Omer Aziz wrote an article critical of Sam Harris. So, as he likes to do, Harris invited Aziz to a “debate”. Without even considering the content, we can conclude that Harris is a dishonest clown. Take a look at the conditions he set:
So I accepted his offer and every onerous condition that came with it. Once again, all the terms were set by him: I would have to read the essay word for word, he could stop me whenever he wanted, I could not record the talk, and Harris reserved the right not to air it if it was “boring”—a standard to be defined only by him, and only after the fact.
They talked for four hours. Then, later:
A few weeks later, I was surprised then to find the following email in my inbox:
I just listened to our recorded conversation, and I’m sorry to say that I can’t release it as a podcast. Even if I took the time to edit it, I wouldn’t be doing either of us any favors putting it out there. The conversation fails in every way — but, most crucially, it fails to be interesting.
Better luck next time…
Sam
Just his lopsided and dishonest debate tactics are enough to condemn him. Unfortunately for Sam, Aziz also seems to have taken notes.
The hypocrisy, for one, is explicit. During our conversation, Harris complained that Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, Salon, and others were unethical and dishonest “regressives” who did not stand up for free speech—a term, first coined by Nawaz, that is bitter in tone and sweet in irony, considering Harris’s debate scheme.
For at least 30 minutes, Harris went on and on about the moral and intellectual failings of individuals and organizations he considered to be left-wing accomplices to jihadists, digressing boringly into petty feuds with people who were apparently so dumb they could not understand the threat posed by Islamist terrorism and so smart they could permanently get under his skin. Enduring the broken tune of the world’s smallest violin was painful enough, but enduring it while the man assumed the air of a virtuoso would qualify, I think, as cruel and unusual punishment.
That sounds sooooo familiar. So does the moral blindness.
Once we had cleared our throats, Harris repeated his cliched trope that he was defending the minorities of the Middle East—atheists, women, and the LGBT community. I heartily agreed that everyone must defend the rights of persecuted minorities, but I asked: Where was Sam Harris’s defense of thousands of Muslims and non-Muslims killed by Western bombs? He had never bothered to defend their right to life, those who had suffered hurricanes of shrapnel for years. Did he not lament those deaths, too?
In his reply, Harris reduced these people to “collateral damage,” and he went off on a tangent about the utility of this term, and the puritan motives of Western policymakers. This is the euphemism Harris repeats quicker than even the most hawkish conservatives do. He does so, I believe, because the Muslim-looking or brown-skinned body is of no human value to him. In one breath he declared his moral superiority in defending minorities, and in the next, he dehumanized thousands of victims and sanitized the victimizers. The corpses of children conveniently hidden behind his two favorite words, Harris could proceed with a clean conscience.
When will people finally see through this neocon kook?
File this under: Least surprising news of the week.
I can’t believe he bothered agreeing to those conditions.
Moral of the story: if someone tells you “I won’t talk to you unless I can record the talk but not you“, Find a way to record the talk
Ugh. When will the absurdist right realise that it’s possible the defend the rights of Muslims, and refugees who may or may not be Muslims but still look suspiciously Arabic while still opposing Islam as a religion and Islamism as a political ideology? Or that free speech does not mean you are guaranteed a stage or that you will never have to deal with responses to your speech?
Don’t worry – it’s a rhetorical question. I know the answer is never.
Collateral damage. Does Harris call himself a humanist? Because if so, I think we have to revoke his rights to that term. Even if the inhumanity of hiding slaughter behind those words doesn’t justify it, I think the irrationality of refusing to address the underlying causes of so many political tensions is enough to do so.
At least when Harris claims he’s being misquoted out of context this time, the solution will be easy.
Just release the tape, Sam.
I love the photo on the article. Sam is in heavy makeup for TV that doesn’t match the skin tone on his hands and really isn’t helping him look healthy. Guy needs a nap. Maybe he can go be spiritual in a cave in Southeast Asia for a while. I half recall that was something he was into.
*Spits* If I could figure out how, I’d vomit up all my estrogen vibe on that mega-asshole Harris.
Harris certainly comes off as an asshole.
I do find some serious points of contention with Aziz, however. He focuses on about the political machinations behind the Rushdie fatwa and the Danish cartoon fiasco. Okay fine, even if we stipulate that, the implication is that Islam is not itself involved in or shaped by these politics. It’s hard to understand how Islam could fail to be causally implicated in these events.
Like Aziz, I see that Islam is not equivalent to its texts nor Wahabbism or anything, but neither is Islam identical to its history. Islam is the stated ideology of a number of oppressive governments and terrorist groups with global reach. Even if the higher ups are calculated liars (not implausible), it’s hard to imagine that the rank and file of these organizations don’t believe in this, and that belief is a species of Islam.
@georgelocke:
Much like ‘Quiverfull’ is a species of Christianity. Highly authoritarian groups and personality cults have been using more mainstream forms of organized religion as cover for… well, probably for as long as there has been organized religion. And a number of recent events show that even the ‘religion’ part seems to be optional.
Please, georgelocke, that’s a really basic category error that you’re throwing at Aziz.
I still don’t understand how a guy who is “misquoted” as often as he is wouldn’t want more recordings of him out there so there will be no doubt of the certainty of his words.
The Harris Fanboys can then reference the recording and say, “See, see, right there. He says ‘brown people’ not ‘brown children’! Checkmate SJWs!”
I guess I just don’t understand the great minds of the movement…
Caine #7:
Uhm, I’d pay serious* money to see that. Kickstarter?
*Well, Australian money, but you know what I mean…
About halfway through one of his books. That is all it took for me, I’m still ticked that I let Sam Harris waste several hours of my life.
Harris is aiming to be Fox Nuisance’s go-to-atheist for TV appearances now that Hitchens is dead. But even they know he’s not up to the challenge intellectually or presentationally.
Come on, you’re misquoting him!
Most mortals are incapable of even hearing Harris, let alone quoting him correctly. However, some highly trained artists can pick up a word or two, and echoes of his words may haunt the dreams of the newly deaf.
And for some reason, armadillos can understand him easily, though they usually just roll up into a ball.
Why would Aziz agree to those asymmetrical conditions? That seems dumb.
I hope Harris will release the tape.
@georgelocke
Christianity is the stated belief of countries who have been bombing the shit out of many other countries for the past century.
Even if the higher ups are calculated liars (not implausible), it’s hard to imagine that the rank and file of these organizations don’t believe in this, and that belief is a species of Christianity.
@16: Agreeing to those conditions is not dumb at all, it’s similar to the delightful, “Please proceed, governor.” Now, Aziz has written a long, detailed, and in my view credible article demonstrating that Harris is an ignorant, bloviating shit. And basically the only way Harris can rebut this is to publish the tape, the whole tape; anything less will allow Aziz to explain what is missing from it, and thus put Harris on the back foot again.
I imagine Harris will just chalk this up to experience and hope that it gets forgotten. But I am amused, so there is that.
Startling lack of Harrisbots on this thread. I wonder what’s holding them up?
FossilFishy:
Money’s money. Shit, I’d love to take it, too, but I haven’t even figured out just what an estrogen vibe is, let alone how to vomit it out.
@petesh #17 I hope you are right.
There is a ytub video from 2011viralling now, showing a guy extracting pus from a spider bite.
For four and a half minutes.
I nominate it as a better metaphor than vomitting.
@numerobbis #18: Don’t fret, I have arrived to defend the great Harris!
Honestly, after listening to his interview with Myriam, I don’t blame him for not releasing the tape with Omar. Its bound to be at least as bad, and my face cannot take any more cringing.
Oh hey does this mean we can just use “not interesting” when the freeze peachers whine about a platform being removed?
Chigau @ 21:
If you want to say you’d ooze all over Harris, go for it. I’ll stick with vomit.
Caine #19
Ha! Yup, but seeing as how there’s no such thing as an ‘estrogen vibe’ it could be anything you nominate it to be. Seems to me that there’s a whole subjective world of spew based metaphors* awaiting your artistic pleasure, every one of them containing a blank space just begging for a pithy two word title. :) Mind you, I’m not sure Harris is worth the effort.
*chigau at #21 notwithstanding, worthy though that suggestion is.
Caine
Since I’m playing Straining-At-Metaphors while I wait for the muscle relaxants to kick-in…
.
Vomitting is (usually) kind of a one time thing. Empty the stomach, stop vomitting.
(yes. there are times when it seems to go on and on. I’m metaphoring here.)
.
I good toxin or bacterial induced pus-pocket or tropical ulcer can keep giving for years and years and etc.
You think you got the thing cleaned and evacuated and it’s scabbing over nicely and *ping*
the one molecule of samharris got together with the last molecule of chitchens and you’re back to draining greenish fluid for days …
chigau [vigorous applause!]
A
beautifulperfect metaphorI really enjoined reading that.
@F.O.
i do something similar with trolls but it has risks. You engage in a good faith effort, but plan for the specific inconsistencies, hypocrisies, reasoning problems and similar. From here you can let them fall out and display the awfulness for everyone to see without prompting them, but it’s also possible to prompt them by “feeding the troll poison”.
That was interestingly consistent with chigau’s apt comparison and I had not gotten there yet.
“I’m going to record our conversation, but you’re not allowed to. Then, I’m going to decide whether or not to publish a version of the recording that I get to edit.”
It’s like some poor attempt at a joke. Sadly, I’m not surprised at this behavior from Harris. It seems entirely in character.
Funny that Harris Fans will scream “censorship” and will demand “freedom of speech” if a blogger deletes their lame comments but here their “god” deletes four hours of conversation and it is all fine. Suddenly, the logic changes to “but it is Sam Harris’s podcast and he has the freedom to publish whatever he wants”.
Although I have to say Aziz makes up a lot of bullshit in his article as well:
Shite and Sunny conflict is centuries old and the two sects have fought many many wars spread over many centuries (e.g., Ottoman – post Safavid Persian wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman%E2%80%93Persian_Wars) . To claim otherwise, it is either dishonest or ignorant. I don’t think Aziz is ignorant though since he sneaks the caveat “modern” in there to make his sentence technically correct but misleading. For an uninformed Western reader, this paragraph can easily imply that Shite and Sunni conflict is a modern phenomenon rather than centuries old hostilities being dealt with in modern times; since he put the term “modern” there, suddenly all the previous conflicts magically don’t count.
@lotharloo #32
I think you’re missing what Aziz is getting at. He is saying this as a counter to the idea that intolerance is an inherent, necessary quality of Islam. The fact that there has been conflict between Sunni and Shia is irrelevant. The point is that there doesn’t have to be.
georgelocke #8:
A species of Islam, sure. The whole of Islam, no. Just like Christianity, Islam contains many different variants, ranging from hardline ‘kill the unbeliever’ sects to pacifistic ‘violence is against the will of God’ sects. What Harris does is take the actions of the ‘kill the unbeliever’ sects and say that ALL Muslims are like that, and therefore we are justified in bombing them. The flipside equivalent would be saying that all Christians in western Europe and the US are Christian fundamentalists advocating for and/or preparing to launch a modern Crusade against the heretical Muslims of the Middle East, and they are therefore justified in attacking us.
@31 lotharloo
When you achieve level 20 Intellectual Atheist and become a Thinky Leader of the Order of Perfect Reason, you gain the ability to bend reality as well as your spine which allows you to stick both your head and your awareness of massive logical failure, deep up your arse, where it is negated by fiat.
But worry not, if you are a mere acolyte, worshipping at the feet of your Thinky Superiors, they also exude a fog of glamour that makes it possible for you, loyal devotee, to continue pretending that they are wearing gold incrusted clothes and their farts smell of truffles.
There’s been some interesting research into authoritarianism lately that, among other things, suggests that you can pretty easily make some people act like authoritarians if you get them scared enough. Honestly to me that’s what Sam Harris sounds like: he’s so freaked out about al Qaeda (who, it’s fairly clear, got lucky, and did not have a plan for what came next) and Daesh (who are too delusional to be a long-term threat) that he is willing to throw every rational response under the bus to justify his fear.
Here’s hoping he publishes the chat now….its surely the only way to know who’s telling the truth?
@lemurcatta 7 #22 I agree, the podcast with Myriam was hard to listen to, neither came out of that looking particularly good but Myriam was making no sense at all.
@Caine #19
No no, you’re getting it all wrong. The estrogen vibe is something women need to have, otherwise atheism isn’t as attractive to them because of all the complicated manly thinking that it entails. I’m not sure if you can swallow it, but vomitting it out would transform you into a theist or at least a non-activist atheist and you’d probably return to kitcheny stuff or wiping kids arses or whatever nurturing or coherence building things women do instead of our manly thinking leadership.
@FossilFishy (NOBODY, and proud of it!) #25
Mandatory explanatory picture.
I’ll just drop this here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/the-atheist-who-strangled-me/309292/
1) I think Omer Aziz made the correct choice to attempt to modify the interaction and then accept the ridiculous terms when Harris wouldn’t budge. The terms themselves paint Harris in a bad light and he will likely have to eventually release the recording anyway. Even editing it at this point would make him look bad. If Aziz had refused, Harris would have been able to crow about his critics not standing behind their words.
2) I commented recently on the link between secure societies (i.e. good health care & education, lower fear of violence) and lack of religion and which direction the causal link goes. My belief is that the security of a society reduces religion far more than a reduction in religion increases security.
Yes, Saddam was a horrible bastard, but Iraq (and the surrounding region) was in a far better state before Western intervention. There is no quick fix to reducing extremism; it’s a generational change that comes primarily from access to education. Bombing a country into the stone age consistently has the opposite effect. Collateral damage is a great way to make enemies. If my family was killed and dismissed as collateral damage, I would be filled with life-long rage towards whoever did it, regardless of their (stated) intentions.
In the lead-up to the last Canadian election, the Conservatives ran a commercial which, among other things, made fun of the Liberal plan to send winter jackets Syria, saying “like that will stop ISIS”. No, it wouldn’t stop ISIS alone, but it would save lives and is probably one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce their ability to recruit, while creating zero new enemies. Bombs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars *each*, kill a lot of innocents, and ruin cities for whoever manages to survive.
Plus, if the “Coalition of the Willing” had stayed out of Iraq in the first place, there would be no ISIS.
Marcus @ 39:
Oh, the irony.
This Azis-Sam thing looks to me like a well-matched fight between two lightweights. I can’t muster any sympathy for either of them.
Harris needs to get a thicker skin and not be baited by apologist law-student twerps.
He would also be well served by sticking with “Islam is a collection of stupid and often violent ideas” and laying off the areas of history and geopolitics where he has little to contribute.
Maybe what Sam needs is a real job. If you’re going to make a living as a pundit, you need to go beyond repeating “There is no god” over again, and while Sam says that well, he doesn’t have very much more to say.
About the only good thing about him is that he reliably sends PZ into hysterical spasms of name-calling.
August
@k5083 #42
More like eye-rolling and head-shaking at the utter inanity. “Without even considering the content, we can conclude that Harris is a dishonest clown.” doesn’t sound hysterical to me.
@k5083 and/or august.
And Azis’ crimes to make you dismiss him?
Don’t forget “arrogant ass”, “neocon kook” — PZ’s reaction to Harris goes way beyond anything rational.
Maybe you can explain what PZ means by ““Without even considering the content, we can conclude that Harris is a dishonest clown.” That seems absurd to me. Sounds like something the righties might say. “Without even considering the content, we can conclude that Obamacare is a bad law.” “Without even considering the content, we can say that the Bible is a great guide to morality.” Without considering the content, we can conclude a lot of things, but why should anyone take seriously what we conclude?
“And Azis’ crimes to make you dismiss him?”
I just think it is evident from reading his original review and his account of the Harris episode that neither the ignorance, the prejudice nor the arrogance are entirely one-sided here.
PZ doesn’t really have the equipment to become hysterical.
Testerical, maybe.
Harris has already well established himself as a dishonest clown. One doesn’t have to listen to David Icke’s most recent lecture to write him off as a lizard-conspiracy kook. Same goes for Sammy.
numerobis, #18
Happy now?
@ k5083 # 45,
As the sentence following your quote makes clear (to me at least), the auto-dismissal is due to the absurd conditions that Harris placed on the exchange and then the decision to withhold the conversation.
But then after that, PZ does get into the details; at least as reported by Aziz. I’d have more to go on if Harris released the recording.
@k5083
There was another sentence immediately after that one. And a quote. And then another sentence. And another quote. Before the content came into it. Did you notice those sentences and quotes?
Using swear words doesn’t make something “way beyond anything rational”. Just like refraining from using them doesn’t make something rational or valid or worth giving a fuck about… However, dismissing something because of the pressence of expletives or other “naughty” language, is very irrational indeed. So, congrats on the massive fail.
k5083, let’s make this wicked easy: You know how you easily dismissed Azis after just two articles? I assume you think it’s not absurd to dismiss him, right? I assume you don’t consider yourself a righty, right? I assume you think we should take you seriously, right?
Alrighty, then. Who do you suppose has read shitloads more than two articles by Sam Harris that you are now accusing of being absurdist, of sounding like a righty, and that shouldn’t be taken seriously? You have read two articles by Azis and “it is evident” that you can dismiss him … but PZ can’t dismiss Sam Harris after years of reading Harris’ vomitous bullshit?
JesusfuckingChrist, you’re an assholish hypocrite.
@ tonyinbatavia #53,
Why would you assume k5083 read either of the articles linked in the OP? Are you just being generous?
Maybe you could have read for comprehension in the first place. Immediately following the sentence you quote, PZ says:
And then he quotes Aziz Re: said conditions:
“Without even considering the content…”, by the simple technique of reading in context, would appear to mean “Considering the absurdly fussy and patently self-serving conditions Harris set…”
Harris is a dishonest clown.
Golgafrinchan Captain @54, as you can probably tell I’m not feeling too generous after readying this knucklehead. See k5083 @46.
CJO:
Oh, no, no, no. Only Harris is allowed the holy context, of which, no quotes must be taken, never ever, amen.
Given that Harris thought he was looking good in the exchange with Chomsky, he must have looked really bad in this one…
IMO, intolerance is inherent to any faith belief system that says “I have it right, and everyone else has it wrong, and I am going to paradise, and everyone else is going to hell”. Obviously, this includes most forms of Christianity too. That’s one thing that Sam Harris has right which many of his opponents do not admit: People are going to act on their beliefs, and it’s silly to think that they won’t.
PS: Sam Harris is still an arrogant, evil ass, and wrong on many, many points.
…
It’s not fair to conflate Saddam with Islamic extremism. From my rank ignorance, wasn’t Saddam more of a run of the mill genocidal tyrant who occasionally supported Islamic terrorists? IMHO, a military intervention was morally justified to remove this person who killed millions of his own country-persons. I also still think that we could have done the military intervention better, and not destroyed the country, and made the people of the country better off, but I remain open-minded and non-committal on this point.
Also my impression, my impression also being from secondary and tertiary sources and also not being particularly deep. But yeah. My impression sure as hell is that the Baathists were actually anti-Islamist at least in certain (important) ways. The Wahhabists hated the man and his “sure, let the women drive; unless they insult me in which case kill them” attitudes.
I don’t know that he ever supported “Islamist terrorism” which would be (I think) the more relevant question. If “Islamic terrorism” just means “people who identify themselves as muslim and also do things that appear to count as terrorism” then half of everything he did was Islamic terrorism. Even a slightly narrower definition (perhaps where “Islamic terrorism” has to have a goal related to the goals of some Islamic sect or Koranic principle) would leave half of what he did as terrorism because advancing Sunnis and punishing the Shia-ne-Ali is, on its own, a goal of many theocratic jerks who consider following Ali to have been treason against Muhammed (who is, of course, being followed by the theocratic jerk in question, at least according to the theocratic jerk in question).
So I think that you’re using “Islamic terrorism” in a sense that is actually common in political discourse (though I think it should be abandoned for confusing the issue since the use cannot be easily distinguished from other definitions of “islamic terrorism” as above), i.e. as something largely synonymous with “Islamist terrorism”.
If used in that sense, I think you’re right that it’s arguable he never once supported Islamist terrorism. Again, I could be proven wrong, it’s not like I’m any expert, but yeah: the people I’ve relied on to provide me an expert’s view have consistently said that he was never a supporter of Islamists or their movements.
Iraq, like other Arab states, did provide money to the families of Palestinian people who were killed by the state of Israel. I bet some of that money supported some Islamist Palestinians. But the money wasn’t to support Islamic terrorism any more than money I might send to a refugee relief agency is to “support” violent action by any armed militants who eat or meet at the camp. You could still claim that Iraq (and Saddam) did end up supporting terrorism, but it wouldn’t be much more meaningful than claiming that I do when I give money to certain relief agencies knowing that inevitably some people forced from their homes will react badly, including violently.
I agree with you on this as well – including being open-minded and non-committal. However, I would add the caveat that I don’t think that the USA can lead or even be a plurality member of any military force deposing anyone leading any government without causing seriously negative consequences. We have a well deserved reputation for killing people and deposing governments for selfish and short-sighted reasons. A plurality involvement by the USA in yet another military decapitation of a sovereign nation state can only deflect inquiry and attention away from the crimes of the guilty regime and as a result provide an excuse for anyone, with any motive, to question the legitimacy of any resulting government and/or constitution.
The only source I have offhand is Christopher Hitchens’ frequent claims that Sadam did support people who wanted to attack the west, who claimed to be Muslim, and who otherwise fit my naive usual definition of a member of al-Qaeda or ISIS.
But regardless, I don’t think it matters. What matters is also what Hitchens often said, and that Saddam was one of the biggest mass murderers in history, basically genocidal, and that is reason enough to remove him from power with military force. (As we both said before, it’s partially an open question whether military force could be more beneficial than harmful. I still lean “yes”.)
@=8)-DX, #38:
Your graphic did have some interesting aspects. The “For women! For Men! For Everyone!” bit did drop it several levels for me. If they really meant to be trans-inclusive, (and let’s give the creator credit for wanting that to be the result) there are graphics for that that are more than just repeating the mirror’s handle and spear’s point – usually on the upper left of the circle and/or turning the circle into a triangle.
It’s not bad per se. It’s just another example of how the relentless devaluing and erasure of trans people and experiences make it hard for trans people like me to be truly part of a community, to feel included in the joke.
i noticed because I’m perfectly happy to include sexual joking in a time and place where others are less likely to be perfectly happy with it.*1
I remember reddening rq’s cheeks with my link during a discussion of “packing” (as one example). So I should have really enjoyed the comic…and didn’t. Because I should be the target audience for such a comic (mainly middle-class & up, sex-positive and sex-fluent feminists), but I just couldn’t trust the unknown person doing the targeting.
Damn trans*-oppression! you make even well-intentioned, sexy humor less fun!
================================================================
*1: comes from being told that sex is inappropriate to the topic even when the topic is oppressing one people for what other peoples imagine the first people do in bed; at some point you realize that even if the other peoples are not being consciously disingenuous, the assertion that discussing sex will do more harm than good has lost a great deal of credibility and the assertion that – given other precursors necessary to productive conversation such as honesty and good faith – discussing sex will do more good than harm starts to look rather convincingly like a reasonable null hypothesis.
@ tonyinbatavia #56
That was me trying to be a smart-ass but I missed the line in #46 where k5083 said they read Aziz’s articles.
@ k5083, props for reading the articles. Apologies for my erroneous assumption.
@Jake Harban:
Somebody’s been reading Digger again, haven’t they?
Duce’s Law:
Just to back up Caine’s Corollary, from #57 in this thread:
Sycophants of any stripe make me sick. Harris’ sycophants only sicken me more often because they are so much more likely than other sycophants to spew their nauseating arrogance around spaces I frequent.
I’m sure if any devotee of Cardinal Pell remained anywhere on the planet, said devotee’s writing would be just as incommodious.*1
*1: Yes, that’s true literally, and yes, that’s a pun.
k5083 @45:
Nah. If anything, that’s not a harsh enough description of a guy who thinks:
• atheism lacks an estrogen vibe and that’s a reason there aren’t as many women as men in the movement
• torture may be appropriate under certain circumstances
• is a racist piece of shit who thinks you can profile Muslims at airports but has never (to the best of my knowledge) explained how this is possible, since people of all kinds of racial backgrounds are Muslim.
No, PZ’s words could actually go a bit farther in calling Sam Harris the vile fucker that he is.
@ EnlightenmentLiberal #59
I wasn’t actually conflating Saddam with Islamic extremism; my impression of what he was like is the same as yours. Before the war, Iraq was a relatively stable country (run by a complete asshole) which had a decent infrastructure and education system. My point was that, as bad as Saddam was, what replaced him is far worse (for Iraq and for the world). Having an educated populace is the path to self-liberation and it will now take them generations to get back to where they were.
Maybe a better planned invasion would have had different results but my expectations were very low when the initial move was called “Shock & Awe”. I can’t see bombing the shit out of a country ever having a net positive impact; it tends to make more enemies than it kills. Not to mention the cost to the soldiers that have to do the killing, even if they weren’t hung out to dry when they got home.
@Golgafrinchian Captain:
Who knows what a “better planned” invasion would have left behind, but the clear US leadership of the invasion, I think, doomed it to have terrible political consequences in Iraq, in the Middle East, and to some extent in any country with Islam as an official religion.
Like you, I was bewildered at the “Shock & Awe” branding: they wanted to “shock and awe” whom? And how, precisely, were the bombs smart enough to limit the “Awe radius” post-detonation? And what, precisely, was to be “shocking” save the violence itself?
But, lastly, I would like to conclude with a bit of irony that the Bush administration appears to have had a lesser way with words than a Golgafrinchian. Perhaps it’s a mercy that George W’s post White House artistic pursuits focussed on portraiture?
@Saad, #49:
I have to get together with you for drinks sometime, assuming your consent, while reading the internet about crappy things happening in the world. Your disdain, irony, sarcasm, and other humors make the process of informing oneself about the world and its humans’ politics (unfortunately necessary for ethical participation in society) so much more bearable.
@ 59 EnlightenmentLiberal
…wasn’t Saddam more of a run of the mill genocidal tyrant who occasionally supported Islamic terrorists? IMHO, a military intervention was morally justified to remove this person who killed millions of his own country-persons
Jesus, you know nothing about Iraq!
Saddam Hussein was a total secularist whose only support for an Islamic terrorist would be to supply the bullet to shoot him. Osama bin Laden, the Wahhabi and the Shi’a clerics of Iran all hated him.
Saddam probably killed hundreds of thousands in his ill-conceived war with Iran but they died mainly as solders not in the equivalent of Nazi concentration camps. You could consider him a psychopath but he only killed Iraqis when they were a perceived threat to him. And often he just beat up and tortured them.
He wiped out an entire city (using poison gas IIRC) but that was putting down a rebellion. AA perceived threat. This was not, at the time, considered all that serious by the West especially the USA, since he was a staunch ally against Iran at the time.
Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq before the First Gulf War was a quite prosperous secular state, a police state that would stamp out anything that looked like dissent but there was normal personal safety and security for the general population; everyone was fed, if neccesary at government expense’ there was little or possibly no sectarian violence, the schools and universities worked, the utilities functioned, the health care system worked (quite well, I believe) and so on. Iraq probably had the one of best record for women’s rights in the Arab world under Saddam
It was much less prosperous before the Second Gulf War due to the insane level of sanctions but there was still a general level of security, no sectarian violence, people got something to eat and so on.
<I also still think that we could have done the military intervention better, and not destroyed the country
Well, there was no legitimate reason to invade the country—all the evidence about weapons of mass destruction and so on were purely British and US fabrications or US intelligence’s credulous belief in the lies of one or two Iraqi exiles.
This, by the way, was clear to pretty well everyone in the world except, perhaps, George W. Bush, the US public whose media was completely gullible/incompetent and believed anything the govenment told them, and Tony Blair. And Blair may just have been a nutty Christen who was imaging some kind of modern crusade against the Forces of Islam.
Post-invasion, it was almost impossible to belief the level of complete and total incompetence shown by Bush, his coterie, and the occupational authority.
Who had no concrete post-invasion plan? Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld because they shut out the State Department who actually had spent years planning for just such a contingency.
Who, with the slightest grasp on reality, fires most or all of the civilian government because they were members of the Ba’ath Party (Hint: Membership was a job requirement like being a member of the Communist part in China). Who was the idiot who dismantled a 400,000 person Iraqi army but let them keep their weapons?
Oh, right Paul Bremer, the head of the occupational authority. Heck, what trouble can 400,000 piss-off, unemployed, reasonably well-trained, armed, ex-military guys cause, particularly when there is no civilian authority because all the civil servants were all fired?
Who forgot that it might be useful to have a few Arabic speakers in the occupational authority?
Who goes into a post-occupation situation with the possibility of insurgency or guerrilla warfare or terrorism on the side of the Iraqis with no idea of how to deal with such things? Oh right, the US Army who wrote their counter-insurgency manual, what, 3 or 4 years after the invasion?
Who forgot to coach common soldiers in at least some parts of Iraqi and Muslim culture? Right, the US Army.
As an example, most US solders are reported as calling all adult male Iraqis “hadji” at least in the early days after the invasion. Hadji is an earned honorific, usually but not always gained by completing the pilgrimage (Hadj) to Mecca. The US equivalent might be calling every adult male “Pastor” or “Reverend”. But of course, no insult to the local religion implied or intended.
Who brought in mercenaries like Blackwater whose basic approach to security seemed to be shoot first and forget the questions,—“we’re immune from Iraqi law and the US doesn’t care”?
Who ignored well-qualified and unemployed Iraqi professionals engineers, etc. during the supposed re-construction and brought in US companies like Halliburton who were incompetent, totally corrupt or didn’t care about what they were supposed to be doing. In many cases Halliburton and other US companies had taken the jobs of those unemployed Iraqis.
Well, yes, the military intervention and more importantly the post-war occupation might have been done just a little bit better. I suppose it could have been done worse but I am not a fantasy writer so I cannot imagine how.
My grossly under-educated opinion on the matter is that we dismantled their government and disbarred anyone from the former Baathists party, which was probably a mistake. Then, rather than attempt a legitimate and honest attempt at democracy, the US installed local warlords as legislators for a long-ass time, and stood by while their installed warlords supported exclusionary policies against the Sunnis. The combination of completely dismantling the former government structures overnight, and installing and maintaining local warlords for a decade who had only their interests at heart, just left the country in a gigantic clusterfuck. Oh, and I’m sure that we stole a bunch of their oil too through our installed warlords giving special deals to US government oil companies, where the deals did not actually benefit the Iraqi people.
Again, grossly underinformed, but that’s what I’ve been able to piece together.
Just for example: I would have had higher hopes if in Iraq, we did what we did in Japan after WW2, according to my grossly minimal knowledge. AFAIK, the US ruled Japan with a US dictatorship that was (purportedly) benevolent for quite a while, but still with input from the former Japanese officials. Then, throw on some programs similar to the New Deal, some land redistribution programs, and it sounds pretty wise. Note: I’m getting half of this from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Japan
Maybe I’m being too idealistic and optimistic. Dunno…
To jrkrideau
That’s not entirely true according to some sources that I trust, namely Christopher Hitchens. See:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2004/10/in_front_of_your_nose.html
That’s not what I’ve read, especially concerning the Kurds. Example (sorry for the Wikipedia citation):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein's_Iraq
Sounds like concentration camps to me.
Quoting jrkrideau:
What’s your point? That genocide is acceptable if it’s not done for religious reasons? Or that I have to own the position of my government? Please. The past positions of the United States government are entirely not-binding on the positions that I can and will endorse. I reject your disingenuous attempts to saddle me with positions that are not my own, and that I have no reason to own.
Unless you were one of the million Kurds living in one of the concentration camps. Or unless you were one of the quarter or half million people that the regime killed (approx).
I gave my moral justification for invasion, and it had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction. Please try to address my actual points. Again, my position is that a tyrannical mass murderer of the scale of Saddam justifies military intervention to remove him – assuming of course that we can formulate a military plan that will do more good than harm for the Iraqi people, but that’s a separate issue which we need to address separately.
And I otherwise agree with your list of gigantic fuck-ups by the US administration.
Correction: It’s at least ghettos, bordering on (concentration) camps. That’s what a concentration camp is, right? An encampment where people of a certain race / ethnicity are forcibly concentrated, right?
Personally, I think that while it is definitely possible to posit a situation where a single military intervention to remove a specific dictator is a moral choice, there is an extensive history of the US and other western powers playing kingmaker for economic gain and leaving places tangibly worse than they started.
In terms of foreign wars/invasions/”police actions” I consider morally justifiable, there’s been exactly two in US history, and the last ended in the 50’s. Even then, we managed to make a huge mess of things by doing a lot of borderline evil things.
Until it’s demonstrated that we’re A. Not just replacing a leader for resources or favorable trade agreements and B. Not going to commit war crimes and mass devastation, I’m not going to support any foreign war of “liberation” or whatever.
What Vivec said in #74. ++
Largely agreed with Vivec in 74.
@LykeX:
I read the paragraph (and its context) a few times and I don’t agree with that. I agree that Aziz wants to counter Sam Harris’s position that completely ignores any factor other than religion and basically only chants “Jihad” but in doing so, he goes too far to the other direction. So he formulates a paragraph that is technically true but misleading, i.e., intellectually dishonest.
When you consider it in historical context, the current Shite – Sunni conflict is not different from the previous historical conflicts: Saudi Arabia considers itself the leader or center of Islam (and they are partially justified for having the holy sites and controlling who gets to do “Hajj”), and Iran is the only major shite-majority country and thus naturally considers itself the leader of the Shite word. Going back a few centuries, the exact same roles were played by the Ottomon empire and Savavid dynasty. Actually, within this historical conflict, the modern players have been extremely well restrained and they have only engaged in proxy wars rather than full-blown conflicts of a few centuries ago.
I also don’t get your reasoning. I am not sure what it means and I don’t understand how it is a useful thing to say. I can copy/paste the exact same argument with respect to any situation.
I’m sure it’s totally coincidental that the Ottoman / Safavid conflict that is totes about different branches of Islam was basically the same two regions as the Byzantine / Sassanid wars (3rd-7th centuries CE) or the Roman / Parthian wars (1st BCE to 3rd CE) or the Greek / Achaemenid conflicts (as early as the 6th century BCE).
In those, Islam had a part to play in the Byzantine/Sassanid wars because the Califate conquered the Sassanid empire. The rest all predate Islam, and mostly predate Christianity.
@bryanfeir #9
I agree with all of this except the implication that because religion is optional or that comparisons can be made to other religions that Islam in particular is not causally implicated in the Rushdie fatwa or the Danish cartoon protests. There are many ways to foment rage and violence; Islam appears to be one of them.
A counter-argument to my own position might go something like this: guns kill people, but it’s silly to blame Smith and Wesson for a particular death. I’m shitty at analogies :)
@chrislawson #10
If you want me to consider alternatives to my position you might make at least a token effort to explain where I’m going wrong.
@F.O. #16
Christianity is the stated belief of countries who have been bombing the shit out of many other countries for the past century.
Even if the higher ups are calculated liars (not implausible), it’s hard to imagine that the rank and file of these organizations don’t believe in this, and that belief is a species of Christianity.
Read more: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/03/07/empirical-evidence-and-reason-demonstrate-that-sam-harris-is-an-arrogant-ass/#ixzz42QD6EPyz
I would agree that Christianity is at fault for many horrific injustices including “bombing the shit out of many other countries”. There are some salient differences, notably that Christianity is not the stated justification for such bombing whereas it is the stated justification for the Rushdie fatwa and the Danish cartoon protests.
I think I was arguing against Aziz minimizaing the role of Islam in these events, but, looking at what he wrote (in the article about the debate, haven’t read his other work), I was arguing against a straw man. Aziz’s point wasn’t that Islam isn’t involved, but that politics are and Harris is dishonest for ignoring that. I agree with Aziz there.
I have a general feeling that there are lefty opponents to Harris who go as far as to say that politics are all there is, denying that Islamic doctrines are at play, and this feeling apparently sparked confirmation bias in me to seek evidence of that problem in Aziz.
I just wrote,
I should point out that even this is not so cut and dry, given that the political support for this bombing is (afaik) explicitly Dominionist in some quarters.
Saad@49: k5083 didn’t show the usual stamina. So yes, happy indeed.
georgelocke@81: “I have a general feeling that there are lefty opponents to Harris”
Can you name them?
My own view is that religions can be exploited to make in-group vs out-group distinctions to motivate dehumanization of the Other, when the opportunity arises. Shia vs Sunni, Catholic vs Anglican, Islam vs Christianity, Hinduism vs Islam, Buddhism vs Islam — around the world we’ve currently got simmering conflicts or outright wars on those lines.
At other times, adherents of various religions live perfectly fine with the others. And at yet other times, religiously homogenous areas end up massacring each other over some other way to differentiate in-group versus out-group. This counterpoint indicates that religion isn’t really the root cause.
lotharloo,
(bolding mine) The word is spelled Shiite, or Shi’ite.
I don’t normally correct spelling in others’ posts, but you keep making the same mistake, and it could be taken as an intentional insult.
Crip Dyke, #69
I’m down. But you’ll be providing all the substance; I’ll just be chiming in with sarcasm every now and then.
The real challenge will be finding a drink I’d like.
@ duncs I’m in the UK as well, but recently returned from years in France.
To some of you, I’m sure my absence has been a pleasure. Rest assured it is more than likely permanent. My atheist/skeptical journey did make a pit stop here, but I found all of you – up to and including the proprietor – much too intolerant and tribal for my tastes. The interesting, and fortunate, thing is that you all did turn me on to Sam Harris.
I’ve been listening to his podcast and reading his blog for a few weeks now and – my goodness – what a breath of fresh air compared to the nastiness here. I haven’t been ’round since (you can thank me later Giliell, et al) but I had to come back once I heard his podcast today. I just knew that PZ would have blogged about this and would have swallowed Omer’s tale hook, line and sinker. I would challenge PZ or anyone else here to take a listen to what really happened on that podcast and then correct the record. It is Omer, not Sam Harris, who is the petulant and dishonest child.
I’m sure I won’t be missed, but in the same way someone wouldn’t be missed at a Klan rally if they started having doubts about the whole racism thing. PZ you and the regular commentariat here are among the most close-minded, intolerant people I know. And I know a couple Trump supporters.
I may not agree with Sam Harris on everything, but at least he has some intellectual integrity and reaches out to those with whom he disagrees to define the areas of disagreement and try to find some common ground.
Tschuss.
-Uncorks a bottle – Champagne, anyone?
Huzzah!
Nobody is surprised you find a dishonest, sexist, racist, anti-Muslim, pro-torture ass like Harris to be a breath of fresh air.
But of course harshly criticizing such ideas and people like you who parrot them constitutes nastiness. Tone trolling at its finest.
Yes, please!
Best news I’ve heard today
sam harris responds in the opening minutes of his recent podcast: https://soundcloud.com/samharrisorg/evolving-minds-a-conversation-with-jonathan-haidt
SH, intellectual integrity? Like evidence, Penny L has no idea of what integrity means. It doesn’t mean being a paranoid Islamophobic bigot with delusions of grandeur.
Bye Penny L. Your hero worship and hypocrisy won’t be missed.
Penny L:
Looks to me like yet another flounce that will fail to stick the landing. How about a simple act, such as…leaving. No goodbyes, no tears, no ultimatums, nothing. Just go. It’s the best way to break up.
Between the Scalia worship and apparent kinship with Sammy, I find it funny that Penny’s comparing us to Trump supporters.
The only difference between them and the average Trumpeter is the atheism.
I like how it’s “more than likely” permanent.
@97
“I know I said you’re a bunch of intolerant tribals and Sam is awesome, but I still want to hang out with you because reasons!”
Penny L’s gone? And here I had just replenished my stock of popcorn….
Maybe next time you decide to announce that you’re totally leaving forever and never coming back, do it on a post that isn’t a couple days old. It’s a much better way to get attention or whatever.
Vivec:
Oh, Penny L didn’t do that. The ‘more than likely’ clause is why I called it as a failed flounce.
You know, on most of the message forums I frequent when someone makes a big production of how they’re permanently leaving the forum, the mods bring out the banhammer so as to discourage any potential recidivism.
Hmmmm…i thought i smelled dishonesty…and look, there’s Penny! You are wrong, that’s why we don’t accept your horseshit, it’s not closemindedness, it’s that we find the shite you are selling to be repulsive and utterly without merit. Rejecting ridiculous, bigoted crap is not intolerance, but if you want to think we are intolerant of you, i’m actually fine with that, just as long as it’s understood that you have thoroughly and legitimately earned that all by yourself. For the last time, hopefully, fuck off.
Penny L @ 88
Why didn’t anyone tell me it was “Opposite Day”?
jimb,
I told you this morning.
It’s my general policy NOT to thank people for NOT being assholes. It’s kind of what I expect a a general baseline.
What, you want render Penny L cookieless?
What about gamergaters? Do they not have a first amendment right to a cookie and a pat on the head? Are you going to withhold all the cookies?
I shudder at the thought of the world you would create…
So, we have Harris and Aziz making contradictory claims about what’s on the recording. However, only one of them has the ability to release the recording to the public and he has very conspicuously not done so. Some people might think that implies something about who’s right.
Is it a coincidence that there were daily comments on this thread up until the day the entire podcast was released, but nothing since? Without defending Sam here, is it possible everyone listened to the podcast and realized what an asshat Omer is?
Alternatively, it’s because it’s an almost week-old post in a blog that only posts the most recent dozen or so comments on the sidebar.
Also, there’s literally no outcome of this debacle that makes sammy come out smelling like roses. He’s still a racist, islamiphobic, dishonest douche.
paul5229 #109
Nope. We know Harris is an Islamophobic bigot. Nothing, other than SH admitting he is wrong and apologizing will change that.
Threads die a natural “death” after a few days. This one did. Newer fish to fry, so to speak.
Yes.
I’d hate to see you actually try to defend anyone. This shows such amazing ignorance of this community and its posting habits, one wonders how you even found the “Post Comment” button.
Yeah, you just keep on that train of thought, Paul5229. Ride it to the end of the line. Ride it pretty much anywhere as long as it isn’t going to leave residue around here anymore. We prefer actual intelligence, actual analysis, and even, when a well-informed opinion isn’t enough, actual evidence that bears on the question at hand.
*whatever the fuck, I’m not really interested and Paul5229 didn’t specify.
Dear me, so many misguided people here who need to understand that criticising bad ideology doesn’t in any way demean people let alone make you a racist.
Sam Harris does this because of what bad ideology does to people, because he cares about people in the Muslim world and those being oppressed. How does calling out the bad ideas of religion on women and gay rights make him a racist bigoted ‘islamophobe’ (< invented my Muslim Brotherhood, you suckers for using such a ridiculous term)
You are part of the problem – denying the free thinkers, gays, women, and oppressed in the Muslim world a voice.
You're not liberal by any stretch – Shame on you.
He does more than that. He says should they be specially searched when traveling by air. Only the Jihadists, of course, but he can’t/won’t tell us how to separate a Jihadist from one of the billions of peaceful Muslims, which is where he becomes a bigot with his proposal, which then actually requires all Muslims to be scrutinize, (but not Jerry Seinfeld).
How the fuck is SH denied a voice? His voiced and public bigoted opinions are called out as such. He can speak, we can criticize. Or are you an asshole believer in “freeze peach”, where asinine opinons can’t be refuted?
You aren’t liberal if you think SH is nothing but a paranoid Islamophobic bigot, as you are probably one (paranoid bigot) too.
I speak as a liberal, who is far more worried about Fundie Xians, Sovereign Citizens, and Bungling Bundy Militant types.
Boring.
But yeah in terms of an actual response
1. No, islamiphobia was not “created by the muslim brotherhood”, it’s the natural melding of Islam and the suffix -phobia. Plenty of people have reinvented the term independent of each other.
2. Being critical of religion is fucking awesome. No one’s calling him a racist islamiphobic douche for that. It’s his pro-torture, pro-profiling stance that does that.
3. How does criticizing Sammy silence people in the Muslim world? Does a muslim twitter account get shut down every time someone calls him an asshole?
Do you honestly believe it’s irrational to be worried about a totalitarian ideology that treats women, gays and anyone with an dissenting voice with so much distain? If this was a political ideology with the same tenets you’d be the first to criticise. These are just ideas and each set of ideas should be judged with the same degree of concern, no matter how many people follow it or how long it’s been followed. Why are you so afraid to deal with this honestly? I have an inkling why you might be. And if you think I’m being paranoid, just look at the many polls in the Muslim world on beliefs and tell me why you’re not concerned for the people living there. This is an unparalleled phenomenon on planet earth – we should all be concerned.
With regards to profiling – I’m not sure why you think there’s anything bigoted about focusing the attention on the most suspecting people – i.e. most likely to be Jihadists. This just make sense and Sam has said he’d be within the profiled group due to he age and background. An 83 years old women from Okinawa or 14 year old Finnish girl is far less likely to be a Jihadist than any middle aged person from Europe, America or the Middle east. This is just basic reason, nothing biggoted here.
He’s also not ‘pro torture’, but has said as a last resort why wouldn’t you torture someone if it would save a number of lives in any given incident? This is a reasoned point. Let me ask you, if someone had your closest family members captive and their assailant knew their whereabouts but wouldn’t tell you and you had them captive – would you not do something to extract that info? Imagine this on a far larger scale were you could save a million lives? How would you react? This is the realm in which Sam’s argument regarding torture exists.
You guys want him to be racist and bigoted so much so that you’re willing to bend the truth to support your unfounded claims.
You mean christian dominionism? Yeah, I’m pretty worried about that.
[citation needed]
First off, it’s a stupid policy. Do you think terrorists are so stupid that they won’t start putting bombs on children and old ladies if they knew that they get through screening easier?
Secondly, nope, it’s still de facto bigotry. Regardless of the reasoning, it’s still unfairly privileging certain races and ethnicities over others because of how and where they were born. And if you don’t think such a policy would be applied to “muslim looking” people more than it would be to white passing ones, you’re living in a whole different universe than the one I’m in.
Blockquotes fail
It’s blatant JAQing off and making hypotheticals that in no way map to reality.
Also, no. I’m not okay with torture. Period. Ever. In no hypothetical situations. It’s unjustifiable, and if you do it, you immediately cede any claim to moral superiority.
There’s a word for this fallacy… it’s late, and I can’t think of what that word is, but no, nobody here thinks it’s irrational to be worried about a totalitarian ideology that treats women, gays and anyone with an dissenting voice with so much dis[d]ain. What we do think is irrational is arguing in favour of tactics that are easily circumvented by actual terrorists, and which therefore serve only to demonise people who look spookily Islamic, including a great many people who are not, have never been, and will never be Muslims. What we do think is irrational is working (intentionally or otherwise (and I have no doubt that it’s otherwise in this case)) to further the aims of Islamic terrorist organisations by fomenting hatred for and fear of Muslims in the west, leaving them feeling despised in their own homes, giving them little cause to love the west and making them vulnerable to the predations of those who seek to radicalise young and disenfranchised Muslims. What we think is irrational is acting as if thinking those things are irrational is the exact same thing as thinking it’s irrational to be worried about a totalitarian ideology that treats women, gays and anyone with an dissenting voice with so much dis[d]ain.
Joe Swainson, 114
Sam Harris is not a voice for the oppressed in the Muslim world.
Vivec – Sam’s arguments on torture are based on hypotheticals, extraordinary scenarios when it becomes imperative to extract information at all costs. Fine, you wouldn’t do it ever, period – good for you but also shame on you as you’ll cede any claim to moral superiority once the hypothetical city’s water system is contaminated and millions die. Quite honestly I don’t believe you’d let that happen, at least I hope you wouldn’t. Also this does not “no way map to reality”, It’s in the realms of possibility, this is why being honest about hypothetical scenarios however extraordinary is important,
Sure I think Islamist terrorists will find any way to kill people including planting bombs on Japanese grandmas and Scandinavian kids if they wanted. However, this is far, far less likely to occur, and in this game you deal with probability.
I’m glad to hear you’re more concerned by “Christian dominionism”. This illustrates your regressive world view perfectly.
Athywren – How am I “fomenting hatred for and fear of Muslims”? By being honest with the truth? You’re supposing that all people in the Muslim world don’t want to hear criticism of Islamic doctrine. You’re empowering Islamists and Islamism by treating Muslim’s, practicing or not, with kid gloves. You are being bigoted towards Muslims by holding them to a lower standard than everyone else. Atheist, secularist, gay, pro female rights, dissenting voices throughout the Muslim world are disenfranchised by your sentiments. Well done you!
Of course! Nothing more regressive than opposing Western theocracy from the dominant religious that actually already has a majority of political power!
I wonder how long illiberal idiots are going to pretend to be the True Progressives in the room? Does this act really fool anyone? Does anyone really think that the True Progressives are people who are preoccuppied with screeching about the evils of Muslims, and bending over backwards justifying torture?
Oh, so close to outright saying “I’m just being politically incorrect”. I was so close to Bingo too. Damn.
Hence, blatant JAQing off. If you set your policy decisions based off stupid philosophy “what if” scenarios, you’re an idiot. If you use those scenarios to justify human rights violations, you’re an evil idiot.
If you want to legally mandate bigotry in order to make our airport security theater even less likely to catch terrorists (screening everyone a little > screening brown people a lot and letting the rest go free), I don’t know what to say.
I’m glad to hear you think ambiguous overseas threats that have hit us all of once in a statistically meaningful way are more dangerous than domestic forces that constantly try to turn our government into a theocracy and push families into trying to torture their gay kids straight.
Joe
Do you think that someone who is willing to blow themselves up would reveal useful information under torture?
Hypothetically.
Vivec, I live overseas so am less concerned about people that “torture’ their gay kids straight”.
I’m far more concerned about people who kill homosexuals for being gay. This is a very widespread problem.
anteprepro – Christianity isn’t “western theocracy” – I won’t argue against stupidity. Also, I never said anything of the “evils of Muslims”. This debate is already tired because you are putting words in my mouth.
Goodbye
Bye idiot, go fellate Sammy somewhere else.
And not remotely unique to islam. Plenty of christian groups here fund “Kill the gays” legislation worldwide
chigau – Yes I think it’s very possible, with the right methods. However, this hypothetical torture scenario isn’t isolated to Islamist captives.
Bye Vivec, good chatting with you.
All the best
If you only think that is a problem with Islam, you are a delusional fool. Jews and Xians use the same OT to justify their hatred. Condemn them all, or condemn none.
Compared to your regressive Islamophic world view? You haven’t made a cogent argument yet, which needs to be in the context of us in the USA. Xians cause the trouble here, not Jihadists.
Describe in detail that will be supported by security experts how that is done not using skin color…..
Bah, SH supporters are so stupid and blind to reality.
No, see, it’s not bigotry if you can think up a reason to justify it.
Joe
Where ‘overseas’ do you live?
Anywhere near here http://freethoughtblogs.com/yemmynisting/2016/03/13/homophobicbiphobic-attack-claims-another-life-in-nigeria-councilman-on-the-run-for-his-life/
?
Numerous studies and security experts have testified that torture does not, in fact, yield useful information. Ever.
Therefore, constructing hypothetical situations to “discuss” whether it might or might not be moral to torture someone for information is nothing but a pointless mental masturbatory exercise that only serves to reveal a particular individual’s fetish for torturing people. It’s no more useful toward the real world than hypothetical situations involving a choice of being stuck in the Game of Thrones world vs being stuck in Narnia.
But microraptor, if it would save all of Narnia, would you torture Aslan?
Vivec #135
uuuhhmm
Isn’t that what actually™ happened?
Who said anything about what you‘re doing? You stomp in here and accuse us of being irrational for taking issue with Harris, then ask what you, a nobody who we know nothing about (although I do recognise the name so maybe you’re a semi-regular here?) have done when we point out some of the things Harris has said and done that we take issue over? Unless you’re Harris, that’s just pointlessly chattering into the wind. Much like your previous comment.
And you’re supposing that chickens aren’t interested in the combined works of William Shakespeare.
…see what I did there? You might be confused by that response – what does it have to do with what you said? At what point did you even mention Shakespeare, or suggest that chickens wouldn’t be interested? That’s because I responded to something that nobody on this thread said. For all I know, nobody has said that outside of my sleep-addled mind.
I still can’t think what the name of that fallacy is. It’s a strawman, and a non sequitur, obviously, but I’m sure it’s something else too.
I can’t help but worry about the planet you live on, where it’s holding people to a lower standard to argue that you shouldn’t automatically assume that they’re more likely to be a terrorist because they happen to look like they follow a particular religion. I’m glad I don’t live there. I’m glad to live on a planet where I’m not automatically considered a terrorist suspect, and I would like everyone to be held to the same standard that I am because, frankly, even before we consider the basic human decency thing of not demonising innocent people, singling out Islamic-looking people as being the threat is just begging for terrorists to just use the many, many extremists who do not look Islamic.
You’re empowering Dominionists and Dominionism by treating Christian’s, practicing or not, with kid gloves. You are being bigoted towards Christians by holding them to a lower standard than everyone else. Atheist, secularist, gay, pro female rights, dissenting voices throughout the Christian world are disenfranchised by your sentiments. Well done you!
Except… you actually are doing that, because while I don’t dismiss the threat of Islamism – nor do I refuse to criticise Islam or Islamism – you actually did just dismiss the threat of Dominionism.
So, Harris did release the whole recording. Frankly, I don’t intend to listen to Harris blather for over three hours, but if anyone else is interested, you can find it here.
To numerobis
I object to the way that you’re using the term “root cause”.
In general, when someone identifies a problem and its cause X, and someone else notes that there is something Y which causes X, then it’s appropriate to talk about “root causes”.
In this case, your earlier argument is that the content of the religion is irrelevant, and that other political factors use it to encourage tribalistic thinking. In this case, the other politcal factors are not the cause of religiousity. It’s not the “root cause”. Rather, I would describe your argument as: both factors need to be there in order to see the results.
Further, in your post, you seem to be primarily concerned with moral responsibility, and what policies we should pursue going forwards. In that particular context, I take objection to what you said. Religion is a cause. It is a root cause. According to even you, religion makes people much more prone to behaving badly. From those uncontested facts, it seems quite obvious that we should be looking to eradicate it – and obviously by using moral means such as debate, speech, education, etc. I find it repugnant when you try to downplay the seriousness and dangerousness of religious belief, and how you deny the moral responsibility we all have to try to destroy religion for the betterment of all.
…
Joe Swainson
Sam Harris has advocated for killing religious leaders because their speech is dangerous. Mere religious leaders for mere free speech that would be constitutionally protected in America. He celebrated a particular instance of this when Americans did it overseas.
I never see people talk about this one. I really wish people would talk about this one more.
Yes, he is. He sometimes couches his support behind hypotheticals, but on at least one occasion, Sam Harris has advocated for the torture and defended the torture of real and particular persons, inmates, at Gitmo bay.
No, I would not. I would not because of punishment that would await me, and I would be in favor of keeping that punishment there because of slippery slope problems. And more importantly, I would not do it because torture does not work!
We did not gain a single bit of useful intelligence from torturing people at Gitmo. Further, given the context, it’s very likely that there was no such plot, and that they had no such information. Yet Sam Harris advocated for the torture and defended the torture of these particular persons.
By my standards, Sam Harris is a miserable excuse for a human being.
I would argue that the existence of violent Buddhist extremists is a pretty good indication that the specific content of a given religion is irrelevant. Once a religion becomes entangled with politics and nationalism all bets are off, no matter how explicitly its scriptures reject violence.
Joe, #123
In a world where people are actually being tortured, a popular writer* from the torturing nation musing about scenarios where torture is justified is not a harmless hypothetical.
* who also happens to be a proponent of profiling people who have the same religious affiliation as those being tortured
Joe the Plumber:
Christianity isn’t, Christian DOMINIONISM is.
I guess a sufficiently advanced True Progressivism is indistinguishable from abject right-wing ignorance?
@EnlightenmentLiberal #139
I agree with all you’ve written, except that I don’t consider Harris “a miserable excuse for a human being”. That is I agree with all your criticisms of Harris (along with your criticisms of numerobis), and I agree that this position of his is not just wrong but immoral, but I don’t think his moral failings in general are sufficient to warrant this conclusion.
@Dunc #140
Violent Buddhists indicate only that doctrinal content does not determine everything. Political forces can act on a religion to change its content just as a religion can direct political currents.
@Joe Swainson #114
I find it ironic that Joe’s comment begins by saying that we shouldn’t be so quick to label people and ends by labelling people.
In general, the discussion here is regrettably polarized in this way. I recognize that folks here aren’t calling Harris a racist because of this one incident. There is a disturbing pattern, and while I agree that he is a racist, this is only a distinction of degree as we are all racists (including myself along the rest of the world). One to admire in Harris is that he reaches out to people he disagrees with. He is not intellectually dishonest for his inability to recognize his errors.
Vivec
Being “overseas”I was thinking about right wing nationalists, who just won between 12 and 25(!) percent in German state elections.
That’s a party that isn’t just openly anti muslim, it’s also a party that wants to reintroduce the guilt principle in divorce and cut all support for single parents (read single mothers) because they “choose to destroy he family”, mandate the use of German in all religious services, ban abortions with the stated goal to “ensure the survival of the Volk” (not even fetus fetishism but outright “volksgemeinschaft fetishism”). A party that is anti gay and wants to roll back the progress made on gay rights. A party that is openly against the freedom of the press, who wants to mandate theatres to put on plays where they portray Germany and “German values” positively.
But apparently I shouldn’t be concerned about them, I should be concerned about my students who fucking walked all the way from Syria, Iran, Irak, Afghanistan. Young men who left their families, their homes, everything and everybody they ever knew just to be able to sit in my classes and learn something…
You may delusionally think so, but, until he admits his errors, he is dishonest. Especially when he has be refuted by security experts as to his bigoted and unworkable ideas about airport security. Any honest and humble person admits their mistakes. If SH won’t do that, he is in fact admitting his own dishonesty and arrogance. All else is bullshit.
I’d prefer to admire Harris’ astounding ability to shut up and go away, but I don’t think that’s very likely to happen.
@Nerd of Redhead #146
I am disappointed that he wasn’t swayed by Schneier, but I fail to see why he should be obligated to agree with an expert. In the sciences, we have people who, for instance, hold out for modified newtonian gravity (MoND), or group selection. These people defy the consensus for what they think are good reasons. Does that make them dishonest? I hope you’d agree that the answer is, “maybe,” or, “not by itself.”
I’d describe a spectrum of “wrong in the face of consensus” going from Creationism (biased/dishonest) to MoND to group selection to atheism (unbiased/honest). I’d put Harris’s support for profiling around the MoND level of disconfirming evidence. One big problem with this description is that it is not uncommon for people to believe in group selection for very bad reasons or for good ones. This is a critical distinction WRT Harris, who comes out with conclusions progressives like myself vehemently oppose via arguments that I view as broadly cogent. (In contrast to MoND, there are some anti-consensus views, e.g. flat earth, which can only be borne of intellectual negligence. In Harris’s case, you have to actually look at his arguments to tell whether he’s being honest; I’m not saying you haven’t done this but that your standards are wrong.)
I like Maarten Boudry’s idea that pseudoscience is characterized by “immunizing strategies” which prevent falsification (special pleading, moving goalposts, etc.). My point was that when Harris reaches out to Schneier (or Namazie or Aziz), this is the opposite of an immunizing strategy. It represents an attempt to examine the differences in opinion; I have found his dialogues informative.
Finally, when you brand me delusional for disagreeing with you, you’re only underscoring my larger point; namely, we should make efforts not to dehumanize/other/dismiss people who disagree with us.
I fully support dismissing pro-torture, racist neocons, no matter how they managed to come to their evil, idiotic viewpoints.
Okay, wait. Sam Harris and his most avid fans argue the following:
-Islam is uniquely threatening and evil.
-Muslims, despite not being a race or ethnicity, can and should be profiled at airports for safety.
-Torture, despite it not being effective and being one of the most horrific things we have a name for, should be permitted if we think it will make it us safer (and thus we are fine to continue using it against alleged Islamic terrorists)
(And of course we have the time where Harris “jokingly” talked about nuking the whole Middle East or some such shit)
And by dismissing them and their arguments, WE are othering and dehumanizing THEM?
Okay then.
**********
This is the same story every time.
Privileged Group X is constantly shitting on Group Y.
No one is paying attention.
Group Y or friends of them, Group Z, try to get Group X to stop, or they finally respond in kind.
Everyone is suddenly paying attention and exasperated about the hostile/aggressive/rude/oppressive/censorious actions of Group Y and/or Z.
Exasperated onlookers join in with Group X in shitting on Group Y.
Rinse and repeat, across all axes of privilege, for ever and ever.
(See also: the right wing appropriating the language of the left)
Really? Who do you go to for tax advice, an accountant or your mechanic? Who do you go to fix your car, a lawyer or a your mechanic? I’ll be the expert in both cases.
When you dismiss experts like SH does, for his own inane policy where he can’t define how to tell Jihadists from normal, peaceful Muslims, he just comes off as a arrogant fool with delusions of his own greatness (I can’t be wrong). I’ll take experts over SH, as they back their claims with third party evidence. Evidence, that as a scientist, I must respect.
You are defending somebody who ignores solid evidence refuting his bigoted ideas. Why bother, unless you agree with his ideas? Otherwise, you would join the folks saying he is full of shit, and not worry about SH being criticized.
@anteprepro #150
Use of the word evil begs the question, and no, it is not implicit in “the motherlode of bad ideas”. “Evil” aside, I don’t see that this position is so obviously wrong as to make supporting it evidence of intellectual negligence.
Supposing we wanted to screen for jihadi terrorirsts, being a Muslim is part of the “profile.”. This does not mean that every Muslim should be subject to enhanced security measures.
If we think torture will make us safer, then we don’t think it’s ineffective, so your hypothetical is puzzling. Sam’s position on torture relies on the premise that it can be effective in extracting information. This premise is wrong, and he ought to realize that. Nevertheless, his argument is that, whatever the moral ills of torture, if it were effective, this necessarily impllies that there is some hypothetical threat so great that it would outweigh those ills. This is basic utilitarian ethics. Of course, the argument falls apart when you remove the premise.
This is a tu quoque fallacy, and it again underlines my main reason for speaking up in this thread.
This is a fair point and something I should probably weigh more heavily However, this kind of argument can be misused to defend any criticism of Harris no matter how ridiculous.
@georgelocke
Much as MoND proponents may be running counter to the consensus, they’re still experts in their field; still trained physicists. MoND has given us good predictions for phenomena that dark matter theories struggle with. There are reasons to take MoND seriously – I don’t think it’s the answer, but parts of it obviously work, and it’s worth paying attention to for that reason alone. Harris, on the other hand, waded into a field not his own, listened to an expert tell him why his idea wouldn’t, doesn’t, and has been seen not to work, and then continued to stick by it regardless.
Forgive me if I don’t treat him with the same regard I’m willing to extend to proponents of MoND.
What the fuck are you trying to refute georgelocke? What argument do you think I am trying to make? My point was that, in all of those basic arguments, is that he is, quite explicitly, othering and dehumanizing Muslims. He just fucking is. If he isn’t, the word has no fucking meaning. That we are “dismissive” towards his othering and dehumanizing rhetoric, and towards his othering and dehumanizing arguments that are used to justify actual discrimination and infliction of harm upon Muslims, is hardly “othering and dehumanizing” Harris and his sycophants. That you think you can defend that absurd proposition by blurting out “tu quoque fallacy” is just utterly asinine.
Yet you support someone who dismisses/dehumanizes/others 1.3 billion people due to his own irrational fears (which he tries to pretend is rational, but they aren’t), and complain about yourself like any tone/concern troll does when your own hypocrisy in defending the paranoid Islamophobic bigot is called out? Your perspective is not even warped. It is nonexistent.
Yes, what you say won’t be considered as reasonable, because it, like SH’s fears, are irrational and full of hypocrisy.
georgelocke:
No, that’s just absurd bullshit. There’s a subtle difference.
What is inconsistent about the conjunction of these claims? (1) torture is effective at extracting information from people, and (2) there is no threat that justifies “the moral ills of torture.”
You said it is necessarily implied that some great thing exists, which does what you wanted it to do. So there must be an inconsistency if you’re right, but I sure as fuck don’t see it. Show your work. How the fuck did you pull that rabbit out of your hat?
Which one? The one claiming torture is effective? Or the hidden one which you took for granted, that for any bad thing you might do, it must be justified to do it anyway because you have scary dreams about imaginary threats which are supposedly worse?
It sounds like “we get to make excuses justifying whatever the fuck we want, so that we’ll feel better about being complete assholes.” I guess any people who pose Some Hypothetical Great Threat don’t have that luxury, although honestly your proposal seems a little threatening, so you may want to be careful where you point that. But please, try to make it sound more sophisticated for me.
I wish I had time to respond to all responses, which I read and appreciate.
@consciousness razor #156
Put simply: whatever terrible act I might commit, if it prevents a more terrible outcome, then it is justified; this is simply what “more terrible” means. I’ve assumed one act can be “more terrible” than another in some meaningful sense, which is true under utilitarian ethics. You’re free to dispute that premise, but I don’t think you’d agree that people who believe in utilitarian ethics are ipso facto reprobate.
The argument goes like this:
P1: It is possible to compare two acts such that one is morally better/equal/worse than the other.
P2: We know that James has set a bomb to go off (James has admitted it, and we have strong corroborating evidence)
P3: James won’t tell us how to stop the bomb willingly, but using torture we can find it out from him.
P4: No other means of finding the bomb is remotely as likely to lead to preventing the explosion as torture
P5: The moral cost of torturing James is X
P6: The moral cost of the bomb exploding is Y
C: However great X is, all we have to do is imagine that the bomb is bigger/worse bomb until Y exceeds X.
P4 seems especially shaky, but it would have to be impossible in principle in order to invalidate the conclusion. (I believe that torture is ineffective in extracting information, yet I can’t say for certain that P4 is impossible: even if it is ineffective, other methods at my disposal might be even less likely to work.)
To me, this sounds like an absurd caricature of Harris’s position. At the very least, it’s not the position I’m defending, which I believe to be much closer to his than this.
*people who believe in utilitarian ethics are not ipso facto reprobate.
This is, of course, where you and Harris run into problems because torture has been proven to not fucking work.
You can simply substitute “torture” with “prayer”. Same good, less bad.
@anteprepro 154
The first point I took up was, “Sam Harris argues that Islam is uniquely threatening.” I suggested that this is not obviously wrong. If it be true, pointing that out would be more like a moral imperative than an ill. Harris obviosuly believes it, and if we can’t fault him for believing it, we can’t fault him merely for stating his case, which is all you accused him of.
What I’m saying is that Harris’s positions make something close to sense under premises that are not gross distortions of fact. You can disagree with the premises, you can disagree with his reasons, you can even say he’s biased, as I believe he is, but calling him a moral monster for making reasonably accurate conclusions from reasonably accurate data amounts to declaring his ideas taboo. Your insistence on the word “dehumanize” resembles this sort of dogmatism. However, some ideas can only be arrived at through unforgivable bias, in which case believing them would make you a moral moster; I’m arguing that Harris’s positions aren’t like that.
If you believe his reasoning is loony or that his premises are grossly distorted, I’ll listen. I’m sure that this is your position, but I can’t argue that he’s not a villain without addressing the merits (and content) of his positions, and it’s confounding to be told that I’m missing the point for doing so.
georgelocke:
Consider an argument like this:
– Torture is effective at gathering information, therefore there is a worse consequence than the torture itself.
That doesn’t follow. How’s it supposed to be fixed? You say something like this instead: “it’s possible the consequences are worse than the torture itself.”
So you need some additional fact, not the fact that torture is effective, to get you to the conclusion that torturing is supposed to be the better option, according to your particular moral theory. That additional fact isn’t logically implied by the fact about its effectiveness at gathering information. So let’s revise:
(1) We know torture is effective at gathering information
(2) We know there’s a very large bomb (e.g.) that will kill many people, which will be a worse outcome than torturing an individual
(3) Therefore, we should torture the individual.
Now there are an enormous number of epistemic issues that you immediately run into. You may know that it’s generally effective, but not that it will work on this individual. What are the chances that it will work on this individual? You may believe you have apprehended the right person, but possibly you’re mistaken about that. You may know that this person has planned or threatened something, but not that there is an actual bomb (e.g.) which will actually hurt anybody.
How did you get so much information about this person, enough to satisfy you that torture is the outcome which is overwhelmingly more likely to produce a satisfactory result (more than any decent method which doesn’t involve torture)? How did you do that, yet at the same time, you also don’t know where the bomb is, whether the threat is even real, what the probability of finding it is, the probability of the person having reliable information to give, the probability of them giving you that reliable information which they actually have, or basically anything else? How would you know, in a situation like that, that your chances are better with torturing the person, if you have no access to any the facts that would provide an honest estimation of the actual chances? In the real world, people don’t just get to invent all of those things for themselves and claim beforehand (hypothetically) that they happen to be right about it all. However, even if you did have access to such a wealth of information, then in that case what the fuck is supposed to be stopping you from disarming the bomb without engaging in torture?
Are there any actual physical situations, ones that a real person will be in while making a decision like this, in which all of the appropriate conditions hold? And if there are any, do you get that it doesn’t follow necessarily or logically, from the simple “fact” that torture is effective at gathering information? You wouldn’t only need to assume that fact (which isn’t even true), but lots and lots of others as well (which also don’t look like they can all consistently be true at once), just to get the argument rolling that in principle it’s conceivable that it might be the right thing to do, under highly idealized circumstances that look nothing like the planet Earth.
And once you see that, you have to see that a conclusion like that is utterly useless in practice. It’s practically begging to be misused … which leads me to think that Harris (and you) want it to be considered acceptable to torture people, as a real policy that somebody somewhere is going to use, despite the fact that your “argument” doesn’t even support it. And that is fucking repugnant. If you don’t see the practical real-world effect of what you’re doing, I have no idea how it could be articulated any more clearly than it already has been by numerous people. This isn’t a game, and it’s not a thought experiment, and it’s not a fucking syllogism. There are real people who are being tortured. Disowning it or denying your part (or Harris’ part) in that, while simultaneously arguing in support of it, doesn’t do jack shit for them. And it’s completely fucking transparent what’s that actually about. Nobody outside of Harris or his little circle is going to buy it.
@Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- #159
The prior plausibility of torture is orders of magnitude greater than prayer. Sam’s belief in the efficacy of torture is not relevantly similar to belief in the efficacy in prayer.
@consciousness razor #161
My own reasons for opposing torture look like this: torture is unreliable. Even when victims can be “broken”, a pitiful word for horror it represents, they can only be expected to say what their captors want to hear, not what is true. Those with the power to inflict torture will be biased in assessing their certainty due to the corrupting nature of this, most brutal power. Cops, in particular, are subject to this bias, so torture should be forbidden in law enforcement. In cases of terrorism, the suspects are likely to be fanatics on whom torture is even less likely to work. For these reasons among others, we must forbid torture. Given that torture, where it occurs, occurs in secret, secrecy renders the marginal likelihood that any special cases (ticking time bomb) will be accurately assessed by the torturer practically nil.
This reasoning depends on the efficacy of torture, and afaict, so do the concerns you raise.
Harris is fond of a particular example found here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture/ section 3.1
A person who is definitely known to have stolen a car is in custody (the man was clearly identifiable in a video recording of the theft). In the car is a baby who, in the summer heat, will surely die very soon unless the car is found. If we knew that we could beat the information out of the culprit with 100% certainty, we would be justified in doing it. Our true certainty is considerably less than 100%. I don’t know what the true posterior probability is, but presumably there is is some range in which it is justifiable and some it’s not.
And then after torturing the guy, it’s revealed that he’s not the perpetrator, just someone who happened to have a similar haircut and jacket.
And, of course, the thing about these perfect “justifiable circumstances” hypothetical situations is that they never occur nearly so neatly in real life. But you’ve already got your “enhanced interrogation” training programs that you have to justify. So you expand the list of what circumstances allow it. Hey, that wasn’t so bad, let’s try expanding the circumstances again, it worked to well. And maybe one more time? Can’t hurt, right?
Next thing you know, you’re just using it as a routine measure on teenagers in Gitmo who are guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time and obviously don’t have anything close to resembling vital intelligence secrets but hey, you can’t stop now. That might make you look bad.
I guess you didn’t read very closely. I mentioned a variety of things that have nothing to do with its supposed efficacy (which it doesn’t even have, as you admit).
Why? If you could find the baby without doing so, then you’d have no reason to even consider it, much less would it be justified. It’s a different issue that reliable information isn’t literally beaten out of people. You could do all sorts of things besides beating the shit of somebody — what are the chances that any of those other methods will work? Why isn’t that being calculated or even mentioned here? If you thought one number would tell you all of it, you’re definitely confused.
Let’s say it’s “effective.” So? How long before you get the information you wanted? If there’s some immediate danger like this, where every second matters, how much paperwork is required to authorize it? Does anybody else need to authorize it, or can it be a single cop who just acts on a gut instinct? Do they have to drag the suspect to a torture room somewhere, or will they do it wherever they happen to be? In the middle of a school cafeteria, for instance — the clock is ticking, so don’t think hard about this. Are the torture machines already revved up and ready to go, with the torturers on the cop’s fucking speed dial? Should they be installed in convenient locations around every population center? How does this work? How long does it take to learn the first fucking thing about this mysterious person, in order to “know” that they’re probably going to give you the information you need? And how is any of this supposed to be a fast process? That is, fast compared to, say, spending all of your time/energy/resources/manpower/etc. to go out and look for the fucking car that has the baby (if a random person hasn’t already noticed and taken care of it).
If you’ve presumably already sent lots of people out to conduct a search and investigate everything you can about it (like a responsible person would), why would it matter if somehow you were certain that torture will work in the alloted time? Who is going to be left to do any of this, if everybody is working as hard as they can in this dire situation, that you’re saying forces us to do things which are patently evil? Besides, lots of other methods work. You’re not being forced into it, and there’s nothing which is in any way necessary about it. Where am I supposed to find a justification? Or even something that simply looks like it could be a coherent reason explaining why you should do it. Because I don’t see one.
If you let the search go on for five more minutes or five more hours, since you have no idea if the baby is alive at any point, when and how and why did you become justified in torturing the person? Should you have done it as soon as possible, because preventing any harm at all to the baby is enough? Once you start, whenever that may be, and five minutes later they walk in with the baby safe and sound, what kind of bullshit are you going to come up with to say it was the right thing to do anyway? Why are you giving all of that bullshit a pass, and only disputing the point that it supposedly works? There’s a fucking huge number of problems here, and you and Harris and many others seem utterly oblivious to them.
Wrong. The SH biography that appears when he is Googled™ says he is a neuroscientist. In all of SH’s bullshit about Islam, evidence (required for science) is lacking, including Islam is the only religion to worry about, and that torture works according to his presuppositional (which make they worthless) hypothetical. He is just irrational noise, not able to back up his irrational philosophy with evidence. And science (with evidence) rules, while pure philosophy (bad axioms give bad conclusion) has problems.
In one of the last reports on threats from Homeland Security, Muslim extremists rated about #7, (LynnaOM reported the list a couple of months ago), with the top problems being Xian Extremists and Sovereign Citizens, like the Bungling Bundy Militia. They are what I am scared of. And flying? Since everybody is searched, not a problem. The Redhead’s wheelchair could contain a significant amount of C4. I should be inspected, even if she is a an elderly woman in a wheelchair. Because what SH considers safe, is what will be the next explosion on an aircraft. As any EXPERT in security would tell the evidence deaf SH, an YOU.
@consciousness razor #165
You’ve convinced me that I shouldn’t try and defend Harris’s position on torture. I don’t think I ever agreed with him, but your comments, especially your points around “It’s practically begging to be misused,” have demonstrated to me that Harris is not only wrong but politically naive (to put it charitably) in failing to realize that making the argument he does in public is a threat to civil society.
Harris’s position is that torture ought to be illegal but ethically justified in circumstances such as the baby-in-a-car scenario. For this reason, your objections related to the paperwork and other official apparatus of torture don’t appear especially relevant. However, the rest of the ethical calculus around due diligence in seeking the child without torture is spot on.
On a recent podcast (with Jocko Willink) he added that in “justified” cases, torturers would not (implying should not) be prosecuted. I think this inconsistency is bullshit and makes any defence of his position that much harder. The law should be applied equally or there is no rule of law.
@microraptor #164
The baby-in-a-car scenario is historical.
@Nerd of Redhead #166
Your post makes a straw man of Harris. He doesn’t think “Islam is the only religion to worry about”, and he doesn’t make arguments based on a hypothetical world in which torture “works”, but about hypotheticals (and real world scenarios) in this world, where he mistakenly believes torture “works”.
There aren’t many RCT’s addressing airport screening, so your argument regarding “science” seems like a red herring. The DHS is certainly an authority on terrorism, but it remains to be demonstrated that the evidence behind its ranking is sufficient to compel assent.
To Dunc in post 140
I am not as knowledgeable as I should be to make this point, but my understanding is thus: You argue that Buddhism is inherently a religion of peace, and its core teachings are about peace and non-violence. My understanding is that this is a caricature of the actual traditions, some sort of bastardized Hollywood version that has little to no bearing on the reality of Buddhism.
Further, I would only adopt the following weak position: Some religions do have core intrinsic content that has remained more or less unchanged since their individual creations. However, people are great at cognitive dissonance. They might simultaneously truly believe in a principle of non-violence and peace, while also taking part in sectarian violence. IMHO, the only proper and defensible position is it’s a tendency, or a nudge, that affects some people, some amount of the time, in a statistically significant way.
You can raise a person to be a believing religious person in an explicitly anti-violence doctrine, and they might still commit sectarian violence, and still remain a committed believer in the anti-violence doctrine! Similarly, you can raise a person to be a bleieving religious person with an explicitly “convert or die” doctrine, and they can believe that “convert or die” is morally obligatory, but they might also not kill anyone ever in spite of their beliefs.
People do operate according to their beliefs, but the beliefs of a person are wonderfully complicated, nuanced, and often inconsistent. It is foolish to reduce my position to “I claim that all members of a religion of peace cannot commit sectarian violence”.
I propose: “Some Huge Imaginary Threat”. Better acronym.
Also,
… The “Harris’ Baby” scenario…?
@rq
“I propose: “Some Huge Imaginary Threat”. Better acronym.”
Clever, but the baby scenario is historical, and, as it happens, the culprit gave up the information after being beaten.
please ignore the above, which failed to respond to rq. The SHIT argument I was describing included a hypothetical theat, the baby scenario being a separate but related issue.
You’ve brought this up several times now. The fact that there is a historical case (or many) makes it no less imaginary in the following sense. You don’t know, in some new circumstance, what the risks are, how to calculate those risks, what the benefits will be of one approach or another, and so forth. Those at best are only in your imagination, if it even occurs to you to think or care about them, because by hypothesis you have no such information, when you’re explaining to yourself how torturing the person is a justifiable thing to do.
If you’re lucky enough to get any of the information after the fact, you could try to rationalize it away with the information you didn’t have at the time, but that’s not how it could work when you’re actually making the decision. A reasonable person can’t think it’s a good reasonable decision to make, if they can’t have that information to reason about. All you’ve got is that somebody might (or might not) be able to come up with excuses for bad behavior later, which doesn’t help you when you want to actually do the right thing to begin with. If you’re going to do any sort of utilitarian bookkeeping like this, then it can’t be a lot of bullshit you invented at the end of the month, to cook the books so that they’ll look superficially as if everything’s okay — that all has to be based on some real calculations which made some kind of sense at the time. And you don’t get to pretend the books must be balanced, under all circumstances, even when in reality they aren’t. If Harris wasn’t routinely making trivial mistakes like that, perhaps people should take him more seriously. Or I guess if what you really wanted was an arrogant bullshit artist, then maybe you’d be satisfied with that. But I don’t know what the point of that would be.
I haven’t even got that – I have conceded the argument. My post you’re quoting here was itself irrelevant to what rq was saying (I was wrong about what I thought he was saying), however microraptor appeared to be under the misapprehension that the baby scenario was fictive; your point that it probably appears “perfect” only because of hindsight/selective reporting seems right. I don’t mean to say that the scenario can be used to support Harris’s position, which I agree is insupportable and reprehensible.
One of Harris’s refrains is that many of his opponents refuse to even concede that such moral calculus can be meaningfully undertaken. I’m not sure whether this is true, but it’s hard to dispute that the calculus is meaningful, even if he gets it wrong.