Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

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!"

that's some high falutin logic!

funny how this guy has come to embody every cautionary criticism about rationalism, science, etc by all those dangerous "post-modernists" he detests.

there's a public service, though, in demonstrating that hewing to some exclusionary and internally defined notion of "logic" is no inoculation against stupidity.

I still think of that dating website message I got one time that had the second line "Are you going to go see Dawkins speak?" and feel glad I noped the hell out of that conversation

xpost ryan on the money

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.

Nah he's just full of himself

Let's not overlook the appeal of leading a movement

extraordinarily bumptious man.

ugh I'm sad this thread was bumped because dawkins was being an actual dumbass, and not to celebrate weird twitter's quest to bob-marleyify him in image memes.

it's such a shame he's mad

http://i.imgur.com/9mZgCxN.jpg

lol

his repeated glib non sequitur dismissals idk reminds me idk something there idk?

hey guys, went away and learned how to think, anything happen while i was gone?

Just some mild rape

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/494031247778512896 jus implying that some kinds of rape are comparable to stealing £1, nbd.

let's remember him for the better times https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/448240882710757376

classic Tweets de nos jours

Richard Dawkins - Malarkey or Effective Way?

twitter is not a good venue for this

but does anyone disagree with the idea that crimes in the same category can have different degrees of badness

sure, but dawkins isn't the one to determine level of badness

If they didn't the criminal justice system would have mandatory penalties for everything.

However, if there's an international push to get a crime that is routinely ignored / normalised / downplayed accepted as a something the police and other authorities (including academic authorities) should be taking seriously, then popping up with these banal opinions 4 u is going to get a deserved backlash irrespective of the medium.

Like, sure, make the argument that 'date rape' should have a differential length of sentence to 'rape at knifepoint' if you want, but maybe wait until people are being regularly convicted and jailed for both.

I agree with the comment upthread that he appears to have extremely limited emotional intelligence - the initial comments, the "because of LOGIC" justification and the subsequent "go away and learn how think" (subtext = "think in the exact same way as me") all indicate a profound inability to understand or relate to how other people's minds work.

All three are ridiculous but the second bit is especially so given there isn't the slightest bit of logic to his initial pronouncement.

I mean if you overlook the fact that he's a brilliant biologist his general standard of debate is if anything lower than that of most of our less self-aware posters.

but does anyone disagree with the idea that crimes in the same category can have different degrees of badness

not at all! simply disagree with notion that some universal notion of LOGIC can discern them.

Let's remember he got into this from the angle that not all child molestation is equal and moved on to rape as a friendlier example

Let's remember he's already got form in saying that some child molestation is actually OK.

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/10/richard_dawkins_defends_mild_pedophilia_says_it_does_not_cause_lasting_harm/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFNs2mOkKzc

This might be my favourite Dawkins tweet.

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/448240882710757376

nothing could top 'can pig feel more?'

my beef with dawkins is simply that his interest in things like "science" and "logic" seems to end as soon as he can use them to make poorly judged and trollish pronouncements about things that have almost nothing to do with science or logic.

I think my favourite part of the "can pig feel more" tweet stream is quite early on in it: " "I dare you to say that to a broken hearted woman who has miscarried." She would not have an abortion anyway, so irrelevant."

This guy is clueless. https://richarddawkins.net/2014/07/are-there-emotional-no-go-areas-where-logic-dare-not-show-its-face/

The thing is, rape is not a taboo topic. Comparing kinds of rape is not a taboo topic either. It's actually eminently worth discussing, since such comparisons already permeate the culture ('legitimate rape' and such). But they are very difficult topics, ones that you can't just blunder into. They require a lot of tact, and a lot of sensitivity. Dawkins shows none, and the conclusion he draws is that the discussion must be taboo.

Also bullshit demarcation between reason and emotion, yadda yadda

"emotional no go areas" --> "I have zero emotional intelligence"

Just when you thought rape, robbery and paedophilia were the only topics in this debate, Dawkins writes a blog post which adds eugenics, abortion, cannibalism, FGM, paedophilia (slight return), trapped miners, organ transplants and tramps, and the Gaza conflict. Then starts digging about why he chose rape as his topic.

https://richarddawkins.net/2014/07/are-there-emotional-no-go-areas-where-logic-dare-not-show-its-face/

haha xpost

I wonder if he's kind of actually losing his marbles. That blog post has a real crazy old man pamphlet feel to it.

I'm still trying to work out precisely why I find Dawkins so loathsome but give a free pass to Jonathan Meades who shares a lot of his knee jerk anti-clericism, anti-Muslim bigotry and PC-baiting challops on 'victim culture', 'special pleading', colonialism, etc. idk, Emotional intelligence is definitely part of its but there's clearly more. Humour, maybe?

i've never heard Meades claim to have incontrovertible access to the FACTS because he done SCIENCE

That's true.

humour helps def

it's not the opinions themselves, fuck knows they're mostly held by millions of rotten-hearted dirtbags, but Dick's continual harping on his rationalism and smarts to give the opinions weight, despite the increasing evidence that he has a very idiosyncratic view of what philosophy and rationalism are