Post #1992877
2026-05-04 19:08 UTC
Elevatorgate was perhaps his most iconic failing. Rebecca Watson challenged the Western atheist community to look at their own unchallenged patriarchy, still being enacted outside obviously patriarchal religious structures.
Dawkins could have taken this moment to think "hey, yes, actually there's a lot of work I still need to do to truly dismantle the sort of thinking I was raised within"
Instead, he threw what can only be described as a hissy fit, named Islam as the only force of patriarchy worth bothering about, and held Watson as some sort of "enemy within" atheism, showing exactly how us-vs-them, paranoid, and binary his thinking had become.
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Replies (2)
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@Tattie@eldritch.cafe 2026-05-04 19:09
I've seen Dawkins described as a narcissist. While I don't use the language of disorders, I do see it as true in the sense that he has long been caught in a defensive strategy which involves obsessively affirming his own intelligence and moral goodness, and denying his own fallibility. AI was like a match to touchpaper. Gas him up a bit, reflect his own language back at him, and he falls in love with his own reflection. 5/
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@rozeboosje@masto.ai 2026-05-04 19:22
@Tattie I still remember "elevatorgate" and a few other occasions where the YouTube atheist community discovered we weren't all as rational, objective and enlightened as we would like to think we are.