I’ve just posted at Feministe about the latest developments in the skeptosphere’s Deep Rifts TM. For those who’d rather discuss the ongoing cyberstorm that began with Elevatorgate here, this is the thread for you. Links to other people’s posts especially welcome.
For those who’d rather talk about anything but Dawkins cynically clickbaiting yet again, there’s always the Open Thread or the Media Circus Thread.
UPDATE – FURTHER READING:
Dawkins has now doubled down and jumped the shark with a triple twist and pike – Richard Dawkins: The Wrongering. See also Rebecca Watson at Skepchick – Dear Innocent People Murdered in Witch Hunts
Categories: culture wars, ethics & philosophy, gender & feminism, social justice
Debate vs Inquiry and “Reasonable Debate” as a silencing tactic 
Are cultural politics worse than no politics at all? 
DUFC #69 
Why I almost didn’t write a post for White Ribbon Day this year 
Hoyden About Town 
Speaking of rape culture, I totally missed this last week:
Related headlines:
Don’t worry ladies, Cee Lo Green is here to explain rape to you
CeeLo Green apologizes for tweets about rape
CeeLo Green’s Rape Tweets Spark Backlash: ‘Disgusting Piece of Trash’
He has since apologised. I didn’t follow it closely but I saw some of the black feminists on twitter like @feministajones really took him to task.
Did you catch that tweet from @garyface likening a Dawkins tweet to an episode of Game of Thrones? “140 characters and something unspeakably awful happens.”
Yes, I remember that one! That was last month, wasn’t it, after Dawkins tweeted about aborting Downs Syndrome foetuses being a moral imperative?
UPDATE – FURTHER READING:
Dana Hunter at En Tequila Es Verdad – The Shermer Allegations: Some Considerations for Those to Whom This Is a Nasty Shock
Dawkins has now doubled down and jumped the shark with a triple twist and pike – Richard Dawkins: The Wrongering. See also Rebecca Watson at Skepchick – Dear Innocent People Murdered in Witch Hunts
Dawkins has gone full slime-pit, quoting several of their memes such as “witch of the week”, and his own coining for #FTBullies, “Feedingfrenzy Thoughtpolice Bullies”.
As I commented on the Pharyngula thread, the next anticipated shark jumping has to be something distasteful and awful such as appearing on a male-supremacist MRA website like A Voice for Men. At present he’s Tweeting something fairly abysmal or abhorrent every day of the week.
Given previous comments from Dawkins, I am disappointed but not surprised.
On the other hand, I would like to jump up and down in protest against the people who (for example in the comments on Pharyngula) are dismissing his scientific work as a”lab hack”. He may be a misogynistic racist etc arsehole, but pointing that out is not actually a rebuttal of the ideas in The Selfish Gene or Extended Phenotype. It’s quite some time since I read them, but they were, from memory, carefully argued with a lot of attention to facts and details. (This is of course part of the disappointment: we know he knows how to do this if he wants to.)
Can we please manage the concept that someone can do something valuable as a scientist, AND be a horrible human being, at the same time?
It seems to be a very common cognitive bias, to retrospectively delegitimise a person’s past ‘good’ when one learns of a previously unknown and undeniable ‘bad’ (and to deny the plausibility of an alleged ‘bad’ when one has been an admirer of the ‘good’). The tendency to not believe ill of those who do stuff one approves is at the heart of the repeated pattern of social* predators operating behind a mask of conspicuous respectability/altruism/celebrity, and the tendency to denigrate the previously celebrated in the face of a disillusionment appears to be the corollary of that (alongside doing a Mrs Dashwood backflip “There always was a something, if you remember, in Willoughby’s eyes at times that I did not like”).
* social predators includes fraudsters and manipulators/abusers alongside sexual predators.
Dawkins has produced another string of tweets that should make any thinking human go WTF?. Here they are, surrounded by some sensible commentary by Dana Hunter: http://freethoughtblogs.com/entequilaesverdad/2014/09/19/dear-richard-dawkins-your-hypothetical-is-still-rape