Sam Harris challenges Noam Chomsky to a debate via email.

[bobalot]

Apparently, Sam Harris has been trying to get into a debate with Noam Chomsky. He emailed Chomsky and this email trail was the result.

Noam Chomsky ending up giving Sam Harris a bit of a schooling. He managed to get some pretty sick burns in there as well.

Easy to know why you’re unaware of my having written about your work. I haven’t done so.

The idea of publishing personal correspondence is pretty weird, a strange form of exhibitionism – whatever the content. Personally, I can’t imagine doing it. However, if you want to do it, I won’t object.

Very glad to see that we are terminating this interesting non-interchange with a large measure of agreement. I agree with you completely that we cannot have a rational discussion of these matters, and that it is too tedious to pretend otherwise.

And I agree that I am litigating all points (all real, as far as we have so far determined) in a “plodding and accusatory way.” That is, of course, a necessity in responding to quite serious published accusations that are all demonstrably false, and as I have reviewed, false in a most interesting way: namely, you issue lectures condemning others for ignoring “basic questions” that they have discussed for years, in my case decades, whereas you have refused to address them and apparently do not even allow yourself to understand them. That’s impressive.

Damn.

[Simon_Jester]

I know two reasons Noam Chomsky might be debated- one is over his opinions on language (if he still holds those) and the other because of his generally rather left-wing politics.

But who is Sam Harris and why do I care about him?

[Grumman]

But who is Sam Harris and why do I care about him?

He is an author and philosopher cut from the same cloth as Christopher Hitchens. I do not know enough about him to say how far that comparison goes, but that at least tells you where he would be arguing from - Harris's opposition to Islamic fascism vs Chomsky's opposition to American misuse of military and political power.

[Adam Reynolds]

He is an author and philosopher cut from the same cloth as Christopher Hitchens.

The two of them, as well as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet were called the Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse at one point. He is actually a neuroscientist rather than philosopher, though I'm not sure how much actual research he has done given that he seems to spend almost all of his time devoted to atheism.

I do not know enough about him to say how far that comparison goes, but that at least tells you where he would be arguing from - Harris's opposition to Islamic fascism vs Chomsky's opposition to American misuse of military and political power.

I'm sure that is the fundamental issue. Harris is quite notably outspoken against Islamic fascism as he calls it. Though he, like many Western atheists, tends to glaze over the fact that at least part of the problem is that the Western world tends to exploit the Islamic world.

More generally this is not the first time that Harris has gotten into a similar debate with someone like this. Security expert Bruce Schneier schooled him on the idea that racial profiling could ever be effective. And despite Schneier's vastly superior knowlege of the topic, had little impact.

The fundamental problelm with people like Harris is that they are intelligent and see themselves are correct on such a fundamental question that there is no way they could then be wrong on something related to it. It is ironically not that different from the extremely religious.

[Metahive]

I know two reasons Noam Chomsky might be debated- one is over his opinions on language (if he still holds those) and the other because of his generally rather left-wing politics.

But who is Sam Harris and why do I care about him?

You can get your fill of Samharrisonian goodness here:

http://anamericanatheist.org/2012/09/26 ... -is-wrong/

In short, Sam Harris is a racist asshole who believes in racially profiling Muslims and once fantasized about nuking the Middle East because those Muslims are just that dang evil and dangerous.

[Channel72]

I know two reasons Noam Chomsky might be debated- one is over his opinions on language (if he still holds those) and the other because of his generally rather left-wing politics.

But who is Sam Harris and why do I care about him?

You can get your fill of Samharrisonian goodness here:

http://anamericanatheist.org/2012/09/26 ... -is-wrong/

In short, Sam Harris is a racist asshole who believes in racially profiling Muslims and once fantasized about nuking the Middle East because those Muslims are just that dang evil and dangerous.

Basically, it's like this:

The Middle East has serious fucking problems. We all know that. Sam Harris thinks that, say, 90% of those problems originate directly from Islam itself. His opponents say it's more complicated, and that the problems are more like 50% foreign intervention, 40% domestic oppression, and maybe 10% directly from Islam itself.

That's basically the gist of these debates.

Personally, I think it's more like 40% Islam itself, and 60% foreign/domestic oppression/intervention. The US has historically fucked around all the time with Central and South American nations, and South-East Asia also has a brutal history of European colonialism. Like the Middle East, those places suffer/haved suffered from political turmoil, ethnic cleansing, poverty and major social strife. But the peculiar ingredient of Islam, and especially petroleum-financed Wahhabi Islam, has led to the unique phenomenon of Jihadism and all the associated atrocities which are particular to that religious tenet, like large-scale gender discrimination, suicide bombings, and the romanticism that attracted people like Osama bin Laden, who lived a comfortable, non-oppressed life as a Saudi prince before deciding to go off to Afghanistan and fight Soviets.

[mr friendly guy]

I know two reasons Noam Chomsky might be debated- one is over his opinions on language (if he still holds those) and the other because of his generally rather left-wing politics.

But who is Sam Harris and why do I care about him?

He is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a nickname given by some to 4 atheists, which include Richard Dawkins, Den Dennet and the late Christopher Hitchens. He is a neuroscientist but he does a lot of work into philosophy, and he is somewhat anti Islam. His views include

a) racial profiling, which I disagree with.
b) Controversial views on the ME where people love strawmanning him, including people in this thread.

Harris has numerous times accused them of creating this strawman and has stated his views which he did so in an interview with TYT. That is Islamic Fundamentalists could trigger MAD scenario if they get their hands on the bomb. Simply put, they look like nuking us, so we nuke them. The idea is that Fundies will ignore the rational decision making that prevented Cold War rivals nuking each other because we were all afraid of MAD. They will ignore it because they like to get their 72 Virgins for being a martyr or whatever their beliefs are.

This is the same type of reasoning people on this board argues against Iran getting nukes. Oh one thing. Harris has outright said he doesn't apply this type of thinking to Iran, because he feels they have demonstrated enough rational thinking. The Islamic Fundies he is referring to might more closely match AQ or ISIL.

I would caution anyone who says Harris wants to nuke the ME and they got this information from a second hand source. Unless they can quote Harris's original work ( in which case Harris in interviews is shifting the goalposts), I would call it failure to appreciate nuance at best, at worse outright dishonesty.

[mr friendly guy]

The Middle East has serious fucking problems. We all know that. Sam Harris thinks that, say, 90% of those problems originate directly from Islam itself. His opponents say it's more complicated, and that the problems are more like 50% foreign intervention, 40% domestic oppression, and maybe 10% directly from Islam itself.

That's basically the gist of these debates.

Personally, I think it's more like 40% Islam itself, and 60% foreign/domestic oppression/intervention. The US has historically fucked around all the time with Central and South American nations, and South-East Asia also has a brutal history of European colonialism. Like the Middle East, those places suffer/haved suffered from political turmoil, ethnic cleansing, poverty and major social strife. But the peculiar ingredient of Islam, and especially petroleum-financed Wahhabi Islam, has led to the unique phenomenon of Jihadism and all the associated atrocities which are particular to that religious tenet, like large-scale gender discrimination, suicide bombings, and the romanticism that attracted people like Osama bin Laden, who lived a comfortable, non-oppressed life as a Saudi prince before deciding to go off to Afghanistan and fight Soviets.

Some of his opponents like Reza Aslan have pretty much gone all the way to 0% is Islam, but the actions of Mao and Stalin can totally be blamed on atheism.

In fact after 7 minutes in a debate between Aslan and Harris I just rolled my eyes at Aslan. The debate went like this

Harris - ME has problems due to Islam.
Aslan - I am an expert, unlike Harris, and my (anecdotal) evidence is that these particular problems aren't there.
Harris - I have pew polls in these countries backing my claim
Aslan - (shifts goalposts), ah but its not due to Islam, its due to reason x,y ,z.

In which case why didn't you just say that in the first place instead of pretending the problems didn't exist.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Jesus Christ, people. I don't know what it is about Sam Harris that sets off such bizarre knee-jerk wailing klaxons in people - he's so entirely inoffensive in his arguments that it's almost painful sometimes. I don't know how he retains such a calm demeanor in the face of people slinging all this shit at him. If you have time for it (it's long), I highly recommend this video:

[mr friendly guy]

That TYT interview I remember Cenk Uyghur going off at him for the most inoffensive statement * yet he treats Reza Aslan with kiddy gloves.

* the inoffensive statement was that Mormon version of Christianity is even more improbable than regular Christianity. Because the latter talks about Jesus reappearing, whereas the former not only says that, but states Jesus appears somewhere in the US. Cenk demonstrated he doesn't understand maths and probability, while Harris has to patiently explain to him something you should have learnt in high school.

[Channel72]

Also - one thing that rarely comes up in this debate which I feel is important to point out:

The heart of modern, Wahhabi Islam, the Arabian peninsula, does not have a history of colonial oppression. The Arabian peninsula is where Mohammed's followers originally coalesced, and it remained an Islamic-ruled state, either under the rule of a larger Caliphate, or under a localized polity like the Sharifate of Mecca, up until Ottoman times - after which the state which is now known as Saudi Arabia came into existence. So there was never any direct European colonial oppression - or even Ottoman oppression - going on in the Arabian peninsula.

The Arabian penisula was basically just a locally-ruled state, of little importance beyond its historical association with the founding of Islam, and the fact that it was home to the holy city of Mecca.

...

But then this happened:




Of course, even before the oil, the Arabian peninsula had always been important in the world of Islam - it was the home of the holy mosques of Mecca and Medina, and a major pilgrimage destination due to the Hajj. But politically speaking, it had always been eclipsed by greater regional powers, either the great Caliphate centered around Baghdad in the Middle Ages, or the Ottomans in Istanbul during the 17th through 20th centuries. But once oil was discovered in the 1930s, suddenly the Arabian peninsula became absurdly influential. And suddenly, the obscure, relatively little-known Islamic sect of Wahhabbism suddenly became officially backed by billions of dollars of oil revenues. This is seriously as crazy as if some crazy fundamentalist Baptist church in the heart of Alabama suddenly came into possession of 90% of Microsoft shares.

And this, in my opinion, more so than Western meddling (again, the Arabian peninsula has no colonial history), is directly or indirectly the major reason for many (at least, let's say 60%) of the current problems facing the Middle East. Untold billions of dollars flow out of Saudi Arabia and into the hands of Jihadists, who in turn are the product of Saudi-funded madrasahs throughout the region. Ironically, most Jihadists actually aim to overthrow the Saudi monarchy itself and replace it with some sort of wacky Caliphate or other, but this is one of those hilarious unintended consequences of cultivating extremism, and also attributable to the fact that the "house of Saud" is in fact not a single monolithic billionaire, but rather hundreds of multi-millionaires whose interests range from funding the latest Silicon-Valley startups to providing ISIS with more rocket launchers.

The second largest problem in the Mideast is of course the Sunni/Shia divide, which plays out mostly in Iraq, and is essentially a proxy-war between the Wahhabist Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran and their respective oil reserves (which in turn plays out on the world stage as proxy-wars between the US and Russia/China).

The point is - Sam Harris may be simplifying the situation, but I think his opponents over-emphasize the legacy of colonialism and the 20th century American political interference in the region. The worst, in terms of long-term damage, act of foreign interference in the region, by far, was the creation of the state of Israel by the UK after World War 2. But in terms of what's happening right now - certainly Sam Harris's opponents are seriously downplaying the entirely native role of Saudi-backed Wahhabism, and the absolute plague it has brought upon that region. Yes, the US is like 99% responsible for the current horrible mess in Iraq - but that is just the tip of the iceberg. The US merely waltzed into the region, guns blazing, and fumbled around like an incompetent idiot, trying ineptly to forge a new state while inadvertently opening the floodgates of endless sectarian violence (which Saddam had skillfully kept in check via an oil-funded police state of his own.)

[K. A. Pital]

But Saudi Arabia and Wahhabist islamism in general could never become so influential without the support of the West, and more precisely the United States of America. In the Cold War, the US chose to actively support the worst of the islamic world (genocidal maniac Suharto, Zia-Ul-Haq of Pakistan, the mujahids in Afghanistan and, of course, Saudi Arabia itself). This continued way into the 1990s, when the US was giving financial support to Chechen islamists.

If Harris thinks that all of this is just the work of the Quran, he is obviously giving the book too much credit. Now, putting money behind the religious fanatics has been the only way to make them powerful, and it has been that way since the Crusades, heh.

[Channel72]

I should probably also clarify that when I say "Arabian peninsula", I'm referring to the inner region (the Nejd region), centered around modern Riyadh, where the house of Saud has historically consolidated power. The extremities of the peninsula (like modern Oman, UAE, etc.), do have a colonial history.

But Saudi Arabia and Wahhabist islamism in general could never become so influential without the support of the West, and more precisely the United States of America. In the Cold War, the US chose to actively support the worst of the islamic world (genocidal maniac Suharto, Zia-Ul-Haq of Pakistan, the mujahids in Afghanistan and, of course, Saudi Arabia itself). This continued way into the 1990s, when the US was giving financial support to Chechen islamists.

That's certainly true - but we're talking about percentages of blame here. Certainly the US shares a significant percentage of that blame. But really, are you telling me that without US support, the house of Saud would have little influence over the region? With that much oil reserves, they'd find buyers and supporters no matter what.

Essentially the major issue here is that a large portion of the world's energy supply is controlled by maniacs.

[Metahive]

Quotes, huh? Here:

The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe. How would such an unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing could make it so: this very perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim state that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own. All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world’s population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher’s stone, and unicorns. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.
-Sam Harris in The End of Faith (2004)

Yeah, sorry, but that's pretty unambiguous. Islamists are just that dang irrationally and genocidally evil that we must kill them first before they do it to us. And then he has the gall to complain that all those stupid Muslim wouldn't comprehend that the nuclear holocaust that just occured was a totally legitimate act of self-defense.

[K. A. Pital]

But really, are you telling me that without US support, the house of Saud would have little influence over the region? With that much oil reserves, they'd find buyers and supporters no matter what.

They would; but it would be much harder for them without that special relationship with the world's first superpower, that's also followed blindly by many other former 'great powers'. In the 1980s, China barely has any money and its oil consumption is miniscule, as was pretty much everyone except guess which nation?

You guessed right, did you not?

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Yeah, sorry, but that's pretty unambiguous. Islamists are just that dang irrationally and genocidally evil that we must kill them first before they do it to us. And then he has the gall to complain that all those stupid Muslim wouldn't comprehend that the nuclear holocaust that just occured was a totally legitimate act of self-defense.

Are you actually retarded, Metahive? He's describing a Wargames-style scenario where the only winning move is not to play; he's not making any statements about foreign policy or his views toward Muslims. Now, you can disagree with the validity of his premise, which is fine, but you're completely distorting his actual argument to fit some bizarre notion you have of him as some kind of Islamophobic racist.

[Channel72]

They would; but it would be much harder for them without that special relationship with the world's first superpower, that's also followed blindly by many other former 'great powers'. In the 1980s, China barely has any money and its oil consumption is miniscule, as was pretty much everyone except guess which nation?

Yeah, but US oil consumption from 1980-2010 does not exclusively translate to sending dollars to KSA. Much of that oil consumption comes from other sources - something like I think less than 15% comes from KSA. So yeah, the US is to blame for indirectly funding Wahhabi Islam, but I don't think the Saudis would be short on influence without US support.

Indeed, Asia as a whole is a much larger consumer of Saudi oil than the US:

http://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=sa

[Metahive]

Are you actually retarded, Metahive? He's describing a Wargames-style scenario where the only winning move is not to play; he's not making any statements about foreign policy or his views toward Muslims. Now, you can disagree with the validity of his premise, which is fine, but you're completely distorting his actual argument to fit some bizarre notion you have of him as some kind of Islamophobic racist.

Retarded, well, are you? I mean it's pretty retarded to deny what's right in front of you and in such a transparently idiotic manner.

In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe.

He's openly thinking about exterminating every Muslim man, woman and child if any of those goshdang evil Islamists near them might get access to the bomb...sorry, but that's speaking for itself. Sorry, but non-racist, non-paranoid, not-stupid people don't fantasize about how necessary it is to eradicate entire regions off the map.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Retarded, well, are you? I mean it's pretty retarded to deny what's right in front of you and in such a transparently idiotic manner.

In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe.

He's openly thinking about exterminating every Muslim man, woman and child if any of those goshdang evil Islamists near them might get access to the bomb...sorry, but that's speaking for itself. Sorry, but non-racist, non-paranoid, not-stupid people don't fantasize about how necessary it is to eradicate entire regions off the map.

Sweet mother of Christ, you really are precious.

Are you really incapable of following him on the intellectual exercise he's proposing? It doesn't even go very far; in fact, it's tautological.

1. Religious fanatics are dangerous,
2. Because religious fanatics are dangerous, they could gain access to a nation-state's resources,
3. Using these resources, religious fanatics could gain access to nuclear weapons,
4. This presents such a threat as to require a lose-lose nuclear strike, making everyone worse off than when we started,
5. Therefore, religious fanatics are dangerous.

You can see the flaw in this, of course (then again maybe you can't, because you don't strike me as particularly intelligent), but the flaw is that it's an inherently tautological argument that proves nothing, and only exists to serve as a rhetorical device to convince people of the dangers of religious fanaticism. Actually nuking Muslims because they're Muslims (or whatever other nonsense you've attempted to read into the argument) never enters the equation.

[mr friendly guy]

. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.[/i]
-Sam Harris in The End of Faith (2004)

Yeah, sorry, but that's pretty unambiguous. Islamists are just that dang irrationally and genocidally evil that we must kill them first before they do it to us. And then he has the gall to complain that all those stupid Muslim wouldn't comprehend that the nuclear holocaust that just occured was a totally legitimate act of self-defense.

Indeed its unambiguous. Just not in the way you interpret it.

He is describing a game theory scenario, only this time the other side isn't afraid of MAD and willing to attempt a nuclear first strike.

You can dispute the premise that certain Fundies aren't afraid of MAD like the Americans, Soviets, and Chinese are, but its batshit insane to interpret that as hur hur hur lets kill Muslims.

He's openly thinking about exterminating every Muslim man, woman and child if any of those goshdang evil Islamists near them might get access to the bomb...sorry, but that's speaking for itself. Sorry, but non-racist, non-paranoid, not-stupid people don't fantasize about how necessary it is to eradicate entire regions off the map.

Except from your own quote that is not the case, because he talks about the "rest of the Muslim world" after a strike.

I apologise. I had thought you were mislead by second hand sources, but no I see you read the original material. I had obviously underestimated your reading comprehension.

[K. A. Pital]

Indeed, Asia as a whole is a much larger consumer of Saudi oil than the US

Now. Before it used to be the different: Asia consumed less oil from Saudi Arabia than US and Europe together. And, of course, in the 1979s and 1980s the oil-consuming part of Asia was primarily Japan and South Korea - two US allies, part of the OECD.

I think that also Saudis and Wahhabi-favoring islamists in general were armed by the US and the developed world. Saudi weapons? Almost exclusively American up until the last decade. Pakistan? A British and US creation meant to realize 'divide et empera' in Central Asia and confront India, armed exclusively by the West (not to mention allowing it to ascend to the nuclear club, an unprecended risk). Afghanistan? Ahem... What else? Which insane motherfucker I haven't mentioned yet that was armed by the West? I guess Sukharto. Oh well. Nevermind.

So who was behind the empowerment and spread of radical islam? The surprisingly bad, but quite honest answer would be: first Britain, then the US.

By now, of course, Saudi Arabia and their ugly 'allies' like Qatar, Pakistan and the rest have grown so powerful, they do not really need so much support from the US, and at times they even turn their weapons against their masters. I mean, who doesn't know that Pakistani ISI was behind the ascendancy of the Taliban? Yup.

So, in essence, the West has itself to blame. Allying with every dark age barbarian to achieve some temporary geopolitical goals? Well then don't whine when it bites you in the ass and the same barbarian is now empowered by all the weapons and money you gave him, and spreading his barbaric fundamentalism across the entire Islamic sphere.

[bobalot]

Sam Harris also wrote "In defence of torture".

[Thanas]

Sam Harris also wrote "In defence of torture".

Oh, now I know from where he seemed familiar.

Fuck him.

[mr friendly guy]

I had forgotten his name in association with defence of torture. That being said, his defence boils down to,
a. We do much worse that torture already with very limited chances of success (eg collateral damage from bombs with the chances of getting that right AQ member low) and we consider that acceptable
b. So why should we object to torture given that torture causes less damage than collateral damage, and the chances of getting information from torture is also low.

Of course we have to ask ourselves if the chances of getting info from torture is low as opposed to non existent (which is my view). However even if we assume that the chances of getting useful information from torture is about the same chance as bombing with collateral damage gets the "targeted terrorist" ie low, my response is to simply to minimise collateral damage and maybe not do these bombing runs with limited discrimination between civilians and the terrorists because just as torture is not ok, neither is this. His response is, this is ok, so why not torture?

I will admit it does make people who say bombing runs are ok, but torture isn't examine their reasoning.

[mr friendly guy]

@Simon Jester - I suggest you read some of what Harris says directly rather than what some people accuse him of.

Sam Harris has a response to what his accuses people of strawmanning him. God damn it, even though I disagree with Harris on issues he deserves to have his argument presented in their form without massive distortion. His ideas should stand and fall on their own merits.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/resp ... ontroversy

Racial profiling

Of course, many of my detractors (like Greenwald) have used this quotation in ways calculated to make readers believe that I want dark-skinned people singled out—and not just in our airports, but everywhere. What my critics always neglect to say, however, is that in the article in which that sentence appears, I explicitly include white, middle-aged men like me in the profile (twice). This still leaves many millions of travelers outside the profile. My point is that we should be giving less scrutiny to people who obviously aren’t jihadists. Whatever the practical constraints are on implementing such a policy, I remain willing to bet my life that the woman in the photo below is not a suicide bomber. Which is, of course, to say that the TSA employee who appears to be searching her body for explosives is not only inconveniencing the woman herself, along with everyone in line behind her, but putting people’s lives in jeopardy by squandering her limited attentional resources.

There is a pic of the TSA employee searching that woman.

I don't necessarily agree with him, but it clearly isn't as encompassing as some right wing retards say.

Pre-emptive nuclear war

Clearly, I was describing a case in which a hostile regime that is avowedly suicidal acquires long-range nuclear weaponry (i.e. they can hit distant targets like Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, etc.). Of course, not every Muslim regime would fit this description. For instance, Pakistan already has nuclear weapons, but they have yet to develop long-range rockets, and there is every reason to believe that the people currently in control of these bombs are more pragmatic and less certain of paradise than the Taliban are. The same could be said of Iran, if it acquires nuclear weapons in the near term (though not, perhaps, from the perspective of Israel, for whom any Iranian bomb will pose an existential threat). But the civilized world (including all the pragmatic Muslims living within it) must finally come to terms with what the ideology of groups like the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS, etc. means—because it destroys the logic of deterrence. There are a significant number of people in the Muslim world for whom the slogan “We love death more than the infidel loves life” appears to be an honest statement of psychological fact, and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from getting long-range nuclear weapons.
It would seem relevant in this context to note that Chris Hedges has since been exposed as a serial plagiarist and liar—a revelation that I find utterly unsurprising. The truth, however, is that I have met worse than Hedges: There was the repellent John Gorenfeld, who interviewed me over the phone (on December 19, 2006) for the website Alternet. I did not respond publicly to the resulting article, because it was so poorly written that I couldn’t imagine anyone taking it seriously. However, it appears to have struck some unsuspecting readers as an honest discussion of my views. So I will simply note my objection to it here. Gorenfeld seriously distorted my positions on two controversial topics—judicial torture and the paranormal—both of which are clarified below.

Yep, he totally wanted to nuke every Muslim man, woman and child.

Personally I agree that Pakistan and Iran are unlikely to fit the role Harris describes. Possibly AQ or ISIL but that remains to be seen how many members (and higher ups) are willing to self harm themselves as long as they take out some of us. Again people fail to appreciate nuance.

Torture

He likens it to collateral damage, which he says is worse. If you accept one, why not the other. I already said I disagreed and why in the above post, however again his position is more nuanced than the black and white picture people paint.

My argument for the limited use of coercive interrogation (“torture” by another name) is essentially this: If you think it is ever justifiable to drop bombs in an attempt to kill a man like Osama bin Laden (and thereby risk killing and maiming innocent men, women, and children), you should think it may sometimes be justifiable to water-board a man like Osama bin Laden (and risk abusing someone who just happens to look like him). It seems to me that however one compares the practices of water-boarding high-level terrorists and dropping bombs, dropping bombs always comes out looking worse in ethical terms. And yet, most people tacitly accept the practice of modern warfare while considering it taboo to even speak about the possibility of practicing torture. It is important to point out that my argument for the restricted use of torture does not make a travesty like Abu Ghraib look any less sadistic or stupid. I consider our mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to be patently unethical. I also think it was one of the most damaging blunders in the last century of U.S. foreign policy. Nor have I ever seen the wisdom or necessity of denying proper legal counsel (and access to evidence) to prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay. Indeed, I consider much of what occurred under Bush and Cheney—the routine abuse of ordinary prisoners, the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” etc.—to be a terrible stain upon our nation.

He is describing a really really far out hypothetical where torture may be justifiable, and its clear its not justifiable in those other situations the US used it in.