Richard Dawkins says trans activists 'bullied' JK Rowling for standing up for women's rights

[PorcelinaV]

Richard Dawkins says trans activists 'bullied' JK Rowling for standing up for women's rights

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/scottish-news/richard-dawkins-says-trans-activists-29511706

Richard Dawkins claims trans activists 'bullied' Harry Potter author JK Rowling and Kathleen Stock for standing up for women's rights....

He claimed that it was very upsetting that a "tiny minority" of people managed to capture the discourse to "talk errant nonsense".

Of course it will happen. It’s easy to dismiss and discredit people on the basis of their immutable characteristics rather than on the quality of their arguments. It’s not terribly convincing though is it?

No, but that doesn't matter as long as you shout it loud enough and often enough.

He's welcome to publish the book, and he certainly made lots of money off of it, but he still looked like a boob to anyone with any background in philosophy or theology.

It's not like people being told they can't talk about gender if they aren't trans, it's more like someone trying to tell everyone they know the truth about the evolution of salamanders when in fact they think salamanders are mythological fire dwellers. No surprise if people think it's a bit of a joke.

Honestly, you are typing nonsense.

Not only is his philosophy sound (and rooted in falsifiability, not po-mo soul-chasing modishness), he is the most brilliant living biologist on the planet.

Go make a meme out of that. He came up with the contagion-led concept, by the way.

I listened to RD talk at Greenbelt last year. I thought he was very interesting.

Good on him for supporting JKR.

It’s more like someone trying to tell everyone they know the truth about the evolution of salamanders when in fact they think salamanders are mythological fire dwellers.

Hardly. For that analogy to work if would require a group of people to insist that salamanders are a real supernatural entity in the first instance and for society to go along with that idea taking it completely seriously and protecting people’s right to believe it in law. That is the status of religion and it is also now the status of gender identity ideology. There’s not (afaik) any protections in relation to a person’s belief about the evolution of amphibians.

Although presumably belief in evolution is protected as a belief.

This doesn't work either. It would also require for there to be no real world evidence for the existence of salamanders.

Hardly equivalent. Discussing biology requires knowledge about actual, real things, but you don't need to know the finer points of the Bible in order to come to an opinion about whether God exists. Lots of people know all the minutiae about the Marvel universe, whereas I don't know the first thing about it. But I still know it's not real.

Iron Man exists and I don't care what you say!

Dawkins doesn’t simply state an opinion on the existence of God. He publishes books on the subject of religions about which he is lamentably ignorant, and argues against his own mistaken ideas of Christian doctrine, rather than the actual beliefs of mainstream Christians.
It would be like me publishing a book saying that atheists believe Christians should be imprisoned or killed, and then arguing that this proves atheists are stupid.

And, if you think the whole of religion is totally mad, you're not required to engage with its theology to make your case. He rejects religion on a fundamental level, not because he hasn't fully grasped the nuances of the Council of Nicaea.

Christians (or adherents of any other religion) don't get to dictate the terms on which non-believers reject the faith, and they would be hypocrites if they did, as - barring a handful of converts - they have all the adopted the belief system of their family and culture. They haven't carefully weighed up the competing belief systems and chosen Christianity after a detailed analysis of which religion is best.

Personally, despite also being an atheist, I don't think it's particularly constructive to run around telling religious people that they are idiots, which is how much of The God Delusion comes across. We're all trying to deal with the mind-fuck that is existing while being aware of our own mortality. If religion helps you get through that, it's not for me to question that, as long as you don't impose your views on me. But, intellectually, Dawkins is on just as sound ground as any theologian in refusing to get drawn into the weeds of belief.

Agnostic; certainly disagree with Dawkins on plenty. Happy to have him support JKR and state clearly that there are two sexes.

Unbelievably, we're in a position where some people genuinely think there are more than two sexes. So we need all the recognised scientific experts to spell it out clearly.

I really do worry about how teenage pregnancy rates are going to be impacted by this bullshit idea that we can choose sex or be a third sex and that 'sex is a spectrum'.

Another article on Dawkins's TV interview: https://archive.ph/usGeB

But, intellectually, Dawkins is on just as sound ground as any theologian in refusing to get drawn into the weeds of belief.

No, he wandered off into topics he knew nothing about. It's been a long time since I read The God Delusion but for instance I remember he tried to call into doubt the historicity of Jesus. This view just isn't supported by the current school of thought. Jesus almost certainly existed - the controversy (obviously) is the accuracy of the Biblical narrative and whether he was the Son of God. Christians say 'yes', everyone else says 'no' and 'don't be silly'. However, Dawkins' problem (iirc) is that he relied on extremely dodgy sources to make the claim that Jesus never existed at all and looked embarrassingly ignorant in the process.

That's just one example.

Dawkins is at his best when he talks about evolutionary biology, and that's what he should stick to.

I understand that there is some proof that sex is something of a spectrum although - and this is the critical point - there's no evidence that it maps onto social concepts of gender in any specific way. Or, to put it another way, it's not clear what, if anything, should be done about this regarding social norms and laws.

I really doubt that Dawkins would be the best person to expound on the subject, however. He doesn't do nuance or uncertainty very well.

The issue isn't whether it's objectively convincing but whether it convinces enough people who matter, unfortunately.

Look at what has happened to (educated) public discourse over the last ten years or so. It's gone from classic liberalism to something else entirely.

The liberal approach which we probably all grew up with was that it's the contents of an argument that counts and the characteristics of who makes it are irrelevant, except that a person's background might their argument more informed (but the proof of this would be in the argument itself.) This view was left of conservatism, which was more 'don't rock the boat'.

Now we have the a different approach, ie, that you have no standing to comment unless you have the right, ie minority characteristics - which Dawkins doesn't have. Because this reasoning applies to social issues - which aren't easily resolved by science - Dawkins' undeniable eminence counts for little. What matters is that he's a stale pale male.

It's a sharp leftwards shift - and that's why Dawkins and co look like right-wingers now. They've been left behind. I say it's a leftwards shift because it has its origins in thinkers influenced by Marx. It's also very hard to argue against because it's an internally consistent theory that functions without much need for evidence. Someone - it might have been Arabella - posted a link to an article by Slavoj Žižek a couple of weeks ago. It was all very erudite on the surface but...

He's welcome to publish the book, and he certainly made lots of money off of it, but he still looked like a boob to anyone with any background in philosophy or theology.

So, not many people then?

Anyway, let's not get bogged down in that puritanical thing of insisting everyone's perfect in whatever they say or do before we engage with the issue at hand. It gets you nowhere.

Sex is something of a spectrum
**
@TomPinch really? I've not seen a single case of a person with functioning gonads producing both large and small gametes. There is also no intermediate gamete between a sperm and an egg.

Sex really isn't a spectrum, and variation within a category isn't evidence of a spectrum.

I'm not a scientist, let alone a biologist, so I can't say I follow the argument well. The article is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/518288a

@EdgeOfACoin

^EdgeOfACoin* · Today 06:07

What secondary evidence is there that Jesus existed? As far as I know, there are no contemporary Roman records, not Egyptian. Both were inveterate recorders of events.

Crikey. Google is your friend.

Make a claim, get called, provide evidence; if not, it's bollocks.

Re the article, the woman was still a woman, despite having some male chromosomes. That's demonstrated by her pregnancy. I remember reading a different article on it and most of her family had similar conditions, nothing to do with absorbing a twin.

Paging @Kucinghitam for an expert explanation.

Would you say the same about the experts in gender, who can't explain in even basic terms what gender is or why anyone should care, but think they're qualified to tell the rest of us (including Richard Dawkins who is an evolutionary biologist) that sex isn't binary and immutable?

he doesn't understand gender

Nobody understands gender. We're re doing the middle ages where all hell breaks loose on you if you do not show vigorous committment to and servicing of the faith, which will be explained to you by very special priests with a lot of power, in ways that serve them and in language that means they're entirely in charge at all times. Heretics will be burned.

I see though that here's yet another person just not pure enough to be listened to.

It's like the unicorn accountant. Somewhere out there, gambolling in the mists, is that rare beast: someone sufficiently pure that when they speak someone doesn't immediately start wittering about "but they said that... and did that.... and sneezed in a suspicious way.... and smell because of that..... so nothing they say can be listened to and if you say you agree with them then you smell too! So ner."