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Sorry for the radio silence, but my mind is currently full of low-level optimizations and inner loops and distributed hashing and integrals, effectively shutting out the blog. Yes, I could just do “ain’t this cool” blogging, but I normally use that as filler while I work on much longer pieces. No work on longer pieces = no filler. That might change, but not in the short term.
Anyway, I did want to pop back up for the latest controversy. Alex Gabriel has written my favourite article on the subject, but I want to cover something very different. Let’s get this band-aid off:
Richard Dawkins is the most prominent member of GamerGate.
Sorry, I don’t even think I was on caffeine when I came up with that one. Dawkins has never been a gamer, even though he seems to have been technically savvy at some point. In what strange universe does this shoe fit?
The funny thing is, if you ask the members of GamerGate to pick some sort of representative, the list doesn’t include gamers. For the AirPlay panel, they picked Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Cathy Young. Those two women have nothing to do with video games, while Milo mocked video gamers. The Sarkeesian Effect, a documentary created by and for GamerGate, interviews Young, various MRAs and Jack Thompson, a guy who’s famous for trying to ban video games. They also spend a long while discussing Rebecca Watson, Chanty Binx, and just railing against feminism in general.
So gaming isn’t a core part of GamerGate, while anti-feminism clearly is. Note too that you don’t have to identify as part of GamerGate to be included in the club; Christina Hoff Sommers talks as if she isn’t part of the movement, yet “Based Mom” is revered by them and the focus of fan art. Her influence demands that she be considered a member.
While it’s tempting to say that anti-feminism alone defines GamerGate, that isn’t enough. Phyllis Schlafly is also an anti-feminist, yet she isn’t considered part of GamerGate. This suggests there’s a cultural or social aspect; you not only have to be an anti-feminist, you have to associate with the right people and say similar things. So let’s take Richard Dawkins down the list, and see how he fares.
Beliefs: Richard Dawkins is an anti-feminist, but in the CHS mould. He claims to be a feminist himself, yet spends an inordinate amount of time mocking feminists. His spat with Rebecca Watson is infamous, he’s gone on the record as saying Chanty Binx deserves mockery and may be mentally ill, he’s retweeted CHS favorably, argued women who drink can’t be trusted with rape claims, claims feminism is poisoning science, and so on.
There’s also a tendency to endorse conspiracies. Remember Ahmed and his clock? Dawkins thought it was all a big hoax in order to get into the White House. Much like the average ‘Gator, he thinks victims make up their abuse in order to benefit from it.
Culture: He’s invoked many of the same terminology they do, like “witch hunts,” “thought police,” and “clickbait for profit.” He reads Brietbart, tweeting links from it frequently. He’s railed about over-sensitivity. Shirtgate? Check. Retweeting anti-feminist memes? Check. “You’re just offended?” Check. Banning, de-platforming, and a general misunderstanding of free speech? Check. Invoking satire? Check. “Lynch mobs” and “cults” show up indirectly. The hottest thing in MRA-land is bashing third-wave feminism in favor of second-wave, which as far as I can tell is a month old at most. Dawkins is on top of that one, too.
Associates: CHS has backed him. Breitbart regularly defends him. He’s retweeted Mike Cernovich, who’s sometimes considered part of GamerGate. He’s retweeted Janet Bloomfield, a prominent member of the MRA community who’s infamous for making up quotes from feminists in order to smear them. The video which kicked off the latest controversy was from Sargon of Arkkad, who’s a GamerGate star, and while Dawkins deleted his tweet of it he thought it was worth a retweet, even after Lindy West explained how sharing it was making the abuse worse for Chanty Binx. MGTOWs follow him, and there’s signs of 4Chan activity.
If you’re still with me, the final leap is the smallest. Dawkins has a much greater Twitter reach than any other person associated with GamerGate. Adam Baldwin? Nope. Milo? Nope. Christina Hoff Sommers? Nope. Dawkins is the undisputed champion here.
That has consequences for the atheist/skeptical movement.
SINMANTYX 
Also and too, he evinces that characteristic GG flavor o’ Frozen Peach: tenuous and fleeting when the spotlight drifts his way. Unless sufficiently sycophantic, Dawkins wants less speech, not more, else he becomes petulant, wrathful, and aggrieved, convinced his interlocutors are Orwellian bogeys or handmaidens to his many enemies. He wants to speak authoritatively on a wide array of subjects from a place of profound and mostly proud ignorance, but doesn’t want to be corrected or contradicted and refuses to consistently apply skepticism when evaluating new information (and when it comes to matters of the interwebs and social justice, it’s mostly all new to him). As a result, he courts bigots and is then wooed by them and that is, sad to say, because he’s much less intelligent and much more credulous than popularly understood. Which is not to say he isn’t also malicious and disingenuous sometimes, but there’s ignorance there, as well, and a thick streak of open anti-intellectualism (cf accusations of “po-mo-ism” when his Orientalism is showing).
I agree for the most part, but I’m not buying the “ignorance” defense. To copy-paste myself:
Ever seen that “Feminism is poisoning Science” video? It doesn’t sound that bad on the face of it, Dawkins is just poking at a crackpot who’s masquerading as a feminist. It gets a bit more worrying when you realize Dawkins first developed that material in 1998. It gets rather alarming when you realize there are two different clips of the same speech running around; one dates from around that time (“I recommend two recent books…”) and another which has much better audio quality and sounds like a much older Dawkins (“I’m just going to quote from…. uh… I forget which book of mine this is, actually…. oh yes, it’s a book review…”). Some snooping suggests the second one was in 2012, while he picked up his “Emperor Has No Clothes” Award from the FFRF.
For fourteen years, Dawkins has been railing against post-modernism and repeatedly bringing up Sandra Harding and Luce Irigaray as examples of feminist thinkers. It’s preposterous to think that, in that span of time, no-one sat him down and explained those two are crackpots, or pointed to any of the benefits triggered by post-modernism. This isn’t compatible with honest ignorance.
The same could be said of his endorsement of Evolutionary Psychology. Look around on YouTube and you’ll find an interview he did with David Buss back in 2010, but Dawkins is such a hipster he was a fan back when it was known as sociobiology. Again, on the surface this doesn’t seem like that big a deal.
But EvoPsych clings to a caricature of evolution. It’s hyper-adaptationalist, almost devoid of attempts to search out the genes tied to behavior, and promotes sharp-edged behavioral modules which are unlikely to arise via gradual and messy evolution. A layperson would have no idea about these flaws, it takes someone well versed in biology and evolution to spot them.
So either Richard Dawkins has a layperson’s knowledge of evolution, all the way back to when he was publishing scientific papers on the subject, or he never thought critically about EvoPsych because he wanted to believe it. He wanted those sexist results to be true, and had no problem shutting out people who tried to set him straight. In the span of 25+ years, it’s almost certain someone tried.
None of this is a smoking gun, but it suggests Dawkins has been opposed to feminism for decades now. Nobody noticed because he took the Christina Hoff Sommers route, calling himself a feminist yet endorsing only a tiny subset of the material. Since no-one tried probing what his feminism meant, and he’d regularly name-drop it (remember the “consciousness-raising” thing from The God Delusion?), we all just assumed he was like any other liberal on the subject.
It seems less like Dawkins is being drawn to anti-feminism, and more like Dawkins has found his people.
Oh, I absolutely agree any actual ignorance or lack of nuance is willful, and not by accident but design. He trumpets causes (or, rather, reactions to causes) he is too lazy to investigate, supports stooges he has no intention of vetting, and repeats comfortable lies he likely knows are false or unsupported but feels plausible deniability and the goodwill of his cohort should see him through, like most born or bred chancers. The cliches he parrots sound pretty and make him feel good and apparently that’s enough for him because the subjects (people who are not upper middling white men, things that are not his hobby horses) simultaneously bore him and make him feel ungrounded and at sea. He is not accustomed to feeling uninformed about anything and feeling so makes him grouchy.
Nearly every man’s a self-professed feminist (“equity” or whathaveyou) when the lip service is this easy and requires no further action or sullying of clean hands and, as you say, no one interrogates one’s actual principles. He probably feels his latent male supremacism is somehow compatible with the begrudging acceptance that, theoretically, anyway, some woman somewhere might be some other man’s intellectual equal — just not his, of course. So, standard reactionary fare, not particularly notable except that he loudly refuses to be intellectually honest about it.
(Thank you, as ever, for doing the lard’s own work and citing all of this. It takes time and effort and sounds a disgusting task, but thank you.)
I’m a reader of We Hunted The Mammoth, so I’ve built up quite an immunity. Here’s my latest research on the subject, copy-pasted from elsewhere:
There’s an English translation kicking around Google, under the name “This Sex Which Is Not One,” which seems to be the work that Sokal/Bricmont are referencing about fluid dynamics. The passage centered around page 110 is a tough read. This implies either a bad translation or that the original French was a tough read, too.
Fortunately, Irigaray provides a summary paragraph at the start of that essay. The English translation:
It seems likely that Irigaray was being poetic, using fluid dynamics as a metaphor for gender, and that translated badly into English. Sokal/Bricmont either missed that she was being metaphoric, or didn’t care. I can easily forgive Dawkins for missing out on this in 1998, but by 2012 it’s almost certain someone tried to point out he was spreading a lie. I also can’t forgive the way he spins this into a conspiracy theory.
His other examples don’t hold up, either. I can’t find Irigaray’s Einstein passage, but by searching on Google Books and sorting by date I also wasn’t able to find anyone using that interpretation of Irigaray before Sokal/Bricmont’s book. You’d think a bold claim like that would have generated some controversy, and been remarked on before Sokal/Bricmont got there.
Meanwhile, I did find this description for “Speech Is Never Neutral:”
Huh, so one of Irigaray’s major research areas was on implicit sexing within our speech. Here’s a passage from “Is the Subject of Science Sexed,” an essay she wrote in 1987:
This makes a helluva lot more sense: Irigaray isn’t saying equations are sexed, she’s saying that our discourse is sexed and this has consequences for the way we think. Hence the question mark in the original quote. We can still take her to task for practicing difference feminism, but this is a far cry from the wild ravings of someone opposed to science.
It doesn’t help that Dawkins only mentions Luce Irigaray, as some of his other material comes from other authors. Here’s Sandra Harding, in “The Science Question in Feminism:”
It’s pretty clear she’s talking about other people’s rape metaphors here. If mere descriptions of nature can fruitfully be explained by referencing rape, in some instances, shouldn’t that metaphor extend to every discriptor of nature? She’s arguing from absurdity here, pointing out a false analogy.
In sum, Dawkins has been spreading misinformation about feminism for nearly two decades now. I think he deserves the label “anti-feminist,” despite his objections.