Dawkins is trending on Facebook again, thanks to his Most Recent Tweet of Infamy. At the top of the list I see (I assume the list is different for different people, because of their different Facebook histories) there are a lot of mainstream media stories and some Facebook posts by friends, and then after that…there is a long stream of right-wing, Christian, anti-abortion links.
Fabulous. Very very helpful.
There’s The Blaze.
There’s Christian News Network.
There’s Life Site News.
There’s Alan Colmes.
There’s Life News.
There’s Ray Comfort.
Richard Dawkins is being consistent again–with his Darwinian/Nazi ideology of “survival of the fittest.” This time he suggests that down syndrome children aren’t fit to survive, and he has the audacity to advocate the taking of a human life–in the name of morality.
May he find a place of repentance and trust in Jesus Christ, before he stands before the One in whom he doesn’t believe.
There’s Breitbart.
There’s End Time Headlines.
There’s Al Jazeera, Salon, Huffington Post UK, The Telegraph, The Mirror, The Evening Standard, The Guardian Australia, Sky News, ITV News, Fri Tanke…on and on. I haven’t scrolled to the end yet; maybe there is no end. There’s a lot. At any rate we can be damn sure this has done no favors to atheism or abortion rights.
He has, at least, apologized. And seems aware that 140 characters was not sufficient to provide an adequate response. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/aug/21/richard-dawkins-apologises-downs-syndrome-tweet
We can hope that this is a learning moment.
I’ve been waiting for him to learn the value of thinking before acting for at least 8 years now…
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/12/29/dawkins-and-the-religion-petit/
This isn’t just a twitter problem.
Dear Professor Dawkins,
If large numbers of people criticize something you said, maybe the problem isn’t with them.
@2
Uhm, he had a book published in late 2006
How can a man with little ability to share experiences with other people when speaking about larger issues be an effective spokesperson for atheism? We do need conceptual “bomb-throwers”, but that is not going to work for everything in something as complicated as sociopolitical persuasion.
One quick tweet – an EPIC amount of damage to:
atheists
women
people with disabilities
He sure is an efficient asshole.
His apology is inadequate – he entirely ignored the main criticism, which was that he was assuming a specific lack of worth in the lives of people with DS.
I put a public comment on my Facebook publicly distancing myself from Dawkins and his views. I may, or may not, repost that on the various religious and conservative blogs. I do think others should do it, as well, but I also think it should be a personal choice whether anyone else wants to put themselves out there like that. I can because privilege and I’m pretty much a nobody so it’s not like I’d get any serious blow-back from it.
please, someone, anyone, who is a close friend of Richard’s…. TAKE HIS TWITTER ACCOUNT AWAY FROM HIM.
Ichthyic @9, why?
(His exercises on that platform have been informative; me, I prefer more information rather than less)
Ok if I just ignore you John?
[OT]
Sure, Ichthyic, since it’s no effort on my part to allow you that degree of comfort.
@1 He did not apologise – only that the remark addressed to followers of both himself and the person he was talking to was picked up by others and taken out of context. With the context understood by both speaker and listener, it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
But this does illustrate both the importance of privacy – something which is not well understood – and how people, not just Richard Dawkins, constantly miscalculate the privacy of electronic communications.
Privacy enables us to say things without the extensive qualification which context provides: without having to consider – for the duration of the conversation – the feelings of outsiders or allow their likely judgements of ourselves (balanced or not) to influence the logic of our reasoning. It is this which makes it vital and which makes zero privacy advocates (‘get over it’) wrong as well as crass. If people could not have conversations such as this, debate would be sclerotic and we would get nowhere fast.
Secondly, we (again, not just Dawkins) keep forgetting the power of the internet to broadcast and retain information beyond our normal expectations. It’s quite a phenomenon.
My feeling on this is that Dawkins could have been more careful but, Internet or no, if the tweet was intended for a restricted audience in a specific context – which it clearly was – than we should either acknowledge and respect that or butt right back out again.
yahweh @13, he wrote a post titled “Abortion & Down Syndrome: An Apology for Letting Slip the Dogs of Twitterwar”, in which he wrote “Those intrepid enough to venture onto my Twitter feed will have noticed a new feeding frenzy yesterday (20th August 2014), for which I apologise.” and “Those who thought I was bossily telling a woman what to do rather than let her choose. Of course this was absolutely not my intention and I apologise if brevity made it look that way.”.
So, yeah, he apologised, though I grant not for his expressed sentiment, but rather for his ignorance of how Twitter works and his carelessness in his phrasing.
Your “we” doesn’t include me; I am quite aware of the power of the internet, and have been for a couple of decades — and I’m not even a prominent media personality!
(I’ll kindly spare you my opinion about your feeling on the matter)