A Dawkins No-No

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Immanuel Can
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A Dawkins No-No

Post by Immanuel Can »

Richard Dawkins has been stripped of his 1996 Humanist of the Year Award for posting the following on Twitter:

Richard Dawkins
@RichardDawkins
In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.

Discuss.


Discuss?
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RCSaunders
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Re: A Dawkins No-No

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Immanuel Can wrote: Thu Apr 22, 2021 5:55 pm Richard Dawkins has been stripped of his 1996 Humanist of the Year Award for posting the following on Twitter:

Richard Dawkins
@RichardDawkins
In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.

Discuss.


Discuss?
These idiots are at least entertaining. Dawkins attempted to dance out of his situation:
"I do not intend to disparage trans people," he wrote. "I see that my academic 'Discuss' question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this. It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue."

The American Humanist Association slammed Mr. Dawkins‘ tweets as insensitive.
Everyone knows it is, "insensitive," to think for oneself and ask questions. "Shut-up and believe what you are told."
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Immanuel Can
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Re: A Dawkins No-No

Post by Immanuel Can »

RCSaunders wrote: Fri Apr 23, 2021 1:39 am Everyone knows it is, "insensitive," to think for oneself and ask questions. "Shut-up and believe what you are told."
It is interesting that even the invitation "discuss" is sufficient to get somebody pilloried these days. And I wonder how we ever got to the point where we think there are some topics that are actually beyond being discussed.

In another way, maybe that summarizes all that is most wrong about our current political environment, and why people on one side of an issue cannot even speak civilly to those on any other. As you say, it's a very "Shut up and believe what you are told" kind of ethos.

I wonder what kind of a future that portends for us all...
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vegetariantaxidermy
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Re: A Dawkins No-No

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

What is a 'humanist' anyway, let alone a 'humanist of the year'?
Serves him right for accepting such a ridiculous award.
And transvestism is a sexual fetish. How dare they assume to know what it 'feels like' to be a woman.
So-called 'transgenderism' is a social construct. Word play.
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Terrapin Station
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Re: A Dawkins No-No

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Immanuel Can wrote: Thu Apr 22, 2021 5:55 pm Richard Dawkins has been stripped of his 1996 Humanist of the Year Award for posting the following on Twitter:

Richard Dawkins
@RichardDawkins
In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.

Discuss.


Discuss?
The reactions that people have lately to having their thinking challenged, to unpopular ideas or attitudes being expressed, etc. are rather scary.
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Terrapin Station
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Re: A Dawkins No-No

Post by Terrapin Station »

It's interesting, by the way, that he would be interpreted as suggesting a negative attitude towards being transgender, rather than simply pointing out an inconsistency that seems rather arbitrary if not hypocritical. I suppose that's because the "party line" at the moment is that "transethnicity" is not at all accepted, but being transgender is accepted, both on pain of social ostracization. So the thinking must be proceeding that if Dawkins is questioning this situation, he must be suggesting that we should react the same way towards transgenders that we react towards Dolezal (because arbitrarily/hypocritically folks can't grasp the idea of accepting Dolezal's "transethnicity" in a manner similar to accepting transgenders).

And it's scary that this sort of stuff has perpetuated and grown so much in academic contexts, because the beliefs, attitudes and social pressures towards the same are just about the furthest thing from an unfettered, non-dogmatic examination of what the world is really like.

When I was younger, it always seemed unbelievable to me that people could be led to scenarios like the Holocaust or like the historical witch hunts--especially re the uncritical mob mentality (essentially with pitchforks and torches) necessary for such disasters, but that no longer seems unbelievable to me, unfortunately.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: A Dawkins No-No

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Terrapin Station wrote: Fri Apr 23, 2021 2:00 pm It's interesting, by the way, that he would be interpreted as suggesting a negative attitude towards being transgender, rather than simply pointing out an inconsistency that seems rather arbitrary if not hypocritical.
Yes, it is.

But I think that the most offensive thing is that his very question puts two politically-correct positions in utter contradiction with each other. For while transgenderism is sacred to the Left, so is the belief in racial identity through skin colour. So they despise Dolezal and adore Kaitlin. Both are simply "morphing" to a new identity their DNA denies, but Dolezal committed the unspeakable sin of making whiteness into blackness on a wish; and Jenner committed the great miracle of making a male decathlete into a Cosmo poster entity, also on a wish. What's the difference, if identity is nothing other than an internal state of belief?

But there's still a residual recognition of the authority of logic, and it's expressed in their irritation at Dawkins. His sin was pointing out the inherent contradiction in their ideology -- which, if logic is "phallogocentric" and "white," as they say, is not even an insult.

It just goes to show you that even the PC can't believe their own hogwash, really. The worst thing you can do is point out to their seared consciences that their beliefs are still ridiculous, no matter how passionately they affirm them. If their belief was actually strong, they wouldn't even be irritated at Dawkins...they'd just say, "Well, that's YOUR truth, it's not mine."
And it's scary that this sort of stuff has perpetuated and grown so much in academic contexts, because the beliefs, attitudes and social pressures towards the same are just about the furthest thing from an unfettered, non-dogmatic examination of what the world is really like.
Absolutely. But it's the big shift our society has gone through, starting with the 18th Century, where they gradually dropped the idea that the external or physical world contains any information that is not simply mediated through the individual perception of the atomistic "self." That's when "truth" stopped meaning "the way things really are," and started meaning, "whatever I feel inside."
When I was younger, it always seemed unbelievable to me that people could be led to scenarios like the Holocaust or like the historical witch hunts--especially re the uncritical mob mentality (essentially with pitchforks and torches) necessary for such disasters, but that no longer seems unbelievable to me, unfortunately.
Yes, that's quite a good point. Of course, as the Holocaust recedes into history, people can find it easier and easier to "hide" it there, and then to pretend it never happened; but how does one "hide" the maleness of an Olympic decathlete? Dolezal fooled the world...even the NAACP. But let's face it: Jenner's fooling nobody. Only those who deny the obvious truth of their eyes are capable of imagining he's anything other than in denial himself.

One has to go a fair distance to make me sympathize at all with Mr. Dawkins. However, in this case...
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Immanuel Can
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Re: A Dawkins No-No

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Terrapin Station wrote: Fri Apr 23, 2021 1:52 pm The reactions that people have lately to having their thinking challenged, to unpopular ideas or attitudes being expressed, etc. are rather scary.
I've been wondering, "What was Dolezal's great 'crime,' anyway?"

It can't have been the assertion that "identity" is defined by one's inner beliefs -- that is a dogma the Left absolutely believes.

Can it have been that her case implies the "whiteness" can have the experience of "blackness," merely by wanting to, and "transitioning"? That would position the Left's "devil," whiteness, as convertible into its god, "of-colourness" (except for Asians, of course). Maybe that was the sin.

But it also might have been this: that the Left was exposed as foolish without their permission. With Jenner, the Left had the opportunity to make themselves "virtuously" foolish...they were offered the opportunity to believe the impossible, ardently, in public, and to compel it to 'come about' with the sheer force of their belief. They could virtue-signal to their hearts' content. But the Dolezal case never gave them that opportunity. Instead, her double life was discovered by accident, after they had already been proved foolish. She shamed them publicly...exposed their stupidity, without even really trying to. After all, she was bound and determined to self-present as black to her dying day; and it wasn't her who uncovered her true identity. But she shamed them, nonetheless.

So accepting Dolezal would not only undermine their dogma that "blackness" is special, irreducible, and unfathomable to "whites," but also would expose them publicly as utterly foolish. So she had to be "forgotten," excluded from the relevant cases of identity-morphing. And Dawkins' question dug her up and brought her back into the discussion. So he also now has to be "forgotten."

Poor old man...he had, perhaps, no idea what can of worms he was opening. Too late now to backpedal. The Left has pegged him as a heretic.

It reminds me of something Malcolm Muggeridge said years ago, that is now more true than ever...

"There is something, to me, very sinister about this emergence of a weird kind of conformity, or orthodoxy, particularly among the people who operate the media, so that you can tell in advance exactly what they will say and think about anything. It is true that so far they have not got an Inquisition to enforce their orthodoxy, but they do have ways of enforcing it which make the old thumbscrews and racks seem quite paltry..."

He said that in his book Christ and the Media, back in 1977, believe it or not....long before our current level of mass-media doublethink was really evident, and long before the current spate of inquisitions began.
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Re: A Dawkins No-No

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Immanuel Can wrote: Thu Apr 22, 2021 5:55 pm Richard Dawkins has been stripped of his 1996 Humanist of the Year Award for posting the following on Twitter:

Richard Dawkins
@RichardDawkins
In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.

Discuss.


Discuss?
Please cite source!
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Immanuel Can
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Re: A Dawkins No-No

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Sculptor wrote: Fri Apr 23, 2021 4:17 pm Please cite source!
"Twitter." Go check Dawkins own account.
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Re: A Dawkins No-No

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Immanuel Can wrote: Fri Apr 23, 2021 4:19 pm
Sculptor wrote: Fri Apr 23, 2021 4:17 pm Please cite source!
"Twitter." Go check Dawkins own account.
I'd rather poke myself in the eye with a blunt stick.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: A Dawkins No-No

Post by Immanuel Can »

Sculptor wrote: Fri Apr 23, 2021 4:20 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: Fri Apr 23, 2021 4:19 pm
Sculptor wrote: Fri Apr 23, 2021 4:17 pm Please cite source!
"Twitter." Go check Dawkins own account.
I'd rather poke myself in the eye with a blunt stick.
You have your source. You won't find any you can trust more, at least on the matter of what Dawkins said.
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Re: A Dawkins No-No

Post by Terrapin Station »

Immanuel Can wrote: Fri Apr 23, 2021 4:21 pm
Good posts above. I agree with both.
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Re: A Dawkins No-No

Post by vegetariantaxidermy »

I just don't get how Twitter has managed to wield so much power in such a short time.
I created an account a couple of years ago for the sole purpose of seeing what all the fuss was about and still haven't worked out how to make comments or do anything with it. There is also nothing 'social' about it.
I couldn't find any of these 'twitter storms' that we keep hearing about.
What am I missing?
Last edited by vegetariantaxidermy on Sat Apr 24, 2021 3:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: A Dawkins No-No

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Dawkins is getting old and as you get old you get more grouchy. There are only few who mellow out instead. He notices all the stupid shit happening now including three quarters of the garbage which qualifies as political correctness. He may not be the most pleasant character, but his views certainly manifest a Weltanschauung more in sync with reality than 90% of what's proclaimed as such on philosophy forums or other forums like it.
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