Were you all following the big fight yesterday? No, not the overhyped, overpaid sight of two rather repellent grown men pounding each other, but the one between Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky. I wouldn’t be surprised if you missed it, or tuned out after the first couple of blows, because they were grossly mismatched, and it was kind of a rout.
Here’s a round-by-round summary.
Round 1
Harris pleas for Chomsky to engage him, claiming that there are many misunderstandings between them; he is willing to clarify things privately, even though his many, many followers would like to see them find common ground.
Chomsky acknowledges that maybe there are misconceptions, and he’s willing to discuss them privately. But he doesn’t see any point in discussing them publicly.
Score: I’d have stored this round a tie, as a neutral opening, except that obviously Harris later decides to make their private discussion public. 0/1, Harris/Chomsky.
Round 2
Given the go-ahead, Harris opts not for discussion, but for a massive dump of a long excerpt from his book, The End of Faith, in which he argues against Chomsky, claiming America is not as bad as radical Muslims. Really, it’s huge. It’s got footnotes. I’d have called the fight on the grounds of a massive foul right there — he’s just walked out into the ring and shat on Chomsky’s shoes. Throwing a chapter of a book at someone is not an inviting way to bring on a discussion.
His main strategy, though, can be distilled down to the two quotes below: America can blow things up because we’re good at heart.
Take the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals plant: according to Chomsky, the atrocity of September 11 pales in comparison with that perpetrated by the Clinton administration in August 1998. But let us now ask some very basic questions that Chomsky seems to have neglected to ask himself: What did the U.S. government think it was doing when it sent cruise missiles into Sudan? Destroying a chemical weapons site used by Al Qaeda. Did the Clinton administration intend to bring about the deaths of thousands of Sudanese children? No. Was our goal to kill as many Sudanese as we could? No. Were we trying to kill anyone at all? Not unless we thought members of Al Qaeda would be at the Al-Shifa facility in the middle of the night. Asking these questions about Osama bin Laden and the nineteen hijackers puts us in a different moral universe entirely.
It was OK to blow up a pharmaceutical plant, because we didn’t intend to hurt anyone, as if we were completely unaware of the fact that a cruise missile loaded with high explosives might, you know, cause injury and death.
We are also forgiven because some Americans protest atrocities.
This is about as bad as human beings are capable of behaving. But what distinguishes us from many of our enemies is that this indiscriminate violence appalls us. The massacre at My Lai is remembered as a signature moment of shame for the American military. Even at the time, U.S. soldiers were dumbstruck with horror by the behavior of their comrades. One helicopter pilot who arrived on the scene ordered his subordinates to use their machine guns against their own troops if they would not stop killing villagers. As a culture, we have clearly outgrown our tolerance for the deliberate torture and murder of innocents. We would do well to realize that much of the world has not.
I note that dead children are OK as long as some people oppose the murders, if you’re American. The rest of the world…well, the existence of non-Americans who similarly decry murder and mayhem does not excuse their wickedness. It seems a little unfair.
Chomsky replies with a quote from himself. It’s only fair!
Or take the destruction of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, one little footnote in the record of state terror, quickly forgotten. What would the reaction have been if the bin Laden network had blown up half the pharmaceutical supplies in the U.S. and the facilities for replenishing them? We can imagine, though the comparison is unfair, the consequences are vastly more severe in Sudan. That aside, if the U.S. or Israel or England were to be the target of such an atrocity, what would the reaction be? In this case we say, “Oh, well, too bad, minor mistake, let’s go on to the next topic, let the victims rot.” Other people in the world don’t react like that. When bin Laden brings up that bombing, he strikes a resonant chord, even among those who despise and fear him; and the same, unfortunately, is true of much of the rest of his rhetoric.
Though it is merely a footnote, the Sudan case is nonetheless highly instructive. One interesting aspect is the reaction when someone dares to mention it. I have in the past, and did so again in response to queries from journalists shortly after 9-11 atrocities. I mentioned that the toll of the “horrendous crime” of 9-11, committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty” (quoting Robert Fisk), may be comparable to the consequences of Clinton’s bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in August 1998. That plausible conclusion elicited an extraordinary reaction, filling many web sites and journals with feverish and fanciful condemnations, which I’ll ignore. The only important aspect is that single sentence—which, on a closer look, appears to be an understatement—was regarded by some commentators as utterly scandalous. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that at some deep level, however they may deny it to themselves, they regard our crimes against the weak to be as normal as the air we breathe. Our crimes, for which we are responsible: as taxpayers, for failing to provide massive reparations, for granting refuge and immunity to the perpetrators, and for allowing the terrible facts to be sunk deep in the memory hole. All of this is of great significance, as it has been in the past.
I think he noticed Harris’s false equivalency. One can simultaneously condemn the terrorism of the 9/11 hijackers while also condemning violent retribution, that also kills innocent people.
And, by the way, pretending that the deaths in the Sudan were unintentional is absurdly disingenuous.
Most commentary on the Sudan bombing keeps to the question of whether the plant was believed to produce chemical weapons; true or false, that has no bearing on “the magnitude with which the aggression interfered with key values in the society attacked,” such as survival. Others point out that the killings were unintended, as are many of the atrocities we rightly denounce. In this case, we can hardly doubt that the likely human consequences were understood by US planners. The acts can be excused, then, only on the Hegelian assumption that Africans are “mere things,” whose lives have “no value,” an attitude that accords with practice in ways that are not overlooked among the victims, who may draw their own conclusions about the “moral orthodoxy of the West.”
Score: Harris is the author of a book on morality; to come out swinging with a ridiculous moral assertion, suggesting that massive civilian deaths can be forgiven if the cause is pure, is like punching yourself out. Chomsky possesses a moral clarity that Harris can only dream about. -1/1, Harris/Chomsky.
Round 3
Harris replies with evasions and a hypothetical. He’s flailing wildly! What is it with these guys who have to invent bizarre, impossible scenarios, like the ticking nuclear bomb that will kill millions if we don’t torture someone, or in this case a strange story of bombing pharmaceutical factories to protect the populace from harm.
1. Imagine that al-Qaeda is filled, not with God-intoxicated sociopaths intent upon creating a global caliphate, but genuine humanitarians. Based on their research, they believe that a deadly batch of vaccine has made it into the U.S. pharmaceutical supply. They have communicated their concerns to the FDA but were rebuffed. Acting rashly, with the intention of saving millions of lives, they unleash a computer virus, targeted to impede the release of this deadly vaccine. As it turns out, they are right about the vaccine but wrong about the consequences of their meddling—and they wind up destroying half the pharmaceuticals in the U.S.
What would I say? I would say that this was a very unfortunate event—but these are people we want on our team. I would find the FDA highly culpable for not having effectively communicated with them. These people are our friends, and we were all very unlucky.
2. al-Qaeda is precisely as terrible a group as it is, and it destroys our pharmaceuticals intentionally, for the purpose of harming millions of innocent people.
What would I say? We should imprison or kill these people at the first opportunity.
Sam, STOP PUNCHING YOURSELF!
Instead of al-Qaeda, try applying your moral calculus of intent to the US. Were we being purely altruistic (option #1), trying to clear out a bad batch of vaccine from that pharmaceutical factory? Would it be unfair for the citizens of the Sudan to judge us as guilty of #2? And isn’t it just stupidly dishonest to create this weird dichotomy of intent?
I’d also suggest that no, even if it were an ally that attacked us with intent #1, it would make no difference: American outrage would be high. We’d ask the obvious question: if you thought there was a bad batch of vaccines coming off the assembly line, why didn’t you just tell us — we’d be motivated to correct the problem ourselves.
When you complain about “God-intoxicated sociopaths”, you’ll have to excuse me for wondering if you aren’t talking about the US congress.
Chomsky refocuses everything: this isn’t a discussion about far-fetched hypothetical scenarios, it’s about real world morality. It’s also not an abstract exercise in contriving rationalizations — people are dying.
As for Clinton and associates being “genuine humanitarians,” perhaps that explains why they were imposing sanctions on Iraq so murderous that both of the highly respected international diplomats who administered the “Oil for food” program resigned in protest because they regarded them as “genocidal,” condemning Clinton for blocking testimony at the UN Security Council. Or why he poured arms into Turkey as it was carrying out a horrendous attack on its Kurdish population, one of the worst crimes of the ‘90s. Or why he shifted Turkey from leading recipient of arms worldwide (Israel-Egypt excepted) to Colombia, as soon as the Turkish atrocities achieved their goal and while Colombia was leading the hemisphere by far in atrocious human rights violations. Or why he authorized the Texaco Oil Company to provide oil to the murderous Haitian junta in violation of sanctions. And on, and on, as you could learn if you bothered to read before launching accusations and professing to talk about “ethics” and “morality.”
I’ve seen apologetics for atrocities before, but rarely at this level – not to speak of the refusal to withdraw false charges, a minor fault in comparison.
Score: It’s another own goal for Harris, stooping to depths of ludicrously sophomoric philosophical games. Chomsky is talking about reality. -1/1, Harris/Chomsky.
Round 4
Oh, jebus, Sam Harris:
Unfortunately, you are now misreading both my “silences” and my statements—and I cannot help but feel that the peremptory and censorious attitude you have brought to what could, in fact, be a perfectly collegial exchange, is partly to blame. You appear to have begun this dialogue at (or very near) the end of your patience. If we were to publish it, I would strongly urge you to edit what you have already written, removing unfriendly flourishes such as “as you know”, “the usual procedure in work intended to be serious,” “ludicrous and embarrassing,” “total refusal,” etc. I trust that certain of your acolytes would love to see the master in high dudgeon—believing, as you seem to, that you are in the process of mopping the floor with me—but the truth is that your emotions are getting the better of you. I’d rather you not look like the dog who caught the car.
IT’S A KNOCKOUT. THIS FIGHT IS OVER. WE HAVE ACHIEVED PEAK HARRIS.
No, really, that is pathetically petulant. Harris is making a tone argument: Chomsky is not being collegial enough, isn’t accepting his word games, is seeing right through his pretense. He seems to seriously believe he’s winning this debate — I’m worried that he’s suffering from a concussion, except that this seems to be Harris’s default mode. He also declared victory in his argument with Bruce Schneier.
While Harris is reeling in delusional fantasies, Chomsky walks up and stomps him some more. I guess this isn’t one of those genteel fights that get called when one opponent is shattered.
Your effort to respond to the question that you had avoided in your published article is, I’m afraid, indeed embarrassing and ludicrous. The question was about the al-Shifa bombing, and it won’t do to evade it by concocting an outlandish tale that has no relation whatsoever to that situation. So you are still evading that question. It takes no telepathy to perceive that.
So let’s face it directly. Clinton bombed al-Shifa in reaction to the Embassy bombings, having discovered no credible evidence in the brief interim of course, and knowing full well that there would be enormous casualties. Apologists may appeal to undetectable humanitarian intentions, but the fact is that the bombing was taken in exactly the way I described in the earlier publication which dealt the question of intentions in this case, the question that you claimed falsely that I ignored: to repeat, it just didn’t matter if lots of people are killed in a poor African country, just as we don’t care if we kill ants when we walk down the street. On moral grounds, that is arguably even worse than murder, which at least recognizes that the victim is human. That is exactly the situation. And we are left with your unwillingness to address the very clear question that opened the passage you cite is, instead offering evasions that are exactly as I described. And your unwillingness to address the crucial ethical question about intentions.
Score: We’re in Bambi vs. Godzilla territory here. There’s no point to scoring anything.
Round 5
Harris is lying on the mat, bleeding, whining about how cantankerous Chomsky is being.
Chomsky again reminds him that of course intent matters, but it’s not relevant here. He reminds Harris who is the master.
I do not, again, claim that Clinton intentionally wanted to kill the thousands of victims. Rather, that was probably of no concern, raising the very serious ethical question that I have discussed, again repeatedly in this correspondence. And again, I have often discussed the ethical question about the significance of real or professed intentions, for about 50 years in fact, discussing real cases, where there are possible and meaningful answers. Something clearly worth doing, since the real ethical issues are interesting and important ones.
Round 6
Oh, the humanity! Please let it end. Put Sam out of his misery. Harris complains again that Chomsky is being cantankerous
, and that he’d never be so unkind if they were face to face.
Here is my assumption about the al-Shifa case. I assume that Clinton believed that it was, in fact, a chemical weapons factory—because I see no rational reason for him to have intentionally destroyed a pharmaceutical plant in retaliation for the embassy bombings. I take it that you consider this assumption terribly naive. Why so?
Chomsky replies with reason — that stuff Harris claims to champion.
The bombing of al-Shifa was an immediate response to the Embassy bombings, which is why it is almost universally assumed to be retaliation. It is inconceivable that in that brief interim period evidence was found that it was a chemical weapons factory, and properly evaluated to justify a bombing. And of course no evidence was ever found. Plainly, if there had been evidence, the bombing would not have (just by accident) taken place immediately after the Embassy bombings (along with bombings in Afghanistan at the same time, also clearly retaliation).
Score: I may have to censure Chomsky for so brutally tearing apart a man when he’s down. What is this, Mortal Combat? Finish him!
Round 7
Harris: Chomsky is uncharitable
and prickly
! More whining about tone.
Then he repeats his claim that he can rank order the callousness and cruelty
, making al-Qaeda the king of evil, while a Clinton conscious of the deaths he would cause is less evil, and a Clinton who acted justly, but happened to kill a bunch of people accidentally, is less evil still.
It’s as if he hasn’t been paying attention.
Chomsky isn’t playing this game anymore.
To summarize, then, you issue instructions about moral issues that you have never even considered to people who have considered and discussed these issues for many decades, including the very case you cite. And when this is explained to you in detail, you have nothing to say except to repeat your initial stance.
Round 8
Harris announces his intent to take his ball and go home.
I’m sorry to say that I have now lost hope that we can communicate effectively in this medium. Rather than explore these issues with genuine interest and civility, you seem committed to litigating all points (both real and imagined) in the most plodding and accusatory way. And so, to my amazement, I find that the only conversation you and I are likely to ever have has grown too tedious to continue.
It’s all Chomsky’s fault that he got battered so badly!
So Chomsky tears him a new one. Again. I haven’t seen so much destruction since the last superhero movie I watched.
Very glad to see that we are terminating this interesting non-interchange with a large measure of agreement. I agree with you completely that we cannot have a rational discussion of these matters, and that it is too tedious to pretend otherwise. And I agree that I am litigating all points (all real, as far as we have so far determined) in a “plodding and accusatory way.” That is, of course, a necessity in responding to quite serious published accusations that are all demonstrably false, and as I have reviewed, false in a most interesting way: namely, you issue lectures condemning others for ignoring “basic questions” that they have discussed for years, in my case decades, whereas you have refused to address them and apparently do not even allow yourself to understand them. That’s impressive.
There’s also no other way to pursue your various evasions of the “basic question” that arises right at the outset of the passage of mine that you quoted. No need to run through this again, but the plodding review makes it clear that you simply refuse to answer the question, perhaps not surprisingly.
I’ll put aside your apologetics for the crimes for which you and I share responsibility, which, frankly, I find quite shocking, particularly on the part of someone who feels entitled to deliver moral lectures.
Round 9
It’s all over except for the slinking away. Harris asks to publish these emails, as if he thinks this has been a triumph for him; Chomsky agrees. So he does. But of course he has to throw in a bit of bragging.
You and I probably share a million readers who would have found a genuine conversation between us extremely useful. And I trust that they will be disappointed by our failure to produce one, as I am. However, if publishing this exchange helps anyone to better communicate about these topics in the future, our time won’t have been entirely wasted.
I am not a reader of Harris, which perhaps explains why I am not disappointed at all. Harris exhibited his usual woefully oblivious moral ineptitude, and Chomsky slapped him down hard.
I am most amazed by the fact that Harris then promoted this as a personal victory.
I am utterly gobsmacked that he can say this with apparent sincerity. Honestly, the irony should have struck him dead.
I still haven’t managed time to sit and read the whole thing, but what strikes me right there in the beginning is that Harris quite obviously was intending to post the exchange when he started it, he didn’t change his mind later. That’s why the long excerpts with footnotes- to make it look better when posted.
That’s not necessarily wrong, but it is disingenuous (even with the note for Chomsky to write as if they were going to publish).
I sent the link to a couple Harris fans yesterday.
*crickets*
Maybe I’ll send this summary as a friendly reminder.
re ROUND 6:
Note, there is a small, teeny tiny, flaw in that argument. The Clinton team could have been investigating that pharma as also being a source of chemical weapons, before that first attack occurred. When they wanted a retaliation target, whatever little evidence they had, they said “good enough, let’s bomb it”.
oops, there goes that, supposed “flaw”. My bad, I always give “slack” to wrongdoers. And secondly, try to defend, a little, the clear underdog (Harris).
As an anarchist-leaning socialist, my money was on Chomsky from the start. From my understanding, while theology plays a HUGE part in Islamic terrorism, there are other factors as well, like politics. Harris far too often ignores the nuances and paints with broad strokes.
With iron-trap reasoning like that, Sam Harris should be making arguments against same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court.
I read this exchange this morning and almost regurgitated milk from of my nose .. and I wasn’t even drinking milk. :—) Then I looked for a PZ Myers comment, and was not disappointed. Classic SH, from the cloying neediness to be taken seriously as an intellectual, to the moving of the goal posts with dubiously tangential “thought-experiments”, to the tone/civility gambit … all of his moves are there for everyone to see, including the losing of his ass conclusion. It was a little bit like watching a nature show framed in an intellectual battle. You know that the wounded springbok’s demise is inevitable … hmm, maybe it was more like a car crash. Not sure…
“Ha! Ha!” That is me pointing and laughing at Sam Harris. You would think that a super, thinky, thinker of the SPI (or whatever the nom-du-jour of the great white hypes would, actually, be able to think and reason. How, or how did Noam Chomsky not put in his responses a, “You dishonest fuck wit!?
Noam Chomsky would get tore up in the Thunderdome. Either that, or he would wade in and lay out some words in perfect Minnesota nice that would silence all other commentators?
Sam Harris’ moral compass reminds me less of a real compass and more of the one from Pirates of the Caribbean, pointing not to true north but rather to whatever his heart desires, in this case whatever conclusion paints him and the US as morally superior.
The ticking bomb scenario Harris likes so much is really absurd, and it says a lot about his “morality” that he keeps trotting it out.
A while ago someone tried to corner me with that consequentialist bullshit “If you had a chance to throw a guy off a bridge and save 10, by sacrificing one…” routine. My response was: “A) This is your scenario. Why don’t we imagine a scenario in which you’ve got no choice but to do something wrong and then I get to hop up and down about what a bad person you are? B) Depending on the circumstances, I could jump, after telling the guy that I refused to push him, and he should hunt you down for creating the situation, and beat the shit out of you for me C) I could try jumping next to the track and waving off the train. D) Hey let’s make a rope with our clothes real fast and when the train sees my naked butt hanging from a string of jeans it’ll stop…”
Those scenarios, in other words, are
carefullybadly constructed hypotheticals which amount to “Suppose I win the debate? Yes? OK! I WIN!”I find Sam Harris annoying, not because I disagree with him, but because I often do agree with his bottom line but he does such a horrible job advocating for it. There are good arguments for the positions he takes, but those are not the arguments he makes. He’s a crappy debater, he thinks everything is about him, and he seems more interested in self-aggrandizement than in intellectual conversation. I sometimes wonder if he’s a plant by leftist atheists to make moderate and conservative atheists look bad. Even when I agree with him, I want to tell him to STFU because of the bad job he does promoting his ideas.
Huge props for the “Bambi Vs Godzilla” reference, too.
I linked to that yesterday in Thunderdome. Apparently for Harris intent is really, really, really magic. If you did not intent to kill hundreds of thousands (merely accepted it as an inevitable consequence), and shed a few crocodile tears afterwards, it’s OK.
That somebody like Harris is considered a “world foremost thought leader” explains a lot about the state of the world….
Caine
Well, we outgrow it every day and every week. There’s a torture report and you outgrow your tolerance. Another black person is killed by the police, you outgrow your tolerance. Again, and again, and again. You just don’t stop the killing and torturing.
Thank you, funknjunk (at comment #7) for the descriptor “cloying neediness”–I couldn’t quite put my finger on what is (one of the things) so annoying about Harris, but that is perfect.
BTW, PZ, you know that this will result in another 100k words about your violent fantasies of beating SH into pulp. I think you enjoy this.
This pretty much tells me everything I need to know about the depth of Harris’s insight and his moral capacity. Unless someone is both a bigot and possesses the most shallow understanding of people, groups, politics, and religion, they have to be aware that al-Qaeda is filled, not with God-intoxicated sociopaths, but with people who genuinely believe their cause is just and who want to do their utmost to bring about a better world for everyone, but especially themselves and their loved ones. They are willing to see innocents more or less as dehumanised collateral damage. Hey. That sounds just like the people who bombed al-Shifa. Funny that.
I cannot think of any sensible comparison of Harris to Bambi other than Harris’s thinking and Bambi’s existence are both imaginary. And both got stomped, albeit I’ve got no idea if Godzilla likes being compared to Chomsky.
I’ve never understood Harris’s rise to gnu-atheist superstardom. I took The End of Faith back to Barnes & Noble for a refund the minute I read that bit suggesting there may be credible evidence for reincarnation. And IIRC, that was only like two chapters in.
I did a Google image search for Sam’s ‘moral compass’ but all it returned were pictures of dowsing rods.
This is the same Noam Chomsky who denies aspects of the Holocaust, right? What a role model.
I also think Sam may have been better off leaving this exchange unpublished. He comes off rather defensive. However, I’m going to take issue with some of your analysis, PZ.
There is a theory in ethical philosophy, that actually has a lot of support in the field, called the doctrine of double effect. It may be that intentions matter quite a bit, even when innocent deaths are a foreseen but unintended consequence of an action. Given that professional ethicists wouldn’t all agree (not even many of them, I suppose) that Sam’s assertion is morally ridiculous, I’m not going to let your statement to that effect go unchecked.
Scenarios like this are common practice in philosophy in order to get at bedrock moral principles. I took an entire course in medical ethics where we parsed through quite bizarre stories that would never happen so that basic ideas of what was right and wrong could be drawn out. I think one of Sam’s biggest weaknesses is that he assumes we all think like philosophers. We are not, and so this type of reasoning strikes some people (yourself included) as strange, but it really isn’t amongst people who talk about ethics for a living.
Overall though, your analysis is pretty spot on.
I saw this last night, and it was a microcosm of why I’m glad I never bothered reading Harris (and why I’m sad I bought two of his books nonetheless). The strawmanning in his cited chapter was bad enough, but then Chomsky shows that Harris didn’t even bother to research Chomsky’s position beyond one source? Or the delicious moment when Harris realizes/admits his beef with Chomsky is about something Chomsky said about Hitchens? For someone with such a reputation as a serious academic, Harris doesn’t seem to care much about thorough or accurate research.
It’s telling that when the facts aren’t going Harris’s way, he resorts to absurd counterfactual hypotheticals, like this scenario, like his ticking time bomb torture defense, like his defense of profiling. It doesn’t matter that these things don’t work, don’t bear any but the most cursory resemblance to reality (and are widely contradicted by reality), it matters that they prove his point in some abstract, useless sense.
It’s telling that Harris is willing to bend over backwards to assume the best intentions of American leaders when they commit atrocities, and to recognize that American society is not a monolithic single-minded hegemony but a coalition of individuals with different opinions, but will not extend the same courtesy to Muslims. Harris decides ahead of time which group is the “good guys” and which group is the “bad guys,” and all interpretations of their actions from that point are filtered through that assumption.
It’s especially telling that a guy who wrote a goddamn book on morality cannot seem to even comprehend Chomsky’s argument that the moral distinction between killing with murderous intent and killing with total indifference doesn’t make the latter the superior option.
And what never even comes up, what really demolishes Harris’s argument, is that he’s pitted the very worst thing al-Qaeda has ever done to the US, 9/11, against just one of a litany of atrocities carried out by the US against the Middle East over the last several decades. It’s not that Harris isn’t arguing on Chomsky’s level, it’s that Chomsky is arguing on an entirely different spatial dimension.
Ugh. I liked Harris’ first book but it seems pretty clear now that he is as ideologically blinded as any religious fanatic. And the strongest MORAL argument in favour of science is precisely that good people can avoid unintended consequence; but by placing intent above consequence Harris flushes this down the toilet. Harris is seems no better than a secular version of a priest, arrogating decision on what is moral for the rest of us.
@Marcus Ranum #10
I think that consequentialist morality is the only morality that makes sense from rational perspective. I am at a loss to imagine any other usefull moral framework than along the lines in order for an action to be moral it should maximise well being with minimal possible harm and any action should be re-evaluated in light of any new evidence. I am also of the opinion that hypotheticals as the one you so heartily dislike are usefull at identifying internal biases, unproven assumptions and making people generall think about what they take for granted. World is not black/white, it is not even only shades of grey, but providing black or white as a contrast to the real color of the world around us is sometimes usefull in assessing that colour and its perception and/or prepare for unexpected.
The problem is of course, when hypotheticals are used as red herrings thrown in the debate to distract from the real – world problem being currently discussed, just as Harris did in this piece (it is again jarring to see someone as prominent to commit a textbook logical fallacy). Is this what you object to, or do you really deem hypotheticals – and discussions about them – as completely useless? I would appreciate if you could expand on your thoughts about this.
I did not read Harris’s “Moral Landscape” but the metaphore as he presented it in talks illustrates consequentialist morals beautifully to my mind. However from what I read about/from him in last few years (including this blog post) he seems somewhat confused and inconsistent in his reasoning. With Chomsky he was punching way, way above his weight and he should reconsider. When an expert and experienced philsosopher tells you your reasoning is flawed, the odds are not that he is mistaken, but that you are manifesting Dunning-Krueger effect. The sad thing about D-K is however, that most people are blind to their own incompetence and are unable to recognize it without tutoring. And tutoring seems to be actively avoided by the like of Harris (and Dawkins, and some more), because they are surrounded by sycopaths that reinforce their illusion on universal competence even on topics where they lack it in spades. Harris seems further blinded by his exacerbated and irrational fear of the boogeyman called “islam”.
@deadguykai #20:
A) [citation needed]
B) No, seriously, I searched, and the best I’ve been able to find are “Chomsky once defended a Holocaust denier’s right to free speech” and this interview, which is anything but Holocaust denial.
C) Thank you for being so economical by including an ad hominem fallacy and a straw man (who said Chomsky was a role model?) in the span of seventeen words. Bravo.
Marcus Ranum:
Ah, the ubiquitous trolley problem. I loathe it, and always have. I’m more of a re-program the kyobashi maru scenario sort of person. At any rate, such problems are fucking pointless, as not one single person knows what they would do in any given situation until they are in said situation. All we know is what we like to think we’d do.
@Tom Foss #25
I would also add red herring to the list of fallacies commited in that one sentence, since Holocaust and its denial are mentioned nowhere in the OP and it seems to be dropped in only to derail the discussion (I did not read the original debate for lack of time – if it is there it might be tangentially relevant).
deadguykai
Now sure you have evidence for this, right?
Beyond the fact that he defended French Holocaust denialists against prosecution on accounts of “free speech” while noting at the same time that he thinks their position is bullshit, right?
You understand that the USA as a country agrees with Chomsky on this, while France, Germany and I disagree with him?
But Kudos for an honest attempt at a real ad hominem!
lemurcatta
That’s the ethical position that lets catholic clinics bleed women with ectopic pregnancies half to dead before they lift a finger.
That’s why Chomsky wins and Harris is a wanker: One of them cares about actual people who actually suffer and who actually die while the other is interested in some obscure and abstract principles. If philosophers could at least not get in the way of those of us who want to make the world a better place I’d be much obliged.
As I recall, after Clinton ordered the cruise missile attack on Sudan’s one and only pharmaceutical plant, stories came out that the CIA had found “chemical precursors” to chemweapons in dirt picked up around the edge of the factory.
It soon after emerged that such chemicals are also found in regular pesticides, something any competent forensic chemist should have known. Chomsky no doubt read the same accounts or better ones, so I worry a bit here that his (typically amazing) memory may be letting him down here in claiming “no evidence” when “flimsy evidence” seems more accurate.
At the time, I wondered whether Clinton was yet again letting himself be led around by the nose by the neo-cons, or allowing that perception as a fig leaf while showing off his “toughness” to the rubes. Maybe he was just punishing the Sudanese for not being sufficiently organic.
Did anyone ever produce a realistic tally of how many people died due to the destruction of al-Shifa?
lemurcatta @21
Double effect is also known as the end justifies the means. I cannot see ethicists supporting this theory although I can see Sam Harris liking it.
Chomsky did do his best to try and refute the Combodian genocide though. I suppose it may have looked to him like a good idea back then but makes him look like a bit of a jackass now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial
I.E.:
(1) = murder
(2) = manslaughter
Exactly! Just because the punishment for (2) is less than that for (1), does NOT make (2) a “moral” action. That concept appears to have flown over Harris’ head. Even comparatively, it is totally wrong to consider (2) to be more moral than (1). Just because something is “Worse”, doesn’t make the lesser “Better”.
Geez, you’d think someone like Harris, who has been arguing religion and politics in public for over a decade now, would have thicker skin. Or maybe being in the public sphere is the problem. He was so used to getting hate mail from semi-literate fundamentalists that he was unprepared for a serious debate with an intellectual giant like Chomsky. Other explanations for his awful performance are welcome.
Was Chomsky’s tone harsh? Yes, but in his mind Harris published incorrect assertions about him in print and is apologizing for atrocities of his government. Even if the tone was unjustified, Harris shouldn’t have let it affect him like it did. Instead of discussing these serious moral issues he whined about tone and offered his bizarre, preposterous scenario.
Look, thought experiments can be useful in debates about morality. They can abstract away the irrelevant details and let you focus on the real issues. However, as Harris demonstrates here, they can also be abused. Harris’ Gedankenexperiment is so ridiculous and irrelevant that it confuses more than clarifies. Chomsky was right to be dismissive of it.
Disappointed in the debating performance of someone “who feels entitled to deliver moral lectures”.
Noam Chomsky is not the perfect god-like human, so telling us all that he got some things wrong on other issues is a) unsurprising, and b) irrelevant.
I know, it was in response to whoever brought up the holocaust and the replies that followed, I think they got their genocides mixed up.
Regarding the moronic “hurl a guy in front of a train to save some other guys” scenario, I’ve found that one of the best rebuttals is along the lines of “if you’re so intent on taking a moral high-ground, why aren’t you hurling yourself in front of the train instead of sacrificing someone else?”
@slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) #32:
Even that doesn’t really get at what Chomsky was saying, because “manslaughter” still acknowledges that actual human beings were killed. Chomsky, I think largely aptly, compares American actions abroad to someone stepping on ants as they walk down the road, neither knowing nor caring that things have been harmed by their presence, because those things are so far beneath them that they don’t merit notice. I keep being reminded of a quote from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, They kill us for their sport,” except even then, there’s an intent involved in the killing that is absent in (Chomsky’s characterization of) the Al-Shifa bombing. It’s not the difference between murder and manslaughter so much as the difference between murder and pest extermination or habitat destruction. The point Chomsky’s making is that we’re not even perceiving the victims as fully human.
Tom Foss,
Yeah, that was fuckin’ hilarious.
If only we could find the distinction between the two types of deadness.
microraptor:
I seem to recall that in the trolley problem (or at least one version of it), the man on the bridge is a fat man, the reasoning being that he alone had sufficient weight to stop the trolley. I’ve often wondered, in a dire situation, which people would take the time to stop and perform all these necessary calculations prior to acting, and naturally, would have plenty of time to avert the trolley by murdering the man on the bridge after doing said calculations. Of course, there not being a man on the bridge never comes up, nor does a scenario positing a skinny man on the bridge. I really, really, hate these idiotic scenarios.
I am blown away that Sam Harris thought it was a good idea to debate Noam Chomsky.
That’s like lowering yourself into an infested intellectual shark tank completely naked. You are not gonna make it. What the hell were you thinking?
Excuse me while I purchase several copies of everything Noam Chomsky has ever written. I’ll use The Moral Landscape as the coaster underneath the coffee that I sip while I read them.
Sam Harris taking on Noam Chomsky is like Vanilla Ice challenging Rakim to a rap battle. Just… just don’t, Sam. Just don’t.
Ah, the ubiquitous trolley problem. I loathe it, and always have. I’m more of a re-program the kyobashi maru scenario sort of person.
The trolley problem was an interesting tool used (briefly) as a way of determining whether people* seemed to have commonly-shared responses to certain problems. That’s all it was; it wasn’t ever intended to become a wanking-rag for armchair moralists. Unfortunately, some of those moralists mainstreamed the trolley problem as a clever “gotcha” tool for argument.
You’re absolutely correct – nobody knows what they’d do until they were actually in the situation. To me, what’s ridiculous about those thought experiments is that it’s trivially easy to start rattling off perfectly reasonable alternatives ad infinitum. What the trolley experiment, ticking bomb scenarios, and whatnot do, is present a sort of false dichotomy: you only have two choices. I.e.: you have to torture the guy or let the baby die. But – as Chomsky keeps trying to point out to Harris – there are always other options. Leadership, problem-solving, initiative – whatever you want to call it – is the art of coming up with other options. Usually that means negotiating.
The reason I am so contemptuous of Harris’ playing that shit is because we’ve been seeing a lot lately about what happens when police take that dichotomous approach. You either submit, or you get shot. There is no 3rd option involving radios, more cops, a chance to sit down and talk things over…** So there’s a crucial question that gets embedded into the introductory logic of the situation, namely that the only choice was to do nothing, or blow up the drug plant. If you think for 5 minutes you can come up with loads of other choices, none of which involve killing anyone.***
(* Since this was social ‘science’, “people” means “a self-selected sample of college undergrads”)
(** Unless the suspect is white)
(*** At the time of that incident I used to occasionally hang out with a guy who worked for a three-letter agency, who claimed – with a straight face – that the reason for the attack on the pharma plant was because there was an underground secret military command/control system below the floor of the plant No kidding. Remember Al Quaeda’s palatial forts in Tora Bora? The same asshole probably was the guy who wrote that report to the NSC)
slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) @32
While there is a difference between murder and manslaughter, the victim is still dead.
@razzlefrog – Excuse me while I purchase several copies of everything Noam Chomsky has ever written
If you want a better understanding of how Chomsky sees the world, I suggest you start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ccNt4Dzyfg
As Chomsky tries to point out to Harris, he’s been saying more or less the same thing for 50+ years. It’s one reason he sometimes sounds a bit frustrated.
I like P.Z., and I like Sam. I am floored by how utterly P.Z. misrepresents Harris here. It’s disingenuous. It starts right in round 2, where P.Z. says Sam chooses to start with a dump from his book. Err… No. Chomsky said that all he knew of Sam was things people had sent him that Sam said about him. So Sam replies by offering the only thing he ever wrote about Chomsky, apologizing for the tone of it, and asking that Chomsky clear up misconceptions in it. A very reasonable thing to do.
It gets worse from there. P.Z.’s loathing of Sam Harris colors the whole thing. A wholly biased reading of the exchange.
I seem to recall that in the trolley problem (or at least one version of it), the man on the bridge is a fat man, the reasoning being that he alone had sufficient weight to stop the trolley.
Yeah, anyone who’s ever seen what rolling stock does when it hits a truck is going to really expect a human of any size to slow down a trolley. If you threw a whole passle of social scientists down, it wouldn’t even slow a trolley. Perhaps that’s why they reference a “fat guy” – it’s because they know they’re lightweights?
People like Harris seem to always share the same failing when it comes to analysing the woeful ‘war on terror’ – they assume that it must be possible to render this situation down into the plot line of a Saturday morning cartoon; good guys versus bad guys, with team truth, justice and the American way obviously being the good guys. And not just good, but so utterly, inarguably morally superior that the other side simply have to be the very definition of mindless evil that has no motivation or justification for their actions beyond carnage for its own sake, and anyone who contests that must be villainous in their own right. The truth never factors into their worldview at all – that there simply are no shining paragons of righteousness in this conflict; all sides have commited atrocities. The fact that Al Qaeda and its repugnant fellow travellers are murderous, xenophobic fanatics in no way implies that the US and its coalition partners are somehow automatically beyond ethical reproach.
The unpalateable truth is that both sides have used terrorist tactics in this misbegotten war; the fact that the US and its allies use drone strikes rather than flying planes into buildings and employing suicide bomb belts does nothing to alter the fact that we have employed terror tactics in a fashion and in situations where we knew civilian casualties would be inevitable. As Chomsky notes, we are taxpayers in a democratic system of government, and as such each and every one of us bears some measure of responsibility for the actions of our government.
Until we learn to deal with that reality, meaningful debate and a final, peacable settlement are never going to be acheiveable.
I think people are reading this all wrong. Yes, Chomsky eviscerated Harris. But let’s propose a thought experiment: imagine Harris had the intelligence that Chomsky does. Now, would Harris intellectually crush his opponent like Chomsky? No, Harris would show restraint, so he clearly has the moral high ground here.
Doug Sinclair @ 47;
No, it isn’t. It’s spot fucking on. Harris is a self-reverential gasbag who contorts what little thinking ability he has to always defend the most horrible of human behaviours.
Personally, I was taken aback by his mention of the My Lai massacre. I was around for that, and I remember it well. I remember peoples’ shock, I remember the outrage, I remember the outpouring of scorn and hate towards Calley. Harris points to this as a point where Americans stopped accepting violence towards innocents. He could not possibly be more wrong. Going back to 1968 for a moment, yes, there was outrage, but there was no effective justice, and My Lai was certainly not an isolated incident. The prevailing attitude in the States in 1968 has zero resemblance to the prevailing attitudes we see now, or the attitudes from the turn of the century.
America is an incredibly bloodthirsty country, with a fucktonne of arrogance wrapped around it. We live in and see violence every single fucking day, and there are always shoals of Americans happy to defend it – look at the current epidemic of killer cops, and you will find way too many Americans defending them. You will find way too many Americans defending war, no matter how many are slaughtered. Sam Harris holds up this banner of violence and bloodthirstiness with pride, and goes to any length to justify loathsome actions.
@37 wrote (referencing my @32):
True, my poor example, was extrapolation from the Baltimore police response to the indictment of the 6 responsible for that death. The not unexpected response was “It was NOT murder!!! (stop calling it “murder”) The cops, while they did make a mistake, had no murderous intent, so stop saying they murdered him, They killed him. Not murder.”
I negligently omitted that reference in my lame metaphor. sorry
Al Dente @45 expressed my point more succinctly.
vytautasjanaauskas@31, it’s not fair to say he tried his best to refute it. What he did do is criticizing the difference in how the US media treated this genocide and the genocide in East Timor, which was committed by an ally of the US.
Note that the neutral status of the Chomsky section in the Wikipedia article you linked has been debated on the talk page, and the consensus is that it is not neutral. Here’s another article explaining how it’s more complicated and way less clear-cut than what you’re suggesting.
Finally, just wanted to add that calling Chomsky a Holocaust denier and/or a denier of the Cambodia genocide (and also a conspiracy theorist) is apparently a classic tactic used by those who find what he says inconvenient.
Chomsky is not a very good Cambodian genocide denier seeing as he how he admitted he was wrong as more evidence became available.
Doug Sinclair ,
Have you tried reading the exchange between Harris and Chomsky?
Harris keeps deflecting direct questions, while pretending Chomsky’s direct and clear answers to Harris’ questions were somehow confusing, all that while tone-trolling the guy.
Ah yes, the My Lai Massacre, an event which was found so horrendous by the US populace and US army several soldiers where afterwards shunned and called traitors even by several congressmen. O wait, those were the soldiers trying to prevent the massacre.
Well, at least the guilty (well, one person apparently) where eventually convicted and spent a whopping 3,5 years under house arrest for it.
See! The US is much more moral than those dirtier, poorer countries! All hail the US of A and all hail Harris!
Hoosier X
What? You mean Chomsky changed his mind because of new evidence? Clearly, Chomsky is not a True Intellectual like Harris.
Yes, Beatrice, I read it. I see Harris genuinely asking for Chomsky to show him how he’s wrong, and Chomsky being relentlessly dismissive, hostile, and condescending. I’m not saying he’s necessarily wrong (and nor, for that matter, is Harris saying he is), but Chomsky is behaving like an ass, and Harris seems genuinely discouraged by it.
I tried reading the entire thing, but I came to this section of the stupidity of Harris and I just refuse to ruin a perfectly lovely afternoon by reading any more of his asinine and horribly violent “philosophy”.
Yup, he considers himself a great thinker but his only thoughts on how to resolve international conflicts are to blame the imperfect weapons killing the wrong people, rather than recognize that the USA’s habit of routinely and callously killing other people and interfering in other governments is the real issue under discussion. Chomsky is clearly far to advanced for the violence besotted Harris. Maybe we could get him a copy of The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss so he can learn some basic principals of ethics and morality?
Doug Sinclair,
Oh, fuck off Harris fanboy, Harris apparently thinks the My Lai massacre shows the moral superiority of the US. He lost the debate before it was started. The only thing he and you can bring to the table are tone trolling and dishonest wanking.
Chomsky went through all this with Hitchens years ago. And many others. Exactly the same old stuff.
By the way, I remember a terrible article slating Chomsky on Ophelia’s old Butterflies and Wheels site, written by someone else (not Ophelia). It was utter shit and I couldn’t believe it was on that site. I’m in the comments calling the author an idiot.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/chomsky-bin-laden-and-the-struggle-for-a-shining-future/
Doug Sinclair
Totally missrepresenting Harris by quoting him
+++
Hey, I’m fat, too! I can jump myself! Clearly the moral thing to do is kill all the fat people!
Maybe the trolley problem is really a good scenario for evaluating the underlying assumptions of the people who created it about fat pople.
++++
Gregory Greenwood @49
Moustache twirling Cartoon villain. Below that treshold, nothing really bad happens. Seriously, it doesn’t matter if US drones regularly murder grannies who are picking veggies as long as they are not murdered for being grannies who are picking veggies.
Thank you, Zenlike. Very civil. Exactly what we saw from Chomsky.
I finally finished reading the emails. The whole conversation reads almost like a scenario envisioned by Harris and partly played out by an unwilling, unaware Chomsky. That’s why some parts read a bit like non-sequiturs : Harris knew what he wanted from that conversation, and he would do anything to get it.
DISCLAIMER: I have no intention to put words in Chomsky’s mouth. It was a long read that got a bit tedious thanks to Harris’ unwillingness to stop pretending he’s stupid for 5 minutes and actually give a serious response. I had to amuse myself.
.. so anyway, I envision Chomsky as going through the debate a bit like this:
Oh look, someone wants to debate me. *sigh*
[drawn in by so much bullshit in so many words]
[explains patiently]
Is this dude serious? Stop lying about me.
[SIWOTI kicks in like a really bad case flu]
What a joke.
I’m going to repeat my question in case you respond out of sheer annoyance at the repetition.
This is getting really weird. Can’t tell if stupid or just an asshole.
Definitely an asshole.
A very strange asshole. Fine, whatever. Moon people if you want to , I don’t care. It’s your own stupid ass on show.
Doug Sinclair
Tonetrolling is all you’ve got. Else you would address the actual point I was making.
Even assuming a human being who was actually obese enough to be able to function as a viable stop for a moving trolley with enough momentum to threaten the lives of the ten other people, there’s no way you’d have the strength to push such a person into the path of the trolley. By necessity, he would have to be outrageously heavy.
Thought experiments can be useful, but only if they maintain a connection to reality. If the scenario relies on, essentially, magic, then what does the answer tell us about how we should act in the real world?
Seriously, tone trolling Chomsky?
Doug Sinclair
Emphasis mine.
Harris starts the whole fucking thing advising Prof. Noam Chomsky, who is, apart from somebody who writes about ethics, probably THE most influential linguist of our times, likely the most influential linguist since fucking de Saussure, to write like this was going to be published, coming off like a tutor who’S advising a college freshman and you call Chomsky condescending?
Just for the record: It’s Harris who desperately wanted some of Chomsky’s time. It’s Harris who bombards Chomsky with delirious thought experiments and avoids the actual question raised.
Doug Sinclair @ 63:
Goodness me, I was the first person to respond to you, Doug Sinclair, and I didn’t even receive an irrelevant tone troll scold for my use of the word fuck. I wouldn’t expect you to address my points about the My Lai massacre or Harris’s idiotic view of it, as that seems to be a bit beyond you. However, if you’re going to tone troll correctly, you should chide every person who responds to you, especially those of us who have no difficulty with those naughty words.
@61
It was written by Andrzej Koraszewski, who seems to be an anti-Muslim writer and a hard-line Zionist.
Interestingly the translation was by Małgorzata Koraszewska, a friend of Jerry Coyne who regularly comments on his website defending IDF atrocities.
Bad mistake.
I, at least, don’t loathe Sam Harris.
He is just an idiot. Dumb.
I would though stay far away from him. He is so clumsy and mentally fogged up that he could accidently kill someone.
In his murky world that would be OK. After all, he wouldn’t and didn’t deliberately kill anyone. However, my cats would still be orphans and I would still be…dead.
LykeX @ 66:
Allow me to bat me eyelashes at you, Sir. The very first time I was ever presented with the idiotic trolley problem, that was my first response – “if this person is so heavy, how the hell would I get them off the bridge?” The presenter wouldn’t answer seriously, but I couldn’t let it go. I weigh 109 lbs – my ability to murder someone by shoving them over the siding of a bridge would be rather limited, to say the least, whereas I don’t imagine it would be all that difficult for a large person to toss my sorry ass over.
Giliell,
Harris strikes me in that exchange very much like a student trying to get a famous professor to have a “serious debate” with him, so that Harris could put it on his resume and brag to his friends.
Caine, while what I will say is a bit simplistic, one’s reaction to the Massacre at My Lai (and the many other destructions of civilian settlements) depended on one’s view of the Vietnam War. Those who supported it think that the dead deserved what they got and were not bothered by the attempted cover up. (Of which, Colin Powell played a small part.) Those opposed saw the massacre as typical of an aggressive imperial power.
The fact that Sam Harris tries to paint the US military reaction to My Mai as shame is ludicrous. Th only shame that was felt was that it became news and the people who were already against the war pointed at it as proof of what they have been saying along. The US military was shamed that they got caught. (Why do you think that since the Vietnam War, the use of “embedded” journalists has expanded?)
You know, looking at the source I found Harris’s writing rather enlightening as a negative example. The examples in his own article silhouette (then utterly fail to notice) the fundamental concept of responsibility. As an example, a paragraph so absurd I am surprised it was not posted in PZ’s article:
First of all, there ARE cases in which auto manufacturers or ski slope developers are rightly condemned for deaths: they have responsibilities to take reasonable safety precautions, and if they neglect these responsibilities to a great degree (such as if they knowingly install extremely faulty breaks in cars) and many people die as a result that is indeed an atrocity. Getting back to the missiles, the same principle applies; when you are wielding that much power you have a vastly greater responsibility to take into account the evidence and potential consequences.
Also, his equivalence of collateral damage to accidents is false. While you might not anticipate most individual occurrences, the fact that it will result from any major military action as a matter of probability is entirely predictable.
As another side note, there is something nauseating about an entity that does something terrible, claims to outgrow it, repeats the process again and again and again, and then claims this as evidence FOR being morally superior. The whole thing is giving me the impression that America is the world’s abusive spouse.
1. A million dead Vietnamese want to know why they are, in fact, dead.
This isn’t ancient history. I grew up during the Vietnam war, knew people killed over there, and spent years protesting the war.
2. This is why I got halfway through Harris’s book, The End of Faith and gave up. I could tell I was wasting a whole hour of my one and only life.
He spends a lot of time Moslem terrorist bashing. It’s not wrong. But it isn’t our main problem. We have our own version of Moslem fundies, the fundie xians. And they are right here in the USA, not an ocean and a continent away.
Wow. Just, wow.
Folks, I am a great Chomsky admirer. I don’t always agree with him, but I am an admirer. I am also a great admirer of Harris. Again, I don’t always think he’s right. I am not a “fanboy” of either man.
I have a completely different reading of this exchange than P.Z., and than most of you seem to. I don’t see Harris “advising” Chomsky from the start; I see him explaining the plans he has for this exchange, and suggesting how Chomsky might want to approach it accordingly. As far as I’m concerned, it’s only a bias against Harris that would allow anyone to see it any differently. I have no particular bias either way in the discussion between these two guys, and I just see Chomsky being a dick. Again, he’s not *wrong*. He’s just being an ass to someone for no discernible reason.
“Tone trolling”, as you call it, has its place. It’s possible to have an exchange of ideas without resorting to “oh fuck off, Harris fanboy”. I’m not offended by the profanity; I’m annoyed by how immature it is. Surely you can make your points more effectively than that.
beatrice
Like “this would look good on your resumé. On mine, not so much”
If AQ were genuine humanitarians, their concerns about the deadly vaccine wouldn’t be rebuffed.
Go away and learn to think logically, Harris.
Doug Sinclair
How’s the air on planet Vulcan?
Seriously, you are a pompous git with an overinflated sense ouf their own reading comprehension and interpretation skill.
Thank you, Giliell, who knows nothing at all about me.
Doug Sinclair
No it hasn’t.
Yes it is, but not with you since you still don’t engage with actual arguments.
You know what is immature? Tut-tutting about bad language, but not engaging with argument or addressing the points made by the other side of the debate.
Doug Sinclair
That’s why I judge you by your writing. Don’t want to come off like a pompous git? Don’t write like one. Try substance for once, it might help.
“Clearly it’s everyone else who is biased. My opinions are logically founded upon the facts as I see them and interpret them, which remain unquestioned, and better yet, merely alluded to.” ~ Harris’ fan
Sigh, zenlike, as I’ve already said, I did not tut-tutt bad language. I was annoyed by immaturity and refusal to engage in actual civil discourse. “Oh fuck off” contributes nothing to any discussion, ever.
I will engage an argument when you make one, which you have not.
Doug Sinclair @77
The problem with tone trolling is that it fixates on how something is said rather than what is said. It gives the impression that you’re more concerned with being told to fuck off then why you should fuck off. There’s the further point that this is a rude blog. Being told to fuck off is par for the course, especially if you make silly statements that Chomsky was “being a dick.”
One last point, on this blog sexist insults like “dick” are not appreciated. Please refrain from using them.
From now on I shall call Harris the Black Knight:
BK: You shall not pass! (Swings chapter of book at Chomsky)
Chomskey: (Draws Sword of Facts, chops off BK’s arm)
BK: I’ve got you now!
Chomskey: Your arm’s off!
BK: No it isn’t. Have at you! (Irrelevancies, evasions, and denials)
Chomskey: (Parries with Logic, strikes with Sword of Facts, chops off BK’s other arm)
BK: ‘Tis but a flesh wound! Aaargh! (Attacks with Magic of Intent)
Chomskey: What are you going to do, bleed on me? (Severs leg with Superior Argument) Oh non-existent Lord, I thank thee for my victory– (email receiver pings) What? Your position is ridiculous. I’ll have your other leg!
BK: Do your worst!! (Attacks with Denials)
Chomskey: (Parries with Facts 3, 4 & 5; whips BK’s other leg off at the hip joint with Powerful Rebuttal)
BK: All right, we’ll call it a draw. (pause) Can I publish this?
Chomskey: Whatever . . . .
You know what sounds like a pompous git, Giliell? How about this: “Try substance for once, it might help.”
Yeah, *I’m* the pompous git.
“The problem with tone trolling is that it fixates on how something is said rather than what is said.”
Fair enough. But nothing was said.
Hairhead,
OK, your amusing interpretation is way better than mine. Bonus points for Monty Python.
Doug Sinclair
So, what about the My Lai massacre, you know, the thing I mentioned before?
Doug Sinclair:
Of course you don’t! That lack of bias would be why you are only defending Harris, and replying with tone trolling, rather than addressing the substance of rebuttals to your less than substantial comments.
Oh, kindly fuck off already. Why do you tone trolls always pull this out of your pocket as a gotcha? As this has escaped your notice, we have your words, all nice and preserved, to go by. You wouldn’t go saying things you didn’t mean, now would you? You’re quite the fuckwit.
Doug Sinclair,
You said you’ve read the emails.
My @86
“Then” should be “than”. Fuck off, Al, if you don’t know the difference.
Doug Sinclair
Good grief, you are actually proud that you are so lacking in imagination that you can only think in terms of dichotomies? I see this entire exchange as Harris in the role of inbred yapping Chihuahua who is challenging a Timber wolf for pissing rights to the forest. The result has been both entirely predictable and boring for everyone but the annoying, pea-brained chihauhau. I have no particular bias either way in the discussion between these two guys, LOL, please write some more pairs of sentences that contradict each other while pompously lecturing us about our tone.
DOUG SINCLAIR! DOUG SINCLAIR! DOUG SINCLAIR!
:cough: I have brought up my response to you twice now. You have not addressed it once, and I can assure you, plenty was said. It’s still there, you know, Post # 51.
Ahh, borkquotia at 95! That should have read
Good grief, you are actually proud that you are so lacking in imagination that you can only think in terms of dichotomies? I see this entire exchange as Harris in the role of inbred yapping Chihuahua who is challenging a Timber wolf for pissing rights to the forest. The result has been both entirely predictable and boring for everyone but the annoying, pea-brained chihauhau.
LOL, please write some more pairs of sentences that contradict each other while pompously lecturing us about our tone.
Doug Sinclair,
Maybe Chomsky was being a bit of an ass, but there seemed to be a very clear reason. As I wrote above, in his mind Harris misrepresented him in print and is offering apologetics for US massacres. Even if the tone was totally uncalled for, Harris did a far great disservice to the discussion by spending so much time on his hurt feelings rather than the US bombing of a pharmaceutical plant or other important moral issues.
Dead civilians > Harris feeling insulted
Caine@96, but there are so many immature remarks to condemn! No time no answer actual arguments!
I guess Chomsky isn’t so bad when he sticks to stuff he knows rather than fucking up linguistics.
sff9 @ 99:
I suppose. *Sigh* I live in vain, waiting for a tone troll to actually respond to an argument. Or even posit one.
I found this bit from him very intersting indeed:
(Emphasis mine)
Wouldn’t this argument work in any situation? “Group X” destroyed “Civilian Infrastructure Y” because they believed it was, in fact, “(Disguised) Threat Z”. Because they had no Rational Reason (TM)* to destroy an actual civilian target.
*That we know of / would be comfortable with
You can certainly put in any old terrorist or attack from any country, continent or era and it works. Swap in GW Bush and Iraq and you get a very succinct historical summary, minus some uncomfortable facts. Any drone strike, too. Between your sincerely held convictions and shoddy or biased intelligence you can do absolutely anything and walk away with you head held high.
Shorter Sam “It probably seemed like a good idea at the time” Harris: Intent is magic.
So anything goes as long as you are thinking positive thoughts. But for heaven’s sake, don’t be rude. Even the noblest of intentions won’t get you a free pass for that one.
Ok, Caine, I missed that post and I mixed you up with another responder, and I apologize for that. It’s hard to keep track in this system. There have already been a number of other replies directed at me that I can’t possibly reply to before more stack up.
Harris’s stance on My Lai isn’t even relevant to my point. I did not claim to agree or disagree with his position on that.
Harris’ point in posting all of this is not to make himself appear right and Chomsky appear wrong. I don’t see that at all. He clearly states up front “If I have misread you, and you can show me where I’ve gone wrong, I would want my readers to see my views change in real time”. He tries to engage Chomsky in an enlightening conversation and keeps getting in reply, essentially, “fuck off”. Maybe you think Chomsky honestly engaged him and addressed his concerns, and in some cases I think he did. But it’s so laced with condescension that it’s near impossible to take anything useful away from it. You can feel Harris’s frustration. He even says ” You appear to have begun this dialogue at (or very near) the end of your patience.” Which might well be the case. Harris suggests that Chomsky might want to tone down the assy behaviour a bit if any of this is going to be printed, but Chomsky just goes on and on with it. Again, I’m not saying he’s wrong! He just comes off really, really poorly.
So, Doug Sinclair, you pretty much admit (post 103) the only thing you have is tonetrolling. I’m just going to call you an idiot, and then you can go on believing this somehow means you have ‘won’ the argument. Bye bye, you are not worth even engaging.
Right back at you, Zenlike.
Doug Sinclair @ 103:
It should be relevant to whatever your point may be, because it highlights Harris’s inability to connect with reality in his pursuit of always justifying American violence. I brought it up because it stopped my reading with a jolt. That he dared to bring that up in such a blatantly wrong manner should tell you something – it should scream to you of Harris’s dishonesty. Harris will go any length to defend bigotry on the part of America / Americans. He is firmly behind the idea that America always acts for the best, when that is patently not so. No matter how bad someone else acts, America can manage to act worse, then crows about it. That sort of shit has been going on a long time, and Harris’s dishonesty over the My Lai massacre is simply one indicator of that.
As for engaging Chomsky, no, he wasn’t attempting an enlightening conversation with Chomsky – if that were the case, it would have gone differently. Harris was looking to claim victory over Chomsky, to justify his villanous and loathsome sense of morality. This is quite clear to everyone else in this thread, and you should, perhaps, wonder why you find yourself so alone in your persistent defense of Harris. Personally, I was surprised Chomsky gave him so much time, I would have been much worse than condescending toward Harris. Of course, I am of the estrogen vibe, so Harris already believes I have no ability to think, let alone indulge in condescending behaviour.
Chomsky gave Harris quite extensive and thoughtful answers. Can we discuss that instead of whether they read as exasperated or not?
Because I think I’m speaking for most people here, when I say that this conversation is getting exasperating.
Truthfully, even I lost sight of my original point. My point was not actually a criticism of either Chomsky or Harris, but of P.Z. He’s so slanted in his coverage of the discussion that it’s disheartening. He refuses to see anything Harris says as anything other than stupid or misguided. For example, “Harris opts not for discussion, but for a massive dump of a long excerpt from his book”. Not REMOTELY what happened.
P.Z. is a cantankerous guy and I love him for it. But I expect better of him than this.
It’s all fine up until this point where Chomsky is apparently sharing responsibility for this atrocity amongst all Americans equally. It would be better if people avoided doing this sort of things and took a clearer view of their own agency. Did Chomsky (and all Americans) have prior knowledge of what was to happen? If so, what were the actions they could have taken to prevent it which were left undone? Knowing that these kinds of things do happen, what actions can Americans take to prevent them generally, and at what cost? Is there a party they can vote for which guarantees such things won’t happen? Can they cut off the funding at source by refusing to pay taxes (whatever the other consequences)? If not these, then what?
There is no such thing as responsibility by association of identity. The United States isn’t a ‘person’ magical created out of the collectivity of American citizens who are somehow all responsible for what he? she? does. Responsibility comes with agency and actions specific people can take or not take. Accepting responsibility and guilt when they have none of these things merely gives people a regrettable and rather laughable false sense of power. Noting their own powerlessness might encourage people to seek a path to power.
Doug Sinclair @ 108:
I’m beginning to think you didn’t actually read the exchange between Harris and Chomsky. If you are going to posit “not remotely what happened”, you need to show your work, not just write out an assertion. Your pertinacity on this issue is already worn beyond thin.
At any rate, you have no need to attempt a castigation of PZ, he didn’t do anything wrong. Like everyone else, he has opinions about people and what they say.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- @ 62;
The only kind of villain Harris seems to consider truly villainous, apparently. Well, not quite true – evil isn’t properly evil unless you dress the part, but top hats and twirlable moustaches are not the only acceptable wardrobe options. Being generally foreign of appearance and somewhat dark of hue seems to work as well, especially if you have a nice beard to go with it…
Well, methodology, just like intent, makes the crime – it is only really veggie picking granny murder if you tie her to the train tracks, twirl your moustache, and laugh maniacally as the train rushes toward her struggling form, in that order. One has to maintain proper standards in one’s villainy, afterall.
Now if the Lone Ranger comes along with his heavily armed drone named Tonto and flattens the entire area to get the aforementioned moustachioed villain, but has a little collateral damage issue what with the vaporising of the Granny, the people trying to save her, and the entirety of a nearby village, well then, that isn’t really villainous. He meant well, you see, and not only wasn’t there a bad intent (totes important when it comes to civilian vaporisations), but the methodology was that of the high-tech-weapon-toting heroic warrior for freedom, and he had the good guy clothes on as well. Even if he didn’t bother doing any due dilligence, didn’t have the proper evidence, and wound up in the wrong area and blew up a village full of people completely unrelated to the bad guy and his nefarious whiskers, that would still be OK. Afterall, you can’t make a freedom omlette without breaking a few eggs, and what’s a few hundred dead innocents between friends anyway? Besides, they probably weren’t really innocent. I’m sure at least some of them probably had suspicious facial hair or something. Come to think of it, that Granny had a few errant hairs on her chin too. I mean, I know women say that happens with age and hormonal shifts, but they would say that wouldn’t they?
Now, if the moustache twirling villain had a drone, used it to kill a bunch of people, and flattened a village, that would be different because… err… reasons. Just ask Harris, he’ll tell you.
————————————————————————————————————————————————-
With apologies to Doug Sinclair for nasty tone and mockery of Harris and stuff. What can I say, I’m planning to grow a moustache…
Anne Fenwick:
Indeed. Americans are responsible for their government, those powers that be and all that. Have you ever read about voter apathy in the States? That one little thing might help you to understand Chomsky’s point a bit better. We all bear responsibility for the societies in which we find ourselves, for good or ill.
I already showed my work, Caine. Harris is not choosing a dump of his book over discussion. Chomsky specifically said that he only knew of Harris’s work from things people had sent him that Harris supposedly said about him. So Harris replied, apparently with the intention of clearing up misconceptions, by quoting the only thing he had ever written about Chomsky. Which is perfectly reasonable to do. P.Z. represents this as Harris somehow avoiding discussion, which is clearly not the case.
LOL! Bambi vs Godzilla! I see Bambi in a whole new light. . .
Gregory Greenwood,
You forgot that the poor Lone Ranger is also constricted by not owning the perfect weapon that can only vaporize the moustache-twirling villain. If the Lone Ranger had the perfect weapon, we can be surely sure that he would have harmed no innocent Grannies (but maybe just wicked ones), but he had none so what could he do but point his imperfect weapon somewhere in the general vicinity of where the villain was once reported seen and do what his Good Intentions forced him to do?
Doug Sinclair @112
So Harris did a dump of his book. What’s your problem? You don’t like the description of what Harris did? You would have preferred if PZ said “Harris slid a chapter of his book under Chomsky’s door” or “Harris was kind enough to send Chomsky an entire chapter of his book complete with footnotes”? But what Harris did was send Chomsky a chapter of his book. Not a couple of paragraphs summarizing what Harris wrote about Chomsky but an entire fucking chapter. In other words, Harris dumped several pages on Chomsky. Which is what PZ said.
For those who haven’t seen it, here is Bambi Meets Godzilla, all 92 seconds of it.
So we’re still talking about tone, except now it’s PZ’s tone instead of Chomsky’a. Except that I was kinda hoping we’d finally get to the meat of the post… like the criticism of what Harris had to say?
Um, I can think of one very good reason for this. And it’s Harris’s fault, not PZ’s.
Regarding all of the comments on Chomsky and whether or not he’s an anti-semite, he’s not (or, at least, I don’t think he is). However, he’s absolutely guilty of lending credibility to a known, proven anti-semite. What people are referring to is his defense of Robert Laurisson, who was a known French anti-semite. Chomsky allowed his work to appear as an introduction to one of Laurisson’s books, though, later, he claimed that he didn’t know it was going to be used in that way.
The problem is that it was clear, even at the time, that Laurisson was a full-blown, raging anti-semite, and Chomsky should’ve known better. Chomsky’s defense, when called out about it, was that he wasn’t familiar with Laurisson’s work, what he had seen didn’t seem anti-semitic, and, in any case, he defended his right to say it. This leads to two conclusions, neither of which are very flattering to Chomsky; either Chomsky was willing to lend Laurisson his credibility and defense without having taken so much as a moment to review his work, or that Chomsky saw something he agreed with in Laurisson’s work but didn’t want to acknowledge it publicly.
Now, all of that said, Chomsky absolutely got the better of Harris here, and, yeah, Harris comes across as just totally outmatched and outclassed. But look at how Chomsky starts out: “Most of what I’ve read of yours is material that has been sent to me about my alleged views, which is completely false.” Harris then goes on to copy and paste the only thing he’s ever written about Chomsky in it’s entirety – it’s kind of pretentious and obnoxious, but I understand why he did it. Chomsky gives the reader the impression that Harris has spent a lot of time writing about Chomsky, when, in fact, it’s only one part of one book. Further, Chomsky’s pretty clear hatred of Clinton borders on the conspiratorial and pathological; like a lot of Chomsky’s critiques, everything’s black and white, with no room ever for context or nuance. In regard to the exchange he and Harris have regarding the chemical plant bombing (and subsequent humanitarian fallout), Chomsky has never, that I’ve been able to find, grappled with the same economic fallout from the Sept 11th attacks. He applies one rationale to one situation, but refuses to apply it to another. This is increasingly common from Chomsky.
I mean, Harris looks like a dumbass here (which is, increasingly, how he always looks). But Chomsky has a persistent habit of both dismissing any critique of him as “not worth discussion” (see: Hitchens, Isaac, DeLong, others). He also has a persistent habit of leaving out facts that are inconvenient to his arguments. He responds to broad criticisms with hyper-specific quibbles, then dismisses his critics as not worth discussion and declares himself the victor.
How far back in history is Harris allowing us to go to look at examples of American atrocities? August 1945 is tempting.
Odd that you think that is clearly the case when Chomsky repeatedly attempts to engage Harris in discussion. Harris dissembles, imports some herring, and erects a field of strawmen. then he goes on to be an insulting turd by declaring that Noam Chomsky hasn’t considered intent!?
Leaving aside the fact that bombings and shooting always have a harmful intent because that is the fucking intended result of bombing or shooting someone, there is no difference at all to the people being harmed. That Harris completely elides this fact is not lost on P.Z., the horde, or Mr. Chomsky.
I’m going to hold my breath until Doug Sinclair gives up tone trolling long enough to respond to … anything else. It doesn’t have to be about this exchange where Sam Harris got totally PWNED. It could also be about, say, lame sophistry in arguments against same-sex marriage.
Tethys,
Chomsky is also careful to put emphasis on harm that wasn’t the main intent but happens through simply not giving a fuck. Harris evades that one by claiming it an improbable scenario.
Al Dente, that’s not what PZ said. What he said was “Throwing a chapter of a book at someone is not an inviting way to bring on a discussion.” As if Harris was trying to stifle discussion by doing so. Rather, Harris was RESPONDING.
As for “tone trolling”, the whole discussion, it seems to me, goes like this:
SH: Here’s what I said about you. Tell me how I’m wrong.
NC: Fuck off. You’re wrong. Read my stuff.
SH: Okay, I get that you think I’m wrong. Tell me why.
NC: Fuck off. You’re ignorant. Fuck off.
SH: I’m not sure I understand. Maybe you can explain it to me.
NC: Fuck off, idiot. You’re embarrassing yourself. You’re an idiot.
The point is not that I think Harris is smarter. I don’t. Even if I grant that he’s dumb (which is a ridiculous assertion I’ve seen numerous times above–he may be wrong sometimes, but he is not stupid), there STILL is nothing productive about this discussion. He’s TRYING to get Chomsky to tell him why he’s wrong, and Chomsky just keeps spitting bile at him. Harris gets a bit prickly too a couple of times, and it’s easy to see why.
It’s not about Harris tone-trolling. It’s about Harris trying to have a productive discussion, and Chomsky refusing to give it to him. And P.Z. somehow sees this as a victory for Chomsky. It’s a victory for nobody. Nothing was achieved. Harris acknowledges this.
Doug Sinclair,
No, seriously, did you read those emails? You said you did. Chomsky gives lengthy replies. He asks Harris questions which he refuses to answer.
And all the while, Harris keeps repeating how Chomsky isn’t taking him seriously, isn’t replying as Harris wants him to, isn’t polite enough…. besides tone trolling, words like ” poisoning the well” come to mind. After all, this exchange was obviously meant for public consumption, public better know how to react.
I’m starting to think that Doug Sinclair is really Sam Harris.
chigau ,
That’s like hoping that all the trolls and mean and evil people online are that one stereotypical 14-year-old in the basement…. We ain’t that lucky.
You have it exactly backwards. It was a clear and obvious win by Harris.
oooh!
Tag team!
@Eric Holp- and just how are you making this judgement?
Doug Sinclair
I suspect that has something to do with the fact that Harris rarely, if ever, says anything that isn’t stupid and/or misguided.
That is demonstrably false. Chomsky is clearly pretty disdainful of Harris (rightly so, in my opinion) but he’s not spitting bile. He’s explaining why Harris is wrong. He’s providing examples of himself addressing the point Harris claims he never thought of. He’s the one in this conversation actually making an argument based on reality while Harris wanks on about intent and impossible, irrelevant hypotheticals. That you characterize this exchange that way speaks volumes more about you than it does about Chomsky or PZ or us.
Sure, let me just polish this medal for him. *spits*
Here you go.
Seriously, we’ve reached the levels of “no, I win”:
Eric Holp
Your clear and substantive argument has swayed me, good sir! A job well done and no mistake about it!
Eric Holp,
What do you think about the My Lai Massacre argument made by Harris?
zenlike,
Chomsky could learn some stuff from this guy, right?
Douglas Sinclair —> hushfile for terminal evidenceless tone trolling and misplaced hero worship. Run along, nothing intelligent to be seen…
Poor Sam Harris tried to boost his social standing by engaging with Noam Chomsky, Chomsky tries to discuss these misunderstandings in detail. ( I especially like this part)
I think Chomsky gave Harris a bounty of productive discussion points on the ethics of violence, and the bullshit excuse of unintended consequences, while handing Harris his ass.
golikehellmachine@120
That would be Robert Faurisson, and he’s still alive (and still an anti-semite) as far as I know. The text was indeed used as a preface to one of Faurisson’s books without Chomsky knowing it. You can read it, and understand a little better the context in which it was written, on Chomsky’s website.
That’s correct. He could have avoided saying “I don’t know much about him but there was nothing problematic in the very little I’ve read!”, for sure.
How is that not very flattering? To quote Chomsky in said preface:
Wouldn’t that be kinda hypocritical to go review Faurisson’s work before defending his legal right to free speech?
Beatrice
Yes, I found Chomsky’s take on intent to be far more nuanced, and pertinent to the questions of the ethics of war and violence and armed conflict. Harris of course claims that the real life bombings of the Clinton administration and all administrations since are just improbable and merit no further consideration. I don’t think Harris is unintelligent, but challenging Chomsky of all people to an intellectual debate and then refusing to engage on a single point is more proof that he truly is a rude, petty, shallow man with a giant needy ego.
Zenlike @ 135:
It doesn’t look like either or us is going to get any satisfaction on the My Lai massacre. As for Mr. Holp, if he’s like other Harris fans who have dropped by here, he hasn’t bothered with the pesky comments or the arguments they contain.
Caine,
True.
One can start speculating on divining the quality of an intellectual be the quality of their defenders, but that would distract from the awfulness already present in the arguments made by the intellectual himself.
Really, I remain flabbergasted at the actual gal of trying to use the fucking My Lai Massacre to actually defend the superior moral position of the United States.
And with flabbergasted I mean fucking angry. To permit myself the use of a ‘bad word’.
Zenlike @ 142:
You and me both. That stopped me so damn abruptly my jaw was 3 yards behind me. Harris was born in ’67, so he can hardly claim to have been around when the massacre took place, but even that is no fucking excuse, when there is a ton of information available about it, as well as the Vietnam war. His viewpoint, his twisting of that event to make the States appear saintly is…abominable. I really can’t get past that, and I know there were many more very wrong things said by Harris, but I remain stuck on the My Lai massacre.
sff9@139:
You absolutely got me on the name misspelling, mea culpa. I was in a hurry and should’ve double-checked it.
Now, as far as Chomsky’s signing of the petition goes, for one, Chomsky’s defense is pretty much always his defense; namely, that he focuses on “narrow and specific” points, which he then declares refutes broad, substantive critiques. I could believe that Chomsky didn’t know enough about Faurisson’s work to say one way or the other when he signed the petition; but, in the essay Chomsky later volunteered defending Faurisson, he goes on to say that he sees Faurisson as an apolitical liberal, and could discern no anti-semitism in anything he had read from Faurisson, both of which are things anyone who had even a cursory familiarity with Faurisson with at the time would’ve been mystified by.
At best, that’s intellectually lazy, since Faurisson was pretty clearly not a liberal, and was very obviously a Holocaust denier and an anti-semite. I find it stretches credulity to think that Chomsky – noted for the detail with which he crafts his arguments, the depth of his rigor, and the truly incredible way with which he can recall details from sources – would be totally disinterested in this individual, for whom he signed a petition, then went on to voluntarily defend in an essay – simply decided not to bother reading anything about him or by him.
Anne Fenwick @#109 It’s all fine up until this point where Chomsky is apparently sharing responsibility for this atrocity amongst all Americans equally. It would be better if people avoided doing this sort of things and took a clearer view of their own agency
Chomsky’s use of “we” does not share responsibility equally. How can you infer that?
Chomsky’s comment, there, is similar to things I’ve heard him say in other responses* – he feels that as voters and taxpayers we are proportionally responsible for the US’ actions. That’s a view that’s rooted in pacifist philosophy (something Harris would do well to read…) regarding the questions surrounding defensive warfare. The problem is that if you wish to argue a war is justified as “defensive” you immediately encounter problems when you start considering the attacker not as a unit (because they are not) but as individuals. If you wish to argue you are defending yourself against an attack from, let’s say, Afghanistan, you have to acknowledge the degree to which the partipants in Afghanistan’s attack are culpable and can be retaliated against, or what about their leaders? Or their support infrastructure? Is it moral to bomb the Wehrmacht in their positions in WWII? Well, what about the factory-workers who support the war-machine? Or the people who pay the taxes that support the war-machine?(***) I personally like that line of questioning because it also demarcates the decision-makers who chose war; you’ll recall that the US invasion of Iraq was not ratified with a plebiscite – it was a decision of the US’ political leaders, ratified by the representative bodies. As such, more blame gets parcelled out to the leaders who made the decision, and then a fairly large slice to the representative bodies, and a goodly slice to the people in uniform who directly had their hands in the crime, on down the line until you get to the taxpayers and (I suppose you could say) everyone who voted for Bush. By that point, the slices are mighty thin indeed. But they’re not invisibly thin.
(*Q&A on the TVO “Big Ideas” podcast, I believe it was this one http://tvo.org/video/165105/noam-chomsky-age-terror )
(** http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199682836.do – highly recommended)
(*** Good discussion on responsibility in war here: http://philosophybites.com/war/ )
Harris also utterly fails to distinguish preemptive warfare(*) from punitive warfare(**) from defensive warfare, which ought to make his arguments immediately suspicious. Worse, he appears to advocate in favor of preemptive warfare, which is criminal aggression.
(* Attacking your opponent because you believe they are going to attack you. This is often cast as defensive warfare, but it is not. It is offensive warfare, often surprise attack, hiding behind a very thin fig-leaf.)
(** Attacking your opponent because of something some part of their population did. This is a form of collective punishment since you are aggressing against an entire group because of something an individual somehow associated with that group, did. The people being punished are, in fact, almost certainly not the people who are guilty. This is why bombing the Hitler’s bunker during WWII would be a more appropriate response than bombing Dresden was)
Chomsky has a persistent habit of both dismissing any critique of him as “not worth discussion” (see: Hitchens, Isaac, DeLong, others)
It’s probably not worth trying to go into it point-by-point here but if you’ve got a link or two to some particularly insightful critique of Chomsky from off of that list, I’d be happy to read it.
I watched aghast at Hitchens’ sneering at Chomsky as he evolved from a leftist to a cheering section for the American right wing; Hitchens’ later “critique” of Chomsky appeared to be be pretty easily dismissed. There’s actually a good summary of it here: ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFt621qFvDA ) which contains brilliant critical logic like:
– Chomsky appears to think the US was a bad idea
– You know who else thinks the US was a bad idea?? ….
– Theocratic nihilists
Therefore Chomsky sides with terror. OH Hitch NO.
Only a free speech absolutist would not look at what free speech they are de facto endorsing. By signing without investigation, they do lend credence in the public’s eye to the validity of the bigotry with their endorsement. Which is why one should always look at what they are supporting. Somethings are better just left unsupported.
I agree that Harris was completely outclassed by Chomsky in this debate, but I have seen a few posters claim that there is no moral difference between manslaughter and murder one. The logic there being that there is a dead person at the end of the encounter therefor the two actions are morally equivalent. Following that logic any action that ends in death is morally equivalent. That seems grossly wrong. Intent isn’t magic, but neither is it irrelevant in a moral calculus.
Giliell,
You say this like it’s a good thing. 60 years on, and we’re still trying to clean up the mess that Chomsky made.
Sili,
QFMFT.
Grewgills @150
BZZZZ! Wrong. Thank you for playing.
There is a moral difference between murder and manslaughter. However there is no difference for the victim who ends up dead regardless of the morality of the killer.
I have no dog in this fight, as I am not familiar with either Harris or Chomsky, although I have heard of them, and I am willing to admit that PZ goes off too soon sometimes. But, after getting halfway through Harris’s chapter-dump on his website there, I will state clearly that Harris has gone ‘way off, ‘way too soon.
I don’t care to read further, or write further. I have a dog in the kitchen who wants to go out. (But for all horde and their good writing, a sincere bit of kibble.)
Well, I guess it was something of a waste of time that I finally went and read this. Sam Harris is using more or less the same rhetorical attacks on Chomsky that have been in use for about 13 years – or more. Chomsky is responding more less like he always has – why change when your opponents keep making the same bad arguments?
Now in my opinion – there are some flaws in Chomsky’s responses – but they don’t help his opponents any, because they refuse to accept that the lives of Africans, or Vietnamese, or Timorese have moral value.
Doug Sinclair:
Sam Harris is making the same intellectually bankrupt and disingenuous arguments, in defense of the same hopelessly immoral policies, that have been made many, many times before. Kindly explaining why these people are horribly wrong has clearly been insufficient. It’s necessary to be uncivil in order to draw attention to the problem. It is not possible to say: “Your ideologies contribute to enormous numbers of readily preventable deaths” in any way that is polite.
Note that Harris is quite keen to approach religion in a way that is “… relentlessly dismissive, hostile, and condescending …”. The only difference between Harris’ treatment of Islam and Chomsky’s treatment of Harris is that Chomsky understands Harris’ position much better than Harris understands Islam.
I’m not sure how to describe my reactions at the moment, but I will tell you the circumstances of them at the moment.
See that Eric Holp up there at comment 129? Four minutes after his posted that comment, he tweeted the same thing to PZ, adding “Rationality won over ideology and conspiracy theories.” Yes, indeed, he wrote more in a character-limited venue than he did here. I don’t know why he bothered. Just a day ago, @erholp tweeted “There is no way to say anything meaningful in a tweet.”
Anyway, the conversation led PZ to respond at 8:56: “I’ve noticed that Harris defenders don’t bother to say what he got right, or Chomsky got wrong: you just assert blanket Truth.”
And at 8:59, Eric Holp answered: “OK, tell me how to do that in a tweet.”
Whereupon PZ pointed out to him “You’ve commented on my blog and done the same damn thing!”
Do you think this skeptic/engineer (as he describes himself on Twitter) will be back to say something meaningful now?
Jesus, Sam. That was embarrassing. That was “Ken Ham getting schooled by Bill Nye and claiming victory anyway” kind of embarrassing. Chomsky is one the clearest writers on US foreign policy that there’s ever been and has been doing this longer than Harris has even been an adult human being – it was extremely naive of Harris to think he could just talk around him and play his adolescent “what if?” terrorism scenarios, much less scold him on his collegiality.
I find it interesting that Harris does in this conversation precisely what we’ve seen at this very blog and elsewhere when a conservative/reactionary enamoured of their own genius is shown the door: refuse to admit error or take correction, play childish games that detract from the actual topics, double and triple-down and moan on and on about fucking tone. I’ve seen it from creationists, IDiots, gamergaters & MRAs – I never thought I’d see it from Sam Harris. Well, I wouldn’t have a couple of years ago – these days I’m surprised when an Establishment Atheist isn’t a roiling cauldron of unexamined prejudices and self-adoration.
I also find it amusing that Harris entitled this exchange “The Limits Of Discourse”, with the obvious implication that Chomsky not playing Calvinball to Sam’s satisfaction is what limited said discourse. Ah, yup, Sam, that was the problem. Noam freaking Chomsky not respecting your authoritah as a Leading Manly Thinking Establishment Atheist Man.
Yup.
It turns out this is not a theoretical experiment. You see, the American war industry has done an amazing job of steadily engineering American weapons to be more and more precise over time. The bombers Clinton direct at the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals plant were vastly more precise than anything available in WWII. But a huge moral error was made anyway, because no moral value was assigned to the lives of Africans. Happened again when G.W. Bush invaded Iraq.
Today’s weapons are much more precise still. Note drones in particular. But there’s still no moral improvement, because there is still little to no moral value assigned to lives of foreigners.
If killing fewer people is not a morally important goal, the precision of the weapons has little moral impact. Perhaps it’s also worth considering the problems of US police with tasers.
Doug Sinclair @ # 47 & 113: … the only thing he had ever written about Chomsky.
The only thing in that book, I’spoze. At the Harrisblog, one finds Noam’s name 103 times, a few from The Sam Himself – e.g.:
Note the absolutist false dichotomies: that could only be the real Sam Harris ranting there. Accept no substitutes!
Anybody want to start a betting pool on when both Chomsky titles disappear from the SH.org “Bookstore”?
Today’s weapons are much more precise still. Note drones in particular. But there’s still no moral improvement, because there is still little to no moral value assigned to lives of foreigners.
They are more precise but not precise enough.
Besides, that’s irrelevant. The US’ use of drones is based on a doctrine of preemptive warfare – the idea being that we’re going to blow so-and-so up before they can cause any trouble. That’s not a moral position to take because the US is the aggressor; the “trouble” that the people being killed prospectively might cause is entirely related to the US having forces exposed in places where they are not welcome, or on nebulous “national interests”. More likely it is the latter; which means that the people being killed are being killed because they threaten US economic expansion or military expansion. If you want to talk about the morality of defensive versus offensive war, the US is entirely without a leg to stand on. The personnel using those tools ought to be aware that they are committing murder.
Sam Harris’ view of America is identical to that of conservative historian Arnold Toynbee —
The curious thing is that an evidence-based rationalist, skeptic, and Global Atheist Thought Leader™ maintains that view despite so much evidence to the contrary. Harris may be as dogmatic as the religionists he despises.
I just read the exchange on Harris’ blog. I’m left with the question: why the fuck did he publish it on his own blog? Is he trying to convince everyone that he can’t argue his way out of a wet paper bag?
I would buy the claim that
The kind of friendly dog that tears babies to shreds on account that they looked at it funny.
Just read the exchange myself, and really have to agree with numerobis (whose comment appears right over the comment box)… Harris would be outmatched by the wet paper bag.
Also, “apologies for the accuracy” may become an integral part of my vocabulary.
marcusrancum@148:
It’s probably not worth trying to go into it point-by-point here but if you’ve got a link or two to some particularly insightful critique of Chomsky from off of that list, I’d be happy to read it.
I watched aghast at Hitchens’ sneering at Chomsky as he evolved from a leftist to a cheering section for the American right wing; Hitchens’ later “critique” of Chomsky appeared to be be pretty easily dismissed. There’s actually a good summary of it here: ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFt621qFvDA ) which contains brilliant critical logic like:
– Chomsky appears to think the US was a bad idea
– You know who else thinks the US was a bad idea?? ….
– Theocratic nihilists
Therefore Chomsky sides with terror. OH Hitch NO.
Hitchens lost his mind after Sept 11th, no doubt, and gave in to his most dictatorial impulses. But, he wasn’t wrong when he took Chomsky to task for his blithe, “chickens come home to roost” take on Sept 11th in the immediate aftermath (which is probably the last truly coherent criticism I remember him writing). Here are a few links – I’m not interested in a flame war, but these are all good, solid critiques of Chomsky that Chomsky basically wrote off part and parcel, because Chomsky doesn’t suffer criticism from anyone, ever. With that said:
-Jeffrey Isaacs: https://prospect.org/article/thus-spake-noam
-Chomsky/Hitchens: http://humanities.psydeshow.org/political/chomsky-1.htm
I’d link to the Brad DeLong piece, but 9/10 times I’ve tried to load it, I get a 404. I don’t give Hitchens a pass – there was plenty for him to atone for, and Isaacs is problematic, too, but they both made good, substantive critiques of Chomsky that Chomsky effectively brushed off, because Chomsky (in his own mind) is apparently above reproach from any kind of criticism.
Haven’t yet read any comments but I have two things to say;
One: You misspelled Mortal Kombat. Not really a big deal.
Two: I never looked into the pharmaceutical factory bombing. I assumed it was bad data, and they really thought it was chemical weapons. I’m assuming Chomsky knows his stuff and will think about that differently now.
OK, now that I have seen the word “effete” used (apparently) seriously in the Isaacs link and clicked Back, is it actually worthwhile for me to overcome my disdain and read the rest of it?
“Blithe” seems like a stretch, anyhow. I’d have characterized Chomsky’s reaction as more of a resigned “really, what were we expecting to happen?”.
octopod@167:
When you can point me to an example of Chomsky seriously engaging a critic (rather than dismissing them on technicalities, a la, “effete”) I’d be happy to read it.
@golikehellmachine#165: Thanks for the refs; I’m still reviewing them, but when you mentioned Hitch and Isaac I more or less figured what you were talking about. It’s good to check these things before going on.
Chomsky, like his opponents, chooses to make his words pretty when he should be making them clear. He (like Hitchens…) is too fond of getting into a slug-fest of tactical facts, when he might be better off at the strategic level. But unlike Harris or Hitchens I don’t imagine myself smarter than Chomsky so I won’t presume to critique his technique.
Hitch and Isaac both seem to have latched on to Chomsky’s “chickens coming home to roost” comment and erected a fairly good straw-man surrounding it. Why Chomsky didn’t simply blow off their critiques as misguided strawmen, I don’t know. But he chose to engage; you’ll notice that he did try to walk back his comment a bit in his reply to Hitch, but by then Hitch was in full howl. I hadn’t read Isaac’s take on Chomsky’s remark before now, but it’s in the same vein — he starts off by delineating that the strawman he is building is, indeed, straw:
… Then proceeds to thrash it soundly. Chomsky is perfectly awful to have said those things, had he actually said them, yes, yes. Etc
I don’t think that is substantive criticism; I think it’s bullshit. What Chomsky clearly was saying is that 9/11 is politically part and parcel of the US’ tendency to project its power into places where it’s not wanted; something it has been doing for a very long time. I think it’s hard to charicature that position but Hitch and Isaac managed to; Hitch, at least, was good with words. And Chomsky didn’t try to blow off that argument, either! His reply to Hitch began,
Seriously, that ought to have dispatched the matter. My opinion is that Chomsky should have blown off the initial strawmanning with a mouth-gaping “you can’t be serious?!” but he didn’t. The rest of the debate is Hitchens bloviating. We are encouraged to forget that Chomsky did not say anything about people trying to blow up Washington or Jakarta, or joining Bin Laden, etc.
He should have blown off Harris, too, perhaps as follows: “That would look good on your resume; perhaps not so good on mine.” Or maybe just “please, stop humping my leg.” I assume it’s embarrassing to find oneself debating moral philosophy with the author of a book on the topic, who appears to have no idea what he’s talking about. Meh.
As you say, Hitch was already going off the deep end (I won’t say he was crazy; I think too much ass-kissing got him in love with authority – he was bought) I interpret his reaction to Chomsky as that of a former leftist who was trying to rationalize his switching sides and being discomfited by one of his fellow-travellers who hadn’t.
I think, if you’re looking for substantive critique in those exchanges, this is the bit you might want to look at:
(Chomsky to Hitchens)
Perhaps also a straw-man? What happened next tells us it wasn’t.
golikehellmachine@#168
When you can point me to an example of Chomsky seriously engaging a critic (rather than dismissing them on technicalities, a la, “effete”) I’d be happy to read it.
Are you making a mistake? The characterization of “effete” was thrown by Isaac at Chomsky. (*ahem* during his epic strawmanning session) Or did I miss where Chomsky dismissed someone as “effete”?
PZMeyers. Love your work but this must be the most biased review you have ever done. Chomsky is appalling: intellectually dishonest, plausible denialism at its worst, defense of the indefensible. He at once claims he never claimed moral equivalency whilst spending most of his time trying to justify same- infact, that it was worse. How about pointing out his ridiculous denials about his own position, focus on semantic trifles, dishonest accusations and subsequent denials he made them, and his irritating self aggrandizement and dismissal of all lesser beings. Have a look at how Hitchens destroys Chomsky on this issue (link in my blog response below). Hitchens mops the floor with him whilst Chomsky calls him a racist, and then later denies calling him a racist, due to his allegation being “Hitchens cannot mean what he says or else he views Africans as lesser beings.” Since we can have no doubt Hitchens, of all people, means what he says, we can hav no doubt Chomsky means to call him racist. But he denies it invoking semantics that he actually said he can’t mean what he says. This sort of semantic drivel is not worthy of anyone’s admiration in my book.
As an Australian I think you US liberals need to stop flagellating yourselves for your countries sins! Yes the US has done horrible things. Yes, the al-Shifa bombing was amongst the worst. But even so, even if it was motivate entirely by a combination of capital R Revenge for the Embassy bombings and by wag the dog political populism (which I believe it was) it remains a lesser crime than deliberately undertaking a terrorist plot whose ONLY motivation is to kill innocent people. There is no virtue in either but it is grossly inaccurate to equate the two.
Sam Harris is far from perfect but don’t let the self appointed intellectual giant of the 20th century off the hook either. Here is my response which lists all the points you missed. It wasn’t a mismatch, just a pissing contest between two ego’s.
http://rationalrazor.com/response-to-sam-harrisnoam-chomsky-the-limits-of-discourse-email-dialogue/
This is what I mean about strawmanning:
(emphasis mine)
That’s from Isaac.
See what he’s doing: he’s saying ‘someone might misunderstand Chomsky as having said all this horrible stuff…. You know, stuff I acknowledge he didn’t say.”
I’m not a great fan of Chomsky, BTW. I was a huge fan of Hitchens’, until I realized what a drooling apologist for empire he had become – or maybe his left-leaning laurels were all just a pose to get more microphone time in a country that leans to the right with a media that’s always looking for a witty contrarian. The motherfucker had a way with words, though.
Marcus Ranum@169, 172, etc:
First off, thanks for engaging without being a prick. (There’s some Harris for you). (Also, good natured joking, not being a dick)
So, to follow with Myers’ boxing premise, Chomsky is Mayweather; he manages to be consistently technically correct while failing to make significant points. Now, in relation to Harris, I think you’re right that Chomsky brushes off an obviously inferior critique because Harris does an incredibly poor job making his point. Which is a shame, because I think intent absolutely matters, and while Chomsky gives some lip service to that, it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t agree. Harris’ problem here wasn’t necessarily that he was wrong – it’s that he was so ill-equipped and unprepared to debate Chomsky that we never actually got to see whether he was wrong or not. Harris, as has been his wont since he has styled himself as a “public intellectual” embarrassed himself and got what he fucking deserved, rhetorically speaking.
Now, to address one of the things you mentioned – you said: “I don’t think that is substantive criticism; I think it’s bullshit. What Chomsky clearly was saying is that 9/11 is politically part and parcel of the US’ tendency to project its power into places where it’s not wanted; something it has been doing for a very long time. I think it’s hard to charicature that position but Hitch and Isaac managed to; Hitch, at least, was good with words.” You’re affording Chomsky a luxury he absolutely does not afford his critics. You’re reading intent and interpretation into his own words, whereas Chomsky (on many, many occasions) does not allow loose wording to justify an argument.
Marcus Ranum:
It’s irrelevant because US foreign policymakers don’t want it to be relevant. They perefer economic power.
Marcus Ranum:
A doctrine that couldn’t be justified if moral value was assigned to the lives of foriegners.
The list of American wars that qualify as defensive is short. I admit I am unsure exactly which wars belong on it, but I can’t see any good argment that puts more than a few on it. Maybe there is only one.
Marcus Ranum @48
Pretty much that. If a trolley is moving slow enough and is small enough that a single person’s weight can radically throw it off the path and ensure 100% success rate, how the hell is it going to kill 5 people?
And I share Chomsky’s exasperation with these magical fairyland sort of “moral” argument hypotheticals as they tell us very little of use in the real world and mostly rely on a magical world that has very little relationship to our own. Maniacal villains tying people to train cars in areas where small trolleys that can be bumped over with anyone with heft that are also unwilling to save themselves when attacked are not a situation we encounter in the day-to-day world. Magical ticking-bombs that can only be defused with the murder or torture of someone foreigny and brown does not happen. And when those are turned to rather than genuine moral incidents such as Al-Shifa or say the mistreatment of minority members of society or sketchy justifications for war and torture, it really starts to feel like a bunch of white cis men trying desperately to avoid really deconstructing the way people dehumanize that which is classified as lesser and finds it easier to moralize and erase their destruction when they are deemed “not proper” or foreign or otherwise marginalized.
Which is why Sam Harris comes off as a complete git here. He wants the retention of the fantasy world where America is pure and good and those we’ve done wrong are bad and those who strike at us are ultra plus bad and are not birthed by any action we have done in the past in contrast to the reality instead of engaging in the world that is.
golikehellmachine:
A “luxury”? To me it looks like an attempt at analysis.
Beyond that, I can’t think of a time when Hitch ever allowed loose wording to justify an argument. He loved attacking loose wording at least as much as Chomsky. Probably more.
But, if Chomsky doesn’t do for Hitch what Marcus did for Chomsky, why does that matter?
hugh harris
First, nobody claimed al-shifa is amongst the worst. It is merely one example of the US governments disregard for some people, among many such incidents. As far as the rest of your remark, your ranking of wanton killing of innocents in New York as a worse crime than the casual and wanton deaths of Sudanese people is both irrational and repulsive. Even worse is your claim that the terrorists of 911 were clearly lesser beings who crashed planes into the twin towers for no reason whatsoever, while acknowledging that Clinton deliberately and casually harmed innocent people for revenge. Clintons actions seem ethically worse IMO, to display such depraved indifference as an official elected world leader, he also failed the very principals of democracy he swore to uphold. Chomsky is exactly correct in his assessment that 911 was a terrible and completely unsurprising event in light of the callous disregard with which some of our Presidents have treated the rest of the world.
“And I share Chomsky’s exasperation with these magical fairyland sort of “moral” argument hypotheticals as they tell us very little of use in the real world and mostly rely on a magical world that has very little relationship to our own”
Really, so philosophical thought experiments have no value whatsoever? Don’t tell the Philosophy department their whole discipline is irrelevant. Jumping at shadows in Plato’s cave.
Chomsky attacks the thought experiment as ludicrous and embarrassing because his allegations of false equivalence are themselves ludicrous and he cannot defend them.
Has anyone read the postscript that Harris added to his piece later? He specifically said that he refused to talk about moral issues with Chomsky because Chomsky did not agree with him that intent is magical. I think that is even more damning than anything else he said in his correspondence.
@hughharris
In all seriousness, philosophy professors I have had would use those examples in class, or in studies, but never apply them to the real world. My professor resolutely refused to debate politics, saying that was outside the realm of philosophy and had nothing to do with his class. He specifically told the student to speak to a political philosopher.
numerobis
Well, at least he got some people fooled. Which brings us to:
hughharris,
What do you think about the My Lai Massacre argument made by Harris?
Doug Sinclair
Fun fact: Just because you don’T see that, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Hell you’re like Harris, arguing from personal incredulity. Harris can’t see any reason why Clinton would bombard the factory if not for good and pure reasons, you can’t see that Harris might try to score points.
Nope. Chomsky very clearly tries to keep the discussion focussed on the Al-Shifa bombing, the point Harrs himself brought up while Harris tries to get away with ludicrous hypotheticals.
Which are Harris fucking concerns? He is concerned with something Chomsky wrote.
There’s just a tiny problem here: Harris begun the dialogue. He’s badgering Chomsky for this. Chomsky indulges him shortly. Can I see Chomsky’s frustration? Yes. I’d be frustrated too if somebody tried to counter arguments about things that happen in the real world with useless thought experiments.
So:
1) he’s tone trolling
2) Harris clearly planned to publish this all along. He basically set Chomsky up to write him some nice content for his page for free. You can see from Chomsky’s replies to Harris’ request permission to publish this that this was not clear to Chomsky from the start. That strikes me as HIGHLY dishonest.
I’d add malicious and evil to the list. As evidenced by the My Lai point
Are you sure you’re not mixing the people up?
Gregory Greenwood @111
I see your sense of bitter cynis matches mine quite well. It’s a sad world.
+++
I think Godzilla did Bambi a favour to put it out of its misery. Poor creature clearly had some leg issues, with everything being moved backwards. But I’m impressed by its ability not to dump onto its butt the way gravity demands.
+++
golikehellmachine
What’S it with these dichotomies? How about three, Chomsky absolutely disagreed with what Faurisson sais but firmly believed in his right to say it, you know, that thing Descartes never said. Many Americans have issues with European laws that limit free speech with regards to the Holocaust. Many Europeans have isses with the Holocaust denialism that is completely legal and unchecked in the USA.
Looking at what you’ve written above, that’s kind of funny.
But really, when did having a principled moral stance against the slaughtering of innocent people become a bad thing? Chomsky gives lots of good evidence why he thinks that Clinton is a despicable person who
ordered the death of thousands of innocent people.
Grewgills
Evidence?
Because what I’ve seen is people saying there’s no difference between murder and manslaughter from the PoV of the victim. They are not just 50% dead because the legal system says the punishment for manslaughter is just 50% of that of murder.
athyco
Thanks for that information. Tells us quite a lot.
hughharris
You know, I found his argument on that matter quite clear, talking about what were Clinton’s likely intent and considerations. Just to rephrase it for you:
Wile Bin Laden killed a few thousand people for the sake of killing them, Clinton killed a few thousand people because he couldn’t be bothered to care about them. That image of somebody stepping on ants was repeated several times.
Personally I think oth, Bin Laden and Clinton accurately judged the importance the respective lives were given in global discourse: Those of a few thousand Americans still being remembered constantly in the global news circus, those of a few thousand Sudanese people being forgotten, erased in their death.
That’s a pretty clear moral argument.
Because you’d really like to do the same with Australia’s?
Tell me, how many people do you get to kill for pure motives before it becomes a serious crime. Another point Chomsky made quite clear: history is FULL with people who commited horrible crimes for “pure” reasons.
So I guess you don’t think the witch hunts of early modern times were lesser crimes because people were honestly afraid of the witches?
How about the crusades? Those who invaded foreign countries honestly believed that this was just and right. They didn’t just kill for the sake of killing, but for god!
30 years war?
The genocide of the American Indians because white settlers thought that god had given them the land?
And what about slavery? Clearly people weren’t made slaves because folks were malicious. Those people were made slaves because white people had good reasons!
Killing abortion doctors? The murderers think they’re saving thousands of children!
Stealing aboriginal children from their families because you honestly think they need to be raised by civilised people?
@178, hughharris:
It’s not that thought experiments have no value (I don’t think anyone here would say that in any absolute sense), it’s that they have limited applications. A serious discussion between two respected academics about an atrocity committed during peace-time probably isn’t the best place to trot out an absurd, sophomoric “what if?” hypothetical in defence of said atrocity.
Harris has used ludicrous ticking-bomb scenarios previously to justify torture, racial profiling and other aggressions; engaging in such fantasies in this exchange with Chomsky was naive and diversionary. Harris could’ve saved himself some time and effort by avoiding this favoured ploy of defending state aggression by inventing fictional scenarios and just presented an actual defence. Harris chose not to do so; Chomsky understandably became exasperated (just as I do whenever Harris starts down this track).
I’m no knee-jerk Chomsky fanboy, but I’m aware enough of his writing and the clarity of his arguments to know that this tactic of Harris’s was destined to fail as soon as he unveiled it. Thought experiments and hypotheticals have an important place – even the absurd ones – but not only was this conversation was not the place, Harris’s particular brand of self-serving hypothetical was particularly inappropriate.
Chmsky is now a very old man… and yet he shows increbible patience and care. Although he starts by saying “I don’t want to debate you”, he still does, and spends what must have been a great amount of time restating points that have never been anything else than clear.
Anyone, even his most decided opponents, must give him credits for this!
From what I have read from him (not the linguistic stuff), Chomsky basically makes one single argument, over and over, that can be expressed as follows :
When we (USA) do Bad Thing X, the US government and medias always explain it as ultimately a good thing ; or : done in good intentions ; or : with predictable positive consequences…
When Bad Guys (countries that are not friends of the USA) do Bad Thing X, the US government and medias make a huge noise about how bad it is.
Of course, this argument can be infinitely applied to various concrete cases, and never gets old.
@Christophe Tull 183
I would argue that Noam Chomsky is quite tired of it and has been for decades, just as I have.
Harris has now written a postscript beneath the exchange.
@Hank_Says. Good point, but I think Chomsky is deliberately being obstinate. Why should he get to decide the facts and framework of debate? He knows he’s on shaky ground. If Chomsky was unwilling to discuss the issue he could have just said, no thanks.
@Gilial et al. I never said Clinton had pure motives, quite the opposite. “Benign” is just one aspect of intentions. All those religious crimes are disgraceful. The intentions behind them are appalling, even though at the time the Crusaders thought they were doing good. The beliefs informing the intentions are what is crucial about intentions.
So you accept Chomsky claims moral equivalency. If you, as his acolyte can admit it, why can’t he? I think he won’t admit it because he is being a cranky old man who knows his position is unjustifiable. He doesn’t want to debate it directly and openly, he just wants to fling a few arrows from the grandstand.
Not at all. The crimes of my forbears against aboriginals were abhorrent. Let’s not just take sides and ignore the evidence.
@methuseus – thought experiments are quite common and a legitimate form of debate in relation to moral issues. If you dont like his example, fine, it’s not a great example, but neither is it “ludicrous and embarrassing.” If one wanted to have an intelligent discussion he might have offered a different one, instead of responding with babyish insults.
Harris is trapped in the Good Guy – Bad Guy dichotomy. In Hollywood movies any action is justified if it fights the Bad Guy. But life is not a Hollywood movie. The guy doing bad things is the Bad Guy, and in this particular case, Harris is defending the wrong guy.
I just want to clarify about the trolley scenario. A lot of people misunderstand it and that is in large part down to people like Sam Harris and Peter Singer misusing it. It is not an attempt at a philosophical argument. Its an attempt to identify nuances in peoples thinking.
I will remove the trolleys and show how this works. You have a subject and you are going to identify two situations to them and in each case ask which of two actions the subject will take. In both scenarios the possible outcomes and choices are identical. The only thing different is the means used by the subject to fulfill the choice.
In each case the subject chooses between 10 people being killed or 1. In the first case the subject can save the 10 by altering the course of events which will unfortunately kill an innocent bystander. In the second case the subject can save the 10 by personally murdering the innocent bystander.
The stuff about trolleys and fat men is badly designed window dressing to the central inquiry, why do most people find it ok to redirect the course of events in case one, but can’t cope with the act of murder in case two? Exploring that question is very interesting and of some value. Understanding why some few people answer differently is also very interesting. Using the trolly scenario to “prove” something is just dumb.
@Tethys
I think your comment shows an honesty that Chomsky was sadly incapable of. So you would agree Chomsky not only says al-Shafia is morally equivalent, but is worse. So why deny it?
I think 9/11 is much worse than al-Shifa. For one, the terrorists motives are explicit.
1. The terrorists of 9/11 wanted to cause the maximum amount of deaths in a built up area, and bring on a global conflict.
2. Clinton’s motives cannot be exactly be determined. If you accept Chomsky’s version then they were extremely bad. For his own political gain, indifferent to the lives of Africans, and in full knowledge there were no chemical weapons. However, there are conflicting reports on this. Bin laden had some ownership of the plant and there was unconfirmed evidence of nerve gas precursors. However, let’s presume Chomsky’s “facts” are correct – it’s still not as bad.
Did he seek to inflict the maximum amount of carnage on Sudan by this action? Is it really credible to believe that Bill Clinton hates Sudanese enough to want to cause untold deaths by wiping out their drug factory? Is this credible as his intention? It conflicts with Chomsky allegation of complete indifference. If it truly was his motive to inflict the maximum amount of carnage he could have indiscriminately bombed residential areas – he could wiped out the whole country. And obviously he did not want to bring on a global conflict. His motives were part revenge, part political populism, part who knows???
If he was indifferent to Africans, is this really worse than being driven by ideological hatred, and believing your enemy are infidels who deserve to die?
Don’t get me wrong, his actions were appalling, but its delusional to say it’s worse than terror.
Am i the only one that read the ” He’s flailing wildly!” bit as if it was a Pokemon fight?
It was embarrashing to read Harris whine about Chomski not accepting his superfluous point that would make his case. If your case depends on a shitty point, it’s a shitty case…
Also, the obvious bias against the “other” and for anything the “good guys” do, is pretty surreal to watch in such extravagant display.
hughharris
1. No I fucking don’t
2. No, Chomsky fucking doesn’t
3. I actually explained to you again what Chomsky’s moral stance is.
4. If you are actually unable of holding two thoughts in your head at the same time, don’t complain when you can’t follow the discourse.
5. Why are you being so dishonest, claiming something I clearly did not say?
6. So now it’s the framework behind the good intentions, no longer just good intentions. There goes that goal post.
7. Explain to me why American Imperialism is actually an ethically sound framework.
@186, hughharris
Chomsky wasn’t trying to decide the facts; he was trying to discuss them despite Harris’s naive retorts and tone-trolling. And he didn’t appear unwilling to discuss the issue at all (quite the opposite in fact), just unwilling to indulge Harris in his tedious parables.
If Chomsky was at all obstinate, he was obstinately trying to keep Harris on topic and obstinate in his refusal to engage in Harris’s self-serving scenery-chewing. Chomsky’s been arguing with people of Sam’s hawkish, absolutist mindset since before Vietnam: he knows the plays, knows the script and knows to avoid being sucked into them.
Harris, on the other hand, embarrassed himself by coming off as so desperate for victory that he forgot to actually debate; he is apparently not sufficiently blessed with self-awareness to have realised it, hence him crowing about his great triumph and castigating Chomsky for limiting the discourse (an ironic own goal if there ever was one).
hughharris:
Chomsky:
I don’t think Chomsky argued that Clinton “hates” Sudanese. Instead, he argued Clinton was uncaring toward Sudanese.
Christophe Till
That’s also why they are honestly surprised that people might actually hate them. Oh gosh, they must hate us for our freedo, because what other reason would people who’ve been suffering under our military terrorism for ages have to hate us, because our motives were always pure and innocent.
There’s the villain in Pratchett’s Nightwatch who will turn around and be honestly upset that you think him a bad guy while he’s still holding the bloody knife in the hand.
How good it must feel to be “right”, to have the correct “moral” point of view.
As far as I can see, everyone is totally confused about the meaning of “justification” – and the politics of power and the bad things done by “the USA” : in order to understand that mess, it would be great to define the term “justification” – but that would create another mess (utilitarism, moral, ethics, hindsight, predicitions,…).
I would like to see Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky discuss the much easier question whether Georg Elser was a hero or not. He killed seven innocent people – if “innocent” has any meaning at all.
Of course Chomsky is right – but this is only a opinon (in this case my opinion) which doesn’t imply that this is the only way to think about this affair. After the fact, with hindsight,…it is so easy to be “right”.
hughharris:
No, it’s not “delusional”. It’s just assigning an equivalent value to Sudanese lives. that’s all it is.
Also, it’s quite ridiculous of you to go on about how difficult it is to determine motives or intent, and then act like they are so much more important than results.
Oh, hughharris, you might read Harris’ postscript where he admits that yes, actually Chomsky evaluated the question of intent.
+++
BTW, that’s a typical Harris gem:
Translation:
Harris: You say they’re morally equivalent!
Chomsky: They aren’t. There’s a good argument to be made that Al-Shifa was worse.
Harris: See, I’m totally right when I say you said they are equivalent.
@191 Giliell
That, right there. It’s similar to how some apologists present the Bible as self-evident proof of God’s existence; America policing the world is simply Right & Just – America’s Just Desserts for single-handedly winning the Hitler War. If America does it, it’s by definition Good and those on the receiving end are Bad. America is a shining beacon and anyone who questions her are evil-doers. But, no, we recognise that the claim that God exists comes from the Bible, so invoking the Bible is circular; so too is invoking America’s own assessment of itself and its actions. “If America says it’s engaging in invasion/occupation/police action X in order to protect the homeland/stop the spread of communism/punish them for 9-11/punish them for WMDs/fight ’em there so we don’t have to fight ’em here, then that’s what America’s doing, and because America fights for truth and justice, it’s the Right thing to do.” That’s not support – it’s not evidence – it’s propaganda.
Before I got sidetracked by atheism in the mid-00s, I spent years arguing with neo-cons and various other trigger-happy yahoos about America’s apparent birthright to fuck with any country they saw fit, ethics and legality aside, and the gross double-standards it engaged in when judging others for engaging in similar activity – not to mention the indignance and hurt feels on display when America was accused of war crimes. Why, for instance, was it bad for Russia to invade and occupy Afghanistan but just fine for the US to do the same in Afghanistan and Iraq – or even attempt the same thing previously in Vietnam? I never got a decent answer, just as I never got a decent answer to “Why was it okay for Moses and his thugs to commit genocide and steal land but not okay when the Philistines tried it?” or “Why was supporting and arming Iraq against Iran in the 1980s a good thing, but supporting and arming Iraq against Kuwait in the 90s a bad thing? ”
No answers, just apologetics and special pleading.
Now I fear I’m straying. Hmm.
Future Generations will ignore this farce.
Two intelligent people, both blinded by their egos, discuss some moral and ethical questions.
Both think, and most observers agree, that there must be a winner and a loser. Victory! There is a “score”, a “round-by-round summary”, “punching yourself out”, “absurdly disingenuous” claims, “Mortal Combat? Finish him!”, “whining about tone”, “ludicrously sophomoric philosophical games”, “lying on the mat, bleeding, whining “…
PZ just hates (or at least dislikes) Sam Harris, he obviously enjoys this “Bambi vs. Godzilla” a lot – it feels sooooo good, I am right and he is wrong, and one of the most intelligent philosophers of our time just destroyed him. Great, wonderful. My enemy defeated!
The confusion of Sam Harris – it just makes me sad. He is not evil – and at the same time his priorities are not mine. But so what? This is only a conversation, fuck “winners” and “losers”.
Next time they should invite Glen Beck to join them.
No, “Georg Kluni”. I doubt future generations will even notice this little chat.
But well done for making sure that if they do, and if they ever read this summary of it on PZ’s blog and then read all the way to comment #199, they’ll notice you proudly standing here and making sure everybody knew how much you didn’t care and how far above it all you were.
@Giliel
If Chomsky says they are in fact much worse why can’t he just say it plainly, and why does not deny comparing them morally?
From his earlier correspondence with Hitchens:
http://humanities.psydeshow.org/political/chomsky-3.htm
“Can the attacks of September 11 be compared to an earlier outrage committed by Americans? And should they be so compared?” NB: His question. If he wants to consider that question, fine, but I didn’t raise it or discuss it, nor will I now”
And yet he did discuss and explicitly compared them.
“correctly, judging by subsequent interchange — that it was unnecessary: the recipients would understand why the comparison is quite appropriate.”
&
“To regard the comparison to Sept. 11 as outrageous is to express extraordinary racist contempt for African victims of a shocking crime,…”
@llewelly
The point of the outrage at Chomsky’s remarks made 1 day after 9/11 is that you can’t accurately compare a moral action just by the outcomes or just by the intentions. I do not claim either so your point is mute. And to accuse others of racism, as Chomsky does, because they judge the facts differently is its own kind of prejudice. No nuance there.
@Hank. Tone-trolling? Are we not allowed to point out when someone is attacking the man not the argument? Would it be tone-trolling to ask Giliel to tone down his obcenities and ad hominems?
I’ll grant you that Chomsky may have felt justified but his argument refused to address the points raised and was pedantic and semantic as he himself admitted, even alluding to defamation. Do people on this thread think this is justified on account of their opinion that Harris is a bigot?
I haven’t heard anyone explain why Chomsky cannot admit he thinks the al-Shifa bombing is morally equal or worse than 9/11 despite most of his supporters here believing the same. What does this say? Is this intellectual honesty? (He clearly alludes to this being the case, as everyone acknowledges) Does he fear being quoted elsewhere because these comments would outrage middle America? We can only speculate.
It’s pitiful no-one can concede this much. I just means you are supporting him out of misplaced tribalism rather than objectively assessing the facts.
is apparently why I’m siding with Chomsky here, according to hughharris @ 201.
It’s an interesting phrase. Those two words are more than adequate to describe Harris’s entire attitude toward US foreign policy. But it is itself misplaced as I don’t support Chomsky reflexively – in this specific case I believe he both conducted himself and argued better than Harris did (though not flawlessly). But don’t let that stop you from uncharitably assuming I’m a mindless automaton who just adopts whatever opinions my alleged heroes do. You’ll notice that for my part I haven’t presumed to predict your motivations and have just played the ball, as it were.
My critique of Harris was based on his focus on the alleged personal attacks from Chomsky, his reluctance to respond meaningfully and his usual go-to play, the ridiculous hypothetical.
Anyway, this got tedious quickly. Goodnight all.
hughharris:
oh, but what did you say earlier?
hughharris:
A purely subjective assessment of motives. In order to build a little strawman.
And then you went on:
hughharris:
You can only come up with “delusional” by hugely prioritizing purely subjective speculation about motives over objective facts about numbers of deaths. Or, perhaps, by subjectively devaluing Sudanese lives.
Objectively assessing the facts is an important thing, but it’s not the only thing.
As for “tribalism”, the truth is, I don’t like Chomsky. But he sends me a nickel every time I reply to one of your bad arguments, so here you go.
hughharris:
As has been pointed out to you previously, Chomsky did consider both outcomes and intentions. So that is not what the outrage was about.
This is so revealing.
I don’t consider Chomsky an infallible hero, so why do so many think they can trouble me by pointing out instances X, Y, and Z where Chomsky was wrong? When I say “Chomsky is right about this“, you can’t believe you’re going to refute me by saying “But Chomsky was wrong about that!”…unless, of course, you’re some kind of shallow authoritarian.
In a slow sort of way, this is a hilarious thread.
Harris Apologists: But… but… Harris didn’t lose! PZ is wrong!
Everyone else: Shut the fuck up, Harris lost because he ignored the points being made (even though he raised them in the first place), and wasted his time and credibility by tone trolling.
Harris Apologists: Telling me to shut the fuck up is rude, so you have no credibility.
Everyone else: Harris didn’t address [points A, B, or C], he just kept changing the subject!
Harris Apologists: But… but… Chomsky once did something I can misrepresent as being horrible, in a totally different venue, years ago!
No wonder the Harris apologists think Harris won; they are totally oblivious to the things which made him lose. It’s like if you had soccer fans who literally went blind when the ball was in their half of the field — after the game they’d be saying “we must have won by default, I didn’t see the other team score a single goal!”
That must be a reference to the Pacquiao-Mayweather boxing match. It has more significance than you seel willing to acknowledge.
God will help him win says Manny
Pacquiao lost, therefore God does not exist.
I think this most revealing thing is the ridiculous focus on who won. Even to PZ, who portrayed this humorously in comparison to a boxing match.
PZ – who is trying to trouble you?
I am pointing out where Chomsky is wrong because he is wrong. Why didn’t you point it out if you recognized it and were concerned about being fair?
@llewelly
I made the point that those speculations were not credible, to illustrate the point that his intentions are not known and only guessed at. That’s not a straw man. If you share Chomsky’s apparent ability to read the mind of his ideological foes perhaps you can enlighten me on Clinton’s precise motives.
@Hank_Says
I’m not criticizing you personally. If not misplaced tribalism, why can no-one concede that Chomsky fails to admit the charge of moral equivalence?
This is glaring and obvious to all surely.
But what distinguishes us from many of our enemies is that this indiscriminate violence appalls us.
If Sam Harris really thinks no one in the Muslim world is appalled by either US violence against them, or terrorist acts in the name of their religion, or ISIL’s recent actions, then he’s even more of a self-righteous, self-serving bigot than I had previously thought. There are PLENTY of people in just about every Muslim country who have no more use for al Qaeda than we have for Dick Cheney — and this has been obvious since 9/11.
Sam Harris is nothing but an attention-whoring hatemonger.
Chomsky made me learn something, so he won in my mind. Harris didn’t make me learn anything, and on top of that showed himself to be an idiot, so he lost.
Both might have taught me something, and then both would have won. But that’s not what happened.
I want to see a rematch. Not of this, but between Bambi and Godzilla. Bambi was too young during that first match, and went down in the first round, this is true, but I think with the right training and having grown into a better weight class, Bambi’s chances have at least tripled. Add in the “lord of the forest” aspect, we really don’t know what sort of nature magic Bambi is capable of now. Godzilla’s got that nuclear breath thing going for it, but Bambi might be able to, I dunno, seal Godzilla away in some sort of tree, or even purify it. I say the time has come!
Raging Bee #209
Harris said “what distinguishes us from many of our enemies”, and then you proceeded to compare the US with “the Muslim world”. Don’t you think Harris had something narrower in mind when he said “our enemies” than “the Muslim world”? I certainly do. I think he was talking about terrorists, specifically al Qaeda, and no, I don’t think there were many people in al Qaeda appalled by 9/11. That’s the comparison Harris is making.
I read this exchange this morning and almost regurgitated milk from of my nose .. and I wasn’t even drinking milk. :—)
Wait…you’re a robot from the “Alien” movies, and Sam Harris’ bullshit still made you bleed through your nose? That’s saying something…
drewvogel,
That’s a false comparison. How many people in Al Qaeda where appalled at the Sudan bombings by the US?
drewvogel: Well, DUH, of course there’d be no protest from the actual perpetrators of violence — just like there was no protest against the Iraq war from within the cabal who launched it. If that’s the comparison Harris was trying to make, then it’s pure bullshit, and it doesn’t prove we’re “better” than anyone else, in any way.
If Harris meant to refer specifically to islamist terrorists and not to the “muslim world” in general, perhaps he should not make a habit of appearing to conflate the two. Chomsky on the other hand has a long history of pointing out how important it is to distinguish between people and convenient categories, and between moral actors and states.
@drewvogel #212: and Chomsky would say two things: (a) so what? and (b) show me the evidence we actually feel bad.
This to me is a very odd discussion. Which is worse, killing a hundred thousand people through blatant, gross negligence or killing ten thousand on purpose? How do you even begin to compare these?
I strongly disagree that good intentions can swing the balance so far. In Harris’ hypothetical vaccine scenario, he says,
Again, I strongly disagree. I would not want someone so dangerously reckless anywhere near my team. Someone who has shown they are willing to accept a scenario where they do so vastly much more harm than good is not someone I want around at all. Dangerous idiots need to be kept away from sharp objects, no matter their basic intentions.
Clinton would have to have believed that the supposed chemical weapons were going to be used to do an incredible amount of harm for his action to have been justified, since, as Chomsky points out, it is inconceivable that he could have been unaware of the human cost the plant’s destruction would impose.
Given that awareness, I find it difficult to argue that his intentions were even “good” at all.
hughharris
1. Who’s that Giliel guy?
If you mean me, there’s a second L at the end of the nym. Also, your colours are showing. Last time I took a moment to reflect upon my gender identity I was still the same cis woman I was when I took that fucking picture that is my fucking avatar.
2. What obscenities? Or is it the word fuck that bothers you?
3. What ad hominems? Really, how about some evidence?
Really? From whose perspective? From the perspecive of the Sudanese people who did not commit any crime except for living in Sudan and who were killed by the unjustified actions of the USA? How is bombing civilian targets in foreign countries because you think it might help your own agenda not terrorism?
Because he doesn’t do so? Why on earth should Chomsky admit to doing something that only exists in your and Harris’ mind? How often does Chomsky has to say that he doesn’t consider them morally equivalent for you to accept his words?
Let’S turn it around: why can’t you accept that Chomsky simply does not answer the questions of abstract moral values and instead focusses on the issue of real human suffering?
Interesting that Harris talks of Chomsky’s ‘telepathy’. Perhaps he was being serious? After all, Harris did once write:
“There also seems to be a body of data attesting to the reality of psychic phenomena, much of which has been ignored by mainstream science.”
it remains a lesser crime
Here’s a hint: if you find yourself ranking atrocities, you’re probably acting as an apologist for one. There is no other reason to rank atrocities. A moral person ought to avoid trying to say that two lesser wrongs make one bigger one, or any such broken calculus.
hughharris:
Now what did I say before?
Here, I do not disagree that intent is difficult to discern. On the contrary, I think it’s ridiculous to assign great moral importance to it, in part because it is difficult to discern.
And yes, Chomsky does overestimate his ability to discern intent, and does downplay the uncertainties. That is quite different from my position, so you have erected another straw man.
@220 dereksmear
Fuck me, for realsies?
Clinton’s motives cannot be exactly be determined. If you accept Chomsky’s version then they were extremely bad. For his own political gain, indifferent to the lives of Africans, and in full knowledge there were no chemical weapons. However, there are conflicting reports on this. Bin laden had some ownership of the plant and there was unconfirmed evidence of nerve gas precursors
Table salt is a nerve gas precursor. So is bleach. So are ethanol and methanol. It’s probably impossible to set up a drug plant without having process chemicals that can be described as “nerve gas precursors.” The “nerve gas” situation is very similar to today’s “meth making supplies” or “drug paraphrenalia” – a spoon is heroin paraphrenalia, and sudafed is a meth making supply in today’s war on drugs. I believe the accusation was that the Shifa plant was geared up to make VX (ironically, a British WMD)
My bet would be that Clinton was more ignorant and opportunistic than malicious. It would have been the CIA that identified it as a chemical weapons facility, and they would have no doubt been highly certain except for a few weasel-words in critical places in their report. But that’s mostly irrelevant because the US claimed it was retaliation for the embassy bombing the same way Bin Laden claimed in his 1998 fatwa that indiscriminate killings of Americans was justified as retaliation for the American presence in the holy land, the blockade of Iraq, and America’s support for Israel.
In other words, Clinton and Bin Laden were both horrible people, who recommended indiscriminate killing of non-involved bystanders as retaliation for something someone else did. It doesn’t take a moral philosopher of Sam Harris’ great stature to tell you that killing someone who wasn’t involved to punish another person’s action is fucking wrong. There’s your moral equivalence.
azhael, #223
Yes, it was in End of Faith.
Shermer: ghosts!
Harris: bending spoons!
Much Thought. Wow. Really skepticism. Such inquiry.
hughharris:
Oh, of course. It’s only terrorism if it happens to white Americans, right?
1856 Scalping the Indians of California: GOOD! Bounty Paid! $7.00 per each male, female or child. (no limit) (in 2014 dollars)
1968 My Lai Massacre: BAD! Condemn the atrocity!
2013 Double Tap Funerals: AWESOME! HEROIC! Awards for Everyone!
Not to put too fine of a point on it.
Also, hughharris
If you think that unconfirmed evidence of something that might in the future be turned into nerve gas is good enough reason for you to kill several thousand Africans, you really place very little value on the lives of Africans.
The words “morally bancrupt” comes to mind.
Say you had bad information and bombed the plant, sincerely thinking you were taking out a nerve gas plant. Then you discover it’s making baby formula (just for instance). The least you could do after your fuck-up is to rebuild the plant!
Meanwhile, the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory was providing about half of Sudan’s medicines, and was the only facility producing TB medicine for about 100,000 people. The bombing, and subsequent sanctions against Sudan left Sudan without any supplies of the malaria treatment drug chloroquine. The bombing also resulted in the halt of a bunch of relief efforts (through fear of retaliation).
So, basically, you could claim that the US government was completely unaware of the consequences of destroying a critical medical facility in a struggling nation, in which case you must answer how that ignorance makes the actions more moral than it otherwise would have been. It’s not like the government lacks the resources to do a cost/benefits analysis.
Or, you could claim that this condemnation of potentially tens of thousands of Sudanese civilians to a slow death through lack of medical supplies was justified because a possible terrorist-connected facility that might have been synthesizing chemical weapons was destroyed, in which case you must answer how the mere possibility of terrorist activity balances out the massive effect on the Sudanese population.
You better have a very good explanation for what you mean by “terror,” because the thought that a foreign country with massive firepower can turn those weapons on your critical facilities with even the barest whiff of terrorist ties, and the rest of the world will either do nothing or support them, is truly terrifying.
I read this whole thing yesterday, and all I could feel was shame. Sam Harris was one of the guys who got me into atheism, and I have actually recommended his books to people (though not in several years). At this point he’s just a bumbling buffoon who can’t get out of his own way. Shame on him, and shame on (past) me.
*the thought that a foreign country with massive firepower and little to no apparent understanding of your local conditions can turn those weapons…
Harris and his fanbois moaning about tone is hilarious.
Harris has called Maz Hussain ‘special’ . He’s labelled Greenwald ‘a sociopath’ and a ‘scandal’ and mocked him as “guy blogging in his underpants, in Brazil, with his 10 dogs, and his boyfriend.”. Harris calls Scott Atran ‘preening and delusional’, and Sean Carroll’s writing ‘stupidity’. Harris refers to Julian Assange as a ‘creepy bastard’. Abby Martin’s comments are ‘a firehose of bullshit’. P.Z. Myers is ‘the shepherd of the internet trolls’. He’s called Reza Aslan a liar, bloviating, assumes he’s being deliberately misleading, and compares him to Genghis Khan.
That’s all fair game. But when Chomsky refers to Harris’ arguments as ‘ludicrous’ and ’embarrassing’, well, that’s just too much. Diddums.
Chris J:
Seems pretty damn terrifying and terrorizing to me as well. What we’re hearing in argument boils down to “if it involves those others, it ain’t terror.” It’s a despicable attitude, and one responsible for a whole lot of terror.
Dereksmear @ 233:
My, my. One might be tempted to think Mr. Harris was born in 2007, rather than 1967.
numerobis
The very, very least you can do is actually admitting you fucked up; but even that is too much for the morally superior US of A.
its delusional to say it’s worse than terror
It’s immoral to rank atrocities.
dereksmear@233:
To be fair, there’s some support for that contention.
zenlike@236: true. I guess at least they did the less-than-least which is to at least not claim the event as a triumph of America Fuckyeahism.
Some of these ticking-bomb scenarios are ridiculous. And so are the motivation for advancing them. It often feels like the proposers are trying to get their opponents to admit to any possible flaw, at which time their entire house comes crumbling down. And the proposer gets a pass on all other arguments. Which says mire about their way of thought than they should admit.
Me, I am kind of old school. A good person steps up, does the best they can, and takes responsibility afterward. If you want to push a fat guy in front of a trolley to save ten people, you by God take the penalty for causing his death. His death was needed, but so was your ostracism and jail sentence. If you bomb a mecical facility to stop terrorists, you damn well replace the medicines, and you resign in disgrace.
A lot of the trolley shit sounds like the guys who want to blame victims for being raped, but want to be free to have drunken sex with drunken strangers, with absolutely no consequences to themselves. That is not how a gentleman conducts himself, dudes.
Harris and his fanbois moaning about tone is hilarious.
I suspect that Harris chose to debate Chomsky because he thought he’d have an easy time bashing a washed-up academic has-been — and then he had to fall back on tone-trolling because Chomsky turned out to be a tougher opponent than Harris expected.
dereksmear #233:
There’s a high jackass quotient among the people that Harris has dissed, though I’m not sure what Sean Carroll did to Harris to get the ‘stupid’ tag. I mean I like Abby Martin’s politics, but it seems pretty certain that she’s a 9/11 Truther, while Aslan and Greenwald are both shifty characters.
What are you referring to?
I am compelled to ask, because by fucking god, there has been a lot of failed attempts at character assassination in this thread.
I’ve never much cared for Noam Chomsky, but you, sir, have changed my mind.
Also, I really have loved the “defenses” that have been mustered on behalf of Harris. A very telling avoidance towards addressing the substance of the arguments, especially the ones quoted, at length, in the fucking original post. Endlessly fascinating, truly.
@241
You’re right, mate. I suppose ad hom attacks are OK when Harris does it.
{Why did I press that?}[restart]
I didn’t know that Harris had gone apeshit over Sean Carroll’s critique of his “science can answer moral questions” thesis. Then Sean calmly takes Harris to the woodshed — repeatedly. Another Harris fuck-up of gigantic proportions. Why is he still taken seriously?
Sam Harris is that guy who, when a woman tweets “All rape is wrong, period” replies frantically “BUT WHAT IF THERE’S A WIZARD??11?!???11???”
Why is Harris taken seriously still? My question: Why was he ever? Seriously, I understood why Dawkins was: Blunt language, science creds. I understood why Hitchens was: Skilled with polemics. I never understood why Harris was, how he fit into the Four Horsemen, or why he got higher billing than Dennett. I swear he was just in the right place at the right time, and he has been riding the wave of that initial good fortune ever since. But, of course, that isn’t quite right. It also ignores the silver spoon in his mouth that he was born with
I will never look at The Golden Girls the same way again.
What if you had to watch The Golden Girls the same way as before, in one big marathon session, or else fifteen cute kittens would be murdered? What about that, anteprepro, huh, have you considered that?
Well, I liked this very much
I could spend time replying to hugh harris’s latest idiotic opinions, but it seems a waste of time since he is so immersed in toxic masculinity that he cannot tell the difference between murdering innocent people (mostly children) in a foreign country for no rational reason beyond looking tough for the media, and flying planes into towers and the pentagon because they symbolize the money and military power before people mindset that they are fighting. Both of these things are morally abhorrent, but I do think that wanton murder + betraying your sworn oath of office+ using your political power to prevent the UN from investigating it at all, is in fact more abhorrent than wanton murder by individuals who have declared war on your country. I’ll just leave this link about the event here, along with this quote from one of the Sudanese citizens.
and this one
Tethys:
This is more crucial than the majority of Americans realize or understand. Yes, the events of 9/11 were awful, and it was terrorism, and shook Americans up no end, because unlike the rest of the world, we had not been on the receiving end of all too regular terrorism. There’s a sense that no matter what happens in the rest of the world, America should always be immune. We won’t get anywhere at all until the majority of Americans, and the American government figures out that we are part of the world, not apart and above everyone else.
“Here’s a hint: if you find yourself ranking atrocities, you’re probably acting as an apologist for one.”
Right – are you applying this logic to me, Chomsky or everyone else on this thread who has compared them? In making the claim of moral equivalence that’s exactly what Chomsky did, and the question debated here is whether that claim is justified, with most accepting that it is.
So the fact that no-one can concede the point is hypocrisy. The spurious denial on account of him saying it’s worse is laughable.
“It’s delusional to say it’s worse than terror
It’s immoral to rank atrocities.”
Yes sure, as Chomsky clearly intended with his woeful comparisons.
Chomsky 12/9/01
“The September 11 attacks were major atrocities. In terms of number of victims they do not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably killing tens of thousands of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it). Not to speak of much worse cases, which easily come to mind.”
I never understood why Harris was, how he fit into the Four Horsemen
According to http://old.richarddawkins.net/pages/staff Robin Cornwell, Dawkin’s mistress, cooked up the idea. I would guess that the other horsemen were selected as fitting comfortably within the shade cast by Dawkins.
Caine
Yes, I concur. One of the motivations for selecting those particular targets was to terrorize the US, the other was to lure the US into armed conflict in Afghanistan. I see no functional difference between the 911 suicide bombers, and the US policy of shock and awe. from wiki
So yeah, lets call our terrorism shock and awe, because that makes it so much better for all the dead innocent people in Iraq/Iran/Sudan/Afghanistan etc.
Ah fuck, the idiot is still spewing nonsense.
Except that Chomsky never claimed any sort of moral equivalence. That idea is simply more of Sam Harris wanking on endlessly about his own misconceptions of Chomsky. Over here in the real world we can condemn both actions as immoral atrocities. Logic dictates that we hold elected leaders to much higher standards than we hold terrorists acting on their own behalf. Logic also dictates that if you are the President of the United States , supposed leader of the democratic free world who literally holds the key to the worst weapons ever invented, and has nearly unlimited resources at your disposal, that you don’t bomb civilians in foreign countries that have nothing to do with the bombings of US embassies in other foreign countries and then do nothing to rectify the crime.
Tethys
If you think insults help your case keep frothing at the mouth. If this is tone trolling, I plead guilty.
Perhaps read what I said again and see where you have entirely missed the point.
“Over here in the real world ” – Is Africa the real world too? Would you denigrate the opinions of under-privileged countries too or does that offend your irrational sensibilities?
Why do you so absurdly deny Chomsky claims moral equivalence and then argue, pace Chomsky, for the same moral equivalence? If the claim is really a reasonable one, and a fair comparison, why not just admit it?
I have clearly shown that he claims not only equivalence, but that al-Shifa was worse, so it is a basic denial of the facts for you and others to suggest otherwise. And quite bizarre.
You are guilty. Who the fuck cares what an insipid fuckwit thinks if all they can do is avoid evidence and repeat claims, like you are doing. I stopped listening to your drivel long ago due to terminal stupidity.
Question to the horde, which hero worshipers are more pathetic? Those of Harris, Dawkins, or the late Hitchens. Given today, Harris’s worshipers are the most pathetic.
I agree, Nerd of. Hitchens was a great writer, Dawkins was a pretty fair writer, and Harris is a Dawkins fan.
Since hugh is simply going to keep avoiding the question and repeating false claims just as sam did with Chomsky, I will just quote Chomsky’s reply to the preposterous moral equivalence quagmire:
hughharris @ # 253 & 257 – do you know the meanings of the words “ranking” and “equivalence”???
Hint: not synonyms.
Pierce R. Butler
“I have clearly shown that he claims not only equivalence, but that al-Shifa was worse” I suspect that answers your charge.
If your cohorts here are clinging to the facile objection that claiming al-Shifa was worse than 9/11 is not moral equivalence then why can’t they just plain say so and admit it.
How can Chomsky claim offense at Harris for characterizing his opinion as LESS extreme than what it is. It only makes sense if he is deliberately being obtuse.
Frankly, I don’t see what evidence I am avoiding and why disagreement needs to result in profanity laced insults. But then I could be talking to 12 years olds – who knows.
hughharris #262
oh, snap.
Ggod one.
Umm… moral equivalence. Does that not mean that the two things under discussion are the same, morally?
Chomsky explored the similarities and differences between 9/11 and the Al Shifa bombing. He provided an argument for why the latter could be regarded as a worse atrocity than the former.
If that counts as a moral equivalence to you, fine. You have a definition of “moral equivalence” that encompasses comparing two morally bad events and concluding that one was worse, ethically speaking, than the other.
However. You can’t argue, as Harris tried to, that Chomsky didn’t address that criticism.
Just because you think Chomsky is extreme and wrong doesn’t mean that he didn’t address that criticism.
You seem to be taking as an indisputable premise that it’s unconscionable to compare the actions of Pres. Clinton to the actions of bin Laden. There’s no rational reason to regard this comparison as unconscionable; it reeks of USA tribalism. Just like Harris’ entire oeuvre on terrorism and foreign policy does.
Well, how would it reflect on you if you couldn’t deal with an argument advanced by a child whose capacity for critical reasoning is not fully developed, simply because that child cursed a lot? Not well, in my opinion. But maybe I’m just 12.
Bonus swears just in case Hugh needs an excuse to dismiss me out of hand too: Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. There. Now everything else I said is irrelevant.
They aren’t morally equivalent. The fact that you, a minor thinker, and follower of another minor thinker, believe so, is meaningless to those of use who have gone beyond the meager bigotry offered by you and Harris. PATHETIC.
@264, SallyStrange:
De-lurking to have a chuckle at that.
It’s telling that anyone who disagrees with or criticises Harris (whether hugh or Sam) in this thread is assumed to be one or a combination of foul-mouthed poopyhead, ignorant tween punching above their weight or hardwired Chomsky fanatic.
Because there’s not even a remote possibility that, in this specific conversation at least, Harris simply performed poorly and ended up looking foolish while Chomsky argued competently and with good reason refused to board Sam’s magic carpet ride.
It’s also telling that I don’t see nearly as many accusations of “fanboy” being hurled at hugh as hugh has repeatedly hurled at others.
[re-lurking]
The part where we hold duly elected officials like Presidents to much higher ethical standards than Islamic terrorists.
Idiot does not qualify as profanity. Maybe if you would stop your dissembling fanboying over Harris and address the multiple criticisms to your whingeing on about moral equivalencies you would be getting less fucks of exasperation in the replies.
You could be a relative of Sam Harris, who knows? You certainly engage in discussion in the exact same obtuse and dishonest manner.
The most succinct and accurate summary of the exchange I’ve seen was this comment from someone called ” jemand” at Ian Welsh’s blog. I’ll quote it here because it was so on the nose and some of you might appreciate it.
“My take:
Sam Harris wanted to play. He wanted to play intellectual games surrounded by his comfy life using the raw materials of others lives as play toys and thought experiments. As a comfortable “big thinker” he wanted to play with another “comfortable big thinker” sharing his privileges, white, male, rich, western, famous– a fair opponent for a little diverting mental play!
Noam Chomsky didn’t want to play, didn’t really see the lives of others as little toys to mine for raw ideas while constructing thought experiments. They were real people, really living, their one lives they ever get…”
Yep that about covers it. Move along, folks, nothing more to see here…
Al Queda attacked the WTC in order to weaken the US economy and hence its military (Remember? The Pentagon was attacked too!), in a desperate ploy to reduce its imperialistic ambitions and its continuous meddling in the Middle East that has costed so many lives!
Hey, it’s easy to play this intentions game.
F.O.
whether it was the stated or unstated intention of Al Qaeda it has been demonstrated that though it took a considerable length of time the effect on our economy has been exactly that. That the middle east is not in any better state with regards liberty and democracy is arguably true even with the “Arab spring”. there is just as much terrorism as before though they use different names and are active in some different places.
there are still some people who have reputations of being “the smart guys” and those who just consider themselves “the Smart Guys” some have been living long enough to have seen these ideas and policies play out more than once and come to a similar result and still they think our reaction with military force no matter how brutal or sophisticated is still the best thing we can do. They are demonstrating the same mental processes that think that the way to stop crime in the U.S. is to shoot down poor unarmed black guys for disobeying the cops!
Or blowup some chosen target( it don’t matter what ) because the electorate wants to see tough action and the CIA said so.
uncle frogy
Ok well I guess you guys got me beat I admit it.
I accept the claim of several of you that Chomsky is not claiming moral equivalence, whilst generally accepted to be logical fallacy of maintaining two things that are similar (not precisely the same), usually used to advance or apologize for one group or ideology over another.
This means he is saying al-Shifa is considerably worse than 9/11, and also that his position has changed for 2001 when he said:
Chomsky: “Assuming so, in the brief message Hitchens may have seen, I did not elaborate, assuming — correctly, judging by subsequent interchange — that it was unnecessary: the recipients would understand why the comparison is quite appropriate.”
And: “To regard the comparison to Sept. 11 as outrageous is to express extraordinary racist contempt for African victims of a shocking crime,…” (http://humanities.psydeshow.org/political/chomsky-2.htm)
Al-Shifa –
cruise missiles kill 1 person, wound 11. Wipe out 50% of Sudan’s medicines. Possible catastrophic consequences of this for Sudan were averted. However, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders all investigated and found no evidence of mass deaths as a result of the bombing. Relief efforts manned by US people aimed at supplying food to areas of Sudan gripped by famine caused by that country’s ongoing civil war were curtailed which increased the casualties.
9/11 –
4 planes are hijacked containing 276 people. These planes are flown into buildings in order to try and extract the maximum civilian loss of life, and destabilize the US economy. Nearly 3,000 people dead. 18,000 subsequent illnesses due to toxic dust. $40 billion in insurance losses, U.S. stocks lost $1.4 trillion in valuation for the week. NYC’s GDP declined by $27.3 billion to 2002. 18,000 small businesses were destroyed or displaced. Add to that the destabilization of the international economy, increases in poverty due to World Bank exposure, and the aggressive stance taken by the US resulting in further conflicts.
So, Chomsky’s thinks al-Shifa is much worse than 9/11 which is a position inconsistent with his earlier one, and one that seems contrary to the evidence. Of course if you asked him, he would deny holding such a position.
Chomsky makes a false comparison which Harris heinously fails to identify. What if Sudan wiped out half of the US’s medical supplies? The implication is that this would be morally equivalent. However, Sudan had 28.1 million people in 2001, USA had 292.8 million. So say both lost half their people. By Chomsky’s lights Sudan’s loss of 14 million, is equivalent to USA’s loss of 146.4 million people. So he is effectively saying that one Sudanese life is worth 10 US lives, if he’s saying they are morally equivalent.
But of course, he would deny it wouldn’t he?
Damn, now that hughharris knows that I’m a feeeeeeeeemale, they won’t reply to me anymore. I hope they don’t find out about other commenters…
+++
cplcam
That gets to the crux of it. Lives vs thought experiments.
Slow down, Hewie. You haven’t yet demonstrated that you understand the difference between a comparison and an equivalence, or whether you can tell when the tu quoque fallacy has been committed or not.
You pasted that from Wikipedia, but you overlooked the “citation needed” there. CITATION NEEDED. You’re claiming that eliminating 50% of the supply of medicine, including all veterinary, TB and malaria medicines, will cause no increase in deaths? That’s an extraordinary claim, and prompts the question why they needed to be making those medicines in the first place. That you accept unsupported claims minimizing the deaths–claims that don’t pass the smell test–demonstrates that you care less about those deaths than you do about justifying the US, or Harris, or yourself.
You also failed to address the fact that Sudan repeatedly called for an investigation of the site, and the US repeatedly refused, and blocked such investigation by the UN.
You haven’t addressed the fact that the plant was not owned by Bin Ladin, nor anyone with close ties to him.
You haven’t addressed to point that crippling a nation’s pharmaceutical output on the basis of unsubstantiated belief that they might possibly be doing something bad is morally reprehensible unless you think of the African victims as on part with an anthill to be exterminated.
And you haven’t addressed the point that failing to make reparations, and restore their ability to make these medicines, demonstrates callous disregard of human life.
I have a hard time understanding the logic of Harris here about the intentions-are-magic argument.
If you agree that this is true (which I don’t) then surely you have to grant the same thing to Al-Quaeda for 9/11. After all, in their minds they did the right thing didn’t they? They surely believe that they have the moral high-ground given that god is on their side and that they believe that killing infidels is a very acceptable moral choice, if not an imperative one.
What am I missing?
—
@ Giliell
I would love to talk more about the differences between the US and Europe regarding Holocaust denial and related free-speech legal issues.
My position has evolved about this: I’m French and use to accept the laws here regarding free-speech on those matter. Well, I still accept them of course but I now tend to agree with the US version of “the solution to bad speech is not to ban it etc.”.
On the other hand, I fully understand where those laws come from. When your (my) country has actively participated in the Holocaust, those laws seem born out of very good intentions indeed.
Anyway, I’m not really articulate about it but would love to hear more about it from you (and other people obviously).
–> Please tell me if this is a derail and if I should take the discussion elsewhere <–
In re SAAD (No 121): You needn’t limit yourself to the end of WWII. Who wrote this? when?
How about this:
This was more or less official doctrine in pre WWII in the US and UK.
@Masked Avenger
I am not arguing that the bombing of al-Shifa is worse than the 9/11 atrocity – the onus of proof is on those wishing to make the case which would entail evidence. However…
Chomsky: “according to the estimates made by the German Embassy in Sudan and Human Rights Watch, probably led to tens of thousands of deaths.”
Not so says Human Rights Watch. No investigation done. http://www.salon.com/2002/01/22/chomsky_4/
If anyone has information on the total amount of deaths caused they can provide it – it’s not up to me to furnish your argument. There was a famine and civil war going on in the country at the time.
Your other comments are complaints about the US not redressing the aftermath, but you don’t seem to think any of that should apply to the terrorists. Why is that? Would you ask Al-Qaeda to make reparations? Does not the fact that you would only expect the US to behave morally after the event indicate their intentions (at least in your mind) are not purely evil. I’ll grant you all of your points regarding the failure of the US and note that I believe the Sudan bombing was morally reprehensible, politically motivated, callous, based on poor intelligence, hasty, with a blatant disregard for human life. Someone earlier stated we expect a better standard from the US President in general. Yes we should. But it’s a fallacy to say that your expectations heighten the immorality of actions committed by the US in comparison to others.
@tomfrog
Yes that’s what Chomsky was saying. Everyone claims benign motives. But when he’s claiming 9/11 was just a run of the mill act of terror, no worse than what the US does regularly, he needs to consider the morality of the reasons it was done. Just because they “think” they are doing good, doesn’t mean they are doing good, nor does it excuse their actions. The key point is that the beliefs of the Islamist extremist groups drive them to commit the most morally bankrupt actions. At a certain point we have to make a value judgement of what is “moral”, and one presumes observing the rights to life and liberty of all races and cultural groups is key value. Chomsky claims Clinton’s supposed “indifference” is worse than the calculated and deliberate mass murder enacted by the terrorists. I disagree with that, and note that if Clinton had with the same beliefs towards the Sudanese as terrorists have towards the US, that they are infidels and should be wiped from the face of the Earth, that the outcomes would have been devastatingly worse.
None of this excuses the often horrific actions the US sometimes is involved in. It doesn’t make it OK for the US to invade countries, it doesn’t excuse the Iraq war, drone strikes, it doesn’t justify racial profiling, it doesn’t justify pre-emptive strikes, it doesn’t excuse prejudice, and it doesn’t mean you should vote for Ted Cruz. .It doesn’t mean I don’t think highly of Chomsky in general, but I believe he’s wrong and irresponsible in this case. IT doesn’t mean the US is a rogue state or a terrorist state. I don’t think that’s true either, but I gather most people on this thread do.
Simply observing the evidence and coming to a rational conclusion does not mean we need to change political allegiances.
If you seek to claim moral equivalence between two actions then you need to justify your position, and that is what is sadly lacking in Chomsky’s analysis. I think his evasions indicate that he knows he’s wrong and won’t admit it. Same as he didn’t admit it when he defended the Khmer Rouge.
Yawn, evidenceless fanbois are dismissed as nothing but asslickers, and unable to acknowledge the evidence that their hero is tainted as a bigot.
Try taking it outside of philosophy to reality. You lose.
Giliell:
And here I mentioned up thread that I was of the estrogen vibe. Oh no! How shall I ever get on without yet more stupid opinions from a distinctly uninformed dude?
James Maiewski @ 275:
I think you may have missed a tiny bit of context – SAAD’s remark had to do with what I and Zenlike brought up about what Harris said about the My Lai massacre (starting at post # 51). However, those are pertinent quotes, thank you.
From Tethys’ quote at 251:
But, but, but, if we let them (Iranians, Cubans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Congolese, etc.) elect their own leaders in a democratic way, they might elect people we (the US government, that is (well, along with the 1/3 or so of USAnians who agree with the GOP/TeaParty/Fox News/NRA politics)) don’t like and they we’d have to go in and overthrow them and set up a nice, friendly dictator (see Vietnam, Cuba, Guatamala, Haiti, etc.). We (the US govnernment and military that is) only want other nations to have democracy if they elect the people we want them to elect.
@hughharris, #276
Well, isn’t it the point actually? I mean, if a group of people genuinely think that it is moral to kill civilians, doing so should be deemed less worse than if you think it is immoral to kill civilians and you do anyway. (again, if you accept the intent-is-magical argument).
AQ thinks it is good to kill people and they do –> this is good.
The US doesn’t think it is good to kill people and they do –> this is not good.
Seems to me that with this argument you cannot use your own moral to judge the actions of people with different morals than yourself.
I may very well not make myself very clear and given what people sometimes defend I feel I have to say that I personally find abhorent the killing of people. I’m merely trying to be the devil’s advocate here and doing so actually condemn the devil very badly IMO.
Am I making any sense or should I revert back to lurking?
Thanks, PZ, for giving me one of the best laughs I have had in a long time!
‘Then he (Harris) repeats his claim that he can “rank order the callousness and cruelty”, making al-Qaeda the king of evil, while a Clinton conscious of the deaths he would cause is less evil, and a Clinton who acted justly, but happened to kill a bunch of people accidentally, is less evil still.’
Also the bit about Harris announcing he will take his ball and go home!
tomfrog
I left you a reply in Thunderdome as not to derail this thread.
+++
Cool. No investigation (as prevented by the USA), no casualties! It’s that easy!
Apparently the “tens of thousands” estimate is
Yet Chomsky himself said:
http://web.archive.org/web/20011011224010/http://www.zmag.org/chomreply2.htm
Looks like Chomsky is claiming to know the specific amount of people who died. But he knows that people died as a result of this.
And in fact, the article in question claims that Chomsky claimed that Human Rights Watch gave the tens of thousands of people estimate. He did in an interview. He either misspoke or did legitimately make that mistake and has since corrected it, because this is what he says on the subject four years after that interview, in writing: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200601–.htm
re Ogvorbis #280
Yup. Tom Lehrer (in “Send The Marines”)
For might makes right,
And till they’ve seen the light,
They’ve got to be protected,
All their rights respected,
Till somebody we like can be elected.
Man… just look at the detail hughharris goes into while describing 9/11, and the detail avoided while describing the Al-Shifa bombings at 271. Hell, they even pin the death toll of the Iraq war and the subsequent destabilization of the middle east on the hijackings, while completely avoiding mention of any secondary or tertiary results of the bombings.
If you want to go that far, you might as well pin some of the blame for 9/11 on the Al-Shifa bombings:
I think hugh is very ignorant of history. As alluded to by Orgvorbis, the US has a long and sordid record of killing off the democratically elected leaders of other countries. Patrice Lumumba is the first example that springs to mind, but the list of people murdered by the collusion of oil companies and governments is quite long and well documented. wiki is a good place to start to understand how US foreign policies could make people hate the US.
Yep, the same BP that is responsible for the gross negligence that is the gulf oil disaster has a long history of interference in mid-east governments up to and including murdering people for profit. Such morality!
Wow, yet another tu quoque argument! FYI there is a book and a movie. Manufacturing Consent It contains a long , nuanced and very unfavorable analysis of the Khmer within the political context in SE Asia. Salon has picked up this story, and the comments are pretty similar to the discussion here. I got a good chuckle out of this one by jonvaljon.
hughharris:
But you have already been told that any investigation was prevented by the US.
What you are doing here is gloating: “ha ha, you don’t have any evidence, because the US prevented the investigation!” You know they covered up an atrocity, and you are happy that helps you win an argument. You are like the Republicans who defund NASA for studying global warming.
Now, if they had thought the number of deaths might be low, they would have allowed it. They believed there were plenty of deaths, but you are nonethless eager to act as an apologist for them.
@tomfrog
Yes, that is what the debate should be about. We of course cannot just assign good based on what people profess to be good intentions. And yes, it does come down to value judgements. But we do have models such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is full of value judgements on how we should assign rights to one another.
@lleqwelly
I already refuted that point – check out the link to Leo Casey’s piece which explodes this myth.
It seems questionable to me for so many to want to defend a claim Chomsky refuses to admit to making with evidence he also admits not to having. I also think it’s poor form for PZ Myers to deliver a glib verdict on a discussion he obviously knows nothing about.
For the rest my last word on this is here – http://rationalrazor.com/chomskyharris-follow-up/
I like last words.
A lot of people are saying “What was Harris thinking, to even attempt to debate Chomsky?”
If Harris’s intention was as he claimed, to engage in honest conversation with Chomsky, then there’s nothing stupid or ill-considered about engaging with someone smarter than you. Those are the best kind to engage with, actually.
Unfortunately, whatever his actual intent, it wasn’t magic enough to imbue Harris with the honesty he’d need in order to carry off such a conversation. He showed himself incapable of admitting his own errors at all in the course of engaging Chomsky, apparently even to himself. The closest he came was to admit that he hadn’t actually done any research into Chomsky’s views beyond the reading of a single book, which doesn’t reflect well on him and casts doubt on the honesty of that professed intent.
It wasn’t until after he’d published the exchange and gotten roasted for it that he grudgingly admitted to them, and in terms that trivialize the magnitude of his really quite serious mischaracterisations of Chomsky’s previous addressing of the issues.
I refer of course to the postscript, in which Harris, after saying it would be unfair to further argue his viewpoint after closing the conversation, spends the better part of a thousand words further arguing his viewpoint.
“Had this been a debate, I’d have been happy to have Chomsky at his angriest. ” — Harris’ Postscript
… because then I’d have wiped the floor with ‘im!
Hugh Harris, fuckwitted hero worshipper:For the rest my last word on this isWho gives a shit what a bigot defender like you thinks, since you obviously are incapable of doing reality checks that would refute both your and Harris’ idiocy? You proved nothing, and nobody cares.
Gack, borked the blockquote in 294.
Marcus Ranem #237
It’s immoral to rank atrocities.
I just don’t understand this. Just now, I was watching a report on Democracy Now about how Israeli soldiers were told by their officers during last year’s war in Gaza to fire indiscriminately, and that everyone in a given area was presumed to be a militant. To me, this is much, much worse than individuals soldier getting carried away, or behaving carelessly or recklessly in the heat of combat. These rules of engagement, which were basically to shoot everyone, were concocted in advance and imposed on the soldiers. This was contrasted with what one of the soldiers says of the rules of engagement in another conflict, in which he was told that “If there is any doubt, there is no doubt,” which meant that he was not supposed to fire on anyone if he had any doubt at all that they were militants.
But if it’s immoral to rank atrocities, then is it immoral to say that a considered policy of indiscriminate killing is worse than a panicked outburst of indiscriminate killing? Is it immoral to say that a policy of “don’t fire unless you are certain” is preferable to a policy of “don’t worry, just fire”? I don’t think it is.
But then, what can “it is immoral to rank atrocities” possibly mean? If it doesn’t mean that all evil is equally evil, and it doesn’t mean that to say otherwise is also evil, then what else can it mean?
drewvogel
I think you are conflating the results with the cause. It isn’t immoral to judge/rank different actions as more or less atrocious. It is immoral to try and rank people dying horribly via bombs and bullets. The genocide of the Jews, the bombing of Japan, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor were all atrocities. We can rank the motivations and decisions that led to those actions as more or less moral, but to say that one group of deaths is more moral than the other is to deny those victims equal status as human beings.
Evil is a pretty subjective term, which is why we use terms like depraved indifference, and callous disregard. It means that the life of the child in Sudan who died due to contracting a horrible cattle disease is equal to the life of the firefighter who died in the tower collapse. The people who caused those things can be judged, but its inhumane to judge the victims.
Wow, this is giving me flashbacks to the discussion he had with Schneier, where Harris also showed off his massive incompetence. I didn’t really know much about Harris, but I remember thinking he was just kind of a silly fool in that debate.
PZ, this post is in the morning blog round-up at C&L; glad it will reach a wider audience.
If I do X, and I know that X will kill thousands of people, then it is morally wrong to do it.
If I do Y, and I believe that no-one will die, but thousands do die, then it is not as morally wrong as doing X.
What matter is not the intention, but whether or not I am aware of the consequences of the act. This isn’t the intention – this is more important than the intention, it’s the knowledge and the awareness of the consequences of the action.
@chris r- that’s true to an extent, but there’s also an expectation of how well-informed you are before doing X or Y. A person who does Z believing that no one will die because they haven’t bothered to thoroughly review the evidence that Z will have a lot of fatalities is pretty morally wrong.
Here’s another example of why I think Sam Harris is such a tool. Instead of challenging Glenn Greenwald on his ideas, he tries to discredit him as a journalist by referring to him in the following ad hominem ways (minute 3:30 of the video): ‘ … ‘basically I saw a guy who is just blogging in his underpants in Brazil with his 10 dogs and his boyfriend who was handed this story.’ OK… in how many ways is this despicable? Let’s count them: ‘blogging’ (Greenwald had at this time written for the Pulitzer Prize winning Guardian newspaper and had published several books); ‘in Brazil’ (ooh, a foreign country, sounds FOREIGN!); ‘with his 10 dogs’ (so Greenwald’s courageous animal activism is to be held against him?); ‘and his boyfriend’ (David Miranda, his life partner: a little casual homophobia to discredit your opponent?); ‘who was handed this story’ (when has Sam Harris ever bravely reported ANY kind of newsworthy info?). Why do people even read this guy’s books? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrjRnAkzhpU
@clevehicks:
yeah, good catch. I haven’t watched that video, but if he’s saying that GG was handed the story without any reference to the long work GG did to earn Snowden’s trust both before any communication with Snowden with his relentless, unusually consistent, carefully researched activist-writing, AND after first contact but before receiving the files when Snowden was feeling GG out before delivery.
yes, Snowden chose GG. It wasn’t that GG went looking for an informant with just this information b/c of a story in mind. But GG did quite a lot of work that was absolutely necessary to get Snowden to hand over that information because Snowden had huge concerns about his ability to trust most media outlets as well as most specific writers (independent or not) competent on military, intelligence, legal and democracy matters.
That’s a pretty snide, thoughtless, dishonest, unjustified and unworthy comment by Harris.
And if someone very cleverly tries to accuse me of hypocritically attacking Harris in an ad hominem way, I am criticizing public statements he has made about a journalist, not trying to discredit him based on mis-characterizations about his personal life, which, believe me, I have no interest in whatsoever.