Richard Dawkins Rape Tweets: Atheist Admits Mistake: 'I Should Have Used Quotation Marks'

[rug]

Posted: 30/07/2014 11:34 BST
Updated: 3 hours ago

An apparently humble, yet defiant Richard Dawkins has addressed the online storm he caused via a series of tweets in which he classed certain types of rape and paedophilia as “worse” and milder than others.

The 73-year-old insisted he had been attempting to make a “simple, logical point” when he sparked the “tsunami” of agonised attacks, among which he was branded “a danger to women”.

He blogged: “In both my hypothetical examples, I made the mistake of forgetting to put quotation marks around the hypothetical quotations.”

Citing this tweet: “X is bad, Y is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of X, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned how to think logically,” Dawkins claimed he had initially demonstrated his logical process in the absence of any specific examples.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/07/30/richard-dawkins-rape-tweets-atheist-admits-mistake-quotation-marks_n_5633059.html?utm_hp_ref=uk

"Quotation marks". That's the ticket.

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins

I may subscribe.

[cbayer]

1. Some people call them "scare quotes", or so I hear.

[rug]

3. .

[hrmjustin]

6. How dare you post that story!

[hrmjustin]

2. I always thought he was a creepand this just confirms it.

[Starboard Tack]

4. Right, well that explains it, doesn't it?

"quotation marks" in "inverted commas" is definitely a milder form of punctuation. Makes everything far less disagreeable.
Time for a cuppa tea now!

[Jim__]

5. Does he state anywhere why he sent such a tweet as:

X is bad, Y is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of X, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned how to think logically

Just an episode of Richard Dawkins Lessons in Logic?

[MisterP]

7. he always causes trouble for himself, trouble that anyone with a 6th-grade education

would avoid--were his parents brothers or something?