Richard Dawkins discovers that his Fanboys are, in fact, socially autistic jerks

This is announcement by the "King of Socially Autistic Jerks" is ironic beyond all recognition.  After Dawkins announced that he was redesigning his website to reduce the amount of "frivolous gossip," the Great Man found himself the subject of villification at the hands of his fanbase. To wit, as he explains:

Imagine that you, as a greatly liked and respected person, found yourself overnight subjected to personal vilification on an unprecedented scale, from anonymous commenters on a website. Suppose you found yourself described as an “utter twat” a “suppurating rectum. A suppurating rat’s rectum. A suppurating rat’s rectum inside a dead skunk that’s been shoved up a week-old dead rhino’s twat.” Or suppose that somebody on the same website expressed a “sudden urge to ram a fistful of nails” down your throat. Also to “trip you up and kick you in the guts.” And imagine seeing your face described, again by an anonymous poster, as “a slack jawed turd in the mouth mug if ever I saw one.”

Mind you, describing someone who has breached True Atheist orthodoxy with this kind of language all the time at RichardDawkins.Net, but apparently the Great Man has never noticed.

The Greatly Liked and Respected Person responds:

You will notice that the forum has in fact been closed to comments (not taken down) sooner than the 30 days alluded to in the letter. This is purely and simply because of the over-the-top hostility of the comments that were immediately sent in. Note that there is no suggestion of abolishing the principle of a forum in which commenters can start their own threads. Just an editorial re-organization, which will include a change such that the choice of new threads will be subject to editorial control. Editorial control, mark you, by the person who, more than any other individual, has earned the right to the editor’s chair by founding the site in the first place, then maintaining its high standard by hard work and sheer talent. The aim of the letter is to describe an exciting new revamping of our site, one in which quality will take precedence over quantity, where original articles on reason and science, on atheism and scepticism, will be commissioned, where frivolous gossip will be reduced. The new plan may succeed or it may fail, but I think it is worth trying. And even if it fails, it most certainly will not deserve the splenetic hysteria that the mere suggestion of it has received.


Surely there has to be something wrong with people who can resort to such over-the-top language, over-reacting so spectacularly to something so trivial. Even some of those with more temperate language are responding to the proposed changes in a way that is little short of hysterical. Was there ever such conservatism, such reactionary aversion to change, such vicious language in defence of a comfortable status quo? What is the underlying agenda of these people? How can anybody feel that strongly about something so small? Have we stumbled on some dark, territorial atavism? Have private fiefdoms been unwittingly trampled?

Be that as it may, what this remarkable bile suggests to me is that there is something rotten in the Internet culture that can vent it. If I ever had any doubts that RD.net needs to change, and rid itself of this particular aspect of Internet culture, they are dispelled by this episode.

It seems that the Greatly Liked and Respected Person has never noticed that his fans get hysterical all the time. 

Also, while he blames "internet culture" - which is fair to some extent - he also needs to look at the psychology of the fanbase he attracts.  These are people who are literally what Eric Hoffer describes as "True Believers."  They have escaped the burden of their frustrated lives by investing themselves in an ideology that gives their life meaning.  As fans they are fanatics, and, consequently, anything that frustrates their ability to escape into the thing that give them meaning is, to them, an evil that needs to be purged from existence.