Atlantic piece on college word police and Trump's popularity

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

This is why it's so hard to fight against from inside the left. You get accused of being a secret conservative and pushed out. The right has had this problem for decades and it's turned them into a such a caricature of themselves that it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between an Onion article and an actual quote from a mainstream Republican official. The problem is that the left is so marginalized in this country that if it follows a similar path of polarization, it will go back to being the political whipping boy that it was in the early 2000's. The right-wingers will continue to inflate their fantasy of left-wing authoritarianism despite zero evidence, but when people are getting fired and shamed on the public stage for saying relatively innocuous things, it can cause some fence-sitters to come over to their side, and that would mean that the period of tentative social victories we've enjoyed in the last few years will be over.

I don't think we'd be seeing the current trend if it weren't for the shrinking number of potential "fence-sitters" likely to actually align with the Right on social issues.

It's like, gay marriage didn't start passing until a majority of the American population was at least prepared to shrug and go 'meh' about it.

By contrast, Loving v. Virginia settled the issue of interracial marriage at a time when most white Americans were still against it, as I recall- and yet nobody ever really mounted a meaningful or successful backlash against that. Within a few years, the idea of the legal system in the US ever barring interracial marriage was dead as a doornail.

So basically, I don't think social progress is as tenuous as you think. It is possible that we will see, for example, attempts to create a procedure for countersuing if one is wrongfully terminated over a frivolous 'discrimination' claim, or something like that. But that doesn't negate the basic change; it simply puts some limits on what that change will achieve.

I wasn't predicting that recent gains would be rolled back, only that the progress could drastically slow if a critical mass of the public comes to feel threatened.

I don't think we've come very far from that when it comes to race and class (although sexuality has improved quite a bit)...

We're... starting to get there on gender. Improvements on race seem to not be coming along at all for blacks in particular, somewhat less badly for other racial minorities (i.e. Latinos and Asians).

The racial issue is inflamed by rising economic inequality. Being poor means getting hit with more injustice and feeling more oppressed by your society. Blacks were more likely to be poor in the 1960s, and that was not addressed in the time available prior to the Reagan Revolution and the beginning of the trend towards greater inequality. As a result, blacks today end up experiencing as much if not more injustice now than they did in the 1970s for reasons that are produced by a nasty tangle of anti-poor AND anti-black discrimination (e.g. abusive police behavior).

By contrast, the poverty issue does much less to interfere with the progress of women's liberation, to the point where we DO start having serious social conversations about things like work-life balance, expectation of women doing all the housework, and so on. We're not there but you can chart meaningful progress.

True, but I think that progress would happen a lot faster if non-bigots who don't "get it" yet were allowed to voice their thoughts without provoking an over-reaction.

No one wants to sit down and discuss the real issues, they just want to circle the wagons and tell each other stories about the other side, and so ordinary people end up with horrendously distorted ideas about what it means to be a minority in America and no one ever corrects them because they're never aloud to voice those ideas outside of family get-togethers and similarly homogenous venues where no one has the perspective to be able to shed light on the subject. We all need to be a little less quick to assume that someone is one of THOSE PEOPLE (whether that's a racist, a statist, or whatever) if we're going to get anywhere.

I'm amenable to this- but I think we're still too far over on the "nobody is speaking out for the minorities" side of the line.

So I'm less concerned about people becoming targets of shirt-anger, especially since a large fraction of the public actually does rally behind people like Dr. Taylor, in a positive way, and because he didn't get fired or anything.

And I'm more concerned about people trying to quash discussion of why "Black Lives Matter" is a borderline subversive remark rather than a mind-blastingly obvious one. Because frankly, people getting shot is a bigger deal than people acquiring a bizarre sort of temporary Internet anti-celebrity.

[Yes, Shirtstorm has a relatively happy ending by the standards of people targeted by angry leftists who see discrimination, and yes the 'Black Lives Matter' movement is an unusually obvious case on the opposite side of the line, but I hope you see my point]

Agreed, but that doesn't mean an inclusive tone is not important, just not as important as making sure the debate happens at all.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

You're not even listening. Nobody is suggesting they be burned at the stake. I even said they shouldn't be fired, in most cases. But again, if it's a high profile company leader who was hired and is being paid to represent a certain narrative or set of values, then again, I see no problem with firing them if they fail to do so. If Mozilla decides that same-sex equality is a core tenet of their organization's values, and then one of their leading figures does something which is diametrically opposed to those values, then yeah - I don't see the issue with firing him. I mean, this works both ways. The KKK has the right to make sure that their stupid "Grand Dragon" or Wizard or whatever the fuck they call their leader believes and promotes Aryan supremacism. If the leader of the KKK suddenly tweets that Jews and blacks are actually awesome and should be treated equally to white Christians, the KKK would likely fire him, as is their right. So again, I don't see the issue here.

Again, I already said I don't believe a large, publicly-traded company should necessarily have the right to fire individual employees for expressing unpopular opinions, but if they specifically hired a leader or executive to promote a certain set of values, then they have every right to fire that guy if he doesn't do his job. I mean, to take the example of say, criticizing Israel: I'm personally very critical of Israel, but I would not be at all surprised if say, I applied for a position as leader of the American Israel Cultural Foundation, and they fired me after I wrote a scathing blog post about treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank. It would be their right to do so.

I do agree that certain employees who publicly represent the company should be let go for going against things the company stands for, I just don't think Mozilla (whose purpose is to promote a product, unlike the KKK or a cultural foundation) should have fired Eich for giving money to a political campaign, or that the Twitter mob should have felt entitled to agitate for his removal just for supporting the wrong side of a political debate.

[Channel72]

^ Really, that's debatable. What does it mean to "promote a product"? In the case of Mozilla, at least, they're not selling anything. Their "product" is open-source, and free. Most of their operating expenses are covered by donations from Google (or at least, used to be, before Google ditched them for Webkit/Chromium).

As a non-profit organization whose mission is basically to create a free open source browser (or operating system, or whatever Mozilla is up to these days), they basically can fire or hire whoever the fuck they want. Maybe they think that the things they value, such as same-sex equality, are just as important as their open-source philosophy and free browser. What exactly is your objection to that?

Anyway, Eich should have been fired long ago for creating Javascript, to say nothing about his donation to Prop 8. [/stupid nerd joke]

[Grumman]

As a non-profit organization whose mission is basically to create a free open source browser (or operating system, or whatever Mozilla is up to these days), they basically can fire or hire whoever the fuck they want. Maybe they think that the things they value, such as same-sex equality, are just as important as their open-source philosophy and free browser. What exactly is your objection to that?

My objection to that is that (1) a company using its position of power over its employees to demand political orthodoxy is far more dangerous than individuals donating money to any political movement this side of the IRA and (2) that this scorched earth idiocy actively sabotages the cause it's supposed to be advancing. If you think that splitting society into "us" and "them" and boycotting a major corporation because six years ago the CEO was wrong about same-sex marriage is a good idea, you are a fucking idiot. As long as Eich is willing to leave his politics at the door, his working in an environment where he is more likely to interact with homosexuals is a good thing, because that is what is going to make him realise he was wrong about them. Telling him he's only allowed to work at companies that homosexuals should boycott means leaving his wrong ideas to fester.

[Simon_Jester]

I think that any question about keeping one's job over political issues should be limited to:

1) Leadership figures who have the power to set company policy, simply because the leaders are entrusted with the task of maintaining the core values of the institution. If the leaders harbor beliefs that are at odds with the interests and culture of the institution, then the conflict needs to be resolved one way or another.

2) Public spokespersons of the institution whose personal reputation is a major asset to the institution. CBS's newscasters cannot reasonably go on a blog and post about how CBS is full of liberal lies. President Republicanguy's White House press secretary cannot go on Twitter about how he's going to vote for the Democrats. If such a person acts this way, then in effect they are using the fact that people listen to them as a way of undermining the institution that gave them the fame that causes people to listen to them in the first place.

A CEO arguably falls into both categories- although this does not mean that a political donation in and of itself is grounds for firing, unless some other campaign finance law was broken.

[Darth Yan]

Here are a list of Sam Harris Quotes. Honestly, they resemble Michelle Malkin to the point that only an idiot would conclude that he wasn't partially racist.


Harris' stance on Islam is often indistinguishable from certain batshit ideologues. Some examples are, it should be noted, quote-mined often by some of his more left wing opponents. However, some of these beliefs are arguably more questionable even with the full context. See if you can tell the difference (additions to the original quote mines are in italics):
"There is no such thing as Islamophobia. It is a term of propaganda designed to PROTECT Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia." (The Moral Landscape)
"Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death."
“In our dealings with the Muslim world, we must acknowledge that Muslims have not found anything of substance to say against the actions of the September 11 hijackers, apart from the ubiquitous canard that they were really Jews.” (The End of Faith, p. 134)
"While the other major world religions have been fertile sources of intolerance, it is clear that the doctrine of Islam poses unique problems for the emergence of a global civilization. The world, from the point of view of Islam, is divided into the “House of Islam” and the “House of War,” and this latter designation should indicate how Muslims believe their differences with those who do not share their faith will be ultimately resolved. While there are undoubtedly some moderate Muslims who have decided to overlook the irreconcilable militancy of their religion, Islam is undeniably a religion of conquest. The only future devout Muslims can envisage — as Muslims — is one in which all INFIDELS have been converted to Islam, politically subjugated, or killed. The tenets of Islam simply do not admit of anything but a temporary sharing of power with the “enemies of God.” Devout Muslims can have no doubt about the reality of Paradise or about the efficacy of martyrdom as a means of getting there. Nor can they question the wisdom and reasonableness of killing people for what amount to theological grievances. In Islam, it is the moderate who is left to split hairs, because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, subjugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world." [11]
"It is time we admitted that we are not at war with “terrorism”; we are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran. This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with millions more than have any direct affiliation with Al Qaeda. Every person living in a western democracy should read the Koran and discover the relentlessness with which non-Muslims are vilified in its pages. The idea that Islam is a “peaceful religion hijacked by extremists” is a dangerous fantasy—and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for moderate Muslims to indulge."
"I AM ONE of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror." [12]
"We have alienated even our allies. Intelligent people could disagree about whether it was the right thing to do to go into Iraq. But one thing is pretty clear, going in we should have gone in with everybody. We need a truly international effort. We need to convince civilized democracies everywhere that civilization itself has genuine enemies. These totalitarian, theocratic, tribal eruptions on many parts of the globe on a hundred fronts. Many, if not most of them, are Muslims. Part of the reason we are so isolated from the rest of the world is our own religioscity" [13]
"Given the damage we were willing to cause to the bodies and minds of innocent children in Afghanistan and Iraq, our disavowal of torture in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed seems perverse. If there is even one chance in a million that he will tell us something under torture that will lead to the further dismantling of Al Qaeda, it seems that we should use every means at our disposal to get him talking." (The End of Faith, p. 198)
"It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development. This is a radically impolitic thing to say, of course, but it seems as objectively true as saying that not all societies have equal material resources. Not all societies have the same degree of moral wealth."
It is now a truism in foreign policy circles that real reform in the Muslim world cannot be imposed from the outside. But it is important to recognize why this is so— most Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith. Muslims tend to view questions of public policy and global conflict in terms of their affiliation with Islam. And Muslims who don't view the world in these terms risk being branded as apostates and killed by other Muslims." (Letter to a Christian Nation, 27)]
"The Iraqi people have been traumatized by this war and by decades of repression. But this does not explain the type of violence they wage against us on a daily basis. War and repression do not ACCOUNT for suicidal violence directed against the Red Cross, the United Nations, foreign workers and Iraqi innocents. War and repression would not have attracted an influx of foreign fighters willing to sacrifice their lives merely to sow chaos. We are now mired in a religious war in Iraq, and elsewhere. Our enemies, as witnessed by their astonishing willingness to slaughter themselves, are not principally motivated by political or economic grievances. Anyone who imagines that terrestrial concerns account for terrorism by Muslims must explain why there are no Palestinian Christian suicide bombers. They, too, suffer the ordeal of the Israeli occupation. Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers for that matter? The Tibetans have suffered an occupation far more brutal than any we or the Israelis have imposed on the Muslim world. The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom and jihad that directly inspire Muslim terrorism. [14]
"The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.[15]
That is not to say, however, that I think we should prevent our fellow citizens from building “the ground zero mosque...” The "Ground Zero mosque" will be viewed as a "sign that the liberal values of the West are synonymous with decadence and cowardice... It goes without saying that tolerance is a value to which we should all be deeply committed. "[16]
"It is time we admitted that we are not at war with 'terrorism.' We are at war with Islam. This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran. The only reason Muslim fundamentalism is a threat to us is because the fundamentals of Islam are a threat to us.[17]
"Insofar as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of France's jails, for instance, are Muslim."
"We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it."[18]
"We are now mired in a religious war in Iraq and elsewhere. Our enemies--as witnessed by their astonishing willingness to slaughter themselves--are not principally motivated by political or economic grievances. How many more architects and electrical engineers must fly planes into buildings before we realize that the problem of Muslim extremism is not merely a matter of education? How many more middle-class British citizens must blow themselves up along with scores of noncombatants before we acknowledge that Muslim terrorism is not matter of poverty or political oppression? It is not enough for moderate Muslims to say “not in our name.” They must now police their own communities. They must offer unreserved ASSISTANCE to western governments in locating the extremists in their midst. They must tolerate, advocate, and even practice ethnic profiling. It is simply a fact that the greatest predictor of terrorist behavior anywhere in the world (with the exception of the island Sri Lanka) is whether or not a person believes that Allah is the only god and Muhammad is his prophet. Moderate Muslims themselves must acknowledge this fact without equivocation. The time for political CORRECTNESS and multi-cultural shibboleths has long passed. Moderate Muslims must accept and practice open criticism of their religion. We are now in the 21st century: all books, including the Koran, should be fair game for flushing down the toilet without fear of violent reprisal. If you disagree, you are not a religious moderate, and you are on a collision course with modernity." answer
if you ask me what our policy on torture should be, I think it should be illegal. I think we should say we don't torture, it's illegal, there are good reasons never to do it. Yet I can well imagine an interrogator being in a situation where clearly the ethical thing to do is to make someone uncomfortable until they talk.I say somewhere in The End of Faith that if you can't imagine any situation in which depriving someone of sleep, playing loud music, water-boarding them - doing something which leaves no lasting physical damage other than making them exquisitely uncomfortable for the moment so that they talk - if you can't imagine a situation in which you'd be willing to do that or sanction that, then you're just not thinking hard enough. There are people who are intending to destroy the lives of millions, render cities uninhabitable - that's what's scary, frankly.
“Islam is the fastest growing religion in Europe. The demographic trends are ominous: Given current birthrates, France could be a majority Muslim country in 25 years, and that is if immigration were to stop tomorrow. Throughout Western Europe, Muslim immigrants show little inclination to acquire the secular and civil values of their host countries, and yet exploit these values to the utmost—demanding tolerance for their backwardness, their misogyny, their anti-Semitism, and the genocidal hatred that is regularly preached in their mosques. Political CORRECTNESS and fears of racism have rendered many secular Europeans incapable of opposing the terrifying religious commitments of the extremists in their midst.”answer
“And one of the problems we have is that many Muslims, for understandable reasons and some for really deplorable reasons, are playing hide the ball with the articles of faith, and are eager to have the conversations of the sort you have had from a very cynical and manipulative perspective. We’re just going to keep having big families, and eventually it’s going to be Eurabia, and the war will be won. There are people who really think in those terms, and they’re not necessarily just the people in the center of the bull’s-eye of Islamic infatuation.”answer
"Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to PROTECT civilization from its genuine enemies." answer
" In fact, there is a doctrine of deception within Islam called taqiyya, wherein lying to INFIDELS has been decreed a perfectly ethical way of achieving one’s goals."answer
"When I search my heart, I discover that I want to keep the barbarians beyond the city walls just as much as my conservative neighbors do, and I recognize that sacrifices of my own freedom may be warranted for this purpose. I expect that epiphanies of this sort couldwell multiply in the coming years". answer
"Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. 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 innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will CONTINUE to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas."answer
"We cannot let our qualms over collateral damage paralyze us because our enemies know no such qualms. Theirs is a kill-the-children-first approach to war, and we ignore the fundamental difference between their violence and our own at our peril. Given the proliferation of weaponry in our world, we no longer have the option of waging this war with swords. It seems certain that collateral damage, of various sorts, will be a part of our future for many years to come".answer
"Zakaria observes that Muslims living in the West generally appear tolerant of the beliefs of others. Let us accept this characterization for the moment—though it ignores the inconvenient reality that many Western countries now appear to be "hotbeds of Islamic militancy." Before we chalk this up to Muslim tolerance, however, we should ask ourselves how Muslim intolerance would reveal itself in the West. What minority, even a radicalized one, isn't generally "tolerant" of the majority for most of its CAREER? Even avowed terrorists and revolutionaries spend most of their days just biding their time. We should not mistake the "tolerance" of political, economic, and numerical weakness for genuine liberalism".answer
"it seems obvious that the misapplication of torture should be far less troubling to us than collateral damage: there are, after all, no infants interned at Guantanamo Bay, just rather scrofulous young men, many of whom were caught in the very act of trying to kill our soldiers". answer
"Give most Muslims the freedom to vote, and they will freely vote to tear out their political freedoms by the root. We should not for a moment lose sight of the possibility that they would curtail our freedoms as well, if they only had the power to do so". answer
"It seems all but certain that some form of benign dictatorship will generally be necessary to bridge the gap. But benignity is the key—and if it cannot emerge from within a state, it must be imposed from without. The means of such imposition are necessarily crude:they amount to economic isolation, military intervention (whether open or covert), or some combination of both. While this may seem an exceedingly arrogant doctrine to espouse, it appears we have no alternatives." answer
"If you get a truly ethical despot in charge—a benevolent despot—that may be the necessary transitional mechanism to democracy. It should be pretty clear that much of the Muslim world is not ready for democracy, and we have to confront that reality. Many Muslims are prepared to tear out their freedoms by the root the moment they are given a chance to decide their destiny. How we transition to a democracy in the Middle East—a true democracy—is a very difficult problem. We should consider the examples of Muslim communities living in Western Europe, and their failure to assimilate democratic values. If ever there were a test case for how immune a community can be to the charms of democracy, just look at the Muslim communities in Holland or France or Denmark. Look at the crowds of people who want newspaper editors and cartoonists decapitated. These are people who are living in Western Europe. Many of them have lived their whole lives there."answer
After Anders Behring Breivik's 2011 terror attack: "As I have only read parts of this document, I cannot say whether signs of a deeper religious motive appear elsewhere in it. Nevertheless, the above passages would seem to undermine any claim that Breivik is a Christian fundamentalist in the usual sense. What cannot be doubted, however, is that Breivik’s explicit goal was to punish European liberals for their timidity in the face of Islam. I have written a fair amount about the threat that Islam poses TO OPEN societies, but I am happy to say that Breivik appears never to have heard of me. He has, however, digested the opinions of many writers who share my general concerns — Theodore Dalrymple, Robert D. Kaplan, Lee Harris, Ibn Warraq, Bernard Lewis, Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer, Walid Shoebat, Daniel Pipes, Bat Ye’or, Mark Steyn, Samuel Huntington, et al. He even singles out my friend and colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali for SPECIAL praise, repeatedly quoting a blogger who thinks she deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. With a friend like Breivik, one will never want for enemies. One can only hope that the horror and outrage provoked by Breivik’s behavior will temper the growing enthusiasm for right-wing, racist nationalism in Europe. However, one now fears the swing of another pendulum: We are bound to hear a lot of deluded talk about the dangers of “Islamophobia” and about the need to address the threat of “terrorism” in purely generic terms. The emergence of “Christian” terrorism in Europe does absolutely nothing to diminish or simplify the problem of Islam — its repression of women, its hostility toward FREE speech, and its all-too-facile and frequent resort to threats and violence. Islam remains the most retrograde and ill-behaved religion on earth. And the final irony of Breivik’s despicable life is that he has made that truth even more difficult to speak about." answer
"This is a terrible truth that we have to face: the only thing that currently stands between us and the roiling ocean of Muslim unreason is a wall of tyranny and human rights abuses that we have helped to erect. This situation must be remedied, but we cannot merely force Muslim dictators from power and open the polls. It would be like opening the polls to the Christians of the fourteenth century". answer
"I suspect that Muslim prosperity might even make matters worse, because the only thing that seems likely to persuade most Muslims that their worldview is problematic is the demonstrable failure of their societies. If Muslim orthodoxy were as economically and technologically viable as Western liberalism, we would probably be doomed to witness the Islamification of the earth".answer
"If oil were to become worthless, the dysfunction of the most prominent Muslim societies would suddenly grow as conspicuous as the sun. Muslims might then come to see the wisdom of moderating their thinking on a wide variety of subjects. Otherwise, we will be obliged to protect our interests in the world with force CONTINUALLY. In this case, it seems all but certain that our newspapers will begin to read more and more like the book of Revelation". answer

http://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/sam-harris-uncovered (by an apostate muslim turned atheist).

Honestly, Sam Harris deserves every bit of scorn he received and only an idiot would trust him on Islam. Fuck he described the Iraq war as a humanitarian endeavor and says that "Theodore Dalrymple, Robert D. Kaplan, Lee Harris, Ibn Warraq, Bernard Lewis, Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer, Walid Shoebat, Daniel Pipes, Bat Ye’or, Mark Steyn, Samuel Huntington, et al." Share his general concerns. "He even singles out my friend and colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali for SPECIAL praise, repeatedly quoting a blogger who thinks she deserves a Nobel Peace Prize." As in the same Hirsi Ali who said Muslims should be stripped of their rights.

Anyone who shares the "concerns" of those whackos is a cretin who would do the world a favor by never contributing to the gene pool.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

That's quite the copy-paste job. Evidently, ripped from a wiki page (this is what came up in a cursory Google search), which upon examination is clearly in the midst of a fairly vicious edit-war, unsurprisingly centered on the very section you copy-pasted.

I am loath to appoint myself Sam Harris' advocate, not least because I disagree with a number of his political views and even the conclusions of some of his arguments. Nevertheless, this ridiculous slandering (libeling?) and mischaracterization of his arguments that's been doing the rounds is tiresome, and so perfectly encapsulates the very wannabe-left "THAT'S RACIST!" mentality that I was objecting to in this thread in the first place that I feel compelled to respond.

First, we need to make something clear. Spewing a bunch of random quotations, devoid of context, doesn't really establish anything. For one, you're not actually addressing any of his arguments or positions - you're just citing a few cherry-picked sentences as if that is somehow self-evident proof that he is someone not worth listening to. The cherry-picked quotes in question also just happen to be ripped verbatim from a non-Wikipedia wiki, which in terms of trustworthiness and value ranks right up there with "drunken rantings of that homeless guy on the street."

Secondly, most of the quotes - which, if I understand you correctly, you are objecting to on the basis of "racism" - seem to deal primarily or wholly with Muslims. Muslims are not a race, they are an adherent to a particular religion. You can be racist toward Arabs or Persians or Africans or "brown people," but you can't be racist toward Muslims. You can be religiously intolerant toward Muslims, but as one's choice of religion is a statement of belief and not an inherent characteristic of a person that the person cannot be faulted for (as race is), this is a significantly less dire charge to levy at someone. Indeed (and here is where I start to disagree with some of what Harris says), a good deal of Harris' arguments center around the idea that it's not necessarily irrational to be religiously intolerant toward Muslims. If you disagree with that, then disagree and engage his arguments on that point, not on some ridiculous charge of racism.

The Islamist-apologist wannabe-Left would very much like you to think, however, that Harris' arguments are racist - specifically because that neatly does away with all that hard-to-do thinkin' and cogitatin'. Dust off your hands and do away with the dirty racist, no argument - and no thought or consideration - required. People like Reza Aslan have gone to considerable lengths to get people like you to believe in the slanderous Strawman Harris they're selling you, because they don't want you to think that maybe - just maybe - Emperor Islam isn't wearing the clothes it purports to be wearing. The very first quote from your copy-pasta directly addresses this point:

"There is no such thing as Islamophobia. It is a term of propaganda designed to PROTECT Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia."

There is a very vocal segment of the political landscape that would very much like Islam to never be criticized, and this sort of unthinking "CRITICISM OF MUSLIMS IS RACIST!" is the first line of defense for that segment. It might seem well-intentioned, due to anti-Muslim backlash in the wake of - guess what - Islamic terrorism, but the reality - as argued by Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, and others, as well as their theological opponents like Maajid Nawaz - is that the wannabe-left's tireless white-knighting for Muslims is only strengthening the more dangerous Islamist extremists by shielding them from criticism. It is more than a little chilling to watch (portions of) the left be so insidiously subverted by the very forces someone on the left should be opposed to: theocratic dominion, and a sobering reminder that a truly free society requires, perpetually, the most uncomfortable sort of self-criticism and civic vigilance.

Incidentally, I highly recommend Maajid Nawaz's brand new book with Sam Harris on this topic, Islam and the Future of Tolerance. Where they disagree is as illuminating as where they agree. I also recommend you check out one of the incarnations of The Wave or Die Welle, a perhaps overly-dramatic but important reminder of a citizen's duty to think for himself and not gobble up whatever nice-sounding nonsense is thrown at you.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Serendipitously, Maajid Nawaz just wrote this on-topic piece:

Daily Beast

The Daily Hate: Corbyn, Trump and the New Politics of Spite
Jeremy Corbyn is the new leader of the Labour Party. Politicians like him on the left and right don’t try to win arguments—they try to destroy their opponents.

We are living in a spiteful, populist time.

Peddling hate makes for popular politicians and being angry is the new “being cool.” Across the western hemisphere a new type of leader is emerging whose rise to power has been as unpredictable as it has been swift. And the one thing these new leaders and their supporters have in common is not their politics, but their utter disdain for their political opponents and the entire “establishment.” And yes, I could be talking about Donald Trump in America, or the far-left rise of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. But I could just as easily be referring to the longer-term rise of Western Islamism, or far-right anti-Muslim street movements such as Germany’s Pegida and others across Europe. And whether we consider expanding campus coalitions to Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) Israel, or the intransigence of extremist Israeli settlers, what many of these movements’ followers share is the desire not just to disagree with their opponents, but to delegitimize, dehumanize and ostracize those with whom they disagree.

The resulting climate is one in which division, bitterness and hate is on the ascendency. It is now simply assumed that anyone publishing satirical content scrutinizing the Prophet of Islam will be murdered by jihadists. Government ministers are warning of the sharp rise in the UK and across Europe of anti-Semitic attacks, while London’s Metropolitan Police reported a 70% rise in anti-Muslim incidents. When a homeless Mexican immigrant was recently beaten and urinated on in the U.S. by suspect Scott Leader while allegedly telling police that “Trump was right,” Trump’s response was to call his supporters passionate. Alongside this, European far-right movements don’t just represent the more thuggish Neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece, but the more sophisticated politicos of Austria’s Freedom Party, Sweden’s “Democrats” and Holland’s Party for Freedom, each with significant and worrying levels of Parliamentary representation.

“And as these groups indulge in their own daily version of Orwell’s Two-Minutes Hate, each with their own little Emmanuel Goldstein-like traitor figure to irrationally rage at, because it feels good, the voices of those who are more comfortable with doubt are being drowned out.”

To question the dogma of any of these saviors of the human condition online, is to invite a modern day virtual lynching which in many cases has offline implications. This directed, targeted and vicious vitriol against individuals who dare to disagree is invariably achieved by inviting a mob to join in, then relishing in the utter defrocking and public shaming of the designated miscreant. As Sir Timothy Hunt recently discovered to his dismay, to deploy a very British sense of self-deprecating irony before a handful of politically charged activists seeking disagreement, can unleash the very gates of virtual hell, one powerful enough to strip even a Nobel-prize winning scientist of his various honorary positions.

It is not their policies that these new populists share, but their emphasis on a new kind of identity politics. The atomization of information, borne of the internet age, is having the opposite effect to what many commentators had previously assumed. As people’s opportunities to succumb to confirmation bias increases online —only seeking out information that confirms their prejudices — instead of eradicating ignorance, extremism and close-mindedness have continued to rise unabated. What would previously have been isolated cases of parochial bigotry with no outlet to vent, are now thriving global sub-communities of people identifying around discriminatory uber-identities. Islamist, Hindu-fundamentalist, racially aligned-activists, the extreme settler-movement in Israel, and Far-Left regressives have all emerged of late to form comfortable groupings focusing on cultural “authenticity,” cultural struggle and cultural dominance.

Any centrist seeking to assert an open-minded and tolerant position between these extremes is instantly subjected to a torrent of abuse from all sides. To hold ideas beyond one’s cultural “station,” and to question these uber-identities, risks instantly being deemed a blood-traitor, a native-informant or a sell-out Uncle Tom. It is as if ideas have color and the pursuit of truth should remain segregated along racial or cultural lines.

And as these groups indulge in their own daily version of Orwell’s Two-Minutes Hate, each with their own little Emmanuel Goldstein-like traitor figure to irrationally rage at, because it feels good, the voices of those who are more comfortable with doubt are being drowned out.

Traditionally, open-minded secular liberal rationalists have not made a case for tolerance. Being opposed to preaching “truth,” those who prefer doubt over dogma and skepticism over certainty have entertained, but never engaged in arguments. But if we are to have any hope in pushing back against the rise of this Daily Hate, skeptics will need to arrive at one irrevocable truth, and then preach it: I may be wrong, but you are certainly not right. The only certainty we have is that those who are certain of a way to arrive at worldly salvation, are committed enough to organize around this, and seek power to enforce it, will invariably descend into a bloody totalitarian fascism. Dogma not only blinds its protagonist, but it muzzles all other opposition. We must mount civil society struggles for skepticism to prevail. The only way to defeat these modern political certainties is to be certain in only one thing: our doubt.

[Hillary]

The headline and sub-headline both accuse Jeremy Corbyn of being a hate monger, yet he isn't mentioned at all in the body of the text.

That's a fairly cheap shot he's not backed up.

As for the article itself, it's pretty textbook "Golden Mean Fallacy".

[Simon_Jester]

That's quite the copy-paste job. Evidently, ripped from a wiki page (this is what came up in a cursory Google search), which upon examination is clearly in the midst of a fairly vicious edit-war, unsurprisingly centered on the very section you copy-pasted.

I am loath to appoint myself Sam Harris' advocate, not least because I disagree with a number of his political views and even the conclusions of some of his arguments. Nevertheless, this ridiculous slandering (libeling?) and mischaracterization of his arguments that's been doing the rounds is tiresome, and so perfectly encapsulates the very wannabe-left "THAT'S RACIST!" mentality that I was objecting to in this thread in the first place that I feel compelled to respond.

First, we need to make something clear. Spewing a bunch of random quotations, devoid of context, doesn't really establish anything...

Many of the quotations in question are at paragraph length. Exactly how much context does it take? I can accept that quoting the surrounding sentence may be important to understand a seemingly damning phrase, or that a paragraph may change the meaning of a seemingly damning sentence. But is it somehow wrong and bad to even try to represent a man's opinions by any means other than passing around his essays and interview records in their entirety?

Because frankly I don't have time to spend reading four to six hours of Sam Harris quotes randomly sampled from throughout his history as a public figure in an attempt to get a view of the nature of the man. If you try to link me to that much material I will ignore it- and you'd do the equivalent too, justifiably.

It is a commonplace activity to try and find quotes ranging from sentence to paragraph length that encapsulate the views and opinions of an individual. While you can reasonably claim that these quotes are biased and should be accompanied by other quotes from the same person, you cannot reasonably point to entire paragraph-long quotes of a hundred words or more and say "NOT ENOUGH CONTEXT!" Not unless you have some ability to inform us about what this context was- that, say, the entire paragraph was him inventing a hypothetical set of words to put in the mouth of a fictional person.

For one, you're not actually addressing any of his arguments or positions - you're just citing a few cherry-picked sentences as if that is somehow self-evident proof that he is someone not worth listening to. The cherry-picked quotes in question also just happen to be ripped verbatim from a non-Wikipedia wiki, which in terms of trustworthiness and value ranks right up there with "drunken rantings of that homeless guy on the street."

Are you denying that they are in fact Sam Harris quotes?

Because that would be a respectable argument.

Secondly, most of the quotes - which, if I understand you correctly, you are objecting to on the basis of "racism" - seem to deal primarily or wholly with Muslims. Muslims are not a race, they are an adherent to a particular religion. You can be racist toward Arabs or Persians or Africans or "brown people," but you can't be racist toward Muslims...

'Racism' is often used as a shorthand in such situations; it is a case of lazy speaking. Especially since many of the very same bigots who are profoundly anti-Muslim themselves tend to think of 'Muslim' as a race. Just as people viewed 'Jew' as a race while carrying out pogroms.

You can be religiously intolerant toward Muslims, but as one's choice of religion is a statement of belief and not an inherent characteristic of a person that the person cannot be faulted for (as race is), this is a significantly less dire charge to levy at someone. Indeed (and here is where I start to disagree with some of what Harris says), a good deal of Harris' arguments center around the idea that it's not necessarily irrational to be religiously intolerant toward Muslims. If you disagree with that, then disagree and engage his arguments on that point, not on some ridiculous charge of racism.

Again, calling Harris's push for religious intolerance of Muslims 'racist' is an act of laziness, not a ridiculous or deliberately false argument.

The Islamist-apologist wannabe-Left would very much like you to think, however, that Harris' arguments are racist - specifically because that neatly does away with all that hard-to-do thinkin' and cogitatin'.

Nope. Firstly, the Islamic-apologist wannabe-Left is in large part a myth, it's as if you were making claims about the political views of a bunch of unicorns. There are a handful of loud scholars who believe foolishness, and that's about it.

People like Reza Aslan have gone to considerable lengths to get people like you to believe in the slanderous Strawman Harris they're selling you, because they don't want you to think that maybe - just maybe - Emperor Islam isn't wearing the clothes it purports to be wearing. The very first quote from your copy-pasta directly addresses this point...

"There is no such thing as Islamophobia. It is a term of propaganda designed to PROTECT Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia."

This is Harris asserting that it is non-racist and non-xenophobic of him to say "Islam is a hate-maddened mob, why haven't they disowned and imprisoned their fundamentalist radicals as Christianity hasn't totally has, they're fundamentally unlike us, they don't understand our freedoms and our way of life, et cetera et cetera."

Thing is... frankly, if you say that enough, you are for all practical purposes a xenophobic influence on your nation's politics. If you say it about a group that is ethnographically distinct from those of your own nation, you become a racist influence on your nation's politics. This is a blunt reality that many people who ARE racists and xenophobes don't want to admit, because they don't want the cognitive dissonance of having to say "yes, I'm afraid of foreigners and think other races are inferior, and that is okay, because the worldview that makes it possible to say this without cognitive dissonance has been pretty well exploded.

But that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be destroyed by the truth. The truth is, there are scary Muslim fanatics out there, the other truth is, this does not relieve us of the responsibility of engaging with and understanding the Muslim world out of fear of the fanatics. If anything it increases our obligations.

is that the wannabe-left's tireless white-knighting for Muslims is only strengthening the more dangerous Islamist extremists by shielding them from criticism.

I have never yet heard 'white knight' used by someone with a good argument. I have so far literally only ever heard it spoken by assholes. Ones who want a license to keep defecating on things they disapprove of. Who cannot be bothered to actually engage with the criticisms of the smelly results of their defecation, and so dismiss the attempt to do so as "white knighting," when in fact it is a natural response to one's distaste.

Just because you didn't dump this pile of bullshit on ME, doesn't mean I won't demand that you clean it up.

[Darth Yan]

He says "writers who share my general concerns — Theodore Dalrymple, Robert D. Kaplan, Lee Harris, Ibn Warraq, Bernard Lewis, Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer, Walid Shoebat, Daniel Pipes, Bat Ye’or, Mark Steyn, Samuel Huntington, et al. He even singles out my friend and colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali for SPECIAL praise, repeatedly quoting a blogger who thinks she deserves a Nobel Peace Prize."

Bat Ye'or is an advocate of the "Muslims will take over Europe and make us all dhimmis" claptrap. Daniel Pipes Robert Spencer and Andrew Bostom (not to mention Steyn and Shoebat) are much the same.

If Harris didn't believe those nutbags I might take him seriously. But the moment you endorse someone like Bat Ye'or and Robert Spencer you immediately loose credibility.


Also the point of Islamophobia isn't that criticism of Islam is bad; it's that things considered "Islamophobic" include beliefs that Islam is uniquely violent, that muslims should be stripped of their rights etc. I'm all for critiquing Islam, but the moment you advocate Muslims be stripped of their rights you cross the line into xenophobia.

[Kingmaker]

As for the article itself, it's pretty textbook "Golden Mean Fallacy".

How? There's nothing fallacious about advocating for centrism and skepticism of extremism. To the extent that the "Golden Mean Fallacy" is a fallacy, it is for arguing that a moderate position is valid simply for being between two more extreme positions. Whether or not you agree with the premises (i.e. extremism is rising), the author is not arguing moderation for moderation's sake, but because he believes extremism is destructive and moderation is beneficial. If you disagree with the article, there are actual substantive objections you could make.

As a non-profit organization whose mission is basically to create a free open source browser (or operating system, or whatever Mozilla is up to these days), they basically can fire or hire whoever the fuck they want. Maybe they think that the things they value, such as same-sex equality, are just as important as their open-source philosophy and free browser. What exactly is your objection to that?

I have a real hard time believing that you'd be saying this instead of screaming bloody murder if Eich had been sacked for making a donation to a progressive cause.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Jesus Christ, Simon, you elevate pedantry to new levels. Is it something you have to work at, or can you just not help yourself?

Many of the quotations in question are at paragraph length. Exactly how much context does it take? I can accept that quoting the surrounding sentence may be important to understand a seemingly damning phrase, or that a paragraph may change the meaning of a seemingly damning sentence. But is it somehow wrong and bad to even try to represent a man's opinions by any means other than passing around his essays and interview records in their entirety?

It takes exactly as much context as required to make the quote not a distortion of the speaker's actual views. In this case, many of the quotes in question have been ripped from complex ethical and philosophical arguments, wherein Harris frequently uses rhetorical hypotheticals to illustrate whatever point he's trying to make. They've been cherry-picked specifically to distort his views and held up in order to get lazy people to dismiss his arguments before those arguments can even be heard.

Are you denying that they are in fact Sam Harris quotes?

Because that would be a respectable argument.

Well I'm so glad you think so. Yes, in a sense, many of them aren't - because they've been maliciously edited to appear to say something that Harris does not.

'Racism' is often used as a shorthand in such situations; it is a case of lazy speaking. Especially since many of the very same bigots who are profoundly anti-Muslim themselves tend to think of 'Muslim' as a race. Just as people viewed 'Jew' as a race while carrying out pogroms.

Again, calling Harris's push for religious intolerance of Muslims 'racist' is an act of laziness, not a ridiculous or deliberately false argument.

Yes, actually, calling an argument that has nothing to do with race specifically racist and then leaving it at that is, in fact, both ridiculous and deliberately false. You racist.

Nope. Firstly, the Islamic-apologist wannabe-Left is in large part a myth, it's as if you were making claims about the political views of a bunch of unicorns.

Then what are you doing right now? For a guy who says this doesn't exist, you sure do seem to be making a lot of excuses for the concerted efforts to defame Harris.

But that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be destroyed by the truth. The truth is, there are scary Muslim fanatics out there, the other truth is, this does not relieve us of the responsibility of engaging with and understanding the Muslim world out of fear of the fanatics. If anything it increases our obligations.

Which, if you bothered to actually pay attention to Harris' arguments instead of crowning yourself King Pedant, is pretty much exactly what Harris says on a regular basis.

If you want to poke holes in Harris' views, be my guest. I might even agree with some of it. My point is that, yeah, you do have to sit through the interviews and essays if you want to actually tackle the arguments. I do have to get going though, so I'll let him defend himself. If you really want to have this argument, then you can sit through this video and then yell at your monitor.

[Simon_Jester]

It takes exactly as much context as required to make the quote not a distortion of the speaker's actual views. In this case, many of the quotes in question have been ripped from complex ethical and philosophical arguments, wherein Harris frequently uses rhetorical hypotheticals to illustrate whatever point he's trying to make. They've been cherry-picked specifically to distort his views and held up in order to get lazy people to dismiss his arguments before those arguments can even be heard.

Can you present examples of such cherry-picking?

Are you denying that they are in fact Sam Harris quotes?

Because that would be a respectable argument.

Well I'm so glad you think so. Yes, in a sense, many of them aren't - because they've been maliciously edited to appear to say something that Harris does not.

Okay, and what does he believe?

'Racism' is often used as a shorthand in such situations; it is a case of lazy speaking. Especially since many of the very same bigots who are profoundly anti-Muslim themselves tend to think of 'Muslim' as a race. Just as people viewed 'Jew' as a race while carrying out pogroms.

Again, calling Harris's push for religious intolerance of Muslims 'racist' is an act of laziness, not a ridiculous or deliberately false argument.

Yes, actually, calling an argument that has nothing to do with race specifically racist and then leaving it at that is, in fact, both ridiculous and deliberately false. You racist.

So if I say 'racist' when strictly I ought to say 'religious-persecutionist-who-shows-worrying-signs-of-thinking-of-the-targeted-religion-as-a-race-even-if-he-publicly-disavows-it,' I am an evil liar?

I... don't think I'm going to adhere to that standard, thank you very much.

See, you're treating 'racist' as if it were a slur that people fling reflexively. By and large, when sane and literate people use it as an accusation they mean it for a reason. you may not agree with their reason, but the reason exists, it is not being done purely to 'shut up' someone who speaks crimethink.

Nope. Firstly, the Islamic-apologist wannabe-Left is in large part a myth, it's as if you were making claims about the political views of a bunch of unicorns.

Then what are you doing right now? For a guy who says this doesn't exist, you sure do seem to be making a lot of excuses for the concerted efforts to defame Harris.

Well, you have yet to satisfy me that Harris is receiving more defamation than he deserves. I know from bitter experience that there are racists and xenophobes and that there is no upper limit on how much contempt and hostility they can advocate against the Muslim world. Or how much ignorance of that world they can exhibit.

I don't know the first thing about Sam Harris. But my Bayesian prior for the proposition "Sam Harris talks like this because he's a xenophobe, not because he's misunderstood" is fairly high, because I know lots of other people who DO talk like this, and who do so because they ARE in fact xenophobes by any reasonable test I can devise.

Which, if you bothered to actually pay attention to Harris' arguments instead of crowning yourself King Pedant, is pretty much exactly what Harris says on a regular basis.

Did I miss the part where you presented those arguments in the thread? I mean, he may be a public figure but he's not one so famous I have much if any prior knowledge about him. The guy has NO reputation as far as I'm concerned, and you're trying to defend his reputation without saying anything other than the bare 'fact' that he's being quoted out of context.

But when you say "no, his views are not accurately represented by this pile of quotes of multi-sentence length, they were all cherrypicked and taken out of context!" I have to ask... what exactly IS the context? What was he saying, in at least some of these instances, that made it so easy to misrepresent him repeatedly?

[Channel72]

Brother Captain Gaius, would you be able to demonstrate how grossly out of context any of these quotes are? Like, by placing the quote in context, and showing how the meaning significantly changes? I'm honestly curious.

That said, I actually agree with some of these quotes:

"Anyone who imagines that terrestrial concerns account for terrorism by Muslims must explain why there are no Palestinian Christian suicide bombers. They, too, suffer the ordeal of the Israeli occupation. Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers for that matter? The Tibetans have suffered an occupation far more brutal than any we or the Israelis have imposed on the Muslim world. The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom and jihad that directly inspire Muslim terrorism."

Sam Harris is simply correct, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us, or how many "that's racist" alarms this sets off, that the widespread practice of suicide bombing is uniquely enabled and encouraged by inherent Koranic doctrines, most notably the romantic pursuit of Jihad, and has been used against occupying powers since the French were in Algeria. (Although I wouldn't say this has nothing to do with "terrestrial concerns").

However, I disagree with Harris' notion that a non-violent Islam is in fact, impossible. He says:

"While the other major world religions have been fertile sources of intolerance, it is clear that the doctrine of Islam poses unique problems for the emergence of a global civilization. The world, from the point of view of Islam, is divided into the “House of Islam” and the “House of War,” and this latter designation should indicate how Muslims believe their differences with those who do not share their faith will be ultimately resolved. While there are undoubtedly some moderate Muslims who have decided to overlook the irreconcilable militancy of their religion, Islam is undeniably a religion of conquest. The only future devout Muslims can envisage — as Muslims — is one in which all INFIDELS have been converted to Islam, politically subjugated, or killed. The tenets of Islam simply do not admit of anything but a temporary sharing of power with the “enemies of God.” Devout Muslims can have no doubt about the reality of Paradise or about the efficacy of martyrdom as a means of getting there. Nor can they question the wisdom and reasonableness of killing people for what amount to theological grievances. In Islam, it is the moderate who is left to split hairs, because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, subjugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world."

This is an exaggeration brought on by the various brands of radical Islam which have emerged via the widespread funding of Wahhabiist Madrassas via Saudi oil money. The Islam prior to the rise of Saudi Madrassas, namely the Islam of the Ottoman Empire, and the Islam of the Abbasid Caliphate (you know... the Islam that existed for most of the past 1,000 years) was not this radical. Far from being some sort of death-cult bent on exterminating everyone, they tolerated Christians and Jews - Jews were way more tolerated in Baghdad than in Europe, for one thing. For that matter, the explosion of mathematical and scientific development that came out of the Abbasid Caliphate demonstrably shows that the Islam of this period was not some narrow-minded death cult.

Harris simply doesn't seem to understand history. Islam was not always like what we see happening today. There are two major phenomena that transformed and radicalized large segments of the Muslim world:

• (1) A backwards extremist Sunni cult out in the middle of nowhere (Wahhabism) suddenly struck oil and became overnight billionaires selling energy to emerging super powers. They then proceeded to spread their fundamentalist ideology by funding and setting up Madrassas throughout the Middle East and Africa.
  
  (2) The Ottoman Empire was destroyed and European powers invaded and curbstomped Islamic forces. The days of perceived Islamic superiority ended, and the Middle East was ravaged, divided and meddled with by Western invaders. This had a strong galvanizing influence on the rise of radical Sunni Islam, and the practice of Jihad and suicide bombings rose to prominence in places like French-occupied Algeria or British occupied Alexandria.
  
  And of course, (1) and (2) have also fed off each other.

But this doesn't mean Islam is inherently incapable of co-existing with peace. But really, the main problem with Harris' rhetoric is that there's still like, a billion Muslims who exist, and who we need to somehow meaningfully engage with. Starting from the position that Muslims are hell-bent on destroying or assimiliating everything they come in contact with is not productive - even if there are a significant percentage of Muslims who are now very radicalized.

[Channel72]

Also, a lot of Harris' arguments are based around the fact that Koranic doctrine makes the Islamic world completely incompatible with a peaceful future or "global civilization". In a sense, he is correct - if we sum up the entire mission of the Prophet as "convert the world by force" - which is sort of what happened. However, the reality is way more complicated than that. In practice, large Muslim empires have been motivated more by political and economic realities (just like, you know, every other polity) than Koranic doctrine per se.

For that matter, the question of how much religious doctrine actually affects the behavior of a large civilization is questionable. By all accounts, Christianity is basically an end-of-the-world death cult. No, I mean really, it is. Any serious New Testament scholar has to admit that Christianity is basically nothing but an end-of-times, judgement day, death cult, which came around at a time when Christians literally thought the world was going to end any minute. A lot of Christian teachings in the New Testament are inextricably rooted in the eschatological context of "the world is going to end any minute, your life here is not important, don't get too involved with the affairs of this world, just hold on to your faith, etc..."

Of course, by the time Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and then the de-facto official religion of all of Europe, the concerns of the various Christian powers became a bit more complicated then "oh shit, the world is going to end, let's not bother doing anything."

And really, the same can be said of Islam. Harris is taking the initial driving force behind Islam, and reducing the motivations of all Muslims and all Muslims polities to the original ~630 AD conquest and expansion. And while the mandate to engage in Jihad and spread Islam certainly exists and is a very powerful force, you can hardly reduce the motivations of billions of people and the behaviors of large Islamic empires to this simplistic religious impetus, any more than you can reduce the actions of the Holy Roman Empire or the Kingdom of Prussia to "the world is going to end and Jesus is coming back! Repent!"

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Brother Captain Gaius, would you be able to demonstrate how grossly out of context any of these quotes are? Like, by placing the quote in context, and showing how the meaning significantly changes? I'm honestly curious.

Can you present examples of such cherry-picking?

Fair enough; though again I stress my displeasure and reluctance in defending someone with whom I don't necessarily agree on every argument, and all I've been trying to do here is get people to agree or disagree with his actual positions and not these fabrications of a racist xenophobe strawman.

I don't know which quotes one actually objects to (especially as many of the quotes aren't actually objectionable by themselves), and I'm certainly not going to go through all of them. Here is one of the listed quotes that seems "anti-liberal" when removed from context:

"When I search my heart, I discover that I want to keep the barbarians beyond the city walls just as much as my conservative neighbors do, and I recognize that sacrifices of my own freedom may be warranted for this purpose. I expect that epiphanies of this sort could well multiply in the coming years".

Just another closet neo-con ready to sell freedoms under the bus to stop them dirty jihadists, right? Well, no.

The Moral Landscape, 89-90

In describing the different forms of morality available to us, Haidt offers a choice between "contractual" and "beehive" approaches: the first is said to be the province of liberals, who care mainly about harm and fairness; the second represents the conservative (generally religious) social order, which incorporates further concerns about group loyalty, respect for authority, and religious purity. The opposition between these two conceptions of the good life may be worth discussing, and Haidt's data on the differences between liberals and conservatives is interesting, but is his interpretation correct? It seems possible, for instance, that his five foundsations of morality are simply facets of a more general concern about harm.

What, after all, is the problem with desecrating a copy of the Qur'an? There would be no problem but for the fact that people believe that the Qur'an is a divinely authored text. Such people almost surely believe that some harm could come to them or to their tribe as a result of such sacrileges - if not in this world, then in the next. A more esoteric view might be that any person who desecrates scripture will have harmed himself directly: a lack of reverence might be its own punishment, dimming the eyes of faith. Whatever interpretation one favours, sacredness and respect for religious authority seem to reduce to a concern about harm just the same.

The same point can be made in the opposite direction: even a liberal like myself, enamored as I am of thinking in terms of harm and fairness, can readily see that my vision of the good life must be safeguarded from the aggressive tribalism of others. When I search my heart, I discover that I want to keep the barbarians beyond the city walls just as much as my conservative neighbors do, and I recognize that sacrifices of my own freedom may be warranted for this purpose. I expect that epiphanies of this sort could well multiply in the coming years. Just imagine, for instance, how liberals might be disposed to think about the threat of Islam after an incident of nuclear terrorism. Liberal hankering for happiness and freedom might one day produce some very strident calls for stricter laws and tribal loyalty. Will this mean that liberals have become religious conservatives pining for the beehive? Or is the liberal notion of avoiding harm flexible enough to encompass the need for order and differences between in-group and out-group?

(he goes on further to talk about conservative morality in turn and its inherent hypocrisies in a similar tone)

He's making abstract philosophical observations about personal and social moralities. His own "stance," as deceptively quoted above, is merely floated as a hypothetical example of how it interacts with his philosophical observations, and is in no way a firm statement of his actual beliefs and policies.

Okay, and what does he believe?

Watch the video I posted. I'm not going to put words in his mouth, and most of that video is specifically of Harris spelling out his views. The actual meat and potatoes starts around the 10:00 mark if you want to skip the Ben Affleck song and dance.

So if I say 'racist' when strictly I ought to say 'religious-persecutionist-who-shows-worrying-signs-of-thinking-of-the-targeted-religion-as-a-race-even-if-he-publicly-disavows-it,' I am an evil liar?

You're a disingenuous (or intellectually lazy) individual if you call someone a racist when he is explicitly referring to practitioners of a particular religious belief and not in any way, shape, or form referring to any ethnic background whatsoever. I mean, would you be objecting in this manner if the arguments were put forth against Christianity, or more loosely Christians? If Harris were transported back to 11th century Europe, would you object (on the grounds of racism) to him writing about "the worrying death-cult belief system of Christians"? Incidentally, Harris does write such material about Christians today, and does not receive accusations of racism over it. Is Harris also a "secret racist" against... uh, who practices Christianity again? Oh, right, lots of completely different people. How dare he talk about Christians that way, that dirty racist! He's racist against Christians!

Well, you have yet to satisfy me that Harris is receiving more defamation than he deserves. I know from bitter experience that there are racists and xenophobes and that there is no upper limit on how much contempt and hostility they can advocate against the Muslim world. Or how much ignorance of that world they can exhibit.

I don't know the first thing about Sam Harris. But my Bayesian prior for the proposition "Sam Harris talks like this because he's a xenophobe, not because he's misunderstood" is fairly high, because I know lots of other people who DO talk like this, and who do so because they ARE in fact xenophobes by any reasonable test I can devise.

Sure, there's anti-Muslim bigots. No question or doubt about it.

Isn't assuming that someone is an anti-Muslim bigot by default itself a form of bigotry? You have made no effort to actually understand what Harris is saying - even when I posted a video so that he can say in his own words what he believes - and you are going on with this ridiculous, pedantic argument about how someone has to go out of their way to specifically prove to you that they aren't a bigot. Which really just gets back to the original topic of this thread (or something related to it, at least) in pre-categorizing views or statements which one deems superficially too offensive to hear or understand on their own merits.

Did I miss the part where you presented those arguments in the thread? I mean, he may be a public figure but he's not one so famous I have much if any prior knowledge about him. The guy has NO reputation as far as I'm concerned, and you're trying to defend his reputation without saying anything other than the bare 'fact' that he's being quoted out of context.

But when you say "no, his views are not accurately represented by this pile of quotes of multi-sentence length, they were all cherrypicked and taken out of context!" I have to ask... what exactly IS the context? What was he saying, in at least some of these instances, that made it so easy to misrepresent him repeatedly?

It's fair enough to say that you haven't heard of him, or that you don't care about him or what he says. That's fine. But I am baffled by this opposition to the crux of my response to Darth Yan, which is "If you are going to disagree with someone, at least do them the courtesy of disagreeing with their actual views and not a ridiculous caricature constructed by malicious wiki editors." Who the fuck disagrees with the actual substance of that argument? Your entire objection can be boiled down to pedantic nitpicking of the details of my response, with the justification that you are utterly (by your own admission) ignorant of who Harris is or what he stands for... so why the hell are you interjecting if you don't care enough to actually understand Harris' arguments?

If you don't know or care what Harris says, then maybe you ought not stick your foot in every presentable orifice when the topic of What Harris Says comes up.

[Simon_Jester]

Fair enough; though again I stress my displeasure and reluctance in defending someone with whom I don't necessarily agree on every argument, and all I've been trying to do here is get people to agree or disagree with his actual positions and not these fabrications of a racist xenophobe strawman.

Thing is, if he's being quoted at paragraph length as saying repugnant things, maybe you should be revisiting the question of what his 'actual positions' really are. I mean sure, maybe all those quotes are out of context, but isn't it at least credible that he's said some nasty shit you weren't aware of?

I don't know which quotes one actually objects to (especially as many of the quotes aren't actually objectionable by themselves), and I'm certainly not going to go through all of them. Here is one of the listed quotes that seems "anti-liberal" when removed from context:

"When I search my heart, I discover that I want to keep the barbarians beyond the city walls just as much as my conservative neighbors do, and I recognize that sacrifices of my own freedom may be warranted for this purpose. I expect that epiphanies of this sort could well multiply in the coming years".

Just another closet neo-con ready to sell freedoms under the bus to stop them dirty jihadists, right? Well, no... [snip]

(he goes on further to talk about conservative morality in turn and its inherent hypocrisies in a similar tone)

He's making abstract philosophical observations about personal and social moralities. His own "stance," as deceptively quoted above, is merely floated as a hypothetical example of how it interacts with his philosophical observations, and is in no way a firm statement of his actual beliefs and policies.

Okay, see, that is a fairly good example of a quote being taken out of context. Do you know if RationalWiki accepts anonymous/non-member comments in its discussion pages? I might want to make a note of this.

Okay, and what does he believe?

Watch the video I posted. I'm not going to put words in his mouth, and most of that video is specifically of Harris spelling out his views. The actual meat and potatoes starts around the 10:00 mark if you want to skip the Ben Affleck song and dance.

I watched portions of it- my computer started locking up, as it often does with long Youtube videos. In any event, since to me Sam Harris is an extremely peripheral figure I'm not going to worry about it much; it sounds like he's only on anyone's radar because of a random Internet kerfluffle and it looks like he's doing a fairly good job of protecting his own reputation.

So if I say 'racist' when strictly I ought to say 'religious-persecutionist-who-shows-worrying-signs-of-thinking-of-the-targeted-religion-as-a-race-even-if-he-publicly-disavows-it,' I am an evil liar?

You're a disingenuous (or intellectually lazy) individual if you call someone a racist when he is explicitly referring to practitioners of a particular religious belief and not in any way, shape, or form referring to any ethnic background whatsoever...

I myself try rather hard not to, actually, but I do understand your meaning.

The problem is that it really is very common for racial and religious xenophobia to get tied up together, especially in a region where there are 'races' which have practiced a specific religion for many centuries. There are plenty of people out there who conflate stereotypes of Arabs/Persians/etc. and stereotypes of 'Muslims.' And for that matter, the Muslims themselves routinely express what in other parts of the world would be ethnic/nationalist issues in religious terms. Which is not surprising since at its heart, Islam is a code of laws for living in the world.

Where Judaism is essentially the origin-myth and legendary history of a single tribe of people, and where Christianity is a messianic faith whose aims are mainly spiritual at least in theory, Islam is in fact a religion with a lot of very specific things to say about how people ought to live, work, raise children, and build a civilization.

So it is hard to say where Muslims as a purely religious institution leave off, and where Muslims as a worldly institution and everyday culture begin. And once you accept that part of being 'Muslim' is to live in a certain kind of culture, given that race is a cultural construct and we routinely call any group of people who've lived under the same culture for more than a few generations a distinct 'race...'

You get people who think of 'Muslim' as a race.

This is a reality. Islam really does blur the lines between culture and religion, and as an indirect result it can also blur the line between race and religion.

I mean, would you be objecting in this manner if the arguments were put forth against Christianity, or more loosely Christians? If Harris were transported back to 11th century Europe, would you object (on the grounds of racism) to him writing about "the worrying death-cult belief system of Christians"? Incidentally, Harris does write such material about Christians today, and does not receive accusations of racism over it. Is Harris also a "secret racist" against... uh, who practices Christianity again? Oh, right, lots of completely different people. How dare he talk about Christians that way, that dirty racist! He's racist against Christians!

Thing is, it's easy to point to people who are now inhabitants of, or who are descended from, the people of medieval 'Christendom,' who are not themselves Christians. It's easy to tell the difference between, say, "Catholics" and "Spanish people."

400 years ago, it was not so easy- for all practical purposes, "Spanish people" were a subset of "Catholics" and were in many cases the more-Catholic-than-thou ultra-Catholic types. Such that people who criticized Catholicism routinely criticized Spain purely because they perceived it as a bastion of Catholicism. And people who engaged in racist condemnation of Spanish people routinely invoked their extreme Catholicism as one of their 'defects.'

So again, the lines can be blurry. Race in the sense of "white people and black people in the US" is distinct from religion, but race in the sense of "each nation has its own 'race,' unless it happens to share a 'race' with a few neighbors" is not so distinct.

Isn't assuming that someone is an anti-Muslim bigot by default itself a form of bigotry? You have made no effort to actually understand what Harris is saying - even when I posted a video so that he can say in his own words what he believes...

In between my last post and my current post I put a bit of effort into it. Let me simply observe that

Thing is, if someone presents me with what ought to be evidence (e.g. paragraph-length quotations), I tend to let it affect my estimate of the probability of statements like "Sam Harris is a xenophobe" or "Tom Cruise is secretly bisexual" or whatever.

As an example... If someone shows me a photograph of Tom Cruise kissing a man, I will mentally increase my estimate of the odds of "Tom Cruise is bi." If someone then claims the picture is photoshopped, I revise my estimate down a little. When someone presents evidence, then after I have tried to assimilate the evidence, I may revise my estimate all the way back down.

But I'm not going to apologize for being misled by what is in at least one or two cases cherrypicked evidence. Not when the evidence boils down to "waterboarding is the price we have to pay" or the like. I have a finite amount of time in my life, and while subsequent research may reveal that I was wrong, I still have to make decisions based on something. All I can do is keep a continuously open mind and re-evaluate my beliefs based on new information as it comes before my eyes.

...and you are going on with this ridiculous, pedantic argument about how someone has to go out of their way to specifically prove to you that they aren't a bigot. Which really just gets back to the original topic of this thread (or something related to it, at least) in pre-categorizing views or statements which one deems superficially too offensive to hear or understand on their own merits.

I am quite capable of listening to bigoted people, I just reserve the right to disagree with them even when they think they're being "fair and balanced."

I can't help it if other people with small brains do this automatic rejection thing you're talking about; I really can't. I don't favor it. But I refuse to stop criticizing people for acting in revolting ways, purely because they might become afraid to do things that are revolting to me.

It's fair enough to say that you haven't heard of him, or that you don't care about him or what he says. That's fine. But I am baffled by this opposition to the crux of my response to Darth Yan, which is "If you are going to disagree with someone, at least do them the courtesy of disagreeing with their actual views and not a ridiculous caricature constructed by malicious wiki editors." Who the fuck disagrees with the actual substance of that argument? Your entire objection can be boiled down to pedantic nitpicking of the details of my response, with the justification that you are utterly (by your own admission) ignorant of who Harris is or what he stands for... so why the hell are you interjecting if you don't care enough to actually understand Harris' arguments?

Honestly, no.

My objection was, initially, this:

You countered several paragraphs of Harris quotes with "those are all taken out of context!"

And my reaction was basically "well shit, they're a paragraph long each, how much context do you need? Can you supply this context? Can you explain this context?" Because it's not like I haven't heard people claim they were taken out of context as a way to get out of trouble for saying something vicious or stupid or obnoxious before...

For someone who writes at a college level, explaining the context is not a hard challenge to meet. For instance, having spent about five to ten minutes reading his explanations of his own views on torture, I can summarize the context of all his quotes on the subject as something like this...

"Look, it does not take much effort to devise a thought experiment in which torture seems so much less bad from a utilitarian perspective than the alternative resulting from refusing to torture. And indeed, I [that is, Harris] can make a case that some of these thought experiments are in fact realistic and are actually what is happening, such that torture becomes small potatoes by comparison to actually blowing up dozens of innocent people as 'collateral damage' in drone strikes, or other things that somehow fail to elicit our massive outrage."

Now, I have my reasons for disagreeing with that. But it's a bit frustrating that I have to dig this up when you were the one telling me that Harris was being taken out of context. If torture was one of the issues you felt he was being taken out of context on (and it may not have been, in fairness), you already knew why you felt that. You already had an explanation like the one I gave in the above paragraph stored in your brain.

So I called on you to present your own reason, at least in a sentence or two, rather than just stop at the assertion "he's being taken out of context" and expect everyone reading the thread to spend an hour or two on research projects to find out how.

[Darth Yan]

Another issue is that he expressed support for Robert Spencer and Bat Yeor. Spencer was caught on a Facebook page advocating genocide of turks and Bat Yeor has been a proponent of "eurabia". Any association with those two nutbags is a kill switch.

[Channel72]

Meh... the more I read here, the more I feel that Sam Harris has an extremely underdeveloped understanding of Islam and the Middle East.

I mean, take this quote, which I already commented on:

"Anyone who imagines that terrestrial concerns account for terrorism by Muslims must explain why there are no Palestinian Christian suicide bombers. They, too, suffer the ordeal of the Israeli occupation. Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers for that matter? The Tibetans have suffered an occupation far more brutal than any we or the Israelis have imposed on the Muslim world. The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom and jihad that directly inspire Muslim terrorism."

Yeah... good question, Sam. Where are all those Palestinian Christian suicide bombers? I guess the doctrine of Jihad in the Koran just inevitably leads to suicide bombing or something. At least, I guess that's Harris' conclusion here.

Here's another question: where are all the Shi'ite Muslim suicide bombers?

Did Harris ever think to ask that? I bet most Westerners never even noticed the glaring lack of Shi'ite suicide bombers. Well, to be fair, there are a few - they're just extremely rare. And yet, the Shia have been oppressed pretty badly in Iraq prior to 2003, and the Shi'ite militant group Hezbollah is constantly fighting against Israel, yet they almost never use this tactic. The few times they supposedly did (like in Beirut in the 80s), they never claimed responsibility and it's still not clear if Hezbollah actually committed all these attacks. To this day, Hezbollah leadership explicitly condemns the practice of suicide bombing.

So where are all the Shi'ite suicide bombers? Well, a few of them have popped up, like in the last few months, in Iraq, in retaliation against Sunni suicide bombers (who regularly use this tactic) - not against "Red Cross" workers or whatever, as Harris suggests is some kind of regular practice amongst all Muslims suicide bombers. Yet still, Shi'ite suicide bombers remain startling rare.

Why is that? It's because it turns out the connection between the Koranic doctrine of Jihad and suicide bombing is tenuous at best. Individual suicide bombers don't strap on the dynamite because they read the Koran and decided this was the best course of action - rather, they were convinced to do so by some Sunni Imam's interpretation of the call to Jihad. As it turns out, Shi'ite clerics, unlike Sunni Imans, rarely endorse suicide bombing as a valid form of Jihad. So how come so many Sunni Imams conclude that suicide bombing is a valid form of Jihad? Because unlike the Shi'ites, most high-profile Sunni imams are a product of the Saudi Madrassah generation - the generation that was educated in fundamentalist Saudi-funded Madrassahs that directly led to things like the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and ultimately things like Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Yet Harris addresses none of this, at least not that I've seen in these select quotes, or the various clips posted online here. I haven't read his books, so I don't know if he discusses these issues, but from what I see here, at least, his understanding of radical Islam is almost childish.

I mean, I agree it's more likely that something like the doctrine of Jihad in the Koran would result in the idea of suicide bombing than anything found in the New Testament - Harris is correct about that. But that doesn't mean there's some clear, obvious link between Jihad as defined in the Koran and suicide bombing. A very hardline, radical fundamentalist version of Islam, which just happens to have the backing of billions of dollars in oil revenue, is mostly responsible for this connection.

Try giving Fred Phelps 100 billion dollars in oil revenue, and see what it does to mainstream Christianity.

[Batman]

Thank you, Channel72! The main, no, practically the only difference between radical Islam and radical Christianity is radical Christianity doesn't have the resources. Islam is no more inherently violent than Christianity, we just managed to pull Christianity's teeth and make them (mostly) impotent (outside the US at any rate).

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Heh, argue against Sam Harris all you like. My only objection was against the rather virulent distortion of his overall views that's been going around the Internet for the past year or so, specifically Darth Yan's continued efforts to smear him by guilt by association.

For those interested, he and Maajid Nawaz articulated last night about a number of the things Simon and Channel are taking issue with. Darth Yan in particular, you need to watch it and stop worrying about who Harris allegedly "supported" one time on Facebook. (Hint: It's possible to agree with something someone says, and disagree with other things they say. I've agreed with Megyn Kelly... occasionally. It does not mean I agree with the vast bulk of Fox News' output.)

[Darth Yan]

Agreeing with someone like Bat Ye'or is a stretch though. Ayaan Hirsi Ali also called for muslims to be stripped of their rights, and lied about her backstory to gain asylum.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

This is what you are doing. Stop.

I assume you're referring to this, where Harris says,

I have written a fair amount about the threat that Islam poses to open societies, but I am happy to say that Breivik appears never to have heard of me. He has, however, digested the opinions of many writers who share my general concerns—Theodore Dalrymple, Robert D. Kaplan, Lee Harris, Ibn Warraq, Bernard Lewis, Andrew Bostom, Robert Spencer, Walid Shoebat, Daniel Pipes, Bat Ye’or, Mark Steyn, Samuel Huntington, et al. He even singles out my friend and colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali for special praise, repeatedly quoting a blogger who thinks she deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. With a friend like Breivik, one will never want for enemies.

All he's saying is that Breivik read a list of authors who wrote critically of Islam, which Harris also does. This does not mean Harris shares any other political views with those authors.

Likewise, just because he's a friend of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who, while a relatively hardline atheist, I have never seen demonstrate any truly objectionable view or behavior) does not in any way impact the validity or lack thereof of Harris' own views. My mother's side of my family are Rush Limbaugh-listening conservadrones... I also regularly eat dinner with them on good terms. Does that de-legitimize my more liberal views? Do I suddenly no longer support gay marriage just because my family doesn't?

What you are doing is ridiculous and it needs to stop. If you take issue with Sam Harris' views, you need to actually tackle Sam Harris' views. Look at his arguments (the Harvard video and the Rubin video I posted are both good starting points), figure out what, exactly, about them you disagree with, and then proceed from there.

[Darth Yan]

He said they "share my general concerns". That seems to imply he agrees on some level with their DA MOOSLUMS ARE TAKING OVER spiel. Bat Ye'or and Robert Spencer specifically advocate that the Muslims are going to take over Europe (as does Steyn). Saying they "share his concerns" when their concerns are essentially islam meets the protocols of zion implies that he buys into that twaddle. Channel72 and Batman already explained how Harris is full of garbage.