Not that I have any interest in Dawkins but I feel for the poor fellow when he gets viciously trolled by a self-righteous creep and feels the need to apologize slavishly and pathetically (see the Twitter exchange at the link).
This is why I don’t participate anywhere but on my own blog. Here I can surround myself by intelligent, interesting people and avoid any engagement with the professionally outraged and customarily aggrieved.
I wonder why people bother trolling Dawkins anymore after pknocker40 already showed us the best way to engage with him.
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There shouldn’t be any surprise at all about what happened here: An organization that claims to be dedicated to free speech and the right to express unpopular ideas caves to pressure from lefty hysterics and bans a speaker for his politically incorrect speech and views.
Happens all the time in intellectual liberal land.
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“pknocker40 already showed us the best way to engage with him.”
The best way to engage him is with incredibly childish tweets??
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“The best way to engage him is with incredibly childish tweets??”
Well, when that’s all you got, that’s what you use….
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“An organization that claims to be dedicated to free speech and the right to express unpopular ideas caves to pressure from lefty hysterics and bans a speaker for his politically incorrect speech and views.
Happens all the time in intellectual liberal land.”
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“are not letting me teach”
Aren’t you in fact teaching? Do you mean that they make it harder for you to conduct your class because of how they react in the classroom?
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In the classroom, out of the classroom, it’s endless whining and moaning about hurt feelings and unimaginable trauma. Annoying as hell, that’s what it is.
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Wow, and here I thought liberals were the oversensitive types with no sense of humor.
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Yes, poop jokes are very funny — for 13-year-olds.
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Poor victimized Dawkins.
Maybe the dude actually felt bad. He’s never given a crap what Lindy West thinks before. As for his conference invite, it didn’t get yanked because of the video; it got yanked because people are tired of him for whatever reason and they needed a pretext. This isn’t even the most outrageous or outre thing he’s said or done, by far.
This is why I don’t participate anywhere but on my own blog. Here I can surround myself by intelligent, interesting people and avoid any engagement with the professionally outraged and customarily aggrieved.
Also there’s the fact that trying to express complex thought is a little difficult in 140 characters, subtweeting notwithstanding.
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Many people are not as thick-skinned (or to use a fancy term, “possess an impoverished emotional range”) as I am. They actually have an emotional reaction to being screamed down by fakely outraged hysterics like this Lindy or whatever. They witness a few of these unhinged maniacs attack people over nothing whatsoever and then they go vote for Trump. And then we are all screwed.
“He’s never given a crap what Lindy West thinks before.”
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I kinda feel for Dawkins. He is a good scientist and his early books on evolution were not bad. He was okay even when he started debating creationists. But then he got embroiled in all sorts of politics – athiesm and critique of Islam. Now he’s like a fish out of water. He just doesn’t have the grounding in humanities to effectively talk about such issues. He’s just not that kind of a public intellectual. He should have stuck to evolutionary biology.
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I agree. A crowd of rabid PR-hunters use the fact that this fellow is kind and mild-mannered and hound him to self-promote. And he is showing extraordinary graciousness when he even responds to the freaks. I’m stunned at how kind he was with this Lindy Schmindy or whatever person. I would not have it in me to be nearly as tolerant.
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Dude < a href=”http://www.businessinsider.com.au/richard-dawkins-tweets-qr-code-link-to-neo-nazi-slogan-14-words-2016-2′>should stay off of Twitter.
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The professionally outraged will find a reason to flip out even if he cancels all his social media accounts.
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True. However, it’s one thing to jam your foot into your mouth over something you actually said or did. It’s quite another to do this over a RT over someone else’s words or expression.
If he has actual ideas that are more complex than a bumper sticker or a tweet, he does them a massive disservice by the way he’s using twitter. Of course he may only have bumper sticker twitter ideas.
Why do Neo Nazis want to piggyback onto his work via a parody mocking “social justice”? Why are they using his work as some kind of wink and nod?
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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