She talks sense faster than most of us can think, says Dawkins

Oy, not another one.

Someone called Jaclyn Glenn, who I’m told is hugely popular among Teh Atheists, did a manic YouTube video echoing the much-echoed complaint about those filthy feminists exploiting that nice Elliot Rodger tragedy for their own filthy selfish self-centered how dare they ends. I could watch only a short bit of it because she’s so annoying. By way of refreshment I found her on Twitter, and lo, only five or six tweets down, who should appear but –

She talks sense faster than most of us can think, says Dawkins, and goes on to call her “the ever rational @JaclynGlenn” while linking to her video – right, because obviously trashing feminism is the epitome of rationality and sense. Or could it be that Dawkins just slaps the label “rational” on any opinion he happens to like? Especially if it’s uttered by a hawt woman?

PZ doesn’t find her claims quite so ever rational and sensible, in fact he finds them to be kack.

I am disappointed. Jaclyn Glenn makes an incoherent rant.

Her point: it’s terrible for feminists to take an issue like this [the Elliot Rodger murders] and try to twist it around, and tells everyone to look at the problems for what they are. It’s not misogyny, she says, it’s because Rodger was mentally ill. And then she reads a paragraph from is manifesto that is melodramatic, self-aggrandizing, and totally over-the-top, and announces that it proves that he is mentally ill.

The standards for psychiatric diagnoses have really gone to the dogs, haven’t they?

So a guy writes a 140-page raving rant about how women owe him sex, how he hates them, and how he wants to lock them up in a concentration camp and starve them to death, and it’s not misogyny — it’s just random insanity, completely unconnected to the culture around him. OK. So much for looking at problems for what they are.

Not to be a broken record or anything, but if a Muslim shot up a bunch of people at a Jewish cemetery, having left a long manifesto about his hatred of Jews, would Jaclyn Glenn be saying very fast and loud on YouTube that he was MENTALLY ILL nothing to do with anti-Semitism shut up? I don’t think she would.

Here’s what she did say about the reaction to Rodger (minimal punctuation because she talks very fast with no real pauses):

Whenever a tragedy happens, and this is something that happens every single time and it annoys the shit out of me every single time, people like to hop onto these types of issues like vultures, they see something and they think it’s gonna help them with their movement or their political agenda and they use it to their advantage, which is disgusting – and they like to downplay, in this case, mental illness.

So, given the Jewish cemetery scenario I just mentioned, would she say it was disgusting for Jews to talk about antisemitism after that incident? Or what if it were an EDL type who shot a bunch of people in a mosque and left a long manifesto ranting about hatred of Muslims? Would Jaclyn Glenn say it was disgusting for Muslims to talk about the anti-Muslim bigotry and hatred in the manifesto? I doubt it.

But maybe she would, and then she would be wrong.

I suspect, though, that she wouldn’t, because the bigotry and hatred there would be obvious to her, while for some reason they are not obvious to her in the case of Elliot Rodger. Misogyny seems to be a special case in that way for a hell of a lot of people. I’m disgusted that Dawkins is one of them.