gsandi wrote:Why is it unfortunate that Dawkins is intelligent?
Unfortunate for them, because it blunts the barb in the "he's smarter than you" jibe that goes throughout their cartoon.
Why is he, indeed, a dick?
Someone who adopts the same "I'm the middle of a Usenet flamewar"
tone for all public occasions will tend to come off as a dick.
I also find him -- and in fact the whole coterie of militant "rationalist" neo-liberal writers of which he's a part -- to be rather intellectually shallow. On the narrow subject of debating dull-witted Creationists about evolution, Dawkins is perfectly fine (albeit not exactly covering new ground). However, as
Terry Eagleton noted when
The God Delusion came out, he seems to imagine that debating some of religion's weakest representatives is the same thing as refuting religion.
This is a non-trivial blind spot at the best of times, and a particularly bad one to have in an age where in the case of at least one major religion (Islam), a large swathe of your political landscape is trying to pass off fear-mongering, distortion, and xenophobia as "rationalist" religious critique. (And many of Dawkins' fellow-"rationalist" celebrities have in fact fallen into the Islamophobic trap, especially Harris and Hitchens but even, to a lesser degree, Myers.)
Oh THAT'S why I was on hiatus. Right. Hiatus Mode re-engaged.
