Richard Dawkins’ forums suspended

It’s hardly the biggest news in the world. Given some of the panic on the web one would think whole of the Internet was due to be shut down. Richard Dawkins’ web forums have been suspended pending an overdue clean up. I’ve been commenting at length on this here.

My original article critical of his forums has been receiving a massive amount of traffic, mainly from a cesspit of substandard debate which makes the Dawkins forums look as if they were frequented exclusively by leading intellectuals.

I have been called “an absolute f**king c**t” on this forum, as they flounder to find some fault in my argument. Finding nothing it can criticise validly, the inferior mind resorts to vulgarity. This is nothing, though, compared with what technical admin Josh has been receiving over at RD.net – an avalanche of despicable abuse which has motivated Richard Dawkins himself to make a statement.

What truly, utterly pathetic people these are who have nothing better to do than mail abuse to people because their crutch (an Internet forum not even on their own site) has been taken away (because of misbehaviour of contributors and moderators, mind you). If ever the phrase “Get a life” was relevant, it’s now.

Richard Dawkins has certainly received a wake up call as to what was going on at his forum, as he says himself above. This, despite him having said this previously, when writing of the marvels of the Internet:

“Of course there are negative aspects, but they are easily forgiven. I’ve already referred to the lamentable content of many chat room conversations without editorial control.

The tendency to flaming rudeness is fostered by the convention — whose sociological provenance we might discuss one day — of anonymity.

Insults and obscenities, to which you would not dream of signing your real name, flow gleefully from the keyboard when you are masquerading online as ‘TinkyWinky’ or ‘FlubPoodle’ or ‘ArchWeasel’.”

Richard Dawkins

To people who have not connected the dots yet, I don’t publish intellectually substandard comments on my site here, so don’t be surprised if your comment isn’t turning up. Don’t even waste your time posting it. That’s one of the benefits of having your own website: you can run it however you like, as you are finding out as Prof Dawkins exercises his executive control. Tough.

I’m going to e-mail some support to Josh now, and then probably have nothing more to do with this debate. It’s just not important enough. If you have any kind of life at all you’ll do the same.