I’m seeing a lot of discussion of Rebecca Watson’s video about Epstein and Lawrence Krauss and Dawkins and the string of women Dawkins has burned through and CFI and That Conference and and and.
It’s worth a watch.
Take notes
Comments
15 responses to “Take notes”
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Thanks for posting this, Ophelia. I have had no particular feelings about Laurence Krauss, and was largely unaware of Lindsay’s existence, but I have been an admirer of Richard Dawkins’s ideas of genetic inheritance for half a century, since about 1978, when I first read The Selfish Gene. He has of course done and written things I haven’t liked, such as his Dear Muslima letter, and his autobiographical book Brief Candle in the Dark was mainly an exercise in name-dropping. I’ve tended to think of those as minor blemishes, but Rebecca Watson’s video makes it clear that it has been much worse than that, and that he is a paid-up member of the Rich White Men can do Whatever they Like club.
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As much as I dislike the wokeism that got our hostess bullied off FTB, I take issue with the frequently repeated trope about how it killed the atheist and skeptics movements. The Men’s Rights Activists who flooded Watson, McCreight, Ophelia, and so many others with personal attacks, cyberbullying, harassment, and threats had dealt these movements their mortal blow long before that. If anything, wokeism just put them out of their misery.
Since the #MeToo movement (remember that?) was briefly mentioned, I was positively surprised to see the #MeToo hashtag gain the traction it did after seeing so many comparable campaigns fizzle out. I was not surprised to see the backlash to #MeToo, which I take to include the “Karen” meme, the “white feminist” meme, the “TERF”/”SWERF” memes, the “sex negative” meme, and, more recently, the “AWFUL”* meme. Nor, for that matter, was I surprised (depressed and disgusted, yes, but not surprised) to see Donald “Grab Them By the Pussy” Trump elected president a few years later. These things are not “fringe”!. I predict already now that we will see a similar backlash to the Epstein scandal. As Victoria Smith puts it in HAGS:
It is only when you have witnessed several such Great Reckonings that you start to get suspicious. There is a pattern: everyone chants the slogans and uses the hashtags; a few ritual sacrifices are made; certain voices start to worry things are going too far; in one or two very well publicised instances, things do indeed go too far; the ‘going too far’ incidents are considered far greater tragedies than all the instances in which women have never seen justice at all; people start to talk about things being ‘post-#MeToo’ or ‘after Rotherham’, as though we have witnessed an irreversible cultural shift; everyone will shake their heads at the fact that ‘no one’ ever noticed the problem before. In practice, very little changes.
Be prepared for the inevitable moment when the current focus on the the horrific abuses of women and girls by powerful men once again starts giving way to the “gone too far” narrative, the “hysteria” narrative, the “witch-hunt” narrative etc.
* Affluent, White, Female, Urban, and Liberal.
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* Donald “Grab Them By the Pussy” Trump
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If only she hadn’t drunk the trans kool-aid and gone full tilt Hamas cheerleading.
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And yet….
She rightfully denounces Ron Lindsey for insisting on giving the opening speech at the Women in Secularism Conference, and using it to complain that men weren’t invited. As she says, women have a right to have a space of their own, without us men intruding. There are times when we just have to shut up and listen.
And yet, she doesn’t get the connection between that and the feminist argument against trans identified men invading women’s spaces.
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Oh I know; believe me, I know. I used to be quite friendly with her, until trans ideology ate her brain.
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Oh, I know you know.
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I know. You know I know. I know you know I know. We know Henry knows, and Henry knows we know it. We’re a knowledgeable family. – Lion in Winter
Just thought it was time for a quote; only we’re not a knowledgeable family, we’re a knowledgeable commentariat.
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I wish Shakespeare had written a play about Henry and Eleanor, but absent that The Lion in Winter is the next best thing.
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[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Take […]
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WaM, let me join in the “The Lion in Winter” love.
One scientist who emerges with some credit from this fiasco is Carl Zimmer. Zimmer asked the Epstein-funded science website Edge to remove his name and contributions after Epstein’s 2019 arrest:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation
The Epstein Files mention Zimmer’s books and public speeches, but show no evidence that Zimmer ever met Epstein.
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She rightfully denounces Ron Lindsey for insisting on giving the opening speech at the Women in Secularism Conference, and using it to complain that men weren’t invited
What a Maroon, he wasn’t complaining that men weren’t invited. He complained about a particular phrase, popular then among those of us who were still part of the Pharyngula crowd, “Shut up and listen.” He found the phrase and its implications contrary to skeptical principles. At the time — I was there — I found it not entirely unreasonable, but tone-deaf.
Since then, having experienced calls to shut up and listen to trans people, my point of view has shifted. “Shut up and listen” has a reasonable sense, which translates to, “OK it’s my turn to speak now and you need to stop talking over me and respect me as you would a member of your group.” That’s how I took it at the time. But it can also mean, “You have to believe pretty much anything I say about my own experience, and any criticisms you have, White Man, can be dismissed out of hand, because you’re privileged and I’m not.” None of the fine speakers at the WiS conference took that tack, but I have certainly seen that attitude play out elsewhere, and I think Lindsay had a point.
I have other quibbles with Watson here, but I’ve come to dislike her so I’m biased (not only is she strongly pro-trans, she’s also denied that any women were raped on October 7th.) She doesn’t mention the fact that Dawkins’s “Dear Muslima” was a response to Watson’s complaint about being propositioned on an elevator. The misogynistic abuse she received afterward was indefensible; I defended her at the time and would do so again, and he really did get touchy when her name was mentioned; I experienced that myself. Thanks to Ophelia, he later acknowledged the abuse she’d received and decried it. At this point I really don’t know what Dawkins’s sexual history has to do with anything; he’s not alleged to have raped anyone, let alone anyone underage.
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Arguably one of the things his sexual history has to do with is CFI, the current boss of which is one of the women Rebecca cites – one of “his” women so to speak. She’s a good deal too libertarian-leaning for my taste, and I don’t think the nepotism is a great look for CFI.
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If it is indeed the case that Dawkins’ attack on Watson was partially motivated by Watson’s argument with his lover at the time, that certainly seems relevant to me. A notorious womanizer (with at least some connection to Epstein) getting defensive about women mildly complaining about sleazy advances from men also doesn’t strike me as a particularly good look. As far as I’m aware Dawkins still to this day hasn’t acknowledged any error on his own part. Not that it would make a difference at this point. I used to be his greatest admirer. Now the best thing I can say about him is that he’s taught me not to have heroes, ever again.
I kind of see Watson’s story as the flip-side of what happened (more recently) to Graham Linehan. None of them started out as extreme as they are now, but both were radicalized by the treatment they were given, only in opposite directions. In a deeply polarized climate it is just too damn easy to fall down entirely on one “side” and almost impossible to remain a consistent, across the board “skeptic”. As I keep saying, I know for a fact that many of the “trans-inclusive”, “TERF-bashing”, “gender-uncritical” feminists used to say the kind of things for which they would now go out of their way to destroy other women’s lives. Watson better hope that some of her past statements don’t resurface…
And, once again, after watching Watson’s video I couldn’t avoid noticing that the YouTube algorithm suddenly started suggesting a lot more TERF-bashing stuff*. It’s funny how that keeps happening…
* As I have previously pointed out, it works both ways.
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Speaking of Rebecca and “Dear Muslima” and all that – via Lady M @ 12 – I’d actually forgotten about that attempted peace treaty with Dawkins. Interesting times.
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