I should go back to desecrating communion wafers. That’s less aggravating than pissing off a pack of uber-“rational” atheists. Quoting Sam Harris directly is an act of such disrespectful temerity that I’ve been flooded with messages that are mostly about how feminine I am, or how I possess a female reproductive tract, or my social status as a cuckold.
But I also get messages trying to explain how, in very polite terms, I am totally wrong on everything, and Harris is totally right, and here is the math to prove it. Here’s one example; the highlighting is all mine.
PZ, you’ve lost me on this one. I’ve always found Harris to be a voice of reason, even if he confounds your expectation of secularists having to be left wing. I’ve listened to the two hour podcast from which the quote you object to comes and I can’t find anything that doesn’t ring true or isn’t backed by the realities unfolding in world affairs.
But this is merely saying that reasonable people can disagree and remain civil. My more serious concern is that you are an emblem for the larger problem he illustrates on the intelligentsia-left; an almost craven inability to acknowledge the need to balance the West’s compassion with a realistic understanding of the consequences of that compassion.
The best example came from the podcast: imagine that for every 10,000 migrants, only 20 Muslim men are sufficiently radicalized to have the motivation and the ability to launch a Paris-scale attack. In truth the ratio is higher, but for arguments sake, this means ten Paris scale massacres per year per 100,000 migrants.
When put that way, who would want to shut down a rational conversation about whether we, in the west, are prepared to accept that? Or whether, if there is no way of screening radicals from legitimate migrants, how we can even in theory shorten our odds.
“But think of the children” I hear you reply. Well, in my own city of Sydney, the most recent attack was perpetrated by a 15 year old boy.
PZ, you’re dead wrong, and sadly I’ve seen your discourse descend over the years into demagoguery. Sam Harris is neither a bigot, nor is he off the mark in his commentary.
There’s nothing in the whole 2 hour podcast that doesn’t sound truthy or isn’t backed up by reality. Let’s examine the math.
He claims that every 10,000 Muslim migrants into a country will be accompanied by 20 radical Islamist men who will launch a Paris-type terrorist attack. He even says this is a conservative estimate.
Breitbart says the US admits 250,000 Muslim immigrants per year. That’s 25 massacres every year!
The National Review says it’s a much smaller number. 100,000 per year, but that there are 7 million Muslims in America. The country is apparently up in flames with 700 massive suicide bombing assaults.
World Net Daily says Obama has allowed 680,000 Muslims to invade the US. That makes him responsible for the 68 imaginary terror attacks that have killed thousands in the last few years. Thanks, Obama!
More credible sources do say there are about 100,000 Muslims entering the country each year…so if we accept that “realistic understanding” of the frequency of terrorists in that population, we ought to be suffering 10 serious, major terrorist events on the scale of the Paris attack every year.
We don’t. QED, my correspondent and Sam Harris are full of paranoid, racist shit.
Meanwhile, we have almost a million police officers on the street, good Americans all, and given recent events in Missouri, Chicago, and Minneapolis, they scare me far more than a desperate assortment of refugees who happen to believe in a different god than most of our trembling white citizens.
By the way, my thought as reading that fearful thought experiment wasn’t “Think of the children!” It was “Think of the human beings.” There are people suffering, and while some people’s minds leap to solving that with bombs and walls, I’d rather see something more humane and compassionate. I’d also like to see the West take some responsibility for what they’ve wrought.
Cenk Uygur nails Harris on his rhetorical deniability. Really, if you fall for his game of “here’s this evil thing I want you to think about, but I’m saying it’s evil, so don’t blame me if maybe we have to do it”, then you’re a fool.
That’s the problem with pulling numbers out of your ass. Your argument is shit.
I love people like this who think they are such uber-rationalists, yet they are apparently unaware that
Since 9/11 less than five refugees have been arrested for domestic terrorism.
One of Harris’ big problems re: his anti-Muslim bigotry is to inflate the threat of Islamic extremists in the United States, while simultaneously downplaying the role of domestic terrorism in this country. Radicalized, extremist white men pose a greater danger to the citizens of the United States than do Islamic extremists (and police officers pose a greater threat to the lives of PoC in the US than do Islamic extremists). Yet Harris doesn’t talk about profiling them. He doesn’t talk about having a conversation about what we should do about that problem. He reserves discussions of terrorism solely for Islamic extremism, which just isn’t anywhere near as big a problem as he irrationally thinks.
And I’m *still* waiting for that shitnozzle to explain how you can profile Muslims at airports in any non-visual way (and when you profile visually, it falls apart bc all Muslims don’t share similar physical characteristics, but if you think they’re all of Arab descent, you’d think they all do share similar physical characteristics-hence the racism inherent in anti-Muslim bigotry).
It amazes me how anyone can seriously try to reduce a major and complicated social, cultural and historical issue to a trite piece of basic maths. And not even maths with figures gleaned from accurate investigations, maths with figures made up on the spot based on a gut feeling.
I mean, the core of the issue here is the motivations of human beings. Why people choose to do what they do. It’s probably because I’ve encountered too many economists who think human behaviour can be reduced to simple numbers that I get so exasperated. Perhaps it’s my training as an ancient and medieval historian, focused on the history of ideas, that has predisposed me to seeing human motivations and choices as very complex products of all manner of imperfectly understood influences that aren’t often obvious from what they say and do. The idea that you can just blithely write off 10% or even 1% or 0.00001% of a specific group of people as “radicalized enough to commit atrocities” without examining their social situation, the cultural influences acting on them from all directions, or the economic realities of their lives seems facile in the extreme.
Admittedly some historians can be guilty of this too. The mistake tends to be in asking a very narrow question that the evidence to hand is not well suited to answer, but pressing ahead anyway through some arrogant belief in the power of pure thought and reason to wrestle valid conclusions from any data to hand.
This is such a good example of the kind of Jedi mind trick bullshit Harris himself pulls. There’s exactly zero justification for this 20/10,000 figure but, because he says his estimate is cautious, he comes off as being entirely reasonable even as spews dangerous Islamaphobic rhetoric.
I tend to agree that quoting Harris is disgusting.
QED, indeed.
If I may add: Sam Harris and his fan boys present themselves as uber rationalists yet have real trouble with a hallmark of rationalism, which is to be able to distinguish, to the best of our ability, causes from mere coincidences, correlations, etc. So, they decided that Islam — all of Islam, not denominations or sects, Sunnis, Shiites, Sufis, Bahais — is directly responsible for terrorism as if Islam is a specific virus that affects any and all that come in contact with it and becomes a full-fledged disorder for many; it’s ideological Ebola.
Islam may not be a race or ethnic group or gender or sexual orientation but the Sam Harris argument is the same distilled bigotry that assumes a causal relationship between a particular characteristic and behavior (I also suspect, although Harris sort of hides it, that since many Moslems are Arabs, pure racism is not far from his intellectual propensities).
But we *know*, with 100% certainty, that there at least two Cuban refugee anchor-baby sleeper agents that are plotting to take over the US Government and destroy the country.
Deport ’em all, let Castro sort ’em out.
I have admired Sam Harris in the past, but with your help I have been assessing whether he merits admiration. I find that on this occasion Harris has definitely lost me. Even if his logic was right (and it is not) that is no reason to try to maximize well-being in humans. The logic of the man is… cold. I would say he is like a Vulcan but I like Vulcans. He is more like a walking talking IBM computer.
I wonder if this thread will get covered in Harris Fanboy “thinky logic” poo like the one over at Dispatches did?
Using the modern meaning of the term “conservative” – i.e. paranoid, xenophobic, and entirely unmoored from reality – he’s right.
No bet, williamgeorge.
Neither Baha’is nor Muslims would be happy at the Baha’i Faith being called a sect of Islam, johnrockoford.
(Was one of those for over 35 years…)
Has Daniel Dennett said anything ridiculously wrong yet or has he been watching the other three “horsemen” in horror and spends every day telling himself to be quiet, please be quiet…?
Marcoli @8
No, his logic is not cold and he’s not like a walking talking IBM computer unless that computer is programmed to hide its trembling from all the fear and loathing it feels. If Harris was truly cold he wouldn’t be letting his emotions cloud his reasoning to this degree.
It’s a real pity – I could assume Sam Harris is rational, but since he looks Christian, and some Christians are radically opposed to reality, I have to assume he is too. It’s not that I’m profiling him as non-rational, mind you, just that I’m anti-profiling all non-Christian-looking people as slightly more rational.
(Trace amounts of sarcasm have been detected in the vicinity of this post – handle at your own risk.)
In what universe is it okay to allow ten thousand innocent human beings to suffer in permanent immigration limbo, or send them back to their home country to be killed, on the off chance that .2% of those people might someday commit violence were we to show them basic compassion?
I can’t wrap my mind around it. Even if one were to accept Harris’s premise, which I don’t, that’s still 9,980 human beings helped out of abject poverty, shuttled away from threat of imminent harm, and into safety, where they can put down roots, start over, contribute to the world in a positive manner. 9,980 human beings who aren’t radicalized, who don’t intend harm, who have done and will do nothing to deserve a lack of security, safety, or acceptance.
I honestly don’t think emotions are clouding Harris’s reasoning. He fully understands the implications of the arguments he makes. He’s a rhetorician; not a philosopher. He’s not actually trying to defend a logical position. He uses words like magical incantations (“of course I didn’t mean to profile muslims by race, gawsh”) and knows his faithful little acolytes will go out into the world and proselytize for him.
@4 Seven of Mine
Bingo.
Look at shinny shinny in my left hand while i use the right one to pull these numbers out of my arse…..ggggggñññññññ…..Ta daaaaaaaaaaa!!
So, given that Germany have taken in 150-200 thousand Syrian refugees, that means they must be suffering a Paris style massacre or two every month. They’re keeping that quiet, aren’t they?
“Neither Baha’is nor Muslims would be happy at the Baha’i Faith being called a sect of Islam”
Granted. But that’s the point. There are no religions per se, easily determined and distinguished taxonomically. What you have are flexible sects, moving within and away and entering and exiting each other. Muslims can’t agree who’s a Muslims and who isn’t, just like Christians (are Mormons Christians? How about the Catholics? Are they “true” Christians? Some Protestants don’t think so. What does Judeo-Christian mean? Is it a religion? A movement? A theological construct? What is it ? Opinions differ).
And that’s the point. There’s no such thing as all-encompassing Islam (or any other religion) as a cohesive, intellectually consistent and immutable political and cultural ideology. That’s why Islam doesn’t cause people to blow themselves up.
Marcoli @8
No, I would say that Harris is very irrational, twisted by paranoia and bigotry. I understand where you’re coming from, though. I also used to follow his work. He got me interested meditation, which I still try to practice. But every time he opens his mouth about security it’s one giant flamebait. The man is dead to me now.
I refuse to buy into this raging anti-Muslim paranoia. We Americans are perfectly capable and willing to kill one another without invoking hypothetical Muslim terrorists sneaking in among the refugees. I recall seeing a recent stat that said since 9/11 67 Americans had died at the hands of radical Islamic terrorists. In the same period over 400,000 Americans had been killed by firearms. So, who should I fear more, the guy down the street with an AR-15 who just lost his job or a Syrian accountant and his family trying to get out of the way of barrel bombs?
I don’t have the stomach to listen to Harris’ podcast in its entirety. Does he make any distinctions between Islamic sects? The current terrorist acts are all from Sunni terrorist organizations. Would he support immigration by Shiites, for instance?
The biggest reason why people are radicalized is because of marginalization due to ethnicity, religion or income. The more this narrative is accepted that the Syrian refugees are Jihadi sleeper agents lying in wait to destroy the West, the more people of Arab and Persian descent will feel excluded. This narrative is exactly what ISIS wants to spread. I’m sure the military industrial complex also likes this way of thinking as well, but you’re more likely to be killed by a cop or a mass shooter in the US than from a Jihadi terrorist. I think there have been around 337 deaths from mass shootings alone this year in the US by mostly white men. If one is to follow a consistent logical approach, as Sam Harris would have us do, we should be racially profiling all white males.
Thats a lovely piece of proofiness our emailer friend has there. Let me run my own numbers in a thought experiment.
We only let in Christian refugees from Syria. Lets say we let in 10000. As Arabs, they will still be discriminated against because bigots like Harris thinks he can tell a muslim by the way they look (and thinks Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t look like a Muslim). I estimate that 1% (100) will become so disenfranchised with US society that they will become Muslims as they search for identity and an accepting community (and I’m being conservative here). A further 10% of them my find a home in radical Wahhabism. So thats 10 jihadists Ted Cruz and Sam Harris are about to let into the country.
Am I not being rational? Can you find a fault in my computation? Fuck off emailer. You obviously don’t work with numbers for a living, unless you are a quack. My life would be so much easier if I could make up numbers and didn’t have to spend some of my time reviewing work to fish out poorly used numbers.
It matters far less what society refugees come from, but what kind of society we make for them. If these bigots would just say “we can’t accept refugees because they are not white and won’t assimilate”, I would at least agree they are being logical because their bigoted views wont allow room for them. But this is why we have all this fancy incoherent ‘nuance’ from Harris. To hide the fact he is a bigot towards Muslims.
Craven? Defying terrorism and right wing fearmongering to welcome refugees is craven now? How the fuck can people like this ever be reasoned with when even basic shit like word meanings are thrown out the window when it suits them.
I made the mistake of looking at the comments on that Cenk Uygar video. Harris fans are accusing him of misrepresenting Harris because Uygar says that “‘it may be the only course of action available to us” is equivalent to saying “maybe we should do it”. Apparently the sacred texts of Harris must not be interpreted in any way.
Imagine that for every 10,000 atheists, only 20 of them are sexist, racist, dudebro dictionary atheists who don’t give a shit about their fellow humans. In truth the ratio is higher, but for arguments sake, this means all of atheism is worthless because it’s tainted by fucknuggets I want as far away from me as possible.
So we can condemn all asylum seekers based on what some idiot thinks that 0.02% of them MIGHT do (though none have actually been documented to have done as of yet) but we must remember that not all men (TM) are rapists, even though at least one study indicated that 1 in 3* men admitted that they would rape if they thought they could get away with it?
*If anyone has good evidence that this number is wrong, please correct me and restore my shaky faith in humanity.
When Bill Maher shows his feet of clay, we in Canada still have this guy
https://youtu.be/6vLipayUNzg
@19: In fairness, Germany is experiencing terrorist attacks on a fairly regular basis since letting the refugees in. The attacks are, exclusively, right wing anti-immigrant attacks on asylum housing. Perhaps Germany needs to evict its right wing. They can’t seem to keep things peaceful.
@22
Of those 400,000 deaths 2/3 are suicide. So just to be clear homicide by gun is still a massive problem in the U.S., but unless you are planning on killing yourself with a gun, the danger from others is about 10,000 per year in homicides by gun. I frequently hear 30,000 gun deaths per year. That is accurate but most of them are suicide. That IS a massive problem but is generally not a threat to other people. Guns are a big problem in nonfatal injuries as well with something like 85,000 per year. I don’t know how many of those are suicide attempts, but I assume some of them are.
#28 HappyNat, you’re totally right.
Love this game. And we can all play it: Some of the Paris terrorists were Belgian. Ergo, I say, ban the Belgians and their ales and chocolates. That’ll keep safe (sadder, but safer, right?)
Firstly, the 15 year old boy was “radicalised” in Australia. He didn’t come here primed to carry out a terrorist attack. He actually had some mental problems which others took advantage of. These people were cowards who used their significant criminal background to obtain and supply him with the gun he used.
Secondly, there are roughly 500,000 Muslims in Australia. If we use the simplistic maths thats 49 Paris massacres that haven’t occurred so Australia must be doing something right.
Thirdly, it has the same problem as the US, gun-fondling right wing neo nazi bigots calling for a holy war against Islam. They have threatened to attack mosques and Muslims and like cowards everywhere have targeted Muslim women. One of them was arrested for bringing a gun to a protest rally. He has since been arrested for possessing illegal weapons and precursor chemicals for making explosives. Thats right we actually have half-way sensible gun laws although the clone of the NRA is doing its best to get rid of them. This particular thug was tried, convicted and sentenced to a whole month in jail, all in the space of less than a week.
Compare this with the case of a teenage Muslim boy whose home was raided 6 months ago by heavily armed police with an embedded Murdoch media contingent. His father was stuck by police and the boy himself was thrown to the ground, beaten and had his arm broken. He spent 6 months in solitary in one of the worst maximum security prisons in the country. When he came to trial the terrorism charges were dismissed for lack of evidence. Thats right they didn’t even have “secret” evidence which is permitted in terrorism cases. He was then charged with the “crime” of having a knife in his bedroom. Again this was dismissed because it isn’t a crime. If he wasn’t radicalised before he was on the receiving end of all this legalised child abuse, he almost certainly is now.
This is pretty much anti-debate. Just a cheap punt, kicking the can further down the road while focusing on things more important to you.
Pretend you’re French, pretend only the last attack happened, and pretend France took in 50k Syrians over the last year (no idea about the real number). Try and engage with the correspondent instead of using it a a springboard other stuff you want get off your chest.
@dutchdelight: Are you suggesting we should ignore the real background information when evaluating this probability of a hypothesis? Are you familiar with Bayes Theorem?
Okay, I’m French. The last attack happened, but now that the investigation has been done, I know that none of the attackers was a Syrian. I think “We’d better get more refugees in here. Maybe they can talk some sense into our home grown idiots. And, if not, maybe they’ll inform on their crazed neighbors before the next attack. They know all about Islamic terrorists, after all and are more likely to be able to provide good intel than the cops who have no idea how to tell a douchebro blowing off steam from a radical with serious intent.”
Oh, I’m not French. But I was a New Yorker on 11 September, 2001. Lived about a mile from the towers and worked in a hospital that received casualties. I remember being scared at that time. The thing I was most afraid of? That my government would go crazy in response. Wasn’t wrong either.
Pretend that instead of Muslims they’re actually Orcs! Pretend that the only way to stop them from eating you is to torture them! Pretend that you suffer from a rare medical condition that means you’ll suffocate if you don’t commit acts of racism on a frequent basis!
I’m suggesting to argue the matter brought up, interpreting it charitably if needed and not punting it.
Things change, same with ideologies and religions, so the lack of a prior similar to Paris in the US is hardly relevant.
pretend dutchdelight is not a bigoted, racist, asshole shit gargler who froths at the mouth towards brown people.
shit, no, i cant
I don’t get how Harrisites or people like @35 manage to rationalize away the fact that we aren’t constantly being attacked by islamic terrorists.
I mean, if 20 out of every 100,000 muslims is a dangerous radical, surely they have the capability to do numerous bombings, shootings, hijackings? It only took 19 people to do 9/11, and they supposedly have over a thousand people at their disposal. It should be trivial
Yet, as of yet, the majority of terror attacks are homegrown white christians. How strange.
And yes as an American following 9/11, my immediate thoughts weren’t “lets bomb some arabs and live in fear that they’ll attack us again”, it was “holy shit i have to stay out of school for the next month to not get shot for being middle eastern”
Syrians are hardly all “brown people”. Muslims even less.
Maybe you should try and learn something about other cultures?
Cenk’s comparison of Harris with Trump was so on point. He totally nailed it.
What happens when you “crack down” on Muslims: you make it easy for ISIS to recruit warriors.
http://my.xfinity.com/articles/news-general/20151125/EU–Russia-Recruits.for.IS-ABRIDGED/
Anybody who ignores such evidence isn’t rational about Islam. They should be ashamed of being paranoid about Islam.
I do.
I’m just mocking you, and your positions, which you’ve shat out in every one of these threads
Where are you getting at? These things, they do not connect together into a logical argument.
@dutchdelight: Which matter brought up should people be interpreting charitably? The claim that PZ and the “intelligentsia-left” are craven and unrealistic and trying to shut down conversation? Or just the ridiculous hypothesis?
And if we should ignore background information because “things change” then on what basis are we concluding that a certain percentage of Muslims are radicalized or that this has a high probability of resulting in a directly proportional number of terrorist attacks?
@42:
Now you go and tell that to Harris.
Well maybe it’s just not for you then.
Racists calling me racist, entertainment is good tonight.
It isn’t racist to call a racist a racist. It is racist to complain about being called a racist if your words and attitudes make you one.
@42
80-90% of Syria’s population is Muslim.
I do ever so love it when projection happens <3
For the record, 100% of nuclear weapon terrorist attacks were committed by white americans. If, say, 5 out of every 100,000 Americans is a dangerous pro-nuke radical (I certainly know 5), then it would definitely be prudent to prevent white americans from immigrating. Who knows who they might nuke next!
Someone has a poor understanding of world affairs and a tin ear for the ‘truth’.
Why does a statement like this so often presage grossly uncharitable misrepresentation of what someone else said, lies, and bigotry? None of that seems very ‘civil’ to me.
Sure enough, a bit further on;
(Emphasis added)
And then…
(Emphasis added)
Accusing your opponent of cowardliness for not being bloodthirsty and violent enough, and of employing a manipulative form of words designed to deceive and control in the manner of a pious snake oil salesman doesn’t seem to be the most ‘civil’ way to conduct a discourse to me, especially when you make no effort to back up such claims with any evidence.
And lest I forget;
Outright lying about what PZ said, again to cast has words in the mould of some form of disingenuous manipulation; ‘won’t someone think of the children’ is emblematic of a form of words designed to use emotion to trump reason, and so is beloved of hyper-rationalists who want to discredit their opponent without bothering to formulate anything approaching an actual argument.
It seems that ‘civility’ has an entirely different meaning than that found in any dictionary according to the acolytes of Harris.
But the best part of this missive has to be;
If you will forgive the crudity of the formulation, this whole argument essentially boils down to ‘fucking statistics – how do they work?’ As PZ demonstrates in the OP It is trivially easy to show that this claim is bogus, because we seem to be short a heck of a lot of massacres if these numbers are to hold. It would require multiple countries to somehow flawlessly cover up large numbers of massacres every year for some unexplained reason. That is one heck of a conspiracy theory, and I don’t see the citations that such an incredibly inflammatory claim demands anywhere in evidence.
Still, that is one thing Harris and Co share with creationists – they both like lying with numbers, and while superficially effective as a strategy, neither group is very good at it if you look closely.
@55
Nothing racist in recognizing that
1. The vast majority of Muslims are non-white
2. The vast majority of Muslims come from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia
3. In the popular view, Muslim is treated as being synonymous with Arab/Middle-Eastern.
bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahhahahahahahahhahahaha *deep breath* HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA hahahahahahhahah you are a joke
This whole Sam Harris business reminds me of the first time I ever went to an atheist gathering, back in the… Late ’90s?
It was a pretty awful affair, about 10 awkward people. The conversation, such as it was, ended up being dominated by some guy with bad teeth who just really, really wanted to talk about The Bell Curve.
Remember that book? It was big news back then. Basically, it was a big stream of vile racism. With graphs! And numbers!
Anyway, everyone else in the room kept trying to talk about other things, but this guy would insert himself in every conversation: “But what about The Bell Curve? Hmm? I am VERY INTERESTED in what it says about black people! Have you seen it? It has NUMBERS! Clearly I am not racist because numbers!”
I was just a kid who was used to arguing with people on the internet, so I sort of engaged with this guy, and tried to point out that the numbers in the book were worthless. Needless to say, my words had no effect on him at all, except to make him follow me out afterwards so he could try to talk some more about NUMBERS.
Racism is weird.
Vivec makes an *excellent* point. Also, America is the only country to ever launch a nuclear attack on another country (as far as I know and have been able to find, history is NOT my strong suit, so please correct me if I’m wrong).
@26 Holms
But you see, of course we are craven. We are cowards because we refuse to allow ourselves to be intoxicated by irrational fear, prejudice and bigotry. They are the brave ones for not resisting those urges, for willfully diving into the pool of irrational fear, they are the brave ones for using “logic”, “rationality”, and specially, the most important superpower, making shit up, to invent demonstrably unrealistic conclussions that confirm their prior biases.
Heroes the lot of them…
dutchdelight, engage with what, exactly? The completely made up numbers? The insults? What part of that ludicrous piece of entirely fictional horseshit are we supossed to interpret charitably?
specialffrog @27 — Thanks for braving the muck to sample some of that commentary.
So if I understand correctly, a deeply philosophical and rational analysis has concluded that a course of action that is admittedly cruel, heartless, and uncivilized (shutting out all refugees, or admitting only “Christian” refugees, or doubling or tripling the length of the vetting process from the current one or two years..) “may be the only course of action available to us.” But this is a purely philosophical conclusion that in no way implies that “maybe we should do it.”
So I wonder if Harris agrees with his fans that philosophy and reason are utterly useless? I am reminded of all of those societies with master computers that Spock, Kirk, and Harry Mudd reduced to smoldering piles of sparklers and junk just by asking questions.
And I just love dutchdelight’s suggestion that we “argue the matter brought up” by making up yet more fake numbers and counterfactual situations. Don’t you see, specialffrog? If we just pretend our Bayesian priors are all zeros and ones, the math becomes so much easier.
@59
You are correct. 100% of nuclear attacks where committed by the US, both of which were on civilian centers with the express purpose of A. Terrorizing them into surrendering and B. Terrorizing the rest of the world into fearing US power.
Seeing as I know at least 5 people who think that nuking North Korea/Russia/The Middle East would solve all tour current problems, my 5/100,000 number has at least as much validity as the Harrisite 20/100,000 number.
So, when will the rest of the world start denying americans travel visas and immigration papers? I mean, the threat of a nuke is just too great!
The vast majority of people on earth are non-white. Congrats.
Are you counting that all as “brown people”? That’s even more racist.
Most muslims aren’t arab/middle eastern. Also, you mean the popular view in your local surroundings. In any case, not my problem.
Back to the actual point, I called out Tashiliciously Shrikeds as being racist for lumping Syrias ethnic diversity together as “brown people”. Nothing wrong with that, if Tashiliciously Shriked wants to learn.
@Tashiliciously Shriked
Unrepentant racist says what?
No, you incredible narrow minded smeg snorting sac of rancid offal, my words were targeting you. As in, *your* unrepentant fear of the unwashed brown masses. Not because *I* think they are brown, but because you have exposed your shit brained and stunningly bigoted views many a time here. Mocking your views as I did is pretty common place. If you can’t understand that, well, then you’re more of a moron than I originally thought.
Which is pretty damn spectular.
Good point!
The way this argument is supposed to work, i think, is that it’s supposed to lead to a question like, how many casualties are acceptable. At which point … i dunno, we’re supposed to flock to Sam’s side or something.
But to most people here the idea that there might be a ratio, any at all, is to scary or divisive to consider i guess, even as hypothetical.
@Tashiliciously Shriked
Your excuse for using racist language like “brown people” would make more sense if you could actually point to me using the term.
Stop digging, just apologize.
You know, just using the words “brown people” is not racist. What Tashiliciously Shriked said in their comment is not racist either.
It is a fact that many people, Harris and his acolytes most certainly included and especially relevant to this post, think that a brown person is automatically a Muslim and a Muslim is automatically a brown person. Many people use this to argue that refugees should be refused entry to host countries IF they’re Muslim. The way they want to determine if they’re Muslim is like the way Harris and his Harrisites want to profile for Muslims at airports: by seeing if they’re “brown people”. So it’s not unreasonable to equate a fear of Muslims with a fear of brown-skinned people.
You’re being ridiculous, dutchdelight, and think you’ve found a “Gotcha” when all you have is your own fear of Muslim people who may or may not be brown skinned.
@dutchdelight: This isn’t a hypothetical. These imaginary numbers are being floated to justify a real policy of refusing Syrian refugees.
And even if it were a hypothetical there is no justification for the claim that the number of Paris-like terrorist attacks is directly proportional to the number of Muslim migrants accepted.
I am just loving this ^.^
It’s like christmas came early, and I didn’t have to participate in disgusting capitalism
Oh look, dutchdelight belatedly figured out that “the correspondent’s” argument was engaged and eviscerated. So now they’re trolling.
How very boring. Run along, little troll.
Tabby Lavalamp @ # 13: Has Daniel Dennett said anything ridiculously wrong yet …?
He did, somewhere back in the Elevatorgate era, try to back Dawkins up with a brief obscure muttering about “radical feminists”.
Perhaps some of his colleagues at Tufts helped him out with a few clues, because – sfaik – he hasn’t stepped in it since.
I just posted this on Jerry Coyne’s website, in response to his column lauding Harris for his Salon interview (which apparently Salon censored): ‘Salon should not have edited out those comments, but that doesn’t change the fact that Sam Harris is nothing but a neocon ‘America firster’ dressed unconvincingly in philosopher’s clothes. His style of argument is particularly obnoxious, always reflexively claiming that anyone who disagrees with him, including Pulitzer prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald or PZ Myers, is a liar and / or is taking him out of context. He would do better to address the actual justified criticisms his wild provocations provoke. Yes, it really is OK to object to some of the disturbing statements he has made about torture, nuclear first strikes on Islamist countries and profiling, among others.’
It looks like dutchdelight also has a problem using racism as a concept. There was nothing racist about Tashiliciously Shriked’s use of “brown people” because:
1) It referenced the very real way that looking for terrorists would play out as Harris’s effectively does focus his xenophobic bigotry on brown people perceived to be potential muslim terrorists.
2) It “punches up” so respects the power dynamic.
3) Is a form of rational discrimination like focusing on black people when studying sickle cell anemia, here rationally focusing on the irrational discrimination of another.
Pathetic. Projection as authoritarian tactic once again. Fuck engaging with these sorts of arguments in a civil manner. They are uncivil by their nature. If Harris and co. wishes to have a civil discussion they can remove the uncivil xenophobic bigotry and try again. Until then they can have more insults, insulting characterizations and pajoratives which are quite rationally and logically placed.
Fuck your hypotheticals.
When people are discussing the idea of closing borders and denying asylum to thousands of refugees based on hypotheticals that are themselves based on nothing but fear and prejudice and not a single bit of actual reality, your precious hypotheticals which you are so enamored with and seem to think it’s so vital to discuss are nothing but racist, prejudicial fearmongering. Fuck off.
By “how many casualties are acceptable” i presume you are implying that in order to prevent casualties among white europeans we should deny entrance to people seeking asylum, on the hypothetical possibility that any of them could possibly eventually engage in terrorist acts. How many syrian casualties are acceptable so that you and your paranoid, fictional delusions, feel safe? And that’s not even going into how that feeling of safety by preventing the entrance of refugees is not just fucked up, but completely unrealistic since the terrorists are european….
Ohh, compelling arguments! With numbers! Let me try one:
Imagine that 1:100 people every day die from haircancer. Wouldn’t you agree to immediately allocate the entirety of the global military budget to haircancer research? In thruth the ratio is much higher, not least because there is no such thing as haircancer, but for arguments sake, this would mean 70 million lives saved every day!
…
Of course the actual number of lives saved will be much lower but no less significant once countries run out of ammunition. All in favour of shifting focus to the war on haircancer*, please say ‘aye’.
*I would have picked global warming, but apparently there’s not enough evidence for that so it’s just too controversial.
@63
1. Yes, and? We’re talking about muslims as a group, which are a majority non-white group. There are plenty of groups that are not primarily made up of people of color.
2. Not even remotely racist. Me, as a middle eastern person, using a colloquial term for people that share my Race’s complexion to point out racism isn’t racist by any meaningful metric.
3. I mean the popular view, end of story. Even a lot of the islamic people in my community tend to conflate the two. It’s a nearly universal perception, particularly in western societies.
OK,l let me get this right:
1) Make up facts like “the Paris attacks were commited by refugees” (they weren’t)
2) Make up numbers “20 out of 100.000”
3) Claim that those numbers you just made up are even too low
4) Profit!
dutchdelight, your kind of pathetasad attempts to change the subject into how I, who had posted a mocking and sarcastic comment about your past overwhelmingly racist views, am the *real* racist is… Well… Pathetic and sad.
Try again.
Also and further, stop being a bigot.
Also and further, use logic when you talk.
@75 komarov
Oh it get far worse than that. It’s not just that the meassures they propose based on hypothetical, made up horseshit wouldn’t in fact have the preventative effect they imagine they would have on the chances of more terrorist attacks, it’s also that those meassures would actually dramatically increase the chances of refugee deaths.
So the argument is, in order to obtain a false sense of security, let them die by their thousands.
@Gen, Uppity Ingrate and Ilk
Maybe not, but since i’ve never used the term, bringing it up to pretentiously call me out on percieved racism is just a hysterical attempt to shutdown discussion, and i’m happy to return bullshit at the same level.
Also, public reminder… I scored the lowest category for implicit racial bias here: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
Pretty sure some of the people that like to derail here with their boring racism chants don’t even make it into the same category.
@specialffrog
I agree, i don’t think there is a meaningful ratio for multiple reasons. I suppose i just feel PZs reasoning is about details, missing an opportunity to point out that IS doesn’t need migration flows, they’ll just as easily use radicalized random young men already in the country for whatever they want. Also, automatic weapons are pretty easy to get in the US last time i checked.
Sigh. I sleep pretty comfortably with one next to me every night. Prejudice is ugly people.
@Tashiliciously Shriked
You are just a sad follower parroting after other misguided people, not even an original argument, it’s hard to take you seriously.
@diane
“attack” includes graffiti, or “unorthodox mail” of the pigs head variety here btw. Oh, and there’s no actual evidence for it being exclusively “right wing anti-immigrant” people doing them. Just the likelyhood that it’s most.
I guess it’s an improvement of pretending it’s all arson incidents though.
projectiooooon
sam harris would prefer to have ben carson elected to be president over noam chomsky. he wants to toss out the first amendment to profile people by religion. he thinks it might be a good idea to kill millions of people in the middle with nuclear weapons. and he wants to label his progressive critics as “the regressive left”…
Carefully guarding that 0 original arguments stat.
@dutchdelight: So is your argument that instead of pointing out that this argument was bad for the reasons he did, PZ should have pointed out that it was bad for different reasons?
Sure, people burn refugee homes for any kind of reasons, like the last episode of Tatort sucked.
Time honed traditional past time.
Really got nothing to do with people being anti-imigrant or such…
Well, Germany’s certainly suffering from an epidemic of terrorist attacks, but these are done by bigoted white dudes…
@specialffrog
I don’t follow Harris to any degree, maybe i’m missing the point.
Well, there we go. Sorry then, I guess there is absolutely nothing wrong with what you’re saying or the assumptions you’re making. Carry on being not scared of Muslims.
dutchdelight @ 42:
and @ 62:
Well, I dunno, a Real Smart Guy said we should profile Muslims based on looks.
I can’t seem to remember who that Real Smart Guy was – can someone remind me? Clearly, it would be someone that dutchdelight presumably wouldn’t agree with in terms of policy towards Muslims, but I just can’t bring the name to mind…
You know, Islamists really ARE that crazy and don’t give a fuck how many people they kill.
The solution, according to some distinguished white people, is to become more like them.
@Tony #2: Thanks, your whole post was enlightening.
@Giliell
Reasonable people can disagree on refugee housing locations, not always in reasonable ways when city councils force the issue.
Or like when a cabinet representative comes over to your village of ~120 people and decides then & there you’ll get 1400 refugees to house in total when the locals agreed to 600 (300 originally), who are already there. Oh, and they’re already on their way.
True right-wing anti immigrant people there allright… lol. (granted they “just” shouted abusive language and attempted to block the ministers exit from the area, which got national attention, so no housing “attack” was needed anymore)
@dutchdelight: So why exactly did you feel the need to comment that PZ was engaging in “anti-debate” and not “engaging” with the correspondent if you agree that the correspondent made a nonsensical argument and you don’t know what Harris said in the first place?
Well then, dutchdelight, you’re so danged non-racist that I feel obligated to send you forth from this site to carry on your totally non-racist fact-free arguments elsewhere. Just not here anymore.
@dutchdelight
To reference the start of the argument over “brown people”, you came here in defense of taking racist arguments charitably. That Harris’s arguments and those of the people supporting him are racist is not in doubt. That is hardly a derail since refusing to take racist arguments seriously, let alone charitably, is a major theme here. I and many here have outlined a limit to what sort of behavior we are willing to tolerate. I will not give even basic respect to such an argument. Religious bigotry is also out for the same reasons. I’m tired of creating more people with good reason to view us with suspension and hate, after all we are literally talking about treating them all the same.
Giving support to racism is racist as far as I can see. It’s prejudicial in support of encouraging respect of racist arguments as something worth someone’s time. It’s discriminatory by favoring the expression of racist arguments over the expression of people tired of that shit. So if you are going to come in here and ask us to look more closely at racism and bigotry as a potential good, even indirectly, at least have the courage to be honest about what you are doing.
And seriously, not racist because of an Internet test? I this culture that is frankly a faith argument. The test has metrics, you can show how the metrics apply to your bias on this page and why they are reasonable, logical and non-recurring biases. I’m not religious enough for that.
Should say “In this culture…” above. I do not phone post so well yet.
“every 10,000 Muslim migrants into a country will be accompanied by 20 radical Islamist men who will launch a Paris-type terrorist attack.”
Why am I still alive?
Suriname has about 15% muslims; the population is about 500 000. That’s 75 0000 muslims, ie 150 radical Surinamese muslims ready for a terrorist attack.
Worse – I have a relationship with a practicising muslima for 12 years now.
So why am I still alive?
An even better, more likely thought experiment involving letting in only Syrian Christians. Out of this 10,000 people, some few are radicalized against Muslims because of their experiences in Syria. Here in America they naturally gravitate toward anti-Muslim Christian terrorists. Swelling the ranks of the largest and most frequently dangerous terrorist groups we have.
I particularly like the argument about the 15-year-old Sydney boy as secret terrorist, as anyone who watches Last Week Tonight will be aware that until recently Australia had a Bush-level blinkered twit as leader, who took every opportunity to alienate the Muslim population in Australia (along like 75% of the country, by the end). Quirky Australian politics meant that because he lost the confidence of the party (for exactly the reason you’d think – he’s a twit and no-one liked him), he’s no longer leader. So if you’re going to argue that past behaviour is indicative of future behaviour, you probably shouldn’t pick the example where the entire political and intellectual climate of the country changed a couple of months ago.
Ack. Autocorrect error in #97 too. That should say “non-racist”. This is going to take some getting used to.
Mathematicians and math instructors are sick unto death of innumerate folks who “do the math” to make their arguments, as if their clumsy calculations are argument clinchers. Nope.
Last year in Canada we had 2 deaths as the result of what could be called jihadist violence. The perpetrators of the 2 attacks were both Canadian born converts to Islam. These are so far the only two deaths in Canada as the result of anyone that could be called Muslim extremists.
This is the same year that 3 RCMP officers were killed in Moncton, New Brunswick by 24 year old Justin Borque, whose beliefs sound like he would have felt right at home amongst the militia and sovereign citizen movements.
An American anti-Catholic, Thomas Bernard Brigham, killed 3 people and injured 30 when he bombed the Montreal Central Station in 1984.
Attacks by Armenian terrorists in the 1980s killed 2 people, a Canadian security guard at the Turkish Embassy, and the Turkish military attaché to Canada while he was stopped at a stop light.
Our homegrown FLQ killed 3 people, including Quebec provincial cabinet minister Pierre Laporte in 1970.
And of course there was the biggest terrorist attack against Canadians, the destruction of Air India Flight 182 in 1985 by Sikh separatists.
You’ll excuse me if I don’t believe Muslims are the biggest terrorist threat to Canada. The terrorist threat to Canada is people who use terrorism, whatever their politics. They could come from anywhere, and organisations that conduct terrorism come and go. For example Cuban exiles conducted at least 10 terrorist attacks between 1966 and 1980 in Canada, resulting in one death, yet have not conducted any since.
Incidentally Canada’s Muslims constitute an estimated 3.2 percent of the population. Compare this with the US, where it is estimated around 1 percent of the population is Muslim.
timgueguen, you missed out on Montreal, École Polytechnique, 19 women murdered by an asshole I won’t name. Homegrown Christian variety of terrorism.
A simple guide to what people mean when they say that anti-Islam hate mongering is a kind of racism.
These are American Muslims:
* G. Willow Wilson, Muslim author of fantasy/science fiction and comics
* Ghostface Killah, Muslim musician and storyteller
The images of people like them are not brandished, when people brandish images of Muslim. They can go about their business and expect not to be shouted at or attacked for being Muslim.
* Balbir Singh Sodhi, Sikh-American gas station owner
* Prabhjot Singh, assistant professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University
Mr. Sodhi was murdered on September 15, 2001, by a mechanic who mistook him for Muslim. Mr. Singh was set upon by a mob of 25-30 young men who punched his face repeatedly and broke his jaw. They also mistook him for Muslim.
So: people interpret ethnic and cultural clues as clues to religion and act accordingly; meanwhile, they miss any actual clues as to personal belief from people who do not present those ethnic and cultural signs. Which is to say, people express prejudice and hate based on ethnic and cultural signs. And that’s…racism, is what that is.
Hope this helps, for those who were wondering.
Which makes it, what, okay? It’s all right to scribble threatening, racist graffiti all over the place in an attempt to frighten refugees into not leaving their homes or, I don’t know, maybe trying to convince them that Europe is more dangerous to them than Syria? Or just make them feel like crap so that they can’t do things like fill out their paperwork and get sent back? Not to mention the pig’s head, which indicates not only that someone is trying to frighten and disgust people but also that they’re presumably willing to kill a pig to do it. (Though, I suppose, if I want to be “charitable” to the terrorists, I could assume that they got the pigs from the butcher.)
Oh, and there’s no actual evidence for it being exclusively “right wing anti-immigrant” people doing them.
Hyperskepticism at work. Who else would spray anti-immigrant graffiti or send pigs’ heads to predominantly Islamic refugees or set buildings that house refugees on fire? In multiple cities and multiple countries. Just a few dozen or hundred unrelated acts of apolitical passion or what? This claim makes no sense. Contrast with the assumption that Syrian refugees must, somehow, contain radical Islamists who are planning to attack Paris or Brussels or wherever else, despite the fact that none of them were involved in the Paris attack and there haven’t been any other attacks recently. We must assume the best of white Christians or atheists and the worst of Asian and Middle Eastern Muslims? No, not a bit of racism there.
Oops. I didn’t read the thread completely and see that PZ had banned DD. Sorry about carrying on an argument with someone who was gone.
Not to argue with the banned Not Racist further, but he’s making an argument that deserves further highlightuning because it is very common.
Let’s call it the “where have all the racists (sexists, homophobes) gone” argument. It comes with two sides
Side one: The thought crime. People voice plain bigotted ideas. When there’s mild criticism, pushback or heavens forbid consequences, people whine about “thought crimes”. AS if anybody knew what they’re thinking and punished them for that. Think Dawkins.
Side two: Not really a racist. Somebody does something racist, sexist, homophobic. You are now not allowed to actually call that deed racist, sexist, homophobic, because they could be entirely reasonable people with entirely reasonable ideas that make them commit violent crimes against a minority for them being a minority.
Not really. It just means those terrorists were filtered out by security/law enforcement before they took action. Aopologies if this was said before. We need to be careful about skipping from “first cause” to “final result” without in-between steps. You can tell I’m awesome at formal logic, can’t you? ;)
But really, and my home country Germany’s police confirm it, there is no disproportionately rising crime rate, no rise in terrorist infiltration that wouldn’t be achieved without the refugee “flood”. Every story about rape spikes, robberies etc. I’ve seen has turned out to be completely fabricated. In fact, I’ve done the math, refugees are 4.5 times less likely than the population average to be crime suspects. To reiterate, terrorists can come into European countries without being detected at the border. There’s no indication that there’s a new element that security agencies can’t handle. Terrorists do not need refugees as cover, they just like to create an atmosphere of fear and loathing so that we reject the refugees and create more hostility against the West, creating recruits for jihadism. They ought to be content with us bombing the occasional school or hospital, but what do I know.
Plenty of room here in my village. We have about 20 people here now where as years ago there used to be closer to two hundred. Plenty of ruined houses that could do with re-building. Plenty of land to grow your own fruit and veg and wallnut and chestnut trees everywhere. This is pretty much the same all over Galicia. The only problem is is the lack of work but perhaps the government both local and national would invest more to attract bussinesses here with an influx of people.
Downside is though that Galicians love their wine, pork and cold cuts. Could be off-putting to some Syrians.
Don Quijote
Germany already has a substantial muslim population. Neither has it ruined German beer and Wurst so far, nor has it had any offputting effect on potential muslim immigrants AFAIK. Though I am very grateful for their culinaric contributions…
On a slightly tangential note – I have noticed that there seem to be significant numbers of incidents in the US where Sikh, Hindu or Middle Eastern people of various kinds are “mistaken” for “Muslims” and attacked. Not that it would be in any way all right if they were Muslims of course, but it makes me wonder – how much education on the varieties of culture and religion in the Middle East do American schoolchildren get? Judging by what I’ve heard of the religious tensions surrounding your public education system, I’m guessing perhaps not much?
In England we tend to get a fair bit these days, though I suppose I got a bit more than most given that I lived in a town with one of England’s biggest Sikh communities for half of my schooling, and it was important for the local people. I would find it quite easy to tell a Sikh from a Muslim most of the time, especially an observant one, and that’s not because I’m somehow special and clever and brilliant, it’s because I was taught the differences. Not that we don’t have some incidents of this nature still, but surely even a basic introduction to the fact there is diversity and difference in all regions, and especially the Middle East, prepares people to think a little bit harder and makes it more difficult to run on ignorant stereotypes alone? Perhaps it’s less important in big, cosmopolitan cities where people are exposed to lots of other cultures, but lots of people don’t live in those places and even the ones that do might not encounter them on anything but a passing or superficial level.
Although I do think that we could have more education on the people of the world and their cultures here in England too. It’s a topic that seems to fall uneasily between stools given the disciplinary divisions we tend to have in our schools. History, Geography and RE touch on some aspects of it, and if you do French, German or other languages then you will learn something of the cultures of the mother countries of those languages, but it’s a fairly piecemeal approach. You might learn about Arabic cultures when you’re doing Islam in RE, but that will be almost exclusively the religious bits – which might give an impression that Islam is all there is to the Middle East. You might learn about Chinese culture if you do Mao’s China in History, but that will necessarily be the culture of China in the mid 20th Century and probably from a heavily political standpoint. You’ll probably never learn anything about Kazakhstan or Serbia or Angola or Canada or the Solomon Islands at all. I guess it’s a historical problem, in that the system was codified long before globalisation happened, when knowledge of other cultures would only be relevant to a very few wealthy people. But for the 21st century it seems like a very important thing to know.
cartomancer:
Only if one cares about others’ culture.
(People are still just people)
All the brown people there are Muslims, right? What more do Americans need to know?
It is kinda weird to see this from Canada — when a photo went around that was allegedly one of the Paris attackers, anyone with any familiarity immediately said “But he’s wearing a Sikh turban!” Of course, the photo was doctored (and apparently by those lovely G*m*rG*t* folks), but it only worked at all because many people are ignorant of different world cultures.
Tony@2: “I love people like this who think they are such uber-rationalists, yet they are apparently unaware that Since 9/11 less than five refugees have been arrested for domestic terrorism.”
That just shows how well their terror cells play the long game! …Well, and it also shows how compromised and downright treasonous the Mus-symps who should have arrested them have been!!
Remember, kids: rationalism means never abandoning an intellectual position in the face of so-called “evidence”!!!
The number one immigrant terrorist group in the U.S. is undoubtedly the Cubans. The list of their terrorist crimes in the U.S. and abroad is so long, that I will give you a couple of lists. Even these are old going back to before the 80’s If there is a terrorist criminal culture in America, it is Cuban exiles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Power
http://cuban-exile.com/doc_051-075/doc0073.html
randay @ 117:
Fixed that up.
#110 Felix
This generally does not actually happen in real life. This is why most governments keep wanting more surveillance and power — because their last round of surveillance and power-grabbing worked so well. Best part of this is many terrorists engaged in many of the most publicized attacks over the years were, in fact, known to LEOs by completely old-school, pre- War On Terror methods, and they did nothing with that knowledge. (In the States, we have agencies that manufacture terrorist plots so that they can arrest some “terrorists”.) Most terrorists aren’t screened out, they just aren’t there.
I suppose it is possible Germany does something different that sets it apart from the worldwide trend. If so, everyone should be looking at Germany. Especially the US.
No.
Imagine that for every 10,000 white men, only 20 are sufficiently racist to have the motivation and the ability to launch a Charleston church scale attack.
Saad @ 121;
Good point. According to his own ‘logic’ Harris really should be voluntarily reporting for racial and gender profiling, and should accept as prudent any decision to intern or deport him. I mean, White guys like Harris and myself are part of a clearly dangerous societal group, and since there is no way to readily tell which of us are dangerous, society just has to treat all of us as a potential threat.
It is clearly our fault for being born so pasty, and either being born with that oh so treacherous Y chromosome, or being a transman. That is just the way the cookie crumbles, right Sam…?
@the not always unbearably annoying Gregory Greenwood, #122:
That’s not how it works. We’re just going to choose NOT to scrutinize people of color and white people who aren’t men. We’re not giving **extra** scrutiny to white men. Just the normal amount of scrutiny – the normal amount to which others are exempt. It’s anti-profiling.
Seriously, if you’re against profiling, shouldn’t you always be on board with anti-profiling? Why are people always misrepresenting Sam Harris’ positions like that?
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden @ 123;
<blockq
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden @ 123;
I am not sure what happened with my last attempt to post. It seems I am too unbearably annoying for the nuts and bolts of the site at any rate.
Trying again…
I love it – that is pretty much the argument of the Harris-ites in a nutshell, only turned against them.
How does it feel to have so directly channeled the arguments of the hyper skeptical champions of ‘true rationality’, even in jest? if you feel the need to scrub that queasy feeling away, just remember that once you start bleeding that counts as having exfoliated enough, even for Harris grade slime… ;-)
Crip Dyke,
As always, you and everyone else here misrepresent Harris. He was clearly arguing for ante-profiling–that is, subjecting people to scrutiny before deciding if they should be profiled.
@What a maroon, #126:
First, they came for the subjects of ante-profiling.
Then they came for the subjects of ante-pre-profiling.
Then there was one less hordeling to speak up for me.
I won’t stand for it. Anteprepro, I promise to have your back. Or I would have done, if the ante-pre-profiling hadn’t already happened before 9/11. Sorry about the lack of time machines and all.
@ the commenter who sometimes almost makes sense formerly known as Gregory Greenwood
Gah! If only you could have told me that in the antepreprologue.
Say, you don’t know anything about reattaching an adductor pollicis, do you? And maybe a couple of hypothenar muscles? Anything helps.
CD
I don’t get it. Should we now profile the commenter Anteprepro more or less than Jerry Seinfeld?
Crip Dyke and Maroon, you make my thinkerbox hurt.
Unlike Ed, PZ takes out the trash.
And while Harris lectures about the dangers of letting in Muslims, another white guy has shot up some people. But we won’t call him (or Dylan Roof, or any other white guys) terrorists.
Just a question, not trying to make a comment. Since Islamic jihadists want to kill millions of infidels, and would if they could, unlike the homegrown domestic terrorists we’ve seen so far(as far as I know), should we be more concerned about some jihadists who might get into this country, or any country. More specifically, if a terrorist were to try to get a small nuclear bomb to an American city, would it be more likely to be an Islamic Jihadist than not? And if so, what should be done? I defer to those with more expertise on this matter. I do hope this question won’t be greeted with an onslaught of opprobrium.
hotspurphd
Actually, it would NOT be more likely to be a jihadist.Indeed, it would be more likely to be a white male who feels aggrieved at the world becoming more progressive, the way most terrorist attacks in the US is. Like, I’m sure the guy who shot up Planned Parenthood would have LOVED to have a nuclear bomb instead to deal with his “legitimate grievances”.
Would the guy who shot up Planned Parenthood want a lot of collateral damage or are his intended victims pretty specific, namely abortion-related targets? I think the latter.
Are theoretical nukes more or less dangerous than very real tonnes of high explosive munitions being dropped on Syria?
Also, we know that Sam Harris would consider preemptive nuclear strikes against Muslim targets potentially justifiable – does that make him more dangerous than domestic terrorists? If a nuclear bomb was detonated in the Middle East, would it be more likely to be the work of Sam Harris or of a nuclear State?
@hotspurphd
The guy who attacked PP had explosive devices and exchanged gunfire with police. It doesn’t appear he was concerned about collateral damage. Another white domestic terrorist tried to kill as many black people as possible inside a church, is it better because he only targeted black people? Another white domestic terrorist targeted elementary school children and teachers. Are they not collateral damage? I think all of them would have used your hypothetical nuke if they’d had one.
I think you should examine why you think “some jihadists” are more of a threat than white males. Also, why do you think terrorism is less bad if it’s focused on a specific group?
>think you should examine why you think “some jihadists” are more of a threat than white males. Also, why do you think terrorism is less bad if it’s focused on a specific group?
I am aware of only one group that is reputed to want to kill all the infidels, millions of people, and who are organized in large numbers and might conceivably get a nuclear bomb. I don’t know what any of these lone wolves wants beyond killing all in their immediate area and then themselves ( and I think their suicidality is different than those who think they are going to paradise). And obviously, I think terrorism is less bad if it is limited to fewer people. Perhaps the whites mentioned would want a nuke but they seem unlikely to ever have the organization to get one. Would not Islamic jihadists be more likely to be able to get the organization and money to get one?
But, but, if only 1 in 100 muslim terrorists manages to sneak a 4 tonne megathermonuclear bomb covered in fire ants, we are superfucked! And that’s just the one….what if it’s 2 of them!!
Incidentally, if an islamic jihadist were to try to get a small nuclear bomb into an american city, you could be 99.999999999% certain that it would be a homegrown, domestic terrorist.
>I think you should examine why you think “some jihadists” are more of a threat than white males. Also, why do you think terrorism is less bad if it’s focused on a specific group?
Obviously I think terrorism is less bad if fewer people are killed. And in the cases mentioned none of them had the organization or the money to get a nuke, if they would want one. We know Islamic jihadists have vowed to kill all the infidels and have shown some skill in the past. I don’t know of any group in America with those stated goals and I don’t think we need to fear any lone killers getting a nuke. I doubt Sam Harris is likely to do such either. Isnt it just silly to say that? We do have a self-proclaimed state which wants to kill us all. And it’s conceivable they might get a bomb. Not conceivable that a lone wolf or Harris would. They are very far from being an existential threat to us. Maybe they are very far from conceivable acquiring a nuke, but may not always be.
Sorry for my 2 similar comments. I thought the first just disappeared. Didn’t know it was posted.
“Incidentally, if an islamic jihadist were to try to get a small nuclear bomb into an american city, you could be 99.999999999% certain that it would be a homegrown, domestic terrorist.”
Why?
Well then perhaps you should reconsider your stance on jihadists, since in America, white men carry out WAY more attacks than jihadists.
Since they haven’t yet, this is rather pointless, isn’t it? Jihadists are no more likely than white men to have access to nukes. Since there are more white men terrorists than jihadists, even in countries who take in a LOT of refugees (like Germany), it follows that white men, not jihadists, are the real threat.
hotspurphd
Doing this
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
Results in this
It makes comments with quotes easier to read.
also FYI
<b>bold</b>
bold
<i>italic</i>
italic
hotspurphd
Those women and healthcare workers only have themselves to blame. Just don’t need an abortion. Or provide one. Or be a black person in a church. O a trans woman. See, it’s totally easy not to become a target of domestic terrorism! At least if you’re a cis white guy…
What makes you believe that an islamist terrorist considers any of those killed by the bombs “collateral damage”? Who’s the “collateral damage” in a school shooting? Who was “collateral damage” in Oklahoma City?
Either provide evidence for the millions claim, or you are nothing but a paranoid xenophobic liar and bullshitter. That is rational thinking. No evidence, liar and bullshitter.
Giliell,
Ah, perhaps collateral damage was a bad choice of words. I meant just that a lone gunman ,non-nuke bomber is limited in the numbers he can kill.
Gen,
There may be MORE white men terrorists but are they organized or all lone wolves?
I don’t know. If they are lone wolves their chances are probably zero of getting a nuke. The chances of ISIS or some other GROUP may be greater than zero. No?
Chigau, I’ll work on it.
Yes, an Islamist terrorist with a nuclear bomb would be a bad thing. Even worse would be a Vogon spaceship sent here to make way for a hyperspace bypass. So perhaps we should be focusing our efforts on traveling to Alpha Centauri to see what plans are on file.
Because highly improbable hypothetical threats are far more important to address than the actual actions of white male terrorists.
of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
28 November 2015 at 8:07 am
I am aware of only one group that is reputed to want to kill all the infidels, millions of people,
Either provide evidence for the millions claim, or you are nothing but a paranoid xenophobic liar and bullshitter. That is rational thinking. No evidence, liar and bullshitter.
I believe I read a news article in the New York Times which stated that ISIS has established itself as a world-wide caliphate whose goal is to make the entire world Muslim and to do whatever is necessary to accomplish that goal. I believe this is common knowledge now among informed people. Since they have shown themselves in Paris, Iraq,Syria , and elsewhere they are willing to kill as many people as they can it follows that they are limited only by their lack of access to technology. If they had it they would do more. They clearly are barbarians with no apparent limits to their barbarity. If they had a nuke it seems they would use it to kill millions if they could. If I am wrong about this then I am misinformed, not paranoid, zxyophobic,a liar or a bullshitter. I don’t know what your lowering the level of discourse so much makes you and I really don’t care.
100% of the nukes in history have been used by white dudes to terrorize people of color. If I had any real fear of a nuclear attack, it’d be towards the idea of some other white country deciding that the US had it coming, not ISIS.
Even if ISIS did get a nuke, I’m not convinced they’d go through the trouble (and multiple checkpoints/levels of surveilance) to get it to the US, when they have plenty of domestic, neighboring enemies that they could use it on much easier.
I’m not sure how you think they’d manage to get a nuke into the US. The only islamic terrorist attack in US history had guys armed with swiss army knives, which are a fair bit easier to hide than a fucking nuke.
Vivec,
I agree. Low nuke prob. now. Maybe not so low later.
Nerd, What a Maroon,
Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on ISIS. its stated goal is world dominion and it now controls a land area occupied by 10 million people. I would say those facts plus it’s recent terror activity In Paris, Beirut , etc., make it more dangerous than any white terrorists I know of in the US.
Please read this and tell me of any group of white men with these motives and numbers. Perhaps you are just unaware of them . Will someone respond to these facts please. Tell me where I am wrong. 10,000 individual lone domestic terrorists are hardly the potential threat of these people, who have already killed thousands of Muslims in Iraq, Syria,and other countries. And they have threatened us. How can you compare a lone shooter at a Planned Parenthood to them? They have terrorized France. We are on a higher alert because of them. Maybe no nukes now, but if something isn’t done by someone then maybe in the future. If there is a low probability of nukes it is still a greater threat to people, the West and Iraq and Syria and the other countries mentioned in the excerpt.
“The group is known in Arabic as ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī ‘l-ʿIrāq wa-sh-Shām, leading to the acronym Da’ish or Daesh (داعش, Arabic pronunciation: [ˈdaːʕiʃ]),[36][37] the Arabic equivalent of “ISIL”. On 29 June 2014, the group proclaimed itself to be an Islamic state and worldwide caliphate, with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi being named its caliph, and renamed itself ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah (الدولة الإسلامية, “Islamic State” (IS). As a caliphate, it claims religious, political and military authority over all Muslims worldwide, and that “the legality of all emirates, groups, states, and organisations, becomes null by the expansion of the khilāfah’s [caliphate’s] authority and arrival of its troops to their areas”.[28][38][39][40] The United Nations has held ISIL responsible for human rights abuses and war crimes, and Amnesty International has reported ethnic cleansing by the group on a “historic scale”. The group has been designated a terrorist organisation by the United Nations, the European Union and member states, the United States, India, Indonesia, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Syria and other countries. Over 60 countries are directly or indirectly waging war against ISIL.
Sent from my iPad
Hotspurphd, your irrational paranoia is showing. You lie and bullshit because you aren’t evidence based. Your word isn’t evidence, nor is vague recollections. Just because you have problems with rationality, doesn’t mean we do. Until you acknowledge the truth, which is that we here in the US have more to fear from Xian terrorists than Islamic terrorists, all you have is your irrational shouting.
Why don’t you take a break?
I think it’s quite a stretch to say that their goal is just to kill infidels. There major reason is obviously political. They commit these attacks against people whose governments are in conflict with them.
Places like Japan, North Korea, South Korea and the entire continent of South America are chock full of infidels.
@141
Because getting nuclear bombs into the US is really fucking hard. Doing so while being brown…a lot fucking harder…
Plus it’s happened exactly zero times in history, so until there’s any indication that this is even a realistic possibility, which there isn’t, this is nothing but hugely exagerated, completely unjustified, fictional fearmongering.
hotspurphd, #150
But wouldn’t you look at
a) the frequency of attacks on American soil
b) the death toll of American citizens
to rank which group poses the more likely and more dangerous threat? And which group warrants more surveillance and attention domestically?
They certainly are.
=/= “these 10 million people within this land area are all die-hard islamic adherents willing to become jihadist terrorists”
and as for
I’ve heard KKK membership in USAmerica is pretty widespread and endemic, reasonably organized, and unapologetic about their White Pride. I don’t doubt that there are at least 20 KKK members for every 10 000 in all of USAmerica ready to kill all the black people at a moment’s notice and a great deal of satisfaction. With a few women as collateral damage, of course.
And then there’s those christian extremists.
But racist troll is racist, so that’s it from me. WILL SOMEONE RESPOND TO THESE FACTS PLEASE. Is there no one else out in the wilderness to hear this lone voice of reason and razorsharp logic??? And to think that it all started with:
I… don’t think hotspurphd is following xir own advice.
Don’t forget the 4channers, MRA’s, PUA’s and GG’ers. Although to be fair, it’s getting pretty much impossible to distinguish between all of these supremacists.
Saad, Dreaming.
I confess, I agree with you. There is not much threat of that now. Points well taken. I retire. Maybe. I wonder though if in decades to come ISIS or another jihadist group will have the means to do something serious here. They are threatening us. Even if they don’t we might feel some responsibility to help put down these groups for the sake of the people they are killing over there though not George Bush style.
And Saad, when you refer to groups, are you referring to just the group of lone terrorists in the US or to an actual organized group?
I will say further i think perhaps people here don’t give much credence to the ideology of Islamic jihadists. And I think we should give some. It’s not just the various kinds of marginalization that have been mentioned here that leads to terrorism is it? Doesn’t the ideology add something. We don’t see this kind of activity nearly so much in marginalized non-Muslim groups do we? Do other groups believe in killing non-believers? Those who leave the faith? Martyrdom ? This is not bigoted zyxophobia to state this. I am not demonizing Islam either. Just the radical jihadist Muslims. Which is what they say they are anyway and I don’t see why we should doubt them. Nerd, you have added exactly nothing to this discussion as far as I’m concerned. I thank the others who have.
Rq,
Thank you. The KKK may be ready to kill blacks. Are there significant numbers of blacks being killed by the KKK.
You are correct,I started just asking a question with no intention to say all that I did but I changed course. I appreciate many of the responses here which have helped to change my thinking. The name calling is not helpful but the facts and arguments are.
I think radical Muslims are as bad as KKK or extremist Christians. I’m not sure everyone here believes that or if they do is willing to say it because they might be seen as racist. Frankly I don’t think any groups in this country pose or are likely to pose an existential threat to any state. ISIS might.
hotspurphd @ 158:
…the military?
Just sayin’.
hotspurphd, #157
Some organized groups and many lone unpredictable terrorists. I’d say that makes the white terrorists more dangerous: the fact that we don’t have one organized clearly defined group to track.
They strike almost completely unpredictably and without an announcement or declaration of a war. We aren’t able to gauge the danger they pose with threat levels or with increasing security.
hotspurphd,
According to folks who study this the link between terrorism and religion is not really as strong as you might believe.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/accordingtomatthew/2015/08/the-link-between-religion-and-terrorism-isnt-as-strong-as-some-atheists-believe/
Professor Scott Atran is quoted in the above post and he concludes that religious ideology is a factor but not nearly the best predictor of jihadi violence.
https://evolution-institute.org/article/here-he-goes-again-sam-harriss-falsehoods/
hotspurphd, #157
I do. But I see it in the correct perspective. It’s not “we want to kill people who aren’t Muslim”.
9/11 wasn’t done because the buildings contained mostly non-Muslims. It’s always about calling the western countries Crusaders, which makes it much more a political motivation than a straightforward religious one. The Paris attacks were done explicitly because of France and Europe’s role in the conflict. The religious aspect is a great way to mobilize gullible and violent criminals. It offers yet another us versus them scenario to work with. And as we can see plainly from history and current events, fostering an us versus them mentality and paranoia in people is a great tool for people like ISIL and the GOP.
So ISIL and the various Islamic terrorist groups are threats. But let’s be honest about their motivations and the level of risk they pose to American lives in America compared to other sources of terrorism.
hotspurphd:
That’s specific? There are many millions of people who are “abortion-related targets.”
Besides that woman or that doctor specifically, why couldn’t they believe that others in the region are complicit, intending to kill them as well? Don’t they routinely blame the entire country, or all of Western civilization, for allowing it? I’ve heard many say exactly that, that the entire country is going to hell because of it, and I’m sure some would be more than happy to punish us all on behalf of their nonexistent god who won’t do it for them.
Have you ever counted the number of people killed by whites and compared it to non-whites?
What are the stated goals of apocalyptic Christian groups? Aren’t they looking forward to a day when everyone must be punished, with death and destruction all over the world? Does it make any difference whatsoever to you if the exact term which is used is “infidels”?
It’s “not conceivable”? I don’t think that word means what you think it means. You can’t have a concept of a “lone wolf” getting a bomb? Why can’t you form that concept, and who cares?
So what? What about people who already do have actual nukes, not potential ones in your imagination? Are they all “responsible
gunnuke owners,” and what would that entail? Is there something about potentially getting nukes that’s scarier than actually having them?Aren’t Christian theocrats extremely influential in the governments which currently have the nukes? Do they not have the potential, if they find their way into such positions of power (if not already there), to use those nukes for any arbitrary reason they like? Or if they control the military (maybe not absolutely, but sufficiently), couldn’t they cause just as much harm that way (if not more), even without using nuclear weapons? Haven’t they already caused an incredible amount of death and destruction, without the need for nuclear weapons?
Salad good comments , good links.
Razor. I agree with yo.
Nerd, your ranting is offensive but you did add one thing. Yu were the first to ask me for evidence for something, which was helpful.
See: police shooting unarmed black people that pose no direct threat to their lives. As a small example.
Though I suppose in your world that threat isn’t so bad because there are relatively few people being killed. Just a few black people, right?
Yet you provided no links. Just more evidenceless ranting and raving.
And you don’t control the thread.
What are you really scared of? And how realistic is that fear of happening?
Rq,
“suppose in your world that threat isn’t so bad because there are relatively few people being killed. Just a few black people, right?”
You really do no understand me. I don’t know what I said that you would think I ascribe to that horrible racist statement. I do not. I see it as a horrible unjust thing which I rave about a lot but hadn’t seen it as terrorism. Haven’t seen anyone else speak f it as that.
Look, I see I was wrong about seeing Islamic terrorists as a major threat now though I think it s only because of. Inability. And I am now enlightened by Scott Atran,who I had read before on other subjects. I don’t think that racism is the cause of my former beliefs and I think people here are too quick to assume it. People can come to wrong conclusions for other reasons than racism. It’s quite clear that some of you enjoy insulting others for the mere sadistic pleasure. I’m sure some innocent people here are hurt by it. I’m glad I am not.
tulse wrote:
I know it’s supposed to be a turban in the image, but the lack of detail in the headwear means I can only seem to see it as a dark toque with pom-pom instead.
It’s not even a good photoshop of the image. Anyone actually fooled by it probably wanted to be fooled by it. However, it is another bit of evidence against those who like to claim that anti-muslim rhetoric can’t be racist because “muslim isn’t a race”.
hotspurphd
Do you perceive a difference between referring to people as ‘blacks’ and referring to them as ‘black people’?
hotspurphd
November 28, 2015 at 5:30 pm
Chigau,
Yes, of course I see it and ‘black people ‘ is much to be preferred and what I would ordinarily say if not in the heat of debate. Now does my unconscious use of it say something about me I wish were not true. Yes, but I don’t accept complete responsibility for my implicit biases, which are unconscious and the result of more than 70 years acculturation in this society. If I’m still struggling imperfectly to keep old attitudes and biases out of my behavior I see that as a good thing, not something to be derided for.
And by the fucking way, if someone is paranoid, and I’m not(I should know I’m a clinical psychologist who is married to one who tells me all the time about my personality traits , positive and negative) my way of viewing him or her with some paranoid thinking, major or minor is with an eye to understanding not condemning , deriding ,or insulting with words more appropriate to a sandbox. Words can hurt and my aim is to , at the very least, not do that. My speculations about those who are so quick to vituperation I will keep to myself. Though I did violate that in an earlier post when I wrote about sadistic pleasure. I don’t know that of course. {as far as paranoid thinking goes, there have been a few times in my life when I was very stressed and I was paranoid for a short while, but those times passed and happily I am not now. I can recognize it when it comes and see it (mostly) for what it is and take steps to deal with it.
Again, I see the error of my thinking and am greatful for the helpful posts here which helped me correct it to some extent. I will continue to read in this area, especially Atran as I was very impressed with his work when I encountered it in a graduate seminar in literary theory a few years ago.
PZ Myers: ” my correspondent and Sam Harris are full of paranoid, racist shit.”
In one line you reduce yourself to the sort of prejudice and simpleminded bigotry neither of which is evident in the correspondent’s quote, or Sam Harris podcast.
If you insist on viewing the world as a series of coded statements driven by ideology and statecraft then that’s what you turn into. A person who has suspended their rational faculties to prosecute grudges and their own ideological bias.
This is what you’ve become.
hughharris #171
I don’t get it.
Sorry, pointing out bigotry is never bigotry, and I have noted for the last 50+ years that typically those trying to maintain institutional bigotry make the claim that pointing out bigotry is bigotry.
Harris has a problem with Islam. It isn’t rational, but emotional, therefore he should just stop talking about about Islam. It’s hard to put your foot in your mouth if it tightly closed. His pride and arrogance won’t let him.
Oooo… was #171 a particularly verbose “you’re bigoted against my bigotry, and that makes you a hypocrite”? Do I get a prize?
If you want to change people’s minds it is better to speak to them calmly rather than swearing at them and calling them names. The only thing that saves this site IMO IS that there is so much good information and good thnking presented along with the rudeness. I don’t understand why PZ engages in it when he has so much else to offer. I know it feels good to swear and say insulting things about people. I do it often but not publically and not to hurt. I guess the value is that so many here enjoy talking that way. And are talking primarily to the choir . I can see that. It does make it hard though to offer a contrary opinion and probably tends to scare some off and some keep quiet for fear of being hurt. It’s no fun being called a racist troll when you aren’t. And that does happen here. False positives will always occur except among the infallible. I’ve mentioned this several times in the past and not once has anyone commented about it. Wonder why?
Oooo… now the calls for civility, guys! Because horrific ideas can’t possibly be trotted out using measured and gentle language, and good ideas can never be expressed with vehemence! It’s always, always best and so totally easy to play the vulcan, because topics under discussion always, always never actually relate to anything that has an impact on our lives and therefore we should never ever get angry or passionate or anything. Because if we do, we might hurt someone’s feelings, and not change their mind, when all they’re wanting to do is discuss such ideas as women should be walking incubators, POCs are not as good as whites(at anything), or the idea that Muslims can be identified just by looking at them, and they should all be treated like they want to kill people. Why on earth would we ever become upset over these ideas? Clearly just maybe a gentle chiding, a down-feather soft rebuke would fare us so much better, right? Because, after all, who would *not* want to engage in such discussions and in as emotionless a manner as possible?
Alright, hotspruphd, was my heavy heavy sarcasm drenched in enough treacle for your delicate, wilting sensibilities?
Evidence? Your words are subject to high skepticism. Why do you think they should be treated otherwise?
Nerd ,
I really don t want to talk to you or hear anything from you.
I have said all I intend to on this subject. And I certainly have no need to provide evidence to the likes of you.
If what I have said is not sufficient then so be it. You might try reading it again. Perhaps you missed something.
It’s takes some restraint to keep from insulting YOU. But I will say that I think that some of the following words probably accurately describe some of the people here-nasty,self-righteous,self-satisfied. Also quick to leap to conclusions. I never said I was afraid but I was asked why are you so fearful? I’m not afraid, not of terrorism.
Again thanks to the civil, thoughtful ones like chigau who actually had an impact on changing my belief that Islamic jihadists pose a serious threat in the US in the foreseeable future, and also made me want to continue visiting here.
I won’t be reading any more posts on this thread.
hotspurphd
Have you ever spoken to or listened to any black people on the subject? There’s quite a few, including some very well-known names (if you’d know anything about it at all) who do call it terrorism on a regular basis.
You should. You really should. It doesn’t matter if they’re inadvertent or not, but the only way you can actually deal with them is to acknowledge them, take responsibility for them (and the effect they may have on others) and learn to do better. You can’t blame your implicit bias for maintaining problematic views, especially if you’re aware of your implicit biases (as you say you are – of some of them, at least).
#172-4
I’m not sure why my comment isn’t clear. Too verbose perhaps.
When you resort to just trashing people as PZ Myers does regularly on this blog it’s a sign he’s abandoned the use of reason in the process. And he presents a post from a correspondent which is far more reasonable than his sworn insults are, arrogantly doesn’t even credit it, and then puts forth an pitifully weak argument based on something Harris doesn’t argue, and concludes that Harris and his correspondent are “full of racist shit.” Come on! How laughable. Myers does not even try to demonstrate how the pleasant correspondent is racist. Does having a different opinion than Myers mean someone is racist? If you’re falling for that then, as PZ says, “you’re a fool”.
Clearly, he’s just cherry picking bits of evidence that suit him and using it to trash Sam Harris. Nowhere does Sam Harris claim “that every 10,000 Muslim migrants into a country will be accompanied by 20 radical Islamist men who will launch a Paris-type terrorist attack.” That’s just BS. How careless.
When a person goes out of his way to unfairly impugn people as PZ Myers does, for what are really just differences in opinion – supposedly not supporting the correct liberal causes – then one has to wonder how sincere his liberal beliefs really are. It’s not very liberal to trash people, and to do so dishonestly is of course worse. But then he would probably retort that I’m just a Harris fanboy Racist Wanker. And yeh, you can cheer for that, because that matches with your liberal anti-US abuse of State violence worldview. So you can applaud illiberal behavior because the ends justify the means, don’t they?
(I also love the widely distributed stupidity that there are more Right Wing attacks than Muslim attacks SINCE 9/11 – half the amount in fact! If you exclude a hinge event, one of the key reasons we even talk about terrorism, then you’ve got selection bias. Make the survey one day earlier and jihadists are 63 times more deadly than right wing terrorists (that’s selection bias too). )
hughharris
I still don’t get who or what you’re on about.
…
hotspurphd
bless your heart
PZ doesn’t just “trash” people…You might have noticed that there’s an actual point to the post rather than a simple list of insults.
It is unbelievably idiotic to see people complaining that the use of expletives somehow takes away from a conversation or a point, when they are the ones refusing to engage the conversation or the point, because of an emotional reaction to the use of expletives. Tone trolling at its finest, that is. Also rather a lot of fun to see people claiming rational superiority, engaging in such blatant irrationality in doing so. It’s kind of delicious…
Who is PZ trashing? He points out Sam Harris is an ignorant verbose bigot who needs to shut the fuck up. And SH’s ideas have be thoroughly refuted by security experts. He is in over his head, but is too stupid and bigoted to realize it. Why can’t you?
hughharris @ 180:
Um… not if what we’re talking about is the reaction to the 9/11 attacks.
(Unless, of course, you think we should count reactions to something from before we started to react to it…)
Or if what’s being discussed is the ongoing threat, which forms a pretty obvious pattern. Such as, for example, someone discussing what sort of people we should concentrate our security efforts on going forward.
This isn’t hard to understand unless you’re trying not to.
Hughharris, you might try *reading* PZ’s post… because if you don’t, you miss things like this, which was directly before a quoted section:
See, PZ gets messages from Harris fans. This particular apologist tried to use entirely made up math to prove that Harris is right. PZ never said that Harris said anything about 20 in 10,000 Muslims. His defender did. And PZ is talking about the email he got. It’s even in the blog post title. “I get email…”
#185 So you’re saying Myer’s argument is that Harris is “full of racist shit” for what someone else says? That’s even worse. It’s not entirely clear who Myer’s is talking about – he just says “he” and refers to the argument above – the obvious implication is that Harris himself has made the same argument. But if he wants to refute arguments Harris hasn’t made and then call Harris “racist” for them, what does that tell you?
I’m sorry there’s no argument there. Just a lousy argument from incredulity based on a counterfactual.
#184 And 9/11 had no causes? What about the Gulf War the Trade Centre 93 bombing? The Sudan conflict? Why don’t we compare the amount of deaths in war in the 20th century and exclude WWII?
#183 I’m not saying SH is right on everything. I’m saying mindless insults are useless – this would apply to your last post.
#182 “PZ doesn’t just “trash” people…” No, but trashing Harris is the main point of these posts, the narcissism of small differences. His argument is non-existent. I’ve made this clear, and haven’t been refuted.
#181 Chigau – well nothing more I can do.
Unfortunately I see little evidence of people honestly trying to engage in an intelligent debate on this site. You can call it tone trolling if you want – adding insult on to insult. It’s what’s missing that’s the problem – balanced, intelligent debate.
hughharris @ 186:
And the Crusades!
…it’s neither dishonest nor stupid to discuss terrorist attacks since 9/11 so long as you’re labeling the discussion as such. If the threat was from multiple 9/11-type attacks, we’d have seen, I dunno, multiple 9/11-type attacks, right?
The fact that we don’t see one type of attack repeated, and do see other types of attacks repeated might – just might – suggest that one, however, horrific was an anomaly, while the others are pattern-based, repeatable (as they were, yanno, repeated), and thus vastly more likely to be relevant in the future.
A major reason some political circles aren’t interested in countering domestic terrorism is that they don’t really consider it terrorism. By pointing out regular, ongoing death tolls, we can help make the point that one shouldn’t lose sight of the mundane by focusing on the exotic.
If your argument is that there wasn’t a global shift in terrorism policy post 9-11, then not positing a break between then and now makes sense. If you think we might be viewing things a bit differently since then, it makes sense to set the periods of looking at things differently into different categories, at least for the purposes of some discussions.
Again, not hard.
# 187 Thanks for at least engaging in debate.
“…it’s neither dishonest nor stupid to discuss terrorist attacks since 9/11 so long as you’re labeling the discussion as such. If the threat was from multiple 9/11-type attacks, we’d have seen, I dunno, multiple 9/11-type attacks, right?”
I think it’s a mistake to view the 9/11 attack as an isolated, one off which is unlikely to be repeated. The US has a very small Muslim population (also am uncorrected selection bias in the sample!) and we have seen numerous jihadists attacks in other parts of the world before and since. ie. Paris Attacks, Charlie Hebdo, Taliban, Beirut Bombing, Tunisian massacre & others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks. Indeed, see if you can come up with another ideology that has more terrorist attacks in this timeframe. (Even allowing for the standard movement of the goalposts to alter every conflict the US has been involved in as a terror campaign I think you’d struggle to equate US Foreign policy with the brutality and futility of this list)
In addition, what’s your evidence that 9/11 is an anomaly? The WTC was bombed only 8 years earlier. Perhaps you could offer the rise of ISIS and the lesser influence of Al Qaeda as an argument, though its counterfactual and unconvincing. (Al Qaeda is more focused on anti western animus than ISIS, which is predominately focused on a religious caliphate).
A proposed shift in “terrorism policy” and its effects provide no reasonable excuse to delete from the sample the most major terror event, in fact it suggests strongly that you should include an equal period before and then an equal period after that hinge event.
It is selection bias in the extreme to take a sample SINCE the most significant terror event in recent memory. That much is elementary and should be admitted as such. Removing that obvious bias results in a sample that shows jihadism is 63 times more deadly than right wing terror. Taking a wider sample over 25 years or so would no doubt reduce that figure, but its hardly going to be the case that right wing terror is more of an issue than jihadism, despite the overwhelming discrepancy favoring the numbers of right wingers in your country.
@hotspurphd
You’re right. PZ has actually tried to reign it in a couple of times, but it hasn’t taken.
In our defense, we get a lot of trolls here, and our trolldar sometimes makes false positives.
No, it actually isn’t. Ever heard of an outlier?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlier
Go back in American history as far as you wish. How many terrorist attacks do you think were commited by jihadists? How many by Americans?
Non-jihadi Americans, I should specify.
It should have been entirely clear to anyone reading for comprehension who PZ was talking about. His words here provided the first clue:
PZ then paraphrases the blockquoted bits from the correspondent. He then addresses the correspondent’s argument, countering it with facts.
If you want to know why PZ thinks Harris is a fool and a racist, there are many, many posts on this blog which make that argument. One was posted just a few days ago; the email PZ is responding to here is presumably in response to that. PZ apparently forgot to link to it. Hima culpa.
This post happens to focus on the silly argument of one of Harris’s defenders.
Read More carefully.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/11/23/what-does-sam-harris-have-in-common-with-the-republican-presidential-candidates/
My #192 should read “highlighted,” not blockquoted bits. And I should have mentioned that PZ paraphrased the highlighted bits, then countered the argument.
On my phone. Typing is hard.
Lady Mondegreen
I’m sorry but the responsibility is on the writer to make his argument, not on the reader to find justification in the whole history of his writings to help him back up juvenile observations like ““full of racist shit”.
Frankly I dont think Myers deserves any more attention.
Your point about outliers is self defeating. Think about it. You really think 9/11 is an outlier? Do you really think this event was so mysterious that it has to be excluded from calculations due to its variability to other death tolls? Does this means the Holocaust should be excluded from statistical analysis? The Armenian massacre? An outlier is only excluded if it reflects a problem in measurement or a heavy tailed distribution. Insert here: ————–droll comment about reading and comprehension.
Her point was nose on. Show where a similar set of plane hijackings and building demolition has occurred anywhere in the world since then. If it hasn’t happened, it is an outlier. That is what the evidence says.
Why do those who defend SH concentrate on a one-time event, instead of looking at all the little acts of terrorism committed in the US by bigots and Xians? My answer is tunnel vision, looking at the wrong thing.
Lady Mondegreen
I’m sorry but the responsibility is on the writer to make his argument, not on the reader to find justification in the whole history of his writings to help him back up juvenile observations like ““full of racist shit”.
Frankly I dont think Myers deserves any more attention. However, I clicked the brief post you outlined and saw the following comical argument.
PZ Meyers: “No, guy, making the assumption that being Muslim, the group most lethally targeted by ISIS, makes one more likely to sympathize with fanatical jihadists, is most definitely bigotry. It doesn’t even make sense.”
Myers is saying that non-Muslims are just as likely to become fanatical jihadists, and to accept otherwise, is bigotry. This is just stupidity. If this is true I’d like to see some examples of non Muslim jihadists. There are none. The concept is exclusive to Muslims. If then wants to claim he’s saying its just as likely non-Muslims will convert to fundamentalist Islam and become jihadists then that is just plain wrong, the vast majority are already fundamentalist Muslims, and he provides no evidence to counter this beyond a bald assertion. He also makes the common misnomer of asserting that because Muslims are most often the victims of ISIS that means Islam or Muslims must somehow not be the perpetrators (so idiotic I’ll rely on everyone’s common sense to see through it). Frankly you are wasting your time listening to such rubbish. This guy is just parroting left of centre platitudes, and trashing anyone who disagrees.
Your point about outliers is self defeating. Think about it. You really think 9/11 is an outlier? Do you really think this event was so mysterious that it has to be excluded from calculations due to its variability to other death tolls? Does this means the Holocaust should be excluded from statistical analysis? The Armenian massacre? An outlier is only excluded if it reflects a problem in measurement or a heavy tailed distribution. Insert here: ————–droll comment about reading and comprehension.
Nerd.
You don’t think the jihadist suicide mission of plowing a plan into a building has anything in common with the more routine suicide mission of plowing a vehicle into a building? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks
The difference is the degree of difficulty – note all the failed plane hijackings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings
If you think 9/11 is a one-time event you are deluded.
Hugh Harris @197,
Actually it seems like a strawman or mischaracterization. Here again is Professor Myers quote you were responding to with emphasis added this time:
Somehow in your reply this morphed into “to
sympathize withbecome fanatical jihadists.”As for whether historical events are outliers how about Nagasaki and Hiroshima? What’s the relative death toll there when compared against all of the jihadi attacks and how does that fit into your moral calculus?
What’s the point of the argument if they just sympathize with jihadists and stay at home watching Oprah? The point of whether they sympathize is how likely they are to become jihadists. Your quibble does nothing to detract from how silly the claim is. Muslims are obviously much more likely to sympathize with causes relating to Islam. No brainer.
I appreciate that US university campuses exist in finger clicking times of ultra-heightened sensitivity to racism & sexism, but it doesn’t mean we should simply ignore reality.
Re: Nagasaki/Hiroshima: I think they are horrific events, acts of deliberate and calculated destruction and murder, for which your country should be suitable shamed. They should never just be excluded from discussion as outliers, and I resent the Chomskian insinuation that I would excuse them (because you presume I’m white or a westerner or some sort of neocon?). Should I know accuse you or racism or supporting rape? (I’m not just in case your irony detector isn’t functional)
Past atrocities by the US don’t make the threat of jihadism go away do they?
@Hugh Harris
Your claim was that “trashing Harris is the main point of these posts, the narcissism of small differences. His argument is non-existent…”
Your claim is incorrect; PZ does not trash Harris just for the hell of it, and his arguments are not non-existent. The fact that he didn’t present an argument against Harris in a blog post about the inanity of an argument made by one of Harris’s defenders is neither here nor there. He has made those arguments elsewhere. Like it or not, this is a blog, with regular readers. Its author is not required to justify his every opinion with a repitition or recap of arguments made in the past.
I never claimed 9/11 was “mysterious.”
No. What PZ said was
Droll comment about reading comprehension not repeated, because bored. In any case, your opinion of that particular argument of PZ’s is beside the point. The point is that he has in the past argued against Harris. That particular example was simply the most recent; it was not the most substantive.
No, the point was also “how well will Muslim immigrants to the US assimilate.”
(I posted my last comment before seeing Plethora’s, or yours.)
FTR I think PZ was being lazy there; but again, the dispute with Harris goes back a way. If you want to engage PZ’s arguments, in fairness you should acquaint yourself with the background, and address his best arguments. If you just want to complain that PZ is mean to Harris, well, you’ve done that. It’s just not true that he has never argued to support his poor opinion of Harris.
@Lady Mondegreen
I appreciate the clarifications, and agree PZ is being lazy.
I’d like you to reflect on your arguments which roughly say that I should acqaint myself with PZ’s prior arguments against Harris, and given these make arguments in favor of branding him a racist, then Myers is off the hook for failing to provide an argument here. Note, you agree he does fail to argue against Harris here as his whole argument is against someone else. So do you think Myers is entitled to just continue claiming Harris or others are racists on the basis of his past arguments, in new posts which presumably are based on new developments? That’s not acceptable in my view.
I think it reflects an all too familiar media pattern of branding people and then referring to them in a derogatory manner regardless of what they say or do. I wouldn’t want to be part of entrenching that sort of illiberal behavior and I hope neither would you.
And forgive me for noting how Myers directly and deceptively presents a conclusion as relating directly to Harris, even though the argument isn’t even his:
“QED, my correspondent and Sam Harris are full of paranoid, racist shit.”
QED? I don’t think so.
Well, Harris has yet to say he *isn’t* still for profiling anyone who ‘looks’ muslim… so…. yeah. racist shit. And don’t try to bring up the anti-profiling bs of ‘oh, it’s not heightened scrutiny, everyone else just gets less!’… the least amount of scrutiny is the base line. Anyone that gets more has heightened scrutiny… so it’s still profiling.
And considering Harris isn’t apparently afraid of white men in this country (by whom he is far, FAR more likely to be in danger from), but is afraid of anyone who ‘looks muslim’ (note that this means ‘middle eastern’), that is the paranoid part. An unreasonably disproportionate fear.
So, sorry. Just because he hasn’t been a racist shit in the last 5 minutes does not mean he has magically changed his tune (and failed to tell anyone).
I said that if you want to take issue with PZ’s assessment of Harris, then you should in fairness acquaint yourself with his arguments. If you don’t like PZ’s style, that’s fine; you don’t have to read him.
PZ doesn’t have to justify his opinion of Sam Harris’s reasoning every single time he mentions it. Blogs are more personal than that; their authors don’t often provide in-depth background for every post. The history exists, though.
Hugh Harris @200,
Can’t speak for Professor Myers but seems as Lady Mondegreen wrote @202 that it was likely about those who would supposedly resist assimilation. Here’s a part of the quote to which he was responding.
Not a mind reader or linguist by any stretch but given Professor Myers choice of words “sympathize with jihadists” it seems far more likely he was referring to the latter as opposed to the former.
Sorry not sorry but it’s not just a “quibble” to expect you to get your interlocutor’s argument right. It’s not a minor detail. Not least because there would seem to be a world of difference between actually being a jihadist and merely sympathizing with them (presumably you would agree with that).
Maybe reading it wrong but seems Professor Myers was not so much calling into question a statistical correlation but rather was addressing the assumption that there is a causal arrow from Muslim to jihadist. Correlation does not equal causation and to assume otherwise in this case would amount to bigotry wouldn’t it?
Wonderful then we have found some degree of common ground on this point. Though not sure that “suitably shamed” goes quite far enough but that’s neither here nor there.
No such insinuation was intended (Chomskian or otherwise) and it never occurred as to whether you are white western or neocon. All of which are irrelevant to the point anyway.
Certainly they do not. But they ought to put it in a different light and give it a different sense of proportionality don’t you think?
No more than past atrocities by jihadists make drone strikes or bombings by the US and its allies, including of neutral hospitals, go away. Or make closed borders go away. Or make waterboarding not happen. The US has not just engaged in “past atrocities”. It is actively committing current atrocities.
.206
“Maybe reading it wrong but seems Professor Myers was not so much calling into question a statistical correlation but rather was addressing the assumption that there is a causal arrow from Muslim to jihadist.”
Maybe? And its racist to disagree with the point he might be making? This is just BS. Of course its more likely that a Muslim will sympathize with fanatical jihadists. Their religion is a key ingredient. It’s plain as day obvious. Honestly, it’s just dishonesty parading as political correctness that fails to acknowledge this. Just admit it. People who believe in Islam are more likely to become Islamists.
“Can’t speak for Professor Myers but seems as Lady Mondegreen wrote @202 that it was likely about those who would supposedly resist assimilation”
No – there are two separate points Myers makes.
“1. No, guy, making the assumption that being Muslim, the group most lethally targeted by ISIS, makes one more likely to sympathize with fanatical jihadists, is most definitely bigotry. It doesn’t even make sense.
2. Complaining that being Muslim automatically makes one less likely to assimilate assumes that Americans can’t really be Muslim, and is also bigotry.”
Note “is also bigotry.”
What other excuses are there?
If YOU obsess about 9/11 YOU are a delusional fool without anything intelligent to say. As YOU so plainly show. All I hear is your hate, fear, and paranoia.
Prima facie evidence by YOU showing that you have irrational fears, and fail to understand bigotry. SH is full of racist and misogynist shit. And he won’t apologize for it, so he believes in it. We have his number, and yours.
206. Re: Jihadism compared to Nagasaki/Hiroshima
“But they ought to put it in a different light and give it a different sense of proportionality don’t you think?”
I think you are referring to the scale of these events being larger. In any event the comparison has no real import as to the extent of the threat from jihadism. The threat from jihadism is real but we can disagree on how significant it is. I personally don’t think its very significant to the US mainland population, but it’s a significant concern in Europe, and its a growing concern worldwide, the longer the caliphate retains territory the more legitimate it looks to people who believe these things.
But I do object to shutting down intelligent discussion by puerile namecalling, and YOU-are Tu Quoque childishness, as evidenced by Nerd here who seems to have deduced that I’m also racist and SH is a misogynist now. Good one.
hugh Harris
here’s an idea: Go to your next Planned Parenthood clinic. Ask staff there who they’re afraid of.
What intelligent discussion? Just because YOU call it intelligent, doesn’t mean others think the same thing. I pity those who try to demonize Islam because of their fear, no matter how they try to present it as logical and reasonable. Which it isn’t.
One logical definition of of bigotry is treating some other group differently because of “reasons”. Usually those reasons come down to fear. What you find reasonable, others find laughable.
I fear Xian terrorists more than Islamic terrorists. They are here, and they are killing, and they are trying to start race wars and stop contraception.
I don’t follow the point Cenk Uygur is trying to make. The entire video seems to be a sort of Trojan Horse designed to trick well-meaning liberals to continue to avoid thinking about issues that make them uncomfortable. Harris’ “thought experiments” on Nuclear First Strike simply go through the motions of imagining horrible scenarios that must be thought through by those with the responsibility of securing nations from “unthinkable” attacks–how dare he actually think about them?! Just one more subject matter the elistist, regressive Left has marked off as too dangerous to talk about in a public forum.
I do notice one positive sign, however. Cenk is beginning to anticipate some of various the permutations he would expect Harris to make to refute his argument, which is a sign that A) he is paying attention to Harris more than he’d like to admit and B) these thought experiments are making his neurons work just a wee bit harder than they are used to and may produce something other than his usual smirky punch line. If he keeps going, he will be in danger of actually thinking something through and letting perhaps a glimse of honest analysis to sneak through.
I am disappointed to see such groupthink and sad polemic here. There is almost no engagement of ideas in the comments I have read. And I must say, seeing PZ Myers state that Sam Harris is racist is disappointing. Please engage the ideas he presents instead of joining the smear campaign.
When do we start the nuclear strikes, Brian Warren? Since we don’t need to act on any reliable information, just fear and paranoia, we may already be in the situation Harris described. Maybe our only option for survival is doing it right this minute. So why are you dragging your feet? Why aren’t you out there right now, trying to save us from the scary Muslims?
@hughharris #211
It is a significantly overblown concern in Europe. Right wing extremism is much more common any many countries (ask for example Giliell how things are going in Germany on that front), it is just that no one seems to care that much. The same is true if you adopt a more historical perspective (Red Army Faction, Red Brigades, IRA…). Only if you take a random definition and cherry-pick the time span you can make an argument that Jihadism is statistically the main threat. Or of course you can do it like Sam Harris: You base it on your gut-feeling and then you pretend that it is all rational by trying to fit the data to your conclusions.
Where I live most people for example would indeed say that Islamists are the greatest terrorist threat (it is always implicit that it is only about threats against “our own” of course). However, the last attack in my country was a disgruntled citizen who went on a shooting spree in the local parliament (14 dead). On the other hand: No Jihadist attacks. Ever.
Really? I could easily argue the opposite. The longer they control territory the more likely they will lose legitimacy because they are not that great at that governance thingy (besides “controlling territory” is a lot messier on the ground when it comes to ISIS as the caricature might suggest). But I actually do not know what the effect is (and probably you do neither). The reason why I bring it up is that his is exactly the kind of hand-waving armchair analysis and pseudo-expertise that Harris uses too to fit the “facts” to his conclusions that are ultimately favoring racist positions and actions.
dis·ap·point·ed
ˌdisəˈpoin(t)əd/
adjective
adjective: disappointed
(of a person) sad or displeased because someone or something has failed to fulfill one’s hopes or expectations.
The cries for people to “engage with the ideas” and “debate” and so forth remind me of creationists trying to gain an air of respectability by trying to get serious people to engage their horseshit with a straight face as if it didn’t smell so bad it makes your eyes water.
Their ideas deserve nothing but contempt and mockery, with the occasional explanation of why exactly they are absolutely ridiculous, but no deference or pretense of respectability is due. Exactly the same applies to the racist horseshit that people like Harris and his fanboys vomit out of their bigotholes…
You want people to engage you like your ideas are serious and deserving of discussion? Then don’t base them on prejudiced fear and bigotry.
212 Religious nutcases could be a possible answer
213 By your own logic your a bigot towards Xian people. “I fear Xian terrorists. They are here, they are killing…” Xianophobe.
216 I never said jihadism is the main threat. But it’s undeniable that it’s a threat. What other terror attacks killing numerous people by non-jihadists have their been in Europe? We’ve got Anders Breivik. And?
218 Feel better?
Read Graeme Wood’s account in The Atlantic “What ISIS really wants”.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
It’s not armchair rhetoric to suggest that territory is crucial to a caliphate, and perhaps you should have exercised caution prior to assuming it was. Territory is an essential requirement.
G.Wood:
“If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding. Former pledges could of course continue to attack the West and behead their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda value of the caliphate would disappear, and with it the supposed religious duty to immigrate and serve it.”
@216
Uh, the Nazis?
You know, that territory-capturing terrorist group that took advantage of disrest and public unhappiness in its home country before ethnically and religiously cleansing the surrounding area and committing numerous human rights offenses on its own countrymen? Sound familiar?
Unlike ISIS’s middling European civilian killcount, Kristallnacht killed like 90+ people alone, and the blitz killed around 40k civilians ostensibly to terrorize and demoralize the Brits.
220. Didn’t we already beat them? But yes, good point, the Nazis were pretty bad.
@221
Yes, we have indeed already beaten the Nazis, more or less. That doesn’t change that as of yet, white christians have severely outpaced jihadists in terms of terrorist casualties. Clearly, they’re the more dangerous demographic.
Is Russia considered to be part of Europe?
chigau, yes, the European parts of Russia are, if that helps. Of course, it’s not in the EU or anything, if the question is going to be gerrymandered that way.
How about the Pegida types in Germany? They’re burning buildings with many people in them. If this hasn’t led to multiple deaths yet that’s due to good building codes, luck, and incompetence on the part of the attackers, not lack of malice on the part of the attackers. I’m far more frightened of right wing violence here than of “jihadists”.
Also, it should be “have there been” not “have their been”. “Their” is the possessive for “they”. Adding this note strictly in cases English isn’t your first language and corrections are useful. If it was a simple inattention error because you were getting passionate about the subject and ignoring the details, just roll your eyes at my fussiness and go on with life.
The US and British bombing of Germany had a pretty overt terrorism component as well. I believe the term was “dehousing”. The allies were clearly the “good guys” in that war but only because the bar was extremely low.
The NSU
The Oktoberfest bombing
Möln, Solingen, Rostock…
Shall I go on?
Um, the IRA? ETA? My city’s never been attacked by jihadists, but it has been bombed by Irish Christians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_pub_bombings
And as for “Muslims are more likely to become jihadists” – so the fuck what? Yes, Muslims are more likely to join a specifically Muslim ideology, but focusing on that is missing the point. The important thing is not whether they join a particular ideology, but whether they’re a threat. It’s like saying that white people are more likely to join the KKK, so they’re the only ones we should worry about. Looking at “likely to become a jihadist” rather than “likely to kill people” is bigoted bullshit.
Shorter Hughharris:
I don’t know a fucking thing about history or other european countries and i’m superscared of muslims, this counts as evidence that i’m right, right?
And no, i don’t feel better, because you keep saying very stupid, ignorant, prejudiced shit…
229.
“Yes, Muslims are more likely to join a specifically Muslim ideology”
Thanks. Then you agree with me and disagree with Myers and therefore are “full of paranoid, racist shit”.
“The important thing is not whether they join a particular ideology, but whether they’re a threat. It’s like saying that white people are more likely to join the KKK, so they’re the only ones we should worry about.”
I wonder if you realize how you’ve contradicted yourself. Would you think a member of the KKK is more or less likely to commit an act of violence? QED. Insert appropriate racial slurs.
228 “Shall I go on?” Yeah name some recent ones and tell me how many in the month of November.
226. “Adding this note strictly in cases English isn’t your first language and corrections are useful.”
Please don’t use incorrect grammar to correct my grammar.
222. “white christians have severely outpaced jihadists in terms of terrorist casualties. Clearly, they’re the more dangerous demographic.”
Ah yes. Well we established that one earlier. If you remove the major terror incidents committed by jihadists then right wing atrocities win. Yeh!
For the rest of you I note you like mention right wing terror attacks worldwide, but aren’t really interested in Islamist attacks. Let’s face it, your looking through an ideological prism and just don’t want to know about Tunisia, or Boko Haram, or the Taliban, or the Sinai attack, or the bus bombing in Tunis, the Bamako Hotel attack, the Kabul bombing…
Should I go on?
(What would Chomsky think of that? Well to do exceptional Americans not interested in casualties in far flung places in the world. There’s a name for that…)
And that’s not in the last 10 years. That’s 17 Islamic terror attacks killing approximately 300 people, and injuring hundreds more…
IN THE LAST MONTH. November 2015. 17 attacks, 300 dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks
I guess that’s why we are all feeling much better about jihadism than in the past, and there’s really nothing to worry about. Nothing to see here.
And anyone who says otherwise is a racist pile of honesty.
Ehm, no. You’ve just not understood anything PZ or the people in this thread have been saying. And I mean literally nothing. Seriously.
@hughharris
#219
The article makes an argument based on the theology of ISIS in connection with the territory. There is no actual data in that article that underpins the point you are trying to make. There are plenty of scholars who argue for example that ISIS is more like a criminal organization, thriving on extorsion within their territory.
Funny that you quote an article in your defense that was widely criticized after its publication (even The Atlantic itself did publish one of the refutations). This is exactely what I mean by armchair analysis. You basically take the first article that confirms your worldview as fact. Of course, one can defend Wood’s take on ISIS but at least you should not treat it as an established fact (as you do) but as the highly controversial position it is.
Yes. So are falling flower pots, train accidents and avalanches. I thought the whole point was to assess the threat.
#231
Why do we talk about Europe? I think because someone wrote:
But hey, it must be the “ideological prism” of someone else.
And I do care very much about these other attacks. I have family in one of these places. I work in some of the others. Do you want me before every posting to make a list of things I care about? Just keep your faulty assumptions to yourself.
So you want to play the statistics game? Then follow some rules at least! Stop the hand-waving, state your hypothesis and the actual causality you are suggesting, clarify your time frame and geographic area. Otherwise it remains an arbitrary argument saying “because numbers”. You are jumping back-and-forth with your claims. I do not feel like looking for the newly positioned goalposts all the time. Obviously you can gerrymander every statistic into confirming a fuzzy claim.
P.S.: And please if you include the term “terrorism” in your definition, make sure to define it too. You will probably have to start by excluding states. Which will make you very unhappy if you think it through.
232. PZ Meyers: “No, guy, making the assumption that being Muslim, the group most lethally targeted by ISIS, makes one more likely to sympathize with fanatical jihadists, is most definitely bigotry. ”
Ehm, Yes. Provide an argument not just an assertion. Seriously.
Sounds pretty bad, assuming that your statistics are correct, which, given that your source is wikipedia is far from certain.
For comparison, in the US there were at least 12 deaths by gun violence in the US on 30 November. Assuming that was an average day, that would imply about 360 deaths due to gun violence in the US in November, 2015. In one country, with one weapon. Not counting other forms of violence. And 30 November didn’t happen to have any multiple shootings, so it was a probably lower than average risk day. Plus my source appears to be going by media accounts and is therefore almost certainly undercounting. Now, why should we be afraid of jihadists to the exclusion of all else? Or whatever it is you are arguing?
Fucking hell, you can’t be this thick so you must really be this fucking bigoted.
The fact that muslims are more likely to join a specifically muslim ideology is no more relevant than the fact that gay men are more likely to go to a male gay bar. It’s trivially true. It tells you fuck all about whether they are actually going to join it, it just tells you that IF anyone joins it, it’s more likely to be a member of that group.
Your assumption that there is necessarily a link between the two for any given member of “insert group here”, is fucking bigotry, and fictional.
233.
So where’s your evidence that “territory” is not critical to the credibility of the caliphate. As usual you are the pot calling the kettle black (I mean that in a non-racial way!!!)
The caliphate requires territory for credibility. That’s well established. Whilst I’ve seen articles by Islamic scholars and others criticizing Wood’s article, and I also don’t subscribe to all of it, most commentators agree its extensively researched and the point he makes about territory is also generally agreed.
So, find evidence against the actual point I’ve made about “territory” rather than trying to fashion an argument about the generalities of the whole several thousand word piece. That’s a non sequitur.
The data is contained in the Koran, Hadith’s and Woods interviews with various Islamists including Anjem Choudary, the ISIS magazine Dabiq and the recruitment videos.
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/16/opinion/bergen-isis-enemies/
Also note this article by Peter Berger, who quotes from the ISIS magazine Dabiq:
“The Syrian town of Dabiq is where the Prophet Mohammed is supposed to have predicted that the armies of Islam and “Rome” would meet for the final battle that will precede the end of time and the triumph of true Islam.”
This is what ISIS says. Now there’s two sources I’ve provided and all you’ve done is make general claims providing no sources. If you know better get off your armchair and produce the data.
I’ve been crystal clear. The argument about stats is based on the bogus claim that since 9/11 there more right wing violence in the US. Sure – excluding 9/11 that’s true. But its selection bias.
Provide your stats comparing right wing terror attacks with jihadism worldwide for the month of November 2015.
Provide your stats from 1985-2015 in the US.
Have a look at the stats worldwide. My advice is to use wikipedia – it takes about 3 seconds.
And then look up the naturalistic fallacy is see how making bogus comparisons doesn’t make threats go away.
Actually, make that a male, gay, k-pop enthusiast, club exclusively for red leather fetishist with ocular heterochromia and the left leg slightly shorter than the right.
Hey, whoever joins is far more likely to be gay!
236. I was quoting someone else who made that moronic statement. Someone who presumably agrees with you.
Duh! Sorry! Source to go with 235: http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/number-of-gun-deaths
Also, another issue: drone strikes. I don’t know anything about this source, it could be completely off, but as a starting point, they’re claiming that drones have killed about 150 in November. So half as many as wiki is claiming were killed by jihadists. Oh, and that was in Afghanistan. Just one country. Nor can I say that the data look terribly complete, given that the source of reporting seems to often be the US announcing its strikes. Also, that’s only drone strikes, not counting crewed plane bombings.
Source: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/drones-graphs/
So that was all somebody else, right?
Yes, it is racists to disagree with that point, because it prejudicially asumes a causal arrow between middleeastern muslim and jihadism.
It occurs to me that this question of right wing violence versus jihadist violence is quite an artificial one. On one side we have people who are fighting to establish a religious state where only their religion is allowed, where “traditional values” like modesty and women staying “in their place” are enforced, and where power is concentrated in the hands of religious leaders. On the other side we have…exactly the same thing. It’s only a matter of which specific religion is being referenced and to an outsider they are basically so close to the same that there’s no point to trying to differentiate them. Now, who should you fear the most? Well, it depends on where you are. Of the attacks that Hugh keeps going on about, only one appears to be in a non-Islamic country. So in a country where Islam is the dominant religion, fearing Islamic terrorists makes the most sense. In the US or Europe, nativist and Christian terrorists are more likely to kill you. Again, not much to chose from between them, but if I were a police chief in the US or Europe I know who I’d be lookign at most carefully.
I see HH is still on his rage of bigotry against Islam under the guise of “intelligent discussion”. But what he is engaged in is not discussion, but rather preaching of his bigotry. Discussion implies that he is listening, which obviously isn’t happening, as there is no learning going on by HH.
There is no rational reason to be a bigot. Just irrational emotional fear. Trying to put on a veneer of rationality doesn’t change the facts, nor make the bigotry justified. And trying to force your opinion on others doesn’t make you look rational, but rather desperate for conformation of your warped ideas.
Yeah, being a redhead with a mustache is a necessary component of being a world class redhead bemustached pianist. But just being a redhead and having a mustache doesn’t mean you can play the piano.
Who’s now trying to limit the data so it fits their argument?
241 and 242
“The fact that muslims are more likely to join a specifically muslim ideology is no more relevant than the fact that gay men are more likely to go to a male gay bar. It’s trivially true.”
So who said the above? You are accusing me of bigotry for a claim you agree is “trivially true”. So let’s see what manner of imbecility you employ to get out of this one.
255. “Who’s now trying to limit the data so it fits their argument?” I was asked to provide a sample size by 233 “clarify your time frame and geographic area.”
Having done so I think it’s reasonable to expect an intelligent response, but I havent seen one yet.
244. List of accusations without proof. It’s actually prejudice to assume someone else who disagrees with you is a bigot without evidence. Unless of course you are a mind reader. Which in your case seems unlikely because of noted deficiencies in this area.
240. I’m sorry but comparing gun violence or crime to terrorism is just shifting the goal posts to avoid the implications of comparisons already made. And you provide no stats on anywhere else. Just the US. American exceptionalism again.
Giliell @245,
Pretty sure you just proved that being a redhead with a mustache makes one more likely to be a concert pianist. Mind blown.
But can you name anyone who is not a readhead with mustache who has managed to become a world class redhead bemusctached pianist? No? Checkmate.
Sam harris is such a facist piece of crap OMA! Especially when he said that all syrian refugees should be granted american citizenship immediately. Like wtf bro!
Nope. Not what I said at all. Not even close.
You’re trying to argue that I am in particular danger of converting to Catholicism because Bill Donohue says stupid, vile crap. No, I’m less likely to be persuaded by people who target me for destruction.
You’ve also twisted the words in a profoundly dishonest way: I certainly don’t think non-Muslims are likely to become “fanatical jihadists” — but then, I’m not so much interested in the ideological distortions fanatics make to justify their fanaticism. I’m concerned about terrorists, period, and whether they’re Daesh or Posse Comitatus or anti-abortion crusaders or members of the KKK makes no difference. And here in America the white Christian terrorists are a far more pressing concern than the relatively rarer brown Muslim ones.
And with that bit of frothing, spittle flecked lying from Mr Hugh Harris, and all the rest of the batshit stupidity from him, he’s run his course and is out of here.
One of the signs of someone I don’t need to hear from ever again is when they’re more disappointed about racists being called racists than they are about racism.
@246
What? You have repeteadly said that pointing out the distinction between “all the members of Group A have trait B” (which is the claim that is trivially true) and “having trait B makes it more likely to be a member of group A” (which is bigotry) is bullshit, that you disagree with it, which means you accept the second point, which makes you a bigot.
@181.Chigau, bless YOUR heart. You too, Saad. And some others.
@250
I haven’t detected anything resembling racism from Harris. But go ahead, throw that word around with the weight of your platform and reputation and then ban me for disagreeing with you.
pathetic
hughharris
One of your sockpuppets was banned.
That means all of you are banned.
Have a nice day.
I know he’S banned, but:
is just hilarious. If you have a baby (which men can, too. That specific bigotry is called cis-sexism), what crime have you committed that makes you a “perpetrator”?
And yet, you seem to be waging war against the idea that muslim is not a predictor for jihadist.
Jesus fucking christ, of course it fucking is!!!! What is wrong with you?? If only a tiny minority subset of muslims are jihadists, assuming that muslim=possibly jihadist is fucking bigotry. And when the assumption is further compounded with brown muslim= possible jihadist, it’s fucking racist. Just like taking any kind of action under the assumption that someone may be KKK because they are white, would be.
Jihadist = likely muslim —> statistical fact
Muslim = likely jihadist —> BIGOTRY
It’s just not possible that you are failing to see this incredibly simple, obvious point, so i’m going to conclude that you do, but you are just unbelievably, disgunstingly dishonest.
Here is an article Wednesday The New Yorker which shows
” that the “main terrorist threat in the United States is not from violent Muslim extremists but from right-wing extremists.”
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/when-gun-violence-meets-ideology
M
Sent from my iPad
Are you fucking serious?
A jihadist is almost certainly going to be muslim. That doesn’t make any individual muslim ANY more likely to become a terrorist. When a christian becomes a terrorist we don’t call them jihadist, we also don’t assume that any christian, by virtue of being christian, might be a terrorist, even though it’s equally true that christians are far more likely to become christian terrorists.
You either have a serious lack of basic reading comprehension or you are trolling. Either way, fuck off already.
A crusader is almost certainly going to be a Christian. Therefore, we need to arrest all Christians before they sack Jerusalem.
Hugh Harris has been banned again under his other pseudonym. Why do the trolls always do this?
Richard Dawkins said “Islam is the greatest man-made force for evil in the world today”
What a racist.
Good thing you’re banning people for spouting incorrect views.
No, I’d be much more likely to say that the ‘western world’ as embodied by the USA is, what with our tendency to go into other countries and bomb the shit out of them for no real reason and say that we’re giving them ‘freedom’. Daesh and Al Qaeda can’t hold a candle to our death dealing.
But sure, let’s demonize all of them automatically, and kill them by the thousands. That will totally NOT make any of them violent or filled with hatred.
Explain.
Not incorrect so much. I mean bigoted.
ie. “Islam is the greatest man-made force for evil in the world today” or assuming that being Muslim makes one more likely to sympathize with fanatical jihadists.
Here I was thinking that the world was all complex and shit and that there are multiple variables to consider with regard to what can motivate a person to actively seek to harm another. Boy, I’m sure glad you lot have figured out it boils down to just one variable though. That makes what to do with anyone who exhibit that one variable rather easy to deal with. Say, what would you have us do with all those Muslims who are so easily persuaded simply by the fact of them being Muslims? I dare say they cannot be trusted, nope, nosirree. We should keep a close watch on them at all times. Maybe even concentrate them into a single area so they’re easier to manage. Wha’d’ya say?
That’s right, that’s why we need to ban people who spout bigoted view like Islam is the greatest man-made force for evil in the world today.
Yep concentrate them. And then when we’ve got them surrounded by razor wire, patrolled by white people, then we’ll have to decide which race to oppress next. Any ideas? All this oppression justified through coded messages of racism disguised as logical arguments – just wait to see how much they capital they can make out of the killers with arabic names.
[snip]
Perhaps you could respond with a volley of profanity and ban me from your site?
[OK. Fuck you, and bye. –pzm]
Actually, considering the sheer number of white terrorists (we simply don’t call them that instead they’re “lone wolves” or “mentally ill”) in this country, I *was* surprised to learn that info.
Oh! Now I know what you’re trolling about! It wasn’t entirely clear that you’re just a run-of-the-mill anti-atheist. It’s been forever since we had anyone try to associate FTB with Dawksdork I could hardly tell what you were saying. Well now! This changes …. Nothing. It changes nothing. You’re a shitheel regardless.
Almost as surprising as finding out the recent Planned Parenthood killer Dear was a conservative Christian.
What are you actually arguing for? That the default presumption in the case of mass murders should be that the perpetrators are Muslim? See, now that is bigotry, especially when the only data we had at the time prior to the revelation was that there was a shooting. In this case, your presumptions about what factored into the decision to murder, namely that the perpetrators were Muslims involved with Daesh to a degree, would have been proven correct, but unjustified in the face of the actual evidence which was available to us at the time.
So, yeah, you’re defending bigotry, through and through. And trying to rationalize it based on information you didn’t have at the time. Sounds quite rational. Natch.
And it WAS bigotry. It still is in fact.
The fact that this particular case turned out to involve ISIS says absolutely fuck all about whether simply assuming that it must have before the facts were known, on the basis of “muslims”, was justified. It wasn’t. You know, when it became justified? Once we actually learned that they were involved with ISIS. Before that moment, it was prejudice and bigotry, particularly since this was such an strange and unusual case that had many elements that didn’t fit the ISIS modus operandi, and it actually took time to learn about their motivation and background. Unless, you know, you are a fucking bigot and all you need was to hear “muslim” and “guns” in the same sentence.
Oh look, that works just the same for the same value of “true”.