This is very stupid, but since Richard Dawkins thinks this is a defense to his original claim:
"How could you think I was likening a hoaxer to a killer? I just meant ‘Only a kid’ is not a knockdown defence. Remember poor James Bulger?”The "kid" is not suing anyone. Under Texas law, he can't, since he's a minor. Suit may be filed in his name (full legal nerd: the lawyers have only sent demand letters so far; no suit has been filed), but it will be filed by his parents on his behalf. Is Ahmed any more than aware of this? Probably, but he has no real choice in the matter. So likening him to a child trained by ISIS to decapitate a prisoner is not only tasteless and brutal and shameful, it's not an apt comparison.
Unless the comparison is that neither child is culpable for their acts, absent a showing that the disabilities of minority should be removed. Either way, Ahmed's family's attorneys sending demand letters is in no way comparable to the James Bulger murder.
Except in Dawkins' mind. Can I ask again why anyone considers this guy smart? Or Twitter worth the trouble it stirs up?
Link courtesy of Thought Criminal
Everyone knows that a 14-year-old geek making a clock from microelectronic circuit boards is just like a couple of pathological 10-year-olds who abducted and tortured a 2-year-old child to death. The two acts are equivalent. I mean, it's only an Oxford chair in the public understanding of science who is telling us so.
ReplyDeleteIf it weren't Thanksgiving and if it didn't mean I'd have to read through some Dawkins to do it, I'd relate his thinking to this to some of his logically disconnected science which is taken as science though it is logically disconnected. We are living in an age of decadence in which mere political expediency is the standard of thinking instead of honest rationality. I think it's a result of the holding that morality is illusory and the mere incidental result of natural selection. There was a time I'd think that was leaping to a conclusion but the gap has been largely filled in by my reading over the last decade.