No, that’s not what happened.
Richard Dawkins retweeted
SimpleHarmonics @HarmonicOz · 24 hours ago
@RichardDawkins @SamHarrisOrg @billmaher A man of science has been bullied to tears today by identity politics.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/11231320/Rosetta-mission-scientist-Dr-Matt-Taylor-cries-during-apology-over-offensive-shirt.html
Just for a start – it’s perfectly possible that Matt Taylor was upset with himself. I felt bad for him while watching and afterwards, and I still do, but not because he was “bullied” – I felt bad for him because he was upset. He could have been upset that he screwed up, and distracted from what should have been an unalloyed celebration.
And think about it in terms of the likelihood. Is it really likely that he was upset enough to get teary because feminists “bullied” him? Wouldn’t that be vastly more likely to make him pissed off rather than teary? I don’t see how or why he would get upset as opposed to angry unless he agreed that he’d screwed up.
And to continue – I don’t see why so many people are being so shitty about this. I don’t see why Dawkins is, for instance. Is it really that hard to understand that a hostile work environment doesn’t attract people who are subject to the hostility? Is that really such an outrageous or “politically correct” claim? I don’t think Dawkins has any desire or intention to drive women away from STEM fields, so why does he get outraged at efforts to change the culture in those fields to make them less woman-repelling?
It’s not a matter of being “weak” or “delicate” you know, it’s not about needing a fainting couch. It’s about how you want to spend your time. Sure, it’s possible to put up with assholes. But is it fun? Is it what we want for ourselves? Hell no. I’m a feminist, but I’m also a human who doesn’t like to be around unpleasant people for the bulk of her waking life. If I were university age and choosing a career I wouldn’t decide to storm a mostly-male profession if I knew (or had reason to believe) the field was jam-packed with sexist shits who would be crapping all over me all the time. I wouldn’t decide to do that because hey I’m a feminist, and that’s the feminist thing to do. Nuh uh. I care way too much about my moment-to-moment life to do that.
It’s not good to have fields that certain classes of people have to be heroic to work in while others just fit right in. That’s not fair or reasonable or even desirable in practical terms. (Why shrink your talent pool? What the hell is the point of that?)
So I don’t get where the outrage comes from. The ugliness of it coming from someone like Dawkins just gets me down. He has all this fame and clout and he could be using it to do good things – and instead he’s using it to piss on feminism. What a legacy.
Thought experiment: the situation is exactly the same but instead it was a Christian who had been wearing a shirt with anti-atheist sentiments written on it who was called out for it and publicly apologised.
Do we think Pope Dawkins and his parishioners would be claiming he’d been bullied into it by ‘identity politics’? Or would they instead be crowing about how they’d had a huge success in the fight for atheist equality, and that they were brave heroes for asserting themselves in the face of Christian oppression?
I think we all know the answer to that.
Oh blahlah fart!
If anybody can be accused of bullying, it’s Mr EdgyShirt.
This is some middle school shit. Urgh!
Good point.
Atheists Australia present: Richard Dawkins, An appetite for Privilege. Maintaining the status quo in Science and Society.
Well, that could be the title of his speaking tour down-under. It won’t, because Dawkins has an appetite for (strictly confined) wonder….
A man of science? Who fucking writes like this? ‘Not just any man, but a man of science.’ That’s important to note; that its “a man of science” made unhappy by having to apologize for choosing to wear an unprofessional outfit on globally televised interviews. Men of science don’t deserve such rough treatment, like having to acknowledge mistakes. Just like men of the cloth don’t deserve it. They’re better than the rest of us.
Not for long.
I don’t think he realizes how many bridges he’s burned. That clout is drying up as I type.
It comes from us not being silent eye candy who stay in our place. You know, like the women on the shirt.
See, Dawkins is a man and when he sees oppression, it is there. When he is being discriminated against, he gets to stand up and say something about it because speaking up is more of a man thing. Women just naturally don’t do confrontation and if they do, they’re bullies who lynch men on Twitter or something.
Also, making men of science sad is the worst because men of science are the specialist men of all and their fee-fees are the most important fee-fees. Women, on the other hand, should just tough out the threats, harassment and slurs slung at them.
It all makes sense if you’re a sexist using your ass as a hat.
BTW, has anyone ever heard the term “woman of science”? Because I have not.
@Jackie:
I have, as a phrase used to describe Scully on The X-Files, in contrast to Mulder’s unmitigated universal credulity. Only one I can think of, though.
– Maybe if was dressed that way he wouldn’t have been harrassed.
– How do we know the tweets are even real?
– If he can’t handle criticism maybe he shouldn’t be on TV/working on a high-pressure project.
There; can I join the “Serious Atheists Club” with Dawkins and Thunderf00t now?
Good grief…he just keeps getting worse and worse.
Are we sure that some nefarious MRA hasn’t kidnapped his family and is threatening them with torture unless he keeps tweeting horrible sexist tweets? Is there a “pod” from planet Sexist Asshole somewhere in his study? Can we check him for a brain tumor?
I have never in my life seen someone go so far off the rails.
“- Maybe if was dressed that way he wouldn’t have been harrassed.”
Was it supposed to say: “- Maybe if he wasn’t dressed that way he wouldn’t have been harrassed.”?
Yes, yes it was.
The more I think about this line, the more I’m unsettled by it. Two posts back, we have a long list of scientists and science writers who were offended by The Shirt and spoke out about it. Few of them would explicitly label as “feminist.” The only mainstream feminist who seems to have wrote about it was Amanda Marcotte; the media firestorm started after Taylor had apologized, so there wasn’t much left to comment on. There’s no actual identity politic there.
So has Dawkins reached the stage where he automatically labels people who disagree with him “feminists?” Has he become the Rush Lumbaugh of atheism, seeing a grand conspiracy where there is none? It’s deeply ironic that he might be making the same attribution error as creationists, thinking that only an intelligent designer or conspiracy can be behind some action, and not a gradual evolution of attitude within a culture.
This is a really good point and can’t be said enough.
Just because some people can jump the hurdles isn’t proof that the hurdles of fine. Not when other lanes have no hurdles at all.
I cannot honestly believe anything that Dawkins says anymore. He provoked a huge fight with “dear muslima” and still doesn’t seem to understand the harm that he caused with that.
Dawkins is not part of the flux of science anymore. Or even engineering. So he could never understand that the lack of women participating in STEM fields has directly affected me and my prospects for income growth. So, even “social justice” aside, there are damaging effects from societal prejudice against women in STEM fields that he is giving a signal boost to.
@Hj Hornbeck
Starting to wonder this myself – and not just with Dawkins. I have read a few essays and blogposts in the last few months from secular/skeptic/atheist types where they essentially straw-man feminists (and holders of other “liberal” positions) to then claim that they are being bullied by irrational haters. Heck I have seen some of these “Important Atheists” defend Gamergate despite not even playing games.
So a man who cries over a negative response to his clothing deserves our sympathy and those who responded negatively should be ashamed of themselves for their “identity politics”. But women who suffer from organized campaigns of verbal abuse for months or even years, who suffer from countless threats of violence, of rape and murder, who are driven from their homes and fear not just for their own but for their family’s safety, they just need to “get tough”.
This. Whether he thinks the furor over the shirt was silly or not, whether he is a misogynist or not… the one thing you can be almost positive of is that he is very passionate about this project.
People working on space missions dream of days like the ones that have just passed. They work for years for a mission that might fail in an instant or in sudden silence and leave nothing whatsoever to show for the effort and money spent.
These people are about as passionate about their work as it gets. Mission days, landing days, etc. literally are the highlight of their professional career and in some cases their entire lives… and they know that is true for everyone else there.
Even if he doesn’t get the problem with the shirt, he’s almost certain to have gotten the message that he did something that detracted from that dream, from the joy and celebration and wonder… it was possibly watching an event day like this that inspired him to go into the field in the first place, it certainly was for many others.
So even if he thinks the shirt is otherwise fine, there’s an extreme likelihood that what you saw there was genuine remorse at having tarnished a special day for his team and his colleagues. It’s very UNLIKELY that what you saw was a man reacting to having been somehow bullied or browbeaten.
Look: If this man was bullied to tears, then what the everliving fuck, Richard, do you call what happens to women every fucking day? Should they not all weep uncontrollably at all times? How is the bar so low for this one fellow, yet so high for women, in your mind?
Fuck. You. Dawk.
Anthony K @ 5
Victorian (-esque) novelists.
Richard Dawkins is a man who has lost perspective. That is if he actually had perspective in the first place. He is a person who calls criticisms from those he calls “social justice warrior” a lynch mob and a “literal witch hunt”. Never mind the fact that no has been killed let alone injured.
So, yeah, Dawkins retweeting a comment that a man of science has been bullied to tears by feminists fits into the character that he has established for himself.
Dawkins is a credible expert in biology, the communication of science, and atheist activism.
Outside of his areas of expertise – say, feminism or any social issue – Dawkins is just another cranky old man, just like anyone else.
End of mystery.
I’d leave off the last bit at least. From my perspective, these days his effect falls into the category of “more harm than good.”
With that shirt I think the guy was trying to rebrand a field of expertise that is viewed as staid and conservative.
He made a very unfortunate choice with regards to that rebranding.
This is somewhat unfortunate because The Shirt, rather than the probe, has now become the centre of attention.
And as for the dearth of women in the field, there may be more reasons than just ‘hostility’ to females.
When one looks at a classes of students studying computer engineering in universities, the overwhelming majority of them are often of Far Eastern origin and I doubt that that over representation is due to the field’s hostility towards Whites or Blacks.
And in the photos I’ve seen of the team leading the mission, I did see some women, so the portrait is not totally bleak.
And these intramural dust ups in the atheist camp are not always justified. ‘Atheist’ and ‘progressive’ aren’t necessarily the same thing. That association reminds me of those Ronald Reagan years when everyone conservative associated Democracy with Capitalism, as though both went together like salt and pepper, as though the one inevitably led to the other. They don’t.
One can be socially conservative and still be a perfectly potable atheist.
He apologized, the feminists and other who criticized have by and large accepted the apology and are ready to move on. It the anti-feminists brigade who are now the ones keeping the focus on the shirt, or rather the poor “man of science”, instead of the probe. I’m ready to let it drop by these privilege blinded people can’t let it go that a man was told his shirt was inappropriate.
This is a very good point, and refutes nothing anyone has said in this thread. Over the years we’ve become well aware that atheists can be assholes.
@23 Decker…
Really? Rocket science is staid and conservative? Exploring other fucking worlds is staid and conservative? Reaching out into the great unknown is staid and conservative?
Jumping Jesus on a stick, that’s the stupidest fucking thing anyone has said since “A man of science has been bullied to tears today by identity politics.”
Look, being holed up on cold, lonely, windy mountain tops tediously observing asteroids and looking at far away planets and spending years to glean bits of info ( as is the case with this probe ) kinda lacks ‘punk’ qualities, you know?
Geez, did you find the late Carl Sagan hip, cool and edgy, or Richard Dawkins suave and sexy?
This is a very good point, and refutes nothing anyone has said in this thread. Over the years we’ve become well aware that atheists can be assholes.
Perhaps they’re dangerous deviants in need of deprogramming.
Somebody really needs to shut down the Dawk’s twitter account. Dawkins is too proud and stubborn to do it but it’s in his best interests that somebody do it for him.
Daniel Schealler @21
I’m reminded of Clarke’s First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
A corollary would be: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states something about science he is almost certainly right. When he states something about social science he is very probably wrong.” Dawkins comments about feminism are Exhibit A.
Good thing we’ve got a psychic here to tell us what some guy he’s never met was thinking when he put his clothes.
If one particular kind of demographical imbalance isn’t due to hostility, then none of them can be? What’s next? You going to tell us that if there are any women in the field then there must not be any hostility…
Yep, that’s EXACTLY what you were going to do next. Congratulations, you’re officially a cliché.
Ah, now it’s time for “don’t rock the boat”. Can’t go upsetting those conservative atheists now can we? All this “gender equality” and “racial equality” stuff just gets in the way of REAL ATHEISM. We have to tolerate their shit and show solidarity for the ATHEIST movement, and fuck all those OTHER social movements. I take it back. You’re not a cliché. You’re THE cliché. The physical embodiment of all that is cliché.
Since Richard is not a mind reader I have to assume that he would experience this as bullying instead of criticism. This is what he thinks he would do if someone criticized him for wearing such a shirt.
In general I don’t want to do anything that might make someone cry, but there are times where applying that kind of pressure is appropriate. Showing someone the effects of their behavior is one of those times.
I’m honestly starting to believe that a reason that the people on that side of the rift was us to “control our emotions” in these arguments is because they not only want us to loose the effectiveness of the tone in communication, I think they just can’t take what they dish out. They are the emotionally sensitive ones that simply can’t take it. Now if Dawkins et al were to ask for an accommodation of some kind I would be happy to oblige. But until they can face what is bringing out these defense mechanisms I have to deal with the damage of their tantrums.
@DEcker 23
You are not a mind reader. Your wishful thinking is rejected.
Yes it’s just so hard to find stories about the lander. I mean it’s just impossible for society to consider more than one thing at once right?
/sarcasm
Are you really so sensitive that the presence of this news drowns out all attention to whatever else in aggregated on news sites? Get some help, you have a problem. Don’t drive, some sparkling thing might make you have an accident.
So you can’t actually discuss the effects of sexual objectification in the workplace, and need to change the subject. That’s pretty typical of someone who is simply emotionally sensitive to a topic and just has to say something, anything.
And your point is? You know this blog tends to be progressive right? Why mention it unless you just want people to stop talking about progressive things? Fuck that.
What other connection could there be? You go from reading Taylor’s mind, to irrational claims of the attention being focused on the shirt, to pointing out that there are more than progressive atheists.
Yeah. Someone can be an atheist and a child molester or a mass murderer too. We go over this every time religious conservatives link us to Stalin or Mao.
This is nothing but an irrational, socially manipulative attempt to change the subject and prevent discussion of the shirt and sexual objectification in the work place.
This is nothing but an irrational, socially manipulative attempt to change the subject and prevent discussion of the shirt and sexual objectification in the work place.
Well this discussion has been so interesting and fruitful.
And the abundance of four letter words employed so enlightening.
Run along and cry mansplainer. You’re wrong, you’re a boor and the sexist opinions and speculations you pulled from your anus are not gospel handed down from on high.
Oh, diddums?
And – Why is he getting all emotional? There shouldn’t be any subjects that we can’t address rationally. He should go away and learn how to think.
So much this. Dawkins in particular is far too emotionally brittle to be lecturing other people about how they should always respond rationally to
provocationideas, no matter what.@ Lady Mondegreen (aka Stacy)
And now he is getting rewarded for it by an indiegogo account. I am certain Thunderf00t will be putting a video out accusing him of being a professional victim in the next few days – right?