Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

He didn't build a clock. He took it out of its case and pretended he had made it. (xp)

Dental plan
Lisa needs braces

mh otm, people who wear their hard-on for logic on their sleeves are the worst, completely impossible to have a discussion predicated on the idea that they're having an emotion.

It's reasonable to assume that Dawkins' knowledge of electrical engineering is exactly zero, and the fact that it might involve some skill* to rehome a clock in a pencil box must be resisted at all cost as it takes the discussion out of the (quite large) space where he feels free to pontificate.

* not necessarily a lot! It was a school science project not an application to NASA.

i do think the whole clock thing is weird and not what it seems, but who cares? dawkins, apparently. he cares a lot.

lol @ Bagels

Xpost Yea. If it's this obvious it's a repurposed clock...then it's p obv not a bomb.

Also ain't like the fucking kid filed the lawsuit.

how'd it get built? how'd it get built? how'd it get built???

Lol

I think he just has too much free time. Needs a new hobby.

Hear there's a lobby for some hobbies

the reporting about the kid "inventing" or w/e else is crappy journalism, the actual story is about a kid who is curious about electronics who was shuffled into the police for no justifiable reason

fixating on whether the kid is actually skilled is a red herring. dawkins seems to want to imply the kid isn't actually that smart, or that the kid's family sent him to school with an electronic device to see what would happen. even if the latter is true, the system's reaction was still completely wrong and dawkins has big old blinders on for not realizing it's the sort of profiling he'd be up in arms about if the kid was an atheist or even just white.

hope everyone has made all the blind watchmaker gags

but who watches the clock kid?

I wonder if he showed this level of tenacity and obsession with uncovering the truth when he was at alleged rapist Julian Assange's birthday party?

did he actually try to uncover anything or just tweet the same hypothetical question constantly

Dawkins isn't the only one saying all this stuff though. Seems like most of the internet turned on this kid and the family. The most reasonable criticisms are the ones that at least feel like the 15m is disproportionate if nothing else. There is something really odd about Dawkins being so overly invested in this story. At this point he is probably kind of desperate to PROVE he was "RIGHT" from the beginning?

he seems kind of monomaniacal and semi-coherent in a way that, truly, signals some kind of dementia to me

But isn't that how the majority of people in his age range sound by default when using Twitter?

even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day

have any of you read his god delusion book? I sure haven't, and have no real motivation to do so after his complete asshattery and inherent lack of understanding of cross-sectional anything his public persona communicates

I couldn't make it past the introduction

A lot of "WAKE UP SHEEPLE" levels of analytical quality IIRC

is this a case of his particular genes being a little to um selfish or something? is that how that goes?

the grossest tweet seems to have been missed here, one that was like 'he's "just a kid", what ages is this kid *link to teen isis executioner*'

"But he's only a kid." Yes, a "kid" old enough to sue for $15M those whom he hoaxed.

And how old is this "kid"? http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/isis-shocking-video-shows-islamic-state-child-executioner-beheading-victim-1511403 …

dawkins has seemed like an ahole for the longest time, now he's just graduated to trumplike

Harlan Ellison's "Repent, Muslim Kid!" said the Sadsackman

Apparently if kids are young enough you can do anything to them and they can't sue.

Had it not been for the probing intellect of Richard Dawkins we would not have the phrase "racist memes".

This thing with him hounding the clock kid is presumably him melding with his online teen weirdo supporters

They're all melding into one being

there's demented and demented, I think I'd rather be lying in my own piss with little idea of where or who I was than having a public (globally visible, in fact) shitfit over the possibility that a brown child did something with a clock. though there isn't much in it.

dumb kid thinks science is about taking previous work and building upon it, what a fool

luckily Richard Dawkins invented everything he uses from the ground up, including the concept behind letters and the sentence structure of the English language. his reasoning is sound.

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 7h7 hours ago
It's exactly like when I said I don't have to read Mein Kampf to condemn Nazism. The numpties thought I was accusing Muslims of being Nazis!
61 retweets 283 likes

every post is trying to convince me he really isn't smart but a total idiot who is really talented with words

So many times he basically posts "stop being so stupid as to infer the very thing which I was clearly implying!"

i'm gonna start going to church now just because of this, fuck.

Remove the comma from that statement for clarity.

xxp anything that isn't there in the cold hard rational letter of the text isn't there at all, enough of yr fuzzy postmodern ideas like 'implication'

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 1h1 hour ago
@CraiggyPops It was a clock but he didn't make it. He took it out of its case and pretended he had made it.

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 1h1 hour ago
@Sean_PFerris @CraiggyPops If it was re-assembly you'd be right. It wasn't he took it out of its case and did nothing else to it at all.

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 5h5 hours ago
@BanTigerTemple It was a clock but he didn't make it. He took it out of its case and put it in a box. With what motive?

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 5h5 hours ago
@Apocalypse_End He made nothing at all. He took a clock out of its case and pretended he'd made something

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 6h6 hours ago
@Mukhtarishaq2 He didn't make anything. He opened a clock, took out the innards and put them in a box so they looked like a bomb

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 1h1 hour ago
@CraiggyPops It was a clock but he didn't make it. He took it out of its case and pretended he had made it.

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 1h1 hour ago
@Sean_PFerris @CraiggyPops If it was re-assembly you'd be right. It wasn't he took it out of its case and did nothing else to it at all.

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 30m30 minutes ago
@lyonsnyc No. He took a clock out of its case and put it in a box. He didn't enhance it in any way. What motive could he possibly have had?

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 4m4 minutes ago
@bbeennyyJ @lyonsnyc You mean you still haven't heard the news? He did NOT tinker, he took a clock out of its case and put it in a box.

― jmm, Tuesday, November 24, 2015 9:35 AM (7 hours ago)

I thought he was clowning himself by writing a fake summary of The Blind Watchmaker 'til I looked downthread. !!!!

Richard Dawkins ‏@RichardDawkins 7h7 hours ago
It's exactly like when I said I don't have to read Mein Kampf to condemn Nazism. The numpties thought I was accusing Muslims of being Nazis!

I remember this ... this was great.

I thought at the time and still think he may not have meant to call Muslims Nazis, but that surely if you're talking about Nazis at all it's time to be careful with your implications. Like the problem was, that he was willing to just straight up bring the Nazis into it when the subject is already delicate in the extreme

Think this is what a lot of these guys (cf Islamophobia thread) don't quite get. An accusation that someone is prejudiced can itself be based on a prejudice

And if he's such a bastion of liberal decency why doesn't he even have, like, a lawyerly concern for key principles such as 'collective punishment is unjust' and 'manslaughter is not murder' and 'proportional punishment' ... why are the deep dark rumblings about the evil crimes of religions just left to hang there menacingly, never fenced in with a sincere delineation of what the appropriate resolution wd be to these crimes

And if such a rationalist, why no awareness that pithy rhetoric is always at risk of stirring irrational mob violence?

Cos he didn't invent the clock man

I don't think he ever claimed to be an anything of decency

may i ask what i said on this thread that upset people so (there was a reference to it elsewhere)?

dawkins is being a dick, and the monomania with which he approaches this stuff seems to me to reveal not only his bigotry but a symptom of a mind that seems to be slowly failing itself. he also seems to have a more and more tortured relationship with grammar and spelling, which also makes me wonder....

possibly your commitment to an armchair diagnosis

everything you're saying anyway can be explained just as easily with "old asshole struggles with new technology", he's spent his life communicating to people via edited books and articles and essays and lectures/discussions in controlled environments; now he's using a tool that connects him directly to literally anyone who wants to say some shit to him and he's limited to 140 characters. he's acting like every elderly white relative who just got a facebook.

not to mention the current political climate as filtered thru sensationalist social media seems to be more than enough to drive conservatives/uh 'soft' racists into the arms of outright bigotry and fascism

oh i'm not being entirely serious re. diagnosis. you're probably right about the technology thing. it just seems like his mind --which was once upon a time so active and inventive -- seems to limit itself to caressing the same insipid grievances over and over and over again. which (if you can put the offensiveness aside for a moment) is saddening.