Twatson Gets Dawky Punched

 [edit: type in red font has an error. Explained in the edit at bottom, also in red.]

Ok, I can't take it anymore. I have to write about this here. I'm sure everyone is aware by now that Dawkins is paying for daycare. This is a great thing on which he and his foundation have been working for a long while. It's not something one just up and does overnight.

Abbie's gaggle of gender-traitors et al have been commenting on her write-up about it. Reading her article on it was fairly straight-forward - he who laughs last laughs best.  She made it fairly evident that Dawkins was working on this before Twatson's box exploded.

Anyway, I rant all over the place about this, including to Dawkins very recently, but I cant take any credit. Apparently this move has been in the works for a long time, with Camp Quest. Apparently before Twatson fell down and threw a temper tantrum and demanded everyone kiss her invisible boo-boo.
She made her move. A rash decision.
Dawkins made his. Carefully planned for some time.

Emphasis added for PZ and his gang.  You'd think words plainly written like that would not require a great deal of explanation. You'd be wrong of course. Naturally, after all if you're reading this, you're probably just as stupid as I am. And we know that I'm wrong on everything. So, there you have it.

So, why is it that Abbie thinks this is a blow to Twatson et al?  Because it is.  All the while that our simpering opposition has been droning on about Dawkins being a woman-hating evil relic, he's been keeping on keeping on.  He sometimes slows down to have a chat with people about stuff, then he gets right back to doing *work*.  There's a difference between writing a blog and talking about issues, and establishing infrastructure and working on issues and then talking to others. Dawkins is in this latter category.

He talks about issues in between his work on resolving issues. Twatson talks about issues and then talks about how she talks about talking about issues.  It's all fine and well and to talk about issues. It's not doing nothing per se, but it's also not doing the work.

Dawkins is the power-lifter here. He's not our "leader" who declares things by fiat to which we all nod and obey.  Why then is he respected as he is? Proven track record. That's why. Whatever else is going on, one thing I can count on as sure as the next sunrise is that Richard Dawkins is somewhere doing something that is going to help some real live people suffer a little less. I cannot do what he does.  You probably can't either.

The difference is that I recognize I'm not in his league on this.  He is the fucking workhorse here. I donate extra cash when I have it lying around.  That's easy. Anyone can send off some guilt money. I just don't claim that a hundred bucks here, twenty bucks there is what's doing the work. It helps. A very, very, very little. But it helps.

So. Abbie goes on to note that the silence from the Dawkins bashing club has been massive. Has it been?

Well, let's see. Dawkins announced this on Saturday. It's now Wednesday.  That's 4 days it took before the first blog post went up from Blaghag*.  How long did it take from when Dawkins commented at PZ's place until Blaghag's tampon exploded?  Hours. Like a decent sized movie worth of hours.

I guess we can tell her priorities. Where is PZ's blog on it? Well, he's waiting for "official" confirmation before he writes about it.  I guess Richard Dawkins saying it aloud in public at a conference isn't official enough. It has to be, as PZ said, on his website before PZ will write about it - to have a link and all to an official source.

I note that Dawkins still hasn't officially said on his website that he indeed wrote anything on PZ's website.  But that hasn't seemed to have stopped PZ from pillorying him, and encouraging others to do the same.

His priorities are clear as well.

So, Blaghag wrote some mean words to Abbie on Abbie's blog:

Your comment "The non-response this move has gotten, the stunned silence from the True Feminists mirrors that of the duped Evangelicals before. Stricken dumb by being too dumb to understand what just happened. Its hysterical." is completely insincere. I was the first person to tweet how happy I was when Dawkins made that announcement. And Ashley F. Miller (whose tweet you used) was one of those "True Feminists" (your words, not ours) who was very critical of Dawkins too.
Not to mention after the announcement, I personally went up to him during the Speaker's reception, shook his hand, and told him how thankful I was about the funding. We had a very friendly conversation. And I'm including it in my post about TAM, which isn't done yet because I spent today recovering from my sleep deprivation and, you know, going back to work.
Please don't take a good thing and use it to spit in our faces. It's immature.

Stupid and rude, but I don't need to defend Abbie. She's a big grown up and is more than fully capable of speaking her mind for herself, which she did in short order.  Now, I just want to point out a feature here. I'll put it in emphasis.
In bold: it's nice of Jen to thank Dawkins for doing things for other people. I too would like to thank Dawkins for doing all the things he's doing for people who aren't me, on their behalf of course.  How about instead of "thanking" him, you fucking congratulate him on an accomplishment no one has been able to do? Thanking him? Like it's a one off or something?

Hats off to Dawkins - excellent job. Wish I could have done something to help, but since I didn't, kudos for being better at this than I am.

In italics: yes, immature noting that while you were decrying him as evil incarnate he was off helping people you were too busy posturing for and being offended on behalf of.  Maturity there. Mm hmm.

So, what did Blaghag have to say on her blog about Dawkins' feat here?

Apparently I didn't blog about it quickly enough, because obviously writing a long post is my first priority, over catching up with sleep, work, and SSA business. Of course, I can't take those arguments seriously when their only ammo is immature name bending like "Twatson.

Quickly enough? You had four fucking days to write out: "Richard Dawkins to pay for daycare at conventions. More to follow as details become available"

That took me 6 seconds to type out. 6. Seconds. Add in time for editing and hitting the publish button and I bet it'd be like 12 or 15 seconds.  For the record, there are about 350,000 seconds in four days - give or take an hour here and there for times of day and zone changes. Call it 300,000 seconds. Divide one by the other and we'll see the kind of expenditure of time we're talking here. 6 seconds out of 300,000 was too much an effort for Blaghag to expend when a truly wonderful thing comes to pass. Apparently, unlike everyone else in the world, she has "work" and obligations to do. Not like us no-named slackers who only sit at our computers writing on blogs all day.

She goes on to say:

Now, the motivation behind it? I can only speculate, since I can't read minds. I suspect this is a very clever way of saying "Look how much I support women, now can we shush about this stupid elevator thing?"

 Really? She doesn't know the motivation but speculates it was done in response to Twatson? This despite having already been told (as we know for a fact she has been considering her response to Abbie came a full day earlier - saying that this was in the works long before Twatson) that this predates the Twatson affair by a long margin.  She speculates, nevertheless, that this was Dawkins trying to shut it up and have it wash under the bridge. He's fucking clever - planning all of this months in advance. Why, I bet he hired elevatorguy (that's me!) to ask Twatson to coffee to have a good background story to wash over by doing this. Dash cunning those Brits are.



So, the RDF people wrote in response to blaghag, on her blog:

RDFRS has routinely supported other secular, humanist, and atheist organizations since it's inception. It is discouraging, given the efforts RDFRS has made to support this movement to suddenly suggest that our motivations are less than sincere. 

 What was the response? Go tell it to Abbie, she's the one saying it's not sincere. No. Abbie said fucking outright that this was unrelated to Twatson and had been in the works for a long time. It is just accidentally great timing that it dropped when it did. And it was. It's fucking brilliant - Dawkins didn't waste his time chatting in comments on blogs. He went back about his business getting shit done. This project finished and was announced at a major convention (unheard of, right?) which has the fortunate side effect of saying "fuck you whiny people. Bitch all you'd like, I'm busy actually doing stuff". *twofingersalute*

Thank you for clarifying this, Liz. I wish some sort of clarification as to when this idea started would have been read with his statement to preemptively dissuade speculation. I know everyone at the conference - regardless of what "side" they were on - thought this was a political move of some sort. People couldn't stop talking about what it meant. I hope you're leaving this same message on the blogs of your supporters like ERV, who are trying to portray this move as Richard giving the middle finger to those who disagree with him.

Blaghag wrote that in response. Apparently, Dawkins still didn't do it right enough for her. He's supposed to preface his announcements in words she should be consulted on to make her happy.

Edit for the shit in red. I dropped the ball and completely fucked up the day.  The time stamp on Blaghag's blog read 10:41. I read it Wednesday morning, and thought it was the current day's posting history. In reality, I missed reading in the block letters at the header "July 19" which was Tuesday, not Wednesday.

Therefore, subtract out 24 hours of seconds and round down in a favorable direction to be generous as possible to Blaghag.

She had 3 days to do a post requiring all of 6 seconds to write out.  This does change the scale of the problem - 6 seconds out of 3 days is a larger proportion of time than 6 seconds out of 4 days. In addition to understating the burden she would have to have endured, it is just inexcusably sloppy reporting to get the fucking date wrong. I have no excuse, just an explanation for how it is that I managed to fuck it up.

Thank you to Astrokid. Nj for calling me out on that.  

I was wrong. He checked my facts (like a good reader should do anyway) and found that I was wrong. He called me out on it, and I'm leaving notes in the original to the edit with the correct information, and apologizing to Blaghag for understating her burden and wrongly attributing to her a delay that she did not in fact have.  

Further note to other side: this is how you apologize and make a retraction - publicly, boldly, and unequivocally.  Confess error, explain what the error is, how you fucked it up, what you've done to correct and then move on in the future trying to do better.

None of that wheedling shit you assholes opposite use.