Admittedly, I didn’t read the whole thing because I was turned off by this:
“…Each time Harris said something about Islam that created outrage, he had a defense prepared. When he wondered why anybody would want any more “fucking Muslims,” he was merely playing “Devil’s advocate.””
This is a complete lie and I remember (and anyone else can validate) Sam was definitely improvising and saying what opponents of the immigration policy idea would say.
I also listen to Sam Sedar’s Majority Report and for some reason they have a real problem with Sam Harris. One episode, the #2 on the show was the host and played a snippet of this exact conversation where Sam sounded like a xenophobic racist and Sedar’s guest host railed on him about it for a good while. The next time the #2 hosted the show, he admitted the sound clip he received, after further research, was taken out of context and that Sam wasn’t saying what he was told. But that was it, no apology or anything, and if fact continued to rail on Sam for other things.
So seeing the bullshit in an early paragraph says a lot to me about the dishonest intentions of the author.
Maybe he had some good points, but putting obvious lies in your screed will make someone like me dismiss your entire argument.
“Fucking muslims” might have been out of context but he definitely uses the devil’s advocate defence.
I would urge you to read on. I was also turned off by this article at first, when they mischaracterized the “new atheists”, implying that people like Richard Dawkins are not civil.
However, the article details quite a lot of Sam’s arguments, explaining why they are are irrational or based on an ignorance of history, for example:
I consistently see this happening amongst Sam Harris’s critics. They frequently pull quotes out of context to make Harris look like a monster. As someone who has listened to virtually all of Sam Harris’s podcasts and read all of his books, I believe Sam Harris is basically a good person. I do think he’s way too deferential towards U.S foreign policy, and that it’s simply naïve to believe that the United States is a “well intentioned giant.” I disagreed with his preference for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. But in spite of those disagreements, I love his podcast. He has amazing conversations with interesting people, and I wouldn’t dare deprive myself of that just because I don’t agree with him 100%.
Just so we’re clear, I consider myself a fan too. I think he’s a fantastically clever man and I agree with him on at least 95% of the stuff he talks about.
But unfortunately, when it comes to Islam and related topics he has an odd blindspot where he makes bigoted statements based on shaky logic (and endorses others that do worse). And he’s dug himself in too deep – he can’t concede even a single argument in this area now.
FTR, I’m breaking my usual weekend radio silence because I’m out of town visiting my in-laws, and trying to avoid awkward small talk they are as happy to eschew as I am.
So let’s look at this very mixed bag of a Sam Harris takedown:
:dubious: I can only conclude that these writers are not terribly familiar with Dawkins and Hitch.
They do have a point about Israel. I have always felt Sam goes too easy on that country.
But the rest of Part I? No. They are mistaking a feature for a bug. Fuck Islam. (Screw going back in a time machine to kill Hitler: Mohammed would be on the top of my hit list.)
They quote Sam pointing out that
The authors think they have busted him with an obvious fallacy:
No. :smack: This first of all ignores the point Sam made about prosperous Muslim terrorists. But further, smoking doesn’t only cause cancer among one distinct group of people. Yet it is exclusively Muslims carrying out terrorism against the West. Where are the Mexican suicide bombers? Is it really similar to smoking and cancer, and somehow they have escaped the effects of poverty in a way that has nothing to do with not having been indoctrinated into Islam? Come ON. :rolleyes:
Then their misunderstanding, or distortion, of the “perfect weapon” thought experiment is a total WTF.
And anyone who read the email exchange with Chomsky and thought Noam got the better of Sam? That line of thought is completely alien to me.
Their critiques of all the “moral landscape” stuff, OTOH, are well placed. Hence the mixed bag. A more focused rebuttal of those positions would be a solid piece that Sam couldn’t so easily dismiss.
I’m not going to rehash points about Murray that we’ve gone over again and again. The following is a weird line of attack, though:
These authors reek of being the type to be Ralph Nader fans. Are they aware that Nader told PBS Newshour his #1 role model for the presidency was Jefferson? I mean, it’s fine to dislike TJ or other “Founding Fathers”. But I’m pretty sure we aren’t at a point as a society where “s/he is a fan of Jeffersonian principles” serves to automatically discredit someone.
Can you run by me again why, for example, Dylann Roof shooting up a black church in the hope of starting a race war doesn’t count as terrorism?
When I was a child the big terror threat in the UK was the IRA. Perhaps the talking point for a while was “Not all Irish are terrorists, but all terrorists are Irish…”
I’m sorry, I can’t possibly take any of the article seriously after such an intentional misrepresentation of Sam’s comments. How could anyone? The author should have been more careful if his intentions were to present legit criticisms.
I’m reading through the tendentious endnotes now. Not sure if the authors are unfamiliar with some of the fine points of Sam’s philosophy, or are disingenuously strawmanning him. For instance, in note 16:
What Sam actually said is that the “categorical prohibition on torture” should remain the law, for essentially the reasons they outline—but in true “busload of children” scenarios, the torturers should be spared imprisonment, either via jury nullification or presidential pardon.
Sure, we could call what Roof did “terrorism”. So let me more carefully define what I mean.
The West engaged in colonial exploitation of many non-Western peoples. But only in the Muslim world have people been consistently, for decades now, plotting to attack the West. How do you explain that? The U.S. behaved abominably in Latin America, right up through the Reagan years. Why aren’t people from that region, who can get here much more easily than Middle Easterners can, attacking us this way? To the contrary, it is a very reasonable counterpoint to right wing paranoia about the southern border to point out that immigrants from that direction are a notably benign group. How do you explain this? :dubious:
The concluding sentence of note 43 sums up the gist of the authors’ fundamental plaint:
So Sam is insufficiently anti-American for their tastes. Which, hey: they are entitled to that opinion. But we have to recognize that it’s a take no one to the right of Chomsky is going to live up to this standard. Even Howard Zinn has a more charitable view of the American people than these guys do. So why specifically target Sam? He shares this insufficient lack of anti-Americanism with virtually all Democrats, and probably 98-99% of the population overall.
The author is clearly misrepresenting Sam. “…he had a defense prepared” implies that when called out on it, he had a defense. But in context, Sam clearly prestated he was playing Devil’s advocate and then made statements that included the ‘why anybody would want any more “fucking Muslims”’ and then immediately rebutted that argument with his own stance.
Reading the article, it is clear the author intentionally wanted to misrepresent this.
Have you heard the part in the podcast the article is referring to?
The article says that he claimed he was playing Devil’s advocate and Sam Harris claimed that he was playing Devil’s advocate. That’s not a lie. Not a complete lie. Not any kind of lie.
You are inventing secret motivations and attributing them to the article’s author. Then you are declaring that the author’s secret motivation was to lie.
Really? Richard Dawkins of the “dear muslima” Rebecca Watson debacle? Going after teenagers like Ahmed Mohamed for no good reason other than being a jerk? Seems out of bounds to you to imply that Dawkins may not be all that civil?
One would be very hard pressed to find any elected Democrats that come anywhere close to Noam Chomsky in harshly critiquing U.S foreign policy. Certainly not in Congress. Maybe there’s a city council member somewhere, but nobody of significance. Chomsky is an Anarchist, and they tend not to run for office.
“Each time Harris said something about Islam that created outrage, he had a defense prepared. When he wondered why anybody would want any more “fucking Muslims,” he was merely playing “Devil’s advocate.””
If you read that AND know what Harris actually said and think the author is not trying paint it in a completely unfair light, you are kidding yourself.
Number one, the painting done by the author is your interpretation. “Each time Harris said something about Islam that created outrage, he had a defense prepared. When he wondered why anybody would want any more “fucking Muslims,” he was merely playing “Devil’s advocate.”” That’s a true statement.
Number, even if your interpretation is correct (it isn’t), painting something in a completely unfair light is vastly different from a complete lie.
I don’t judge Dawkins the same way, and I think that clock kid deserved a takedown. But I do agree that Dawkins is more strident than Harris, so my criticism of these authors comes from the opposite direction: they are IMO off base to claim Harris “stands out” even compared to Dawkins and Hitchens (Hitch also took a more uncompromisingly scorched earth approach to religion than Sam ever has).
Oh, I definitely agree. When I said “virtually all Democrats”, I was including Democratic rank-and-file voters as well.
ETA:
I agree that this is not playing devil’s advocate. It’s just expressing good common sense.
Of my group, everyone who knew about the reality were highly critical of Obama drone strikes. Obviously if you didn’t see criticism of Obama’s policies you weren’t very diverse in your reading of the news.
The difference is that typically it did focus on policy, where Trump is professing objectively evil ideals just as Sam Harris does on his obsessive anti-Muslim and ignorant eugenics like biological morality.
Sam Harris went to school to get a PHD to justify his biological based bigotry, and like the eugenicists earlier in this century is making the same mistakes while trying to use a similar pseudo-scientific justification.
Sure, I saw those criticisms of Obama’s drone strikes, from the peacenik crowd (including my own mom). The same naive crowd who thinks if we zero out the Pentagon’s budget and replace the Defense Department with a Department of Peace, everything will be yippee skippee and we can all run around peacing out to double rainbows. :rolleyes: