Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

even george takei's twitter is odious sometimes though.

I think one reason why he seems weird to us (I mean, most of us on this thread think he's weird as far as I can see) is because a lot of us have probably ingested, borne in mind whether or not we've stuck with, a certain amount of Marxism and other ideas from the political left wing, and he hasn't.

Dawkins' atheism and scientism codes as left-wing (because anti-Christian) in the world of Facebook memes, but it's worth remembering that he was an anti-Marxist "apolitical" type whose ideas and arguments were congruent with the sociobiologists and ev psych theorists that became conventional wisdom in the Reagan/Thatcher era. His political opponents from that era, like Richard Lewontin or (to a lesser extent) Stephen Jay Gould were far more in tune with modern liberal / progressive politics. He mocked their humanist impulses at the time, and I'm sure another couple of decades at Oxford haven't given him any greater affinity for the underprivileged.

It's about as surprising to see Dawkins stomp on modern sensibilities about rape as it would be for Camille Paglia or pre-Obama Andrew Sullivan.

I think one reason why he seems weird to us (I mean, most of us on this thread think he's weird as far as I can see) is because a lot of us have probably ingested, borne in mind whether or not we've stuck with, a certain amount of Marxism and other ideas from the political left wing, and he hasn't.

― cardamon, Wednesday, August 20, 2014 2:02 PM (6 hours ago)

i dunno, i mean i've absorbed plenty of left wing political ideology (even agreed with some of it), and my dislike of dawkins has nothing to do with that. i find him intellectually incurious, arrogant to the point of self-delusion, and depressingly naive in his failure to see religious intolerance as a symptomatic expression of a boundless & fundamental human capacity for intolerance in general. 20th century history of marxist revolution & government should be sufficient to show that religion is hardly alone in its capacity to motivate violence.

Also, 20th-C history has no shortage of scientists happily contributing to Mass Evil.

Ya but Oppenheimer thought he was Shiva.

Only after the fact

I always imagine him adding a "mua-ha-ha-ha-ha" at the end.

i was vicious and snotty about dawkins back when i was 17 and pro-iraq-war, it's like my one intellectual constant

plasmon otm tho, he is an avatar of neoliberalism. the contempt for belief in anything but the straight line of progress and the totalization of science seems kinda how-do-you-say fundamental to the Whole Thing.

I always imagine him adding a "mua-ha-ha-ha-ha" at the end.

lol.

("the straight line of progress and the totalization of science" of course historically not an idea reserved for people who haven't absorbed any marxism lol, but yknow what i mean we have a different left these days.)

i dunno, i mean i've absorbed plenty of left wing political ideology (even agreed with some of it), and my dislike of dawkins has nothing to do with that. i find him intellectually incurious, arrogant to the point of self-delusion, and depressingly naive...

Reminds me of that study which I would gooogle up if I could be bothered which found that people who lean right/conservative politically actually seem to have a form of mental impairment in that they tend to be UNABLE to notice small differences between similar things--Dawkins's blundering attempts to equate and rank various hideousnesses seem like that deficit in action

My phraseology may have been tactlessly vulnerable to misunderstanding, but I can't help feeling that at least half the problem lies in a wanton eagerness to misunderstand.

Dawkins on awesome form with this non-apology. it's one of the great public bloodsports of the moment watching him crash stupidly around in the bullring of twitter, confused by his own gore.

from here sorry.

undue self-regard and total indifference to doubt

imo this is about 80% of the secret to success in academia

lol, just in academia tho?

i think one of the weirdest things about him is that everything he has said at book length since about 1980 is stupid, but it's mostly been well-expressed in the limited sense that he organizes sentences in a paragraphs in a way that is considered 'good writing'.

he's my number one counterexample for people who say that if you write them down, your thoughts will necessarily become wise through the mere process of expressing them elegantly and clearly.

well, there's also mein kampf I guess

Hitler's sentences not really elegant imo

I don't read German, so I couldn't tell you

he organizes sentences in a paragraphs in a way that is considered 'good writing'.

A particular kind of making it seem like good writing where he knows how to use language to make what he's saying seem reasonable. One easy way to do this is to constantly invoke reason and say 'surely it is not reasonable that ...' etc which he does and there are other more subtle ways

One easy way to do this is to constantly invoke reason and say 'surely it is not reasonable that ...' etc which he does and there are other more subtle ways

this is the most beautiful evisceration of dawkins that i have ever read

half the problem lies in a wanton eagerness to misunderstand.

Dawkins otm wrt internets, ilx included

let me misunderstand his remarks about harmless pedophilia some more

or maybe his misogyny

yes he's a horrible horrible human being, I feel better about myself in comparison

I don't need to use myself as a benchmark to evaluate others, or vice versa

Dawkins is just ridiculous

he is but feel like people do this all the time with people they've already decided they don't like. "wanton eagerness to misunderstand" them and paint things they do/say in most neg poss light at the slightest opportunity. It's lazy.

Like they don't feel their case is strong enough against him so let's throw PEDOPHILIA and MISOGYNY at him and hope it sticks

I mean, it's a reasonable sentiment, but citing fuckin' Richard Dawkins and saying "yeah, that makes some sense" when he is in fact saying all kinds of stupid shit and it's a ray of sunlight in a garden of shit is not the way to do it. Much more reasonable people have made that case, make a thread about them.

He literally said that light pedophilia should be whitewashed over because he wasn't harmed by a man touching him inappropriately as a kid, and he is sure his peers were fine. Repeat: he said he's sure his peers with fine with a little child molestation.

I don't give a shit what he says about other stuff, he said that! I'm not throwing it at him!

if you don't give a shit what he says about other stuff why do you care what he says about that?
there's lots to criticize without labeling him as approving of pedophilia and misogyny. Pretty sure he's against them no matter what you'd like to believe.

damm liberal gotcha social media

https://richarddawkins.net/2013/09/child-abuse-a-misunderstanding-w-polish-translation/

In his own words, including a straw man dialog he thinks someone might say to him, and his sweeping away of the latter comment with "We discussed it among ourselves on many occasions, especially after his suicide, and there was indeed general agreement that his gassing himself was far more upsetting than his sexual depredations had been. "
..as if, hey, I knew all the people this guy abused and we agreed it was no big deal

so yeah, he basically is making a case that some pedophilia is no big deal if the social institutions around you support it and all your friends agree with you in public that it's ok

I give a shit in that people give him a soapbox and he repeatedly makes the same logical mistakes and shows the same biases time after time, it's just not immediately evident when it's about topics you may agree about

I'm sure this is just the imprecision of language and I'm just an agitator

I recommended Curtis White's book _The Science Delusion_ earlier, and here's a bit with him from last year where he actually go into the weird reductive philosophical choices that Dawkins et al have been loudly making over the past decade plus about cognition, creativity, thinking, etc:

http://www.strangenotions.com/the-science-delusion/

Plasmon, I think you might dig this.

i believe the appropriate word for this boy is "buffoon"

The science delusion is too eager to link its critique of the limitations of scientism to that offered in the 19th century by various Romantics. I gave the book a glowing review at the time bc I wanted to use the platform to attack Dawkins, but in hindsight the chapters on Schelling were a mess.

I do appreciate the book for at least introducing me to Schelling, who I had never encountered in my (admittedly limited) Continental philosophy classes.

"This is where the book started for me, with Jonah Lehrer’s repellent argument (in Imagine: How Creativity Works) that all human creativity is the consequence of brain events, the dribbling out of chemicals like vasopressin."

Wait isn't jonah lehrer the plagiarism guy? I thought his whole deal was creativity was the consequence of sampling and being in a cool scene with eno and david byrne. Basically's he's on the same page as white, but it seems like he got grossed-out by the mention of brain juice.

Deepak Chopra called out Dawkins for the Ice Bucket Challenge! It's on! Your move, Dawkins.

http://i.imgur.com/yDyVVvk.jpg

Wight Dawk

Brrrrrr what happened to that boy

http://www.duhaime.org/Portals/duhaime/images/Bentham_head.jpg

seriously fucked up lighting for that dawkins portrait

Men who look like old lesbians iirc

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119596/appetite-wonder-review-closed-mind-richard-dawkins"> brutal takedown

Unlike the best of the colonial administrators, some of whom were deeply versed in the languages and histories of the peoples they ruled, Dawkins displays no interest in the cultures of the African countries where he lived as a boy. It is the obedient devotion of those who served his family that has remained in his memory.

Ouch.

I am glad a fellow atheist is compelled to eviscerate him so fully

One might wager a decent sum of money that it has never occurred to Dawkins that to many people he appears as a comic figure. His default mode is one of rational indignation—a stance of withering patrician disdain for the untutored mind of a kind one might expect in a schoolmaster in a minor public school sometime in the 1930s. He seems to have no suspicion that any of those he despises could find his stilted pose of indignant rationality merely laughable. “I am not a good observer,” he writes modestly. He is referring to his observations of animals and plants, but his weakness applies more obviously in the case of humans. Transfixed in wonderment at the workings of his own mind, Dawkins misses much that is of importance in human beings—himself and others.

https://www.facebook.com/nightwish/posts/10154745049630068

waiting for Dick to get on the gamergate parade float