“Send this genius an invitation to the White House”
It’s still going on, and getting worse – Dawkins calling Ahmed Mohamed, age 14, a “fraud” on Twitter, and complaining that he was invited to the White House and MIT, and defending the use of Breitbart as a source. He’s trending on Facebook. Multiple news outlets are reporting on his Twitter bullying.
Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins 3 hours ago
Cool invention.
Send this genius an invitation to the White House.
Brilliant short film, says it all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=2&v=kHk_6Vh4Qeo …
This is a senior scientist, a best-selling author, famous and loaded with awards – being sarcastic about the genius of a boy of 14, a brown immigrant boy in Texas.
It’s not a good look.
Huge numbers, including me, + the White House, were taken for gullible fools https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=6&v=kHk_6Vh4Qeo … & police were fooled in a nastier way.
How were we taken for gullible fools? I don’t recall anyone claiming Ahmed had made some sort of extraordinary invention. I assumed it was tinkering, of the kind that boys of 14 do, that’s a sign of interest in tinkering and maybe the principles that guide it. I didn’t assume he was doing real engineering at his age. The fuss wasn’t because he was taken to be a genius, it was because his school treated him badly.
Dawkins is energetically setting fire to his own reputation today.
If people expect a 14-year-old boy to be so precise in his language that he never misuses the word “invent”, then they haven’t known any 14-year-old boys.
My younger brother used to do this sort of thing all the time, and many people considered him a “genius”. But then, my younger brother was (and still is) white.
Dawkins must be God’s messenger; telling the unfaithful to return to the fold, just so as to avoid guilt by association.
Dawkins has lost it. Completely. Irreversibly. Unambiguously.
Yet I’m surprised that nobody seems to call out Taslima for her egregious reactions. She started badly
and then went steadily downhill
Somebody really needs to sit her down and dispel her rank paranoia as well as her abject reasoning. I really believe she’s better than this.
Well, you know, Saikat, if anyone has good reason for paranoia of this kind, it’s Taslima. She wears a target, and has for over 20 years.
I partially agree Ophelia. Yes, she definitely has good reasons for her paranoia. But that does not mean that we should leave it uncontested, that such views should not be dispelled. I have been reading her for over 25 years now and I have seldom seen her espouse views like these. This is just not her.
That is rather disappointing, but I understand where’s she’s coming from both literally and figuratively. I do not know her well enough to discuss it with her and certainly not on Twitter.
So let’s say the kid did misrepresent his achievement. Let’s say he is getting credit for an “invention” he didn’t actually invent. Why does Richard Dawkins care about this, again? Dawkins has become such a cranky weirdo.
Dawkins isn’t setting fire to his reputation.
He’s just rebranding it to suit a larger, more loyal, and much better funded support system.
Dawkins gets a lot of credit for the idea of the selfish gene, which he didn’t invent. All he did was take apart some ready-made work and call it a different name…
I used to build stuff when I was a kid, too. I’m old enough to have built shortwave radios with valves. I made amps. And later I made digital recorders. And then fractal generators. And then ray tracers… and then neural nets and genetic algorithms and… well, just about everything else geeks built around that time.
I never claimed to have invented any of those things, but I was starting with a few bits of wire and a handful of rusty nails and no internet and the kind of family not receptive to people contraptioning in their bedroom. So when I got something to work, I was pretty proud even when I didn’t quite know why it worked. It wouldn’t have been such a great jump to calling them inventions and it wouldn’t have taken very much kindness for someone to have agreed, in the spirit of encouragement.
But that’s not the issue: guy took a clock to school, got cuffed and arrested. What he made it from or whether he invented the concept of timekeeping couldn’t be further from the point.
Jafafa Hots @#9: “He’s just rebranding it to suit a larger, more loyal, and much better funded support system.”
Aha, yes! The patron secular saint of underappreciated white men.
In all of this, Dawkins is coming across to me as petulantly *jealous*. Perhaps he himself has not been invited to the White House on a sufficient number of occasions.
“I assumed it was tinkering, of the kind that boys of 14 do, that’s a sign of interest in tinkering and maybe the principles that guide it.”
And girls. The kind of tinkering that girls and boys do.
@Saikat Biswas
I guess Taslima is saying she would have genuinely believed it to be a bomb – which , while I find it t be an ignorant view, is atleast understandable.
If the Police/Teacher had indeed evacuated the school and called in the bomb squad then we might be able to excuse something – However thats not how this story played out.
maddog @12 – yes, obviously, but that wouldn’t have been right in that sentence, because “boys of 14” was specific to Ahmed. It wasn’t a generalization about what kids do, it was about Ahmed.