Sam Harris on Orlando and the Response of Obama, Trump & Clinton
This could have gone in numerous threads, Terrorism thread, Shooting thread, US political thread or Religion thread. In the end I think it needs it's own thread.
If you have 25 minutes this is a must listen.
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I aint wasting 25 minutes. If you think some 25 minute propaganda deserves its own thread then at least explain some key points of the video and provide some initial commentary.
Why wouldn't you just put it in the mass shooting thread where everyone is talking about Orlando anyway.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Atheist moral philosopher. Author of "End of Faith", "Lying", "Free Will", and others. Fairly controversial figure for his views on religion, particularly Islam. Got into a spat with Ben Affleck on Real Time a while ago that ended up all over cable news for a week or so.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Special snow flake wants attention. Its why people always start redundant threads.
It's idiotic comments like this that shut down so much dialog on this board. Unfortunately, the dynamic around here for so many posters is to prove they sit at the big poster table. Far more frivolous threads exist here that is for certain. Don't like the thread? Couldn't be bothered to give a listen to one of the most articulate people you will ever hear speak on an issue of major importance (regardless of whether you agree with him or not)? Leave, don't read this thread. No one has an obligation to post in a way that fits your news consumption preferences. Look, special snowflake wants to only read things of his interest and only in bite sized chunks. There's tons of click bait sites out there for the likes of you.
This thread is a great idea. There are enough followers of Harris and his ilk on this board.
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Sam Harris is a bit of an Islamophobic idiot. Has a good base of criticisms inspired by true intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens, but there is more fear and ignorance in Harris than he likes to admit.
He caters to the lowest common denominator of atheists.
Dawkins is just worse. Harris is absolutely fine until you get him talking about Islam, where his strong ability to reason and actually think is thrown completely about the window.
Dawkins is just worse. Harris is absolutely fine until you get him talking about Islam, where his strong ability to reason and actually think is thrown completely about the window.
I have yet to hear Harris say anything inaccurate about Islam.
Use of the word "Islamophobe" has run its course. It now says more about the user, than the target.
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Harris is rather different from Hitch or Dawkins in that his best skill is his ability to be precise with language. People just don't seem to know how to deal with that, because language is usually inherently vague. So he'll use a very specific corner case to talk about a very specific issue, and people will generalize his statement to apply in other cases where it wasn't intended.
One of the most obvious examples is the controversy caused by the statement "rape is perfectly natural", which was in one of his books. It was in the context of rebutting the naturalistic fallacy - the notion that if something is natural, it is somehow morally acceptable. His point was that something being "natural" tells you almost nothing about its moral content, and the example used was that many animals rape. This was then taken by some less than scrupulous critics and put into internet memes to suggest that Harris is pro-rape.
It's happened on a number of topics on issues that are hard to talk about because they're politically charged (nuclear deterrence and torture being two other biggies). Hence the following page, set up to clear up any such (often intentionally created) misunderstandings:
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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I have yet to hear Harris say anything inaccurate about Islam. Use of the word "Islamophobe" has run its course. It now says more about the user, than the target.
Anti-muslim bigotry is certainly a more accurate term in that it can't be conflated with wholly appropriate (and in my view necessary) criticism of bad religious doctrine. But peoples' response here is inevitably going to be that it's just a semantic argument. The problem is that in order to think clearly about highly charged topics, we need to talk clearly about them too, and understand what our terms mean. Which is why understanding the difference between Islam, Islamism and Jihadism is so crucial to being able to have this conversation.
EDIT: If we're going to have a Sam Harris thread generally, by the way, that video at the top isn't the best one to use. I think his exasperation leads him to be less compelling than usual there. Still generally right, but he's much more interesting on other topics than Islam anyway, and has been more interesting on Islam at many other times.
Frankly, he's said all he's likely to say on Islam and so his discussion on that topic is far more boring than on AI, free will, how reasoning and intellectual honesty should work, and for some people I imagine meditation and spirituality (not my area of interest). I'd suggest if you want to know what the guy is about, there are better things to listen to him on -
This is a recent one with Neil Degrasse Tyson:
Spoiler!
This one on the mutliverse is incredibly interesting and edifying... I've listened to it a couple of times:
Spoiler!
Here's his spiel on Rogan about the Presidential candidates, mainly Trump, which is one of the most withering critiques I've heard:
Spoiler!
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Last edited by CorsiHockeyLeague; 06-22-2016 at 09:35 AM.
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Harris faces the twin handicaps of relying on reason and empiricism in a social media environment that is hostile to both. It seems that thinkers like Harris and Steven Pinker catch even more flack from the left than they would if they were actually right-wing. The ideologues who dominate social discourse these days tend to be so passionately partisan, and so obsessed with their enemies in the opposite camp, that they can't get their heads around the notion of social debate that doesn't hew to the conventional left vs right dogma.
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Sam Harris on Orlando and the Response of Obama, Trump & Clinton
