389432783304548352

"his sign said not" wtf Dorks??

http://static1.fjcdn.com/comments/4755254+_a8a82276dbeb5898a47157d54c7b88d9.jpg

LOL

brilliant trolling by someone

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkens

http://www.scotsman.com/news/celebrity/mosque-attack-conviction-mad-richard-dawkins-1-3455037

Dawkins sides with the SDL on religious hate crimes against Muslims.

I like the ambiguity of the URL.

jesus this guy.

if i ever became a top oxford don with strings of postnominals, the first thing i'd do was try as quickly as possible to become a banal sub-clarkson/littlejohn type figure.

i'd have a sticker on my car that said 'my other professor's a nick ferrari'

I hate the neologism "owned" for "scored a victory over". I have no intention of owning anyone, and nobody will ever own me.

oh Richardpaws

if Dick doesn't do the important scientific work of drawing up a scale for degrees of sexual assault, who will?

he's done this before anyway i think, clearly wants to take away some of the hysteria from sexual abuse carried out in a loving environment

lol then Mr Religion Is For Morons complains about the internet being full of absolutists

"I'm just creating a really creepy hierarchy, what's wrong with you people?"

he's the vociferous but not very bright punter at a night-school philosophy class

He's a fucking prick.

dick dorkins

i think he's just lonely and craving attention tbh, i can't think of any other explanation for his bizarre addiction to making these kinds of statements on Twitter. he surely knows that they're offensive and hurtful, and presumably doesn't care about "the kind of people" he's seeking to hurt. but why he thinks Twitter is the ideal format for his bluff pronouncements on "logic" - WHICH FAIL AT BASIC LOGIC FOR THE MOST PART - god only knows. i get that some people crave publicity but his lack of self-awareness, his sheer foolishness (irrespective of whether you agree with his fundamental arguments he frequently makes them in the weakest, stupidest ways possible) - it's baffling. and hilarious, obv.

this guy is an embarrassment to his profession

Maybe his profession is to be an ignorant arsehole? He doesn't seem to have done anything else for decades.

I think he has zero emotional intelligence and really thinks he's being daring through challenging opinions

ffs can we at least get a link for lols

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10998498/Richard-Dawkins-in-storm-over-mild-date-rape-tweets.html

ah he was making a point about eh not adverbs what're those other ones the ones for nouns, pronouns ya pronouns

now idk if that was the best way to do that but then I'm not a professor of English nor am I one of evolutionary biology so I guess I'll defer to the fucking clown

I wonder which kinds of murder are worst

I like how he started this by talking about Israel and than managed to just dig deeper and deeper from there.

Also he doesn't appear to understand how syllogisms work.

I wonder which kinds of murder are worst

gonna just go ahead and guess that he would say scientists being murdered by muslims is worse than muslims being murdered by scientists

he doesn't seem to know what a syllogism is, he doesn't seem to understand the difference between degrees of harm and degrees of culpability, tbf to the lad he seems to know how Twitter works

I love when scientists try to come up with philosophy and principles of morality on their own, works so well. See also: west coast technologists thinking they understand government.

ugh don't remind me

Prof Dawkins began his Twitter musings by lecturing his 987,000 followers on syllogisms. “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.”

“Mild pedophilia (sic) is bad. Violent pedophilia is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of mild pedophilia, go away and learn how to think,” he wrote.

“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.

It's quite typical of Dawkins to get really interested in some abstract point - in this case, the point that Y being worse than X doesn't make X good - and then go groping around for real world examples to illustrate that point which, if he studied them a bit at all, he would see don't actually fit. Then also for him not to understand why people have a strong reaction to the statement.

Which is obvs a fairly common human trait (see my contributions to ILX) but it's the sort of thing you avoid doing in public or semi-public spaces or under an authorial/professional name

"Ok but suppose if you don't rape the fat man, he'll fall across the trolley track and rape five OTHER people. THEN what would you do. AHA! Time for you anti-rape absolutists to go away and learn how to think!"