Thursday 1 February 2018

A criminologist studies hate-speech and then applies it to Darwin, Wallace and evolutionary biologists

Introduction: hate-speech and hate-crime
When a perpetrator targets a victim because of the victim's personality or (presumed) membership in a certain social group, that crime is motivated by bias or prejudice and is called a hate-crime. When a speaker uses verbal expressions aiming at the vilification and denigration of certain persons or groups of persons, that speech is motivated by bias or prejudice and called hate-speech. The latter facilitates the former in that it depreciates the marginalized group (them, the others) and aggrandizes the in-group thus creating an enabling environment for hate-crime (Sutton & Griffiths 2002; Mann, Sutton & Tuffin 2003; Sutton & Wright 2009). The worst from of hate speech even denies the victims the status of being proper humans and claims super-humanity for the in-group.

Mike Sutton, the criminologist
Dr. Mike Sutton knows all this because he has been a reader in criminology at the Nottingham Trent University, was also a founder of the Centre for Study and Reduction of Hate Crimes, Bias and Prejudice, and has published academic articles on hate-crime and hate-speech in relation to race or ethnicity.

For example:
— M. Sutton & C. Wright (2009). Finding the far right online: an exploratory study of white supremacist websites. Internet Journal of Criminology.
— D. Mann, M. Sutton & R. Tuffin (2003). The evolution of hate: social dynamics in white racist newsgroups. Internet Journal of Criminology
— M. Sutton & MD Griffiths (2002). Far right groups on the Internet: a new problem for crime control and community safety? The Criminal Lawyer 123: 3-5.

But now, Sutton also knows how to walk along the razor's edge between using hate-speech and committing litigable hate-crime. It's quite simple. Here, he explains:
"Hate speech is a form of hate crime, and, speech can take the form of written or spoken word6.
6 In the UK, hate speech can be criminal if it falls within the definition of inciting racial hatred. However the law is quite complex in this area and there are several defences available." (Mann, Sutton and Tuffin 2003, p.4)
In other words, as long as his hate speech is not inciting racial hatred, Sutton will be on the safe side. And since he knows so well, now, he puts his expertise to good use against Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, and evolutionary biologists.  

Just to make sure you know what plagiarism-claims look like, that come without hate speech, the following shows a classic examples and its spin-off before turning to Sutton's hate speech dressed as academic claims. Here's Loren Eiseley's (1959, Charles Darwin, Edward Blyth, and the theory of natural selection. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103(1): 94-158) claim:
>>On page 78 of the 1844 trial essay on the road to the Origin [a sketch that has been published after Charles Darwin's death by his son Francis] occurs the following observation: "In the case of forest trees raised in nurseries, which vary more than the same trees do in their aboriginal forests, the cause would seem to lie in their not having to struggle against other trees and weeds, which in their natural state doubtless would limit the conditions of their existence." When one turns to the Origin itself one finds that this statement has vanished. In Patrick Matthews' [sic] book on Naval Timber and Arboriculture, which contains a full anticipation of natural selection, occurs, however, this intriguing remark: "Man's interference, by preventing this natural
process of selection among plants, independent of the wider range of circumstances to which he introduces them, has increased the difference in varieties particularly in the more domesticated kinds."
[Matthew, 1831, On Naval Timber and Arboriculture, p. 308] Darwin's comment, in other words, sounds as though based on Matthew at least I am unaware of any other convenient source.<< (Eiseley 1959, p. 110)
And here's what Hugh Dower made of Eiseley's claims, again, without hate speech:
"For 150 years, the world has been led to believe that Charles Darwin was the originator of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Though evolution scholars have always known that to be technically inaccurate (in the sense that he wasn't the first), I have recently discovered that it is completely untrue (in the sense that he wasn't even an originator). I shall show, beyond reasonable doubt, that Darwin was strongly influenced by, among many others, a Scottish estate owner, Patrick Matthew (1790-1874), who had hit upon exactly the same theory, and Darwin subsequently lied about his knowledge of Matthew. To begin with, for the benefit of the many people who have never heard of Matthew, I shall tell the story as it appeared in public print."
Mike Sutton, the hate-speaker
Compare this with the following many examples of Sutton's prose defaming Darwin, Wallace, and evolutionary biologists respectively as Daleks, zombies, mynah birds, sea squirts etc. and, of course, Hitler and Nazis.

A recent outbreak of his hatred was a fantasy of hanging, drawing and quartering Darwin (see also http://archive.is/bQju7): 
Picking this theme up, one of his sock-puppet Twitter-identities indulges in a fantasy of slaughtering Darwin and dancing upon his grave (http://archive.is/ixurg):
And, pathologically, the retweet is by @criminotweet again. That is, this man is talking to his other selfs all the time.

Here is an older example that has also been archived at http://archive.is/lDD4V and http://archive.is/DDvj7. Charles Darwin is already disparaged in the header of the blog by a frog sitting on his head and tadpoles entering his ear, and the biologists who think that Darwin's contribution to science was more important than Patrick Matthew's are dehumanized as Daleks.




Here is another example, where Darwin is likened to Hitler and evolutionary biologists to Nazis saluting. Sutton implicitly aggrandizes himself by association with the disobeying August Landmesser among the Nazi-crowd. (The page has been archived at http://archive.is/2Cccq):




Ironically, Sutton believes that he has the right to perpetrate his acts of hate-speech propaganda by virtue of his being the founding director of the Centre for the Study and Reduction of Bias, Prejudice and Hate Crime. This shows that Sutton is acting under the colour of law, authority and title. That is, he claims and implies that the acts he is committing are related to and legitimized by his role as an academic, criminologist, and director of said Centre, when the contrary is true.

These are only two examples of a long list of hate-speech acts perpetrated by Mike Sutton over the course of many years. Here (http://archive.is/ikIGp), here (http://archive.is/Yj8Jp;), and here (https://archive.is/WZO1K) are some more examples insulting evolutionary biologists variously as: "zombie horde, mynah birds, parroting Darwin deification cult, frozen donkeys" etc. etc. and aggrandizing himself as a "supermythbuster."



Comparing evolutionary biologists with Hitler:



By the way, he deleted the incriminating Hitler-stuff from his blog.



Sutton keeps insulting Richard Dawkins, for example:
http://patrickmathew.blogspot.de/2018/01/coughidiot-ahem-snort.html (http://archive.is/4drbg).

[By the way, his bogus claim about Dawkins having stolen the idea of the selfish gene just serves to show that Sutton does not understand that identical words, terms, or phrases can have different meanings. In particular, Bill Hamilton used the term selfish gene, in order to refer to genes (alleles) for selfish behavior and contrasted them with alleles for altruistic behavior. Dawkins used the same term, however, in order to refer to replicators replicating at the expense of the organism they reside in. That is, Dawkins has flipped the perspective in a Necker-cube fashion. He referred to Hamilton's genes for altruistic behavior as "selfish genes," whereas Hamilton's genes for selfish behavior are just normal to Dawkins. But that's beyond the ken of Sutton.]



And some defamation of Darwin as a Zombie (http://archive.is/KtHLy) and evolutionary biologists as a Zombie Horde (http://archive.is/7V9pQ):





Evolutionary biologists as sea squirts (see also http://archive.is/kgPbi):


Alfred Wallace is another historical person that Sutton likes to vilify (http://archive.is/d5fLq):

The long-refuted claim that Darwin's Origin of Species was causal in the Holocaust gets an absurd twist, because Sutton exempts the far more jingoistic and racist Patrick Matthew from the same charge and maintains that Matthew would not even have played the causal role that Darwin allegedly did, even if he'd been more widely recognized (https://archive.is/Jj9Ih).