Quote:
Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague
Only for people who are incapable of thinking in thought experiments. His statements are clear to people who have the ability to think in the manner required by philosophy - hypotheticals, corner cases, thought experiments, and very narrow bands of applicability of particular principles. If you remove the conclusion from the specific premises that underlie it, as people are often wont to do, the conclusion suggests, to someone who's barely paying attention, something different from what it actually was.
The problem is that much of the public is only capable of thinking in 240p.
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Ah, the old "the only reason you don't respect him as much as I do is because you're not as smart as I am." When your argument is that the majority of people are incapable of grasping Harris, that their thinking is not capable of the required clarity, or that the only reason one might not find him perfectly clear or reasonable is because of their own completely inability to interpret basic elements of debate and conversation, you come off smug and vapid. Not intellegent and reasoned.
His statements are often unclear and clumsy, he gets in his own way more than he bothers to be clear. His conclusions are interesting but his reasoning for them is at times incredibly weak.
He is an intellectual for the pseudo-intellectual age. His need to be inflammatory and make points for shock value are indicative of his desperation to be heard and to be known. He needs people to hear what he's saying, not for the purpose of argument, but for the purpose of ego. I think anyone who knows of Harris would be happy to admit that he is passionate about himself. The weak and unnecessary retread video posted at the start of this conversation is evidence of that.
Harris can be brilliant. But he can also be the enormous joke that peter12 thinks he is, and that is his own doing. Harris is respectable but rarely admirable. Those who do truly admire him generally do out of a confirmation bias and cease to engage in any further intellectual thought pattern past "Harris must be defended or else my own views are suspect." It's no different than religious belief, in that sense. Harris is providing opinions and musing that vary greatly in their validity or substance.
And I hope this isn't being confused as me being one of those dangerous liberals Harris fears, set on taking away freedoms of speech and curtailing language to the least offensive. I absolutely love Hitchens, who shared some similar thought patterns on Islam, he just wasn't quite the idiot Harris can be.