{"id":2478,"date":"2020-02-20T07:00:19","date_gmt":"2020-02-20T12:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/?p=2478"},"modified":"2020-02-20T09:24:53","modified_gmt":"2020-02-20T14:24:53","slug":"hemant-mehta-eugenics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/2020\/02\/hemant-mehta-eugenics\/","title":{"rendered":"Hemant Mehta joins mob dragging Dawkins through the mud for tweeting fact about eugenics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/2020\/02\/hemant-mehta-eugenics\/(opens in a new tab)\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"680\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/files\/2015\/07\/richard-dawkins.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1364\" srcset=\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/files\/2015\/07\/richard-dawkins.jpg 680w, https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/files\/2015\/07\/richard-dawkins-300x159.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Gee, it must be a day ending in Y, for there&#8217;s a new deliberate misrepresentation of something <strong>Richard Dawkins<\/strong> said \u2060\u2014 <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/2017\/07\/kpfa-dawkins\/\">the smear campaign<\/a><\/strong> never ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Earlier this week, Dawkins <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/RichardDawkins\/status\/1228943686953664512\">tweeted this<\/a>: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p> It\u2019s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It\u2019s quite another to conclude that it wouldn\u2019t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs &amp; roses. Why on earth wouldn\u2019t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com\/2020\/02\/16\/dawkins-makes-a-tweet\/\">Snowflakes bursted into outrage<\/a> for, apparently, stating that something morally outrageous is factually possible is some kind of sin or something. Or, how <strong>Hemant Mehta<\/strong>, of the not-so <em>Friendly Atheist<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20200219224929\/https:\/\/friendlyatheist.patheos.com\/2020\/02\/16\/richard-dawkins-puts-foot-in-mouth-again-with-tweets-about-how-eugenics-works\/\">put it<\/a>: Dawkins &#8220;<em>put his foot in his mouth<\/em>&#8221; (?).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">LOL. Imagine being <em><a href=\"https:\/\/friendlyatheist.patheos.com\/2020\/02\/16\/richard-dawkins-puts-foot-in-mouth-again-with-tweets-about-how-eugenics-works\/\">this<\/a><\/em> triggered by a statement of fact. A bit like getting mad at someone for saying that people die if you put a rope around their neck and hang them by it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The icing on the cake, though, was <strong>Mehta&#8217;s victim-blaming<\/strong>. People who already hate Dawkins jumped to his throat to mischaracterize his words and had a mob go after him, and Mehta&#8217;s response was: Twitter sucks at nuance, so if people fail to uphold the charitable principle or are illiterate, that&#8217;s on Dawkins!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Go figure! Next time the <em>&#8216;Friendly&#8217; Atheist<\/em> will excuse Torquemada and say atheists are to blame for stating facts without the proper decorum in the Middle Ages. Also: how dare History books claim that burning people on stakes worked, and they died?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is not the first time tweeting a fact has got Richard Dawkins into trouble with the <em>bien<\/em>&#8211;<em>pensants<\/em>, and it would be naive to think it will be the last one. We will know when it happens, though, for<strong> Hemant Mehta will bend over backward to justify people harassing Dawkins<\/strong> over the tweeted fact, blame the whole thing on the scientist, and claim Dawkins should stop tweeting however he feels like and <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/2015\/10\/richard-dawkins-twitter\/\">get with the program instead<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">See? I know the script by now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gee, it must be a day ending in Y, for there&#8217;s a new deliberate misrepresentation of something Richard Dawkins said&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":1364,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,196],"tags":[293,434,142,317,58,403,316],"class_list":["post-2478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atheism","category-philosophy","tag-bullying","tag-eugenics","tag-hemant-mehta","tag-politically-correctnesspolitically-incorrect","tag-richard-dawkins","tag-sjw","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/avant-garde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}