Re: Dawkins Censorship (3 New Articles 26.02.10)

Post by **Kman Supra** » Fri Feb 26, 2010 12:23 pm

Telegraph : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... iests.html

http://www.techeye.net/internet/dawkins ... ternet-war

http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/top-stori ... ship-storm

Post by **Animavore** » Fri Feb 26, 2010 12:28 pm

Barely a fact straight between them.

Oh dear.

Post by **RoaringAtheist** » Fri Feb 26, 2010 12:30 pm

The Techeye one particularly is just plain annoying - the others are just aping what's already been said.

Post by **Strontium Dog** » Fri Feb 26, 2010 12:35 pm

The Telegraph one doesn't even spell "atheists" right in the headline!

This is the standard of journalism nowadays - thoroughly woeful.

Post by **PsychoSerenity** » Fri Feb 26, 2010 12:37 pm

I can't believe how lazy these journalists are! They haven't even tried to get the full story.

Post by **Azathoth** » Fri Feb 26, 2010 12:43 pm

Why would they? People calling Dawkins names sells more papers.

Post by **Sisifo** » Fri Feb 26, 2010 12:54 pm

RoaringAtheist wrote:The Techeye one particularly is just plain annoying - the others are just aping what's already been said.

Why? I think it is a good in-a-couple-of-paragraphs summary of events.

Post by **RoaringAtheist** » Fri Feb 26, 2010 1:04 pm

Sisifo wrote:
RoaringAtheist wrote:The Techeye one particularly is just plain annoying - the others are just aping what's already been said.
Why? I think it is a good in-a-couple-of-paragraphs summary of events.

Some of their wording (besides the fact that the story is incorrect as presented there, just like all the others.) :

Fundamentalist atheist

< Sigh

However, the announcement created such an explosion of ire that the planned 30-day switch-over period had to be scrapped and the discussion forum locked down immediately.

< This is incorrect; the messages supposedly used as reason for shutting it down completely did not appear until hours later and on an entirely different forum.

Some members have moaned that their their profiles have been wiped out and others have lost access to files and messages that they uploaded onto the website.

< over 30.000 posts were removed, including moderators' and a lot of great content, up there with the best on RDF. Way to trivialize bookburnings.

He will continue his purge his website of this “vicious element”. If only there were a similar system of autocratic control on humanity which could make them behave in a way that Dawkin's likes. What ever happened to the Catholic Church?

< :rolleyes:

Post by **GenesForLife** » Fri Feb 26, 2010 1:12 pm

My response to the media would be, shall we say, unprintable at best...

Post by **lordpasternack** » Fri Feb 26, 2010 1:24 pm

Posted to Torygraph:

Let's set one part of the record straight - Richard's announcement on his forum is not a reliable source of an accurate version of events. He was not there. He turned up after everything had happened, with no information as to what happened except for the site admin Josh Timonen's version of events, and a cursory browse of another forum, which in his ignorance of events, he totally misunderstood and misrepresented.

He doesn't even to my knowledge have any actual evidence that what he says is correct - that the INITIAL discontent was intolerably vitriolic - since I believe Josh deleted all the content, rather than keeping a private copy for posterity. And how convenient for Josh.

It is this site admin, Josh, with whom many forum users are disgusted and in some cases outraged. NOT RICHARD. Yes, some of us are offended by the actual website changes - but speaking for myself and numerous others - we are far, far more outraged by Josh Timonen's conduct during the events that transpired - including unreasonably stamping on what was simple frank criticism, and putting the forum into read-only mode.

There are a number of other more slimey offences committed either by Josh or a colleague of his, and he deliberately deleted some admin logs in a rather calculated attempt to cover up the actions he'd taken.

It's my understanding that some people are collecting or have collected substantial evidence indicative of Josh's mendacity and calculated exploitation of the trust he knows Richard places in him - and this will all come out in the wash eventually. And that will be a relief.

Post by **Rum** » Fri Feb 26, 2010 1:28 pm

Apparently Forum members were also 'fans' of his.

Post by **Heresiarch** » Fri Feb 26, 2010 2:26 pm

Strontium Dog wrote:The Telegraph one doesn't even spell "atheists" right in the headline!

They're trying to capture customers from The Gaurdian.

Post by **ED209** » Fri Feb 26, 2010 3:15 pm

Psychoserenity wrote:I can't believe how lazy these journalists are! They haven't even tried to get the full story.

Not only that, but the level of inaccuracies and downright falsehood (Dawkins' was not the target of any vitriol, Dawkin's did not claim to be the target and has himself been misquoted, the vitriol was not on his forum which by that time had been shut down, the vitriol was not in relation to the proposed changes but to the arbitrary wholesale destruction of posts etc) in these professional articles is amazing. This isn't Watergate, they don't need groundbreaking investigative journalism - they only have to look on the internet where all the info (including the original quote-mined posts) is freely accessible and even summarised, documented and packaged for the likes of them on Peter's excellent blog and other places. If journalists of the so-called quality press can't even get right a story that doesn't require them to do anything more onerous than looking on the internet, what the fuck have we come to.

But in a way, looking at the quality of some of the comments from their readers this is hardly surprising. People are actually using the 'slack-jawed' quote to argue (in their mind, rigorously argue) in favour of Dawkins' characterisation of thousands of users, I'd have thought that however thick a person is they would be able to see the fallacy of attributing a single quote to thousands of people - come on, Torygraph reader, surely even you can see that they can't all have said that. The difference between the posts from ex-RDFers and general public is like night and day, not in terms of familiarity with the background to all this but in terms of being able to draw logical conclusions from simple premises. These people really need to sharpen their reasoning skills, obviously the main-article-and-comments format that these papers use does nothing to foster clear thinking, perhaps a spell on the RDF forum would have been of great help to them

Anyway, 'Employee of Richard Dawkins insulted somewhere on internet' isn't much of a story however you look at it. 'Employee of Richard Dawkins deletes thousands of examples of solid scientific writing out of spite, then deletes logs and disrupts members' backup processes with Dawkins' public support' is rather more interesting and has the benefit of being true. I knew that 90% of what we read in the papers is bullshit, but this episode has really brought home to me the implications of just what that means. It means that 90% of what we read in the papers is, quite literally, bullshit

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