Worst Take of the Week: Elon Musk vs Richard Dawkins

Welcome to Angus Take House – a weekly column in which I will be pitting two of the wildest takes the world's great thinkers have rustled up against each other. This is your one-stop shop for the meatiest verdicts and saltiest angles on the world's happenings. Go and grab a napkin – these juicy hot takes are fresh from the griddle.

TAKE #1:

What’s the story? The miraculous rescue of 12 Thai teenagers from a complex network of flooded caves.
Reasonable Take: The cave divers are heroes!
Tesla Model-X Take: The cave diver is a nonce!

I was on holiday last week, and as part of my break I vowed to check the internet as little as possible. I’m trying to train myself out of that horrible, irrational conviction that if you don’t check Twitter every few minutes you might miss some terribly important incident that may or may not have happened – which for the most part it never has. This was easy in the first Airbnb, which was in the middle of a national park and had no wifi. So I read my book, went for a swim, drank beer, and played cards until it was too dark to see. I felt free from something. The paranoia started to melt away. The second Airbnb, however, which we came to after three days in the wilderness, did have wifi. Worse still, we needed to use the internet almost instantly to book a table at a local restaurant. I’ll check Twitter once, I figured. Just a taste. Just to see what’s going on.

“Elon Musk calls British diver in Thai cave rescue 'pedo' in baseless attack.”

I changed out of my swimming trunks, packed up my bags, wished my girlfriend a short but firm farewell and vowed never to turn my back on Twitter ever again.

In case you missed it, like me, this week Elon Musk called one of the British divers who led the heroic rescue of 12 Thai boys and their football coach from a complex system of underwater caves… a nonce. The bizarre insult was slung after Musk’s offer of a mini submarine he had built to help with the rescue was criticised by the British diver, Vern Unsworth. Musk tweeted to say: “Never saw this British expat guy who lives in Thailand (sus) at any point when we were in the caves…” He followed this up later to say, “Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it.”

This take, this turn of events, is genuinely so strange it’s difficult to know how to write about it. Where do you begin critiquing a tech billionaire calling a cave diver a paedophile because he didn’t like his submarine? The whole thing feels like the end result of that game where you add a sentence to a story, fold the paper over and pass it to the next person in the circle. How do you account for a man of that wealth, and supposed intelligence suddenly pivoting to full Eric Bristow mode because an operation to save some children don’t want to use his hastily assembled “child-sized submarine”. Elon Musk seems intent on becoming a less likeable version of Dexter from Dexter’s Laboratory.

Musk has since apologised, saying his words were written in anger after “after Mr Unsworth said several untruths & suggested I engage in a sexual act with the mini-sub, which had been built as an act of kindness…” The damage, however, may have already been done. His conduct on social media has provoked alarm from some high-profile investors, as well as seeing a drop in Tesla’s stock value (this has since climbed back again). Whether or not Elon Musk shags mini-subs is, at this stage, unclear.

TAKE #2:

What’s the story? The bells of Winchester Cathedral. Literally, just that.
Reasonable Take: Don’t these church bells sound nice?
Flying Spaghetti Bolognese: Yes! Which reminds me of some thoughts I have about Islam.

Celebrated atheist Richard Dawkins here, enjoying a nice day out in Winchester, taking a brief break to sit down on a bench and take in the celestial clangs of the cathedrals. Celebrated atheist Richard Dawkins, thinking about what he’s going to have for lunch, contemplating buying a scotch egg, maybe considering checking the prices in the cafe attached to the cathedral. Celebrated atheist Richard Dawkins then stopping someone as they walk past, asking them to take his photo, and then, apropos of nothing, announcing to the internet that he prefers the way church bells sound to the Muslim call to prayer.

Dawkins has, unsurprisingly, come under quite a lot fire since posting the above tweet, which very few people saw as the analysis of cultural upbringings he purported it to be. He has since followed it up with another, clarifying his point that Allahu Akhbar “is anything but beautiful when it is heard just before a suicide bomb goes off,” which has, of course, done him absolute fuck all in the way of favours. As it currently stands – and I almost respect to him for this – the tweet remains up, in all its strange, My Racist Day-Out glory.

My favourite part of this terrible take is the image/text juxtaposition. If you’d only seen the picture – and you didn’t know what Richard Dawkins looked like – you wouldn’t guess the caption in a million years. You’d probably guess it was a picture of a grandfather visiting his grandson for his graduation day, that the photo’s been shared by his daughter, the newly graduated student’s mother, with a caption along the lines of “dad enjoying the sun and cathedral before Julian’s graduation!” At best you might assume it was the author byline photo on a Blogspot about retracing England’s pilgrimage routes.

Sadly, however, it’s simply an image of a man trying to dress an irrational mess of negative connotations up as something hard facts, or social science. Dawkins might be free from religion, but that doesn’t mean he’s free from ideology, and Islamophobia has got him hook, line and sinker. Ironically, Dawkins also spends much of his time on Twitter denouncing supporters of Brexit and Trump on the grounds of their ignorance. He was, in fact, decrying “nasty, jingoistic, xenophobic, Farageist Little-Englandism” barely two weeks before turning on the “aggressive-sounding” Muslim recital.

The trouble with making atheism your main an intellectual pursuit, is that by appearing to offer such a simple truth – God is not real, I love science – it tricks people into thinking they are much more interesting than they actually are. It’s why Ricky Gervais constantly tweets black and white photos of himself, with quotes like “if God is real, why do puppies die”, why neeks worldwide talk about Christopher Hitchens like he was James Dean, and why Richard Dawkins believes his base prejudices to be operating on some higher plane of thought. When actually he’s just another racist old man barking into the ether.

PRIME CUT: Submarine nonce.

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