Good news – Sam Harris is ready to rock & roll.
Sam Harris @SamHarrisOrg · 21m
I have a draft of my response to my feminist detractors. Just going to run it by my wife, my mother, and Martha, my copy editor.
Fabulous start. We’re not colleagues, we’re not people with reasoned disagreements – no, we’re his “feminist detractors.” I guess he’s so important and correct that there’s no such thing as reasoned disagreement with him, there’s only detraction.
But at least he knows lots of women, so that’s reassuring. He has a wife, a mother, and a copy editor.
To be fair, in your first post on this incident you said “fuck you” to him – which has been the approximate tone of a lot of the ‘reasoned disagreement’ that’s been directed at him. So I don’t know that I would take being called a ‘detractor’ so badly.
I do hope his mother’s as old as me and that she can give him 50 years’ worth of being told what she thinks and what women can’t do.
OK! I’m an optimist.
Okay- my issue here is that he is saying that people who criticized his comments think it was of little worth, when in fact, the opposite is true. His words carry a lot of weight, and those critiquing him are doing so because not only was what he said factually untrue, people listen to him. Many people.
Seriously, the people who try this ploy – presumably most of them will at least concede that in history, if not today, women have suffered discrimination, right? Do they imagine all misogyny throughout all time has come from people with no mothers or sisters or wives or daughters? Do they look around, see no one from the line of Kronar, and conclude that sexism is over?
You know, it’d be so very easy when Harris or Dawkins or whoever screws up, to say, “Hey! Skepticism and/or atheism, we aren’t like those other -isms. Sometimes we say stupid shit, but we can admit it. I said some stupid shit and I need to step back and examine why I said it.” But, no. No, it’s, “Detractors, haters, you-who-are-not-worthy-to-question-me, I was misquoted, you didn’t understand…” every time. Which, sadly, makes them little different from the Ted Haggards of the religious side of things. It makes me sad. And tired. Very, very tired.
How is this any different from “My wife is ok with me calling people c*nts.”?
Yes, yes, I know he didn’t call anyone that. But it’s the same rationale. I am not universally hated by women, therefore, nothing I ever say can be considered disparaging to women.
On the “I-know-some-women” thing: it kind of reminds me of when he offered a prize to anyone who could show him why The Moral Landscape was wrong, in a very short space, judged by… er… him. Granted, in this situation, he’s not appointed himself the arbiter of the quality of whatever he produces; but it’s not like he’s chosen the most stringent critics, is it?
Imagine a peer-reviewed journal where you were allowed to nominate your friends and family as readers.
I can’t be a misogynist. Some of my best relatives and formal business associates are women.
How come his wife and his mother don’t have names?
Ophelia, the tweet is simply pointing out the irony of him asking women for help on his reasoning for an essay, which is itself defending against allegations that, if were true, would not predict him doing so.
Does this really need explaining? I guess so.
There is a reason feminism has witnessed a severe loss in credibility. My guess is that it has something to do with the type of attitude we’re seeing here in this post.
Enzyme, pleases stop spreading misinformation about who judged the essay contest. Russell Blackford judged the essays and picked a winner.
Actually, that is a rather hopeful comment. In the standard usage taught e.g. to trainee priests for many centuries, the sins of “detraction” and “calumny” are different ways of damaging someone’s reputation; it’s detraction if what’s said is TRUE, calumny if it’s false. I’m sure Sam Harris wasn’t aware of this, though.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
It’s funny how I keep getting people – usually first-time commenters – telling me that I / FTB / feminism / Social Justice warriors / rage bloggers / drama bloggers / etc have lost all credibility. Have I? Have we? Has it? News to me.
“Feminism” does have something of a “branding problem” is society at large, but I suspect that’s mostly due to AM Radio trash-talk.
I came up thinking I was a post-feminist. If anything, these last few years have convinced me otherwise.
So Sam Harris says:
Then women (and men) critique that statement and he feels those people are angry and he doesn’t like that his ideas are being criticized. Interesting.
Ophelia, I don’t know you, so I don’t know if you have any credibility or not. But as someone living and involved in academic clubs on a college campus, from my experience this is certainly the case with feminism.
While I doubt I have much more time than you for the “I’m not sexist, I know some women” ploy, I think Harris’s comment here is capable of another, more likely, and much more favourable, interpretation: He’s letting us know that he’s not giving us his uncensored expression, so even if his essay turns out to be entirely free of the kind of solecisms you’d otherwise pounce on, he’s being open in acknowledging that he doesn’t deserve credit for this.
I agree “critics” may have been a better word than “detractors” (but let’s see what the essay actually says first; depending on what people and issues he’s actually talking about “detractors” might be more appropriate). But perhaps this is the kind of overreaction which makes him want to run his words through three filters before publishing. “Detractors”, while maybe not the [i]best[/i] word he could have chosen, strikes me as neutral enough; statements such as “It turns out his detractors were correct” don’t even have the faintest whiff of paradox.
*woosh*
@magicthighs
The point is, if there is anywhere that feminists should be generating a substantial influence, it is on college campuses where young and open minded people are concentrated. And more broadly, “feminism” has problems that most other ideological stances don’t: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/feminism-poll_n_3094917.html
I wonder why?
bwahahahhhaahaha
Will at 19-
If the many friends and family I have who work at colleges in some capacity are correct I think the “open-minded” part of that statement is of the rose-colored glasses variety. From what they say the majority of students that attended the schools they work at have little desire to have their opinions or beliefs challenged. In fact many express serious offense if a professor, administrator or librarian doesn’t act like their values and beliefs are undeniably sacrosanct (others are free game, however). It seems most are not there because they value education or learning, instead they are there because they think that is just the next step in life or because they want an education so focused and narrow in order to land this or that specific high-paying job.
Mind you I do live in the southern US, where education has never really had a very high premium placed on it. That cultural aspect no doubt has a fair part to play in this attitude they often see but the ones who have been at it for many years, a couple decades in a few cases, have stated that they’ve noticed the virulence with which this posture presents itself now has increased greatly, particularly in the last ten years.
Ophelia @13
It’s also funny how many people spend so much time and effort telling you and others that credibility is lost or the movement is dying. If the movement is dying why spend so much time telling us that, why not let us wither and die? It’s like the people who say Obama is an incompetent president and then spend all their time trying to convince everyone he is a communist trying to ruin the country. If something you don’t like is dying you don’t spend all your time worrying about it.
Just to be fair, Youwhat, to be totally and absolutely fair in a way that nobody could possibly disagree with because I’m so reasonable and I explicitly stated that fact in this very sentence, so you just have to accept it as truth and not even consider for a second that this is a classic example of poisoning the well because I’m being so completely honest and wise, you can fuck right off.
*looks desperately for a “Like” or up-vote button on Marnie’s post*
*looks for the same for Jeremy’s post*
*collapses on floor, laughing, remembering her philosophy professor dealing with 15-25 screaming and/or crying students (out of a class of less than 50) after the mere suggestion that not everything in the Bible was literally true. “Open-minded”. Will, you crack me up.*
We all know that college students are so very open-minded and academically rigorous when evaluating topics because they tell us so. Uh-yup.
@RyanCunningham Lolwhat? I just intended my post as a slightly snarky comment on what I see as the absurdity of complaining about being called a detractor when in her original post on the subject Ophelia wrote “fuck you”, and also “*spits*”. I feel like only one of those two things is rude and hostile, and if the response to it is at all snarky or hostile itself it’s probably at least in part because the “fuck you”/”EVIL MISOGYNISTIC ENEMY” approach doesn’t tend optimise for civil discussions. I imagine Harris has been receiving *a lot* of messages telling him essentially the same thing – in reply to a quoted answer in an interview we didn’t witness…an answer which may or may not reflect his considered opinions on women/atheism or women generally. So while I can understand reading his comments and being offended, I can’t understand the rudeness and complete lack of charity that’s been the salient form of response to Harris – and to people like me who write snarky internet comments because they’re irritated by said lack of charity and rudeness.
Because it’s not pleasant being told to “fuck off” by one person, so I can only imagine what it’s like for Harris.
Benson @13:
Perhaps this is an organized campaign? Anti-feminists are infamous for such things.
Will @10 – I hadn’t realised that RB was the judge. It was SH himself in the first instance, wasn’t it? (I sort of lost interest in the competition after that – even before, it struck me as a silly move to pull.) Ho hum.
@yazikus #3
I think he’s saying people consider him to be of lesser worth thanks to those comments.
@Will #19
Um. I’ve been to some of these. Open minded? Yes! Naive, ignorant, inexperienced, jumping to conclusions? Most certainly. I was most definitely quite a twit at university, my experience with feminism there was the few gender-studies involved rather wacky independent women, and the largely and broadly dismissive men.
Feminism is not some new and revolutionary idea that needs a lot of youthful students to take up its mantle (although there are plenty of young people who can and do), it’s a well-researched, mature and significant idea, that has progressed over the years due to the strong theoretical and empirical work from feminist researchers and thinkers. It’s something you really need to educate yourself on before jumping to conclusions, because the media/popular/cultural portrayals and dismissals of feminism are mostly misrepresentations and misunderstandings.
(I posted that incorrectly… But I guess it’s helpful that it’s in moderation since making an FTB account for the blogs that neat one. Sorry!)
Youwhat? #26:
There were words after the “fuck you.” Lots. Even more than 6 of them. Tone has fuck to do with reason. You can have the nicest tone and say the cruelest unreasonable thing. Just as you can be a big aggressive meanypants and say very reasonable things. You have to focus on the meaning of words rather than their tone. This isn’t about his tone by using “detractors.” The word detractor has a specific meaning. The “detractors” isn’t mean or aggressive, the word itself is dismissive. It is saying the arguments have no actual reasonable value, people are just disparaging or attacking him. Which is why Ophelia said: “reasoned disagreements – no, we’re his ‘feminist detractors.’”
If you stop at the words “fuck you” because you don’t like the tone, then fuck you*. You used “lolwhat?” Do you have any idea how hard it was to keep reading the words of someone who said that?
*”Fuck you” is an expression of anger. It’s a wonderful profanity because it doesn’t come with any splash damage of indirectly associating any particular group as a whole with the cause for the anger (thinking tone is more important than substance).
Canonicalkoi @5 wrote:
You know, it’d be so very easy when Harris or Dawkins or whoever screws up, to say, “Hey! Skepticism and/or atheism, we aren’t like those other -isms. Sometimes we say stupid shit, but we can admit it. I said some stupid shit and I need to step back and examine why I said it.” But, no. No, it’s, “Detractors, haters, you-who-are-not-worthy-to-question-me, I was misquoted, you didn’t understand…” every time.
**
Dear Canonicalkoi:
The dismissive response you talk about does happen a lot. But I don’t think we should say that it happens “every time”. And, in this case, I don’t think that Harris is *simply* dismissing the criticisms he has received. He is, after all, writing (and proofreading, polishing, not-tweeting-at-3am-after-a-6th-glass-of-scotch) a response. That surely suggests that he might be engaging in “reasoned disagreement”. Doesn’t it?
I would like to think that disagreements can be reasonable even if they do contain words like “fuck you” or “detractor”.
@26 Youwhat?
Yeah, considering Harris’s words are denigrating all women because of their lady-brainz in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary (he basically said: “women aren’t attracted to me, so they don’t buy my books…haha but seriously, it’s generally because they’re not smart enough to appreciate me”), I’d say he started with the fucking rudeness.
Same with his words on nuking Islamic countries, or justifying torture, or justifying “racial” profiling against anyone who “looks like a Muslim”: fuck how nice and civil and detachedly academic his tone is, the ideas are sick shit that deserve no fucking respect.
Hell, I’d say the civil tone makes it worse: he’s not saying “women are stupider than men because hormones” as a careless insult, it’s his considered opinion that they are so.
Oh, boo fucking hoo. How about being told you don’t belong in the movement, over and over, by the men in the group? Because that’s the message movement atheism is sending out all the fucking time, to far more people (namely, all women). Try recalibrating your application of empathy: it seems to only apply itself to defending the white male asshole in the situation.
@Enzyme
Actually, you’re also right. After numerous complaints of the possibility of Harris fudging the judging, he stated:
(Bolding added). So, yes, officially Russell was the “judge”, but he was over-rule-able by Harris. Taken from Harris’ official rules page here – http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-moral-landscape-challenge1
Arrrgh. Again with the double-posting. Apologies.
@Thomas Hobbes
Instead of saying, “I was misquoted” or “I was quoted out of context” or “The journalist seems to have conflated several things I said creating a quote I did not say”, Harris has responded with several tweets stating wasn’t it possible he was misquoted? Doesn’t quoting out of context happen? Note that he didn’t come out and just say it did, instead he dealt with possibilities. His semi-final tweet speaking of “feminist detractors” was just the icing on the cake.
Let’s look at this from another angle. Person you hold in high regard is quoted as saying something particularly racist about blacks. There it is, in black and white, on the Internet and/or in print. Instead of saying, “Oh, hell noes I didn’t say that!”, this person coyly asks if it weren’t possible they were misquoted. Golly, isn’t that just possible? For the next 22 or so hours, the person continues to posit that mis-quoting *could* have happened, you know. Then, they say, “Well, because of all my race-baiting detractors out there, I’m clearing it up on my blog. And a friend of mine, who’s black, has looked it over.”
You’re telling me that wouldn’t leave a bad taste in your mouth? Honestly?
I’m pleased to see some people (YouWhat?, Will, Thomas Hobbes) pushing back against this rather pathetic episode of manufactured outrage. I just read Harris’ accountant and it takes an uncommonly offended mind to really take such umbrage at his comments. More importantly I find it hard to fault his generalizations about gender preferences for certain types of arguments (which some people dishonestly characterize as claims about intelligence).
By the way, no scholarly journal, textbook, mainstream periodical, etc. is going to publish letters, comments, or articles that use “fuck” in any context other than creative writing, reported speech, and a few other reasonable exceptions. The fact many of you are blind to this reality and remain titillated by profanity is indicative of the general maturity level among the bien pensant FTBers.
Katherine Woo,
It must be your estrogen vibe and nurturing nature that cause your dislike of the word fuck.
@Katherine Woo #35:
Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but this is a blog, not a scholarly journal, textbook, mainstream periodical, etc. Shockingly enough, different writing styles may be employed in different contexts.
But while you’re there on the fainting couch, could you perhaps fetch my monocle? I do believe it popped off when I read such shockingly improper language.
I remember being an open-minded liberal student on a college campus. I remember even being asked to contribute to the campus’s inaugural feminist publication. I rediscovered the article I wrote earlier this year. The jist: feminism is great and all, but all those man-hating radicals give the whole movement a bad name. I’d bought into the same bullshit nonsense that Will has–conservative propaganda that has dominated the discussion on feminism since women were fighting for suffrage. I also, like so many men, had no reason to think I should actually do any real research or reading before spouting off on the topic. I was working from the image that feminists had in pop culture, which has not changed significantly since the turn of the last century. Shocking that feminism would have a PR problem when the media is dominated by conservative men.
Will, feminism doesn’t have a credibility problem. People who trot out their female family members and colleagues as though that proves they can’t possibly say or do anything sexist? Those people have a credibility problem–just like Rick Santorum’s daughter talking about her dad’s gay friends, or Anthony Cumia and Bill O’Reilly talking about their black friends. Maybe don’t make the mistake I made in college. Don’t spout off on a subject you haven’t bothered to learn anything about. Read up on some Feminism 101 blogs. bell hooks’ “Feminism is for Everybody” is available as a free ebook online. Read it, it’s good. Don’t assume that the impressions you’ve gotten from Rush Limbaugh and that ilk accurately represent feminists. Why would they?
Incidentally, has anyone used the phrase “sexist pig” in seriousness since, like, 1975? It seems like a hallmark of strawfeminist depictions, that, like bra-burning and man-hating, bears only the vaguest resemblance to reality.
and a whole new coterie of tone trolls come out of the woodwork.
Ophie (can I call you Ophie?*), you really need to get some better trolls. Maybe that nice PZed fella can loan you some of his. After all, he’s male (he has a beard and everything!) so he clearly must have better trolls. I’m sure if you ask nice, and maybe offer to make him a sammich or something, he’d be willing to offer you some advice on cultivating better trolls.
* Yes, this, and all that follows, is snark. I hope Ophelia gets the reference, because my google fu failed me and I can’t actually link to it.
canonicalkoi @34 wrote:
“You’re telling me that wouldn’t leave a bad taste in your mouth? Honestly?”
No. I’m not telling you that. Yes, it would leave a bad taste in my mouth.
I only wanted to say that, if Harris is taking time to think about the criticisms he has received and to write a response, he is not being nearly as dismissive as some people are suggesting here. His response might be wrong. It might be horrible. It might be arrogant. It might reveal him to be irredeemably sexist. But the fact that he is responding with a 2500+ word essay suggests that he doesn’t believe we are being addressed as “you-who-arenot-worthy-to-question-me”.
@ Thomas Hobbes
When his response to amounts to the same bullshit expressed in 10 times as many words? No. No, it doesn’t.
Also, “reasoned” has an actual meaning which is not synonymous with “producing a response.”
Places I don’t use the word “fuck”:
in any of my published scholarly papers
in the classroom
when talking to my mom
in front of my children
on twitter, even, due to the particular mix of people following me there
Places I do use the word “fuck”:
on blogs that fucking allow it
in emails to and in conversation with my own friends who don’t mind it
You are making the error of thinking that the way someone communicates in one venue is the only way they can communicate. It’s called code switching. Everyone does it. You seem to be of the facebook generation, the people who think that something communicated in one medium must be palatable to all audiences at once, because there is no such thing as differing circles of communication any more.
Do you realize that your very words seem surrounded by petticoats and pearls when you talk that way? There is no “titillation”. It’s simply another form of expression that can be satisfying to use. If you would like to search for some deeper meaning, I will say that every time I swear, I feel a bit of happiness that I no longer feel that I’m sinning against God when I do so. Does that work for you?
Oh yes, throwing in French phrases is quite mature, not at all reminiscent of someone putting on airs to attempt condescension. Every time I see someone do that, I’m put in mind of Corabeth Godsey trying vainly to convince the Dew Drop Inn to put lace curtains up to add a touch of “culture” to the place.
Oh I didn’t even notice Katherine Woo’s whining about “fuck” again. It’s pretty fucking hilarious that she keeps accusing us of being obsessed with the word when she’s the one who feels the needs to comment on every fucking use of it.
(Content warning: contains the f-word and the aitch-ee-double-hockey-sticks-word)
I’m fairly impressed by Katherine Woo for writing a comment in which she didn’t wail about Leftists hiding under the bed and in the closet in order to steal our civilizations. At least, not explicitly. The effort may have overtaxed her though, as beyond that she failed to say anything else of substance.
“I just read Harris’ accountant and it takes an uncommonly offended mind to really take such umbrage at his comments.” is seventeen words longer than is necessary to write “You’re too sensitive”, which is neither original nor evidenced. “I find it hard to fault” is so vacuous as to hardly be worth writing, let alone described as “more importantly”. That’s a big paragraph for saying nothing more than “I agree with Harris, YouWhat?, Will, and Thomas Hobbes, and I disagree with you.”
As for,
If she’d left out “In any context”, she still wouldn’t have a point of any relevancy to this blog, but at least she wouldn’t be so obviously wrong. “Any context” includes quotations and discussions about language and how it relates to people. Subjects in which one would fairly expect to read the word “fuck” in scholarly works include but aren’t limited to: anthropology, classics, epidemiology and public health, film and literature studies, linguistics, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology. I’m fairly certain one of my own professors wrote about its use, or at least its analogue in Hokkien. Hell, right on the wikipedia page for the word, there’s this example:
The word might upset her, but fortunately for the human enterprise of science, actual academics are a bit more objective about it.
All of that being said, if people who wish not to read the word prefer, I would be happy to include content warnings on comments of mine that contain it so they can choose to read on or skip me.
(Content warning: contains the f-word)
Whoops, that second blockquoted bit should have read like this:
@ 35 Katherine Woo
Was it good? I read his lawyer and his bank manager last spring, but found them a little dry.