Of course context matters, but one reason it matters is because people abuse it. There is a legitimate complaint to be made when someone distorts or mangles an isolated quote to say something completely different from what the author intended. Here’s an infamous example: the creationists’ favorite quote from Darwin’s Origin.
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.
They love it because all they read is natural selection…absurd in the highest degree
, and think they’ve got a slam-dunk debunking straight from Darwin himself. This is a case where you must read the rest of the context, because what he’s doing is setting up a rhetorical case that selection seems absurd, but what follows is a whole chapter in which he explains all the gradations and intermediate steps in the evolution of the eye. And of course all it takes is the next two sentences to make it clear that he’s saying exactly the opposite of what creationists want him to say.
When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [“the voice of the people = the voice of God “], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certain the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.
This is the sin of partially quoting someone to twist their position. Another method of distorting a quote is the use of ellipses to artfully delete intended meanings. One of my favorite examples of this technique was found by John Lynch, in a review of an intelligent design creationist book.
Darwin actually, if unwittingly, promulgated the charter for all later social Darwinists: “Let the strongest live and the weakest die… . Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”
See that ellipsis? It’s magic. It contains seven deleted chapters from the Origin. If you can cobble together any set of words said at any time by anyone to make a “quote”, then pointing out the context is important in evaluating the validity of the quotation. I’ve said many times that you should never ever trust an ellipsis in a creationist document — it will conceal multitudes. You really should check out the Quote Mine Project for a long list of similar abuses.
So let me just say that defending against misquotations by pointing out that the context completely changes the meaning of the fragment is a fair argument. There are more than enough examples of people mangling meaning with partial quotes to make evaluating context important.
But more and more, I’m seeing “that was taken out of context!” as a get-out-of-jail-free card for statements that were not taken out of context, but were actually representative of the views of the person. For instance, Donald Trump said there should be “some form of punishment” for women who get abortions. That he said it is a fact; that Trump is not generally supportive of women’s rights is also a fact, so it was representative of his views. That he later, after getting quite a bit of heat, reversed himself, does not mean it was taken out of context. Actually, given general Republican policies on reproductive rights, it fits right in with the context.
Another master of the “out of context” escape clause is Sam Harris. This is a guy who can write an essay called “In Defense of Torture”, and then tries to argue that he’s not defending torture, because you have to include the context that he thinks it’s horrible and ought to remain illegal…although we should still do it when necessary. Ironically, it’s when we do take his writings in the full context of his arguments for torture, racial profiling, bombing, killing people for what they believe, etc., that his fans are most likely to scream that we are “taking Sam out of context!”
Harris has something in common with fundamentalist religions, as well. Islamists, for instance, are fond of claiming that quoting the Koran is “out of context”; they’ve even gone so far as to claim that even quoting a translation from the original Arabic means you’ve removed all the relevant context and are distorting the meaning. But they are using “context” as a waffling weasel word to obscure the clear meaning and intent of the words of their holy book. There are clear and plain spoken passages that express sentiments that are not compatible with the modern mind, but are accurate representations of their time, and that there are other scattered bits that that soften or even contradict some of those passages is not “context” that excuses you from ignoring the bits you don’t like. For example, this:
Does the Koran say that men have the right to physically beat their wives or not? I say yes and quote the following verses to prove my point:
Sura IV.34 : “As for those [women] from whom you fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge [or beat] them.”
This translation comes from a Muslim. Have I somehow distorted the meaning of these lines? Let us have a wider textual context:
Sura IV.34 : “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. God is high, supreme.”
If anything, the wider textual context makes things worse for those apologists of Islam who wish to minimize the mysogyny of the Koran. The oppression of women has divine sanction; women must obey God and their men, who have divine authorisation to scourge them. One Muslim translator, Yusuf Ali, clearly disturbed by this verse adds the word “lightly” in brackets after “beat” even though there is no “lightly” in the original Arabic. An objective reading of the entire Koran (that is the total context) makes grim reading as far as the position of women is concerned.
If you were actually to take context into account, rather than using it to bury or excuse unpleasant reality, you ought to face reality: Islam was founded in a patriarchal and aggressively expansionist culture that took concepts like honor and purity very, very seriously, and used religion and divine authority as a tool to control people’s lives. Context makes it reasonable to interpret the Koran as authorizing men to abuse women. If you want to rationalize it, don’t say these words are taken out of context, but instead point out that cultures are complex, diverse, and changing, and that the views of many modern Muslims are more sophisticated and interesting than that. Unfortunately, that creates new conflicts, because it requires admitting that the words of the holy book are not the perfect and unchanging principles of a flawless holy being.
And let’s not just pick on Islam. Christianity is just as bad. There is no “context” to excuse Leviticus, for instance; it literally begins by claiming that “The Lord called to Moses and spoke to him”, handing down a long list of do’s and don’ts. It’s specific. It’s clear. It’s detailed. It is not metaphorical. It is not poetry. The first part is all about how to properly splash blood from animal sacrifices around in order to make this primitive god happy. The only context in which it should be understood is that this is a document from an ancient culture with practices we now consider brutal, ugly, and pointless — you don’t get to claim that the New Testament changes the context of Leviticus. It is what it is, and you don’t get to radically reinterpret Leviticus on the basis of the Gospels, as if sticking a Jesus torture and execution story on a chapter about splashing altars with blood makes it all alright.
I think if we properly considered context, those two examples simply make it clear that the Bible is bloody horrible, rather than somehow magically making it a good guide for modern life.
No, I think the Trump quotes (and other GOP primary quotes) truly ARE being taken out of context. The original context was to rile up the Trifecta Of Libertarianism: Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia. Among the BASE, Professor Myers, among the hateful racist sexist homophobic BASE. The original context was NEVER intended to include the New York Times or NBC News picking up on it and referring it to the public at large. And this is why they have to so furiously backpedal once the general election season comes around. Because all of their primary statements are now being taken out of context.
That makes no sense.
I agree that that is the context: racism, sexism, and homophobia. That’s the point; that is their context, and excusing them as being presented out of context is incorrect. We are reading him exactly as he intends to be read. That we find them repugnant, either in isolation or in context, does not change that fact.
If only the horrible lamestream media would stop making conservatives look like ugly selfish bastards by reporting their actual words! What a dirty, underhanded tactic!
l’d say you’ve chosen a relatively inoffensive passage from the Bible to make your point. You could have chosen God’s command to commit mass murder of women and men and rape of girls, stone people to death for gathering sticks on the sabbath, the condoning of sexual slavery (“concubinage”) and a whole lot more. Splashing animal blood around doesn’t seem all that bad.
Just once, I would like to see some sort of standard for political figures (and others who habitually bring in the out of context defense) where the out of context defense is completely ignored until the context is brought back. The phrase is a transition statement to an actual explanation, and it being used as an explanation in and of itself is all sorts of grating.
BTW this Slacktivist post is somewhat on point, and worth reading. It’s about how Christians pick and choose what parts of the Bible to believe in. You might also want to follow his link to the “God hates shrimp” dilemma.
Forget context, the misuse of that particular Darwin quote really defies even basic common sense. It would be one thing if they were quoting some later work of Darwin to suggest (as they love to do) that he “recanted.” But why on earth would Darwin “admit” in The Origin that the very theory he has written the book to espouse is “absurd”?
It’s as if atheists started trying to “prove” that god doesn’t exist by saying, “well, the Bible says ‘there is no God.'” Even without knowing the context (the full quote, of course, is “the fool has said in his heart ‘there is no God.'”), it ought to raise anyone’s B.S. meter.
@PZ, 2
I think you might have missed a little snarksasm in that first post. :P
It’s kind of depressing how common the misquoting out of context thing happens among supposed skeptics, like when people quote Andrea Dworkin, saying all sex is something something expression of hatred against women something, thus proving that all feminism everywhere is evil, misandrist and divorced from reality, when she was actually, if I remember correctly – it’s been a while, and that book gives lead a run for its money on density – talking about the idea that marital rape was an impossible concept.
I believe Sir Mix-a-Lot said it best; “I like… t…o… lie.”
Trump is a bad “context”, he twists his words, by misquoting others, and then claiming he was just quoting what others are saying. Totally disregarding the reason he quoted them in the first place. Trump is so pretzel language that trying to use his quptes as examples for or against context will get one equally twisted into logical knaughts [sic]. EG, I just twisted myself into a knaught.
I really hate when Harris fans do this. They so often claim his critics are taking him out of context, but I’ve yet to see them present whatever the fuck is the proper context in which it is apparent that SH doesn’t support torture or racial profiling or bombing.
Ah, context. As a translator, I am confronted with that all the time, and it can be tricky, but certainly not always.
Richard Dawkins gives a good example of how his “Eddington concession” was misused to make him say things he actually didn’t.
As for the Bible, I have always been “fond” of the story of the Levite and his concubine in Judges. It is an appallingly cruel story, but Christians defend it by pointing out the “context” of the next chapter where they gather to slaughter the people of Gibeah at his instigation, as if that makes everything alright.
Cervantes, the Slacktivist essay on shrimp was pretty interesting, but better in pointing out the problems with accepting part of the laws and not other, than with how to intelligently do that sort of thing.
If my memory serves me correctly, Sam Harris did not really defend torture, but argued that torturing a few people was less bad than maiming and killing hundreds or thousands or more in a war. If one is to measure inflicted suffering as a quantity, he has a point, but in my view, inflicting suffering can never be a Good Thing. Also, a person who does not understand that torture is pointless, cannot rightly be called intelligent, I think.
I seem to remember that Sam Harris gave Israel as an example of how useful racial profiling can be. While I can understand the logic, I would argue that it is to be avoided. It makes me think of screening for certain cancers. While nobody argues that this is not useful for detecting early cancers and for preventing cancer deaths, many people including me, would argue that the suffering, anxiety and medical problems caused by the screening far outweigh the benefits and that screening should therefore be abandoned.
O, PZ, you are such an elitist! You can’t expect people to read a whole chapter of science. Besides, quote mining is the last blue collar industry left. Trump doesn’t have any context, he’s pure white noise (pun intended)
we are “taking Sam out of context!”
The context is “Sam is awesome”
The context is “Trump is the bestest and biggest!”
So, yeah, you’re out of context.
many people including me, would argue that the suffering, anxiety and medical problems caused by the screening far outweigh the benefits and that screening should therefore be abandoned.
If I get you right, in this context, you are saying that you think that because of your opinion about certain medical procedures, other people shouldn’t get them?
Marcus Ranum
That’s a really uncharitable interpretation of a very mainstream argument. Lots of medical agencies believe that the harm done by broad screening outweighs the benefits, with PSA and <a href="http://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/Page/Document/UpdateSummaryFinal/breast-cancer-screening1?ds=1&s=breast%20cancer"mamography both being widely discussed.
@qwints – if I understand correctly, the issue is not whether screening is “harmful” but whether it is effective. The question of false positives and whether a biopsy is “unnecessary” or not is a real one, but isn’t the question of “harm” being driven by insurance companies not patients? I don’t see why patients can’t decide these things; I certainly don’t see why someone would feel that their personal opinion should trump a patients’ choice of procedures and diagnostics. I just find it weird when libertarians cheerfully say they’d reduce someone else’s choice on a matter that is that individual’s business.
Since this is about context, let’s be fair to Mr. Trumph. IIRC the question he was asked was “if abortion is outlawed, should violators be punished?” or something to that effect. In that context the answer isn’t completely off, punishment is a normal response to “crime”.
The real problem here is that he accepted the premise. Any decent person (my definition, if you disagree then sod off) would reject such a notion as reprehensible and unacceptable. So it isn’t really that he’s willing to punish women who has an illegal abortion but that he’s willing to entertain the idea of making it illegal.
I’m agreeing with #19. Trump had been posed a hypothetical, and he answered properly.
If abortion is illegal, women who have one should be punished. What else is possible? Who else is going to be punished for an abortion? The doctor? If it is considered the same as murder, we’d not let a woman go just because she hired someone else to do the hit.
Trump is an awful person, and he should have deflected the question. But slagging him for that answer in a post about context is not good.
Bart B. Van Bockstaele @13:
This strikes me as Sam Harris providing a defense of torture:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/in-defense-of-torture_b_8993.html
I don’t know if he has since retracted his defense of torture (I’m hoping he’s realized that it’s a violation of human rights that doesn’t provide reliable information, but if he has, I’ve not heard of it).
While context is always important, just as important is HOW people understand certain things in religion and what context they follow in understanding passages.
My favorite, irritating examples involve claims that Christianity is a religion of love and mercy whose long bloody history of torture and mass murder is because many believers took passages out of context or misunderstood them as condoning violence. In reality, if you read enough historical Christian literature, you realize that the killers were the ones who best understood how the violent passages fit in ways that required killing non-Christians and heretics. It’s the modern, liberal types that don’t know the actual historical context.
As briefly as I can put it: Christianity has, from the beginning that we know of, portrayed Christians as soldiers of god under relentless assault by Satan, using non-Christians and heretics to wage war and try to lead good Christians into damnation. So Christians have a right, even a duty, to use all available weapons to protect themselves and, if possible, save others. Killing, in theory, is the last resort, but is justified nonetheless. Christians’ thousand-year genocide of European pagans was based on 1) protecting Christians under pagan governments; 2) opening up potential converts to salvation. If a pagan government blocked proselytizing, then Christians were justified in killing pagan leaders and soldiers to gain access to potential converts, usually surviving women and children.
There’s far more about this that can be said, but all Christian violence across the centuries exists within this overarching context.
Bart B. Van Bockstaele wrote:
Yes, that is true, and the title can even be justified under that premise, but Sam has also supported the idea that we might need to preemptively detonate nuclear bombs on Islamic nations. Such an act would cause untold devastation, and massive “collateral damage”. So, if one is going to argue that torture isn’t as bad as “collateral damage”, and that we should be more shocked by such casual dismissal of civilian death caused by war, one shouldn’t then suggest doing something that would kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Harris asks us to consider the consequences of thought experiment #1 (torture vs collateral damage) completely isolated from thought experiment #2 (preemptive use of nukes to prevent some other unnamed tragedy), and seems to act like combining his opinion on these two things into one position is somehow invalid.
Sam has also supported the idea that we might need to preemptively detonate nuclear bombs on Islamic nations
Yeah, specifically because they are controlled by a death cult. Because, you know, the christians who mostly control the US military’s nuclear arsenal, or the equally fanatical tribalists who control Israel’s nuclear arsenal – those guys are cool.
Bart B. Van Bockstaele, #13:
Why would our two options be limited to torture or war?
How is it “not really defending torture” if your argument in favor of doing that thing consists of claims that it’s better than other things? I don’t know what a “real defense” looks like to you, but to me that definitely qualifies.
Why? If a person is suffering a terminal illness, let’s say, and they want you to help them end their life, it could be necessary that they’ll suffer in the process. Isn’t it good to do that? (Or are you talking about some other kind of “good” that isn’t applied to an action that a person can take?)
Or for a milder and somewhat different case, suppose you have to amputate someone’s arm to save their life (because here they want to keep living). That’s going to cause suffering, and it’s the only option available to you, and it’s a good thing that you’re doing for them.
It would of course be very weird to say that they should thank you for the pain they experienced (or any other negative experiences which result). But they should at least be satisfied with the outcome — the real action you took had better effects overall than the alternatives. If they’re not all positive effects, it may still be good, because it’s often not within your ability to make only the positive effects happen and none of the negatives. Even if you could have, say, performed an equivalent medical procedure which caused no pain throughout the rest of the person’s life, there could be many other kinds of suffering or many other downsides to the procedure which you have no way to control.
Erlend Meyer, #19:
I don’t think I understand the last sentence. In what sense is it not really the case that “he’s willing to punish women” for having abortions, if he makes it clear that he wants them to be illegal and expresses his understanding that this sort illegality is supposed to result in “punishment”?
If there were any coherent wiggle room between his statement and being “willing to punish women,” then I’m having trouble making sense out of what that’s supposed to be.
Menyambal, #20:
A proper answer would be “abortion shouldn’t be illegal.” If abortion were to become a legal, the proper response would not be to follow the law and punish women accordingly, but to change the law so that it doesn’t occur. Because we write the laws and can make better ones.
Maybe I don’t understand what you mean by “deflect.” I want honest (or at least revealing) answers from politicians about their political views. With that information, I can have a reasonably good idea of whether or not they intend to do the right sorts things in office. If they “deflected” a question about any stuff like that, then however they do it that would make it harder to determine what their actual views are like. So that’s not what he should’ve done, unless you mean that for the purposes of getting himself elected (not in order to get a good result) he should’ve concealed his real views from the public.
What do you mean? Like PZ said, when taken in context, his statements apparently do represent his positions on those topics reasonably well. He can be slagged for his terrible answers, and the people claiming they’re “taken out of context” can be slagged for confusing (or deliberately deceiving) others about it.
@ # 25: (A proper answer would be “abortion shouldn’t be illegal.”)
That was the point I was trying to make. In the limited context of “if something is illegal, should violators be punished?”, yes is a perfectly good answer. The fact that he didn’t object to the idea of banning abortion is the real issue.
Nobody I know said they would.
Just because B is less bad than A does not mean that B is good. Giving someone a beating is usually less bad than killing that someone. No sane person would argue that beating someone is “good”.
This reasoning is outside the context. The context is about about Sam Harris making certain claims about inflicting suffering with the intent to harm, not about inflicting suffering with the intent to cure. Anyone claiming that cutting someome open to take care of an acute appendicitis is bad, is insane. In the first case, suffering is the goal, in the second case, suffering (and perhaps even death) is a side effect. Context is extremely important.
I suspect this is totally out of context. Perhaps you should read his “Letter to a Christian Nation”. He doesn’t seem to suggest in there that “Christians are cool”. Context is important.
Did he? I am unaware of it, but I haven’t been following Sam Harris for a long time. I therefore have to allow for the possibility of an unknown context, but as an absolute, it is just as bad as what the Bible defends.
Thank you for that link. I have clicked on it. I have saved it for future reference, since I don’t have the time to read it thoroughly right now, I just skimmed it.
I did notice these two things:
He seems to be making a hypothetical case, a thought experiment, not an actual case.
I would argue his case is wrong, because he does not seem to take into account that torture tends to give the answers the torturers want to hear, not the answers necessary to solve the problem at hand. but I may have missed it. However, this would also seem to indicate that he is attempting to make a genuine case and – if confirmed – it would go against everything I remember of him. It would certainly go a long way to encourage me to change my mind about him.
The point is that Harris’ argument (as you presented it) is fallacious, whether or not anybody you know has explicitly said that. You went on to tell us that he has a point about that (which you rejected for unrelated reasons that I also discussed), which isn’t true if his argument is fallacious.
You’re not explaining why arguing in favor of an action, by presenting reasons for doing it (such as “it’s better than the other things we could do”), is not a “real” case of “defending” the action. Of course it doesn’t necessarily mean that you believe doing so will be all smiles and rainbows. Maybe, your argument is stupid or shouldn’t be convincing to anyone, so it’s not successfully doing the thing you wanted it to do. But in ordinary English, it does mean that the purpose of your argument (however successful it is) was to “defend” that course of action, perhaps in certain specific circumstances, instead of doing any other thing.
Citing certain types of reasons to make your case doesn’t imply that you weren’t attempting to make that case. It means you were doing it, and you were doing it in a particular way.
Maybe you assumed that a “defender of torture” is supposed to say that torture is their favorite thing in the whole wide world, that all of the time everywhere for any arbitrary reason we should all be torturing each other, that this has priority over any other thing anybody could conceivably care about, and so forth. But that kind of shit is not what a “defense” of torture needs to look like, so people would not at all be wrong for calling it a “defense” if it doesn’t meet ridiculous standards like that. Maybe apologists for Harris would agree to those terms, but reasonable and honest people wouldn’t.
I think they’re factually wrong. Which is what I thought you were — that is, I think you misspoke or didn’t consider the implications of what you were saying, so it was worth a few minutes to discuss some of the problems with that sort of view.
But you did make the apparently sweeping claim that “inflicting suffering can never be a Good Thing.” You should mean what you say. “Context” doesn’t fix things like that. You could’ve said “can’t be a Good Thing (with exceptions X, Y, Z)”, since the existence of such exceptions means the word “never” doesn’t add to or clarify anything about what you really wanted to express. That would express your idea more clearly, in a way that doesn’t provoke fairly obvious objections like the ones I made.
Please don’t create splash damage for “the insane” or people with mental disorders/illnesses. It’s not an insult or a generic term that you should use to describe any sort of “bad thinking.”
Many can’t. For one very simple reason: the education system is so bad, many (most?) lack the information and insight to make such decisions. Deciding on invalid grounds is not deciding, it is choosing from equally meaningless options. It is precisely why I am advocating non-optional courses and tests as a precondition to the legalisation (not decriminalisation) of recreational drugs, or the practice of such ill-advised activities as climbing Mount Everest, or riding a bike at night without lights and reflectors.
In order for people to make decisions that are truly their own, they must be in possession of all relevant information.
You get me wrong. This is fast becoming the consensus in the medical community and it is essentially based on the idea that we should not inflict harm, unless the benefits are shown/thought to outweigh the disadvantages. Saving a few lives is great, but it is not so great if the screening to make this possible costs more lives than are saved by it.
Van Bockstaele, you find this
an example of a hypothetical. Actually it is the premise of the piss-poor series “24.”
Well let me present you with further hypotheticals.
Is it OK to torture everybody who might have knowledge of the placement of the bomb?
If you are torturing a “known terrorist” and they name 2 other persons as a terrorists, is it OK to torture those other persons?
Let me also present you with a major problem – torture does not produce adequate or accurate information even in the short term; this has been shown to be the case by every practical experience and study. For example, during WWII the British operated a prison where torture was carried out, the London Cage. After the war (and despite the claims of its Commanding Officer) it was found that in no case did it produce actionable intelligence. The experience of the London Cage was later repeated in the H blocks when IRA prisoners were questioned, torture did nothing to forewarn about attacks and produced much unreliable and contaminated information.
Maybe that is why I wrote this in comment 30:
@16, 18 Marcus Ranum:
The line you’re reacting to is “screening should be abandoned.” This means that medical agencies shouldn’t institute a policy of trying to test everyone for X. This does not mean that patients can’t ask to be tested for X. The underlying logic for abandoning screening might, however, imply that insurance companies (or the government in more enlightened countries) shouldn’t be asked to pay for tests if the tests aren’t expected to be useful. That is, there are three different questions here:
1. Should we institute a program testing everyone [who meets criteria Y] for X?
2. Can anyone [who meets criteria Y] be tested for X of their own accord?
3. In case 2, should we fund the test for them or ask them to pay?
It isn’t a violation of patient choice to say “We don’t think there’s a benefit to doing this, and it might even be harmful, so we aren’t going to pay for it for you.” I can’t exactly stroll into the local hospital and demand they give me an ultrasound to test for pregnancy, since, as a cis male, the chance of that is essentially zero. If I can find a doctor who’s willing to do it if I pay enough for the procedure, that’s another question, though.
PZ, I was going to observe (before I saw Mr Van B’s idiocies about torture) that pulling quotes out of context is a technique used by all those who venerate religious documents. Christians in particular will cite whichever part of the Wholly Babble suits their purpose. Then, when pointed at texts that say the opposite, the believer accuses the doubter of quoting the “Good” book out of context.
If he did, he’s an even bigger idiot than I thought, because Israel does not use racial profiling – they use behavioural profiling.
The cost / benefit trade-off for various different types of cancer screening is under constant review by experts, based on the best available (and constantly evolving) information about the rates of both type 1 and type 2 errors in the screening processes, and the effectiveness of early diagnosis and treatment. It’s not at all uncommon for screening schedules to be reduced or abandoned due to these sorts of concerns. Personally, I would rather leave such determinations to expert specialists in the field. What makes you think you know better?
As I said, this is what I remember. My memory may be wrong.
Yes, and does this make it verboten to mention it?
What makes you think I think that?
The bit where you said “many people including me, would argue that the suffering, anxiety and medical problems caused by the screening far outweigh the benefits and that screening should therefore be abandoned.”
No one. If abortion is illegal, it should be made “illegal but tolerated” until the law can be changed.
How do you know that? Or know whether the “known terrorist” you have is the one who knows where the bomb is? If I were a terrorist mastermind with an army of wannabe martyrs, I’d order one to specifically get himself captured and hint that he knew where the bomb was. He’d probably start denying everything after the waterboarding, but no one would believe him. Better yet, he’d probably start parroting back what the suspicions they were feeding him, further reducing the chances of any actual intel being passed. This would keep any authorities capable of stopping the bomb from going off busy long enough for it to go off whereas otherwise they might use actual investigative skills to find out where it was and foil my evil plot.
If I can think of that plan, so can ISIS.
Infophile@#36:
The line you’re reacting to is “screening should be abandoned.”
Context is everything. The context in which I am reacting to that line is that it’s being delivered by some random fart-bag on an internet blog. And in that context it is pretty reasonable to suggest they pound some sand.
Where in that sentence do I say I know better?
He doesn’t. Hence the word “imagine”.
Subject to certain conditions, I dare hope. Such as “only qualified medical personnel allowed to perform the procedure, in hygienic circumstances, and the like.”
Seriously? Are you some sort of Eliza-type chatbot, producing syntactically-correct statements with no understanding of their meaning? “[I] would argue that the […] problems caused by the screening far outweigh the benefits and that screening should therefore be abandoned” is very clearly a declarative statement about your opinion of the benefits of screening, and the fact that you bothered to write it clearly implies that you believe that it has some value. Are you now saying that you’d like to tack a rider on, effectively saying “but hey, I don’t know actually what I’m talking about, so my argument is worthless”? Cool, I’ll just mentally append that to all of your comments from here on…
No. It clearly implies that this is my opinion. I am too well aware of the relative value of the opinion of a single person to claim I know better than someone else who may be in the possession of different or more relevant information. It is called modesty. Maybe you should try it once in a while.
Don’t pretend to know what a person is thinking unless you can back up that claim with evidence that you are psychic.
Dunc @47:
Yeah, it’s called commenting. Happens around here all the time.
It clearly implies that this is my opinion
Sam Harris, is that you?
Yeah, sorry PZ, if my tone wasn’t clear. My comment wasn’t intended to be logical, unless you’re a Libertarian politician or Fox pundit.
#48
With the way you twist your words and constantly shift their meanings, I can now understand how you can defend Harris’ “In Defense of Torture” as not being a defense of torture.
Torture is simply wrong and inhumane and indefensible. The ‘ticking time bomb’ thought experiment, often employed to support the use of torture, ignores reality and depends on folks knowing specific facts as being 100% true (never happens). One does not even need to bring in efficacy of torture to know that it has no defense, ever.
#52
I wrote this in comment 30:
Please explain to me how this can be interpreted as defending Harris’ “In Defense of Torture” as not being a defense of torture.
And you continue to defend Harris (if not torture)
@Bart B. Van Bockstaele
#53
It seems pretty straightforward to me. In response to Tony! @30,
…you mentioned that you noticed two things. This directly implies that the things are relevant to Harris defending torture since the only other thing you mentioned was not getting to read the whole thing yet. The first thing you mentioned,
…is irrelevant to Harris’s intentions or actions.
1) You do not explain how the fact that the case is a hypothetical renders this a non-defense, please correct this. While I don’t see Harris, Dawkins and similar ilk do so successfully on issues such as this, hypothetical examples are supposedly meant to be representative of reality in some fashion and thus relevant and useful in thinking about reality. Such a conception of hypothetical examples seems to render them utterly useless on a definitional level as opposed to the de facto level I am used to.
2) He can be incorrect about how or why he is defending torture and still be defending torture by action with the additional quality of doing a shitty job.
There should have been a “…and the second thing you mentioned…” after 1).