US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3681

I thought I had internet links saved in my .doc, turns out I didn't. That is kind of dumb on my part. Most of the content I'm talking about is referenced using article names, which means you can google the name and find the article it's coming from. If there's some source material that you can't find and wish to, please signal it to me and I'll do my best to find it again.

My two main attacks on Sam Harris are based, one on the content of some of his arguments, and the second on the way he argues and defends himself. I think his general tactic is to combine very obvious statements about reality and very provocative statements, and when he’s attacked for the provocative ones, to roll back to the obvious ones and pretend this is what he’s being attacked on. What you have said illustrates kind of well what I’m talking about. You’ve mentioned what he thinks of islam, and you’ve mentioned that it’s causing the most terrorism today (an obvious statement) and that there are concerning polls about islam and what some muslims think (another obvious statement). What he’s doing is hijacking the conversation and having us believe that if you don’t agree with him about islam, well it must be that you disagree with those obvious statements. You must not think that it’s a problem that this amount of muslims believe apostasy deserves death. A lot of his arguments function in this fashion.
On top of that, he's been relentlessly attacking the character of people who disagree with him and have argued against him. These people are not simply wrong, they're also evil; they're dishonest, they're misrepresenting him with an evil intent, and sometimes they're also assholes if they're really lucky. This manichaean view is useful especially because it's so manichaean: it allows you to dismiss factual claims that are made against you, because the people making them aren't honest actors and don't deserve an answer. My favorite example of that is the Mondoweiss article by Theodore Sayeed called Sam Harris, uncovered: http://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/sam-harris-uncovered. Whether you agree with the article or not, you will notice that it's a fully sourced piece, which references Sam Harris' writing on a consistent basis, and that its criticism of Harris is always based on reasons that are explained.
Here's the one and only time, as far as I know, that Harris has adressed this article in any way: "I receive a stream of emails demanding to know why I continue to ignore Theodore Sayeed’s demolition of me on the website Mondoweiss. The answer: I’ve never heard of Theodore Sayeed or Mondoweiss. A subsequent glance at his article reveals misrepresentations of my views and tendentious maneuvers that seem to have been made in very bad faith. Engaging with this sort of thing only gives it greater currency—or so I like to believe, given that I have no time to engage with it."
If you're familiar with Harris, you're familiar with how much he's claimed to be misrepresented. He has put a lot of time into making sure people know that he's misrepresented a lot by everyone. I guess he didn't have any time left to explain how that was the case.

Here are some points in no particular order, focused mainly on content and dishonesty in Harris‘ speech:
1. Harris will tell you that he doesn't criticize all muslims, he criticizes islam. His concern is with the doctrine being wrong and dangerous (the mother lode of bad ideas, a thoroughgoing cult of death), not with the people who call themselves muslims. Basically, his depiction looks like this: there are fundamentalists and extremists, and there are the people who truly follow islam. Those are the people we don't like. Then there are other people, nominal muslims, many of whom "don't take their faith seriously". Those are the people who are fine. Which is why not all muslims are criticized.
It’s a logical conclusion: if you criticize an ideology, but not all the people following it, then obviously the people you don’t criticize are the people who don’t really follow the ideology to its end.
Many problems with that: first, there are people who are muslims, take their faith seriously, and don't believe that their faith commends them to do anything as terrible as the fundamentalists believe. According to the portrayal here, those people aren't muslims, they just think they are. That doesn’t portray the muslim world well at all. A more accurate representation should be: here are fundamentalists and extremists, here are radicals. Those are the people we don’t like. Then there are other people, moderate muslims, and then non-practising muslims and nominal muslims.
The reason why my depiction is more accurate is because the claim Harris makes about fundamentalism being directly tied to islam is inaccurate. Not because it’s wrong: it isn’t wrong, there is a clear connection between the texts of islam and the beliefs of the fundamentalists. What Harris ignores is that there is also a clear connection between the texts of islam and the beliefs of the moderate. A moderate will cherrypick the quran and ignore what he doesn’t like, but a fundamentalist will do the exact same thing. As such, an honest observer can’t declare that one group is „true islam“ while the other isn’t (in the same way that an honest observer cannot say that the fundamentalists aren’t muslims). Harris speaks of some of the contradictions regarding the link between the quran and fundamentalism in the End of Faith, but he says they are „loopholes“ that are „easily dismissable“. Oh, okay? Why does that line work for fundamentalists, but not for moderates? He, of course, doesn’t explain that.
At 8:30 in the Affleck interview, Harris says „there are hundreds of millions of muslims who are nominal muslims, who don’t take the faith seriously, who don’t want to kill apostates, who are horrified by ISIS, and we need to defend these people […]“ A description that coincides with what I‘ve described, in which he says the moderates of islam are people who don’t take their faith seriously, which coincides with everything he’s ever said about the doctrine of islam. Commenting about this specific interview, he said on his blog: „Unfortunately, I misspoke slightly at this point, saying that hundreds of millions of Muslims don’t take their “faith” seriously.“
Interesting mistake to make. Especially interesting considering that a month before that, he had this to write on this very same blog (or miswrite, I guess?):
„In drawing a connection between the doctrine of Islam and jihadist violence, I am talking about ideas and their consequences, not about 1.5 billion nominal Muslims, many of whom do not take their religion very seriously.“
Now this isn’t the first time I’ve copypasted this point, and it’s been objected to me that in his more recent book with Majid Nawaz, Harris is presented with a similar vision by Nawaz and seems to agree with it (or me). Well, I have not read this specific book. It’s possible that Harris has become more sensible about this topic, and I certainly would commend him for that. The thing is, I have not seen this recent enlightenment come with an acknowledgement that what he used to think on the topic was bullshit, and so I can’t factually say that he’s departed from those ideas.
I think it’s especially telling that Harris is adressing this specific message to liberals, as opposed to muslims. When he talks about islam, he doesn’t want to influence the muslim world, he doesn’t want to influence islam. He wants to influence the left-wing of our own countries. It is my belief that this point is especially important because we’re talking about islam, precisely because the polls show that the amount of radicals in islam is so important. I think if you portray islam to its face in the way Harris has portrayed it, you’re helping the cause of extremism. You’re lending credit to the notion that we have a culture war on our hands, and you’re telling all of the people who feel muslim but don’t associate with radicalism that they aren’t really muslim unless they do, that they belong to an enemy culture. I don’t want moderate religious people to have to choose to either deny their own culture or be an extremist. I want them on my side against extremism. This is the message I want out there.

2. Harris develops a concept in the End of Faith: there is a link between belief and behavior. When someone believes in something, it influences how likely he is to act in some ways. We will ignore, for the purpose of this criticism, that this is one of the top 5 Captain Obvious comments of all time. We will instead focus on how he uses this link to demonstrate that his criticism of the texts of islam is necessary. He will say, this thing is written in the quran, therefore, based on the link between belief and behavior, it’s logical that fundamentalists behave this way today.
That’s not really how beliefs function. Beliefs are dangerous insofar as they are held, not insofar as they are written. The best example of this I could come up with is a reverse example. The quran says, and reinforces several times, that there should be no compulsion in religion. As a muslim, you are only the messenger, nothing else is demanded from you. You should let he who believes it, believe, and he who rejects it, reject. According to the logic of Harris, there can’t be a problem with killing apostates in islam, because the quran speaks very clearly against that, and there is a link between belief and behavior... Yeah well. Beliefs are beliefs. Texts are texts.
You may think I’m being too simplistic in how I describe the thought process of Harris. I am not: he is. In his interview with Cenk, he compared secularism in christian countries and secularism in muslim countries. This is how he illustrated the difference: in the Bible, there is the line „Render to Cesar the things that are Cesar’s“, and there is no equivalent to that in the quran.
Consider this: the reason why we have secular democracies today is because we had a line in the Bible that allowed us to, while muslims did not… Where in this train of thought is the Holy Roman Empire, or the concept of Christendom? No clue. Where are the thinkers of the Enlightenment that actually did lead us to secularism? Did they do so because they wanted to follow the Bible? Can’t say, can’t tell.

3. The introduction to The End of Faith, the first writing that you’re introduced to if you read Sam Harris’ books, is intensely misleading for several reasons. It depicts a suicide bombing. Somebody detonated a bomb in a bus and killed plenty of people. You don’t know anything else. The book then asks you: „Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy—you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy—to guess the young man’s religion?“
Simply said, that isn’t a criticism of islam. The response to the question isn’t: because the doctrine of islam is so terrible that it leads to terrorism. The response to the question is: because in today’s context, there are more islamic terrorist acts than any other. When someone tells you: „Everytime I read the paper and see gang violence, it’s a Black or Hispanic kid who did it“, you don’t think he has a good point about black culture. And yet somehow saying the same thing about islam isn’t shocking.

4. There is a footnote to the introduction to the End of Faith (about the suicide bomber who you can trivially guess is a muslim):
„Some readers may object that the bomber in question is most likely to be a member of the Liberations Tigers of Tamil Eelam—the Sri Lankan separatist organization that has perpetuated more acts of suicidal terrororism than any other group. Indeed, the “Tamil Tigers” are often offered as a counter¬example to any claim that suicidal terrorism is a product of religion. But to describe the Tamil Tigers as “secular”—as R. A. Pape, “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 3 (2003): 20-32, and others have – is misleading. While the motivations of the Tigers are not explicitly religious, they are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbably things about the nature of life and death.“
Same claim in the article Bombing our illusions:
„Several readers followed Pape’s and put forward the Tamil Tigers as a rebuttal to my claim that suicidal terrorism is a product of religion. But it is misleading to describe the Tamil Tigers as “secular,” as Pape often does. While the motivations of the Tigers are not explicitly religious, they are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and death.“
It won’t surprise you that I have a few things to say here:
. Oh, okay, when you wrote this, you knew that the group that had done the more „terrororism“ was the Tamil Tigers, a secular organization? Then maybe you shouldn’t have encouraged people to bet their lives on the fact that the bomber is muslim?
. When you discussed Cenk, you told him that when a muslim commits an act of terror and says it’s for Allah, we should take him at his word. Here, someone commits an act of terror and says it’s for secular and nationalist reasons. Now you’re looking for other reasons. Interesting double standard. No true secular would ever do that, am I right?
. Maybe notice the casual racism there? Sure, you claim that you’re secular, but well, you’re Hindu, so you culturally have crazy beliefs, we should take your claim that you’re secular with a grain of salt. It’s as if our good old Sam has suddenly forgotten the kind of crazy beliefs that we culturally have in Europe… Or perhaps we should take any European’s claim of secularism with a grain of salt too, but weirdly enough, this topic hasn’t come up.

5. In 2006, Israel caught criticism for carpet bombing Gaza and Lebanon. This is how Harris responded to the criticism (in an article called The End of Liberalism?): „In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. [Muslims are worse than Israelis (note: the shift from religious appartenance to national appartenance is from the original)] Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.“
Actually, the fact that Israel has the moral high ground is EXACTLY why we were able to criticize it. When a terrorist causes a suicide bombing, nobody thinks: „Damn, those terrorists, another suicide attack, I didn’t think they could stoop this low.“ They are terrorist groups, it’s what they do, it’s what’s expected of them. Israel, as a democracy, has ascribed values to itself because of being a democracy. When it doesn’t follow these values, it acts in a less moral way than we expected it to act. Which is why we criticize it. Your defense of Israel relies on the very notion that justifies the attacks it got.

6. Harris proposes a thought experiment about justifying nuclear first strikes if an extremist muslim country were to come in possession of nukes. Yeah, I know, it’s not a justification (except it is, unless you think „ensuring our survival“ isn’t something we should aspire to), yeah, I know, it’s self-defense (then why isn’t it self-defense for the islamists to first strike us, when they know that we would first strike them in self-defense?). The argument that he developed on the subject of nuclear first strike is very reminiscent of what was said by many about Khruschchev before he came into power: he was very dangerous, there was a good chance that he would use nukes, we should nuke him first. I think we’re glad today that we didn’t listen to those voices.
The biggest reason why his thought experiment is not thought provoking at all is that we already have an extremist muslim country who has access to nukes. It’s called Pakistan…

7. Since we were just talking about self-defense, here’s why you can’t attack Harris for saying „Some beliefs are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them“: because there is context to the sentence. In this context, it is made explicit that Harris doesn’t want to kill harmless people for thought crimes. (blog post: on the mechanism of defamation)
Yeah, Sam, except the quote that we criticized contains the term „dangerous“. As such, we clearly don’t think that you’re targeting harmless people. Your claim of misrepresentation misrepresents our claim.
There are two levels for this claim: either you’re describing self-defense, in which case you’re describing something obvious that is already accepted by everyone, so why would you need softeners like „it may be ethical“ as opposed to „it is ethical“, or you’re describing something more than self-defense, in which case it’s not a misrepresentation to say that you are. There is no middle ground there. The blog post „on the mechanism of defamation“ is one of the clearest examples of the dishonesty of Harris which I’ve mentioned in my introduction. It’s a blog post in which he’s complaining about being misrepresented, and then in the sole example he gives, he proceeds not to show how he’s misrepresented, but how he’s right to believe what he believes. This is called backing your argument, not displaying a misrepresentation. But his line of defense hasn’t been „I need to back my arguments“, it has been „my opponents are dishonest assholes“. And so this is what we get.

8. Here’s how Harris defended the notion that we should profile muslims, or anyone that could conceivably be a muslim: it’s not racial profiling, it’s anti-profiling, we should profile people who can conceivably be a threat, not 5-year-old girls and 90-year-old japanese women. Unfortunately for him we haven’t forgotten that 5-year-old girls and 90-year-old japanese women can be muslim, that it’s conceivable. Unfortunately for him we haven’t forgotten that 90-year-old muslim women don’t represent a threat superior to 25-year-old japanese men. Unfortunately for him, saying „muslim“ is not the same thing as saying „a threat“, those are two different ideas, so pretending that you meant the latter when you wrote the former is misusing the english language. To claim misrepresentation when you used words of different meaning just so you could elicit a controversy is transparent and laughable. This might be the only case in which the defense of what Harris says paints a picture as despicable as what he said in the first place.

9. Islamophobia: the Maher interview with Affleck: „I’m not denying that some people are bigoted against muslims as people“. An e-mail to Greenwald: „There is no such thing as “Islamophobia.” This is a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia.“

10. During the interview with Cenk, there is a 15+ minutes segment in which Cenk tells Harris that islam is one factor amonst others in terrorist acts, not the only factor and not the predominant factor. For 15 minutes, Harris develops his criticism of islam. Cenk, several times, reiterates that he acknowledges it is a factor, and offers that it isn’t the only one. Each time, Harris continues with his criticism of islam. At the end of the segment, Cenk says it once again, and Harris counters: „I agree with that.“
Oh, you agree? Maybe you should have said so the first time then. This is a common mechanism for Harris. You answer questions in ways that elicit certain reactions, but you don’t fully confirm the basis for the reaction. You say Cruz is reasonable for wanting only christian refugees, but you don’t say you want it yourself. That way, if you’re attacked, you can whine that you’re misrepresented. Here, if you’re criticized for blaming only islam for the terrorism, you can say: but look, at the end, I said I agree that there are other factors…
This also enhances confusion. Now plenty of people don’t know where others stand. People say that Cenk is a muslim apologist, because they are under the impression that he thinks islam has no blame at all. We are called regressive because we don’t want to blame islam for anything. But we do want to. We want to blame islam accurately. Then why are we disagreeing with Harris? That’s what he said to Cenk the apologist… And round it goes.

11. There is perhaps no better example of a dishonest Harris than the discussion on religions not being equally wrong. He said to Cenk that it was a mathematically true fact, that you’d have to be a moron to think otherwise (this argument is often used by followers of Harris to discredit Cenk). There is a discussion on Youtube called Four Horsemen, in which Harris discusses other new atheists. At the very end of this discussion, Sam brings up the notion that all religions aren’t equally wrong. Hitchens and Dawkins both disagree with him, saying that they are. Hitchens even says they are latently equally dangerous. Sam Harris, at this point, doesn’t tell them they are mathematically ignorant and stupid. He’s like okay, let’s have a debate about that. And they proceed.
In this discussion with new atheists, Harris is interested in talking about whether religions are equally wrong. Which is why they do that. In the discussion with Cenk, Harris is interested in wanting other people to think of Cenk as a moron. Which is why he dismisses Cenk’s opinion as being ridiculous. Notice the epic, epic double standard.

12. The US has good intent. „Ethically speaking, intention is (nearly) the whole story. The difference between intending to harm someone and accidentally harming them is enormous—if for no other reason than that the presence of harmful intent tells us a lot about what a person or group is likely to do in the future.“
That’s from Chomsky vs Harris. There are two things I want to say about this.
First, here the opposition is between accidentally killing someone and willingly killing someone. It is fallacious to represent collateral damage as „accidental“ because your intent wasn’t to kill the people you ended up killing. We know how bombs work. We know that we kill people with them, it’s not an accident. Let me present you with a thought experiment: you have three people in front of you, one of them is a terrorist. You have no way to determine which one is. Because you want to prevent further acts of terror, you decide to kill all three of them to ensure the terrorist doesn’t escape. Your intent wasn’t to kill the other two, you had nothing against them. But their death can’t be described as accidental. You knew what you were doing. You are stating that killing the enemy is worth more than keeping these people alive. You are saying their lives don’t matter enough. And maybe you’re right, bear in mind: that’s another discussion. But either way it is very different from accidentally killing someone, and you’re smart enough to know it, so you can’t be arguing in good faith.
Second, we don’t know from this discussion what it is exactly about the US that causes it to have good intentions. Cause we know from reading the End of Faith that it’s not simply saying that it does:
„Are intentions really the bottom line? What are we to say, for instance, about those Christian missionaries in the New World who baptized Indian infants only to promptly kill them, thereby sending them to heaven? Their intentions were (apparently) good. Were their actions ethical? Yes, within the confines of a deplorably limited worldview. The medieval apothecary who gave his patients quicksilver really was trying to help. He was just mistaken about the role this element played in the human body. Intentions matter, but they are not all that matters.“
Those people are acting ethically within the confines of a deplorably limited worldview. The US, on the other end, are just acting ethically, period. We don’t really know why. Because Sam Harris says they are? Can’t we say that Harris has a deplorably limited worldview himself, in which islam is evil and it’s more important for a president of the US to be really against islam than to be a rational individual?
The mechanism, in a nutshell: good intent makes you a good person, unless I’ve decided that you have a limited world view, in which case good intent isn’t that important. In other words, we’re good because we’re good.



Challenge accepted.