104 Comments
User's avatar
Peter mimms's avatar

One can tell you are a true scientist, because you are willing to say "I got it wrong". Well done for setting such a good example. Stay well.

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My name is Zoran's avatar

Yeah, he said to 3.000.000 people on X that they censor him.

And he made apology here, in substack, to over 25.000 followers that 'he got it wrong'.

Not once he used social networks to apologize, a place where he spread this conspiracy theory of censorship, that he 'got wrong'. Nope, people still read his memes about motocyclist. Yup, that is outright attempt to manipulate masses. He made this apology hidden from majority, to himself, and barely anyone knows it exists.

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Dom Alhambra's avatar

Jump to conclusions for millions and then quietly apologize. Nice. The damage was already done to make people think there’s a conspiracy against him.

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Matt Habermehl's avatar

Is there evidence of this hack and admin accounts? If so, then fine. If not, a healthy dose of suspicion is still warranted. Based on the new information you were provided, you have said "I got it wrong, everything's more or less ok at Facebook". Their PR experts may have been counting on that.

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Emily Shaw's avatar

I also felt that when reading this. For most of it, I thought it was sarcasm.

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David Dunderdale's avatar

Yes, he may have got it wrong. The new generation knows that hacked is usually BS for, I didn't realise lawyers might get involved..

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Randle Carr's avatar

If you believe that explanation your apology was the right thing to do. High road. Well done.

I on the other hand choose to believe you were shut down by an algorithm that punishes feee speech, and that once someone realized your status in the real world they made up a reason post-haste. No apology required.

Carry on!

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Monica Nicolau's avatar

Shouldn’t it be FaceBook that apologizes to you? Publicly?

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Kristine Harley's avatar

Sorry to be cynical, but do you believe this explanation?

Closing down accounts without explanation is tyrannical.

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Harrison Merims's avatar

I guess it was too much to believe/hope that you were admitting your stance on trans individuals was wrong.

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Steve's avatar

Trans individuals? Which ones? He had been talking about the XY *males* in the women’s boxing category at the Olympics. And he was right about them.

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Dragonmama's avatar

He has never had a problem with criticizing any religious teaching. Why should the faith of Gender Theory be exempt from criticism?

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Ima's avatar

not a stance; an observation about reality and mammals.... maaaate

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Henry's avatar

Can you elaborate? What has he got wrong?

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Frank D. Fagnano's avatar

Thank you, Richard, for continuing to keep your (and our) moral standards high. More proof that morality can exist without unjustified false beliefs. See you in NJ in September. My 12 year old son will be in attendance as well.

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bjkeefe's avatar

Sadly, you are apologizing for the less important thing.

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Crawdad's avatar

Oh get a grip. Humans are a sexually dimorphic species and women are adult human females. Men who claim to be women are profoundly sexist and anyone advocating for them as “women” is sexist too. The sex that gestates and gives birth to the ENTIRE HUMAN RACE gets a word and that word is FEMALE and that word can only mean anything if it EXCLUDES ALL MALES. Grow up.

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Erik Klausmeyer's avatar

For what it's worth, the account review and closure process is highly automated, and where it involves a real person, those are people who are in a contact center in India or something similar, and they have no process to give the account owner any kind of detailed explanation.

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mamoose124's avatar

Erik Klausmeyer may be correct but one would think that Facebook has the resources to amend their policy in such cases to include notifying the account holder. Give me a break! Facebook should be apologizing to Dr. Richard Dawkins not the other way around.

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Monica Nicolau's avatar

And if what you say is correct, and I have no reason to doubt it, this says a lot about FBs customer service, and even more, it says a lot about the ability of the user to correct mistakes made by FB.

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The Angry Yogi's avatar

"...might it have some connection with my contemporaneous stand against genetically male boxers fighting women in the Olympics?"

Who are you to decide for anyone else who they are? How on earth do you think you get to attest to anyone else's genetics without a shred of evidence? What right do you have to discount the IOC's eligibility requirements? Lazy archaic patriarchal misogynistic white supremacy at it's finest.

Too bad you're not willing to say you "got it wrong" about Imane Khelif. I hope you are identified in the cyber-bullying lawsuit by French investigators.

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Sez77's avatar

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 - oh Lord. This was priceless Angry Yogibear.

How dare anyone, anywhere, EVER, attest to someone's genetics (despite my 7 yo having a knack for picking it).

Determination is just not possible!

Obviously we had it completely wrong all these centuries; what we previously knew to be knowable is now relegated to the mists of time, now known only to the ancient Babylonian Mystery Schools.

As famous NASA derp Don Pettit once said "We used to have the technology, but we lost it".

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Ruaridh or Roderick's avatar

Ad. hominem writing at its worst, Angry Yogi.

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6jgu1ioxph's avatar

Sometimes people lie about being female. It’s not proven in this case, but it’s also not so wildly implausible that you get to shout down someone else’s informed speculation. One might as well ask: who are you to decide that Khelif must be taken at his/her word?

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User's avatar
Comment deleted
Aug 17
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6jgu1ioxph's avatar

I think this can be dissolved quite simply. Erin is correct that the reality is more complex than whether someone has XY or XX chromosomes, but incorrect in the implication that sex is therefore *all that* much more complicated. Yes, there are other combinations of chromosomes than XY or XX, and there are some conditions where someone does not develop a male body despite having XY chromosomes, but sexes are defined universally among all anisogamous species according to which of exactly two types of gamete an individual (or part of an individual) has the function to produce ... and in humans that basically means whether someone is born with testes or ovaries. The vanishingly tiny minority of people born with neither testes nor ovaries, or with both, may complicate things a little, but those people are pretty much invariably not the people that the trans activist movement is trying to obfuscate biology on behalf of.

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My name is Zoran's avatar

So you're basically saying we have extremes of XX females and XY males on both ends, and we have no idea what to do with XY females giving birth, XX males, or 46,XX/46,XY fertile true hermaphrodite, or other chromosome combinations and variations that nature can produce, so let's pretend they don't exist, and discriminate against, because who gives a fuck about science and nature, we have to keep the old beliefs of Adam and Eve alive and well, because it's hard to comprehend that nature can produce something non-binary, not fitting in our preconceived ideological categories.

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6jgu1ioxph's avatar

No, that's not remotely what I'm saying, and I'm genuinely baffled as to how someone could get that interpretation from what I said, unless they were making a concerted effort to misinterpret me in the most uncharitable way possible.

I'm not saying we should *pretend that people with DSDs don't exist*, I'm saying that we shouldn't use the fact of their existence as an excuse to abolish events and spaces from which people who are clearly and unambigiously male are excluded (or indeed from which females are excluded; let the boys have an all-male club if they wish).

And what I'm also saying is that even people with DSDs are usually not difficult to peg as either male or female, so by default should be expected to use the same intimate spaces as the other members of their sex. The only people who present a genuine challenge to that, that I can think of off the top of my head, are, firstly, the people who are genuinely lacking in differentiated gonadal tissue of any kind (although I understand that when that happens, they develop a female-typical external phenotype, albeit that they need extrogenous hormones in order to experience puberty, so should for practical purposes be considered female), secondly, the people born with both male and female gonadal tissue, who are so vanishingly rare that they can probably just use whatever intimate spaces they prefer without it being a widespread problem, and thirdly, people with CAIS who are on a technical gonadal-tissue-based analysis male, but who develop in such a female-typical way in all other respects that it makes far more sense to treat them as females rather than males.

None of those conditions justify abolishing the existence of toilets, changing rooms, sports leagues, dating apps etc. that biologically normal males are excluded from.

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Ima's avatar

Onus is not on the victim of incompetent inept and/ or fractured service corp makin billions outta personal data imo humbly

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Dee's avatar

As others mentioned, this is a great example of admitting that one is wrong and taking into account new information.

However, I still have questions. It is quite a coincidence that this hacker chose to delete your account shortly after you posted on a controversial topic. How did this hacker gain access? What was the hacker’s motivation? How did deleting accounts benefit the hacker? Were you targeted because of your beliefs or this post? I’m sure you won’t get those answers but this still seems very coincidental. You’re being very generous to accept their explanation without answers to those questions

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Bob's avatar

The hacker didn’t delete the account. Somebody added a number of new admin accesses to the account.

This triggered warnings at Facebook. Facebook shut down the account.

I somehow doubt it would have been resolved as quickly if it had been an ordinary individual’s account. His people worked with Facebook staff to sort it out.

Facebook should have notified his staff, earlier, to avoid the kerfluffle.

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Saturnine's avatar

It’s not like Facebook haven’t got form for closing down anyone who doesn’t adhere to the tranny cult so I wouldn’t feel too bad.

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Stephanie Rankin's avatar

I do not think a corporation is an entity needing an apology.

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S'onid's avatar

A corporation can't and won't apologize to anyone. It is an "Artificial entity" that can't/wont take any accountability but will rule as a AI's conscious(it doesnt have feelings). It will Disregard safety for others, take most, if not all natural resources and destroy environments all for money to give to real people that hide behind it. Corporations are spy weapons for the wealthy and unstoppable.

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Bob's avatar

When one has made a mistake, or is actually at fault, it’s important to say so.

Facebook took down an account without warning the owner. Richard Dawkins seems to have been mistaken about their motives.

People seem to have forgotten the difference between acknowledging an honest mistake and apologizing for actually damaging someone. Richard Dawkins was doing the former. Facebook owes him the latter.

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CHARLES GREEN's avatar

This is case Exhibit A for how a mature human being takes responsibility for their own actions, being careful to neither over-apologize (by assuming someone else's responsibility) nor by minimizing one's own actions. Kudos to you sir.

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Sez77's avatar

“Now I am left in the mortifying position of having unjustly imputed an ignoble motive to Facebook. I accept responsibility, and publish this to correct the record and apologise”.

No. This is case Exhibit A of the naivete of even intelligent people.

This was typical of Facebook's tyrannical over-reach and thought-policing, and their manipulation in response was so successful, it left the gullible recipient apologising for the other's bad behaviour.

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Elias Ruiz's avatar

Scientists admit when they were wrong. This is highly respectable. Cheers.

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