PZ Myers just moved up quite a few more notches in my book. Richard Dawkins? While I can respect his body of work, I’ll never look at him the same again. How very, very disappointing.
PZ:
I’m taking one last stab at explaining this. Imagine that Richard Dawkins meets a particularly persistent fan who insists on standing uncomfortably close to him, and Richard asks him to stand back a little bit; when he continues, he says to the rest of the crowd that that is rather rude behavior, and could everyone give him a little breathing space? Which then leads to many members of the crowd loudly defending the rudeness by declaring that since the guy wasn’t assaulting him, he should be allowed to keep doing that, and hey, how dare Richard Dawkins accuse everyone present of trying to mug him!
That’s exactly analogous to Rebecca Watson’s situation. She did not make these hysterical accusations everyone is claiming, she did not compare herself to the oppressed women of the third world, she did not demonize the clumsy sap in the elevator — she asked for some simple common courtesy, and for that she gets pilloried.
Sorry, people, but that sends a very clear signal to women that calm requests for respect will be met with jeers by a significant subset of the atheist community, and that’s not right.
More evidence atheists perhaps differ from the rest of the population only by being atheists.
Except maybe not.
Maybe, being geekier, more young, and more male, atheists are actually more assholic.
Maybe.
Some of the reaction has been disturbing, but this is not different from what women go through all the time. We point something out, we’re told that either it’s not that bad, not bad at all, we’re taking it too personally, etc. I’m actually encouraged by the number of men in the “movement” who have called Dawkins out on this.
He wries that our goal is to set the bar where women don’t have to fear being raped.
That is as absurd as choosing as one’s goal the complete elimination of assault, embezzlement, or mugging.
Surely he realizes this.
Too many people write that sort of thing, all the time.
He bans people?
Ouch.
I was banned from a popular liberal blog for advancing the claim that the US did not have to join in the Second World War and would have been better off not doing so.
No obscenity, profanity, or anger.
Just advocacy in two short posts.
Who says there are no liberal dogmas it is thought-crime to oppose?
I don’t ban people here, but there are a couple of commenters I moderate, only because they’ve shown me in the past that they need to be. My blog, my home, you know? As for that other blog . . .
As far as setting the bar, PZ was calling men to set the bar higher within atheist/skeptic world, not the entire world, or even the U.S. He was saying “We can be better” and in doing so, calls out Dawkins, in particular:
Point taken.
Thanks for cleaning up those messy posts I left.
Often, btw and a propos of banning, it’s not the host but the regular writers of comments who are the most determined to enforce a kind of local orthodoxy.
Which is not to say I don’t agree with your remark, “My blog, my home.”
Quite true.
I don’t have enough readers / commenters to have any kind of local orthodoxy.
What I often wonder is how Dawkins would respond if it was his family member who told the same story. Would it still sound like “keep your mouth shut because there are women who have it worse”?