New Atheists vs. Social Justice Warriors

In the middle of my JULIA & BUDDY production I took the time to address the issue of Richard Dawkins vs. Adam Lee on July 6. It isn't only them though, but what they represent - New Atheists vs. Social Justice Warriors.

In case you aren't familiar with the terminologies - "New Atheists" are generally considered to be lead by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett, and until he shuffled off this mortal coil, Christopher Hitchens.

Since Hitchens is gone other atheists are up for being considered as the fourth of the Four Horsemen of atheism - see the Wiki I linked to above. Steven Pinker is one of the most prominent runners-up, and I think the most appropriate - like the others he is devoted to explaining human behavior through evolutionary psychology, a research theory that posits among other things that women have evolved to be more monogamous than men, and less capable, innately, at math and science ways of thinking than men, which is why, as Larry Summers famously argued, women don't have as successful careers in STEM.

And Hitchen's own personal contribution to this mighty theory is that women have evolved to be unfunny. Outside of the New Atheist bubble, Hitchens is known as the guy who said women aren't funny. Serves the asshole right.

The New Atheists also tend towards xenophobia, especially against Muslims, most likely in a terrified response to the 9-11 attacks. Sam Harris is especially awful in this respect, justifying torture and promoting ethnic profiling in security checks.

I've discussed my objections to the New Atheist celebrity leaders throughout this blog, right from the very beginning if you count Pinker, who has flirted with the edges of more hard-core sociobiology - the racial aspect - through his publicly proclaimed intellectual affiliation with right-wing operative Razib Khan.

While Pinker has no trouble citing Khan to back up his own work, he has stated that Stephen Jay Gould's critical views on evolutionary psychology should be discounted due to Gould's leftist political leanings. Although as far as I know Gould was never an actual political operative like Razib Khan.

Pinker's absolute, shameless, blatant hypocrisy on this issue should be more widely-known and should certainly give anybody pause when deciding whether to worship Pinker as a Great Man of Atheism, along with those other seriously flawed celebrity atheists.

On the other side are the Social Justice Warriors, who are just as obnoxious as the New Atheists, but in different, and sometimes opposite ways. I haven't been criticizing Social Justice Warriors for as long as New Atheists, but I have certainly been doing so a lot lately. Surprisingly there is no entry in Wikipedia for Social Justice Warrior - I will probably remedy that soon - perhaps because the term is less well-known, although Richard Dawkins has been using the term lately. But science fiction writer Will Shetterly, while not the coiner of the term, has been most prominent in using the term, even writing a book about SJWs.

SJWs have well-known proponents, although they don't have the celebrity status of the leading New Atheists. But SJWs tend to think and act in mobs anyway, through the power of social media aggregation, and so are less likely to stand alone as an individual celebrity.

One of the most prominent SJWs is Mikki Kendall, whom readers of this blog know I have a personal beef with: several years ago she used her Tumblr account to proclaim me, by name, as a "racist." This was because some friend of hers I argued with on Facebook decided I was a racist because I defended John Lennon and Yoko Ono's use of the N word in a song written 40 years ago. They used the N word to make a serious political point about sexism, not to attack African Americans. But you can't reason with a SJW mob. They know what they know and anybody who argues with them is automatically a racist.

The power of Google-bombing a person's name is still under-discussed in the media, considering how much power it has to harm people, and legally. Google suggests that if you don't like what somebody is saying about you, which is showing up in Google results, ask them to take it down. But if you ask a SJW to take it down, that only confirms your guilt in their mind, and they will simply post even more links, to make their defamation against you go even higher in Google results.

Kendall was joined in her Tumblr smear of me by K. Tempest Bradford, also via Tumblr. Bradford is a science fiction writer, and included by Shetterly in his blog on SJWs. I had a Facebook exchange with Bradford during which I asked her to stop smearing me, and I found it fascinating that Bradford basically excused the smears on the grounds that I was rude to friends of hers when I argued with them. In other words, smearing me as a racist was justifiable payback for my bad manners. I will have more to say about Bradford's response, and the attitudes of SJWs generally as soon as I get a chance.

In any case, I concluded on July 6 that both sides are idiots.

However, I must acknowledge that Richard Dawkins has scored one for the New Atheists by this statement, made with Ophelia Benson:

It’s not news that allies can’t always agree on everything. People who rely on reason rather than dogma to think about the world are bound to disagree about some things. 

Disagreement is inevitable, but bullying and harassment are not. If we want secularism and atheism to gain respect, we have to be able to disagree with each other without trying to destroy each other.
In other words we have to be able to manage disagreement ethically, like reasonable adults, as opposed to brawling like enraged children who need a nap. It should go without saying, but this means no death threats, rape threats, attacks on people’s appearance, age, race, sex, size, haircut; no photoshopping people into demeaning images, no vulgar epithets. 

Richard adds: I’m told that some people think I tacitly endorse such things even if I don’t indulge in them. Needless to say, I’m horrified by that suggestion. Any person who tries to intimidate members of our community with threats or harassment is in no way my ally and is only weakening the atheist movement by silencing its voices and driving away support.

Bravo.

I was one of those who pointed out that Dawkins had a responsibility to denounce the shitstorm of rape and death threats that his ill-considered personal attack on Rebecca Watson inspired, and so even if this statement is three years late, it's something.

To give you a sense of how it should be done, recall that idiot Twitterer Suey Park called for the Colbert Report to be cancelled because of her own obtuseness (deliberate or not) over Colbert's parody of the Redskins football team name. I'm still not entirely convinced that Park is not a sock puppet of some right-wing think tank - her friendship with Michelle pro-Japanese-internment Malkin alone is extremely suspicious. But she could be real, and just a garden-variety dumbass Social Justice Warrior.

When his show returned after the weekend, Colbert defended himself, in character, but while he was doing it he said:

"Now all of this was started by a hash tag activist, or hashtivist, who has been viciously attacked on Twitter, and if anyone is doing that for me I want you to stop it right now. She's just speaking her mind and that's what Twitter is for..."

And that's how it's done. But Colbert is an entertainer and while his show and the Daily Show has a clear demographic, they can't speak only as the leaders of a self-selected group of people.

And that's what makes them different from both New Atheists and Social Justice Warriors, who tend to live in their respective bubbles. So New Atheists will make the most outrageous claims about the religious and religion in general without providing evidence, and as if all New Atheists live in a world in which they don't have to co-exist with religious people - including close friends and relatives.

Social Justice Warriors are perhaps more insidious - under the guise of social justice they will attack anybody, even allies, or perhaps especially allies, who ventures even slightly out of the political correctness compound, or who even leave themselves open to the slightest misinterpretation, as in the Colbert controversy. They are so in love with their self-image as defenders of justice that they will try to invent cases of injustice so they can get their superhero tights on and fight it.

Of course the New Atheists have their own dreams of glory - they like to imagine themselves standing tall against the forces of ignorance and superstition and, in their most misguided logical leap, terrorism which they equate with Islam. And so they support stupidities like the outcry against the "9-11 mosque." I went to the counter-demonstration.

Now it appears that Richard Dawkins was not getting off on the power of having his slavish New Atheist followers attack feminist atheists - especially but by no means only Rebecca Watson - at least if Dawkins was to be believed. He apparently was oblivious the the phenomenon, or at least didn't seem to understand he might have the power to reduce the viciousness through speaking up against it. Well now he has, so let's see if it works.

So that gives New Atheists a boost over Social Justice Warriors at this point - I consider Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism to be a SJW because he censored me when I suggested that certain of Ayn Rand's literary output might have been due to Ayn Rand possibly having an autism spectrum condition. He told me to STFU and allowed his good buddy Azkyroth to attack me as someone out to hurt people with Asperger's.

And mind you, I had been contributing to the discussion of Atlas Shrugged on Lee's blog for months, and had shown no indication of wanting to harm anybody with Asperger's. But that does not matter - when a SJW has their hero tights on, you cannot reason with them any more.

It's issues having to do with brain functionality that is one of the big problems with Social Justice Warriors. Just as it is unacceptable to use gender and race and other physical features to suggest a difference in emotional/intellectual expression, they believe it is also unacceptable to even discuss the possibility that conditions like Asperger's, or even mental illness might have an influence on the way a person expresses themselves.

You can see it in Greta Christina's response to somebody suggesting that the disgusting "Amazing Atheist" might have a mental illness:

Brian Walsh @ #13: Please don’t do that. The idea that hateful and vile people must be mentally ill gets trotted out a lot (it did with the Elliot Rodger shooting), and it’s very problematic. It diminishes responsibility for hateful and vile behavior. It marginalizes people who are mentally ill, perpetuating the idea that we’re dangerous and/or evil. And it disproportionately gets used to protect white people. (As has been pointed out many times by many people: When a white person shoots a bunch of people, they’re mentally ill. When a black person does it, they’re a thug. When a brown person does it, they’re a terrorist.) Please don’t do it. Thanks.

Please note that she doesn't present an argument for why the Amazing Atheist is not mentally ill - she proclaims that it is unacceptable to suggest that anybody who is hateful and vile has a mental illness.

Just as it is unacceptable to Lee and company for anyone to speculate that Ayn Rand might have had Asperger's. Because friends of Adam Lee and Greta Christina (or apparently Christina herself) have Asperger's and mental illness. And so you must not ever say that anybody who is bad might have the same condition. 

This is censorship, plain and simple. They think they are promoting social justice, but what they are doing instead is making areas of discussion taboo. And demonizing anybody who wants to explore that area of discussion.

Social Justice Warriors are wrong in this. Wrong and stupid. And they need to admit that their censorship and shaming attempts are wrong. And chances are they never will - they believe in their own absolute correctness and moral superiority and you dare not attempt to argue with them or they will have no qualms about smearing you and attributing all kinds of evil against you. And then they will censor you, so you cannot argue back. 

That's what Dawkins and company mean by "witch hunts" and they do have a point. So New Atheist are slightly up on Social Justice Warriors in my book.

Until the next horrific thing they do/say/support. Tune in for future reports.

Why SJWs are no better than New Atheists

I've been blogging lately about the fights between the New Atheists and Social Justice Warriors, of whom I've presented Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism as a leading example, especially since he tangled directly with Richard Dawkins as a result of writing a column attacking Dawkins in the British newspaper The Guardian.

But in his response to Bill Maher and Sam Harris vs. Ben Affleck, Lee demonstrated why SJWs and New Atheists are fundamentally the same: they hold simple-minded views of religion and human cultures.

Although he has some reservations, Lee basically agrees with Sam Harris and Bill Maher about Islam:

On the other hand, it’s not true, as defenders of Islam like Affleck have claimed, that Islam is a basically peaceful religion hijacked by a small minority of violent extremists. Even if you disregard terrorism and other non-state actors, nearly all of the countries where Islam holds power are repressive, illiberal theocracies.

This passage represents, perfectly, the ass-backwardness that SJWs and New Atheists share. Lee believes that because many countries that have repressive governments have a majority Muslim population, it means that the cause of the repression are the tenets of Islam itself.

Anybody who is not a half-wit can see through this mind-set by considering: the tenets of Christianity have not changed a jot since they were codified in the Bible, and yet majority-Christian nations are less repressive now than they were in the past. Clearly the cause-and-effect breaks down here.

The remarkable thing about the New Atheists and atheist SJWs like Adam Lee is that they attribute as much power to holy writings - to the actual words and prayers and books -  as any religionist does. Sweet mother of irony.

The mental model that they all use to comprehend the world was called by anthropologist Marvin Harris, "idealism" which he discusses in his book Cultural Materialism:

The intuition that thought determines behavior arises from the limited temporal and cultural perspective of ordinary experience. Conscious thoughts in the form of plans and itineraries certainly help individuals and groups to find a path through the daily complexities of social life. But these plans and itineraries merely chart the selection of preexisting behavioral "mazeways." Even in the most permissive societies and the richest in alternative roles, the planned actions - lunch, a lovers' tryst, an evening at the theater - are never conjured up out of thin air but are drawn from the inventory of recurrent scenes characteristic of that particular culture. The issue of behavioral versus mental determinism is not a matter of whether the mind guides action, but whether the mind determines the selection of the inventory of culturally actionable thoughts. As Schopenhauer said, "We want what we will, but we don't will what we want." Thus the human intuition concerning the priority of thought over behavior is worth just about as much as our human intuition that the earth is flat. To insist on the priority of mind in culture is to align one's understanding of socio-cultural phenomena with the anthropological equivalent of pre-Darwinian biology or pre-Newtonian physics. It is to believe in what Freud called "the omnipotence of thought." Such a belief is a form of intellectual infantilism that dishonors our species-given powers of thought. (Cultural Materialism, pp. 59 - 60)

"Intellectual infantilism" - that's exactly it. That's what Bill Maher, Sam Harris and Adam Lee all share.

And bonus in that passage above - Harris quotes Schopenhauer's immortal observation about free will (or absence thereof) - which I also quoted in my play JULIA & BUDDY. (And on my Facebook profile too, if you want to know.)

It should be noted that Sam Harris, along with all the other New Atheists, is a devotee of evolutionary psychology, which would seem to be mutually exclusive with idealism but evo-psycho doesn't have much to say about changes to human behavior that happen in a less-than-evolutionary time span, so it's useless when trying to explain, say, the changes in the relationship of nations and religions from the Enlightenment to the present. So they resort to the default mind-set of any common ignoramus.

Islam provides the "inventory of culturally actionable thoughts" but the impulse to violent behavior does not arise from reading the Koran any more than it arises from reading the Bible - the Koran and the Bible provide only a framework in which the violence - in response to infrastructural causes - happens.

But it's easier to be intellectually infantile, and so that's what SJWs and New Atheists do.

Who are the "New Atheists"?

While I wasn't paying attention, it has been decided that the "New Atheists" would now represent atheism. The "New Atheists" as far as I have been able to discern, are not in the least different from old-school atheists on the question of gods. So in general, I am certainly on the side of any atheists, New or not. Unfortunately, the "New Atheists" are a bunch of douchebags, and it annoys me that they are the go-to guys - and of course this group of careerist public intellectuals are a gang of guys - on the issue of atheism.

The biggest douchebag of all is Christopher Hitchens. Even if he hadn't been a Bush/Iraq supporter, he would have achieved the Congressional Medal of Douchebag (the first of these was bestowed by Jon Stewart on Robert Novak) through this piece of misogyny in Vanity Fair: Why Women Aren't Funny. Read this and then consider - he was actually paid to publish this addle-brained piece of useless shit.

The next biggest douchebag is probably Sam Harris, the one I knew the least about before he was declared New Atheist. He argued in the Huffington Post that Islam is more likely to create terrorism than any other religion. This is just plain wrong. It isn't any religion that creates terrorism - it's the infrastructure - religion is just an excuse and it just so happened that the region currently producing terrorists is primarily populated by Muslims. Christianity, with its "Prince of Peace" is no less likely to produce violence.

The other two official New Atheists are Evolutionary Psychologists - Richard Dawkins and Daniel C. Dennett, which is a completely bankrupt approach to human culture - but I've blogged about that extensively at cultural-materialism.org

But since these are all famous public intellectuals, forming a kewl boys club of atheist mavericks of course they're going to get all the attention, and all the religious folk will start to think of them as the four popes of atheism.

I don't want to be represented by douchebags and evolutionary psychologists. And if the commenter on Pharyngula is actually Dawkins, as claimed, [comment #120] well Dawkins is kind of a douchebag too.

Why Sam Harris is a second-rate thinker, at best

I'm taking a temporary break from examining the ravings of Cotton Mather to examine the ravings of one of the heroes of the so-called "New Atheist" movement, Sam Harris.

To be a "New" Atheist you can't just disbelieve in deities and magic and all other varieties of woo. You have to be xenophobic too.

The New Atheists are so xenophobic, they actually privilege Christianity over other religions. Previously my go-to example was Richard Dawkins' statement in his book The God Delusion:

"There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse."

But as of September 19, 2012, Sam Harris has provided me with a much more stunning example:

 The spectrum between rational belief and self-serving delusion has some obvious increments: It is one thing to believe that Jesus existed and was probably a remarkable human being. It is another to accept, as most Christians do, that he was physically resurrected and will return to earth to judge the living and the dead. It is yet another leap of faith too far to imagine, as all good Mormons must, that he will work his cosmic magic from the hallowed ground of Jackson County, Missouri. 

That final, provincial detail matters. It makes Mormonism objectively less plausible than run-of-the-mill Christianity—as does the related claim that Jesus visited the “Nephites” in America at some point after his resurrection. The moment one adds seer stones, sacred underpants, the planet Kolob, and a secret handshake required to win admittance into the highest heaven, Mormonism stands revealed for what it is: the religious equivalent of rhythmic gymnastics.

He literally states that "Mormonism (is) objectively less plausible" than Christianity.  From which we can infer that Sam Harris believes that one set of myths is "objectively" more plausible than another.

Sam Harris actually thinks that because Mormons have additional myths related to the physical resurrection of Jesus, it makes Mormonism less believable than Christianity.

Harris must have only a vague acquaintance with the many and varied myths associated with Christianity, so if he wants to play "which religion is more implausible" I'm ready to go:

• Mormons don't believe that Jesus' mother Mary was assumed into Heaven on her death. They think she just died like anybody else. 

So chalk one up for Mormons on the "more plausible" side.

Clearly this way lies madness. This is not atheism. This is bullshit disguised as atheism in the defense of xenophobia.

Previously I thought that New Atheists pulled the "Christianity is better" line exclusively against Islam. But here we see that Christianity is also claimed better than Mormonism.

So what does Mormonism and Islam have in common? They're less familiar to the New Atheists than Christianity. Because fundamentally, the New Atheists are conservatives, even if only Christopher Hitchens was obvious about it.

Harris claims to be a liberal in the post I link to:

I am no fan of Romney’s, and I would find the prospect of his presidency risible if it were not so depressing, but he did accurately detect the first bleats of fear in the Obama administration’s reaction to this crisis. Romney got the timing of events wrong—confusing, as many did, a statement made by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo for an official government response to the murder of Americans in Libya. But the truth is that the White House struck the same note of apology, disavowing the offending speech while claiming to protect free speech in principle. It may seem a small detail, given the heat of the moment—but so is a quivering lip.

His view of the United States governments' standard diplomatic response to an international crisis is that it's appeasement - a view indistinguishable from that of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

To truly understand the New Atheist paranoid, xenophobic view of adherents of non Judeo-Christianity, consider Harris's statement in the same article I link to:

Some percentage of the world’s Muslims—Five percent? Fifteen? Fifty? It’s not yet clear—is demanding that all non-Muslims conform to the strictures of Islamic law.

Harris has no idea what percentage of the world's Muslims (there are 1.5 billion of them) are making this demand. He throws out as high as 50% but he has nothing to go on. But that doesn't stop him from making the convenient assumption that it is a significant, worrisome percentage.

There are fanatics in every religion. But it is the New Atheist party line to suggest that Islam is more likely to produce religious fanaticism. And their reason is very different from the one given by most anthropologists or sociologists: the socio-economic conditions in the parts of the world that happen to have a high percentage of Muslims.

No, the New Atheists actually believe that it is the mythology of Islam itself that produces violence.

You only need to have the most basic grasp of the history of Christianity to know that it was responsible for holy wars, burning witches, and the Inquisition.

And if you have any grasp of the foundations of logic it would occur to you: Christians believe in the "more plausible" doctrine of the bodily resurrection of Jesus just as much now as they did in the days of the Inquisition. And the raging homicidal Jehovah is, to this very day, in the Old Testament, advising his people on the best way to treat slaves; and wiping out entire cities. And so since the mythologies haven't changed, they can't have had any effect on the change in behavior of their believers.

It's not the mythologies that religious people believe in that make them violent. To paraphrase Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign - it's the socio-economy, stupid.

I would go so far as to suggest that evolutionary psychology is to blame for the Neo-con New Atheists's inability to admit to the socio-economic factors that control human behavior. Dawkins is a leading proponent of evolutionary psychology and Harris appears to believe in evolutionary ethics, although I have yet to link him to "evolutionary psychology" specifically. But a faith in what was once called sociobiology seems to be just as much a part of being a New Atheist as xenophobia. That's why, although Hitchens never actually bothered to learn the basics of the evolutionary psychology system, he argued, half-assed, that women were essentially not funny thanks to evolution.

Although evolutionary psychology proponents give lip service to nurture, in fact they are utterly reflexive about attributing everything to nature. As David Buller demonstrated when he pointed out that David Buss was claiming that female sexual slavery was an example of female sexual preference.

Although EPs sometimes claim that religion itself is an adaptation, that doesn't help much when you are claiming that some religions produce more virtuous behavior than others. And since EPs reflexively discount historical and socio-economic conditions as an explanation for human behavior, what do they have left to explain current events?

The term is "idealism." They don't examine the complex social conditions, they fall back on what the ideologies say.

For an important comparison of the competing explanation of the way human societies work, see R. Brian Ferguson's "Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why Yanomami make war." (the link will download a PDF) Although it's important to understand that while the New Atheists fall into the biological camp when it comes to explaining Yanomami warfare, they fall into the "cultural" camp - a better term is "idealist" - when it comes to explaining religions. They look at what the culture claims about itself, not the socio-economic infrastructure that shaped the culture. And Ferguson, Marvin Harris and I fall into the "materialist" camp, sometimes known as cultural materialism.

But whether EP is to blame or not, there is no excuse for someone who apparently makes a living as a public atheist intellectual to display such astoundingly shoddy thinking when it comes to the relative "plausibility" of religions.

And it's truly embarrassing to me as an atheist for Sam Harris to be touted as some kind of intellectual superstar of atheism. He's a second-rate thinker, at best.

Excellent article in The Nation about how Sam Harris, in addition to Hitchens, made common cause with the Bush administration.

My theory on why the New Atheists are so freaked out by women these days, plus my ancient argument with Amanda Marcotte

Last week I blogged about the latest skirmish in the ongoing war of Social Justice Warriors and New Atheists. They are at it again this week.

The New Atheists came off worse in their claims that Adam Lee had smeared Richard Dawkins in the piece he wrote in the Guardian.

First Adam Lee's own cluelessness, which is admittedly relatively minor sin in comparison. He's responding here to Dawkins' whining on Jerry Coyne's blog:

I, on the other hand, am an atheist blogger who writes articles. When people say things I disagree with, sometimes I write articles criticizing them.

Lee is trying to present himself as a nobody blogger in comparison to big celebrity Richard Dawkins. But this is either disingenuous or stupid or stupendously obtuse. Dawkins wasn't responding to a nobody blogging, he was responding because the piece was published in the Guardian. Most Americans have never heard of the Guardian, but surely Lee realizes that it's a huge fucking deal in England, especially to liberal Britons - it's like the New Yorker and the New York Times rolled into one publication. 

But that's nothing compared to the New Atheists. As usual Dawkins reveals himself to be a thin-skinned drama queen:

I long ago declared that I would not wish to go on living if I found myself in a world dominated by people who no longer care about what’s true and express open contempt for factual evidence. Either a 1984 world where the Party in power is the sole arbiter of what is “true” and enforces it with violence; or a world where truth is whatever society deems it to be, regardless of evidence, and where dissenters are ruthlessly punished by vitriolic abuse or ostracism rather than violence. 

I fear we are sleepwalking towards that feared world, where people shun evidence and despise facts: a world where dogma is king, emotion is queen and evidence is exiled; and where dissent from orthodoxy is suppressed by verbal if not physical jackboots. 

The hypocrisy is strong with Richard Dawkins. But Rebecca Watson already handily nailed Dawkins for that in her parody of his infamous (and yes, sexist) "Dear Muslima" letter.

Before continuing further with the sins of Richard Dawkins I should say that I'm not at all surprised that Jerry Coyne attacked Lee on Dawkins' behalf - although I was once an admirer of Coyne (just as Lee was once an admirer of Dawkins) and read his blog regularly, I gave up on him for his support of evolutionary psychology, worship of the New Atheist assholes and disgusting Islamaphobia. And his complaint about Lee's article is truly pitiful:

It’s one-sided, quoting only the anti-Dawkins Usual Suspects, and accuses not only Dawkins but Sam Harris of “ignorant sexism.”

Where does Coyne get the idea that an editorial has to be two-sided? Lee was saying that Dawkins and Harris have said sexist things and it seems to be a pattern. Does Coyne really expect Lee to take a survey of non-sexist things Dawkins and Harris have said and present those in some absurd effort at "balance"? The guy is making an argument here, not writing a documentary.

Lee provides links to Dawkins' own words. Coyne could have argued that Lee is misunderstanding Dawkins (although I think not) but he doesn't even bother because he's too busy having the vapors that somebody criticized his hero:

I won’t bother to dissect it in detail because reading it makes me ill.

But nobody has the vapors like Richard Dawkins:

I fear we are sleepwalking towards that feared world, where people shun evidence and despise facts: a world where dogma is king, emotion is queen and evidence is exiled; and where dissent from orthodoxy is suppressed by verbal if not physical jackboots. 

Unfortunately, thanks to the influence of Social Justice Warriors on our present discourse, Dawkins isn't completely wrong about exiling evidence. Not that Dawkins is innocent of doing that, himself, but I'll get to that in the section on my theory (below).

I lost respect for Adam Lee precisely because of his disdain for evidence - he censored me on his blog while allowing a friend of his to claim I was out to get people on the autism spectrum because I speculated that Ayn Rand might be on the spectrum. Allowing his friend to shriek slanders about me, on the basis of no evidence was clearly perfectly acceptable to Adam Lee. So he is, unfortunately, not a good argument against Dawkins' worries concerning evidence.

And then there is Amanda Marcotte - in her latest Nation column, which is excellent, Katha Pollitt addresses the New Atheist misogyny (although she doesn't mention the Lee piece in the Guardian) and writes admiringly of Marcotte:

Alas, the ability to take such instruction is in good part something Sam Harris thinks women sadly lack. “There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women,” said the bestselling author of The End of Faith. “The atheist variable just has this—it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.” It seems to me, judging from recent events, that atheist men are the fragile flowers here—they, not women, are the ones wilting under criticism. Perhaps they can’t stand it that women are withholding that “extra estrogen vibe” that used to make conferences so much fun. (Amanda Marcotte, of the steel-trap mind, has a fine time slapping Harris around at Pandagon. Remind me never to get into a fight with her.)

I did get into a fight with Marcotte, on Facebook three years ago, which you can read here. I was not at all impressed by Marcotte's steel-trap mind. Marcotte had written a book review in which she suggested that Internet porn was misogynist because of the attitudes of Larry Flynt, Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione. She then maintained in our Facebook discussion that most online porn was misogynist but when I asked her for evidence she declined to present any. And when I presented evidence to make a point about straight vs. gay pornography Marcotte pulled this:

• 

  Amanda Marcotte Nancy, I may be pro-porn, but I'm going to defriend you for posting porn on my page. My mom looks at this.

I didn't "post porn" on her page, I posted a link to a gay porn site as evidence that gay men's porn included some of the same activities that Marcotte and friends were claiming was innately misogynist. When confronted with an argument based on evidence, Marcotte used her mother's delicate sensibilities to derail the argument. Which was not only sleazy but outrageously hypocritical - it was Marcotte herself who posted the link to her discussion of porn on her page. Apparently that was OK for her mother.

It's interesting that Pollitt herself argued my side of the issue against Gloria Steinem years ago (although I haven't yet found the reference online.) I doubt that Steinem's mind is inferior to Marcotte's.

My theory on why the New Atheists are so freaked out by women these days

It must be said that nobody shuns evidence like people who promote evolutionary psychology, which includes all the New Atheists. Atheism is not a religion - but evolutionary psychology is the religion of the New Atheists.

I've talked a lot about evolutionary psychology on this blog, so I won't go into everything that's wrong with it, but Dawkins' view of women is entirely dependent on the gender essentialism of evo psycho. In the New Atheist mind, claiming that women don't want as many sex partners as men or claiming that women are innately less interested in a "critical posture" as men is not misogyny, it's just science. And the fact that they have no evidence at all that it's women's nature to be these things is not a problem. Having a theory based on pure untestable speculation is good enough for them. And when scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould criticized their theories, they launched personal attacks against him for his political leanings (as Pinker did) or for his failure to be polite once (as Dawkins did on the Pharyngula web site - Dawkins shared a personal anecdote that Gould was too dead to respond to.)

The huge problem here is the inability of evo psycho advocates to comprehend the importance of economics to gender roles. I've been mulling this over quite a bit lately and I have a theory about it: factors impacting women directly are considered of no relevance to the fundamental human condition by New Atheists (and many others), but instead are categorized in their minds as "women's issues." Issues such as equal pay for women, sexual harassment, etc. have no real impact on their theories of the world. 

And so they have completely ignored the gradual but growing economic independence of women over the past 50 years. This independence changes utterly the balance of power between men and women that has existed for millenia, and that of course changes everything else about human society.

Which is why the twenty-first century is such a trial for Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker and Jerry Coyne and intellectually-old-before-his-time Sam Harris. They feel hounded over trivialities while they want to talk about serious issues.

From their perspective all they are doing is making casual conversation infused with evolutionary psychology good sense about the nature and predilections of women - a minor topic, really - and inexplicably they are ruthlessly punished by vitriolic abuse of incomprehensible meanies.

I will give Marcotte this - her response to Harris is enjoyably snarky. But even better from my perspective, she highlights evidence that supports my theory of New Atheists towards "women's issues" - he's supremely dismissive:

Again, the acerbic tone that offends him so greatly that he goes into italics-bonanza mode should suggest perhaps that he is not as masculine and tough and women are not as soft and receding as he thinks. On average, even. Also, the reason a lot of women hated Hitchens is Hitchens thought we were inferior by dint of biology. I find that offensive whether you say it gently or say it acerbically. It’s the content, not the tone. Or, as the calm, rational manly man Harris would write, it’s the content, not the tone.

I believe that a less “angry,” more “nurturing” style of discourse might attract more women to the cause of atheism.

He gave this its own paragraph. Because every rational person knows that saying things repeatedly makes them more true.

However, I haven’t spent even five minutes thinking about how or whether to modify my writing or speaking style so as to accomplish this.

I want to be offended that Sam Harris admits he cannot be bothered to think about women beyond just dismissing us outright, but honestly, all I ever think about him is dismissive, so I guess we’re even? At least I have reasons for my dismissive attitude.

But this part towards the end of Marcotte's snarkfest is most amusing from my perspective. First Marcotte quotes Harris, then responds:

How much is explained by normally distributed psychological differences between the sexes? I have no idea, but I am confident that each of these factors plays a role. Anyone who thinks disparities of this kind must be entirely a product of sexism hasn’t thought about these issues very deeply.

It might be 50% that women are inferior. It might only 25%. Have you considered that it’s 95% that women are inferior? All I’m saying it it cannot all be sexism. Because reasons. By the way, have I told you I don’t think there’s a god?

If you read my argument with Marcotte, she is equally vague and unconcerned with evidence as Sam Harris is, in supporting her claims that most pornography is misogynist. But that was three years ago - maybe she learned to respect evidence since then.

And when it comes to Sam Harris, this question cannot be asked often enough:
Why does anyone take Sam Harris seriously?

New Atheists vs. Social Justice Warriors - round 2

When I last blogged about the ongoing war between the New Atheists (most prominently represented by Richard cranky old man Dawkins) and the SJWs (lead by Adam censorship Lee) the New Atheists were on top thanks to Dawkins being less obnoxious than usual.

But thanks to Dawkins remembering who he really is, and Sam Harris never forgetting, the Social Justice Warriors are back on top.

Lee had an op-ed about Dawkins in the Guardian recently: Richard Dawkins has lost it: ignorant sexism gives atheism a bad name:

But over the last few months, Dawkins showed signs of détente with his feminist critics – even progress. He signed a joint letter with the writer Ophelia Benson, denouncing and rejecting harassment; he even apologized for the “Dear Muslima” letter. On stage at a conference in Oxford in August, Dawkins claimed to be a feminist and said that everyone else should be, too. 

Then another prominent male atheist, Sam Harris, crammed his foot in his mouth and said that atheist activism lacks an “estrogen vibe” and was “to some degree intrinsically male”. And, just like that, the brief Dawkins Spring was over. 

On Twitter these last few days, Dawkins has reverted to his old, sexist ways and then some. He’s been very busy snarling about how feminists are shrill harridans who just want an excuse to take offense, and how Harris’s critics (and his own) are not unlike thought police witch-hunter lynch mobs. Dawkins claimed that his critics are engaged in “clickbait for profit”, that they “fake outrage”, and that he wished there were some way to penalize them.  

For good measure, Dawkins argued that rape victims shouldn’t be considered trustworthy if they were drinking.

I was just discussing evolutionary psychology with anthropologist David Price and others on Facebook today, thanks to this excellent criticism in the Nation, and right in the middle I saw the story about that idiot Sam Harris - Harris claims that atheism and skepticism are innately masculine.

Although I despise Harris for his right-wing hideousness (supporting ethnic profiling, torture, and opposing gun control), and general stupidity, he was the only member of the New Atheist "four horsemen" (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Pinker) whom I thought I had no reason to accuse of misogyny. I should have known better.

As always, the main question about Sam Harris is this: Why does anyone take Sam Harris seriously? 

Favorite quote from that article, which is over a year and a half old but still relevant:

Before delving further into this NRA wet-dream of an essay, let us reflect on an important facet of Harris’s personality. The common thread running through all of Harris’s logic-abortions, the key to understanding how a purported “intellectual” can be so consistently wrong and so morally repugnant, is his unbridled cowardice — both of the intellectual variety and an all-pervasive, crapping-his-pants fear that manifests itself in the form of sophistry and a brazen disregard for following the available evidence to its logical conclusion.

It is true though that SJWs like to engage in witchhunts as I found out myself directly when I was targeted by Mikki Kendall and K. Tempest Bradford, but I had a good laugh over Rebecca Watson's payback of Richard Dawkins' infamous Dear Muslima letter - Dawkins, Harris and friends like to imagine that if they get any criticism for the mind-bogglingly stupid, sexist things they say, they are the victims of a "witchhunt." 

For the record I don't consider Watson a SJW, although Mikki Kendall was promoted at least once on her Skepchick site. 

So the SJWs have won round 2 against the New Atheists. Now what group-think censorious awfulness will the SJWs come up with next to show that they, not New Atheists, are the biggest assholes? I expect we'll know within a month or so. 

New Atheists cover themselves in more shame

I've been too distracted lately to pay attention to the ongoing war between the Social Justice Warriors and the New Atheists, since the Bill Maher vs. Ben Affleck controversy, but I see that the New Atheists are still ahead in the obnoxiousness race right now.

Richard Dawkins can't seem to wrap his head around the concept of straight white male privilege.

Sam Harris is looking for stories of political correctness. He's probably still sore that he was criticized for defending torture and proposing ethnic profiling.

Michael Moore joins the Islamaphobia brigade. I always thought Moore was more likely to be a SJW than a New Atheist.

But the most telling item is the profoundly racist web site, American Renaissance, enthusiastically agreeing with an Islamaphobic editorial by Jerry Coyne.

American Renaissance has always loved the New Atheist brand of gender and sometimes ethnic essentialism expressed in evolutionary psychology - Steven Pinker and his best buddy Razib Khan are favorites. And now they can love the New Atheist xenophobia too.

But never count out the awfulness of the true Social Justice Warrior. More about that soon.

Swinging cats

Soon-Yi and Allen - I had to pass them because
they walk slow like a couple of tourists

You can't swing a cat without hitting a celebrity in this town. Today I went to a Meetup meeting for Philosophy over on the UES across the park from me and got to meet Massimo Pigliucci who was presenting a lecture with audience participation on the topic of morality vs. ethics. Of course he's not known outside of the world of philosophy, but he's a pretty big deal within it. I had heard the name before but I wasn't aware that Pigliucci was such a prominent critic of Sam Harris - I've been a non-prominent critic of Sam Harris for years on this blog.

After the meeting I found this excellent piece online, Reflections on the skeptic and atheist movements in which Pigliucci says:

I have already mentioned Harris, who writes about ethics with little acknowledgment (or understanding, or both) of just how complex a topic it is, and how much literature there is out there to engage with. As he infamously wrote in the first footnote of chapter 1 of The Moral Landscape, “Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy … [but] I am convinced that every appearance of terms like ‘metaethics,’ ‘deontology,’ … directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.” Why are we taking such a brazen display of anti-intellectualism as anything more than a clear mark of an overinflated ego? But far from that, Michael Shermer then builds on Harris’ point (or perhaps simply restates it, at much greater length), coming out with yet another “revolutionary” book about the science of ethics, predicated on an argument that had so many holes in it that I felt a bit embarrassed having to explain them in a public forum a couple of years ago [15].

Pigliucci goes after other New Atheists I've expressed dislike for, Dawkins and Hitchens, although he doesn't mention Steven Pinker in this piece (he does elsewhere though.) He also criticizes Neil deGrass Tyson, which surprised me, but then I wasn't aware that Tyson had dismissed philosophy. And he goes after P. Z. Myers, unfairly, I thought, although I will agree that his Pharyngula can get really nasty - but I found it much worse before everybody realized what an asshole Dawkins was. And of course Dawkins himself was a contributor to the nastiness of Myers' blog, as I found out directly through personal experience.

I also disagree with Myers on some issues, most especially his defense of identitarians (aka Social Justice Warriors) like Suey Park of #cancelcolbert infamy, and I tangled with him briefly over Hillary Clinton a couple of months ago on Twitter. But he's generally one of the good guys. And naturally he had plenty to say in response to Pigliucci.

I'm surprised it took me so long to really become acquainted with Pigliucci's critiques of the New Atheists, since he's especially well-qualified to defend philosophy from their attacks, being not only a long-time skeptic/atheist activist but also an evolutionary biologist as well as a philosopher. 

I came to know the New Atheist celebrities not through their various political controversies but through my disagreements with evolutionary psychology. Which I discovered via the anthropologist Marvin Harris, who criticized it back when it was known as sociobiology. 

And I came to philosophy also from Marvin Harris, through his criticism of Hegel (and the Hegelian dialectic) and his quoting Schopenhauer. In fact currently if you Google "Marvin Harris, Hegel, Schopenhauer" my blog post is the first hit.

So like so many New Atheist notions, the idea that philosophy is no longer of value, to be replaced by "real" science is overweening and absurd.

After the Philosophy-in-Manhattan Meetup, I walked home through Central Park when I was stuck on a path walking behind a slow couple in front of me. To my annoyance it was another one of these old man with a much younger woman couples, which I see so often on the Upper West Side due to old men using their wealth by buy women. But as I passed their slow asses I realized it was in fact Woody Allen and Soon-Yi. 

I once fantasized that if I ever ran into Woody Allen, whom I despise at least as much as New Atheists, I would kick him, but thanks to this natural experiment I have discovered I would not. But I still think he's a creep. And he walks like a freaking tourist.

All aboard the wingnut welfare gravy train with alt-right Claire Lehmann & white supremacist Jared Taylor

Alt-right Claire Lehmann is really proud of her boy Bo Winegard, so she keeps promoting his left-bashing work in Quillette.

Lehmann is especially solicitous of Winegard's career as we can see when she felt it was her duty to attack me as a " troll" for daring to point out that Bo Winegard is a hack taking wingnut welfare from alt-right promoters of racism like Claire Lehmann. With lots of dittos from her bot-like ditto-heads.

But then Lehmann as a member of the alt-right, seems to prefer men who promote "scientific" justifications for racism.

And it's mostly men, the ratio of men to women writing for Quillette is at best 10:1. This is no doubt partly due to Claire Lehmann's raging, obsessive, unhinged hatred of feminism.

But then Christiana Hoff Sommers has been riding the Koch brothers gravy train for decades in exchange for constantly attacking feminism, and no doubt Lehmann would like an easy wingnut welfare-style gig like that for herself. If in fact Quillette isn't already a direct vehicle for right-wing institutional funding, which would not surprise me a bit.

Quillette appears to be a way of rebranding the alt-right in order to make it appeal to centrists, and thanks to the assistance of New Atheists like Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne and Michael Shermer she's been making decent progress. It doesn't hurt that she is an advocate for the religion of New Atheists, evolutionary psychology, making a big to-do over James Damore, who was merely repeating everything that evolutionary psychology, human biodiversity and other hereditarians have been promoting for decades, ever since the Pioneer Fund paid people to come up with data proving the inferiority of blacks.

It cannot be pointed out often enough how right-wingers who typically side with corporations against workers suddenly find they no longer approve of "at will" laws like the one Google operates under in California. Funny how that works.

Alt-right Claire Lehmann often publishes the work of people who believe in the genetic inferiority of blacks. In addition to Bo Winegard and Ben Winegard, she's published the work of Brian Boutwell, Kevin Beaver, Razib Khan, Richard Haier, Jonathan Anomaly, Jordan Peterson, JC Barnes and probably many others.

Alt-right Claire Lehmann is undeniably part of the alt-right: she was a regular on alt-right Rebel Media while running Quillette, which was founded in 2015. Lehmann has appeared on Rebel Media as recently as 6 months ago. Rebel Media has featured the work of, in addition to Ezra Levant its founder, a creepy man with a bizarre love/hate obsession with Justin Trudeau, Gavin McInnes, Milo Yiannopoulos, Michael "pizzagate" Cernovich, Faith Goldy, Pamela Geller, Jack Posobiec and others. And of course Rebel Media adores Trump.

Quillette seems to be the perfect alt-right/evo-psycho pipeline to legitimacy thanks to the New Atheists and their fanboys. Here's another example: a piece by Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell titled On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism, first published in Quillette, is here republished in American Renaissance - presumably by permission.

So Bo Winegard (and his brother and Boutwell) aren't just hacks taking money from Quillette, they are hacks taking money from the unashamedly white supremacist Jared Taylor at American Renaissance.

Anybody who denies the connections between Quillette, often endorsed by Steven Pinker, and the alt-right is a liar.

My critique of Quillete and the theories of the evo-psycho bros have been perfectly rational - but because it's something that alt-right Claire Lehmann doesn't want to hear, she called me a troll, blocked me and accused me of bullying and smearing Bo Winegard. And Bo Winegard "just feels sorry for" me.

These people have no idea how laughably hypocritical they are.

Honey Man vs. Occam's Razor

I've been criticizing identitarians (aka Social Justice Warriors) quite a bit lately, but what about their arch-nemeses the New Atheists? I've been documenting both sides of this public idiocy coin for a couple of years now, including their mutual contempt society.

So what have those New Atheists been up to?

Well it appears that Sam Harris is continuing to be a complete asshole but I will have to address that later because right now

Richard Dawkins is still obsessed with Mohammed Ahmed, the kid who was arrested when his Texas school teachers thought the clock he made for a class project was a bomb.


Now I'm sure Dawkins has heard of Occam's Razor, which is:

(a) principle stated by the Scholastic philosopher William of Ockham (1285–1347/49) that pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” The principle gives precedence to simplicity: of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. The principle is also expressed as “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.

The simplest explanation of Mohammed Ahmed's arrest would be this:

• American schools have been the scene of weapons-based violence in recent years.
• Texas is a state notorious for its anti-Muslim sentiments as this Houston Press article demonstrates - written before the Mohammed Ahmed incident.
• These two facts contributed to a Texas school over-reacting when a kid named Mohammad Ahmed came into school with a rebuilt clock - they had him arrested for fear it was a bomb
• It was announced that Ahmed's family is suing the school district for 15 million and an apology. They say the kid's due process rights were violated.
• Lawsuits over handling of an arrest are not uncommon in the United States.

Conclusion: a Texas school's fearfulness over a teenager's science experiment led to an over-reaction and then an unsurprising lawsuit. 

Simple right? Or maybe just too simple for an Islamaphobe like Richard Dawkins. Dawkins was known as an Islamaphobe long before he ever heard of Ahmed Mohammed.

Using nothing more than hunches and suspicions Dawkins, supported by his sycophants and cheered on by right-wingers, has attempted to turn it into something much more complex. 

Dawkins tweeted his evidence-free suspicion that Mohammed Ahmed is not the victim of misjudgment but the perpetrator of a deliberate media scam.

Then, because the clock was not proven to Dawkins' satisfaction to be sufficiently original, Dawkins accused the kid again without any evidence of being the perpetrator of a deliberate hoax. 

The Twitter-verse, rightly, mocked Dawkins for his absurdity in picking on a 14-year-old kid's failure to live up to adult standards of inventiveness.

But Dawkins remained convinced of the kid's nefariousness and so when Mohammed's parents sued the Texas school district, Dawkins was ready to pounce.

First he doubled-down on the conspiracy theory that the kid deliberately made the clock look like a bomb.

Now remember, Dawkins never presented any evidence that the kid was a deliberate perpetrator of a clock-hoax or a media scam. He simply proceeds as if it was a settled case.

The real lesson Dawkins appears to have taken away from the negative response to his September tweets was that people dislike him for suggesting that a kid could be criticized like an adult. 

And so in order to demonstrate the children are just as culpable as adults, he tweeted this immortal tweet:

Now there are several things to note about this.

First, Dawkins seems to think that a 14-year-old is the prime instigator of the lawsuit against Texas. And because he makes this bizarre assumption, he then suggests that Ahmed isn't really a minor - by putting "kid" into quotes.

Second, he suggests that the 10-year-old in the photo is also culpable for his actions, even though the caption for the photo itself  - which Dawkins provided - says "child executioner... being forced by Isis militants to decapitate his victim.

It's as if Richard Dawkins does not come from this planet, and doesn't realize that minors generally are expected to obey the adults on whom they are dependent. In Mohammed's case, his parents, in the ISIS child's case, murderous extremists. But Richard Dawkins apparently feels that for being in a situation where they obey the will of their elders, children are no longer "kids."

And somehow Richard Dawkins and his followers are so mind-bogglingly obtuse that they believe that it's just wacky that the famously Islamaphobic Dawkins could be criticized for comparing Ahmed to an ISIS forced-murderer kid. Dawkins keeps insisting that it has nothing to do with both being Muslim, just that they both happen to be minors.

"All" Dawkins did was say that Ahmed and the ISIS kid were equally culpable for their crimes. Except of course Ahmed was guiltless of a crime. Except that Richard Dawkins persists in believing he is guilty of a crime. 

Now in spite of Dawkin's dark insinuations about Ahmed, what he keeps harping on the most is that Ahmed did not employ sufficient creativity in building his clock and yet referred to it somewhere as his "invention."

What Dawkins and his followers appear to be unable to grasp is the absurdity that a celebrity scientist is spending his days criticizing a teenager for either bad word choice or boastfulness. A teenager who did nothing  legally wrong and would be unknown still except for his wrongful arrest.

However this isn't the first time that Richard Dawkins used his celebrity to criticize a nobody. People in the atheist community are well aware of Dawkins role in "elevatorgate."

In 2011, Rebecca Watson, known only in atheist circles, complained in a video - very briefly - about a guy hitting on her in an elevator and Watson said "guys don't do that." And this one tiny thing caused Richard Dawkins to have a hissyfit - the story is told here on Watson's blog The Privilege Delusion. As a result of going up against Dawkins, Watson was inundated with rape and death threats that went on for at least three years.

Richard Dawkins finally apologized in 2014 for his Dear Muslima letter, although vaguely - it was too little too late, Watson had already been terrorized by his slavish fan-boys.

So Dawkins has a history of using his celebrity to pick on nobodies for petty reasons. And Watson was attacked by fellow atheists who had formerly been part of her in-group. Ahmed Mohammed was already a member of a hated minority in Texas before Dawkins began to smear him as a criminal mastermind. And at the present time the leading Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, has suggested that there be a special database to track Muslims. 

On ABC News’ This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked Trump, "You did stir up a controversy with those comments over the database. Let's try to clear that up. Are you unequivocally now ruling out a database on all Muslims?"
"No, not at all," Trump responded. "I want a database for the refugees that -- if they come into the country. We have no idea who these people are. When the Syrian refugees are going to start pouring into this country, we don't know if they're ISIS, we don't know if it's a Trojan horse. And I definitely want a database and other checks and balances. We want to go with watchlists. We want to go with databases. And we have no choice."
Trump’s exchange with Stephanopoulos seems to be the clearest explanation of his position. No, he would not rule out a database on all Muslims. But for now, he wants a database for refugees.

And in such an environment, with such slavish followers, Richard Dawkins is attacking this nobody Muslim kid, implying he's guilty of crimes and should be considered culpable for them as an adult. And he seems to be implying that the fact that the kid's parents are suing for due process violations indicates he is guilty of all Dawkins' insinuations.

What could possibly go wrong?

Dawkins got lots of well-deserved criticism for his insanity on Twitter and on web sites such as NYMagazine: Richard Dawkins Is Really Committed to Calling Muslim Clock-Making Kid a Liar.

Now in spite of the fact that Richard Dawkins has become batshit insane out of fear of Muslims, he's also been very irritated by airline security procedures - something that you would think he would appreciate. So when they took his honey, he became furious and began a series of tweets that came to be known  "honey gate." My favorite response to Dawkins' self-importance was this:

I should mention that I despised Richard Dawkins long before he ever got a Twitter account both because of his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and my personal run-in with him on the Pharyngula web site. That was back in 2009 when everybody still thought Dawkins was a cool guy. Now everybody except right-wing Islamaphobes and hardcore New Atheists know that Dawkins has lost it.

One more thing before I finish with Dawkins - I notice that critics for the New York Times revere New Atheists. A review of Dawkins recently publish memoir begins:

Some lumbering robot, this Richard Dawkins. “Lumbering robots” was one of the ways in which this scarily brilliant evolutionary biologist described human beings vis-à-vis their genes in “The Selfish Gene,” his first and probably still his most influential book — more than a million copies sold.

Yeah he's scarily something. I wouldn't say brilliant.

More of my thoughts on Richard Dawkins elsewhere on this blog.