Seriously bro you could have just read the quote and saved yourself a ton of embarrassment. Like the second post in this tangent was me telling you that you needed to be defending race science and that you needed to check back with Harris HQ instead of freelancing, but it never even occurred to you that this isn't a creative writing prompt, this was a subject that several discussions happened and a few articles were written about.


I mean, we just learned you don't listen to the things he says. You have to understand that you vouching for him not being racist the rest of the time lost credibility when you vouched for him not being racist in l'Affair Murray despite being ENTIRELY IGNORANT OF WHAT HE OR MURRAY SAID.

That remains a strawman. You shouldn't have listened to the Murray one in the first place, he's always been a fraud.

Clovis didn't read the transcript I linked that he ****ing RESPONDED TO lol it's insane how easy it is to bait these morons into faceplanting.

I think there genuinely exists a cross section of people for whom the aggressive Christianity of the tea party truly is a turn off but nonetheless are down with endless bombing of the middle east, reduction of the welfare state to zero, etc. Right wing ideology is so well funded in this country that they can afford to support the political equivalent of Fresca, call it "new atheism" or whatever, and rope in a few extra people even though the majority would find it distasteful.

This is a very western-centric take. Tell this to a gay guy living in Iraq or Syria, a woman being stoned to death for being raped, or how about millions of women denied basic education.

Obviously terrorism is largely a boogeyman in the west but you simply can’t deny the suffering brought to the Middle East by Islamism.

But that's not my beef with Sam nor do I think it's anybody's beef.

The beef is when he applies that same thought regarding Islam to Muslims who grew up in the western world. Just because you're from Saudi Arabia doesn't mean you're looking forward to the next honor killing in small town America.

A lot of the things he says he pins as Sklansky-esque thought experiments so he can distance himself from the stupidity. He can go, "No, I don't believe [insert moronic thing here]. It was just a thought experiement for [insert stupid reason here]." For example, his stance on torture is that it should be banned but it just can be justified if torture would elicit information necessary to stop the imminent destruction of the human race. What kind of absurd take is that? When will that situation ever arise? That's like saying, "Rape should be banned. It's vile and horrible. But in the event that the only two surviving members of the human race are you and another fertile woman and propogating the human race is essential, then I think it's fine to break that moral code and rape her if she doesn't want to **** you." It's a situation that will never arise. It's completely and utterly pointless to even think about.

https://samharris.org/response-to-controversy/

Section on torture is at the bottom..brief excerpt below. Also discusses his position on Islam.

“But realism is not the point of these thought experiments. The point is that unless your argument rules out torture in idealized cases, you don’t have a categorical argument against torture. As nuclear and biological terrorism become increasingly possible, it is in everyone’s interest for men and women of goodwill to determine what should be done if a person appears to have operational knowledge of an imminent atrocity (and may even claim to possess such knowledge), but won’t otherwise talk about it.

My argument for the limited use of coercive interrogation (“torture” by another name) is essentially this: If you think it is ever justifiable to drop bombs in an attempt to kill a man like Osama bin Laden (and thereby risk killing and maiming innocent men, women, and children), you should think it may sometimes be justifiable to water-board a man like Osama bin Laden (and risk abusing someone who just happens to look like him). It seems to me that however one compares the practices of water-boarding high-level terrorists and dropping bombs, dropping bombs always comes out looking worse in ethical terms. And yet, most people tacitly accept the practice of modern warfare while considering it taboo to even speak about the possibility of practicing torture.“

It’s kind of hard to discuss SH positions honestly here when people take 1/2 sentence lines form long articles and misconstrue them.

Yay for false equivalences!

Oh this guy maybe wants to play. I'm very much into discussing Harris' positions honestly and at length.

dude, is believing Charles Murray is a racist a controversial belief, do you think, or one well supported by the facts?

Does Sam Harris share Clovis' belief that Murray is a racist(but perhaps thinks it's important to let racists participate in academic discussions about ranking the different races)?

It directly address the in theory problem you brought up.

I may have missed it but I’ve never heard him make this claim. I’ve heard him say what seems to me is the opposite. He is in favour of Muslim immigration and strongly supports moderate muslims trying to change the faith.

Two obvious objections to SH's argument

1) I'm not okay with dropping a bomb to kill a man like OBL if it puts innocent people at risk

2) If banning A and banning B are both justified in principle then it's still correct to ban A if you can't practicably ban B.

I'd also argue a jeopardy issue. If in some extreme case someone believes torture is justified then it needs to be so serious that they should be willing to break the law and face the danger of consequences. There should also be jeopardy in deciding to drop bombs that serves a similar role as making torture illegal.

He was mentioned much more in Unchained/pv7.

Holy ****! At first I was going to quote some of this for the lols, then my head started spinning, and now that I'm finished the article I'm simply dumbstruck. He talks and writes like the leader of a cult. What a narcissistic, misogynistic, transphobic, bloviating moron. Oh, he's also a charlatan and a lunatic, and a walking murder/suicide waiting to happen.

2) problem is that banning A(casualties of war) can only happen if we agree to ban all war. Which if we become pacifist, then evil dudes will take over resulting in more suffering.

Actually, I don't think the Tea Party was all that religious when you compare it to the evangelical movement of the 80's-90's. By and large it was much more concerned with racebaiting over Obama's birth certificate and BENGHAZIIIII than religion, although the Christian Right jumped on board because those people are the most credulous morons on the planet. Certainly the (((Koch))) brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party weren't all that interested in promoting Christian fundamentalism.

Really, the evangelical involvement with the Republican Party was an aberration, a trend that started in the late 70's, reached its peak in the mid-90s, and was on its way out when the New Atheists popped up. George W Bush was their swan song. If you look at the tastemakers in today's Republican party you see guys like Hannity, Laura Inghram, Dana Loesch, and etc. who are nominally Christian but almost never actually talk about Jesus. To say nothing of the alt-right guys like Milo who are positively sacrilegious. There's no Jerry Falwell or Ralph Reed anymore, no evangelical power-players in the movement. Glen Beck is the only one I can even think of and he's Mormon and a persona non grata. Maybe Mike Pence but he's really a back-bencher. It's a far cry from the Family Values party I remember as a kid.

Basically what we have now is a secular personality cult of Trumpism that occasionally throws a bone to religious right to keep them in the coalition. But they're also playing the other side by breaking bread with the irreligious alt-right.

You're not supposed to "(((" ")))" the Koch bros are you? They are not Jews.

I missed a lot of threads there. Especially in the horrendous pv7 era.

This is true, I think I confused them with Soros or something.

I still stand by the claim that they aren't Christian fundamentalists. From wiki:

They may well not be religious. Their father was a founding member of the John Birch Society and he built refineries for Hitler. They def aren't Jews.

I honestly don’t know enough about Murray to make that judgment not do I think it’s central to this debate. I’ll certainly grant that it’s suspect someone who devotes their time to studying race science, is on conservative think tanks, and advocates for social policy that is negative for certain races(Harris thinks there can be honest debate to be had in this realm; and he sides with Klein in regard to social policy, but won’t make the leap that this = racism)

Harris definitely did not think Murray was racist before he had him on his podcast. As mentioned before, it was because Murray was de-platformed, attacked, and his assistant suffered neck injury and still suffers from post concussion symptoms. While having no interest in this topic of race IQ, he sees the bigger problem of not being able to discuss ideas freely.

Harris is cognizant of who he gives a platform to and talks often about the dilemma of where to draw the line. He can have people with bad ideas on the podcast and challenge/expose them. The risk is that their message still gets out and he runs of risk of guilt through association.

why you would think IQ is a measure of inferiority. Klein didn’t have a comeback to SH point if he thinks he’s inferior to some other dude that is a genius and surely has a higher IQ. It’s Klein and others who load the dice by saying lower IQ means you are inferior and no one is saying whites are inferior to Asians.

Maybe it’s because they can read beteeen the lines and know Murray is full of **** and has poor intentions. SH would argue that this is a policy debate that can be argued separate from the science of it. The science itself doesn’t seem that controversial, in that there are certainly differences between races.

It’s part environmental and part genetics. Again, whatever that # is that genetics play a role in can be debated by scienctist or argued who cares, but there is a right answer to that question.

Gotta wait for ALL THE FACTS to come in before we decide if this race science guy might be a racist.



Yo maybe look up "controversial" in a dictionary and rethink this.

I mean, maybe, but, from Harris' mentor,

****ing Christ

https://reason.com/archives/2007/10/...the-west/print

For f*** sake, post the interview questions if you want to give context.

It's literally the thing we're debating. Also, how much time will you need? This **** is so ****ing transparent. Just say that you don't think he's racist because you share his belief that black people are stupid, man, we all know that's what you think, these ****ty dishonest dodges are insulting.

Klein and Harris do not agree on social policy. If they did, Harris would have disagreements with Murray. Instead, Harris was quite chummy with Murray but insanely emotional with Klein. Murray didn't hurt Harris' feelings by calling black people dumb, but Klein damn sure hurt his feelings by calling Harris dumb.

White supremacy seems like a slightly bigger problem in America 2018 than college students being mean to a racist, but like, this is the sort of **** that happens when you live in an intellectual bubble like Harris and you do. You think that if you come up with SOMETHING, ANYTHING in response everyone has to be like "oh well that settles it" rather than, you know, easily identifying that you're full of **** and dodging questions because the answers make you look bad. Like Harris' "I don't even care about race and IQ" is just a slightly less embarrassing version of the Clovis "lololol I trolled you" dodging of me in this thread. Because, uh, yeah you do. You evaluated race and IQ to determine your opinion of Murray, buddy, I can deduce your opinion on that subject. Harris just wants to keep the conversation on a subject he thinks he can "win" on. He still lost, because he's extremely stupid.

Who the **** has he ever challenged or exposed? He didn't even ****ing disagree with Murray!



"Ah, but I just said blacks were stupider than whites, I never said they were inferior. Also I think the welfare state should be curtailed for blacks" get the **** out of here

Why is this the first you've responded to me after I've repeatedly tried to engage you?

Regardless, if this makes me read a Reason Dot Com article and I find out the context is fine, I'm gonna be fuuuuuurious.