Hi LP,
First post! (To everyone else here, having commented on this subject elsewhere on the web I was invited by LP to share my ideas here, and so I am probably only going to participate in this thread.) If I may, I’ll start with your last statement:
lordpasternack wrote:PS. I have never claimed to be male, and have corrected people everytime they have made that assumption. The only reason that my old profile on RD.net states that I'm male is because that was the default option on the profiles of the (then) newly revamped site in 2010, on which I never participated, and so never "reassigned" my profile. I am shown clearly as female on a number of sites which pre-exist my involvement in the atheist community.
Amusingly, I too had an account on RD.net back in the day that was marked as ‘male’ by default, so I’m in the same boat that you are of having incorrect old accounts.
lordpasternack wrote:Okay - I'm tired - but I just want to make one remark for the time being: the interesting thing about this issue having blown up on Freethought Blogs, is the way in which all the anti-FtB people have cast me into the deepest cynicism, and are interpreting everything I have ever said with the least charity possible - and not really grasping that there are epistemological issues involved here, which are independent of me and/or my personality. Sure, you may doubt me because of what you perceive to be my personality - but are you going to attempt to falsify my statements, or just ad-hom the hell out of me, and leave it at that?
Before I delve into replying to the current issues that have been brought up on FtB, I thought I’d say something about the figure of Dawkins as a ‘leader’ of movement atheism. I came into contact with the atheist movement largely because of having read Dawkins’ TGD in 2007 or so. I joined RD.net soon after and posted mainly in the old front page threads rather than the forum; I made a few posts on Pharyngula prior to Crackergate, and so on. After the forum meltdown and the changes to the nature of the site I rather lost interest with posting there any more, and the general ambience and the tenor of the commentariat. I tried accessing my old account just now on the new RD.net and got this dreadful error message:
You account has been disable on the old site and is not allowed to be transferred. Please contact us at feedback@richarddawkins.net if feel you have reach this message in error
(Wow, who’s the twit with no understanding of grammar coding the new site?)
Anyway, my 2 pennies worth. There’s always been a rather fannish element surrounding Richard on RD.net that pretends he can do no wrong, and from my time reading and participating in the front page comment threads I also got rather more than a small vibe suggesting that some of that halo was based on sexual objectification (of him) or fascination (towards him). Given the idea of atheism is ‘no gods, no masters’, I always found the adoration surrounding Dawkins a bit hard to take.
Both the unwillingness to admit that Richard is fallible, has feet of clay, and the unseemly fannishness surrounding him, struck me as pretty unhealthy and unskeptical. A few years later and the forum meltdown followed by the Timonen embezzlement lawsuit fiasco probably caused the scales to fall from some people’s eyes. However, despite all that controversy there are still plenty of Dawkins fans who are quite noticeable say, for going around and policing those who criticise Dawkins’ bizarre arguments which he gets involved in on Twitter. It’s as plain as day that Dawkins often says silly things that are famously capable of being easily misinterpreted, and then the Dawkins fanclub comes along to blame the people who are taking Dawkins’ statement at face value when it’s clearly Dawkins who’s at fault for failing to make his points clearly and unambiguously. This fannishness is still there, even three years after the forums were nuked.
lordpasternack wrote:It's fascinating reading the rampant speculation, and the gossip, and shitty ad hominem arguments from all camps… Ultimately, though, this is an issue that will boil down to subtantive evidence - substantive evidence about the issues that are actually important. I may be a complete bastard, and that's quite irrelevant to whether my claims are ultimately grounded in reality, and bolstered by evidence. I don't care what people think of my personality, or anyone else's, generally - I'll do my best to make all my data publicly verifiable (yeah, private emails are difficult to verify unless they are loaded up in front of you, sorry) - and you can reach your own interpretations. I don't care if I get harassed and/or completely misconstrued - I have always been honest, and I intend to be substantive. That is what is ultimately important to me, here. Even Dawkins knows as much.
A lot of the meta-commenting I’ve seen around is trying to speculate why a person holds a certain position as a means to being able to dismiss it trivially, rather than dealing with the actual facts that might lead them to hold it. As an example: Dawkins has said some silly things that are capable of being interpreted as sexist and racist (e.g. the famous ‘Dear Muslima’ has certainly been cited as sexist and racist, since women, and particularly Muslim women, are not a monolith). Some of the people criticising Dawkins for these things happen to be bloggers or commenters at FtB, which is notoriously left-wing and feminist, so the meme goes, it’s FTBullies and feminazis bashing Dawkins because they hate anyone who’s a well-off, white heterosexual male. (And many of the threads quickly get derailed into total pro versus contra false dilemmas.)
This would remove any nuance from where the actual criticism lies, which is usually a lot more fine pointed than that. While there are some commenters at FtB who have almost complete antipathy for him, no one can honestly pretend that that attitude is universal. Plenty of people there will defend his scientific credentials in evolutionary biology, and then draw a line between that and his writings and attitudes on things outside of that. I still think TGD is a worthwhile book and am not rushing to desecrate my copy; I don’t hate the guy; I don’t think everything he says is either worthy of criticism, or should be immune from it. I dislike the polarisation that assumes that someone must be totally in support of or completely against a figure like Dawkins, when it is more than possible to agree with a lot of what he says, while disagreeing with substantial points too.
The mismanagement of the Richard Dawkins Foundation
It’s obvious you’ve spent a lot of time looking into this, and it wouldn’t at all surprise me that there was a culture surrounding Richard of not questioning management decisions he makes for his foundation. I’ve spent a little time working in (or otherwise involved with) dysfunctional and mismanaged organisations that were too small to have a strong culture of corporate responsibility and which tended to revolve around the ego of strong leaders who had major gaps in their knowledge. Most critically, the ego-driven culture around those leaders manifested in an inability to appropriately delegate those responsibilities to people with the proper experience and knowledge.
The RDFRS is clearly small enough to have a thin smattering of expertise, so that a few resignations here and there would result in functional gaps. It’s not clear how suitable certain employees past and present were initially employed; whether their talents were directly related to the jobs they were hired for; and whether nepotism or just friendly connections were employed (e.g. ‘someone told me Josh Timonen was good with computers, so I hired him to run my website’). If the RDFRS has areas of incompetency, for example, it also might imply that it has no ability to assess that the people they are hiring are actually competent to perform the work they’re being hired for.
I have had no personal dealings with any employees of RDFRS and have only met RD himself in passing (after he’d finished a book signing), so I have no basis really to comment on the bulk of stuff written in the previous thread about Elizabeth Cornwell, and whether it’s a case where the worst or most incriminating stuff has been cherry-picked or not. There are obviously factual things which have been adduced (the Karen Owens deposition is a good starting point; the February 2010 e-mail from Cornwell to Timonen fills in more of the picture; as does the extract from the land holdings database from Virginia for Cornwell’s home address), but some of the criticism reaches well beyond that. I had looked in on these forums about April, and noticed then the sort of disbelieving mockery that was going on, which I was tempted to think was because there seems to be an unduly large amount of personal investment in the investigation and claims.
Roger Derwen, Marion Mistress, and Paula Kirby versus Rebecca Watson
A few FtB commenters have drawn some of the dots surrounding Richard’s intervention in Elevatorgate. As Cornwell herself pointed out in 2010, Paula Kirby was by then Dawkins’ mistress. In June 2011 at the World Atheism Conference in Dublin, Paula was asked to speak to a panel topic of ‘Women in Atheism’ which she personally found embarrassing as she was of the view that women shouldn’t need to be singled out for what seemed like tokenism, and that as a women she had experienced nothing in the way of sexist barriers preventing her participation in the movement. The following day Rebecca Watson and Richard Dawkins were sharing a panel on ‘Communicating Atheism’ and Rebecca took the tack of replying to Paula’s comment which she identified as a fallacious ‘argument from ignorance’ that because she had not experienced sexism in movement atheism did not imply that other women all had the same experiences, and then brought up her own experiences from having communicated atheism and skepticism as a woman and the particular backlash she’d received.
Whether it was impolitic or not for Watson to criticise an argument Dawkins’ mistress had made while Dawkins himself was sitting right beside her, more than a few people have noted that Dawkins’ refusal to share another panel with Watson probably goes all the way back to this, prior to Elevatorgate. After ‘Dear Muslima’ a lot of people were curious why Dawkins had put his foot in his mouth and puzzled at his refusal to retract the attack on Watson, or even to admit he had heard any of the criticism. This was after he had actually invited people to criticise him (without using the word ‘fuck’; this was on Pharyngula, after all) and I was one of the people who offered a reply to Dawkins suggesting why I thought his attack was wrong and his characterisation of the incident as ‘zero bad’ was faulty (I abstained from using the word ‘fuck’).
After Dawkins’ ‘Dear Muslima’ silliness, it then appears there was an asymmetric boycott. Watson on Skepchick announced a personal boycott on Dawkins, though there were quite a number of people who either honestly or maliciously interpreted her as calling for a boycott from all her followers, too. Meanwhile, in private Dawkins had blacklisted Watson by refusing to participate in any event to which she’d be invited, as Sarah Moglia’s recent blog post appears to confirm.
The question obviously presents itself, what could Watson possibly have done to provoke such a response from Dawkins? You can have a look at the Dublin panel, and the two of them act quite amiably towards one another during the panel — there’s one bit where Watson mentions how she enjoys Dawkins’ reading his hate-mail, and she especially wants Dawkins to say one particular insult so she can later record it as a ringtone — and Dawkins good-naturedly obliges. What happened in the intervening month before ‘Dear Muslima’ to turn Dawkins volte-face against her?
Unsurprisingly, the Cornwell ‘some possible ideas’ e-mail written over a year beforehand provides a good working hypothesis:
Robin Cornwell to Josh Timonen, 26 February 2010 wrote:One of the things I know extremely well about Richard is he is conflict-avoiding and he [is] female-dependent. There is a lot of psychology at work here… but Richard is extremely weak when it comes to demanding females.
While Richard and I are not together any longer, we do have a friendship. It has been under a great deal of strain. When Paula, who has been his mistress now for over two years, found out about me she demanded that he end his friendship with me. It has been a struggle and I will be very honest here - extremely painful on an emotional level. I have. The irony is that I would never have become ED if Richard and I were still in a sexual relationship. I have done my best not to use our relationship to move the Foundation in the right direction, and in fact - when Karen was trustee - she did all she could to keep me out of the loop on all financial decisions. She succeeded.
Paula will remain an influence on Richard, and for whatever reasons but she does not have to be the one that Andrew goes to for advice. Unfortunately, Richard had constantly assured me that she was not involved in the Foundation decision making processes. But apparently this is not the case.
While I am prepared to be skeptical about the truthfulness of Cornwell’s account to some degree, there is corroboration of her having been Dawkins’ mistress from the deposition by Karen Owens made in the RDFRS v. Timonen, Norton, Upper Branch litigation. She claims that Kirby made demands on Dawkins to end his friendship with Cornwell, which provides a good explanation for Kirby being responsible for Dawkins’ apparent hatred towards Watson, as well as why Dawkins is so pliable as to be the instrument of a feud established between Kirby and Watson.
Can't say I'm surprised since he is a bit of a pompous intellectual bastard. Bet Dawkins does real well with the women who think they are smart though 
